Not Every Feeling is an Emergency

Great blog post exploring how techniques for dealing with OCD can be broadly applied to all the feelings we feel. We can either make our internal world foreign, or we can adjust the alarm. This is what mindfulness is, mechanistically. It’s the phone-free walk, sitting with the awkward silence, dealing with boredom standing in line. It’s wrestling with the blank page instead of having AI fill it for you. It’s accumulating enough small moments where you don’t reach for the fix. Enough reps that your brain learns the default: not every feeling needs a response. True toughness is being able to sit with the feeling and decide: is this alarm real and worth responding to, or should I let this crazy thought or feeling just float on by. This is the work I've been doing for several years now. It's painful, being able to trust in not only yourself but your communities and support systems. But on the other side of it, there's a world where you can load Reddit in a private browser tab, scroll for…