It’s 3pm on a Tuesday. You’re at your desk. You’ve been at your desk since 8:30 with a short break for lunch. Your shoulders are somewhere up near your ears. Your jaw is doing the thing it does at 3pm. You’ve got two and a half hours of work left before you can leave the building.
Your body is sending you a small, persistent signal. It’s the same signal it sent at 3pm yesterday. The signal is that the body would, if it had a choice, like to be somewhere with horizon, with moving water, with air that doesn’t come out of a vent.
You can’t give the body that. You’ve got the work to do. The bills don’t pay themselves. The mortgage waits. The kids need pickup. The signal will be politely ignored, as it has been every day this week, and most of the days the week before.
This article is about what that signal costs to keep ignoring, and about what the body is actually asking for.
The Two Settings the Australian Body Knows
An Australian body, if it grew up here or has lived here long enough, knows two general states of being. There’s a coast state and there’s an office state. The body knows both. The body prefers one. The body has been overriding the preference for a long time.
The coast state is what the body does when the input thins out and the horizon opens. The breathing slows. The eyes stop scanning. The shoulders drop. The cortisol drops. The body, given several days of the right conditions, will settle into a baseline that most Australians who experience it describe in some version of: this is what feeling normal is.
The office state is what the body does to function inside conditions it was never designed for. The visual horizon is replaced with three feet of monitor. The hands are doing one repetitive task. The ambient noise is climate control. The body, after several hours of this, is running a small ongoing performance - keeping the attention on, keeping the posture right, keeping the impulse to move overruled - that takes a steady amount of energy you don’t quite notice you’re spending.
Most Australians have done both states. Most Australians know which one their body prefers. Most Australians live, week to week, inside the state their body doesn’t prefer, and visit the state their body does prefer for a week at Christmas and maybe four days at Easter.
The cost of doing that, on a long enough timeline, accumulates. The accumulation is what this article is about.
What’s Doing the Overriding
You’ll have noticed by now that the override is real. You’ll have tried things to reduce its cost. The standing desk. The walks at lunchtime. The reminders to breathe. The Pomodoro timer. Some of it has helped at the surface. None of it has touched the underlying ask the body has been making.
That’s because the ask is happening at a different level. About five per cent of what’s running in you at any given moment is conscious - the part that read the standing-desk article. The other ninety-five per cent is the subconscious, and the subconscious in your case has been carrying the small ongoing tension of running the body in office state for years.
For a lot of Australians who work indoors, the subconscious carries something like: I’m not where I should be. The conditions are wrong. The work is fine but the body is overriding. Keep going.
It doesn’t run as language. It runs as the 3pm signal. The held tension in the shoulders that no amount of stretching quite reaches. The slight permanent low-grade longing that doesn’t have an obvious object.
The conscious-level corrections don’t reach that signal. The signal is the body asking for something the office can’t provide. The way through isn’t to override harder. The way through is to update what the subconscious is doing with the gap.
What the Method Reaches
The 3pm signal is not a complaint about the calendar. It’s the body operating on conditions a calendar cannot change. The conscious mind can ignore the signal, book a coffee break, push through to 5pm, and the body will be making the same ask at 3pm tomorrow because the ask is being made from a layer your scheduling tools don’t touch.
Inner Influencing addresses the layer underneath. It does not require giving up the indoor career or rearranging the working day. It updates the subconscious settings about what to treat as urgent information and what to treat as background noise.
Reaching that layer requires the subconscious to be addressed in its own language - a specifically structured request rather than a thought, a wish, or an affirmation. The trigger phrase that signals the structure is “Purple Cow.” Deliberately strange. The strangeness is the difference between request and noise. One statement. Said once. No repetition.
Try It For Yourself
Read each statement below slowly - out loud if you can. Say it once, then stop. Let a moment of quiet follow before the next one.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the constant low-grade tension my body has been carrying from running in conditions it was never built for, the held longing at 3pm on a Tuesday for an environment I can’t have, and the cost of overriding what the body is asking for in order to get the work done, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then pause and notice.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the belief that the office override is just the cost of being a working adult, that the body’s preferences don’t count when the bills need paying, that the longing is something to be suppressed rather than addressed, and the conviction that I have to choose between functioning in the world and listening to what the body needs, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Take a breath. Let it settle.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will make it easy for me to do the work I need to do without the constant low-grade ask running underneath it, to access something of the coast-state baseline even at the desk, and to let the body settle in the conditions I have rather than the ones it was built for, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then simply rest for a moment.
What Just Released
You may have felt something small. A breath that went somewhere it hadn’t been reaching. A slight unclenching in the shoulders, where the office override has been sitting. A faint sense, even small, that the 3pm ask has stepped back a notch. Whatever happened, the subconscious received the signal at the layer where the running tension has been held.
This kind of shift doesn’t arrive with drama. It tends to arrive as less of something - less of the held override, a slightly quieter version of the longing that hasn’t had anywhere to go.
What you just did is the entry-level move of Inner Influencing. There are deeper layers underneath - the original instructions about what work is for, the long-running rule that the body has to be overridden for life to be funded, the inheritance of a particular Australian deal between effort and indoor work. The free Inner Influencing Discovery Kit takes you further into this work and explains why it reaches what other methods don’t.
A lot of Australians have been running the office override so long they’ve stopped noticing it as a thing they’re doing.
It’s a thing. The body’s been keeping a tally.
The subconscious doesn’t need an argument. It needs the right signal at the right level. You’ve just sent one.