"Just In Case" Items and Your Secret Pact With Distrust

Day 5 of 7: Quantum Releasing Before the Solstice Portal

You have a drawer that functions as a doomsday bunker for hypothetical scenarios that will never happen. Cables for devices you haven’t owned since Obama’s second term. A phone charger for a brand that went bankrupt. Forty-seven rubber bands because apparently you’re preparing for a rubber band emergency that requires immediate access to forty-seven of them. Somewhere in your closet lives a bag of bags inside another bag, and you keep it because “you never know when you’ll need a bag” as if bags aren’t literally everywhere, breeding in grocery stores, multiplying under sinks, available at every single checkout on earth.

Your solar plexus holds every “just in case” you’ve ever stored. That knot below your ribs that tightens when you consider letting go of something “useful”? That’s not practicality. That’s your nervous system running a scarcity program installed before you had language to name it. Your belly learned to hoard before your mind learned to reason.

That box of “might need someday” items is a time capsule of distrust. Distrust in the field, that you are. Distrust in your future self to figure it out. Distrust in the basic reality that things come when they’re needed and leaving a gap doesn’t mean falling into it.

You’re not organized. You’re terrified. And you’ve given fear a label maker and a shelf in every room.

Your gut stores ancient survival data. Famine memory. Migration memory. The cellular echo of ancestors who didn’t have Amazon Prime and actually needed to keep things “just in case.” But your nervous system can’t tell the difference between your great-great-grandmother’s real scarcity and your imagined one. It runs the same panic program for a missing phone charger that she ran for missing the harvest.

Here’s what the Container Store won’t print on their labels. Every “just in case” item is a physical manifestation of a belief: the future is hostile and I must prepare for its attack. You’re not storing batteries. You’re storing evidence of your worldview. Every junk drawer is a theological statement about whether the universe has your back. Plot twist: it does. Your drawer just hasn’t gotten the update.

The space between your ribs remembers every time you reached for something that wasn’t there. Every moment of not-enough that wrote itself into your fascia. But it also remembers every time something appeared exactly when you needed it. Every unlikely provision. Every synchronicity your mind dismissed but your body registered. Your tissue holds both stories. Today you choose which one runs the operating system.

✨ THE FIELD MECHANICS OF SCARCITY HOARDING

Your nervous system creates contingency anchors. Every item you keep “just in case” represents a potential future threat neutralized. Your brain registers it as safety. One less thing that could go wrong. One less way the universe could betray you.

Problem: you can’t actually store enough to satisfy a nervous system running a scarcity program. The program doesn’t have an “enough” threshold. It just keeps adding items to the list of things you might need someday, expanding infinitely, colonizing every available drawer and corner and closet.

Your amygdala doesn’t understand probability. It understands pattern. You needed something once and didn’t have it? Filed permanently. Now your entire home becomes a defense system against a moment that happened once in 2009 and probably won’t happen again.

Your solar plexus is the center of personal power and trust. It’s where you digest not just food but reality. When it’s clogged with “just in case” energy, you can’t digest new experiences properly. Everything filters through “but what if I need it.” Your gut becomes a hoarder of possibilities instead of a processor of presence.

Meanwhile you can’t find the scissors because they’re buried under nine things you’ve never used but definitely can’t throw away.

💎 THE PROTOCOL

This one goes straight to survival wiring. Move slow. Your system genuinely believes this stuff keeps you safe.

One. Stand in front of your “just in case” zone. The drawer. The closet. The garage corner. The folder on your desktop with 3,000 screenshots you’re saving for reasons you can no longer recall. Let your eyes scan without fixing.

Two. Pick up an item that’s been waiting for its hypothetical moment for over two years. Hold it. Notice your solar plexus. That space between your belly button and your ribs. What happens there?

Three. Exhale sharply through your mouth with a short “HA” sound. One quick push from your core. Like you’re blowing out a match that’s been burning too long. This interrupts the fear pattern, shocks the vagus nerve out of hoarding mode.

Then ask your body the real question. Do I keep this from trust or from fear?

Trust feels like openness in the belly. Space. Breath moving easy.

Fear feels like grip. Clench. The subtle sensation that letting go means losing control.

Your gut knows the difference between genuine preparation and anxiety cosplaying as responsibility. The first impulse tells you everything. The mental negotiation that follows is just fear hiring lawyers.

⚡ PERMISSION

You can release something potentially useful without betraying your future self. You can trust that what you need will come when you need it, not because you hoarded against the possibility of need. You can admit that keeping forty-seven rubber bands has never once saved you, and letting them go won’t destroy you.

Every “just in case” item you release is a vote for a universe that provides instead of withholds. Your nervous system learns trust through action, not affirmation. You can journal about abundance forever and nothing shifts. Throw away one cable you’ve been hoarding since 2015 and your body receives a direct message: we are safe without this. That message rewires more than any mantra.

What actually leaves when that item goes: The belief that you have to prepare for every possible disaster alone. The identity of someone who can’t trust. The exhausting vigilance of scanning every future for threats and storing defenses against each one. The version of you who needed physical proof that she wouldn’t be left without. She did what she could. Her era is complete. You can close the drawer.

🔥 INTEGRATION

Maybe today you clear one entire “just in case” zone. Maybe you throw away three cables and feel like you just jumped out of a plane without a parachute. Both are massive. Both register in your nervous system as evidence that you survived letting go.

That survival data is the point. Your body needs to experience releasing something it thought was necessary and then... nothing bad happening. That’s how you reprogram scarcity. Through lived proof. Through being okay without the thing you were sure you needed.

Some items will leave easy. Some will trigger a full internal presentation on why you definitely need that specific Allen wrench for a piece of furniture you no longer own. Thank your mind for the TED talk. Let the item go anyway.

Your solar plexus deserves to digest present reality instead of defending against imaginary futures. Your gut deserves to stop running threat assessment on every object in your home. Today you trade hoarding for trust, one useless cable at a time.

✨ BREATH FOR TODAY

Stand in front of your “just in case” stash. Or hold one item you’ve been keeping against emergency. Inhale into your belly. Let it expand soft and full. Exhale sharp through mouth: one quick “HA” from your core. Feel the release. One more round. Inhale slow. Exhale sharp.

Hand on solar plexus, that space below ribs. Words inside, quiet: “I don’t feed this anymore.”

Whatever you keep or release, your body just voted on whether the future is threat or gift.

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Tomorrow: Day 6: Other People’s Weight in Your Drawers 💎