Skill One: Notice

How to feel what’s happening in your body and emotions before it runs the show.

You’re in the middle of something ordinary. Folding laundry. Making coffee. Reading an email. And then, ten minutes later, you realize you’ve been snapping at everyone in the house for the last hour and you have no idea why.

Or you sit down to make a phone call you’ve been avoiding and your chest is so tight you can barely speak — and you didn’t know it was that bad until you tried.

Or you walk into a room and your whole body just goes — some old, fast feeling you can’t name — and before you can process it, you’ve already said the thing you wish you hadn’t said.

If any of that sounds familiar, this skill is for you. It’s the first of the eight coping skills, and it’s the one without which none of the others can really work. It’s called Notice.

What is the skill of Notice?

Notice is the practice of becoming aware of what’s happening inside you — in your body, in your emotions, in your thoughts — while it’s happening, instead of finding out about it ten minutes or ten hours later.

That sounds simple. And in a way, it is. But for most of us, it’s also genuinely new. Because most of us have been trained, for a very long time, to not notice.

We’ve been trained to push through. To keep moving. To not let on. To handle it. To get the thing done. Noticing felt like a luxury we couldn’t afford — and over the years, it became a muscle we stopped using.

So if you read the description of Notice and think “I have no idea how to do that,” you are not alone, and you are not broken. You are exactly where most of us start.

Why does Notice come first?

Because you can’t regulate what you can’t see.

If you don’t know your nervous system is activated, you can’t anchor it. If you don’t know you’re having a catastrophic thought, you can’t reframe it. If you don’t know an emotion is starting to rise, you can’t sit with it. If you don’t know you’re being hard on yourself, you can’t soften.

Every other skill in this series requires Notice as a precondition. Without Notice, you’re just reacting — doing whatever your old patterns do, on autopilot, with no opening to choose differently.

With Notice, you get something precious: a pause. A small gap between what’s happening to you and how you respond. And in that gap is every other skill we’re going to learn.

What does the research say about Notice?

A few quick anchors, because this matters and I want you to know this isn’t just self-help intuition.

There’s a clinical word for the kind of inner awareness Notice trains: interoception. It’s the ability to perceive what’s happening inside your own body — your heart rate, your breath, the tension in your shoulders, the tightness in your chest. Research over the last decade has shown that interoception is one of the strongest predictors of emotional regulation. People with high interoception recover from stress faster, manage anxiety better, and have more stable relationships. It is a measurable, trainable capacity.

In dialectical behavior therapy, the foundational skill is called observe — which is essentially Notice by another name. Marsha Linehan, the psychologist who developed DBT, placed it first for the same reason I’m placing it first here: nothing else works without it.

Mindfulness research points the same direction. People who develop the capacity to observe their own internal experience — without immediately reacting to it — have measurably better mental health outcomes across nearly every category researchers have studied. This isn’t fluff. It’s one of the most replicated findings in the last twenty years of psychology.

How do you actually practice Notice?

Four entry points. Pick one. You don’t need all four.

1. The body scan

Three times a day — morning, midday, evening — stop for thirty seconds. Close your eyes if you can. Start at the top of your head and move slowly down through your body. Forehead. Jaw. Shoulders. Chest. Stomach. Hips. Legs. Feet. You’re not trying to fix anything. You’re just noticing what’s there. Tight? Loose? Warm? Cold? Buzzing? Heavy? Whatever it is, it’s information. Name it inside yourself. Then keep going with your day.

2. The emotion check-in

At a chosen moment in your day, ask yourself one question: What am I feeling right now? Try to name it specifically. Not just “fine” or “stressed.” Try for something more precise. Tired. Annoyed. Lonely. Grateful. Worried. Restless. If you can’t name it, that’s also useful information — “I can’t quite tell” is a real answer. The act of asking is the practice. Naming is a bonus.

3. The trigger pause

The next time you feel yourself getting activated — about to snap, about to shut down, about to react — pause for one breath. Just one. And ask: What’s happening in my body right now? Don’t try to change it. Don’t analyze it. Just locate it. That single breath of awareness is often enough to give you the gap you need to choose your next move on purpose.

4. The end-of-day review

Before bed, take two minutes to ask: What did I feel today that I didn’t fully let myself feel? This is the gentlest practice of the four — you’re noticing in retrospect, with the safety of distance. It builds the muscle. Over time, you’ll start noticing things in the moment that you used to only see in retrospect.

“But I don’t have time for this.”

I know. So let me be honest about what we’re actually asking.

The body scan takes thirty seconds. The emotion check-in takes ten. The trigger pause is one breath. The end-of-day review is two minutes.

If you did all four every day, you’d spend less than five minutes on Notice. That’s not a time problem. That’s a habit problem — and a very real one. Because the issue isn’t that we don’t have five minutes. The issue is that we don’t yet have a relationship with our inner state that makes us want to spend five minutes there.

That’s okay. The relationship is what we’re building. Start with thirty seconds. Once a day. That’s all I’m asking. The rest will follow.

“What if I don’t like what I notice?”

This is the deeper question, and I think it’s worth naming honestly.

Many of the women I coach are afraid of what they’ll find if they actually slow down and feel. They suspect — rightly — that there’s grief underneath the productivity, or anger underneath the smile, or exhaustion underneath the capability. And they’ve spent years not noticing because the not-noticing was a kind of survival.

If that’s you, hear me on this: you don’t have to feel everything at once. Notice doesn’t mean drowning in it. Notice is the first skill in a series of eight that are designed to work together. By the time we get to Tolerate and Soften and Surrender, you’ll have ways to meet what you find. For now, you’re just learning to see it. Without acting on it. Without judging it. Without trying to fix it.

You’re allowed to take this slowly. There is no rush. The work waits for you.

The faith dimension: be still, and know

There’s a verse in the Psalms that I think is one of the most quietly profound things in scripture. Psalm 46:10. Be still, and know that I am God.

We tend to read that verse as an instruction about God — a call to know God. And it is. But notice what comes first: be still. Before knowing, there is stillness. Before knowing God, there is the quieting of the noise inside us that drowns out everything God might want to say.

Notice is, in some sense, the practice of becoming still enough to know. Still enough to hear your own life. Still enough to feel where God might be speaking through your own body, your own emotions, your own quiet exhaustion or unnamed grief.

When we never notice, we never get still. And when we never get still, we live whole lives never quite hearing what was always there.

What I want you to take from this post

Just this:

You can’t change what you can’t see. Every other skill we’ll learn in this series — anchoring, reframing, tolerating, softening, surrendering, connecting, rooting — depends on this one. Without Notice, none of them have anything to work with.

Pick one of the four practices. The body scan. The emotion check-in. The trigger pause. The end-of-day review. Try it for one week. Not perfectly. Not consistently. Just once, in some form, every day.

By the end of the week, you’ll have noticed something about yourself you didn’t know before. That’s how this work starts. Not with a breakthrough. With a small, persistent willingness to look.

Before you can do anything else, you have to be willing to see what’s there.

This is the third in an 11-post series. Start with Post 1: The Bunker You Build on a Sunny Day or Post 2: Coping vs. Controlling. Next: Skill Two — Anchor. How to regulate your nervous system so you can think clearly under pressure.

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