This post was coauthored by Scott J. Allen, Ph.D. and Ron Riggio

Let’s face it, your workday is probably jammed full of Zoom and live meetings, back-to-back, with urgent email, texts, and phone calls in between. Your brain and nervous system never get the memo that they’re allowed to reset.

This setup has costs. The version of you at 4:45pm, after seven straight meetings, is not the one who showed up sharp at 9am.

So, how do you stay centered, present, and clear-thinking throughout the day? Resets are the answer!

These resets are easy to use and don’t take a lot of time or resources. Try them out. What works for one person may not work for everyone, so experiment.

1. Turn the Meeting Into a Walk-and-Talk. Sitting across a table puts people in a posture of evaluation, reading expressions and managing eye contact. Walking side-by-side removes that entirely, and conversations tend to open up. This works especially well for one-on-ones and brainstorming sessions where you want ideas to flow rather than get pinned down by formality. Apple’s Steve Jobs was famous for this and research supports its efficacy.
2. Take a Quick, Effective, Physiological “Sigh.” Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and colleagues have popularized the technique (Balban, et al., 2023) of taking two inhales through the nose, back-to-back, followed by one long, slow exhale through the mouth. The double inhale reopens collapsed air sacs in your lungs, and the extended exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system, the part responsible for calming you down. It takes about fifteen seconds and works anywhere. Here’s a brief video explaining the practice.
3. Turn the Video Call into a Phone Call and Walk. If the agenda is a conversation rather than a shared document, ask to dial in instead of logging on. Cameras off, shoes on, and you get sunlight, movement, and a change of scenery, none of which a video call can provide. There’s also good evidence that walking increases creative output.
4. Do a Random Act of Generosity. Cover someone’s coffee. Volunteer for the task nobody wants. Send team members a surprise note of gratitude. Research shows that giving activates the brain’s reward centers in ways similar to receiving. It’s a win-win.
5. Try the Doorway Reset. Before you go into the next meeting or start the next conversation, pause for ten seconds at the threshold. Name one thing you want to bring into it, such as curiosity, patience, or full attention, and one thing you want to leave behind. Psychologists call this an event boundary, and studies show that consciously marking the transition between contexts helps your mind let go of the last one.
6. Shrink Your Meetings. Try a 25-minute meeting instead of a 30-minute meeting. The reclaimed minutes make the difference between arriving at your next one already behind and arriving with a moment to reset. Use the gap on purpose: stand up, grab some water, look out the window. In any case, it’s a good strategy to set time limit defaults that make more sense.

None of these are complicated. What they require is a willingness to test something small and pay attention to what happens. Try one out this week. See if it changes how centered, grounded, present, and clear you feel by Friday.