Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Miscara, and in today's episode, I'm going to share two questions you can ask to reground yourself in stressful moments.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so we're all familiar with moments of feeling overwhelmed, stressed, like life is flowing at us in a much higher volume than we're able to hold and meet.

When this happens, the nervous system tends to go into fight, flight, freeze, fawn, reactivity, and the majority of it is grounded in a sense of unsafety. We feel like we're

losing a sense of control over our immediate environment. The brain really likes having a sense of control

and predictability. And thus, you can say the nervous system starts scrambling, finding a way to

keep you safe, finding a way to get through the experience. So there are two questions I invite you

to ask yourself in those moments as a way to help stabilize the brain to take it from this soupy mess of there's so much going on. What do I do?

Two, having a sense of what's here and how to move forward.

And these two questions are, one, what can I control right now? Two, what can I let

be? What can I control? What can I let be? Now, even though these might feel like two different

kinds of questions, meaning one's about regaining control, one's about letting

go. They're both related to a sense of agency because consciously letting go is still on some

level, some form of control, some form of feeling that you have agency over the situation.

You're consciously seeing, okay, this is outside of what I can control,

and I'm going to let it go.

So we break these down.

What can I control?

What can I let be?

The what can I control allows you to, again, see the mess of the moment

or what could be perceived as the mess of the moment,

...