As a child and teenager, I didn’t enjoy studying very much. Especially maths, physics and science. I had other priorities, like talking on the phone for hours with my best friend or reading novels. So, I did the bare minimum to maintain my B student status. “She has so much potential”, teachers would tell my parents at every student-parent meeting, “but she doesn't put in the effort. She rests on her laurels.”

The problem was that for my parents, especially my dad, getting good grades in scientific subjects was very, very important. To them, it was the difference between succeeding in life or being jobless, and I’m barely exaggerating.

I’m not gonna lie to you, there was mounting evidence to support my dad’s laziness claim: I always got excited about the beginning of things but never finished what I started. I’d take up new hobbies, only to give them up. I’d ask my parents for new pets (“just one more rabbit please”), but then I’d get bored and somebody else would have to take care of them. I didn’t study as much as I should’ve. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

So I internalized this belief: I’m a lazy person with no follow-through. And beliefs we internalize from a young age, especially when accidentally enforced by a caregiver, tend to be extremely sticky.
Up until five years ago, I strongly identified as a quitter. Nowadays, I don’t anymore. And I want to tell you about how I got there, because I know how painful the sting of self-disappointment is and how real the consequences of limiting beliefs can be.
So here’s what I learned in four tips.

✍️ If you want to make the most out of this post, grab a pen and paper. I’ve included a prompt for you with every tip.

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Tip 1: Understand why it matters

The problem with these beliefs is that they can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies because of this sequence:

Belief —> Thoughts —> Emotions —> Decisions —> Actions —> Reality

The problem isn’t the belief “I’m lazy” itself. It’s what it triggers next: “Therefore, I’ll never amount to anything. Therefore, why bother? I’ll only disappoint myself and others.”

And then the actions follow: Not signing up for the course, giving up on the painting, canceling plans… which leads to more disappointment…. which locks the belief in even more.

If you believe you’re not clever, you might feel panic at the idea of getting that big promotion. So you won’t apply for it. As a result, you won’t get it, even though you deeply wanted it. You’ll miss all the growth it would have brought you, and the salary bump that could have transformed your life. That single decision puts you on a different trajectory than if you didn’t have the belief.

Beliefs are worth paying attention to. Let’s see how we can work on them.

✍️ But first, I want you to do something: Write down one negative belief you hold about yourself.

Tip 2: Fight the bias

All humans share one annoying trait called “confirmation bias”. It means that every time you form an opinion, your brain is naturally inclined to look for evidence that supports it and ignores anything that doesn't. And by doing that, it locks in the belief even harder.

In one of my lives with my friend , she used a fantastic analogy for this. Imagine a field with a shortcut into town, she said. Everybody uses it, so over time, a deep pathway forms. You can see exactly where you need to walk. There are neural pathways just like that in our brain. They’re the obvious paths your brain has been taking for ages.

Now imagine a farmer comes and moves the gate two feet to the right. People start walking down that way, forming a new pathway. The old one gets overgrown and abandoned. Moving the gate is changing the belief “I’m lazy” to “I get things done when they’re important to me.”

✍️ Remember that limiting belief you wrote down? What's a new pathway you could start walking instead?

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Tip 3: Generate Proof

Sometimes, our beliefs are not unfounded. They might even totally true, and telling yourself the opposite only gets that flagged as false by your brain and discarded. The problem is when they start sounding like a life sentence. If they’re accompanied by the words “always” and “never”, that’s your cue to pay attention.

The easiest thing you can do, is switch those with one powerful word: “yet.”

“I’m not good at drawing” becomes “I’m not good at drawing yet.”

“I’m terrible at chess” is now “I’m not good at chess yet.”

It’s a completely different sounding sentence, isn’t it? At the heart of the switch is the belief in your ability to change and grow. It’s the removal of the finality of the “nevers” and the “always.”

I know it doesn’t come naturally at first. That’s when it’s time to generate proof. And nothing says “strong evidence” to our brain like action. In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about casting a vote for the person you want to become every time you do the thing. And the goal is to have enough votes for your brain to update its perception of you.

So if you’ve decided to pursue a goal that matters, every time you do something you said you’d do, you’re casting a vote for a non-lazy identity. And it puts those helpful sentences on steroids, because now they’re backed by proof.

✍️ What’s the smallest action you can take this week to cast a vote for the new belief you want to cultivate? The brain loves it when we write these things down.

Tip 4: Check for hidden messages

An important thing I learned about myself is that every time I feel lazy about something and procrastinate, that feeling is a compass pointing to fear. It’s usually a fear of messing-up, hiding a fear of shame or a fear of loss.

I’d been talking about getting into investing for ages but hadn’t lifted a finger. I told my husband I didn’t have time to learn about stocks, that I had too much on my plate. I finally opened an investing account earlier this year but procrastinated on the last step, and the account got automatically closed. Months later, I had to redo the whole thing from scratch and take a physical bank appointment to get it running. Yet, weeks passed again before I finally made my first investment, and only because my husband kept nagging me.

Why did it take me 2 years instead of 2 weeks? Was I just lazy to take care of it? No, it was because deep down, I was afraid of doing it wrong and losing all my savings.

✍️ Whatever your limiting belief is, poke at it a little, ask yourself why 3-5 times and see what surfaces.

I was on a walk the other day and a thought popped up in my mind: “How are you going to become a conference speaker if you’re such a poor speaker in English? Choosing my fourth language, for Substack, was a mistake.”

Not too long ago, I know this thought would have taken root in my mind and, slowly but surely, killed my motivation and made me quit Substack. Because “what’s the point?” and “I can’t be bothered because this is going nowhere.”

Instead, I answered back. “I’m not articulate yet. Public-speaking is a skill I can learn. I’ll get better at it over time. And even if I never become a public speaker, who knows where Substack might take me? I’ll keep going.”

And this is why this work matters, even if it takes time.

Rooting for you, always ✨🩵

What's the limiting belief you're going to work on this week? Tell me in the comments. I'll be your first cheerleader 🎊

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The amazing self-confidence coach and I had an entire conversation on limiting beliefs. Check it out to learn how to deal with them 👇🏼

If this piece spoke to you, you might enjoy this one too:

And yet, what did I do all day long? Trash talk myself, call myself names and bring myself down. I knew, conceptually, that you shouldn’t do that, but I wasn’t even aware I was doing it to myself.

That’s where the difference between understanding a truth and actually living it lies.

My aha came from podcasts. Interviews where admirable, successful people described the same brutal inner voice I thought was mine alone. And by listening to them, I started hearing myself. I gained a different type of awareness, a crystal clear one, and it led to something beautiful: action.

This is chapter two of After the Aha, my three-month collab with eight creators writing at the intersection of psychology, mindset, and inner work. Chapter one explored the ahas we keep on having. This one is about when the aha hits later than it should.

Here’s what they said.

What did you understand intellectually for years before you started living it?
(when the aha hits late)

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Nathalie Cohen from the Nathalie Cohen publication

A little Substack gem, Nathalie’s publication is a place of wisdom and profound humanity.

That external achievements can never satisfy an inner void.

I grew up in a home where achievement mattered - a lot. I internalized that I was only worthy when I succeeded, and struggled with anxiety, low-grade depression and feelings of emptiness from an early age.

Even though I went to therapy, a part of me kept hoping that if I became successful and impressive enough, I would finally feel worthy and whole.

So, I frantically chased: another degree, another job, another country, another career pivot, another promotion. While each move gave me temporary relief, the inner void always returned. I didn’t realize it back then, but I was never moving any closer to a solution, I was simply escaping. They even have a term for this: awayness.

Ultimately it took close to 10 years, 5 degrees, 4 jobs, 2 different careers, 3 countries, 2 kids and a burnout to hit rock bottom and finally understand that peace truly is an inside job.

Through Vipassana meditation, I developed a practice that helped to finally stop escaping: equanimity. The ability to stay mentally balanced and to observe emotions and situations, instead of immediately needing to respond to them.

Raquel Devillé from Ce n’est pas dans ma tête

Meaning “It’s not in my head”, Raquel’s publication offers nervous system regulation tools for highly sensitive and neurodivergent women.

That I am not my thoughts. I could explain it. I could teach it. I believed it in theory. But when anxiety showed up, I still fused with every story my brain was telling me. "This is dangerous. Something is wrong. You're not enough." I knew those were just thoughts. I still lived as if they were facts. What changed wasn't another book or another aha. It was body-based work. When my nervous system finally felt safe, the thoughts lost their grip. Not because I out-thought them. Because I stopped running from the sensation underneath.

WENDY TOMLINSON from The Empowered Mindset

One of the kindest voices on Substack, Wendy will lift your energy and make your mindset extra strong.

My first introduction to the law of attraction was The Secret. I read the book and watched the film over and over for weeks. Then I researched all the speakers, learned everything I could, and eventually trained as a Law of Attraction Practitioner, which took me two years. The day before I qualified, my husband told me our marriage was over. I couldn't believe it. I kept thinking, I didn't ask for this. The course founder told me, in no uncertain terms, that I absolutely had asked for it, and that within a few months I would see that clearly. She was right. What I understood then was that it didn't matter how much I said I wanted our marriage to work. What I truly felt at a deeper level was that I was miserable and I wanted to be free to live the life I really wanted. That was the moment I stopped understanding the law of attraction intellectually and started seeing how it had been working in my life all along.

Kat Korobacz from Kat Korobacz’s Substack

Where CBT therapy meets the nervous system, Kat’s Substack is about how to turn understanding into movement.

I could have written the case study on myself. I understood my history, where the wounds came from, why I responded the way I did, in real depth, for years before anything about my actual life changed. That's a strange place to sit: fully able to explain yourself and still stuck exactly where you started. What I eventually realised is that insight was never going to be the bridge. It can describe the far bank in perfect detail and still leave you standing on the near one. The piece that was missing was including the body and the nervous system as an active part of the work, rather than just the mind's account of it. That's the personal shift that's shaped how I practise now, as a qualified therapist: knowing why you feel something and feeling safe enough to feel differently are two separate jobs. Being stuck in the middle, between the two, is a painful place. It's where a lot of the negative beliefs people carry about themselves come online even more: the sense of being broken, or lazy, or simply beyond help, when really they've just been given the map without ever being shown the bridge. And once those beliefs come online, we contract even more, which only widens the gap between knowing and doing rather than closing it.

Shelly Roberts from Pen is Power

Shelly’s publication is a place to explore the cycle of Beliefs > Thoughts > Feelings > Actions > Results.

What we eat and drink has a direct influence on how we feel physically and mentally. We can get away with living on processed, fast foods when we’re younger, but… it does catch up with us eventually.

Nicola Farnhill from Connected to Self

Nicola works with midlifers who, just like her, are done with survival mode.

I understood intellectually, and for years, before I started living it, that not everyone will treat you the way you treat them. But there is no room to be a victim in this situation, no. Only the awareness to be gained that boundaries can only be respected when they are expressed and stood by. Just because you know what you need doesn't mean that others do.

Mahmoud Owies from Brilliantly Dark

Warm and profoundly honest, Mahmoud writes his own story in a way that lets you see yours.

This will sound so stupid, but I always understood that one day I will die. However, I never felt it, it never really clicked, not until the death of my father two years ago. I finally started seeing it so clearly: my time here is limited, and waiting for miracles is not the best way to live.

Break Free With Me (Mac) from The Personal Freedom Podcast with Mac Dohm and Porn Free Millenial

Mac’s work is about faith, courage, and the daily choices that can reshape a life, drawn from lived experience.

For years I understood that my worth wasn’t determined by my failures. I could have quoted Scripture about grace, talked about forgiveness, and encouraged someone else to believe it.

I just struggled to believe it applied to me.

Pornography wasn’t only reinforcing unhealthy behaviors and clashing with my Christian values growing up, it was reinforcing an internal narrative that I was fundamentally broken. I knew the truth intellectually, but shame interpreted every setback as proof that I hadn’t really changed and never truly would.

Things began to shift when I learned to separate my identity from my behavior. Much of that growth came through Christian-based therapy, including Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), joining a men’s Bible study at my local church, installing accountability software on my devices, and building consistent accountability with my little brother and my recovery coach.

I still take full responsibility for my choices, but I no longer allow my worst moments to define who I am. That shift didn’t just help me break free from pornography, it changed the way I saw myself and what I believed was possible.

I love the phrase “never waste your suffering”, and reading through these answers, I realized these are eight people who did not waste theirs. They took difficult experiences like burnout, anxiety, divorce, grief, or addiction and turned them into a personal reckoning.

Wendy's marriage ended and the law of attraction stopped being theory. Nathalie burned out and equanimity became a practice. Mac faced the shame underneath his addiction and grace applied to him too.

None of them chose the catalyst but all of them chose what to do with it. The aha hits late because our nervous systems, our histories, and our identities need more than an idea to move.

If you’re in the middle of something hard right now, seeing it clearly is asking a lot. So here’s another way to say it: Whatever you’re going through has something to teach you. But you don’t have to learn it today. The lesson will still be there when you’re ready.

Next month, chapter three: What moved them from knowing to doing? The specific moment things finally tipped.
See you then! 🫶🏻

💬 Your turn! What did you understand intellectually for years before you started living it? We’d love to know.

Leave a comment

If you missed it, here’s chapter 1:

Have you ever gone through a rough patch? I mean a really difficult period where life throws something hard at you, the way you’d throw a yarn ball to a cat, minus all the cuteness and fun. “Here’s something for you to grapple with. Let’s see how you do.”

I’m in the middle of one of these. It’s okay, all humans will go through at least one significant personal crisis in their lifetime. It’s a normal part of the ride. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck. For the past three years, mine has been an all consuming cycle of waiting, followed by grief, then more infernal waiting… until the next serving of grief. Infertility in a nutshell. If you know, you know.

But here’s the thing: When you’re knees-deep into something like this, you start to change. My factory settings are: joyful, sociable and entrepreneurial. But these days, I’m dragging my feet, isolating myself from friends and my new year’s goals look like a big joke. I can barely recognize myself.

And in the middle of all this, I noticed three thought patterns showing up in my brain. They pop up like bad weeds, making the view even worse.

This post is about recognizing these thoughts and plucking them out with grace. If you too are struggling with a tough chapter these days, stick around, this will help.

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Thought nº1: “The sh*tiness is forever”

This weight in your chest, this feeling of “something awful is happening” is staying with you forever, whispers your anxious brain. This is who you are now. A sad, disappointed person, dragging their feet. Your goals are cancelled. Your dream life is cancelled. You’re sentenced to feeling like this forever. It’s all final.

Here's the truth. When we're in crisis mode, our brain doesn't like complexity very much. Subtlety, nuance? Nah, we ain't got no time for that. We need to activate black and white mode my friend.

Remember this: Our nervous system’s number one job is not to keep us happy. It’s to keep us alive. And survival means fast decisions in black or white. Threat or Safe, Fight or Flight, Forever or Never.

That's why, in the middle of a hard chapter, everything starts to feel permanent.

Thought nº2: “Old you is gone”

Not that long ago, I used to listen to podcasts on every commute and finish books weekly. To unwind, I’d watch business content on Youtube, or spend hours on Substack.

This changed my life for the better. Get inspired, learn new stuff, apply it to my life, see it work, learn something else, on repeat. Nothing was more satisfying to me than seeing my own progress.

“I’ve lost my spark,” I told my husband the other day.
I miss the version of me who strives for more and better. The goal setting, the project planning, the manifesting. Nowadays, that version is nowhere to be found. The infertility topic is running in the background 24/7 and has called dibs on all that mental energy, leaving me with the bare minimum to stay afloat.

And because I’m not displaying my usual personality traits, it feels like that entire version of myself is gone. But deep down, I know what’s actually happening. It’s not gone. It’s just on-hold for now. My nervous system is putting most of its resources toward one job: getting me through this chapter.
Meanwhile, the goal setter is in the waiting room and she’s got time. She did not just pack up and leave.

Traits don’t disappear, they just get deprioritized. And when the crisis passes, they come back.

Thought nº3: “Everything sucks”

As a direct consequence of patterns nº1 and 2, you are now starting to entertain unusual thoughts. The words “nothing”, “never” and “always” show up a lot. It’s all absolute. You’re on route Cynicism and it’s not pretty. Think about it as imaginary smoke, tainting everything with the colors of dread.

“Ugh, this sun again, it’s too bright.” (I adore sunny days.)
“Why won’t Fulanita stop talking this morning?” (Fulanita is my most interesting colleague and I learn a lot from her.)
“Time to leave work. I bet there’ll be a traffic jam on the road, as always” (Traffic jams on my commute only happen about once every three months.)

The problem with this is that our brain is always looking to confirm whatever we’re feeding it. This is like the anti-manifestation strategy. What I’m subtly telling my brain is: Everything’s bad, let’s look for more bad stuff to confirm how bad everything is.
And the brain, powered by negativity bias, will deliver on a task like this. It’ll overperform because it’s primed to look for threats.

I want to say something before we go further. Seeing these patterns doesn't fix them, but it changes something. You go from being sunk by them to noticing them. And once you notice, you get to choose what to do next.
Here are four specific things I've been doing. They help me a lot.

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Move nº1: I see you

The good news is that seeing these patterns is half the work. Most people never spot them. They take everything they say at face value and pay for it in unnecessary suffering. That's not going to be us.

Move nº2: Talk back

Switch the script from a monologue to a dialogue between you and… you.

- I’m failing at life.
- No you’re not. This is only one chapter, not the entire story.

- I’ve lost my spark.
- It’s still there, buried under the struggle. It’ll show up again.

- This will never work.
- You don’t know that.

- Life is hard.
- Life is a series of chapters. This chapter is hard. Better ones are coming.

Move nº3: Radical self-kindness

If someone you deeply love was in pain, what would you do? Think of three things you would actually do for them.

You’d force them to get out of bed and take a walk with you. You’d bring them donuts or cook their favorite dish. You’d draw them a bath, take them shopping, or encourage them to paint, because you know that always cheers them up.

Now take that same energy and all that love, and direct them right at you. How does it feel? Uncomfortable? Well, it shouldn’t. You deserve that same compassion. You’d do it for them. Do it for you.

Move nº4: Ask for help

A lot of my writing is about pulling myself up from my bootstraps. I’m all about empowerment and independence. But this doesn’t cancel the fact that humans are social beings and there are times when we simply cannot do it all on our own.

It took me forever to get a life coach. Now I can’t imagine going through this without her support. I know therapy is still a luxury for many, but if you can afford it, find a good professional. It makes all the difference, I promise.

And if you can’t, reach out to your family and friends, and be explicit about your needs. My husband had to travel two days before we found out the results of our last fertility treatment. Those two days are the most excruciating stretch of the whole process and I was feeling anxious and resentful at the idea of facing them alone. But my coach saw things differently. She said I should tell him exactly how I felt and what I needed of him during that time. I didn’t like doing it. He should know this without my help, I thought. But I did ask him to check on me often. He said he was already planning to check in every day, but now that I told him, he was going to double down and make that multiple times a day, texts and calls. He did and it helped.

I guess what I’m trying to say with all this is: It’s okay to lose sight of your usual self for a while. It doesn’t mean she’s lost forever. It’s just a symptom of a rough period. Believe me, and I’m telling you from the trenches, it’s not a life sentence.

I know none of these fixes will make the hardship go away. But they can lower the volume and protect you from the layers of extra suffering we tend to pile on top of the pain that's already there.

And one last thing: Please, please, be kind to yourself while you're in this. It matters more than you think ✨

💬 If you're going through a hard chapter, I'd love to know one thing that's been helping you. Small or big. Tell me in the comments.

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And if you enjoy dissecting your thoughts, you might enjoy this piece too..

My mind goes blank and I say nothing as their words slowly sink into my chest. They feel heavy and their weight lingers there, oppressing me.

The moment passes, the conversation shifts but so have I. I’ve slowly turned into Ice Queen. Very, very cold…

And for the foreseeable future, I will infuse every single one of our interactions with this icy breath, until you finally ask me what’s wrong.

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The Origin of The Cold

There’s this Moroccan concept called nefss.
It roughly translates into a mix of pride and self-respect. Moroccans are big on nefss. We’ll raise our head, lightly pat our noses with our fingertips, and say “my nefss is up here.” It means “I’m a proud person,” “I have self-respect,” “I won’t be humiliated.”
We carry our nefss like a badge of honor.

This idea was central to my upbringing. And while I’m all for some healthy pride, nefss often gave my ego permission to take the wheel.

I learned, mostly by watching others, that whenever somebody I’m close to hurts me, this is the proper procedure to follow:

1. Step 1: Lash out immediately. Give them a witty I’ll-put-you-back-in-your-place reply.
   If you don’t, it must mean you’re a pushover and have no nefss. To reclaim some of it, move to the next step.

2. Step 2: Ignore them completely. Wait, expectantly, for the next time they approach you. Meanwhile, relive the moment a hundred times in your head and rehearse every way you’ll make them pay.

3. Step 3: Freeze them out. When they finally reach out, don’t look at them. If they make a joke, don’t laugh nor smile. If they ask a question, don’t answer them, or do so in very short, dry replies. Extra points if you’re unnecessarily dismissive. They know what they did.

4. Step 4: Maintain the freeze until, intrigued and pained, the offending party asks you what’s wrong. When they do, hallelujah! Some variation of this dialogue can now unfold:

— Is something wrong? You seem off.
— I’m fine.
— Did I do something to upset you?
— Well I don’t know, did you?
— What did I do?

And then maybe, after what could last minutes or days, we can finally get into the problem. The offence. There can finally be a conversation about what happened and, in the best of scenarios, some repair.
But in many cases, the cold facade melts away before we ever really talk, and the resentment stays inside us, fossilizing into something bigger over time.

Emotional Maturity Isn’t Automatic

I wish physical and emotional maturity grew at the same pace. but it doesn’t always work that way. So many children are stuck into the bodies of functioning adults. We throw tantrums, we sulk and, just like crying babies, we expect others to guess our needs and tend to them.

We think we’re angry, and we are, but deep down, we’re also terrified. We run away from tough conversations as if we were chased by a tiger. In moments of conflict, God forbid we show our loved ones that we’re vulnerable.

This is a problem. When we give others the silent treatment, it gives us an illusion of control. We’re back at the reins and now have the power to punish them. But is punishment really what we want? What’s actually going on inside us?

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Behind The Ice Wall

I realized that behind my facade of detachment and superiority, lied a weeping child, terrified to be found out. Because then, they’ll know how much I cared and how vulnerable I was. I’ll lose my power.

One day — much later in my adult life than I care to admit — I realized I din’t like myself like that. So, I stopped. That 4-step process might have served an earlier version of me, but it was no longer compatible with who I was becoming.

The switch happened after years of observing others stuck in these toxic dynamics. I could witness first hand how much it hurt their relationships. I understood that difficult conversations have a high return on investment and began to see my ice wall for what it was: childish, cowardly, and a desperate cry for love.

Bringing Up the Thermostat

My default mode is still going -100ºC when I’m mad at someone I care about. This kind of deeply rooted behaviors doesn’t disappear over night. But now I catch myself and never allow it to go on for long. I take a short time to calm down, then I reach out and say:

“When you did X, it made me feel Y because Z.”

I won’t lie, it doesn’t feel good in the moment. In fact, I hate every minute of it because my voice will shake, and I’ll tear up and then I’ll hate myself for it. But I hate it the way I hate going to the dentist. It’s not a pleasant moment, yet, it’s necessary.

The important relationships in my life deserve the discomfort. The stranger who bumps into you and doesn’t apologize? That you can let go of.

But your best friend, your partner, or the coworker you spend 40+ hours a week with? They’re worth it.

This is what it means to be a mature adult. And the conversation not only gives the other person a space to explain and apologize but it also builds intimacy and trust.

If like me, you have a tendency to turn into an AC when triggered, I get it. It doesn’t even feel like something we do on purpose. It just happens. But we can fight it and choose to act in a more mature way. The next time a loved one hurts you, consider observing your reaction. Name what you’re feeling and try to understand why. Then use your words and just tell the person what they did and the way it made you feel.

Skip the accusations and the nasty comments and don’t assume they know. Tell them.

Maturing is becoming aware of our patterns and choosing how we want to show up. Remember, nothing grows in icy temperatures.

💬 Do you come from a culture (or a family) that taught you to punish rather than talk? Tell me about it below.

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This is not a post on nutrition. This is a post on the gap between knowing and acting. In my case, that gap was bridged by a chronic disease diagnosis. But do things always need to get that bad before we actually get moving?

People-pleasing is bad. Overthinking is not worth it. Daily meditation will change you. It’s important to move your body, and so on, and so on…

We get the lesson and it might even hit us like an epiphany. We try it out for a while, but the relapse always comes back.

So I started wondering how this shows up for other people. I asked eight creators from different corners of psychology, mindset, and inner work three questions: What's a lesson you keep relearning?
What did you understand intellectually for years before you started living it?
What moved you from knowing to doing?

Their answers became this mini-series I’m calling After the Aha. Each question will be a post over the coming weeks and today we’re tackling the first one.

These are all people I admire and I loved their humanity and insights. I hope you will too.

What's a lesson you keep having to relearn? (the aha you have to keep re-having)

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from the Nathalie Cohen publication

A little Substack gem, Nathalie’s publication is a place of wisdom and profound humanity.

That you can’t choose your pain, but you can choose whether you multiply it. It is a lesson that I keep having to relearn, especially in life’s most mundane moments.

The other day, I came home after a long, draining day at work. When I opened the door, I was greeted by our screaming toddler, whose sister had “stolen” his toy, and our crying 4-month-old who needed to be fed. When I then asked my husband where the milk formula was that he had promised to buy, and he said he forgot - I felt my blood starting to boil. Before I knew it, I slipped back into a well-worn pattern: I started blaming everyone and everything for my misery. My husband. My kids. The Universe. Slowly, I let my mind build a case against my life.

In Buddhism they actually have a name for this: the second arrow. The first arrow is the unavoidable pain of a difficult event, the second arrow is the pain that we add by dwelling on it. In that case, we don’t suffer once, but twice.

Later that evening, as I sat at the dinner table feeling particularly resentful, I remembered that I had a choice: I could keep compounding my suffering by feeding the story, or I could acknowledge the difficult feelings, feel them, and let them pass.

It is a choice I have to keep making again and again, but every time I do, it creates a little more space to deal with what is actually happening.

from Ce n’est pas dans ma tête

Meaning “It’s not in my head”, Raquel’s publication offers nervous system regulation tools for highly sensitive and neurodivergent women.

That rest is not the reward at the end of the to-do list. It’s part of the work.
I teach nervous system regulation. I help women slow down. And yet, I still catch myself running on empty, telling myself “just a little more.” The aha hits. I feel better. And then, a few weeks later, I’m back at it.

The thing is, knowing something intellectually doesn’t rewire your nervous system. The pattern was built over decades. One insight doesn’t undo that. So I keep re-learning the same lesson. Not because I’m failing, but because this is literally how the body works.

from The Empowered Mindset

One of the kindest voices on Substack, Wendy will lift your energy and make your mindset extra strong.

One lesson I have to keep relearning is that I don’t need to fix everything for everyone. Where this comes into play most is with my mum and my son. Both are fully functioning, very capable adults, and most of the time all they need from me is to listen, to be present and to give my support. Not to fix.
In fact, when I forget this lesson, I end up taking away their power, and that’s something I never want to do. So I keep coming back to it.

from Kat Korobacz’s Substack

Where CBT therapy meets the nervous system, Kat’s Substack is about how to turn understanding into movement.

That coping and regulation are not the same thing. I can function under pressure, hold a lot, wear every hat required of me, that's simply who I am and what my work demands. But being able to cope is not the same as being okay. Working in acute, high-intensity environments keeps me in "go" mode by default, so I keep having to relearn that functioning well isn't proof my nervous system is settled. The question I keep coming back to is "am I actually okay, or just still upright?"

There's no single fix for this, partly because my work itself doesn't stay still. The environments I'm in, the intensity, the hats I'm wearing, all shift, which means what my nervous system needs shifts with them. A tool that worked last month can go quiet on me this month, not because it failed but because I'm not the same person in the same conditions I was when I found it. So it's a menu, not a prescription, and I have to keep checking what my body actually needs right now rather than what I think it should need by default.

What's changed most isn't the tools themselves but my relationship to my own nervous system. It's become an ongoing dialogue rather than a problem to solve once. Like any relationship, it needs attention, it needs me to keep showing up and asking rather than assuming I already know the answer from last time. So it's a journey in which I always feel like a student, because the person I'm learning about keeps changing too.

from Pen is Power

Shelly’s publication is a place to explore the cycle of Beliefs > Thoughts > Feelings > Actions > Results.

People are more important than pounds. People, especially those you love, fill you up with memories, feelings and energy in a way that money and “things” never can. So, I guess the lesson I have to keep relearning, is to make spending time with my loved ones my nº1 priority and not let work occupy too much of my time.

from Connected to Self

Nicola works with midlifers who, just like her, are done with survival mode.

As an Empath, the lesson I have had to keep learning is one of discernment, of knowing when to give in, to let go, to no longer put in effort where it is not appreciated or wanted. Not to make my deep understanding of why someone does the things they do, the reason to empathize to the point of self-sacrifice. Some people cannot meet me where I am; they cannot see that I believe in them and their potential, and they can only make my staying a sign of weakness, which they ultimately exploit. Yes, my lessons in this situation are about knowing my worth and discernment.

from Brilliantly Dark

Warm and profoundly honest, Mahmoud writes his own story in a way that lets you see yours.

I think I’m living inside a lot of loops, to be honest. But if I have to pick one, I think it would be that I should never waste my energy on someone who has made it so clear that they don’t want me or my energy in their life. I spent... and still sometimes spend... so much time overthinking my relationships with people who have already forgotten about me.

They’re not evil, and I’m not evil. Some people just won’t like your energy or thoughts; it doesn’t fit with how they want to live, and that’s always okay. What’s not okay is obsessing about it forever.

from The Personal Freedom Podcast with Mac Dohm and Porn Free Millenial

Mac's work is about faith, courage, and the daily choices that can reshape a life, drawn from lived experience.

The lesson I keep having to relearn is that personal freedom isn’t something you achieve once, it’s something you practice every day through a series of intentional actions and decisions. For me, freedom is both a destination worth pursuing and a state of mind that must be strengthened like a muscle through consistent repetition and daily habits.

There’s a part of me that still wants to believe I’ll eventually arrive at a place where discipline becomes effortless, the temptation to fall back into old habits disappears, or life settles into a constant state of peace. But eight years of recovery from pornography addiction and more than three years rebuilding my life after divorce have taught me otherwise.

Freedom isn’t built by one life-changing “aha” moment acting as a silver bullet. Those moments absolutely matter, they become milestones that remind us why we’re fighting. But lasting freedom is built through thousands of ordinary choices made long after the inspiration fades.

Every day, I’m casting another vote for the kind of man I want to become and the identity I want to inhabit. That’s why I keep coming back to the basics. I intentionally invest in my spiritual health, physical health, relationships, and passions. When I fall short in one of those areas, I no longer see it as proof that I’ve failed. I see it as a signal that I’m drifting and need to realign with what centers me.

As I was reading, I kept coming back to this thought: Every creator on this list is someone I consider deeply wise. They read, they teach, they've spent years doing the work. And every single one of them named a lesson they keep having to relearn. They all admit the same thing: The lesson comes back✨

So if you've been beating yourself up for knowing better and still falling into the old pattern, I want you to hear this: You're doing the exact thing every wise person does. You're relearning and that's what the work actually looks like.

The next post will take on the aha that hits late: What it looks like to understand something intellectually for years before we start living it.
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💬 Dear reader, tell us! What is a lesson you keep relearning? Let’s turn this comment section into a goldmine of shared humanity 🩵✨

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My boss, it turned out, was not a big fan of delegating. He had hired someone because it seemed like the expected thing to do, but I wasn’t allowed to actually do anything. Once in a while, he’d call me to his office and say: “Let’s update the schedule.” What he meant was: “Sit next to me while I update the schedule.” Not once did I touch the mouse. He’d click around asking me things like “What happens if I click here?” or “How do I link these two milestones together?” I was reduced to being his human software manual. And that was maybe an hour, which left me with a remaining 38 hours a week with absolutely nothing to do.

This was the director of a multi-million project who refused to let the project scheduler (aka me) do the scheduling he was paying her for. I’d sometimes spend entire mornings scrolling through Excel files, or pretending to type. Anything to use my hands and look like I belonged. It was torture.

To make matters worse, every day at 10 am, the girl sitting on my right would look up at the rest of my teammates and say: “coffee?” Then they’d all get up together, and go gather around the machine. I could hear their chatter and laughter from my seat. For the first four months, not once was I invited to that daily break.

I’m a pretty sociable person, so I’d expected to make friends right away. The reality was a little different. I soon found out that people from the northeast of France, l’Alsace, weren’t the kind to immediately open up to strangers. They took their sweet time and needed to know you first before letting you in.

And to me, it felt like rejection. Combined with my excruciatingly boring days at the office, I started to feel very lonely, isolated and useless. My self-esteem was taking a serious hit. Most evenings of those first months, I'd get to my 15m² studio (161 ft²), close the door behind me, and cry. Little did I know that experience was about to teach me one of the most important lessons of my life.

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Before Strasbourg, the idea of doing any kind of activity alone was foreign to me. Fun plans required fun friends, period. What do you mean eating alone at a restaurant? That sounded insane.

There was a reason behind that thinking. When I spent too much time alone, things would get pretty dark, pretty quickly inside my head. And being surrounded by productive, contributing people who seemed busy and useful, while I sat at the margins doing nothing… Well, it didn't help. It opened the door to all sorts of unkind thoughts. I felt less than, I felt excluded, and it all seemed to confirm my worst fear: I was a fraud.

Eventually, spring sprung (literally), and reminded me that I was living in a beautiful city.

I’d gotten tired of the crying and the gloom, and I started spending more time outside. Small steps at first: some solo shopping downtown. Then I widened the radius. I discovered the art of roaming the city aimlessly, walking through new neighborhoods, taking pictures of everything, like a tourist. I stumbled upon the beautiful city park. Then I started bringing a sandwich and a book and lingering there a little longer.

One day, I spotted an outdoors Djembel dancing class, signed up for it and ended up loving it. It gave me something to look forward to every weekend. Little by little, I was proving to myself that I could be alone and have a good time.

Soon enough, I was taking the bus to nearby German towns to spend the day window shopping and that same summer, I took my very first solo trip to Barcelona and Porto. Just me, my backpack, a couple of hostels, and free city walking tours. I had a blast.

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Eventually, a girl my age at work invited me to a dinner party she was hosting for the rest of her friends from the team, and just like that, I was in. Officially accepted into the tribe… and the 10am coffee break. Not long after, another teammate introduced me to his Brazilian wife. We connected right away thanks to my time in Brazil. I got to keep my Portuguese alive and hang out with her once in a while. My social life finally bloomed and the loneliness was behind me.

But in retrospect, those lonely months are one of the most important things that have ever happened to me. They introduced me to myself. They also taught me that it was safe to be left alone with my thoughts. And most importantly, that life doesn’t stop in the absence of others. I’m still an extrovert (kind of) and need real connections to thrive, but other people’s availability is no longer a pre-requisite for my enjoyment.

It’s one of the most empowering lessons I ever learned. I carried it back to Paris when my girlfriends started falling in love and stopped being free every weekend. I took it with me as I wandered Parisian streets, admiring art exhibitions. Or when I sat by the Seine to watch salsa dancers, finished books in cafés or even took myself to the movies. It’s still with me to this day, in San Sebastian where strolling the beach or writing in the park isn’t only something I’m comfortable doing, but the kind of afternoon I look forward to. Sometimes I even pick it over meeting friends.

Ultimately, your alone time reveals the relationship you have with yourself. I spent the last decade working on mine, the same way others work on their marriage. Listening to it, getting to know it deeply, taking it out on fun dates and excursions.

It’s a fantastic way to build self-confidence and the certainty that, even when you’re alone, you have your own back. And you show up differently in the world when you know that. There’s no desperation in the way you relate to others. You’d like their company, sure. You need it, even. But when they’re not available to you, your world doesn’t stop. You’re still confident enough to sign up alone for the dance class, or show up to the walking tour.

That's the freedom I want for you.
It’s one of the most valuable things I own.

What's an activity you used to think you needed a friend for and now love doing on your own? Rely to this email or tell me below 👇🏼

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This year has marked a turning point for me, and I can’t even clearly articulate why. It’s just this weird feeling I get.

• In the elevator, a stranger gets in: Unbearable silence → phone.

• Walking down the street: What if I get a text → phone.

• In the shower: Some music would be nice → phone.

• In any waiting room: Boredom is worse than death → phone.

And don’t even get me started on scrolling. Endless, disgusting scrolling that leaves you deflated and drained of the will to do anything. The worst is that hint of disappointment I get when I crave a notification and there isn't one.
Compulsively scroll email. Compulsively scroll Whatsapp. Compulsively scroll Substack. Or like, , the calendar app. I’ve been there too, Ben.

My dad, who’s a retired doctor, told me that thirty years ago, doctors would sit around a table at every meeting or conference, and the first thing they’d do is light a cigarette. That would be unthinkable nowadays. I feel like we’re at a similar moment with our phones. We know something is off, but couldn’t tell you exactly what. And many of us are in complete darkness.

By now, we’ve all heard some version of “scrolling is bad for you”, so I won’t get into the specifics of that, but if you want to know exactly how bad it is and why, I highly recommend neuroscientist ’s work. He opened my eyes to my brain’s chemistry and why the crash after scrolling feels so miserable. Once you understand what's happening, it becomes very hard to unsee. Which is what pushed me to try to do something about it.

If, like me, your gut’s telling you it’s time to take some space from your phone, here are 8 things I’m doing to go back to a more analog life. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting closer every day. Here’s how:

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1. Wake up with a different device. I got a smartwatch but a traditional alarm clock will do just fine. It removes the excuse of “how would I wake up without my phone?”. Mine sleeps in the living room now, which makes the next two tips much easier.

2. Check your phone as late as possible in the morning and never as soon as you wake up. The news, notifications, or other people’s lives should not be the first thing your brain is exposed to in the morning. It fries your dopamine circuits before you're even out of bed. Give yourself at least an hour before you let any of that in.

   I swear by this magic sequence:

   get up —> brush teeth —> wash face —> make bed.

   It’s scientifically proven to transform your mornings and takes about 5 minutes. Seriously, try it. It’s unbelievable.

3. Set a parting time with your phone at night. The earlier before bed, the better. The brain can't unwind while we're feeding it new exciting input every thirty seconds. Set a time at which both you and your phone can recharge. Mine is 9 pm.

4. Resist the urge to use your phone as a crutch during uncomfortable social moments. At the party where your friends didn’t arrive yet, or at the doctor’s waiting room when you’re a little nervous. Make it your personal little game of “how long can I resist without touching my phone?”. I try to look longer and closer at my surroundings and notice the tiniest things like the details in someone’s bag or somebody’s body language. Really, actually see things around me. It’s no instagram, but it can be entertaining.

5. Delete your favorite apps. Yes, even Substack. Not the account, just the app. Every time you really want to use it, intentionally, you can download it back. You’ll have to go to the app store, wait for it to download, and deal with a bunch of pop notifications. By doing this, you engineer some useful friction that does two things: it reduces the temptation because your brain knows the app is not there and makes the constant app checking much less automatic. And don’t forget to delete the apps after you’re done. Doing this simple thing divided my screen time by ten.
   There will be relapses, but that’s okay. Still better than not doing anything about it.

6. Let yourself be bored. The next time you’re in public transportation, look around. It alarms me how enslaved we’ve become to that thing, our necks bent in total submission. Be a little rebel, and look out the window instead.
   Boredom is where our best thinking happens. When we fill every dead minute with a screen, we lose the space our mind needs to process the day and be creative. These days, I try to give it back.

7. If you haven’t yet, I beg you, block all notifications except the ones you genuinely want to have. The only notifications I allow are from Whatsapp, and that’s only because my parents live in Morocco, my best friend and my brothers are in France, and I have dear friends all over the world that I want to keep in touch with. But apps like social media or even emails? Sorry, but no. I decide when I give you my attention, not you.

8. Create physical distance from your phone while doing something else. When I’m watching tv, my phone stays on the dining table, out of my sight and out of reach. When I’m writing, it’s in another room. When I’m watching a movie, I’m watching the movie. Also, phones shouldn’t be bathroom companions. In and out, my friend. We need to relearn how to do one thing at a time and physical separation helps a lot.

I know I’m not the only one who’s a little fed-up with my phone, lately. According to ’s note, thousands are feeling it too:

There’s an undeniable no-phone movement gaining momentum, and I’m definitely on board. Realistically, it’s impossible for me to lead a no-phone life, especially while keeping multiple long-distance relationships of different kinds. Plus, smartphones are incredibly useful and I don’t want a radical break up. But maybe we can open the relationship a little, spend less time together, and see other people and things and places.
If you're a sensitive person like me, this is one of the most important habits we can build in 2026. Because emotional work gets much easier when the input slows down. It gives us space to think and feel more clearly ✨

💬 What would you add to this list? I'm collecting tips!

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Liked this? Share it with one person whose phone habits you've been worrying about.
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The Serbian organisers made a bold move this year. They included a one-hour session in the schedule, delivered by a renowned Serbian psychologist, called “How to overcome self-doubt and imposter syndrome in family-owned businesses.”
As a plus one, I wasn't expected to attend any of the meetings, but my husband asked if I wanted to check it out and I immediately said yes.

I don’t have a family-owned business, but I was curious about the angle she’d take and the kind of response it would get from these mostly male, white-haired businessmen in suits. How would they feel about moving from strategy, numbers and business to an hour of emotion talk?

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The speaker was a brilliant woman, a master public speaker who’d been coaching companies for years. She started with defining imposter syndrome, then moved to a series of concepts I was already familiar with, but that might have seemed quite foreign to this specific crowd: emotional regulation, emotional agility, self-awareness, constructive vs destructive emotions.

All throughout the talk, she kept asking: “Do you have any questions?”, “What are your thoughts on this?” She got a couple of questions by (surprise!) one young lady and one young man, but the rest of the time: crickets.

As she was speaking, I was constantly monitoring her audience. Two guys behind me spent almost the entire time talking and laughing about something else. Others were on their phones or typing away on their computers. One older guy kept taking pictures of the slides, which was nice to see. The rest seemed to be paying attention, but silently. No questions and no comments. God forbid they get caught showing interest in such a topic.

Mid-talk, the speaker asked us to take five minutes and discuss the slide on constructive vs destructive emotions with the person next to us. My husband and I had a little debate on whether guilt is destructive. Afterwards, one lady CEO told me that during their chat, both the guys on her right and on her left, big business shots in their sixties, told her that their emotions never affected their business decisions. They said that throughout their entire 40 years+ career, they had never felt anxious at work, nor angry, nor sad. All the decision-making happened in their heads, always. I don’t know about you, but I call bullsh*t.

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The speaker must’ve been used to those silences because she ended her talk with an invitation: She'd be at the gala dinner that evening, and she'd love to answer any questions we hadn't asked.
I was determined to put that debate on guilt to rest, so I kept glancing at her table all evening, looking for my chance to approach her. It wasn’t until hours later that I finally got my turn. And you know why? Because people had been coming up to her all night.

I had been feeling bad for her because of all those silences, but when I told her about it, she said she was actually having a glowing evening, because of all the interest the topic had generated. So I realized it’s not that her talk didn’t have any engagement. It’s more that the engagement had to happen under the radar. At the dinner, after the dim lights and a few drinks, on the sidelines. It couldn’t show its face in the conference room. That was too visible… no, thank you… too risky.

And I keep wondering why. Why is curiosity about our inner life still treated like a “soft” topic to be consumed privately? Why do grownups have to wait until the gala dinner to ask the psychologist a question? Probably because we still live in a world where emotions are equated with weakness. And nobody wants to look weak in front of their peers.

Coming from a ten-year career in corporate, I’m painfully aware of how lacking most workplaces are of emotional skills. Imagine a world in which these are openly talked about and rewarded. Where managers get sent to emotional agility training, and where people’s bonuses are tied to specific emotional skills, like self-awareness or empathy.

I think we’ll get there someday. Things are already changing. But meanwhile, please, let’s normalize interest in emotional skills. They play a much bigger role in performance than they’re given credit for and their absence has a scandalous, invisible cost to everyone close to a man who claims he has never once felt anxious at work.

💬 What's something you've been curious about for years that you'd never bring up at a work dinner? Tell me in the comments 👇🏼

PS. If you've been doing the inner work in private for a while and you'd like a space where the curiosity gets to show its face, I work with a small number of 1:1 clients.

I’m sure some of us wouldn’t be very interested in reading it. That document would be very long and repetitive. We’re talking about thousands and thousands of thoughts each day.

Amongst those who do read it, the most analytical minds would immediately feed it to AI and turn it into clear metrics and charts:

• % of thoughts about what other people think of me

• % of Negative vs Positive thoughts

• Imagined conversations count

• Inner critic appearance rate

• Worst-case scenario count

“Let's set targets, KPIs, run monthly reports, and analyze the trends.”

Others might turn them into art. Little illustrations of our inner dialogues. I’m sure some of those would be hilarious. Isn’t this one by great?

And let’s not forget about the creatives who’d finally be reunited with those fleeting, brilliant ideas they didn’t write down because they were sure they’d remember them, but didn’t.

No matter what we do with it, that transcript would be revealing.
By looking at our thoughts with a fresh discerning eye, we’d gain incredible clarity on our patterns and fears. We’d also detach from them and see them for what they really are: thoughts, not always facts.
Sometimes brilliant (keep), sometimes harmful (discard).

Maybe this device will exist someday, and bring a whole bunch of ethical issues with it (imagine someone hacking into your thoughts, what a nightmare), but until then, we still have the exercise of manually pulling out our thoughts from our mind.

And I don’t mean Dumbledore’s pensieve (I wish). I just mean good old pens and notepads. When you think about it, this practice is the closest thing we have to that transcript. It’s slower, messier and incomplete in comparison, but it’s the same idea. A way to look at your own thoughts from the outside and see what they're really made of.

2,425 years ago, Socrates said:

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

And it still very much holds true today.

Yet, I used to resist journaling like my life depended on it. Until I figured out a few tricks that today genuinely make me want to sit down with a notebook. Let me share them with you.

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1. Get Stationery You Love

I absolutely love a good pen. One that’s satisfying to use and that flows easily on the page. I get a good deal of joy from the smooth running of the ink on a piece of paper. So much so that I keep begging the marketing director at my job to give me a few of the “good” pens. She always generously indulges me and laughs at the disproportionate amount of gratitude and joy that triggers in me.
Mireia, you’ll never read this, but I love you forever.

And then there’s the other issue… notebooks… It’s a sickness, really… I want to buy them all. The last time I was at a stationery store, I almost sent an SOS to my husband to “come get me out of here.” But I decided to be a big girl, took a deep breath, put the 6 notebooks back on their shelf and only kept one. It’s gorgeous. I have no use for it yet, but its time will come.

And here’s the one I’m currently using:

It was handmade at an authentic little shop in an Italian village. Every time I open it, it reminds me of that trip. I love the touch and smell of the leather and the paper is super soft. When I reach for it, it immediately engages my senses and primes me for a good session of looking within.

My point is: find micro things that make the experience enjoyable for you. It makes a difference, I promise.

2. Phone out of sight

I don’t know about you, but I’m growing increasingly sick and tired of my phone. I know I’m not the only one. There is a rising movement towards going back to a more analog life, and for good reason. Our phones are making us miserable. Be it the constant bad news, the hellish social media comparisons, the addictive scrolling, or simply a perpetual state of brain frying, our bodies are telling us “enough, please” and we can feel it.

Nothing will ruin a good journaling time like pop up notifications. I don’t always succeed, but I try to be strict with this rule: if I’m going to have a calm moment of contemplation, my phone has to be out of my sight, ideally in another room.

And I didn’t come up with this. Science did. Findings have shown that the mere presence of our phone on our desks harms our focus. Isn’t that wild?

3. The Setting Matters

Here in Europe, the days have started getting much longer since March. This means more time outdoors this time of year.

I either go to my favorite bench at the nearest park or, on lazier days, make myself a drink and sit on my terrace. I’ll take out my journal and put it in front of me, but I won’t immediately start writing.

Soon enough, I’ll start paying attention to plane traces on the sky, male ducks making a move on the same lady duck, the shape of the clouds, birds chirping, the outfits of strangers, dogs saying hi by smelling each other’s butts, and an array of tiny mundane moments.

After a while, I’ll start to notice my own voice from within. And it’s a different one. It’s calmer, contemplative and generally wiser.

That’s my cue to open my journal and grab a pen.

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4. Pressure off

This is the most important tip, and I want to be as clear as possible:

It does not matter what you write. The only thing that matters is that you write.

You’re not writing a novel, your text won’t be published, nobody cares.
In fact, here’s a list of things that don’t matter about the output:

• That you sound like a good person, or even a sane person

• That your thoughts come out in any particular order

• That you make any sense at all

• That your style is beautiful

• Spelling mistakes

My technique is:
Thought emerge —> Write thought as is. Repeat for a while.
That’s it. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than this.

5. Pauses are allowed

There will be moments when you’ll run out of things to write. That’s okay. I take frequent breaks during these sessions and go back to watching my surroundings. Sometimes I’ll doodle a little until another stream of thoughts shows up.

You don’t have to force anything, there are no rules (other than “phone out of sight”. Seriously that one matters).
You’re the boss here, you’ll know when you’re done.

And one last thing: It doesn’t matter much whether you handwrite or type. After years of typing, I switched back to handwriting this year and I love it. This note by says it all:

The truth is I’ve never once regretted spending time writing my thoughts. It clears out the clouds in my head. And every once in a while, I go back to old entries and can see how far I’ve come. It reminds me that progress is happening, even when I can't see it day to day.

But most of all, I write down my thoughts because it feels good. And that’s reason enough.

Tell me: what stops you from sitting down with a notebook? I want to hear what your version of the resistance looks like.

Leave a comment

PS. If you've been writing in circles and you'd like another set of eyes on what's actually going on inside your head, that's the kind of work I do with my 1:1 clients.

Here's How We'd Start

A like helps this post find other people who need to hear "your writing doesn't have to make sense." Tap 💗 to help me find them!

In my mind, the only acceptable response from my manager would be a quick “Sure, no problem. Thanks for letting me know” or something along these lines.

Instead, here’s what I got: “That’s fine, as long as you're reachable and not skipping any important commitments.”

It felt like a slap in the face. What am I, 4 years old? As long as you’re reachable? Of course I was going to be reachable! And don’t even get me started on the commitments part.

I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but this email kept my brain hostage for 2 days.
48 hours with a tight jaw, running imaginary confrontations with my boss while doing the dishes, brushing my teeth, and on my way to work.

Walk with me for a second here because I want to show you how I dug myself out of this hole. The tool I eventually found is one I've used a hundred times since.

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Step 1: The Venting

My initial reaction was shock. Intense blinking and blank stares at my screen. Then came the indignation. Is this some sort of joke?

If you’re like my friend Camille, you might not get what was so bad about that email. Just a manager doing his job, right? That’s a fair point. I’m usually all for assuming positive intent when triggered. I even wrote a whole piece on how not to take things personally. But there was a specific context with this guy. A history of behaviors that made it hard to take my own advice. I just knew too much.

My first move was to spin around in my chair and tell my colleagues.“You’ll never believe what he just wrote me.” It turned out most of them had also been on the receiving end of unpleasant emails from him over the weekend. So, they started venting to me. My indignation met their indignation, and we had a big indignation party that left us all validated but even more indignant. We even managed to contaminate the one girl who’d been spared the toxic emails. She was now fuming too.

I’m not gonna lie, the venting felt great in the moment. But looking back, it wasn’t a smart move. Research shows that venting can improve the relationship between colleagues, but it also amplifies our frustration, leaving both the venter and the listener more upset than before.

Step 2: The Narrative

Now that my anger was fully magnified, my brain proceeded to build a compelling narrative around that email. It came up with convincing reasons as to why that specific manager wrote what he wrote. Reasons that had to do with his character, his leadership style and his levels of emotional intelligence. I even made up childhood traumas for him. Do you do that too or are you normal?

The new stories started building on old ones and stacking into a tall pile of incriminating explanations. The more I elaborated, the worse I felt.

I was aware I was in story-making mode, but it felt impossible to question and I just couldn’t stop.

Then came the fantasies. First, I drafted a cutting reply in my head: Don’t worry, I do not usually skip important commitments or suddenly become unreachable while I’m on duty. Then I imagined confronting him about his communication style. My favorite scene was the one where I storm into his boss’s office, all righteous and dignified, and hand in my letter of resignation, explaining that I could no longer tolerate the disrespect.

Good imaginary times… and quite revealing too…

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Step 3: The Journaling

By now, I’d decided to leave that email unanswered. A non-response can be the best response. I was going to solve my plumbing issue and that was all that mattered.

Eight hours later, I came home still very deep in the rumination cycle. So I walked to the nearest park, picked a bench under the trees, and unleashed my irritation on my favorite journal. That’ll help, I thought. And a few insights did emerge:

• The email did not infuriate me because it came from someone I find unpleasant. I imagined it coming from someone I liked and realized it wouldn’t have been okay either.

• When reminded of something obvious, adults experience it as patronizing. That’s a normal reaction. “Don’t eat the whole cake, leave some for the rest.” “Well, duh, who do you think I am?”

• My brain was interpreting the whole thing as a status contest with this man. “He’s putting me down to lift himself up,” I firmly believed.

• True or not, this was proving to be emotionally expensive and had to stop.

• On some level, I believed that rising above it all meant letting him get away with it. It felt unfair.

• The incident did not deserve the amount of mental space I was giving it.

I felt a little calmer after, and walked home. Isn’t walking supposed to regulate you? It did a little bit, but not enough to stop the mental loop. My mind just loved revisiting that email.

Step 4: The Self-Coaching

That’s when I started asking myself some serious questions: Why am I so triggered? What am I protecting? I realized it was all about my dignity and my worth. It felt like they were under attack. It wasn’t the first time I'd reacted this way to feeling disrespected. The mental pattern usually goes something like this:

Rude behavior —> Feeling of disrespect —> Threat to dignity —> Rumination.

Do I have a self-worth problem? I wondered. If I’m giving people such an easy access to my dignity, maybe it isn’t rooted enough… Is it really that fragile?

Then I thought: What would I tell a friend if they came to me with this problem?

Here’s what I think I’d say:

• You can decide it’s not worth your energy.

• That email took 2 minutes to write, it’s costing you an entire day. Let it go.

• Non-retaliation does not mean submission.

• All this rumination and all the confrontation fantasies are a desperate attempt to even the score with this man.

• Someone can disrespect you and your worth remains fundamentally unchanged. Disrespect can perfectly mean nothing.

• This person will keep behaving this way with you. Why don’t you see these events as a chance to practice letting go of minor aggressions?

  

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Step 5: The Thing That Finally Put It To Sleep

The following day, the rumination machine started again the moment I opened my eyes. I decided right there and then that enough was enough. It had to stop.

I had diagnosed the problem, identified my dignity wound and my status dynamic with this guy. I had walked, written and breathed. Yet, my mind kept presenting me with opportunities to revisit the situation. I was keeping the injury open by checking on it every 5 minutes and craving a resolution that the situation was not going to provide.
I had to simply let it be an annoying, unresolved, slightly stupid thing that happened.

So, I googled “How to stop a rumination cycle?” and started reading through a number of tips. One of them caught my attention, although to be honest, it sounded pretty lame. I didn’t think it would work.

It’s dead simple: Every time a thought on this topic shows up in your head, think “enough.”

It worked immediately. Throughout the entire morning, my brain kept sending me invitations to revisit the topic, and I kept turning them down.

-“What if…”
- “Enough.”

-”Let’s reread the email. Can you believe this guy?”
-”Enough.”

-”How’s it going to be like when you see him? Will you act cold?”
-”Enough.”

I labeled every one of these intrusive thoughts as recurring event instead of new problem to think about. And it worked like magic. By the end of the day, I’d moved on. Think of it as waving off a fly, or when your five year old kid keeps putting his toy on your head for the thousandth time while you’re trying to work. “Enough, honey.”

I’m not going to lie, I hesitated a lot about posting this. This is me, giving hundreds of strangers a window into just how obsessive my mind can get about tiny things.
It feels vulnerable and a little risky. Will people think I’m crazy?

However, I remembered that if I go through this, many people do too. And if this piece can help them feel seen, validated and less lonely, then it’ll have been worth it to have unveiled such an intimate part of myself. Plus, I did figure out a very effective strategy against rumination. And that is worth sharing with my fellow overthinkers 🫶🏻

Step nº 5 was my personal breakthrough. Journaling, spending time in nature, or walking can all bring you much closer to the answers. They’re fantastic ways to build self-awareness and find some relief.

But for those tricky cases when nothing seems to work, it’s time to press that “enough” button. I hope it serves as an extra tool in your self-regulation toolbox.

Tell me you've done this too. What's the most disproportionate amount of headspace you've ever given a tiny thing?

And if you enjoyed this read, press the 💗 to let me know. It’ll make my day! ☀️

If your own loops have been louder than usual lately, I work with a small number of 1:1 clients to help quiet exactly this kind of noise.

Let's explore this 1:1

I remembered the paper.

My dad had spent weeks building my visa application. He’d gathered every document, navigated every line at every office, asked me a hundred times to please pay attention. “If you worked for me…” he kept saying, “we would not get along.”

He finally handed me one important document to present at a specific immigration office in Paris with one instruction: take it to Paris. Don’t lose it.

What did I do instead? While I was packing, I looked at the file, didn’t recognize it, and tossed it in the trash. Just like that.

Somehow, the paper got rescued (filled with tomato sauce) and I got to live in Paris, but man, did I get in trouble for that one…

So yeah, that was 22-year-old me. Careless, distracted, and somehow always one tomato stain away from disaster.

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A few weeks ago, my friend invited me on his podcast. He’s the writer behind , and one of the people who makes Substack feel like a lovely neighborhood. He asked me to walk him through my journey, from that careless girl to who I am today. He asked about being a highly sensitive person, about the small habits that work, about what emotional intelligence actually means in daily life. I’ll share the full conversation at the bottom of this piece.

Of everything we talked about, I noticed a thread: The cost of who I became.

A few years after the tomato sauce incident, the careless girl was gone.

In her place was someone who never forgot a document. Never missed a deadline. Never let anything slip. I’d become the kind of person my dad had been trying to raise. Reliable and sharp.

But the voice that built this new version was not kind.

How could you be so stupid? Are you serious right now? You’re so dumb. That kind of voice, running in the background all day, every day.

It made me thorough and good at my job. Someone people trusted with the paperwork and the deadlines. From the outside, I looked like I’d grown up. From the inside, I was constantly bracing.

I told myself it was working. And, yes, in a way, it was.

The inner critic had a plan

Here’s the thing: my inner critic wasn’t cruelty for its own sake. It was a specific strategy with a specific goal: Keep me out of trouble.

The logic went like this: if I am hard enough on myself, I won’t become her again.

Her, the careless girl. The one who throws important things in the trash. The one who needs her dad to rescue her. That one.

The harsh voice was the protection system I’d built to improve, and it did its job.

But it charged me a price I couldn’t see at the time.

The avoidable cost

The cost wasn’t just feeling tired or anxious, though it was that too. The deeper cost was something I only understood years later.

Harshness keeps you small.

When you spend a decade expecting to get punished for every mistake, your shoulders start hunching toward your ears. You walk through your work life with your head slightly down. You take fewer risks, because risks are mistakes waiting to happen. You stop volunteering for the thing you’re not sure you can do, because if you fail at it, the voice will be relentless.

You can perform like this. You can perform really well, actually. Plenty of high-achievers run on this exact engine.

But you can’t shine. You can’t experiment and take up the kind of space that real growth requires. Because all of that demands an inner space where you’re allowed to be a beginner. And the harsh voice… it doesn’t like beginners. It eats beginners for breakfast.

The truth is I was overpaying for performance. Getting good results, yes. But paying with my nervous system, my creativity, my willingness to try things. Paying with the version of me who could have been bolder, more curious, more at ease.

And here’s the part that took me years to accept: I would have performed even better without it.

The whip wasn’t earning me anything I couldn’t have obtained for free.

Listen to the full conversation 👇🏼

Peter and I talked about my path from Morocco to San Sebastian, the moment I realized at 32 that I’m a highly sensitive person, the small daily habits that make a difference, why emotional intelligence might be the most important skill nobody teaches us, and the one thing I’d change about the world if I could.

Peter is a generous host and such a thoughtful interviewer. He has more of these episodes coming as part of his Substack-Luminary Interviews, so if you enjoy this kind of slow, honest conversation, his Substack is worth your time.

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If you’re reading this and there’s a voice in your head right now that already wants to argue, that says you do need the harshness, that without it you’d suck at everything, I understand.

I lived inside that voice for years.

All I’ll say is this: Try one week of speaking to yourself the way you’d speak to someone you love. Just as an experiment. I know it’ll change your life.

The careless girl is still in me, by the way. She still forgets and messes up. But these days, the voice that meets her is much kinder. And she’s much happier for it.

If you've been suspecting that the way you talk to yourself is costing you more than it's giving, that's exactly the kind of pattern I help my 1:1 clients with. If you'd like to think it through with someone who'll ask the right questions, here's how we'd start.

💬 Tell me, what did your inner critic say to you this week? Naming it out loud takes away its power.

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Will you stay a little longer? I’ve written more about this..

I now live in San Sebastian, Spain where, every day at work, I speak Spanish, English and occasionally French and Portuguese. At home, it’s a crazy pot-pourri of languages with my Basque husband, who’s also an idiomatic enthusiast. Here’s an example of random Whatsapp conversations between us and the perfect illustration of how we speak to each other in real time:

Weird, I know..

And although I’m infinitely lucky that I can loosen the rules when I speak to him, and just use the first word that comes to my mind regardless of the language it pops up in, I can hardly do this with other people.

Which means I often stop mid-sentence because my brain has the perfect word ready, except it's in French, or Darija, or Spanish, and I happen to be speaking English.

Sometimes, the command will go something like this:

Withdraw word —> Translate to language I was speaking in —> ‼️Translation unavailable‼️

And today I wanted to share with you one of my favorite untranslatable words, one that I wish existed in every language.

That’s the French word “bienveillance”, an elegant and unique expression of what makes us human.

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What does bienveillance mean?

Bienveillance, pronounced byan-vay-yahns, comes from “bien”, meaning well, and the verb “veiller”, meaning to watch over. It’s the active desire for someone else to be okay, combined with a readiness to look out for them. The wishing-well is baked into the word itself, which I love.

More than a behavior or an emotion, bienveillance is a disposition, a posture. It's a generous stance you hold toward someone. It shapes how you read them and see them, even before you act.

It’s different from kindness which usually shows up in action. It’s less about doing a nice thing and more about the caring intent you hold before anything even happens.

I guess the closest English word to it might be benevolence. But benevolence sounds formal and distant, often tied to charity or a powerful figure being gracious. Bienveillance in French is warmer and more everyday. You'd use it about a teacher, a colleague, a way of listening, an attitude.

What I love about carrying a bienveillance posture — une posture bienveillante — is that it not only benefits others, but it makes us happier too, lighter. It turns us into better managers, teammates, friends and even parents. We become magnetic.

Let me show you how.

5 Ways to channel bienveillance every day

1. You assume the best possible reason for someone's behavior before you assume the worst. The cashier didn't smile back. Bienveillance is reaching for the kind explanation first. "He's probably having a hard day" instead of "How rude." You do it because most of the time, the kind explanation is the true one. And even when it isn't, you're the one who gets to keep your peace.

2. You let people save face. Someone forgets your name or makes a visible mistake. Bienveillance is choosing not to point it out. You don’t need to win the small moment. You don’t take pleasure from making them feel the sting of their slip. You’re generous. "No worries at all, that can happen to anyone", you say before they're even finished apologizing. You make being human around you feel safe.

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3. You give people room to have a bad day without making it mean something. When your partner doesn’t greet you with his usual warmth, or your friend doesn’t call you back, bienveillance is resisting the urge to file it as evidence against them. You let one bad moment be just that, a moment, instead of a verdict on the whole relationship. You extend the same grace you'd want extended to you on your worst day.
Of course, if that’s a repetitive behavior, you might need to have the uncomfortable conversation. You’re cultivating bienveillance, you’re not a pushover. But if it’s just an occasional mistake, you simply let it go.

4. You notice the person doing the invisible work and name it. I had a colleague who made sure the printer was never out of paper. My best friend always remembers our friendship anniversary (August 28th). My mom plans my favorite meals every time I’m home.
Do you have someone in your life who does nice things without you asking? Bienveillance is catching these tiny acts and saying them out loud. "Hey, I noticed you did that. Thank you so much." You become the one who witnesses every sign of kindness.

5. You speak to yourself the way you'd speak to someone you love. This one is easy to forget, isn’t it? When adopting an attitude of generosity towards others, don’t forget to extend that same goodwill to yourself. There’s no reason why that beautiful attitude of warmth should stop at your door. “Anyone could have made that mistake...”, “I’m still learning… I’ll do better next time.”, “I’m tired, I should get some rest.”
Real bienveillance includes you, always.

Bienveillance is empathy, maturity, and awareness, all gathered into one simple posture you can choose a hundred times a day. I truly believe cultivating this turns us into an irresistible version of ourselves.

Did this resonate with you? If so, press the 💗 to let me know. It’ll make my day!

And if you speak more than one language, I’d love to know your favorite hard-to-translate word. Reply to this email or tell me in the comments!👇🏼

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Peacefully? Yeah, right.
Instead, it takes a familiar turn down Rehearsal Street. Right at the corner of Anxiety Square and Life-or-Death Road.

Because you’re now replaying a fight that hasn’t happened. Probably never will.
Yet here your are, crafting the perfect sentences and the punchiest comebacks.

And so you start feeling the tightening in your chest and the heaviness in your stomach.

You’re simply taking a shower. Nothing else is happening.
But your body is fully involved.

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This is what I call disaster rehearsal.

The mind believes something very compelling: If I feel the pain ahead of time, I’ll be more prepared. If I suffer now, it won’t shock me that much later.

It feels responsible. Strategic, even.

But it comes with a hidden cost.

I once rehearsed a difficult conversation with a colleague for two days. I prepared what I’d say if he got defensive. What I’d say if he yelled. What I’d say if he shut down. By the time we actually talked, I was emotionally drained from a fight that hadn’t even happened yet.

He, by the way, took it beautifully. The conversation lasted ten minutes.

I had spent two days suffering for a ten-minute moment that didn’t even hurt.

The body doesn’t distinguish between imagination and reality very well.
When we rehearse grief, rejection, humiliation or loss, our nervous system responds as if it’s real.

Which means we don’t suffer once.
We suffer twice.

Once in our imagination. And once again if the thing actually happens… which often never does.

I understand this impulse deeply. Rehearsing pain feels like control. It feels like bracing.

And yet, safety doesn’t come from pre-feeling every possible outcome.
It mostly comes from trusting that when something real happens, you will respond.

Why wouldn’t you? You always have.

There’s nothing weak about this pattern. It’s your mind trying to protect you in the only way it knows how.

The work is simply to notice it.

“Ok, I’m rehearsing again.”

And come back to the sensations of the present: the foamy soap caressing your skin, the delicious warm water dripping on your shoulders, the scrub of your fingertips on your scalp. Much nicer, isn’t it?

There are no confrontations happening.

Just a mind that cares a little too much. And a body that deserves a break.

Will you drop a little 💜 for me?

It’ll feel like catching your smile across a crowded room ✨

💬 And please tell me, before you go…

What does your shower brain rehearse most often? I want to know I'm not the only one fighting imaginary battles in between shampoo and conditioner. 🤭👇🏼

Also, if you keep getting pulled into disaster rehearsals…

Let's explore this 1:1

And if you’re new here, I send reframes like this one, every Sunday ✨

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Here’s one more for the road..

All of these situations have one thing in common: In each and every one of them, I took things personally.

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The Weight of Resentment

I don’t know about you, but I for one hate feeling resentful.

Grudges are heavy, and I don’t want to carry them for longer than necessary. So whenever I feel wronged, I look for ways to free myself from the disempowering feeling.

I never do this for the offender. I always do it for me.

Over time, I've found a 3-step strategy that works almost every time. and today I want to share it with you.

1 — Know This: It’s The Ego Talking

Before casting blame, look inward.

Most of the time, when I feel wronged, the real culprit is my ego.

It’s that part of me that screams: “I’m important. I exist. I am here. See me. Respect me!”

Whenever it’s hurt, the ego makes you see the entire situation through the lens of a victim.

And this lens builds narratives that support our position as the wronged one:
The impatient driver stressed me out. The line cutter disrespected me. They did not give me the consideration I deserved.

We make it all about us, when in reality, it’s all about them.

While indulging in righteous victimhood feels satisfying in the moment, it does nothing for our happiness.

To regain control, we have to challenge this angle, and force ourselves to see the situation from the eyes of the offender.

I know it feels completely counterintuitive, but it works.

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2 — Don’t Let Assumptions Win

Hanlon’s Razor is a powerful mental model that says:

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

I like to replace the word stupidity with unawareness, as it’s a much more common reason in my view.

When somebody annoys us, it’s easy to get carried away in detailed narratives that assignes to them all kinds of intentions.

I find it immensely helpful to remember that most people are not evil.
They’re not intentionally trying to hurt me.
They either don’t know any better, or have reasons for acting as they did; reasons that I know nothing about.

We create stories around these offenses, then we believe them as if they were the absolute truth.
And worst of all, we act on them.
We cut people off, or impulsively lash out at them.

Nowadays, when I catch myself crafting a narrative on somebody’s intentions, I forbid myself from believing it, even if my mind screams at me how obvious and true my assumption is.

It’s crucial to remember that it’s only an assumption and that the reality can always surprise us.

Ask yourself:

“If this email had been sent by my favorite colleague whom I know has my best interests at heart, would it read with the same tone in my head?”

The answer is almost always no.
The best part is that, in the rare cases in which there truly is malice, we can choose whether or not to be affected by it.

For that, I turn to ancient wisdom and keep this quote in mind:

“If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.” — Epictetus

Reclaim your power over the situation and refuse to be a victim.

3 — Empathy’s Your Friend

This is a tricky one, but perhaps the most effective step: You need to find it in yourself to empathize with whomever has offended you.

I used to have a colleague whom the whole office found obnoxious. Every time he opened his mouth, he adopted this “know-it-all” tone and lectured everyone about how they should be doing things. Some people described his comments in meetings as a nail on a chalkboard.
To make matters worse, nature had inflicted upon him a permanent expression of superiority. An unfortunate eyebrow placement made them appear constantly raised in disapproval and arrogance.

After participating in a team meeting in which he once again angered everyone, I reminded myself how unlucky the poor guy was.

“Imagine,” I thought, “if you had so little charisma that every time you tried to contribute to a conversation, everything you said was systematically discarded just because it came out of your mouth.”

I would hate to be burdened with this and disliked by everyone around me, without having the slightest idea why.

After I formulated this thought and imagined myself in his shoes, I managed to find it in my heart to be much less annoyed by — and even friendlier to — him.

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Let Go of the Hot Coal

Keeping the ego in check is not something you do once and are over with. As Ryan Holiday says, think about it like cleaning your kitchen. The mess is deemed to come back.

Resentment is nothing but this comfortable nest we make for anger, bitterness, and cynicism. It keeps them alive and well for a long time.

The driver pressuring me on the road? Perhaps he’d just had terrible news and was rushing to the hospital. My manager interrupting my presentation? He’s unaware he’s doing it. His intention is to add value to the conversation, not to make me feel small.

Or maybe the driver, the line skipper, and the manager are all inconsiderate people.

Either way, I get to choose what I do with it.

I have the option of not reacting to the honks and take my time passing the truck.
I can kindly signal to the line cutter that I was there before him.
I can ignore my manager’s interruptions and keep talking in a higher voice.

We always have a choice, and that’s liberating news.

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” — Buddha

Let go of the hot coal and choose peace.

Will you drop a little 💜 for me?

It’ll feel like catching your smile across a crowded room ✨

What's something small that recently took up more of your peace than it deserved? Tell me in the comments. We'll workshop it together. 👇🏼

Also, if you find yourself rehashing these moments long after they're over…

Let's unpack it!

And if you're new here, subscribe for more reframes like this one, every Sunday ✨

Stay with me a little longer… This one's worth it:

I rehashed that sentence for three days.

Three. Full. Days.

I reread the email at least twelve times, looking for hidden meaning. I drafted four different replies in my head and discarded them all. I wondered if she was annoyed with me. I wondered if she’d talked to other people about it. I considered whether I should clarify, defend, or just move on. I considered whether moving on would look like I didn’t care. I considered whether caring this much was the actual problem.

By day three, I was exhausted. She, meanwhile, had almost certainly forgotten she’d written those words.

Do you do this too? If you subtly nodded in approval, here's the thought that helps me most:

Our brain still operates on ancient software. It hasn’t updated.

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Why your nervous system overreacts

For most of human history, social tension could actually mean exclusion. Exclusion meant vulnerability. And vulnerability meant danger. A tribe that turned on you was a death sentence. There were no "other tribes" down the road. There was no "starting fresh somewhere new."

So your nervous system learned something very logical: threats to belonging are threats to survival. Treat them accordingly.

This wiring helped keep our ancestors alive. It’s awesome. It’s the reason we’re here.

But nowadays, the “threat” has turned into a delayed reply from someone, or one slightly cool sentence in an otherwise normal email.

And your brain still hits the same alarm button.

It doesn’t know the difference between a tiger in the bushes and a tense Zoom call.

So it catastrophizes. It insists this is urgent.

There’s something almost endearing about it. Your brain is trying to protect you. It just hasn't realized you live in 2026 and not 12,000 BC.

The reframe that helps me

When I catch myself spiraling, I sometimes pause and say: “Okay. What’s the actual threat here?”

And then:
“Not a tiger. Just an email.”

Sometimes I'll get more specific:

• "Not a tiger. Just a colleague who wrote that sentence in 30 seconds and moved on."

• "Not a tiger. Just one line out of an entire email that was otherwise fine."

• "Not a tiger. Just my own brain doing its overprotective ancestor thing."

That thought alone can lower the volume and make the situation feel proportionate again.

It doesn't make the discomfort magically disappear. But it gives me some healthy distance from it. Enough to keep living my day instead of losing three of them to one sentence.

Your brain may treat everything like life or death. But you don’t have to.

What's the most recent thing your brain decided was a tiger? Tell me in the comments. It helps to know we're all out here misreading our inboxes together👇🏼

If you've been spiraling about something for longer than the situation deserves, that's often when outside perspective makes the biggest difference. I work with a small number of 1:1 clients to help them deal with exactly this kind of noise. If that's you right now, here's how we'd start.

Liked this? Share it with one person whose brain also confuses emails for tigers. And if you're new here, subscribe for more reframes like this one, every Sunday ✨

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Catastrophe is part of the deal.
Fairness is a human invention.

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Most of us grow up expecting life to unfold a certain way:

• You’re born into a loving family.

• You build a fulfilling career.

• You fall in love.

• You have healthy children.

• You lead an active life for decades.

• You lose your parents at an advanced age.

• One day, when you’re very old too, you die a painless death surrounded by loved ones.

It sounds normal because that’s the story we’re fed from a young age. And it’s a beautiful story.

But sooner or later, something will inevitably go off script.

A diagnosis.
A loss.
A divorce.
A betrayal.
Infertility.
A phone call you’ll never forget.

We know these things happen. We see them around us. But we relate to them as distant possibilities. We think “if” it happens to me not “when.” And that’s a mistake.

Because when that difficult moment comes, and it will come, many of us will feel a second layer of pain:

“This isn’t fair.”
“Why me?”

Well, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but fairness is a human invention.
Nature doesn’t care about fairness.

The gazelle licks her newborn calf only to watch it be eaten by a lion minutes later.
The majestic oak tree grows for centuries and a tornado decimates it in a few hours.
Bodies malfunction, cells mutate and accidents happen.

Just because we evolved to be a sophisticated, modern specie, it doesn’t make us immune to the biology of being alive.

I know it sounds scary and negative, but I happen to find this realization liberating.

It means we can drop the expectation of fairness, and accept things for what they are.

When difficulty arrives, you move faster toward adaptation.

You’ll still rage and fear and grieve, but you stop arguing with reality.

There’s another consequence to this mindset shift: It becomes the perfect gateway to gratitude.

On ordinary days, you start noticing what didn’t go wrong.

You wake up.
Your body works.
No bad news.
No emergencies.

You realize those days are gifts.

When you understand that disaster is part of the contract, uneventful days become events to celebrate.

One day, the phone will ring and the next off-script chapter will begin. And when that day comes, you’ll see it for what it is: an expected part of the human experience.

But until then, you get today. And today deserves to be fully appreciated.

If today was uneventful, what’s one thing you’re grateful for? Tell me in the comments.

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I offer a 1:1 space where we slow things down, make sense of what’s happening inside you, and work toward more clarity and calm.
If that feels like something you need, fill out this short form.

Here are 5 actions that instantly make you more emotionally intelligent:

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1. When you feel triggered, pause.

   Every time you pause when every bone in your body is urging you to scream, you win. That pause, even a very brief one, gives your prefrontal cortex time to come back at the wheel and bring along some wisdom with it.
   You have now moved from autopilot to choice, and isn’t that beautiful?
   If you allow it, emotional regulation will dramatically improve your life.

2. Name your emotion precisely

   This is where you flex that sweet self-awareness muscle.
   You can’t manage what you can’t name. So instead of keeping your head in the fog, how about playing the little game of What am I feeling Right Now? And sad, mad, bad won’t do. We’ll want to go really specific here.
   Sometimes a dominating emotion will come up very quickly: “I’m frustrated!”
   But more often than not, the answer will sound more like a recipe: “A big cup of frustration, 2 tablespoons of disappointment, and a pinch of apprehension.”

   It’s okay if the answer doesn’t show up right away. You can use an emotional wheel to help you pin point the right description. Here’s one I like.

3. Separate facts from the story you’re telling yourself

   This has been a big one for me.
   The brain is a meaning-making machine and all it does all day long is fill gaps with stories. The key here is to separate the two:

   • Fact: “They replied two hours later.”

   • Story: “They’re ignoring me.”

   • A more helpful story: “They replied two hours later. There must be a valid reason for that that I don’t know right now.”

     Doing this saves you from lots of unnecessary stress.

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4. Replace vague assumptions with solid data

   Now that we’re able to see our brain as the compelling storyteller it is, we can take an extra step and find out the truth.
   How? Easy: By asking for it before jumping to conclusions.

   So instead of ruminating on “They’re mad at me” and “that was disrespectful”, try finding out the facts by simply asking questions. “What made you react in that way?”
   By doing this, you’re activating two core EQ skills: Empathy and social awareness. So, take out your little fossil brush and dig a little deeper: What is it like from their point of view?

5. Stay on your own side after a mistake

   After a mistake, the natural inclination for many of us is self-attack.
   ”I’m so stupid”, “I always mess everything up.”

   All this does is trigger feelings of shame. And shame will shut down learning and growth faster than anything else.
   Staying on your own side keeps the focus on the behavior, not your entire identity.

   “I didn’t handle that very well. I’ll do better next time.”
   Self-compassion, cheesy as it may sound, is a powerhouse for emotional stability, resilience and I dare say, even productivity.

   ---

   I love these five because they demystify emotional intelligence as being this big, intimidating goal. They can easily slip into your daily life and make you smarter every time you care to use them. 1% at a time.

   Pick one of these and try it today. Which one are you choosing?
   If you want help applying this in real situations, I offer 1:1 sessions. Apply here —>

   Subscribe for practical ways to handle tricky emotions. 1% at a time.

   
   

Today I’m leaving the floor to a special voice.
, an authentic thinker who explores the human experience through philosophy and deep reflection. I loved her refreshing thoughts on anxiety. The artwork is the cherry on top. Happy reading ✨

One of my favorite Grimm’s fairy tales is also one of the least known. It’s called, “The Boy Who Went in Search of Fear.”

The hero is a young man who is so dim-witted and ignorant that he doesn’t even know what it’s like to feel afraid. He’s curious, though, and so he decides to spend three nights in a haunted castle. He encounters demonic animals, ghosts, walking furniture, and all kinds of terrifying apparitions – but all he manages to feel is some confusion and annoyance. As a reward for surviving the castle and finding hidden treasure, the king gives the dim-witted young man his daughter to wed.

Even though he is now rich, secure, and married to a stunning princess, our hero is still dissatisfied. It’s driving him crazy that he’s never experienced fear, and it’s driving his wife crazy that he won’t stop talking about it. Finally, she comes up with a scheme: she and her maid dump a bucket of water and minnows on our hero while he’s sleeping. The sensation of cold fish wriggling against his skin shocks him awake; he gets goosebumps and has a eureka moment: this must be what it feels like to be afraid!

It’s an absurd story, of course, and meant to be entertaining. But I think it also teaches a profound lesson: anxiety is what makes us human. It ennobles us. Without anxiety we can’t be courageous or wise or sensitive. Even our foolish hero could sense this, and that’s why it drove him mad. His inability to feel fear meant he could encounter the most terrifying situation imaginable, and yet he learned nothing from it, and felt nothing. Worst of all, he could not connect with other people including his wife. He was isolated by his lack of anxiety.

One of my favorite philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote that all of us must go through an adventure just like this young man. Each of us must confront anxiety and understand both its positive qualities and its harmful ones, so that we’re neither indifferent to it nor overwhelmed by it. “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way,” writes Kierkegaard, “has learned the ultimate.”

Anxious in the right way. I find this phrase both fascinating and cheering. It suggests that we can live with uncertainty, even a little bit of fear, while still flourishing. Experiencing anxiety isn’t the same thing as being weak or neurotic; it’s required for being a sensitive, thoughtful person who pays attention to the world around you. I would even argue that at least a little bit of anxiety is necessary for becoming a good person. But what does “being anxious in the right way” look like?

Of course there are the practical things: noticing our thoughts and naming them, for example; especially when we’re feeling uncomfortable (this one has been very helpful for me). Or going for a walk with our dog, or spending time alone outside, appreciating the beautiful flowers, mountains, or whatever happens to be in our view. The more mindful I am of my thoughts and where my attention is going, the more meaningful my life becomes, and these practices help me with that.

But the most powerful mechanism of all that I’ve discovered for managing anxiety is not any particular ritual or practice. Instead, it’s been a gestalt shift in how I view anxiety itself: as an inevitable part of a life that is interesting, meaningful, and even exciting. There is no adventure without danger or risk. There is no reward without suffering.

Too much anxiety prevents us from being happy. But it’s also impossible to be truly happy as an adult human being without any anxiety. One of the best ways I’ve learned to be anxious in the right way is to view life as an adventure. Only unlike the unfortunate hero in our story (who, I’d argue, is not truly a hero), we have the opportunity to be courageous and grow in ways we can’t imagine.

It might sound romantic, even audacious to call one’s life an “adventure.” Our lives aren’t a film or a storybook with a neat and tidy ending planned out. And yet, aren’t we drawn to movies and great literature because there is something truthful in them?

If you’ve been to a creative writing workshop, you know that one of the most fundamental ingredients of a good story is conflict. Without conflict there’s no growth, no mystery, no challenge, no interest at all. Part of what makes fiction so enjoyable is that we, the audience, can feel reasonably sure most of the time of a happy ending – yet we can’t be entirely sure. And even if the ending is happy, it often won’t be what we expected. Much may still be unresolved. It might even force us to think.

Our own lives are a story that has not yet reached its end – and that uncertainty is both exciting and anxiety-inducing. Anxiety is intense because it’s inseparable from possibility. There are countless possibilities, good and bad, that we can’t even begin to imagine. We know the hero in the story gets to live happily ever after, but what about us?

For example, right now I live a very modest but happy life with my husband and two-year-old daughter. If nothing ever changed, I’d consider my life a very successful one; but of course, change is unavoidable. I hope that the future changes are good ones: a bigger home, for example. Or that my daughter will do well in school and make lots of friends. All of these hopes are reasonable, but there is also a possibility that none of them will happen. And there are darker possibilities still: one of us might die in a car accident. Or come down with bone cancer. Or some other complication so strange and unexpected I couldn’t begin to imagine it.

The fact my life has no guaranteed outcome is a major cause for my anxiety; perhaps for you, too. A natural reaction for many of us is to look for some form of control: eating more leafy greens, saving in a 401K, always wearing a seatbelt, or even “karma-seeking” behavior like spending time with those in need. To a point, there’s a lot of good in such behavior. We need a little bit of sobriety to give ourselves better odds at life.

But it’s not hard to see how we can take this to an extreme. The person overwhelmed by anxiety may choose, out of “safety”, to hardly ever leave her house or let anyone enter it. Such examples are rare, but they do exist. What I see more commonly are milder forms of this: fear of having a family, falling in love, or even getting a dog because of the vulnerability and the variables it creates. Or a fear of talking to someone with a different viewpoint because it may nudge them to shift their worldview. Or simply avoiding all thoughts of one’s anxieties and distracting oneself with devices and a never-ending list of to-dos.

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An even more subtle form of control is blind optimism and pessimism: blind optimists try to bypass their anxiety by insisting that all will be well, and therefore there is nothing to worry about. Stubborn pessimists do the same, but by assuming the worst is already happening or will happen. In both cases, there is a reluctance to confront uncertainty and embrace both the good and the bad events that might come out of that uncertainty.

The best companion I’ve found for adventuring through a life of uncertainty is hope. I think hope is a very misunderstood, sometimes controversial concept, and has been for millennia. The ancient Greeks, for example, had very ambivalent feelings about it. When Pandora opened the forbidden box and released evils into the world, the only thing left inside the box was Hope, but this wasn’t necessarily meant to be a consolation; one cynical interpretation is that because hope is still locked in the box, it’s ineffective and worthless. Hope is often associated with nothing more than a feeling, with wishful and sometimes even delusional thinking.

I see hope very differently. To me, it is one of the most powerful and humbling forces in the universe. Hope is the counterweight to anxiety. Both are necessary, but hope is the traveling companion who keeps anxiety in its place, who meets uncertainty head on, who makes the adventure possible – especially when we find ourselves in the abyss and must find our way back out.

The 19th-century poet Maria Rainer Rilke wisely recognized that even the most difficult things we endure can have meaning and beauty if we choose to look for it. In a letter to a fellow poet, he wrote:

The foolish young man who didn’t feel fear while in the haunted castle couldn’t feel joy or excitement, either; nor could he act courageously. Because of his numbness he couldn’t even feel love. He was almost inhuman because of this, which makes him both comical and tragic.

Anxiety is our birthright; it’s what makes us human. We can choose to suppress it, control it or not think about it. Or we can choose to be anxious in the right way, with hope as our guide in the darkness. And if we see life as an adventure, we can learn to love even the challenges and the dangers – not for their own sake, but for what we can learn from them to become wiser, better people.

What does being anxious in the right way look like to you?

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I glanced at the name of the sender and took a sharp breath. I already knew what was coming.

It was from the rudest person I’ve ever dealt with in my career.

I should have been used to him by now, but I once again started feeling my blood boiling with rage.

I reread the email three times, getting more wound-up by the second.
This time, I had to respond. He went too far.

So, I clicked on “Reply” and started writing a satisfying, I’ll-put-you-back-in-your-place answer. I was typing so fast, smoke was almost coming out of my keyboard… and my ears.

I reread my draft feeling anticipatory satisfaction, the kind you get when you attack someone who’s truly had it coming.

This was a bully with a track record of making people cry at work.

Who does he think he is?
“I’ll show him,” I thought.

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When navigating difficult emotions, we’re largely untrained.

The education system doesn’t teach us much about a crucial skill: Self-soothing.

So when something difficult happens, we react the only way we know how:

• We defend.

• We attack.

• Or we shrink.

As Brené Brown famously said:

“We are emotional, feeling beings; who, on rare occasions, think.”

She explains:

“When something difficult happens, emotion is at the wheel. Cognition and behaviour are bound and gagged in the trunk and emotion is driving.”

Calm is a Power Move

For a long time, I thought the goal was to “control” my emotions.
But I see it differently now.

My goal is always to remain calm.

Because calm changes everything:

• How clearly I think

• What I say

• What I don’t say

• How I feel about myself afterwards

Looking back, I can trace most of my worst decisions to moments where I lost my calm.

So over time, I started practicing something simple:

Interrupting myself before I react.

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3 Simple Steps That Actually Work

Here’s what actually made the difference for me.

First: I notice what’s going on in my body.
Tight jaw + Heated chest + Fast typing = That’s my cue.

Second: I press pause on the reaction
I finish the email, but I don’t send it yet.

Third: I create some space.
I take a few breaths and I do something else for a while.

Only then do I ask myself one powerful question:

What would the best version of me do here? The one aspire to be?

An alternative could be: What would <person I look up to> do here?

Then go I ahead and try to do just that.

When the Best Reaction is No Reaction

After saving my furious email as a draft for later, I moved on to other tasks.

A couple of hours later, I reread the offending message.
I was still annoyed, but calmer.

I wondered what the best version of myself would do.

And from that place, the answer was obvious.

The best version of me would not engage.
She would simply rise above it.
She wouldn’t give this man a minute more of her attention.
“When they go low, we go high”, as the saying goes.

I could almost see her. Professional and unbothered

And for a brief moment, I was her.

So I deleted my draft and moved on. Just like that.
And you can too.

This was one small example of choosing calm. I’m curious where this shows up for you.

And if moments like this keep coming up and you want a space to unpack them, that’s something I can support you with. Fill out this short form and let’s have a chat about it.

We discussed the gifts and curses of being a life long helper.

If you’ve had, from a young age, to carry the weight of being the listener, the reliable one, and the helper, this conversation is for you.