Some days your brain hijacks the whole thing.

That was today. A personal matter reached in, took the wheel, and drove off with the hours I’d meant to spend elsewhere. By the time I looked up, the day was mostly gone. Lost to total derailment.

I want to be honest about it, because I think naming it is almost always a good first step. Today was one of those days. That’s a truer thing to say, and a kinder one, and as it turns out, a more useful one.

The Brain That Lies

Here is what I’ve come to understand about a day like this.

The hijacked brain is not a quieter version of the clear one. It is a different narrator altogether, and it lies.

It spins its story from the parts of you that are hurt, disconnected, running low on belief — and then it hands you that story as if it were fact. Facts about your work. Facts about your worth. Facts about what other people meant, what they intended, what they think of you. It authors all of it, confidently, in a voice that sounds exactly like your own.

That is the trap. Not the pain itself — pain passes. The trap is that we believe the narrator precisely when the narrator is least trustworthy.

We tend to flatten two very different states into one.

We treat feeling bad and thinking clearly as if the first is simply a slower, heavier version of the second. It isn’t. The hijacked mind isn’t the clear mind running behind schedule. It is drawing from a different source. And so the real danger of a day like this is not the tears or the lost hours.

The real danger is the decisions.

A choice made against a backdrop of pain will quietly inform everything downstream of it. And you won’t see the tint, because the tint is coming from inside the lens. This is why, on a day like today, the discipline is not calm down. The discipline is don’t decide anything. Not yet. Not from here.

What Saved Me

So what do you do, when you can’t trust your own reporting in the very moment you most need it?

You don’t argue with the narrator. You can’t out-think it — it’s using the same compromised instrument you’d be arguing with. What you need is something from outside the state. Something the clearer version of you left behind, on purpose, for exactly this.

These are my anchors.

Something already written about who I am. In a clearer season, I wrote down who I am and what I’m about. So that on a day like this one, I have something truer to read than whatever my brain is currently generating. I am not my emotions. And here, in my own earlier hand, is the evidence — waiting for me to remember it.

Writing down exactly how I feel. I put the feeling into words. I do this with AI, and not because it’s warm — because it isn’t. A friend commiserates, and commiseration fuses with your frame; it agrees with the narrator. AI holds the line between fact and assumption, especially when the pain is about someone else and my brain is busy writing their motives for them. It keeps it real. There’s even something to this beyond the practical — naming a feeling is what moves you out of the reactive brain and back toward the thinking one. Writing it down isn’t venting. It’s a return to the reliable narrator.

Letting myself feel it, for as long as it took. I allowed myself to cry. I did not treat it as weakness. I treated it as an outlet — getting it out of my system, taking however long it needed to take. Because here is a thing worth writing down:

You cannot be efficient about anger, or grief, or sadness, or self-doubt.

They have their own duration. Rushing them is just a subtler way of not trusting yourself.

Why the Plan Has to Come First

None of these anchors were invented today. That’s the entire point.

I keep coming back to Susan Rose Blauner’s How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me: One Person’s Guide to Suicide Prevention. Today was nothing like what she survived — I want to be clear about that. But the structure of her wisdom reaches all the way down to an ordinary derailed Monday.

At the heart of her book is a crisis plan. Tools assembled before the crisis — because the moment your brain turns against you is exactly the moment you cannot build them. The storm is not when you draft the plan. The storm is when you reach for the plan you already drafted.

No one can make us feel anything. It’s up to us to feel whatever we feel. — Susan Rose Blauner

Same mechanism, lower volume. Whether it’s the far extreme or a hijacked afternoon, the discipline is identical: readiness assembled beforehand.

You do not rise to the level of your intentions in a crisis. You fall to the level of your preparation.

I Survived the Day

And I did survive it.

The hours weren’t what I wanted them to be. But I didn’t make any decisions I’ll later regret. I didn’t let the narrator sign anything. I let the feeling move through, I reached for what I’d left waiting, and I made it to the quiet end of the evening still myself.

That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole thing.

And there’s a turn in it I don’t want to miss: the day that nearly undid me is also, now, something I can offer. I know this terrain because I’ve walked it. The anchors, the crisis plan, the refusal to decide from inside the pain — these aren’t theory for me. They’re field notes. All is not lost on a day like this. Sometimes the day you barely get through becomes the map you hand to someone else.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

The anchors work only because they were already there. Which means the real work happens before the storm, on a clear day, when you least feel the need for it.

What have you set down, in a clear season, for the day your brain turns against you? And if the answer is nothing yet — what would you want the steadier version of you to leave as a solid anchor?

About Giselle

Most costly decisions begin with a wrong read of the situation.

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer and Pre-Fixer. I don’t fix; I pre-fix. Most advisers jump to solutions before they’ve found the real problem. I find it first — the part that isn’t fully visible yet. Once we see that clearly, everything else falls into place, and confident, right action can follow.

Through my daily Strategic Alignment Journal, I explore leadership, decision-making, and the patterns that shape organizations — helping leaders make sense of complexity before they commit significant time and money to the wrong thing.

What’s the one thing about your business that frustrates you most — the thing that, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to resolve?