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

I am your host Corey Muscarra tuning in from a parked vehicle on the side of the road in San Francisco.

And in today's episode I am going to share a simple technique, an acronym that you can come back to to practice better self-care

and not get caught up in reactive tendencies.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in with our favorite thing,

The Bell.

I'll ring it, you listen,

and let it serve as a mini meditation. So have you ever had the experience where something just feels off in the moment and you sort of say something you wish you didn't say or do something you wish you didn't do?

You kind of get caught up in a reactivity that just

doesn't feel like your normal self.

We might blame this on moodiness or some external variables, but a lot of times that reactivity or something feeling

off in us that's causing us to react can come from some basic self-care needs that aren't being met.

So in this episode, I'm going to share with you a four-part acronym called Holt, H-A-L-T that you can use to literally halt, check in with yourself and see if there

is not something that you could do for yourself in that moment to give you more of what you might need on a basic level.

So let's go through this.

H, the first letter of H stands for hunger.

Now this can be both the physical need that we often think of, like, hunger for food,

but it could also be an emotional need.

So starting with food, a lot of the times,

if we're not connected to our bodies or we have a lot going on or the rush of the day just

takes over it can be easy to forget to eat or to drink water or we can get caught up in bad eating habits,

...