Stand Guard at Your Mind: What Horses Taught Me About Staying Sane

The psychiatrist leaned back and said something that changed everything.

I'd been telling him about my mornings—how after mucking stalls and hauling hay, I'd stand at the fence with my coffee. Just watching. Horses grazing. Clouds drifting. The steam from their breath in cold air.

I told him I felt guilty about it. Standing still when there was so much to do.

He nodded. "Ah, so you're practicing mindfulness. Keep doing that."

I had no idea what "mindfulness" meant. But his words landed like mercy. He wasn't telling me to push harder. He was telling me this simple act was keeping me sane.

So I kept doing it. And I learned something you won't hear in wellness content:

Staying sane isn't about bubble baths and positive affirmations.

It's about standing guard at your mind.

What "Standing Guard" Actually Means

Every morning, I'd walk out to the paddock. Cold air. Boots crunching frost. The world narrowing to: horses, fence, sky. The sensory input was simple. Real. The rhythmic sound of horses chewing. The swish of a tail. The smell of hay, sawdust and earth. The wind on my face and the weight of the mug warming my hands. Nothing engineered to trigger me. Nothing designed to hijack my attention. Just life. Actual life. Happening at the speed of now.

This is what my nervous system had been starving for.

Real vs. Manufactured

There are two kinds of input coming at you every day:

Real: Wind through trees. The smell of coffee. Cold air on your skin. Your feet on solid ground.

Manufactured: Notifications. News cycles. Designed outrage. The 47 things screaming for attention that have zero impact on your actual life. One grounds you. The other hijacks you.

Your phone is engineered—literally engineered by teams of psychologists—to make everything feel urgent.

But the horses? They don't give a fuck about your timeline. They care about the hay. The patch of ground. The now.

And watching them taught me: most of what's screaming for your attention doesn't deserve it.

What the Horses Know

Horses live in complete absorption with what's actually happening.

A horse doesn't worry about tomorrow or replay yesterday. It eats. Moves. Notices what's real. Then goes back to the hay. Not because horses are simple. Because they know the difference between what matters and what's just noise.

I'd spent years letting everything past the gate. Every notification, every crisis, every piece of outrage felt urgent. My nervous system was in constant manufactured emergency.

Standing at the fence, the horses showed me something radical:

You can be aware without being hijacked. You can notice without spiraling. You can care about what's real and let the noise stay outside the gate.

The Practice

Standing guard looks like this:

• Stop letting everything in. Learn to recognize the difference between what actually needs you and what's just performing urgency.

• Choose what gets your attention. Where you put it matters more than almost anything else.

• Find your fence. Mine is literal—a paddock with horses. Yours might be a trail, a garden, a quiet room. But you need a place where the sensory input is REAL.

• The Truth: You can't control the chaos. But you can control the gate.

You can't fix chaos by absorbing it.

You fix it by learning to stand in the middle of it without letting it colonize your nervous system.

The horses already know this. They're in the field right now, completely unimpressed by your anxiety. Eating their hay. Living in now. You can learn from them. Or you can keep scrolling.

The question is:

What are you letting past the gate that has no business being there?

Not what you SHOULD filter out. What are you ACTUALLY letting take up residence in your head? Most of it isn't urgent. And the sooner you learn to stand guard, the sooner you get your sanity back.

Ready to stop letting chaos run your nervous system? Free tools for standing guard at your mind → screwthescript.com

XO, Line

"Still figuring it out,

sharing what works."