"You do ask the hard ones, Professor." She sat down, reminding herself not to flop gracelessly. "'Control' doesn't seem to work well, honestly. It's the pink-elephant problem. What I've generally done in crisis situations is divide my mind in two -- one half to do the thinking and the other half to panic more or less ignorably in a corner. Until now, I hadn't thought of extending that to less-fraught circumstances... is it worth a try, or am I on completely the wrong track?"