It’s too hot to think straight, isn’t it.
The hottest May on record, as it turns out — and the other night the temperature never even dropped below twenty-one degrees. No wonder none of us is sleeping. Hot, bothered, faintly irritable for no good reason. A few degrees too many and suddenly nobody’s quite themselves.
I want to start there, because the weather is showing us something useful about a deeper kind of restlessness. The inner kind. The churn so many of us carry under perfectly functional lives.
There’s a chaos that runs from the inside out that we can do something about. It’s also the one doing the most damage to your day.
Let me explain something I find fascinating, and I’ll keep it simple.
There’s a thing in science called chaos theory. We hear “chaos” and picture mess and randomness. Scientists mean almost the opposite. A “chaotic” system is one that’s so sensitive that one tiny nudge at the start grows into something huge later. A butterfly flaps its wings, and a few weeks later there’s a storm a continent away. Small cause, big effect.
That’s how the inner life works too. The churn is rarely one big thing. It’s the low, daily friction you’d barely name — and lately I’ve been hearing the same few from almost everyone. Being overextended: saying yes to one more thing when every cell of you wanted to say no, then carrying the quiet resentment of it. Feeling faintly out of sorts with yourself, without being able to say why. The sense that the role you play — the capable one, the dependable one, the one with the answers — has started to feel less like you and more like a part you’re contracted to perform. Confidence that’s begun to feel like a performance rather than the real thing. None of these is a crisis. Each is small. But a small friction, running under the day, doesn’t stay small.
Your body reads it as a threat that never quite passes, so it keeps a slow drip of cortisol and adrenaline running, the stress hormones built for real emergencies. Fine for an afternoon. Corrosive over a year. That drip is what keeps you wired at night and flat by morning, nudges your blood pressure up, wears at your immune system, and frays the very sleep this heat is already stealing. So this isn’t only mood. It’s your health, quietly taxed in the background, all day long.
Here’s the part I love, though. When scientists watched all that “chaos” for long enough, it wasn’t random at all. It kept circling one spot — never landing on it, always orbiting it. They called it a strange attractor. The dance looked wild, but it was organised around a centre.
Your restlessness has a centre too. The snapping, the racing mind, the sleeplessness aren’t separate problems to fix one by one. They’re all circling the same thing — and the work of the inner life is not to silence the churn but to come home to that centre.
The yogis understood this as something you practise, not something you simply choose. Satya, truthfulness, they treated as an inward discipline first — and they noticed that as the inside steadies, the outside settles with it. Sadhguru calls this kind of work inner engineering: small, repeatable practices that bring you back to yourself, so that being yourself stops being a thing you have to perform and becomes the ground you stand on.
So what do we actually do.
Not push it down — that’s the instinct, and it never works; pushed-down chaos just comes out sideways, usually at the people you love. The old practice the yogis called svadhyaya is closer: gently watching yourself, without rushing to fix anything. When the churn rises, don’t act on it. Pause, and let it point.
And give the body a way to come down, because it listens faster than the mind. Here’s the practice I’d offer you this week, and it takes sixty seconds: breathe in gently through the nose for a count of four, then let the out-breath be longer — slow, for a count of seven or eight — and do that for a minute. The long exhale is the signal your nervous system reads as safe. It eases the foot off the accelerator, slows the heart, and quietly tells the cortisol drip it can stop. Do it before you open your laptop. Do it at 3am. Do it in the car before you walk through your own front door.
It’s small. It’s simple. And so was the butterfly.
The peace the tradition calls santosha was never about having everything sorted. It’s just no longer being at war with what’s true about you. And that, it turns out, is the quietest, most powerful gift you can give everyone around you too.
The heat will pass. The restlessness, if you let it, has something to tell you.