On difficult meetings, the professional composure nobody gives you credit for, and the second coffee that quietly saves the morning
Every morning I protect my 15 minutes pretty fiercely, and by the time my coffee is done, that sense of “I’ve got this” settles in, the feeling that today is going to be a good one. And most days, that holds. But there are some days that no amount of quiet morning ritual can fully prepare you for. The days when a specific experience, many times from a specific someone, for reasons entirely their own, has decided to be very difficult.
You know that moment where everything in you wants to respond “WHATTTTT?”, and you make the conscious, slightly exhausting choice to respond a completely different way instead? Where you are calm and measured and constructive, and somewhere in your chest there’s a small, polite riot happening that nobody in the room can see? One recent morning, I was, by every observable measure, the bigger person in that conversation, and it took more out of me than I’d like to admit.
So I got up, walked to the kitchen, and made a second cup of coffee, not because I’d planned to, but because my body apparently knew before I did that I needed one.
What happened in those few minutes while the coffee brewed is hard to fully explain, but I think it comes down to this: making a cup is one of the few things I do in a day that belongs entirely to me, that doesn’t require me to be strategic or measured or professional or anything at all. It’s just the familiar warmth of the process, the smell of it, the small act of doing something I know how to do in a body that needed a moment to remember it knows how to do things. I wasn’t processing the conversation, I wasn’t rehearsing what I should have said, I was just there, in the kitchen, making coffee, and that was enough.
Why stepping away actually works
A little science
A second cup of coffee helps on a hard day because the act of making it creates psychological distance from stress, giving your brain’s prefrontal cortex time to reset and restore clear thinking.
Stepping away from a stressful situation, even briefly, restores your ability to think clearly and respond calmly. When you experience something emotionally activating, your brain’s stress response stays switched on long after the moment has passed, keeping your prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for clear thinking and measured decisions, offline. Physically leaving the space and doing something familiar and low-demand gives it a chance to come back online. Researchers call this “psychological detachment,” and studies consistently show that even a short mental break from a stressor meaningfully restores both cognitive function and emotional regulation. Your body wasn’t being dramatic when it walked to that kitchen. It knew exactly what it was doing.
By the time I sat back down, nothing had changed except me. The situation was exactly what it had been twenty minutes earlier, but I had just enough room around it now to see it more clearly, to feel less like the ceiling was low and more like I had actual space to move. The second cup gave me that, no resolution, no answers, just the two minutes of stepping away that my nervous system apparently needed before it could function properly again.
You would think a good morning ritual would mean the day would follow in kind, that a good intentional start would imply that the rest of it would have the decency to cooperate. It doesn’t quite work that way, and I think I’m finally at peace with that. What the ritual actually gives you, what the cup gives you, first and second and maybe a third, is somewhere to return to when the day gets harder than expected. A small, reliable thing that’s always there, that never asks anything of you, that just does its job quietly.
If this is the kind of thing you like thinking about, the ritual, the science, what’s in your cup and why it matters, I write about it every week. Come find me here.
Some days genuinely take two cups. Maybe three. How many have you been taking lately? Drop it in the comments, I’d love to know I’m not alone in this. ♥
Leave a Reply