"Somewhere between a video of a dog doing taxes and a girl making her matcha, I stumbled upon Mel Robbins, motivational speaker and Ted Talk legend, telling me to high-five myself. The video had pandemic energy. That quiet, echoey desperation of someone who's spent too long indoors talking to objects. Mel explained that in her darkest days she looked at herself in the mirror and gave herself a high-five. You are your own cheerleader, she said. You've survived 100% of your worst days."
"The self-help economy thrives because it offers a sense of agency; the illusion that if we just reframe, breathe, manifest, hydrate, optimise we can out-think the chaos. Mel's high-five was a mirror-slap heard round the world. And for a brief moment, even my cynicism wanted to join in. So I decided to invent my own method. Something equally absurd yet profoundly spiritual. A practice that could heal the modern soul. Introducing: The Hiccup Method!"
A person scrolling social media encounters a viral motivational high-five practice characterized by pandemic-era desperation and widespread adoption. The practice promises self-cheering and survival-of-worst-days reassurance, supported by studies and testimonials. The person describes economic and social precarity—rising costs, housing unaffordability, moral decay—and frames self-help as an economy supplying perceived agency through rituals and optimization. In response, an alternative micro-practice is proposed: the Hiccup Method, which reframes hiccups as reminders of being alive and offers three approaches—forgetting, startling, or breath-holding—as mindful techniques for reclaiming presence and surrender. The method is presented with playful absurdity yet seeks genuine spiritual consolation.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]