The two phrases I hate most in 2026 are: Hey, I have a quick question and Hey, so and so has an urgent request.
(Footnote: I cannot remember what the 2025 one was. Maybe “lean in.” Just lean in. It took the entire complexity of human emotions and nervous system regulation and flattened it into two words that mean absolutely nothing. But sure. Let’s lean in. Lol.)
Let me start with the first one. A quick question. If you learned just a little basic brain science, you would know there is no such thing. There are only two kinds of questions: ones that require deliberate thought, and ones that do not. If it requires deliberate thought, it routes through your prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for reasoning, planning, and careful judgment. That process is slow by design. And if it does not require deliberate thought, then it runs on pure automatic processing, habit, reflexive response. More like: oh, hmmmmm. Really? Wow. That’s awesome. Subtext: whatever. Either way, nothing about this is quick. But please. Go ahead. Call it quick.
Now the second one. So and so has an urgent request. This sentence makes me cringe every single time. Part of it is the translation problem. In Chinese, there is no fully equivalent expression that lands the same way. If you translate it word for word, it sounds like someone is bleeding. Like a person at the edge of their last breath. Like a child got run over. My nervous system cannot tell the difference.
And then I learned. Gradually. That 99.99% of the time, no one is dying. No one is hurt. No child got run over. What is actually happening is that someone needs an answer so they do not look stupid in front of other people. That is the urgency. My adrenal glands, which did not go to medical school for this, are being called into service to protect someone’s ego.
Hahaha. Too funny.
Both phrases do the same thing: they hijack your sympathetic nervous system under completely false pretenses. Cortisol floods in. Adrenaline follows. Ten hours a day of questions that are not quick and requests that are not urgent. My stress response, which evolved over millions of years to help me survive predators, is now primarily being deployed to help make sure others look prepared and poised on a virtual call. Then I start to wonder what the heck is wrong with me. Everyone else is so composed. Only I look crazy!
This is how I ended up signing up for a year of Steezy classes and learning, from zero, about groove.
One of the fundamentals of grooving is bouncing. I did not expect how hard it would be. My body did not know how to bounce. I practiced for more than three weeks before I could find the rhythm and stay in it. The reason I could not bounce? I did not know how to stay loose. My joints were locked. My muscles were locked.
When I finally learned to bounce, I could not stop. I practiced mentally everywhere: bouncing in my head while driving, bouncing in my head while fake smiling, bouncing in my head while genuinely smiling. There is something about it that is structurally opposite of those two phrases. Bouncing requires you to yield into each beat, weight dropping, knees soft.
Body isolation was even stranger to me. Drop the shoulder. Separate the chest. Let the head move independently from the neck. Each part accountable for itself, not dragged into someone else’s emergency.
Movement, it turns out, is one of the most direct ways out of sympathetic dominance. Rhythmic, repetitive physical movement helps bring the body back toward parasympathetic tone.
Now when I hear quick question or urgent request, I turn on the groove in my head. I bounce in my head. I laugh in my head. And in reality I stare, nod, and hold a blank face that gives nothing away. There is something almost cosmically funny about it once you see it clearly: the daily theater of urgency, performed with complete sincerity. All of us one quick question away from the edge.
I keep bouncing.
It is either that or lean in.
Stranger in a Strange Land 