Natalie Goldberg

Stress Mistakes Everything for an Emergency

If stress makes everything an emergency, relief begins by restoring discernment. A practical pivot is to ask, “What happens if this waits an hour?” or “What is the true consequence?” These questions reintroduce gradations—important, preferable, optional—where stress insists on only one category: urgent. As discernment returns, so does choice. You can still act quickly when something is genuinely time-sensitive, but you stop donating emergency energy to ordinary life. [...]