Challenge #16: The One-Task Challenge

What if doing less could actually help you accomplish more?

We live in a world that celebrates being busy.

We answer emails while eating lunch. We check our phones while watching television. We listen to a podcast while cleaning the house. We start one task, remember something else we need to do, and suddenly we’re juggling five things at once.

We call it multitasking.

But sometimes, multitasking isn’t making our lives easier. It’s making our minds tired.

Your challenge today: Do one thing at a time.

Choose one task today and give it your complete attention.

It doesn’t have to be something important or complicated. You could:

• Drink your morning coffee without checking your phone.
• Fold the laundry without watching television.
• Prepare dinner without scrolling social media.
• Have a conversation without looking at your phone.
• Work on one project without jumping between tasks.
• Sit outside and simply notice what’s happening around you.

For those few minutes, allow yourself to be completely where you are.

Why this matters

Our brains need opportunities to slow down.

Constantly switching between tasks can leave us feeling scattered, even when we’ve accomplished a lot. When we focus on one thing at a time, we give our minds permission to settle.

And here’s something important:

You don’t have to earn your right to slow down.

Especially during the years of menopause and beyond, life can already feel like we’re carrying a lot. Work, family, relationships, responsibilities, changing bodies, changing priorities, and sometimes a growing realization that we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives simply rushing from one obligation to another.

Maybe this is your invitation to pause.

Not forever.

Just for one task.

Try this today

Before you begin something, take a moment and say to yourself:

“For the next few minutes, this is the only thing I need to do.”

Then notice what happens.

Notice how you feel before you begin.

Notice whether your mind tries to pull you somewhere else.

And when it does, gently bring yourself back.

No criticism.

No frustration.

Just come back.

That’s mindfulness.

A little reminder from Breathing Room

You don’t have to completely change your life to create more peace in your life.

Sometimes it starts with something as simple as putting down the phone, taking a breath, and giving yourself permission to be fully present for what you’re doing.

One thing.
One moment.
One breath at a time.

That’s your Challenge #16.

And remember—small steps can create big changes.

With love,

Rita Long
Breathing Room w/ Rita Long
ritalong.org

You know the feeling. You wake up at 2 a.m. with a thought that shouldn’t even matter at that hour, and suddenly your mind is running laps. The same concern circles back. Then again. Then again. Before long, you’re not just worried about the original thing. You’re worried about being worried.

That is the worry loop. And if you’ve lived there for any stretch of time, you already know that trying to think your way out of it rarely works.

The good news is that you don’t have to think your way out. You have to breathe, move, and shift your way out. Here are five simple practices that can help you do exactly that.

1. Name It Without Feeding It

The moment you notice the loop starting, say it out loud or write it down. Not a paragraph. One sentence. “I am worried about money.” “I am afraid this won’t work out.” Naming what’s happening creates a small but important distance between you and the thought. You are not the worry. You are the one noticing it. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

2. Give Your Body a Job

Worry lives in the mind, but it takes up residence in the body. Tight shoulders. A clenched jaw. Shallow breath. When you shift your focus to a simple physical action, your nervous system gets a different signal. Wash the dishes slowly. Take a ten-minute walk without your phone. Stretch on the floor. The goal isn’t distraction. It’s re-grounding. Your body knows how to be present even when your mind has wandered three weeks into the future.

3. Try the 4-7-8 Breath

Inhale for a count of four. Hold for seven. Exhale slowly for eight. Repeat four times. This breathing pattern activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part of you that tells your body it is safe to settle down. It takes less than two minutes and costs nothing. Keep it in your back pocket for the moments when the loop starts spinning fast.

4. Ask One Grounding Question

Instead of following the worry wherever it wants to go, interrupt it with a simple question: “What is actually true right now, in this moment?” Not tomorrow. Not last week. Right now. Most of the time, the honest answer is that you are physically safe, you have what you need in this moment, and the thing you are dreading has not happened yet. Sometimes that single question is enough to loosen the grip.

5. Choose a Worry Window

Give yourself ten intentional minutes each day to worry on purpose. Set a timer. Write down everything that’s bothering you. When the timer goes off, close the notebook. If a worry surfaces outside that window, remind yourself: “That gets its time later.” This practice trains your mind to stop treating every moment as the appropriate time to rehearse worst-case scenarios.

Breaking free from the worry loop is not about becoming someone who never feels anxious. It is about learning that you have more say in where your attention goes than the loop wants you to believe.

You can step out. One breath, one question, one grounded moment at a time.

The colors we reach for say more than we realize — and intentional color choice can become one of the most powerful tools in emotional healing.

Have you ever felt instantly calmer stepping into a room painted soft sage green? Or noticed a surge of energy when you wore something bright red? Color is rarely neutral. It speaks to something primal in us — influencing mood, memory, and meaning long before we find the words to describe what we’re feeling.

Art therapy takes this intuition seriously. Rather than treating color as decoration, it treats color as communication — a language available to everyone, regardless of artistic skill.

What is the color wheel of emotions?

The color wheel of emotions is a framework rooted in psychology that pairs colors with specific emotional states. Think of it as an emotional vocabulary for those moments when feelings are present but words aren’t. Red might surface as passion or frustration. A deep, quiet blue might represent the particular heaviness of grief — or the open spaciousness of peace. The same color can hold opposing truths, which is part of what makes working with it so revealing.

In art therapy settings, this framework helps people externalize what’s internal — giving visible form to experiences that might otherwise stay locked inside.

How art therapists work with color

In a session, a therapist might invite a client to choose colors that feel true to what they’re experiencing right now — not what looks good, but what feels honest. Someone moving through anxiety may find themselves drawn to blues and greens without quite knowing why. Someone who feels emotionally stuck might instinctively reach for vivid yellows and oranges.

The act of choosing is itself meaningful. And what emerges on the canvas — the weight of a brushstroke, the way colors bleed into each other, the parts left blank — often reveals more than verbal reflection alone could uncover.

A useful question to sit with during this process: Why does this color feel right today? Or: What does this shade remind me of? You might be surprised what comes up.

There’s no right outcome here. The goal isn’t a finished painting — it’s a moment of honest contact with yourself, expressed in color rather than words.

Color as a path to healing

What art therapy reminds us is that color is never just pigment. It carries memory, emotion, and meaning that words can miss entirely. Whether you’re processing something heavy or simply exploring how you feel on an ordinary Tuesday, picking up a brush and letting color speak can be quietly transformative.

You don’t need to be an artist. You just need to be willing to look at what you reach for — and ask yourself why.

Every shade has something to say. The question is whether we’re listening.

Your Brain Isn’t Broken — It’s Just Starving for a Moment of Nothing

Why learning to be bored might be the most radical thing you do this year.

5 min read Originally published March 2026

Picture this: you’re deep in the middle of something — a project, an article, a train of thought that was actually going somewhere. Then, without any warning or real reason, your hand moves to your phone. Not because something urgent happened. Not because you needed information. Just… because.

Sound familiar? Here’s the thing most people don’t realize: that moment wasn’t a failure of willpower. It was your nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do — hunting for a reward.

The dopamine hunger you didn’t know you had

Our brains are wired to seek stimulation. When a task stops feeling interesting or rewarding, dopamine levels quietly dip. And the moment that happens, the brain starts sending out urgent requests: find me something. A notification. A headline. A thirty-second video about absolutely nothing. It doesn’t really matter what — as long as it delivers a quick signal that something is happening.

The problem isn’t that we occasionally get distracted. It’s that we’ve built entire systems — apps, platforms, feeds — specifically designed to feed that hunger on a loop. Which means we’re rarely ever actually bored anymore. And that’s a much bigger issue than it sounds.

“We’ve built an entire world designed to make sure you never have to sit with your own thoughts for more than fifteen seconds.”

Boredom is not the enemy

Here’s the counterintuitive truth: boredom is actually useful. When your mind isn’t occupied with input, it starts doing something remarkable on its own. It wanders. It connects dots. It surfaces questions and ideas and feelings that haven’t had room to breathe. Some of your best thinking — your clearest decisions, your most creative ideas — lives on the other side of boredom.

But you’ll never get there if the moment any quiet opens up, you fill it. Every time you reach for the phone to avoid a dull moment, you’re essentially telling your brain: silence is dangerous, stillness is something to escape. Over time, that message sticks.

Why stillness feels so uncomfortable

There’s a reason people describe silence as “deafening.” When all the noise stops, what fills the space isn’t peace — at least not at first. It’s everything you’ve been too busy to deal with. The awkward conversation you replayed a hundred times. The goal you keep putting off. The quiet truth you’ve been carefully avoiding.

We scroll past these things a dozen times a day. But when the screen goes dark and the room goes quiet, they’re still there. Waiting.

This is why stillness can feel more like a confrontation than a rest. And it’s also why it matters so much. That discomfort isn’t a sign that something is wrong — it’s a sign that your mind is finally getting a chance to process instead of just react.

Try this today

Set a timer for just ten seconds. Find a blank wall — not a window, not your phone, not the room’s most interesting corner. Stare at it. Do absolutely nothing. Notice what your brain does when you don’t hand it something to chew on. That’s where it starts.

A small experiment with a surprisingly big payoff

You don’t have to go off-grid to reclaim your attention. Start with one app — the one you reach for most automatically, the one you open without deciding to. Delete it for just 24 hours. Not to be productive. Not as some kind of punishment. Just to see what happens when that particular exit door is closed.

You’ll probably feel restless at first. Maybe even irritable. That reaction itself is worth paying attention to — it tells you how much mental real estate that app has been quietly occupying.

But something else tends to happen too. Small windows of time reappear. Thoughts start completing themselves instead of getting interrupted. You remember that your inner voice actually has things to say, once you stop talking over it with content.

This isn’t about willpower or going on a digital detox retreat. It’s about reclaiming tiny moments — the five seconds at a red light, the two minutes before a meeting, the space between one task and the next — and letting them be what they are: nothing. Just you and your brain, without an agenda.

Silence isn’t emptiness — it’s raw material

The most interesting ideas don’t usually arrive while you’re consuming something. They arrive in the gaps. In the shower. On a slow walk. In the moment after you close the laptop and haven’t opened anything else yet.

Those moments are not wasted time. They’re the conditions your mind needs to actually think — not just process input, but generate something original. When you protect even a little of that space, you’re not opting out of life. You’re opting back in to the parts of it that are actually yours.

So maybe the most rebellious thing you can do in an age of infinite content isn’t to find better content. It’s to need less of it. To tolerate a little quiet. To let boredom show you what’s underneath.

You might be surprised what’s been waiting there all along.