I Thought I Needed to Calm Down. I Actually Needed to Recognize What Kept Winding Me Up.
For a long stretch, my whole self-improvement effort was aimed at one thing: calm down, breathe, manage the anxiety better. I tried most of the standard tools. Some of them helped, briefly, in the moment. None of them touched how often I needed to use them, which kept being exactly as often as before. What the Calm-Down Strategy Never Addressed It treated every spike as a fresh, isolated event to be managed on its own terms, which meant I got better at riding out any individual spike without ever getting better at reducing how many spikes there were to ride out in the first place. Why I Never Noticed the Repetition I was so focused on managing each spike as it happened that I never stepped back to compare them to each other. It genuinely didn't occur to me, for years, to ask whether they were actually the same spike showing up again and again rather than a series of unrelated ones. What Comparing Them Finally Revealed Nearly every spike I could remember had the same specific trigger underneath a lot of surface variety: a particular kind of moment where I felt my competence was silently being evaluated. Different rooms, different people, same exact trigger, over and over, for years, completely unexamined. What Changed Once I Saw the Trigger Instead of Just the Spikes The goal stopped being "calm down faster" and became "notice the evaluation-trigger the moment it shows up" — a completely different skill, aimed much earlier in the sequence, at the actual thing producing the spikes instead of just managing their aftermath.
Meet Ori — built to help you find what's actually winding you up, since calming down faster never touches the trigger itself.
Part of The Recognition Library →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai
This is an illustrative composite, not a real member account.