Choice evaporates as pressure builds.

When most of us wake up, we are not starting fresh, with no carry-over from the days, weeks or months before. The day begins with a continuation of thoughts left open, conversations unfinished and perhaps a background sense of pressure that didn’t really drain away overnight. Sleep is essential for our wellbeing, but it doesn’t clear everything out, and for many people it’s interrupted or shallow. So, morning often doesn’t feel like a beginning. It feels like picking things up again. The ‘bucket’, already partly full, is carried forward into the day.

Our internal dialogue starts almost immediately. It doesn’t need inviting, it just begins. Where am I? What have I got to do today? Am I…? A stream of sentences is already running, largely in the background. It’s automatic, familiar, but rarely noticed. And because it normally goes unquestioned, it can feel like fact rather than interpretation. We don’t experience it as something happening. We experience it as how things are.

From there, it’s a small step to reaching for the phone. The dialogue is already active, and the phone gives it even more to work with. Messages, emails, updates, information — each one adding something else to carry. Some of it matters to us, some of it doesn’t, but it all contributes to filling the bucket. And because this often happens before we’ve created any space to intervene or exercise choice, we begin the day reacting or responding rather than choosing how we want to engage.

As the day unfolds, some practical things may come out of the bucket, but the underlying feelings, emotions & burdens are likely to remain. What’s more likely to happen is that we continue to fill the bucket by replaying, anticipating, evaluating - and maybe even procrastinating. Conversations continue internally long after they’ve ended and tasks stay mentally open even when we think we’ve moved on.  Unless we intervene in some way, not much will change. Although at times the bucket might fill quickly and dramatically, it’s often gradual and progressive, which makes it so much more difficult to spot just how full it’s become. Our internal dialogue plays a big part in this. It keeps running throughout the day, commenting, judging, comparing, positioning. Do I like this? What’s he on about? Is this as good as when…? Most of this goes unnoticed because we’re not consciously generating it - it sits in the background creating near constant noise.

When it’s close to capacity, it doesn’t take much for it to spill. A comment that lands badly. An unmet expectation. A delay. Someone asking for one more thing. We react more strongly or forcefully than we might like, or we withdraw, or we lose patience in places we normally wouldn’t. These experiences can feel uncomfortable or confusing, but they’re often less about what’s happening now and more about how much we’re already carrying. It’s tempting to treat the circumstances that seemed to lead directly to the spill as the issue and to explain our reaction without looking at what led up to it. When we do that, the pressure might be alleviated temporarily as we ‘vent’, but very quickly, the pressure builds up again.

Choice matters, but it’s often the first thing to slip out of view when the bucket is full. We don’t notice its absence because we’re busy coping. We respond, carry on, hold more, and call that normal. The shift begins when we remember to bring choice back into view. Not everywhere and not all the time, but often enough to change how we relate to ourselves and to others. From there, the day is no longer something that simply happens to us.

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