Your brain is like a toy car engine. If you never clean the dust out or give it new batteries, it gets slow and grumpy. Sometimes your body wants to be “energy efficient,” which is just a fancy way of saying it wants to take a nap forever!. To keep your toy car zooming, you need to “clean up” old thoughts that make you feel heavy.

Why it Happens: The body seeks to reduce effort to survive. Without “maintenance” like sport or self-care, the engine becomes “overloaded” with “negativity”.

How to Fix It: Commit a “Transition Ritual” to leave you past activity like work/stress energy at the door.

Context: The Austro-Hungarian researcher Hans Selye defined stress as the body’s non-specific response to demands. At Good Words, the focus is learning that we must move from “strain” back to a healthy “stretch” to stay productive.