Well, ladies
Clare told me to try that nose-pinch thing she does when her focus drops and I did not want to try it, because Clare told me to try it.
That is the whole problem, stated plainly. When she suggests something, even something small, even something free and harmless and ten seconds long, my first instinct is to resist it. Not because it is bad. Because I did not find it myself. I have been this way my whole life and I am not going to pretend I have fixed it. 🤍
I tried it anyway. Tuesday morning. Sitting on the edge of the bed, alarm off, eyes barely open. I pinched the bridge of my nose, held it, counted to ten.
Nothing happened. I felt my fingers on my nose and that was it. I thought, fine, this is Clare's thing, not mine, and I reached for my phone.
Wednesday morning I tried it again, I do not know why, maybe stubbornness in the other direction. Same spot, same ten seconds. And this time something shifted. Not in my nose. Behind my eyes. A small release, like the muscles around my eye sockets had been holding onto sleep and the pressure gave them permission to let go. When I opened my eyes the room was sharper. Not dramatically. Just enough to notice.
Here is what I realized sitting there on Wednesday with my phone still face down on the nightstand: my mornings have been wrong for a long time and I kept blaming the alarm, the light, the coffee, the season. But the thing that was actually wrong was that I was going from unconscious to fully stimulated in about four seconds. Eyes open, phone up, everything in the world rushing in before my body had a chance to arrive.
I do not think the nose pinch fixed my mornings. I think the ten seconds of not reaching for the phone fixed my mornings, and the nose pinch was just the thing that kept my hands busy long enough to not reach.
But there is something physical here too. The pressure along the bridge of the nose sits right over the sinuses and directly between the muscles that control your brow tension. When you press there first thing, before screens, before light, before anything demands your focus, you are releasing the face before you load it. Most of us wake up already furrowed and do not know it until we catch our reflection an hour later. ☕
So I have been doing a version of this for four days now. Not exactly Clare's. Mine is slightly different because of course it is, because I cannot just do the thing someone tells me to do, I have to adjust it first. What I do: before I pick up the phone, I press both thumbs into the inner edges of my eyebrows, right where the bone dips, and I hold for five seconds. Then I release and open my eyes wide.
Five seconds. The face softens. The eyes clear. The phone can wait.
Then on Monday evening I caught the mirror and my face looked softer, not braced against anything. I thought, that is a sexy face, which is not a sentence I have said to myself in years. 😌
I have not told Clare I am doing this because if I tell her it will become a system and she will ask me how many mornings in a row and whether I am tracking it and I just want to keep it mine for a little while, this small quiet thing between me and the first five seconds of the day. ✨
Dani would say just throw your phone across the room. Dani's solution to most problems involves throwing something or pressing something very hard, and I love her, but my thumbs on my own eyebrows is about as aggressive as I want my mornings to get.
Try it. Before the phone. Five seconds of pressure right where your eyebrows start. Let your face arrive before the day does. 😌
