Why “Just Focus” Doesn’t Work
Why task initiation is hard—and how to meet yourself with compassion and strategy.
Numbing as a Safety Strategy
We’ve all been there: you know there’s an important email to send, a tough conversation to have, or a milestone you’ve been putting off—yet somehow you find yourself scrolling social media, reorganizing your desk, or making yet another cup of coffee. What starts as a one-off escape can quickly turn into a default pattern. Before you know it, avoidance becomes your habit, and you feel stuck in a loop of “I’ll get to it later” that never ends. Avoidance isn’t about laziness or moral failing. It’s a deeply human response to stress, fear, and overwhelm. But when it becomes our go-to coping strategy, it chips away at our confidence, self-trust, and sense of forward momentum. The good news? With awareness and practical tools, you can start interrupting avoidance and move toward intentional action.
Even the most resilient, highly skilled person can hit a wall of stress that exhausts their bandwidth. When life throws one challenge after another—tight deadlines, family crises, health scares—our nervous system can become chronically “primed” for overwhelm. We stay stuck in a stress cycle, oscillating between freeze, fight, or flight, and never quite getting back to calm. That’s when a simple toolkit of quick resets becomes essential. Rather than waiting fora break in the action—or hoping that “things calm down”—you can reach for a strategy that brings your system back toward its optimal zone. Over time, having a suite of science-backed options helps you maintain steady resilience, so you can meet both the daily grind and the unexpected stressors with more ease. Below, I’ll introduce the four categories from my Stress Reset Menu handout—plus why each matters, how to use it, and ideas for customizing your own go-to list.
Start with curiosity
Foundations of Prioritization: Core Tools for Making Decisions When Everything Feels Urgent
For so many of us—especially those navigating ADHD, anxiety, or high-demand lives—prioritization doesn’t come naturally. It’s not about laziness or lack of discipline; it’s about managing a constant flow of inputs without a clear filter. You know the feeling: the to-do list is a mile long, everything feels important, and your brain is bouncing between urgency and inertia. That’s why I created the Foundations of Prioritization handout—a visual guide to three core tools that help reduce overwhelm and build sustainable habits around decision-making. These aren’t trendy hacks. They’re time-tested frameworks that help you move from reactive scrambling to intentional, values-based choices. Let’s walk through what each one does—and how they work together
So how do you find your footing in the shifting terrain of summer?
Most of us weren’t taught how to have hard conversations. We learned to avoid, appease, over-explain, or explode. And when the stakes feel high—especially in close relationships—it’s easy to freeze, second-guess ourselves, or fear how the other person might react. The fear of conflict or rejection, the pressure to say it perfectly, or the worry about how the other person might react, can feel overwhelming. So we wait. Or we vent. Or we stay silent—telling ourselves it’s not a big deal. But here’s the truth: hard conversations are where growth happens . They’re how we build trust, clarity, and mutual respect —both within ourselves and in our relationships. And just as importantly, hard conversations can help us discern who we’re dealing with . When we communicate with honesty, care and accountability, we learn a lot—about ourselves and about the people we’re in conversation with.
We all have moments when we check out instead of tuning in. Maybe it’s scrolling endlessly, avoiding a hard conversation, saying “yes” when we mean “no,” or jumping from task to task without finishing anything. For many of us—especially those with ADHD, anxiety, trauma histories, or people-pleasing patterns—this isn’t about laziness or lack of willpower. It’s about emotional overload, internal dissonance, and a nervous system doing what it knows to survive: avoid discomfort. But avoidance has a cost. When distraction becomes a default, it quietly pulls us away from our goals, values, and self-trust. We start making decisions reactively—driven by urgency, fear, or emotion—instead of from a grounded, intentional place. Over time, that gap between how we act and who we want to be can leave us feeling disconnected or stuck. Here’s the good news: we don’t have to bulldoze our discomfort or shame ourselves into change. Some of the most powerful shifts begin with something much gentler—a pause.
