The Frequency of Choice

I was standing in the supplement aisle at our local health food store last week doing the thing I imagine you've done too. Reading labels. Comparing proteins. Whey or pea or hemp or collagen, grass-fed or wild-caught, this salmon or that one, and somewhere behind all of it the bigger questions humming away: paleo, vegan, Mediterranean, none of the above? I have spent over 25 years in this field and even now, these types of choices hold the danger of making my head spin.

Here's what I find fascinating about that spin. It isn't a knowledge problem. Some of what's on those shelves has real data behind it. Some of it is riding a wave of popularity and nothing more. And even the well-researched options weren't researched on you, your body, your history, your particular season of life. So the mind does what minds do when they're handed forty options and no felt way to sort them: it revs, it loops, and eventually it quietly shuts down.

Researchers have watched this happen in real time. In one now-famous study, shoppers offered twenty-four varieties of jam stopped to browse far more often than shoppers offered six, and then bought dramatically less. More options drew the eye and froze the hand. The research on decision fatigue tells a similar story: the sheer volume of choosing wears down the quality of our choices, until by nine at night we're reaching for whatever asks the least of us.

That's the landscape so many of us are trying to be well inside of. Abundance everywhere, and a nervous system calibrated for a much quieter world.

The Question Underneath the Question

For years I have helped my clients (and myself) navigate that question... which choice is right for me? Which protein, which plan, which protocol.

But there's a question underneath it that interests me more: where am I when I'm choosing?

Not where geographically. Where energetically. What state, what frequency, what field am I standing in when I reach for the thing?

Because here's what I've noticed, in my own life and in thousands of hours sitting with people trying to make change in their lives: the 9 PM version of me, depleted and scrolling, chooses differently than the version of me who slept well, who had a gentle walk in the day, who feels resourced and accompanied in her own life. Same kitchen. Same options. Different chooser. And once I saw that clearly in my own life, I began paying attention to the state I bring to my choices, because that state shapes what I reach for and how it will land more than anything printed on a label ever will.

What the Map Is For

This is where I tend to reference David Hawkins' work, even though for the conventional science world it is not considered rigorous science. Hawkins proposed a map of consciousness, a scale of emotional states rising from shame and fear through courage, acceptance, love, peace. Somewhere along the way, I stopped needing all of my maps to be laboratories. Some maps are valuable because they give language to what we already feel.

And what we already feel is this: shame chooses differently than gratitude does. Fear reaches for different food than love reaches for. Despair and delight walk out of the same pantry holding different things. Every state we inhabit carries its own vibrational signature, its own frequency, and our choices come out tuned to it, the way a voice comes out tuned to the breath beneath it.

One thing matters enormously here. When I say higher frequency, I am not describing a ladder of human worth. There is no hierarchy in this, no better person standing on a rung above you. Higher simply means more coherent. More resonant with your own wellbeing. A cello string isn't morally superior when it's in tune; it's just finally playing the note it was made for.

The Body Votes First

So here is the topic this whole article has been moving towards: what happens if, instead of choosing from the depleted place, we pause and adjust the frequency first? Not white-knuckling a virtuous choice from a collapsed state, which is exhausting and rarely holds. I mean shifting the state itself, even slightly, and letting the choice change on its own.

I love that the science actually meets us here. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio ran a series of experiments where people drew cards from decks, some secretly rigged against them. Their bodies, measured through tiny changes in skin conductance, began responding to the risky decks well before their conscious minds figured out anything was wrong. The body voted first. Damasio called these signals somatic markers, and an entire field of interoception research has grown up around them, mapping how the insula, a deep fold of the brain, continuously reads the body's internal state and feeds that reading into every decision we make. Your body is already assessing the field and casting its vote before your mind finishes its spreadsheet. This is measurable physiology, quietly at work in you since before you had words.

I've written before about the truth bell, that clear tone that rings underneath the noise when something is true for you. This is its close companion. The bell was about hearing truth through the static of other people's certainty. This is about learning the two most useful notes your body plays: its yes, and its no.

A Coherent Yes, A Coherent No

So let me offer you a micropractice. It takes five minutes, and it's less a technique than an introduction, a chance to formally meet two signals that have been with you your whole life.

MICROPRACTICE:

Arrive. Wherever you are, let your feet find the floor. Take one slow breath, and let the wall of options, whatever it is today, recede for just a moment. It will wait for you.

Ground in the light. Call up something genuinely good. A shaft of afternoon light, the face of someone who loves you, the warmth of gratitude for one true thing. Let it be honestly available rather than manufactured, and let it settle until you can feel it somewhere in your body, not just picture it. We do this first because we're about to read a delicate instrument, and an instrument reads truest when it's been tuned.

Calibrate your yes. Now bring to mind something that is an unquestionable yes in your life. A person, a place, a food that loves you back. And simply notice: where does yes live in you? For some women it's a softening through the belly. For others, a warmth spreading in the chest, a subtle lean forward, an opening behind the sternum. There's no correct address. You're just learning where yes keeps house in your body.

Calibrate your no. Then, gently, bring to mind an unquestionable no. Notice what changes. A tightening in the throat, a contraction in the gut, a pulling back, a dimming of the inner light you gathered a moment ago. Again, just notice. The no is not a problem; it's information, and it's protective, and it's yours.

Ask. Now bring in the actual choice, the protein powder, the eating style, the commitment you've been circling. Hold it in the field you've created and listen for which signature answers. Which frequency does your body return? You might notice something clear. You might notice something quiet and ambiguous, and that's a real answer too; some choices are genuinely neutral, and knowing that frees you from agonizing over them. The signal grows clearer with practice, the way any tuning does.

What you're building here is a form of embodied discernment, your own version of what the muscle testers and applied kinesiologists have been reaching for, grounded in your direct felt experience. You're teaching yourself to consult the part of you that votes first.

Choosing from the Hum

The aisle will still be there next week, with its forty proteins and its competing certainties. The world isn't going to become less abundant, and honestly, I don't want it to. Abundance is a beautiful thing to be surrounded by once you can hear yourself inside of it.

So the next time the options rise up in front of you and your mind begins its familiar spin, I hope you'll remember that you brought an instrument with you. Pause. Find the light. Let your frequency come back to coherence before you reach for anything at all.

May your yes be warm and unmistakable. May your no be clean and kind. And may every choice you make this week guide you to the most coherent you that you can possibly be.