The Japanese Safety Technique That Helps My Anxiety

Have you ever felt completely disoriented in a familiar place? Like your brain just... forgot where you were?

Railroad workers in Japan figured out how to prevent this kind of dangerous confusion using a technique called "pointing and calling." When checking a signal, they don't just look - they physically point at it and say out loud: "Signal is green, proceed."

This simple act engages multiple senses and creates conscious awareness instead of autopilot behavior. The result? Dramatically fewer errors and accidents. The technique has spread to manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries because it works so well at cutting through mental fog and grounding people in observable reality.

I discovered its power personally during a moment that still makes me grateful for patient friends.

I have some anxiety about driving on the freeway, and a friend offered to practice with me to see if she could help me work through it. During one drive on a stretch of road I'd traveled many times, I felt that familiar wave of panic rising and told her: "Nothing looks familiar. I don't know where I am."

She reassured me that anxiety can create exactly this kind of disorientation - your brain gets so focused on the fear that it stops processing familiar information normally. Then she suggested something that seemed almost too simple to work.

"Try naming what you can actually see," she said. "Call out the road signs, the landmarks, anything concrete."

So I started doing exactly that: "Exit 45 coming up. Speed limit 65. Blue Honda in the next lane. Mountains on the right." Simple, factual observations spoken out loud.

The relief was immediate. It was like the fog lifted and I could think clearly again. The anxiety was still there, but it no longer controlled what I could perceive.

This connects to something I learned recently about energetic boundaries too. When I was picking up on my sister's emotional energy during a vacation and feeling overwhelmed, my first instinct was to push it away and resist it. But what actually worked was naming observable differences between us: "She has brown hair, I have gray. She's in that chair, I'm in this chair."

Here's what both experiences taught me: When emotions feel too big to navigate - whether it's anxiety, overwhelm, or even absorbing someone else's energy - naming what's actually happening in the present moment can be more effective than trying to process or resist the feelings.

It's not about dismissing emotions, but about giving yourself an anchor in observable reality when feelings threaten to sweep you away.

Whether you call it pointing and calling or simply naming what you see, this technique works because it grounds you in facts rather than projections, in the present moment rather than anxious futures.

What situation in your life might benefit from more naming and less feeling your way through the overwhelm?

#Neuroplasticity & Boundaries