The Value of Finding Our Reset Button

Photograph by Element5Digital on Pexels

A few weeks ago, I took a road trip through the Southwest of the United States with my family. I won’t call it a vacation because there’s a word for people that call traveling with young children vacation, and that word is liar.

But despite the jetlag-induced demands for breakfast at one am, despite playing varsity level  trunk Tetris with more stuff than any human family should reasonably need, despite kneeling in parking lots to change my infant son’s overflowing diapers as he loudly informs me that he is not amused, and despite fielding an endless stream of complaints (Too hot! Too cold! Too sunny! Too windy! Too sandy! There’s cheese on this hamburger! You’re talking too loud! The music is too quiet! Her sandwich has more jelly than mine!), somewhere along the way an incredible thing happened.

Driving on empty roads with the uninhabited desert stretching all the way to the horizon, I finally managed to put aside my to do list and all of the expectations of what should happen during this trip and simply experience it.  And just like that, there it was: A much needed reset.

Reset Buttons

Reset buttons are ubiquitous. We can find them on our phones, computers, remote controls, elevators, even our hair dryers. They allow us to restore a system to its original state of functioning when it has developed programming errors, become overheated, or flat out short circuited.

Being the complex operating systems we are, there are times when we, too, need a reset.

Simply put, a reset is anything that takes us out of autopilot and places us back in the driver’s seat of our lives. It lets us take stock of our situation with newfound clarity. It returns us to a higher state of functioning, one that allows us to better address the task at hand: the tricky business of living.

Resetting Isn’t Resting

Resetting is often conflated with resting. But as similar as those two words may be, resting and resetting are not the same thing. I’m a big fan of rest, the way I imagine someone living in the desert is a big fan of water. And although rest can sometimes help us reset, rest in and of itself is not enough. Conversely, resets can happen independent of whether or not we get the rest we need. I didn’t return from my family trip rested- 336 hours of nonstop childcare duties made sure of that. (Oh yes, friends, I counted.) But I did return with the ability to assess my circumstances from a different vantage point and consider where I might want to course-correct to progress towards the outcomes I seek.  

Reading the Signs

It’s easy to recognize that a reset is needed when your hairdryer smells burnt and shuts itself off or when your computer screen is stuck on those infuriating spinning dots. And yet, when we most need a reset is when we may be least likely to read the signs in our own lives.

One of the signs I’ve come to recognize is tunnel vision.

A Step Back

I recently taught at a pediatric advanced life support training seminar. The participants were all acute care doctors- intensivists, anesthesiologists, emergency medicine physicians. Every last one of them was experienced in handling emergencies and running a code (ie: resuscitating a patient who is dying or technically has already died.) As we ran through one mock code after another, one thing became very clear. No matter how experienced we may be, once we turn our attention to a task we perceive as critical, it becomes almost impossible to see what is happening to the left and right of us, let alone the entire picture. The team member doing chest compressions simply could not keep track of what medications had been given, nor could the team member managing the airway recognize when the person doing chest compressions was becoming fatigued.

In our personal and professional lives, this tunnel vision manifests as a laser sharp focus on the goals or tasks we have set for ourselves and an inability to recognize when they no longer serve us in achieving our overarching objectives. Just like in those mock codes, we have to take a step back to recognize where we are in the cycle and whether we need to adjust our strategy. A reset is that step back.

The Space Between Stimulus and Response

Some of the other warning signs I’ve identified in myself are ruminating, feeling detached or disconnected, loss of empathy, self-pity, reactivity, and an inability to focus.

Reactivity, in particular, is a big one for me. Viktor Frankl is often attributed with saying:

When I find myself unable to access that space before responding to a stimulus, whether it’s in a tense situation with a patient at work or in an argument with my kids at home, I know it’s time for a reset. By resetting, we widen the space.  

Tall, Grande, Venti

Resets, like coffees, come in multiple sizes. There are tall, grande, and venti-sized resets and each serve a different function.

Small resets are a bit like flowers that grow through the cracks in the sidewalk. They catch our attention and get us to shift our gaze without ever breaking our stride.

These minor resets occur throughout the course of our regular days and weeks, are mostly unremarkable and brief in nature, and may even take place in passing.

Some of the small resets I’ve experienced recently have included a thought-provoking exchange with a stranger on an airplane, a ten-minute guided meditation, a phone call with a friend in need of an empathetic ear, a walk in the sun after being stuck indoors, receiving some encouraging feedback out of the blue, a productive fight with a loved one, and an insightful quote I came across.

The beauty of small resets is that they are everywhere, giving us ample opportunity to refresh our perspective even in the midst of our busy lives. Their individual impact on us may be fleeting, but cumulatively, it’s the small resets that scatter the dust that settles on our day-to-day and keep us feeling vital.

They help us to pause and address questions such as: What is it that I need in this situation? Can I give myself or another person some grace? Is there room to rethink my current strategy?

Medium Resets

Medium resets are more like a stream that cuts across our intended path and compels us to find an alternative route. Because they disrupt the regular flow of our lives, albeit temporarily, we take more notice of them than we do with small resets.

My medium resets in the past few months have been wide ranging, from learning about black holes at the Planetarium and briefly grasping just how incredibly vast and powerful the Universe truly is, to an unexpected physical setback that knocked me off my feet and made me acutely aware of the enormous privilege of good health, to a four-hour spa visit during which I basically sat in a quiet room in a bathrobe and luxuriated in the glorious silence, to initiating a standing lunch date with a new friend, to reclaiming an underutilized space in our home.

Medium resets encourage us to ask ourselves slightly bigger questions: Is this how I want to feel? Do the structures and routines I live by serve me (or am I serving them)? Am I making room for what I value?

They can nudge us back on course when we’ve begun to veer in an unwanted direction or find ourselves spinning our wheels uselessly. Unlike small resets, their impact on us lingers, though it ultimately fades.

Large Resets

And then there are the BIG resets. Large resets are like boarding a flight to Brussels and arriving in Tokyo instead. They tend to involve major life events and have a way of upending our carefully constructed plans.

We’ve all experienced large resets. The death of a loved one. The birth of a child. Leaving a job we were invested in. Meeting our soulmate. Living through a pandemic. Finding our calling. Some are joyous, some are painful, and all leave an indelible imprint on our lives.

Large resets reorient us to ourselves and bring us back to the most central questions of our lives. Is this where I want to go? Is this who I want to be? Is this how I want to live? They help us realign our path with our values.

Harnessing the Potential of Resets

Small, medium, and large resets happen whether we plan for them or not. What we do with them, however, is up to us. What if we could learn to recognize our reset buttons and begin to purposefully incorporate them into our lives?

In thinking about the impact resets have on us, I’ve begun to consider where I can become more deliberate about harnessing their potential to energize and center me, to change my perspective, to direct my next steps. And, perhaps most importantly, to bring me back to the reality of now, the only moment I have any control over. Because it is in this moment that the trajectory of my life is being set, over and over and over again.