I Didn’t Need a Holiday—I Needed Six Minutes
How a simple nervous system practice changed the way I carried responsibility
The Six-Minute Practice That Changed How I Lead
Most stress management advice assumes the problem is too much to do.
So it offers tools to do less. Delegate more. Batch your tasks. Protect your calendar.
All useful. None of it touches the real problem.
The real problem is that your nervous system doesn’t clock off when you do.
You can clear your inbox. You cannot clear the background hum of a brain that has been trained by years of high-pressure leadership to stay on alert — even when the threat has passed, even when you’re home, even when nothing is actually wrong.
I spent twelve years running a family orthodontic practice. The workload was manageable. The state I carried it in was not.
What changed it wasn’t a holiday or a restructure or a better productivity system.
It was six minutes a day.
Here’s the structure.
Shirzad Chamine’s work on Positive Intelligence introduced me to what he calls mental fitness — a set of practices designed not to empty the mind but to intercept the nervous system before it escalates.
The core practice takes two minutes. Three times a day. That’s it.
You close your eyes. You steeple your fingertips together and press lightly — tip to tip. You move your attention slowly around the points of contact. The heat. The pressure. The texture. You stay there for two minutes without trying to solve anything.
That’s the whole practice.
It sounds too simple to matter. It isn’t. What it does — over days and then weeks — is give the nervous system a reference point for calm that it can access under pressure. Not after the meeting. During it. Not after the difficult conversation. Before the next one.
The science behind it is about intercept timing. Most stress responses are automatic — they happen before the conscious mind has decided anything. This practice trains the brain to introduce a gap between stimulus and response. A fraction of a second, then a full second, then longer.
In that gap, you get to choose.
After three weeks of this practice, my anxiety — which I had carried for over twenty years — had measurably reduced.
Not gone. Reduced.
The practice hadn’t changed my circumstances. It had changed my baseline. I stopped arriving at difficult conversations already braced. I stopped leaving the office carrying tomorrow’s problems in my body.
The work was the same. The state I did it in was different.
And state, it turns out, changes everything downstream — decisions, communication, presence, how the team reads you in the room.
How to install it:
Set three two-minute reminders in your phone. Label them whatever you want. Morning, midday, afternoon.
When the reminder fires — stop what you’re doing. Steeple your fingertips. Bring your full attention to the physical sensation of your hands. Stay there for two minutes.
Don’t try to think about nothing. The point isn’t emptiness. The point is presence — giving your nervous system a two-minute window where it isn’t required to solve anything.
Do this for twenty-one days before you evaluate whether it’s working.
If this practice has been sitting in the background of your work for years — the tension you stopped noticing, the state you mistook for personality — it may be worth a conversation.
The six-minute practice is the entry point.
What comes after it is understanding which pressures you’re actually carrying, which belong to you, and which you’ve simply never been shown how to put down.
That’s what a Clarity Call is for.
Thirty minutes. No pitch. Just a clear look at where the weight is coming from and whether there’s a way through it.