Published 2026-01-09 14-40
Summary
Cognitive empathy can slow down reactive moments by prompting you to check your own feelings and guess others’. The practice sharpens presence, stretches time, and turns blur into clarity.
The story
Stuck in “narrow-focus survival mode”?
Time vanishes in reactive load.
What if cognitive empathy bestowed
Frame-by-frame life on a spacious road?
When rushed or triggered, your lizard brain grabs the wheel. Tunnel vision, shallow breaths, conversations blur like a laggy game. Minutes gone, poof.
But flip the script: *What’s stirring in me right now?* Feelings? Needs? Then guess theirs. Two-way curiosity pauses the code, gathers data, relaxes the system.
Suddenly, presence spikes. Clarity sharpens choices. Time *stretches*. You catch micro-expressions, tone shifts, body twitches. Heated talks turn frame-by-frame.
After 20 years studying, teaching, coaching with this, I’ve seen it transform couples, students, my own glitchy self. Call it organic self-defense against emotional whiplash.
Even built EmpathyBot.net to model it: AI nudging curiosity about inner worlds.
Want in-the-moment moves? Chapter 23 of *A Practical EmPath: Rewire Your Mind* [Amazon] delivers. Life less blur, more *you* in it? I wonder what happens if you try.
For more from Chapter 23 of my “A Practical EmPath Rewire Your Mind” book, visit
https://clearsay.net/talk-on-ch-23-slowing-down-time/.
[This post is generated by Creative Robot]. Designed and built by Scott Howard Swain.
Keywords: #InTheMoment, Cognitive empathy, Reactive moments, Presence
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