What Hooks You?

You know that moment when something happens and you can feel yourself react almost before you know what you’re reacting to?

Your body knows.

Maybe your chest tightens. Your jaw clenches. Your stomach drops. There’s a rush of heat.

And then your mind catches up.

Suddenly you’re having an entire conversation in your head about what just happened, what that person meant, what they shouldn’t have said, what you should have said, and why none of this should be happening in the first place.

You’ve been hooked.

I get hooked all the time.

Sometimes it’s something I hear on the news. Sometimes it’s something someone says to me. And sometimes it’s something incredibly consequential to my life and well-being.

Like roundabouts.

I have talked about this before because apparently I have strong feelings about how people use roundabouts.

Someone stops when I don’t think they should stop and I can be catapulted into the stratosphere in no time flat.

Which is kind of ridiculous.

Who cares if someone stops at a roundabout?

Apparently, I do.

And that’s exactly why it’s such a good place to practice.

Start with the small stuff

Traffic. Weather. The person standing in the wrong line. An annoying comment. Someone moving too slowly when you’re in a hurry.

These little moments give us an opportunity to notice what happens when reality doesn’t match the way we think it should be.

For me, one of the first clues that I’m hooked is blame.

Someone else is responsible for the way I’m feeling. Something shouldn’t be happening. My circumstances aren’t the way they’re supposed to be.

There’s often a story attached to it too.

They’re doing this to me.

They’re making me feel this way.

Why would they do that?

If they only knew…

There goes the story.

Sometimes we even make the weather personal. You planned a hike. It rains. And somehow it feels as though the weather has done something to you.

That’s a clue.

You’re hooked.

What’s real here?

This is where the practice begins.

Not by telling yourself that you shouldn’t be upset.

Not by pretending the interaction didn’t bother you.

Not by forcing yourself to think positively.

Start by acknowledging what actually happened.

What’s real here?

Someone said something to me.

I didn’t enjoy that interaction.

I’m irritated.

I just got jostled.

I’m a little out of center and my nervous system is reacting.

All of that can be true.

But then I can notice something else that’s true:

I’m not in danger.

I don’t have to fight.

I don’t have to run.

I don’t have to solve whatever is happening inside the other person.

They probably have an entire story of their own going on, and that’s theirs.

My business is here.

With me.

Come back to yourself

Once I recognize that I’ve been hooked, I can turn my attention back toward myself.

I can slow my breathing.

I can notice what’s happening in my body.

I can ask myself what I need.

And then comes a part of this practice that can be surprisingly difficult:

Kindness.

Kindness toward myself first.

And toward the other person, if I can.

If kindness feels like too much of a leap, neutrality is enough.

I don’t have to approve of what someone did. I don’t have to like the situation. I don’t have to convince myself that everything is fine.

I can simply practice removing the ill will.

I was recently taught something about this that I love:

In the absence of ill will, there is goodwill.

That doesn’t mean becoming passive. It doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries or tolerating harmful behavior.

It means I don’t have to keep generating hostility inside myself in response to something that has already happened.

And when I stop feeding that reaction, I begin creating the conditions to come back to center.

Unhooking creates choice

This is why the practice matters.

When I’m hooked, I’m reacting.

The story is driving. My nervous system is activated. I’m blaming, defending, rehearsing, predicting or fighting with something that may not even be happening anymore.

When I unhook, I create a little space.

And inside that space is choice.

I can decide what deserves my attention.

I can decide whether I need to respond.

I can decide what I want to carry forward and what I can put down.

I can decide what happens next.

This isn’t necessarily easy work. Awareness doesn’t instantly make the irritation disappear. Sometimes it takes a while for the body to settle and for us to find our center again.

That’s okay.

This is a practice.

And the small moments are where we practice it.

The roundabout.

The weather.

The irritating comment.

The stranger who rubs you the wrong way.

They give us relatively low-stakes opportunities to notice when we’ve handed our attention and our sense of agency over to something outside ourselves — and practice taking them back.

Because unhooking isn’t about controlling the external world.

It’s remembering that we have agency in how we meet it.

We can return to ourselves.

We can find center.

And from there, we can choose what happens next.