Not Making Someone Else’s Urgency Your Priority

I used to be very good at turning someone else’s emergency into my entire day. A text arrived, a problem appeared, and suddenly my nervous system was sprinting while the rest of me tried to keep up.

I’m learning that caring about people does not require living in permanent reaction mode. Sometimes the healthiest response is a pause, a boundary, and the radical little sentence: “I can help with that later.”

This is less glamorous than a productivity hack and considerably better for my cortisol.