Last year a pipe burst in my house.
Now I should tell you — I am great with my hands.
In dentistry. Outside of dentistry I am a disaster. I have paintings still sitting in my closet that I haven't gotten around to hanging.
So when water started pouring out of a pipe, my first instinct was to stand there and panic.
But here's the one thing I did know how to do.
Turn off the main water line.
That one move stopped everything.
No more damage. No more chaos. Just a wet floor, a wet vac, and a phone call to a plumber who actually knew what he was doing.
The pipe didn't fix itself. But the pause gave me enough space to make the right decision.
And I couldn't stop thinking about how much we need that in life.
"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
That space is your shut off valve.
Most of us in healthcare are terrible at finding it. We go from stimulus to response with zero gap. Difficult patient? React. Tough day in the clinic? Spiral. Big life decision looming? Obsess over it at 2am instead of sleeping.
We never turn off the water. We just let the damage keep spreading.
Here's the thing though — the pause doesn't have to be long.
Here's what the research actually shows — even a 30-second pause is enough to activate your prefrontal cortex, lower cortisol, and shift your brain out of pure reaction mode.
But knowing that and actually doing it are two different things.
The way I've built that muscle is through daily meditation. A few minutes of coming back to my breath every morning — not in a crisis, not when I need it, but consistently, before I need it. That's what creates the gap. So when a difficult patient walks in or a hard day hits, the pause is already trained into me. I'm not trying to find it under pressure. It's just there.
The practice is upstream. The moment is downstream.
And when that moment actually comes, you still need something concrete to grab onto. For me in the clinic, it's a breath before I walk into the operatory. For you it might look completely different.
Maybe it's waiting for the curing light to finish and actually using those 30 seconds instead of mentally moving to your next patient. Maybe it's a quick escape to the bathroom between appointments just to breathe. Maybe it's a walk to your car after a hard shift before you call anyone.
It doesn't matter what it looks like. It just matters that you have one.
Because the damage in life rarely comes from the pipe breaking. It comes from not turning off the water in time.
💊 This Week's Prescription:
Identify your main water line this week — the one thing that gives you a pause when everything is flooding. If you don't have one yet, pick something small and use it once a day.
Hit reply and tell me what it is. I read every one.
— Dr. Mike
P.S.
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