Ordinary Anchors: What Keeps You Here When Everything Feels in Motion
When life becomes unbearable, we often keep moving — but stop looking up. Ordinary anchors are not just the things that keep us going. They are the things that bring us back.
By Janeth Nuñez del Prado, LCSW | Desert Bloom Psychology & Consulting.
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WHERE THIS BEGAN
This concept didn't arrive through a textbook. It arrived in a session.
A client was describing how they were managing — technically managing — during one of the hardest stretches of their life. They were going to work. They were feeding their children. They were getting through. And they were, in the most fundamental sense, not okay.
What I noticed was this: they had kept up the small routines. The morning coffee. The evening walk. The same meal on Sundays. The anchors were intact. But something in how they described them made me realize the anchors were functioning as survival mechanisms — not as sources of replenishment. They were moving through the motions without being in them.
That distinction — between keeping the anchor and actually inhabiting it — became the seed of everything I am about to say.
I have come to understand ordinary anchors most deeply in the context of people who have been away from home for a very long time — not physically, but psychologically. The public interest professional, the attorney, the overwhelmed parent, the clinician who has been in the wasteland so long that the wasteland's logic starts to feel like the only logic. If that resonates, you might start with The Hero Was Never Meant to Stay.
WHAT ORDINARY ANCHORS ARE
An ordinary anchor is a small, repeatable thing that signals continuity. A walk at the same time each day. A meal with someone you love. The particular quality of morning light in a familiar room. A cup of coffee before anyone else is awake.
These are not grand gestures. They are not self-care routines or wellness protocols. They are simply — ordinary. And that ordinariness is precisely what makes them powerful.
When life becomes overwhelming — when we are waiting for an outcome that hasn't arrived, or grieving something that cannot be undone, or simply trying to hold together a life that feels like it is coming apart at the seams — the nervous system loses its sense of rhythm. Time dilates. Threatening stimuli get encoded more deeply, more persistently. The future collapses into a single anxious point.
Ordinary anchors restore rhythm. They give time its normal shape back. Not because they fix anything — but because they interrupt the dilation. They remind the body that life is still happening. That Tuesday follows Monday. That the light still comes through the window at the same angle it always has. That you are still here, and the world has not collapsed around this single unresolved point, even when it feels that way.
THE HOT AIR BALLOONS
There have been two times in my life when I experienced significant and unexpected loss.
Both times, I kept running.
The Rio Grande bosque — the cottonwood forest that runs along the river through Albuquerque — was where I went. It had been a place I loved long before the losses. And I returned to it during them, almost automatically. The body knows to keep moving even when the mind doesn't know where it's going.
What I didn't realize, until much later, was that I had stopped looking up.
I was running with my gaze straight ahead. Not taking in the trees, or the light, or the river. Just moving. Just getting through. The anchor was there — the routine, the path, the rhythm of my own feet — but I was not fully in it. I was somewhere else. Running in the bosque while being entirely somewhere else.
At some point — I cannot tell you exactly when — something shifted. The acute fog of early grief began, slowly, to lift. And one morning while on a run, I looked up.
There were hot air balloons in the sky. Multiple balloons, drifting over the city in the early light, the way they always do in Albuquerque in the fall and spring.
My first thought was that there seemed to be more than usual. And then I realized: there weren't more balloons. The balloons had been there all along. I had just stopped looking at the sky.
That morning was not a cure for anything. The grief was still present. The loss was still real. But something in me had returned — some capacity for peripheral vision, for upward gaze, for noticing beauty that was not directly ahead of me on the path.
The anchor had been keeping me functional all along. But on that morning, it became something more. It became a portal back.
WHAT THE RESEARCH TELLS US - AND WHAT IT DOESN’T
There is a growing body of research on what happens to time perception under stress. When we feel threatened, the brain encodes threatening stimuli more deeply, more persistently — which creates the subjective experience of time moving more slowly. This is why a crisis can feel endless even when it is objectively brief. And it is why sustained uncertainty — the kind that does not resolve, that simply continues — is one of the most psychologically demanding experiences a person can have.
The pandemic gave us a mass experiment in what happens when ordinary anchors disappear. The commute, the gym, the school pickup, the Friday dinner — these were not just parts of our routine. They were the structures that gave time its shape. When they were removed, days blurred. The threat of the unknown expanded to fill all available space. People who had never struggled with anxiety began to struggle. People who had previously managed well began to falter.
What the research supports — and what I have observed clinically — is that ordinary anchors work not because they distract us from difficulty but because they restore the nervous system's sense of rhythm. They reduce the temporal dilation. They create pockets of predictability and peace in an otherwise unpredictable landscape.
But the research cannot tell you what I have come to believe through clinical work and lived experience: that there is a difference between maintaining an anchor and inhabiting one. And that difference matters enormously.
ANCHORING VERSUS AVOIDANCE
This is the distinction I want to be careful about, because it is easy to misunderstand.
An ordinary anchor is not the same as a distraction. Distraction is a way of not feeling what needs to be felt — numbing, escaping, bypassing. Anchoring is something different. It is staying in contact with life even while the hard thing is also present. Not choosing between the grief and the run. Bringing both.
The difference is subtle and it is real. A person who goes for a run to avoid thinking about their situation is using movement as avoidance. A person who goes for a run because it is Tuesday and they always run on Tuesdays, and they let themselves notice the light on the trees while they do it, is anchoring.
One keeps you from feeling. The other keeps you in contact with living.
I was running in the bosque both ways, at different times. The grief required both. There were runs where I needed to go somewhere else in my mind, to survive the mile. And there were runs — later, slowly — where I could let the cottonwoods back in. Where I could look up at the New Mexican sky — and the familiar feeling that I was inside of a marble looking up returned.
Both were part of the process. Neither was wrong. But the second kind was what brought me back.
ON GUILT
One more thing, because I see it often and it deserves to be named.
People in crisis often feel they do not deserve ordinary comfort. That enjoying a meal, or a walk, or a good cup of coffee while something terrible is happening is a betrayal — of the seriousness of the situation, of the person they are grieving, of the weight of what they are carrying.
It is not.
Ordinary anchors are not a sign that you are not taking things seriously enough. They are not evidence that you are okay when you are not. They are evidence that you are still here — which is, in fact, the most important thing.
The hot air balloons were beautiful. The grief was real. Both were true at the same time.
That is not a contradiction. That is what it means to be alive.
A GENTLE INVITATION
Think about the ordinary things in your life that have kept their shape — even during the hardest stretches. The walk. The morning routine. The meal. The particular window with the particular light.
You don't have to do anything with them right now except notice they are there.
And if you find yourself going through the motions without being in them — that is okay too. The anchor is still doing something, even then. It is keeping you here. And keeping you here is enough.
When you are ready to look up, the hot air balloons will still be there.
This piece is intended for informational purposes and is not a substitute for individualized mental health care.
