One Ding, One Disaster: How to Reset Before the Spiral Wins
10 Dec 2025 · 7 min
Steve Lichtman describes how a single LinkedIn notification spiraled into hours of doom-scrolling and self-doubt. He offers three 30-second resets: stand up and get sunlight, speak a command to yourself, or clear your desk and close your laptop.
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You ever have one of those mornings that's rolling smooth and then one notification just flips the entire day into a dumpster fire? Come on, we've all been there. You've been there. It's not the notifications fault, right? I mean that's, that's you letting the spiral win. So today we're going to be killing spirals dead with the first move in the rise framework, reset. Because reset is the foundation for everything, being able to make a quick change. So one day I was on a coaching call with a client about a year ago, Sharp guy, beautiful practice, awesome reputation. And he's telling me about his morning and he's like, man, I opened up LinkedIn, dropped a quick post ding. Couple minutes later, see somebody in my field that just announced the exact type of thing that he was building for months. So can you imagine? You make a post, you think you're like, oh, I'm fricking killing it. Then you go the feed, the algorithm picks it up based on what you posted and it shows something similar, which is now a competitor that you may or may not have even known about. And they're doing something just like you. Similar framework, similar pricing, maybe better branding, you know, hundreds of comments already because they've been out for a while. The client froze. This is what prompted the phone call with me, because he panicked, right? The curse is blinking. This guy spends like a half hour, an hour later just doom scrolling, you know, just feeling like total garbage, questioning everything about his business, right? Am I, am I? It goes back into imposter fears, right? And that imposter syndrome of am I really doing what I'm supposed to, supposed to be doing in life? Am I really making that change that I want to make? Am I affecting that change upon people that I'm hoping to make a man, he just sends me a text out of nowhere. He canceled calls that day like it was a mess. I get a text, which is what prompted the phone call in the first place, going, I think I'm done. All from one ding, one notification created this entire like half a day or more waste of this gentleman's life. And this is a person who's great human being, great family man, great business owner, has a great business on top of it. It's not like it's, you know, he's in a world where he's strong at what he does and he's successful at it, but yet that one notification, that one ding, completely ruined his day. So that moment right there is, you know, where most people lose. It's where most business owners and consultants and entrepreneurs, they lose. They think they need motivation or a new strategy. That's total bs. What they need to do is take a hard stop reset and put that emergency break on the spiral. Because once you spiral, you just keep going. That's where you end up the doom scrolling. It's where you end up doing all the competitor research, wasting your time looking at other people's stuff when you've already got good stuff and you're just not owning it. Right, so let's get into so what do you do? Right, so there's three resets that I use and teach every day and you can pick one of them and just use it the second that you, you know, you feel it, your chest getting tight, you feel your agitation, your anxiety, your stress levels, your watch, you know, if you're wearing like one of these modern smart watches, it's beeping and saying, hey Steve, your stress level's high. No, no it's not. It's never gonna be high. You know, I pride myself in being as, as energetic as I may be. I've learned to manage my stress in a way where I don't feel stress anymore. I'm able to stop reset myself. And as a kind of frenetic energy human being, that's a pretty impressive thing in the first place, I would think because it's not always easy to do, right? Sometimes it's really hard to do. So the first thing is a physical reset. This is the one that I love because this is like just stand up, walk out of the room, go outside. As they say. As all my hoop friends say, touch grass, go touch some grass, get some sunlight on your eyes, on your body and go do some physical exercise. You could either do burpees, you could go take a walk, go take your dog for a walk. And at a brisk pace, not a slow meandering. Don't pull your phone out, don't put your AirPods in. Be in the moment. Because you can't think your way out of physiology, right? You just, you have to move. Second way, like this could be working. Maybe when you're trapped on a call or something like that, you know, if you feel stuck or you feel stuck in the process, you do a verbal reset. So you could either hit your mute if you're in a group call and kill your camera, or if you're between calls, you could just say it out loud and be like, hey, Steve, stop. I like to say new track because I'm a musical minded human being. So I just Flip tracks, go to the next track. So I'll just pause myself that way, use a verbal reset and just be like, hey dude, what the fuck, man? Like just move forward. So hearing your own voice command, that can break the loop instantly. It's very powerful what we can do with our own minds and how we can help ourselves. Like that. So the next one is an environment reset. So it's like when your desk looks like a crime scene, right? Close all the tabs, wipe the desk down, shut down the laptop, you know, signal your brain that the old session is dead and a new session is gonna begin. Now because that's super important, you could do any of these in 30 seconds and then the spiral is already gonna stop. You're gonna kill that spiral before it goes outta control and you'll turn your six hour meltdown into just a five to six minute blip where you just took a couple minutes, you reset yourself, maybe 10, 15 minutes. If you, the dog around the block or you know, go to the store back, whatever you might do just to break that, that, that frequency that's locking you in, you know, that's, yeah, that's, that's just. For me, that's just the way you got to do it. You have to physically just jar yourself. So this riff of the day is going to be the spiral. Doesn't care about your to do list. So hit reset before it drives the car and drives your day into the wall. Yeah. Remember guys, spirals are part of being human. It happens to us every single day. Something could potentially become the next spiral. But the win that you're going to find from this is how fast you recover. So catch it early, reset hard, get your day back. And you know, look, if you want a crew that spots your spiral before you do and yanks it out of you, the community's. You know, we're still taking a wait list at the community at Unshakable AF. You can go to my website, Steve Lichtman.com and click on Become Unshakable in the top right corner and just get on the waitlist with the school community and yeah, look, the link show is going to be in the notes. Now just go reset something. If you're stuck right now, use this as your moment to reset. And thanks so much for listening. I'm Steve Lichtman and this is unfiltered and unshakable.
