Sing along until it passes

Put a song on, loud, and sing the whole thing. In the car, in the kitchen, wherever you happen to be standing. Badly is completely fine. You cannot hold the posture of a craving and sing at the same time. Wanting is a held breath: shoulders up, jaw tight, chest braced, everything short and clenched. A chorus takes all of that apart by force, and it does not stop to ask whether you currently feel like singing.

The mechanism is your breath, not your mood. Every sung line is a long slow exhale, and long exhales are the one lever you can reach from the outside of your own nervous system. It is the same thing the breathing exercises are after, except this version does not require you to sit quietly with the urge and concentrate on it. You get the physiology and the distraction in the same three minutes. The song does the work. Your only job is volume.

Something else is happening that matters more than it sounds. You cannot sing and argue at once. For the length of one track your head is not building the case, not negotiating terms, not running the old script about how hard today has been and how this once would not really count. The lawyer in you has been handed lyrics instead. The argument does not get won, it gets skipped, and skipped counts just as much as won.

Pick something you already know every word of, not something new. Three or four minutes of that puts you well past where most waves crest, and you come out the other side slightly out of breath and in a noticeably different mood than you went in. Singing is one of the oldest ways people have crossed a hard hour, and a great deal of it was aimed straight at God. You are allowed to enjoy the way out. None of this has to be grim.