One month after returning to Los Angeles, I have somehow managed to fit a keynote, Harvard, a Fortune 100 AI engagement, ANEW’s beta expansion, a book deadline and a move into four weeks. Meanwhile, my left pinkie—the finger I had previously considered largely decorative—has acquired three doctors, an MRI order and a course of steroids. It turns out that building a big life does not make its smallest parts any less important. This is the story of an unusually full month, an inconveniently consequential finger and what happens when the body decides it is done waiting politely for your attention.

For most of my life, I have regarded my pinkie as largely decorative.

This is apparently both anatomically inaccurate and, according to three separate doctors, a terrible long-term strategy.

My left pinkie has become the main character in what should, by any reasonable measure, have been a very big month.

Lemme say— it’s had fair competition. Buckle up.

A month ago, I landed back in the states after several weeks in London, where I had written three separate essays about the undeniable feeling that LA was calling me home.

Since then, I gave a keynote at an AI Conference in Venice and met the kind of people who make launching a product like ANEW in a city like Los Angeles feel immediately more possible. The caliber of people we rubbed shoulders with was incredible— such as someone very well connected in the longevity space who offered to organize an event focusing on ANEW and our ethos. His first Healthspan conference had Blueprint’s Bryan Johnson as a guest speaker, so… let’s just say I’ve made a note to self to “be on point,” whatever that means.

We also expanded ANEW’s beta to more than 300 people, and on Monday, I will address Harvard’s Human Flourishing Network.

Meanwhile, through my work with Tribe AI, I built and launched an entire product from end to end: an interactive playbook containing more than 90 resources— templates and agents designed to guide forward-deployed product strategists and engineers through complex AI transformation engagements. Somewhere in the hours in between I flew to Seattle for an onsite with a Fortune 100 company where I advised on a possible multi-billion-dollar AI initiative… the sort of sentence that feels ridiculous when I read it back.

On the creative side of things (holla side-hustles 💪🏽), I finished reviewing my editor’s edits to my second speculative sci-fi manuscript, which is now in proofreading ahead of its release in mid-October.

And at ANEW we are on the cusp of releasing a new product feature, along with significant enhancements to two of the foundational features already in the platform. Our native apps aren’t far behind and will be launching within the next few weeks. 🎉

Oh and on Tuesday after 15 months of living nomadically, I actually move into a real home.

Any one of these things could reasonably have been the plot of an entire quarter. Instead, like guests who had misunderstood the invitation and turned up to the same dinner party… I found myself juggling them simultaneously.

And yet the thing currently reorganizing my calendar is a finger I routinely forget exists.

I injured it fresh off the plane from London— jammed it doing pull ups, which is the kind of injury adults tend to describe with mild embarrassment because it sounds like something you should be able to resolve by wincing, shaking your hand a few times and carrying on with your day.

Which is more or less what I did.

I carried on rock climbing… and strength training. I carried on building, speaking, traveling and working, occasionally registering that my finger was still bruised, swollen and did not appear interested in participating in the full range of movement typical for this appendage.

It turns out there’s a 90% chance that I’ve dislocated it and ruptured the surrounding ligaments and a 10% chance that I’ve ruptured the central tendon.

An X-ray, an MRI order form, an ER doctor, an urgent care doctor and a hand specialist later, I have been told that if I do not address it properly now, I may end up with a pinkie that cannot fully bend, flex or function for the rest of my life. Trust me… I’ve flirted— heavily— with the idea of this option.

My autoimmune disease has also complicated the healing process. The inflammation, rather than receiving the message that the original emergency had passed, appears to have settled in and made itself comfortable— a stark reminder that I live in a body that not only refuses to follow conventional timelines for healing, but also incites systemic inflammation to combat an injury that should be confined to my little finger. I am now on a short course of steroids to persuade my immune system to kindly stand down.

The past month has given me an enormous amount to hold.

There is ANEW, moving from the fragile intimacy of its earliest form into something more people can actually experience. There is the responsibility of advising companies making decisions at a scale that can alter industries. There is a book that has existed privately between me, a Google Doc, my publisher and my editor now preparing to become an object strangers can hold in their hands (and critique). There is a home and a future that seems to be arriving all at once.

And there is the smallest finger on my body, reminding me that holding more means the structures doing the holding are astonishingly important.

I think we often mistake size, visibility and urgency for significance.

We assume the things occupying the most space in our calendars must also deserve the most space in our attention. Meanwhile, the quieter, load-bearing parts of our lives continue doing their work without ceremony: our bodies, our sleep, our homes, our relationships, our small repeated promises to ourselves.

We barely notice them when they are functioning. Then one of them fails, and suddenly the entire system reorganizes around its absence.

There is also an irony here that has not been lost on me.

I have spent years building a company around the idea that the body is constantly giving us information.

ANEW exists because our biology, behaviors, beliefs and circumstances do not operate in neat little compartments, however convenient it might be to treat them that way. Small signals can tell us something about the whole system. Feelings are vital signs. Patterns matter. Paying attention earlier matters.

And apparently, founding a company around listening to the body does not make you immune to treating your own body like something you can “snooze.”

I, too, am apparently a case study.

What makes the decision to slow down for it difficult is not that I do not understand the stakes. It is that everything else feels consequential too.

This is the challenge with operating in a full life.

The reason we neglect small things is rarely because we have decided they do not matter. We neglect them because larger, louder things keep presenting themselves as evidence that now is not the “right time.”

The present rewards us for responding to what is loud. The future depends on whether we also attend to what is quiet.

The whole person must be taken into account.

On Tuesday, I will move into my first real home in 15 months. I do not have boxes to unpack so much as a car that has been carting my life around for more than a year. The clothes, training gear and accumulated practical debris (like olive oil, digestive enzymes and an air fryer) of a person who has become skilled at never being entirely unpacked.

I will take those things out of the car and give them somewhere to live.

There is something fitting about that happening now. Home is a quieter kind of infrastructure. It does not ask what I can produce. It gives the producing person somewhere to return to.

Maybe building a life that feels meaningful is not only about knowing which big things to pursue. Maybe it is equally about learning which small things must not be sacrificed along the way.

The future I want requires a hand that can lift, play, write and hold the people and things I love. It requires a body I listen to before it has to become the loudest voice in the room. It requires somewhere to put down what I am carrying.

So, for now, I am making room for the smallest member of the operation.

A pinkie promise, of sorts, to the person who will have to live in everything I am building.

ANEW is currently expanding its beta. If you would like to explore a different way of understanding how your biology, behaviors and beliefs interact—and learn to recognize the patterns shaping your capacity—you can join us at app.anewalchemy.com.

Leaving London after a month away gave me a different kind of clarity than I expected. I came hoping for networking momentum, but what I found was friendship, gratitude, and a stronger pull back toward California. In this essay, I reflect on transient cities, community, place attachment, and why big moves do not have to be forever to matter. From dragging a cello onto the Piccadilly line to realizing the future is gathering in LA, this piece explores how communities can scatter, spread, and become soil for what we build next, even after we leave them behind.

Cities Are Not Vows

I left London by dragging a month’s worth of clothes, a backpack, and a cello down four flights of stairs and onto the Piccadilly line.

There are more elegant ways to close a chapter. A black cab, perhaps. A slow walk over a bridge. A final glass of wine somewhere with low lighting and a bartender who looks as though he has read Proust under duress.

I chose public transport, a large wooden instrument, and the relief of discovering my top was moderately sweat-wicking.

This felt correct.

London has always had a way of making me earn the cinematic version of things and then giving me the municipal version instead. You want a poetic farewell. It gives you a lift outage. You want a meaningful goodbye. It gives you a cello case wedged between commuters pretending, with admirable discipline, not to notice.

I was leaving after a month back in the city I lived in for eleven years. The trip had been planned around a friend’s health gala, with the hope that I could build the rest of the month around friends, meetings, and possibly some useful momentum for ANEW in the UK.

The friends happened.

The meetings, mostly, did not.

This is not a complaint, exactly. It is more of an anthropological observation made by a woman who had sent several warm follow-ups and started to understand why British people invented both queuing and emotional repression. There is something about London networking that can make polite persistence feel like a national sport.

There were exceptions, of course. There always are. But the pattern was clear enough that I stopped trying to argue with it.

The most useful business meeting I had in London was not even really a London meeting. It was with someone I had met during my stint in San Francisco, who happened to be in the city at the same time. We went for a two-hour walk. She made time last minute. By the end, she had three connections for me and two high-value California doors opening in September and October, including one gathering of leading thinkers across health, wellness, biotech, and frontier technology, and another dinner series around somatic health with founders, investors, and connectors.

Meanwhile, while I was in London trying to understand what London was for, our first major public debut for ANEW fell into place back in LA: a launch event and AI conference with Grateful Giraffes in Venice on 9 August.

I kept asking London to open a door here.

It kept opening doors back to California.

There is a version of me that would have found this frustrating, and to be clear, she did make a few appearances. She enjoys a plan. She likes an itinerary. She believes an international flight should produce at least one measurable outcome beyond “saw friends” and “remembered what Gluten Free options there aren’t at most places.”

But the more honest thing is that the trip did give me something.

It gave me my friends.

Not networking in the slightly grim way that word can be used by people holding warm white wine in rooms with name tags. Actual friendship. People who made time. People who wanted to see me. People who have known several versions of me and did not seem especially interested in making me audition for my place among them.

That has been more moving than I expected, although not in a sad way.

A few people told me this month that what I built here was special. That it has not been the same since I left. That the community I gathered had a quality to it that people still remember.

I believe them.

And I also do not feel grief about it.

That surprised me at first. There isn’t one single “London is done” chemical, sadly. The brain has not released a little certificate of chapter completion, although frankly it should.

But there are moments when something in the system updates.

Environmental psychologists have a whole language for place attachment, because even geography requires theory. Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford describe place attachment as a bond between people and place that involves social and physical features, as well as affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes. In other words, a city is not just a skyline and a rent problem. It becomes part of how we feel, remember, behave, and understand ourselves.

Which makes sense to me.

London is not just where I lived. It is where I became so much of myself.

It is where I moved at twenty-two, green and determined and pretending those were the same thing. It is where I learned to be competent in public. It is where I became an internationally ranked bodybuilder, a technical leader, an author, an artist, a woman who left a religion, left a marriage, came out, rebuilt, hosted, gathered, sharpened, and performed the kind of life that looked impressive from the outside and was often much more complex from within.

London held a version of me who knew how to build rooms.

Actual rooms, sometimes.

I had an old, vintage, re-stained farmhouse table I bought on eBay for almost nothing. It was one of those pieces that looked as though it had survived several families, a minor fire, and at least one emotionally complicated Christmas. I loved it immediately.

I used to arrange pillar candles of different heights down the center, and they would melt straight into the wood because I am apparently the kind of person who sees a table and thinks, “What if this had wax topography?”

People gathered around that table.

So many truths, tears, and tales were shared there. Dinners stretched. Too much champagne would appear. Someone would say the thing they had not meant to say. Someone else would laugh too loudly. Someone would cry, then insist they were fine, then not be fine, then be loved anyway. It was not branded as community. No one had made a deck. There was no mission statement. It was just a table, candles, food, time, and enough safety for people to become a little less edited.

That table feels important now because I think I used to believe community had to stay gathered in order to prove it had worked.

Same people. Same room. Same rituals. Same city. Same table, ideally without anyone moving to Lisbon, falling in love, burning out, having a child, changing careers, or deciding their seasonal affective disorder required a different climate.

A very reasonable ask, provided everyone agrees to arrange their life choices around my attachment needs.

This month, I realized I do not believe that anymore.

Many of the people from that chapter have moved on or are moving on. Different countries. Different lives. Different versions of themselves. Some are leaving London. Some have already left. Some are still here, but not in the same formation.

And I do not feel sad about it. I feel grateful.

Not because it mattered less than I thought, but because perhaps it mattered in a different way than I understood at the time.

Maybe a community does not have to remain assembled to have been real.

Maybe some communities last because they spread.

That word feels more true to me than “travel.” It is not just that something moves. It is that something multiplies, diffuses, takes root in other places, gets carried in gestures and standards and dinner invitations and the way someone now makes people feel at home because they once knew what it felt like to be made welcome.

Years ago, someone told me I was going to be like a plant that got repotted multiple times, carrying the soil of all my previous places with me.

I’m thinking about that now.

At the time, I probably heard it as a statement about resilience. A pretty way of saying I would survive movement.

Now I hear something else in it.

Repotting is not a clean break. The plant does not leave one pot and enter the next with pristine roots, politely rinsed of all prior context. Old soil clings. Some of it falls away. Some of it stays. Some of it contains nutrients the next place cannot provide. Some of it contains little bits of what had to be outgrown.

You do not move cities empty.

You carry soil.

You carry accents of places in your timing, standards, appetite, humor, suspicion, generosity, tolerance for weather, and opinions about what constitutes a reasonable commute.

You carry the way one city taught you to fight, another taught you to soften, another taught you to build, another taught you to leave.

Sociologist Peggy Levitt has a concept called “social remittances,” which refers to the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that people carry between places. She was writing about migration and cultural diffusion, but I love the phrase because it gives language to something many of us feel long before we can explain it. We do not just move our bodies. We transfer ways of being.

We carry soil. London gave me soil.

It gave me an appetite for sharp conversation and good books. It gave me friends who can make a joke land with the precision of a surgical instrument and then avoid the emotional consequences with a heroic commitment to changing the subject. It gave me standards. It gave me grit. It gave me beauty. It gave me the particular confidence that comes from surviving British bureaucracy and still having enough life force left to complain about the weather.

It also gave me loneliness. Performance. Over-efforting. A tendency to confuse admiration with belonging. A belief that if something mattered, it needed to become impressive enough for other people to notice.

I am carrying all of it.

But I am not trying to replant myself here.

London and LA are both transient, but in different accents.

London transience often looks polished. People disappear into visas, partners, new boroughs, new jobs, Europe, the Gulf, the countryside, a slightly alarming number of “quick coffees soon” that everyone involved knows will require divine intervention. Friend groups rearrange quietly. Someone moves and the group chat remains, preserved in amber by three annual messages and one person still liking everyone’s posts.

LA transience is louder about itself. Someone is moving to Topanga for wellness reasons. Someone else is trying Austin for tax reasons. Someone is in Venice for a season, Silver Lake for an identity, Pasadena for the trees, and no one is entirely sure whether Joshua Tree is a place or a personality test. People arrive with a script, a startup, a healing protocol, a pitch, a heartbreak, a dog, or a podcast that “isn’t really a podcast yet.” They leave with different friends, different language, different posture, and occasionally a suspiciously strong opinion about magnesium.

Both cities are full of people in motion.

And maybe that is why this trip clarified something I had been discussing with friends all month.

We hesitate to make big decisions because we secretly think they are forever.

Moving countries. Moving cities. Leaving a job. Starting a company. Joining a community. Leaving one. We treat these decisions as vows when many of them are experiments in soil.

A move can be sincere without being permanent.

A chapter can be complete without having been a mistake.

A community can scatter without having failed.

A version of you can belong somewhere without needing to stay there forever.

I used to believe that if I chose something, I had to know what it meant. If I moved, it needed to be the right move. If I built a community, it needed to last. If I left, there needed to be a clean narrative explaining why. Preferably one that could withstand questioning from concerned relatives, immigration officers, and the part of me that likes to turn life into a strategic review.

But life has become less interested in giving me final answers.

What it keeps giving me is direction.

California is pulling me back.

Not as an abstract idea. Not as a fantasy of sunshine and reinvention, although I remain supportive of both. But as a place where the next version of my work seems to be organizing itself.

An SF connection in London opening doors back in California. September and October gatherings with folks that have influence and gumption. A joint ANEW x Grateful Giraffes launch event in Venice. The excitement I feel about building community there. The way people in LA participate rather than only admire. The way the city seems willing to gather around something early, strange, interdisciplinary, and alive.

I came to London thinking perhaps I would create momentum here.

Instead, London gave me evidence that the momentum is elsewhere.

And somehow, that does not make the trip feel wasted. It makes it feel honest.

Because the trip also reminded me that what I built here did not disappear because I left. It changed form. It moved into people. It spread. It became dinners elsewhere, friendships elsewhere, standards elsewhere, courage elsewhere, stories told in rooms I will never sit in.

The farmhouse table is gone now. I sold it before I left. Someone else has it. I hope they understand the wax situation was part of its charm.

But the table was never the point. The point was what happened around it.

The point was the part people carried away.

I am writing this from The Centurion Lounge, cello finally checked (phew), on my way to Arizona for a five-day pause with my niece, nephew, sister and parents before I return to LA. The stop feels right. A little intermission between the city that formed me and the city that is calling me back.

I think I need the quiet. Not to make myself sad about leaving London.

I am not sad.

I am grateful. Tired. Slightly sweaty. Very ready. Excited, actually, in the way you feel when you are not running away from one thing so much as being pulled toward another.

London was real. The community was real. The years were real.

The version of me who built rooms around candlelit tables was real.

And now much of what was built has scattered.

Good.

Maybe that is how some things last.

Cities are not vows.

They are places we enter, love, misunderstand, use, resist, become inside of, and eventually, if we are paying attention, know when to leave.

I am leaving London with a cello, several bags, a sweat-wicking top that has earned my loyalty, and the strange relief of not needing this place to be my future in order for it to have mattered.

I do not think we lose the places we leave.

Not really.

We carry their soil.

And sometimes, when we are ready, we plant with it somewhere else.

This article explores what happens when intuition does not offer a clear inner memo, why some seasons feel unproductive but are quietly restoring us, and how time away from LA has clarified the cultural soil I need to build ANEW. Drawing on creativity research, attention restoration, and the metaphor of a fallow field, this piece asks whether stillness is sometimes the condition that makes real growth possible beneath the surface.

Before a meaningful trip, meeting, event, or threshold, I get some faint internal briefing note. More “this will be about closure” than “please report to Gate 42 for your destiny.”

This trip to London gave me nothing.

Which felt cheeky, given the fact that I had flown across the world, paid for a flight during a surge due to oil prices and Wimbledon, and would have appreciated even a single bullet point on what I could expect.

I had planned to come here months ago for a friend’s health gala, with the vague intention of building a month around it. Some networking. Some time with friends. Some London re-entry. A few useful conversations. Perhaps one of those meetings where someone says, “You absolutely must speak to…” and then actually sends the email.

A girl can dream.

Somehow, despite having had this trip on the calendar for months, it still felt like it had been sprung on me.

London had once felt more like home than anywhere since childhood. I know, for example, that if a British person says something is “not ideal,” someone may well be on fire.

I expected the trip to give me some sense of why I was coming back.

Instead, it was blank.

At first, I thought the blankness meant I was missing something. Had I not prepared enough? Was I too distracted? Was there some obvious emotional assignment I had failed to pick up because I was too busy carting my belongings around with my nomadic lifestyle, answering messages, and remembering whether I had packed adaptors?

Which I hadn’t. The Gala got to see my hair au naturel.

Classic.

I kept asking myself what the trip was for.

Was it for business development? Reconnecting with friends? Getting clarity on LA? Revisiting an old version of myself? Launching ANEW in the UK? An expensive experiment in jet lag?

London, in classic London fashion, simply stood there being clever, uncharacteristically hot (👋🏽 sun tan), and emotionally unavailable.

For the first few days, I tried to make the trip justify itself. I reached out to people. I tried to schedule meetings. I hoped being here would help us build momentum for ANEW in the UK.

Instead, getting certain meetings into the calendar felt like trying to arrange coffee through the House of Lords.

Not across the board. My actual friends have been amazing. They have made time, shown up, prioritized me, and reminded me that I have a place here that is not dependent on being the most impressive version of myself. That has been more healing than I expected.

But from a business-building perspective, the energy has felt effortful, slow and guarded.

London networking has a way of making even a casual coffee feel as though it requires three warm introductions, a committee note, and someone’s godfather having gone to school with someone else’s godfather.

Meanwhile, the most generative meeting I’ve had here so far was with someone I met during my stint in San Francisco, who happened to be in London at the same time. We went for a two-hour walk. She made time last minute. By the end, she had three connections for me and two important events she wanted to invite me to back in SF.

Different city. Madly different operating system.

That was clarifying.

Not because London is bad and California is good. London gave me some of the most important years of my life. It sharpened me, challenged me, expanded me, introduced me to people I love.

London is brilliant. It is funny and layered and intellectually alive. But different environments grow different things.

And what I am increasingly sensing is that LA is the right environment for me to build in right now. Not as a referendum on London (we know how those go...). But for this version of me, my body, my work, LA feels like the soil I need.

London, oddly, feels like white space. The negative around the image.

The thing that is not the picture, but allows the picture to appear.

And that realization is irritating me a little, because white space is hard to invoice.

I wanted London to be useful in a way I could point to:

• A meeting

• A partnership

• A plan

Something that at the end of the month I could call “strategic value.”

Instead, I am starting to think London is useful because it is refusing to be useful in the way I hoped.

I did not pay Wimbledon-adjacent airfare for my nervous system to tell me to sit quietly and look at a tree.

Before I worked in tech, I worked on aid projects, including sustainable agriculture.

So I know that a fallow field looks inactive from the road.

Nothing is being planted. Nothing is being harvested. There is no visible proof that the land is doing anything impressive. It just sits there, apparently unproductive, while those of us who like to plan develop a twitch.

But underground, things are happening.

Nutrients are replenishing. Microbial life is reorganizing. The soil is recovering. Old material is breaking down into something the next crop can actually use.

The land is not failing. It is restoring itself.

That requires the farmer to step back and let conditions simply be.

That is the part I find difficult.

I know how to push. I know how to make things happen. I know how to fill a calendar, structure a project, launch a thing, lead a team, rewrite a strategy, and squeeze meaning out of an experience until it raises its little white flag in surrender.

I am less practiced at letting things be, despite spending the last two years trying to go into remission. What can I say? Some lessons require more than one lap around the block. This is apparently one of those lessons.

Because I think that is what this season is (still) asking of me.

Some forms of progress do not respond to effort. They respond to conditions.

That is harder to trust. Control freaks do not like subjecting themselves to the will of conditions.

It is one thing to say you need rest. It is another to sit in a city like London, with a month ahead of you and plenty still to build, and not immediately turn that time into something productive.

I can journal, walk, reflect, meditate, write. Things that look slow from the outside, but still feel as though they are achieving something. They are helping me become clearer, calmer, better, more emotionally literate, more likely to say something at dinner that starts with “I was reflecting on...” at which point everyone has every right to leave.

True idleness is different. True idleness does not give you immediate proof that it is working.

I apparently need more of it.

My creativity has felt depleted for the last year… plus. Not gone, exactly, but certainly overfarmed. Sometimes I swear I hear a cricket chirp up there in the ol’ noggin. I have been asking that same field to produce and produce and produce without giving it time to recover.

I have been building a company while healing from autoimmune disease. Leading while learning. Consulting while writing. Editing a manuscript while trying to root myself in a new city. Creating strategy while attempting to remember that I am a mammal.

The science appears to support this.

In a 2012 study, Benjamin Baird et al found that people who took an incubation period involving an undemanding task performed better on previously encountered creative problems than those in other conditions. The benefit was linked to mind-wandering, not deliberate effort on the problem.

In other words, the brain keeps working when you stop standing over it asking whether it has finished yet.

Attention Restoration Theory says something similar from another angle. Stephen and Rachel Kaplan proposed that after sustained directed attention, certain environments can help restore mental capacity through “soft fascination,” a kind of gentle attention that holds the mind without gripping it.

Not all useful attention feels like effort.

Some of it feels like noticing the weeds and wildflowers along a train line.

Or sitting with a friend who knows you and does not need you to be anything other than how you are.

London is not giving me momentum. But it is giving me space.

Enough distance from LA to feel what LA has been growing in me.

Because sometimes you cannot know what an environment is growing in you until you step back from it long enough—whether by leaving or simply changing your pace or focus—to notice what stops growing.

In LA, things move differently. There is a kind of openness that can look ridiculous until it changes your life. Someone introduces you to a person they met twice at a sauna because “you two should know each other,” and somehow that person is exactly the person you needed to meet.

It is easy to make fun of LA. It often deserves it. The city contains an alarming number of people who can say “somatic” and “seed round” in the same breath.

But beneath the absurdity, there is something my life currently needs.

A willingness to experiment. A culture of introduction.

A sense that early things are delicate and need people around them.

A permission structure for work that is strange, interdisciplinary, body-based, AI-adjacent, health-adjacent, and difficult to explain unless the person across from you is at least conversationally open to the idea that feelings may have biological metadata (which in a sentence… is what we’re doing).

ANEW needs that. I need that.

Not because I need applause. I’ve had it. Applause is lovely, but it does not necessarily become infrastructure.

I am much more interested now in participation.

People who do not stand at the edge of the thing and admire it, but step into it. Help build it. Carry it. Challenge it. Introduce it to the next person. Make it less mine and more alive.

That is how things actually grow. And growth, like soil, is ecological. It depends on the right conditions.

Right now, London does not feel like the place where ANEW wants to take root first.

And maybe I needed to come back here to see that clearly.

Maybe I needed to return to the place where I once maximized every hour to realize how little I want to live that way anymore.

There are old versions of me all over this city. In cafés. Museums. Opera houses. In the muscle memory of how quickly I’d walk between stations because that’s what you do here.

This month, London seems to be asking whether I can let time metabolize.

And that is uncomfortable because it means trusting that something is happening even when I cannot see it.

How am I doing?

A bit restless. A bit tired. More grateful than I expected. Very glad to see friends who feel like home. Clearer that LA is where I am meant to build right now. Slightly suspicious of how hard it is for me to enjoy time that does not immediately produce something.

Trying, with mixed success, to let London be London without turning the whole trip into something I’m judging by the contents of my calendar.

I am also realizing that some old material is breaking down.

The version of me that thought she had to be exceptional to be loved.

The version that trusted achievement more than attachment.

But maybe the old self does not always need to be resurrected. Sometimes they need to become soil.

That is not failure. That is how fertility returns.

A fallow field does not look like progress from the road. It looks empty.

But underground, the old material is breaking down. The soil is recovering. The biology is reorganizing itself toward life.

Maybe some seasons are like that.

After one year, one month, and two days away, I returned to London and felt something unexpected: not just nostalgia, but a mismatch. This essay explores how different environments amplify different aspects of us, why ambition can become an old operating system, and what happens when growth asks us to become more coherent rather than more impressive.

I landed in London yesterday morning and, within a few hours, had the oddest sensation that people could tell I didn’t quite belong here.

Which is ridiculous, of course. Because I know this city.

I lived here for eleven years. I know which side of the escalator to stand on. I know how to read the oh-so-subtle mood of a room. I know the specific British commitment to making tube adverts slightly self-deprecating, as if even a mattress company is embarrassed to be asking for your attention.

And still, something felt different.

I came back after one year, one month, and two days away.

Or rather, I arrived back. Because despite having this trip scheduled for months, it somehow managed to blindside me.

Normally before something meaningful happens I prepare for it psychologically. I have a sense of what it exists to achieve. I create some inner scaffolding so that when the thing arrives, I’m not an American who misunderstood British banter (aka: aloof).

This time, the universe told me nada. My intuition has been… blank. And that’s fair enough, because life has been a little full in the run up to leaving.

I’ve been building a company. Consulting in AI. Leading teams. Trying to root myself in Los Angeles. Editing a manuscript. Dating in a way that has asked more of my nervous system than I care to admit publicly, though here we are. Rebuilding family relationships. Healing hormonally and physically after years of feeling like my body had gone slightly rogue.

And then suddenly, 👋🏽 London. The city that used to know me.

When I first moved here, I was twenty-two.

Bright-eyed. Intensely ambitious. Starting a job in academia, working alongside PhD students in social and behavioral research. I was coming from a year of living in Copenhagen that had felt like friction from start to finish. My visa was delayed after my passport was lost by the UK government (twice). My housing had run out. By the time my visa finally arrived, I went straight to the airport and bought a ticket for the first plane outta there.

Looking back now, I see how young I was.

At the time, I thought I was beyond my years. I was managing people twice my age. But in truth, I was convinced that the answer to almost every problem was to throw more willpower at it.

To become more disciplined. More impressive. More indispensable.

And London rewarded that part of me.

London is witty, brilliant, elegant, cutting, historically self-aware, emotionally evasive, and intellectually alive. It can make you feel like you’re in the middle of the world and somehow still slightly underdressed.

It rewards sharpness. It loves competence. It respects restraint.

It can turn ambition into a social language. I spoke that language fluently.

Over the course of those eleven years, I became an internationally ranked bodybuilder. I received cross-national recognition in technology leadership and innovation. I published academic work and fiction. I hosted a solo art exhibition.

I also left my religion, got divorced, came out as queer (and dealt with the interpersonal repercussions of that). I rebuilt myself in public while privately being far more anxious, exacting, and brutal with myself than most people would have guessed.

My life looked effervescent. And for a while I was convinced that it was.

Always going somewhere. Training for something. Speaking at something. Flying to something. Launching something. Conquering something.

Achievement was cathartic to me. It gave the anxiety somewhere to go.

London, beautiful and brilliant and relentless as it is, knew exactly what to do with that version of me.

It amplified her.

Different environments amplify different aspects of us.

And sometimes, returning to an old environment shows us that the part of ourselves it once amplified… is no longer a part you commune with.

That is what feels strange: London doesn’t feel foreign.

I do.

I’m familiar with the tube lines. The odd little cultural cues that make the UK feel like nowhere else. The pace. The restraint. The layered wit. The way people communicate entire emotional landscapes through punctuation and the word “quite.”

But I’m not the same person who left. I’m calmer now, more grounded, less obsessively rigorous, less willing to override myself in order to be exceptional.

But I also know what I want more clearly. I know where I won’t compromise. I have more self-respect. I don’t have the same hunger to prove I can do hard things, perhaps because I have now done quite a few hard things and, plot twist, would like a snack (without weighing it first and turning it into a test of character).

I have a lot of tenderness for the version of me who left this place.

She built things, survived things, made a habit of taking ordinary opportunities and turning them into something special.

But she was expensive and unsustainable to maintain.

This version of me prioritizes something else.

Coherence.

When I moved back to California, I needed to heal.

Not in the Instagrammable sense where “healing” means buying linen trousers and starting a program that ‘only has 10 slots available.’

My autoimmune symptoms had worsened. My hormones were offline. My nervous system was tired of the parties and the events and the pressure to look perfect in every photo. My relationship to achievement had started to feel less like devotion and more like masochistic extraction.

San Francisco was my entry port… and it was quiet. Productive, but monastic. I made incredible connections in tech and AI. I began forming a team around ANEW. But I was also sick in a way that made perfectionism humiliatingly unavailable. I couldn’t push the way I used to.

I tried.

Obviously.

But my body had other plans.

Then Los Angeles started whispering, which was unexpected because I had never imagined myself living there.

LA is absurd and sincere at the same time.

A place where someone may ask about your nervous system before asking what you do, and somehow both annoy you and heal something in you.

It can be performative. Of course it can. Half the café has a coach. The other half is a coach. Someone is definitely talking about their attachment style loudly enough for it to wind up in someone else’s instagram reel.

And yet beneath the clichés, there is also permission:

• to become strange on the way to becoming honest

• to take the body seriously

• to experiment

• to break the mold in order to create something new

If London says, “Be sharp enough to be taken seriously,” LA seems to ask, “Can you be self aware enough to make an impression?”

Neither city is better. They amplify different things.

And I’m beginning to understand that the thing I need amplified now is not the same thing I needed amplified before.

This really is about resonance.

I’ve been thinking about what gathers people around something.

We tend to talk about this in external terms.

• How do you build a community?

• How do you get people to care?

• How do you become more visible?

• How do you make the thing compelling enough that others want to be part of it?

Those are not bad questions.

But I suspect they are not the most important questions. That instead might be something like this:

Is the thing you’re building actually aligned with the person you are becoming?

Psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot developed what’s known as the self-concordance model, which looks at the difference between goals we pursue because they are genuinely aligned with our interests and values, and goals we pursue because of pressure, expectation, or external validation. Their research found that self-concordant goals are associated with more sustained effort and greater likelihood of attainment, partly because the work fits the person rather than requiring the person to continually contort around the work.

So much of modern ambition is built around contortion.

We ask:

• How do I make myself more marketable?

• How do I become the kind of person this industry rewards?

• How do I package the story?

• How do I get the room to understand me?

But maybe resonance begins when the distance shrinks between what we know, what we believe, how we live, and what we build.

This is also why the nostalgia of returning to London feels more complicated than simple sentimentality.

Research on nostalgia, particularly work associated with Constantine Sedikides and colleagues, suggests that nostalgia is not merely a longing for the past. It can help foster self-continuity: the feeling that our past and present selves belong to the same unfolding story.

Nostalgia can make us feel more connected to who we were, not so we can go backward, but so we can better understand how we got here.

London is not asking me to return to who I was. But it is making it impossible not to notice who I am now.

The city is still doing its thing, but my internal response has changed.

The place that once activated my ambition now seems to be revealing my boundaries. The environment that once amplified intensity is showing me the quietness underneath it.

I’ve spent the last year building a company around the idea that our bodies, behaviors and beliefs are always telling us something.

What I didn’t expect was to arrive back in London and feel my own system speaking so clearly before my mind made sense of it.

Maybe this is what listening feels like before it becomes language.

Just noticing what still lights up, what tightens, what softens, what feels familiar but no longer alive, what feels foreign but true.

Self-determination theory, one of the more influential frameworks in motivation psychology, argues that people thrive when three basic psychological needs are supported: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

In other words, we are not only motivated by achievement. We need to feel that our actions are internally chosen, that we are capable, and that we are meaningfully connected to others.

I don’t know yet what this month in London is here to show me.

My goal is to be present, pay attention, and learn whatever quiet truth I suspect is waiting between the cobbled streets and indirect conversations.

This is the first of four articles I’ll be writing while I’m away. I don’t know exactly what the series is yet. They’ll have to earn themselves.

But for now, the realization is this:

There comes a point where growth is no longer about accumulating more.

At some point, growth becomes about reducing the distance between who you are, what you believe, how you live, and what you are building.

Maybe sometimes you have to return to a city that used to know you to realize it no longer has access to the same version of you.

That girl did her job. Now, someone else has the floor.

Two weeks after launching ANEW, I found myself at a private Paris Saint-Germain event inside one of Hollywood's most iconic buildings, surrounded by athletes, executives, founders, and people I never expected to meet. What surprised me wasn't the room itself. It was how comfortable I felt in it. That evening led me down a rabbit hole of research on belonging, imposter syndrome, immigrant psychology, nervous system regulation, and the hidden ways we learn to make ourselves smaller. This article explores what happens when humility helps you succeed, but self-respect becomes the thing that allows you to fully step into your impact.

A few nights ago, I found myself standing inside the Hollywood Athletic Club.

The event was the private opening celebration for Paris Saint-Germain’s FIFA Club World Cup campaign.

Now, if you’re imagining that I arrived looking like someone who belonged in a room full of celebrities, athletes, luxury brand executives, and people whose names regularly appear in magazines, I regret to inform you that I was wearing an Amazon shirt.

Not a metaphorical Amazon shirt.

An actual Amazon shirt.

The sneakers were considerably nicer, but only because I’d bought them a couple of years ago when I was still making tech-exec money.

The Hollywood Athletic Club itself feels like a relic from another era. Built in 1924 during Hollywood’s golden age, it once welcomed some of the most influential figures in entertainment through its doors. Walking through it feels a little like stepping into another chapter of Los Angeles history. The ceilings are high. The architecture is ornate. The lighting is low enough to make everyone look slightly more attractive than they probably are.

There were trays of canapés moving through the room, performers weaving through the crowd, conversations happening in small clusters, and at least a dozen faces I recognized without being entirely sure why.

I’ve never been particularly good at celebrity spotting.

I suspect this is because I wasn’t raised in environments where knowing who was important was considered important.

Growing up, I wasn’t taught to pay attention to status.

As a result, I often find myself in situations where everyone else seems to know exactly who somebody is while I’m standing there wondering whether they’re an actor, an athlete, a musician, or just someone with unusually symmetrical facial features.

What struck me most about the evening wasn’t the event itself.

It was my reaction to it. Or more specifically, the lack of reaction.

Ten years ago, I would have felt wildly uncomfortable in a room like that.

Five years ago, I would have been performing confidence while secretly hoping nobody noticed I felt out of place.

This time felt different. Though not completely different.

There is still a part of me that looks around rooms like that and thinks:

How on earth did I end up here?

I suspect that part may never disappear entirely, and honestly, I don’t want it to. There is something healthy about remaining amazed by your own life.

But what surprised me was how okay I felt. Not important. Not impressive. Not superior.

Just okay. Present.

Comfortable enough to start conversations.

Comfortable enough to take up space.

Comfortable enough to trust that I belonged there as much as anyone else.

A few days later, I was speaking with someone I’m mentoring through my consulting work.

We found ourselves talking about something that many immigrants and children of immigrants understand intuitively, even if they don’t always have language for it.

The feeling that you’re fortunate to be in the room at all.

The feeling that opportunities are something to be grateful for, rather than something you’ve earned.

The feeling that there are other people who belong here more than you do.

As we talked, I realized I had spent most of my own life carrying some version of that story. Not because anyone had explicitly told me I didn’t belong.

But because when you’re the first person in your family to enter certain rooms, there isn’t always a roadmap for how to inhabit them.

And suddenly the experience I’d had at the Hollywood Athletic Club made a little more sense.

Because for much of my life, I’ve assumed that confidence was something people either had or didn’t have.

And yet the more I reflect on that evening, the more I suspect confidence is often something much less dramatic.

It’s familiarity.

Or perhaps more accurately, the gradual reduction of unfamiliarity.

A few days after the event, I found myself going down a rabbit hole of research.

Psychologist Gregory Walton has spent years studying what he calls belonging uncertainty. His research suggests that when people enter environments where they feel unfamiliar, underrepresented, or socially different, they often spend a disproportionate amount of mental energy questioning whether they belong there.

Small setbacks feel larger. Neutral interactions feel more ambiguous.

A delayed response to an email becomes evidence that someone isn’t interested. A missed introduction becomes evidence that you don’t belong.

The room starts providing “proof” for a story that was already running in the background of your mind.

What struck me most about this research wasn’t how unusual it sounded.

It was how normal it sounded. Because I suspect many of us carry some version of this:

• The founder walking into their first investor meeting.

• The employee stepping into a leadership role.

• The first-generation college student.

• The immigrant.

• The child of immigrants.

• The person from a working-class background suddenly finding themselves surrounded by wealth and influence.

• The person rebuilding their life after illness, divorce, grief, or failure.

This can happen when the environment changes faster than identity does.

Part of you arrives before the rest of you catches up.

From a biological perspective, this makes a remarkable amount of sense.

Research from social neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues has shown that social rejection and exclusion activate some of the same neural networks involved in physical pain.

In other words, our nervous systems take belonging very seriously.

For most of human history, this was adaptive.

Humans survived because of tribes, families, communities, and social groups.

Being excluded wasn’t simply uncomfortable. It could be dangerous.

Thousands of years later, our biology still carries traces of that reality.

Which means that walking into a room where you feel uncertain about your place can activate machinery that is far older than the room itself.

Your body starts asking questions before your mind does.

• Am I safe?

• Am I accepted?

• Do I belong?

Looking back, I suspect this dynamic has shaped far more of my life than I realized.

It’s part of what has driven me, which in turn has opened doors.

• I’ve never assumed I was the smartest person in the room.

• I’ve never assumed opportunities would simply appear.

• I’ve never assumed I was entitled to anything.

Those beliefs created humility. They created curiosity. They created a willingness to learn.

But they also occasionally created hesitation. Because there is a subtle point at which humility stops serving us. A point at which gratitude begins to masquerade as self-doubt. A point at which respect becomes self-erasure.

A point at which being grateful to be in the room prevents you from fully participating once you’ve arrived.

Which brings me back to ANEW.

Two weeks ago, we launched the beta.

Since then, some genuinely unexpected things have happened.

• We’ve been invited onto four podcasts.

• We’ve had conversations with people connected to healthcare systems, insurance, employee benefits, elite sport, and wellness.

• We’ve begun exploring what a pilot could look like within a hedge fund.

• We’ve been offered representation at the Concordia Summit.

I’ve found myself having conversations that, if I’m being honest, would have felt completely implausible to me a year ago.

At the PSG event, a luxury brand creative director spent a good part of the evening asking questions about ANEW before insisting that I text him because he wanted to be part of the beta.

At one point he joked that I’d probably have a cure for cancer by next week.

Shortly afterward, he introduced me to one of his longtime friends, a two-time UFC heavyweight champion who had recently opened his own gym and who, despite having every reason to be intimidating, turned out to be warm, generous, and deeply interested in what we’re building.

Since then, there have been conversations about introductions, partnerships, healthcare, employers, and opportunities that I genuinely couldn’t have predicted.

I don’t say any of this because I think it’s impressive.

Most founders eventually learn that startups are built on conversations.

Lots and lots of conversations.

Many of them go nowhere. Some become opportunities. A small handful change everything.

The outcome isn’t the point.

The lesson is.

What I’ve found myself reflecting on isn’t the momentum itself.

It’s the version of myself that momentum is requiring me to become.

Because every one of these opportunities seems to ask the same question.

• Can you remain humble without making yourself smaller?

• Can you remain grateful without treating your presence as accidental?

• Can you continue learning while also recognizing the value you bring?

For a long time, I thought confidence meant believing you belonged in the room. Now I’m not so sure.

I think confidence might simply be the willingness to contribute once you’re there. To ask the question. To follow up. To share the idea. To take the meeting.

To stop waiting for someone else to confirm that your seat at the table is legitimate.

Because the truth is, nobody handed me permission that evening at the Hollywood Athletic Club. The room didn’t suddenly decide I was worthy. The building didn’t change. The people didn’t change.

What changed was my relationship to myself.

The people I admire most are rarely the people who think they’re the smartest person in the room. They’re usually the people who are secure enough not to need to be.

The celebrity trainer who gave me the tour embodied that beautifully. He seemed to know everyone, yet treated every person with the same level of respect. There was no performance to it. No hierarchy. No need to prove anything. Just presence, curiosity, and genuine warmth.

Watching that felt like its own lesson. Because maybe the goal isn’t to eliminate humility.

Maybe the goal is to pair humility with self-respect.

To remain teachable while still taking up space.

To remain curious while still trusting yourself.

To remain grateful while recognizing that gratitude and worthiness are not mutually exclusive.

So here’s a small experiment.

The next time you find yourself in a room that intimidates you, whether that’s a boardroom, a networking event, a first date, a gym, a doctor’s office, or a conversation you’ve been avoiding, pay attention to your body.

• Notice your breathing.

• Notice your posture.

• Notice whether you make yourself smaller.

• Notice whether you’re scanning for evidence that you don’t belong.

Then ask yourself a simple question:

Am I responding to the room as it is?

Or am I responding to an old story about who gets to be here?

Because sometimes growth doesn’t look like becoming a different person.

Sometimes it looks like realizing you’ve been allowed to take up space all along.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky, that realization arrives while you’re standing in a hundred-year-old Hollywood landmark, wearing an Amazon shirt, wondering how on earth you ended up there, and quietly discovering that you belong.

We spend much of our lives waiting for the next milestone to arrive. The promotion, the move, the relationship, the business launch, the health breakthrough. We tell ourselves that once we get there, we'll finally feel relieved, confident, fulfilled, or at peace. Yet when the moment arrives, many of us find ourselves immediately focused on what's next. In psychology, this is often called the Arrival Fallacy. But what if we've misunderstood it? What if the feeling we're searching for isn't waiting at the destination at all? What if it's already showing up along the journey, and we're simply overlooking it?

Anyone who lives in Los Angeles has had this thought:

“Once I get there, I’ll finally relax.”

Which is funny, because “there” is usually 47 minutes away, three exits ahead, and moving at approximately the speed of a depressed tortoise.

You spend the whole drive imagining the relief of arrival. You’ve strategically moved a call to coincide with traffic, or maybe left two hours earlier than necessary to avoid 'rush hour,’ or mentally negotiated with Waze more times than you’d care to admit. Somewhere along the way, you became convinced that the feeling you’re looking for is waiting patiently at your destination.

Then you arrive.

You find parking (eventually), check your phone, open your calendar, reply to a text, and immediately start thinking about where you need to be tomorrow.

Which raises an interesting question:

If getting there doesn’t create the feeling we’re looking for, where exactly are we expecting that feeling to come from?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

A little over a week ago, we launched the beta version of ANEW.

It happened on my birthday. For most of the day, I wasn’t feeling excited. I was feeling anxious.

We were close. Agonizingly close. The kind of close where you’re refreshing Slack every few minutes, wondering whether the final issues are actually final or whether some previously undiscovered gremlin is about to emerge from the codebase and derail everything at the last moment.

I had dinner plans with my aunt and her wife and was adamant that we launch before I left.

Then, right as I was walking out the door, I got the message.

We were good to go. So the email went out.

After two years of research (both technical and scientific), ANEW was finally live.

And then I put on my shoes and went to dinner.

No dramatic shift in consciousness occurred. I didn’t suddenly feel transformed. Mostly, I felt relieved that we’d hit the deadline we’d set for ourselves. Shortly afterward, I found myself wondering what we might have missed.

Was there a bug lurking in a corner of the system we hadn’t tested? Would anyone even open the email on a Friday night? In hindsight, that response makes perfect sense.

Because the truth is that most of us don’t spend our lives pursuing goals.

We spend our lives pursuing what we imagine those goals will make us feel.

Nobody wants a promotion because they enjoy organizational charts. Nobody moves across the country because they have a passion for updating their mailing address. Nobody launches a company because they deeply enjoy late-night debugging sessions and existential conversations about product-market fit.

What we actually want are the feelings we’ve attached to those milestones:

• Freedom

• Security

• Belonging

• Recognition

• Confidence

• Meaning

The goal is real. The effort is real. The achievement matters.

But the reason we care about those things is often emotional.

Nobody sits in LA traffic because they love the traffic. They’re sitting in traffic because they believe something worthwhile exists on the other side:

• A birthday dinner

• A date

• A new job

• A concert

• A reunion

• A new chapter

The destination becomes attached to a feeling.

And that’s where things get interesting.

Because every so often, the feeling shows up before the destination does.

A couple of years ago, I competed in bodybuilding. One of the earlier competitions I entered was the UK National Championships.

As you’d expect, I’d spent months preparing. Every meal, every workout, every posing session had been building toward this one event, which initially I’d never even expected to go to. If there was ever a moment that should have felt like arrival, this was it.

Yet the moment I remember most wasn’t stepping on stage.

It was the morning of.

A few of my friends had travelled with me from London to Birmingham in a van. When I woke up, several of them climbed into bed with me and we sat there talking and laughing about everything other than the competition.

I remember looking out the window and thinking:

I’ve already won.

The competition hadn’t even started. I hadn’t achieved the goal. I hadn’t placed third yet. I certainly hadn’t qualified for bigger international competitions yet.

But for a brief moment, I felt exactly what I thought success was supposed to feel like:

• Supported

• Connected

• Present

• Enough

The destination was still hours away, yet somehow I’d already arrived. And therefore… I was actually able to enjoy the experience for what it was.

From a biological perspective, this makes a lot of sense.

Much of our motivational machinery is built around pursuit. Dopamine, despite its reputation, isn’t really the neurochemical of fulfillment. It’s heavily involved in anticipation, motivation, learning, and movement toward something. It evolved to keep us seeking food, opportunities, mates, resources, novelty, and possibility.

In other words, your brain is designed to care about what’s next.

Which explains why so many milestones feel strangely anticlimactic.

You get the job. You launch the company. You move to the city. You hit the goal.

And your brain says:

Great. What’s next?

Your nervous system isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing exactly what evolution designed it to do.

The ancestors who stopped paying attention after achieving something important were generally at a disadvantage compared to the ones who continued scanning the horizon for opportunities and threats. The brain is remarkably interested in the next problem.

Arrival, however, is something different.

I’ve started to suspect that arrival isn’t something the brain is particularly interested in.

Arrival is something the body experiences.

I’ve felt this recently in Los Angeles.

Which is ironic, because for years I had absolutely no desire to move here. My sister has lived in LA for a long time, and visiting always felt vaguely stressful. Then something shifted.

Not intellectually, but somatically.

Over the course of a few months, Los Angeles started feeling right. I couldn’t fully explain it. There was simply a growing sense that this was where I needed to be. That this was the right container for the next chapter of my life and for ANEW.

Since arriving, an extraordinary number of things have started falling into place. Potential collaborations have emerged from unexpected places. Introductions have appeared almost out of nowhere. Conversations have opened doors that weren’t even on my radar a few weeks ago.

And yet, if I’m being completely honest, there are still moments where I sit in my Airbnb staring at the white walls and think:

Not quite.

Because there are still things I want to happen. But whenever I catch myself doing that, I realize something. The feeling I’m waiting for isn’t actually on the other side of those milestones.

Because I’ve felt it already. I’ve felt it in conversations. I’ve felt it in moments of clarity. I’ve felt it in the opportunities beginning to emerge. I’ve felt it in the quiet certainty that I’m moving in the right direction.

And maybe that’s what we get wrong about the arrival fallacy.

The lesson isn’t that achievements don’t matter. They do.

The lesson is that we’re often postponing a feeling until some future event gives us permission to experience it.

Which brings me to a small experiment.

The next time you catch yourself thinking:

“I’ll feel better when...”

Pause for a moment. Then ask yourself what feeling you’re expecting that future event to create. Not the milestone. The feeling.

• Relief?

• Freedom?

• Belonging?

• Pride?

• Security?

• Connection?

Once you’ve identified it, ask yourself a second question:

Is there any evidence of that feeling already present?

Not fully, not permanently— just partially.

Right now.

Because that’s what happened before that bodybuilding competition. The feeling showed up before the result.

That’s what happened with LA. The feeling showed up before the apartment, the partnerships, and whatever comes next.

That’s what happened with ANEW. The feeling showed up before the outcomes.

I’ve started to suspect that some of the most important moments in life aren’t the moments we arrive.

They’re the moments we realize we’re already beginning to experience the thing we thought was waiting for us at the destination.

Maybe the point isn’t to stop striving. Maybe the point is to stop postponing.

To stop delaying feelings of connection, meaning, belonging, gratitude, pride, or aliveness until some future version of life finally gives us permission to feel them.

Because every time I’ve felt truly “arrived” in my life, the feeling wasn’t created by the milestone.

The milestone simply gave me a reason to notice what was already there.

The future of wellness is not more control. It is deeper understanding. As AI wellness tools, wearables, hormone tracking, recovery scores, and personalized health platforms become more sophisticated, many of us still feel disconnected from the body we are trying so hard to optimize. I built Anew from that gap: the space between body data and body intelligence. After years of bodybuilding, autoimmune recovery, somatic therapy research, and building AI-powered wellness technology, I’ve learned that true wellbeing does not come from forcing the body to comply. It begins when we learn how to understand what the body is trying to tell us.

There was a period of my life where, if I was eating pecans, I had to break them into tiny pieces first.

Not because I was making some chic little salad from a Malibu cookbook with a foreword about nervous system regulation.

Because I was allowed 5 grams of pecans a day, and the only way to make 5 grams of pecans feel like anything was to find the smallest pieces and make them last.

So yes, technically, I was eating pecans.

Emotionally, I was negotiating with a nut.

This was during my bodybuilding years, when my body had become both a project and a proof point. I tracked macros, training splits, calories, body composition, steps, output, recovery, water, sodium, and whatever else seemed like it might explain why my body looked one way on Tuesday and completely different by Thursday (because the body does love a plot twist).

I was in the gym four hours a day, every day, while also doing 20,000 to 30,000 steps and working full time as Chief Digital Officer at a fast-growing software company, where I led product, design, and engineering. And yes, I’ve been told many times that I must ‘love pain.’

A gym friend once told me that watching me on the StairMaster made them want to rip the power cord out of the wall. Not because I was doing anything dramatic, but because I looked like I was in visible pain and had somehow convinced myself this was character development.

At the time, I would have called that discipline.

And it was discipline. I do not want to flatten it into pathology, because bodybuilding also gave me things I still value: devotion, precision, resilience, an almost spiritual respect for consistency. It taught me that the body is adaptive, responsive, and capable of extraordinary change.

But it also taught me how quickly care can turn into management.

How seductive it is to believe that if you just track enough, restrict enough, optimize enough, and override enough discomfort, your body will eventually become the version of itself you asked for.

For a while, mine did.

Until it didn’t.

There was no single dramatic moment where control stopped working, which is annoying because it would have made for a cleaner essay. Instead, my body told me in installments.

I would rest, then panic. I would tell myself I was listening, then some new symptom would appear and I would immediately become a woman with eighteen browser tabs open, three PubMed papers half-read, and a supplement cart that suggested I had either discovered the meaning of life or lost the plot entirely.

The way I knew I was off course was not because of some metric on a dashboard, but because the pain in my wrists would become so bad I could barely use my hands.

That is not ideal when your life involves writing, building, typing, and generally trying to brute-force reality through a laptop.

Over the last few years, while recovering from autoimmune illness, I have tried or researched almost everything that could plausibly sit under the banner of “maybe this will help.” Peptides. Anti-inflammatory supplements. Functional medicine. Rheumatology. Chinese Medicine. Biohacking Discord channels. Lupus survivor Reddit threads. Diet overhauls. Gluten-free everything, including learning how to make gluten-free sourdough because gluten-free bread is often less “bread” and more “wait… didn’t I have something under my turkey?”

People have recommended hydrogen water, or maybe oxygenated water. I can no longer remember which, which feels appropriate.

People have prayed for me. I am not religious, but I do have religious people in my ether, and when your body becomes mysterious enough you become surprisingly open to all benevolent submissions.

The hardest part was not that I lacked information.

I had information. So much information. Labs, symptoms, practitioner notes, theories, protocols, supplements, dietary rules, intuition, body signals, and the kind of wellness internet advice that makes you wonder whether everyone is secretly living in a different human body with different laws of physics.

The hard part was that my body was going to move at her own pace.

I could do everything “right” and still not get the result I wanted on the timeline I wanted. I could change the diet, take the supplements, sleep more, train less, regulate my nervous system, research the mechanism, follow the protocol, and still wake up inflamed, exhausted, swollen, foggy, or in pain.

If you are someone who has built an identity around effort, this is deeply inconvenient.

Because effort had always worked for me, until it became the thing that was keeping me from hearing what my body was trying to say.

Eventually, I had to admit that my body was not failing to comply. She was communicating.

And I had spent a very long time confusing control with understanding.

That distinction changed everything for me.

It also changed what I believed wellness technology needed to become.

Because we are living in a strange moment in wellness. We can track sleep, strain, glucose, HRV, cycles, macros, meditation streaks, stress, symptoms, supplements, sunlight, steps, moods, readiness, and probably, at this point, whether our attachment style is affecting our REM latency.

And yet a lot of people still feel like strangers to their own bodies.

We have more signals than ever, but not always more meaning. More data, but not always more trust. More protocols, but not always more context. More people telling us what to do, but not necessarily better tools for understanding what is actually happening inside us.

Everyone is building tools to measure the body. Very few are building tools to help people understand the body.

That is the gap ANEW was born from.

Not because data is useless. Remember: I am an ex-bodybuilder and a product person. I love a data point. I simply no longer believe a data point is the same thing as wisdom.

And not because science and intuition belong in separate corners of the wellness internet, judging each other.

The point is that the body does not experience health in isolated lanes, even if the industry insists on organizing itself that way.

No one wakes up and thinks, “Today my endocrine system is unrelated to my inbox, my childhood, my sleep debt, my training history, my relationships, my glucose stability, and the fact that I ate dinner standing over the sink.”

People experience all of it at once.

Fatigue can be biological, emotional, behavioral, environmental, hormonal, relational, or some extremely annoying combination of all of the above. A craving is not always a willpower issue. A shutdown is not always “just a mood.” Inflammation is not just a lab marker. Anxiety is not always a mindset problem. And sometimes the symptom your body keeps repeating is the closest thing you have to a message.

Traditional medicine has its place, and so does lab work. But it was not traditional medicine alone that helped me understand what was happening in my body. It was working with a functional medicine practitioner and a rheumatologist who understood that labs do not always tell the full story.

Symptoms matter.

And your body tells you your symptoms.

Which sounds obvious until you realize how much of modern wellness still trains people to outsource authority away from the body itself: to the score, the meds, the protocol, the expert, the influencer, the lab, the app, or the person on the internet who is somehow both extremely certain and selling colostrum.

Sometimes those things help. Sometimes they are genuinely useful. But without context, they can become another pile of fragments: a sleep score, a hormone panel, a supplement stack, a therapist, a coach, a wearable, a podcast episode that convinces you for 36 hours that your entire personality is actually a magnesium deficiency.

More fragments are not the same as more understanding.

And more control is not the same as wellness.

The next horizon of wellness is not control.

It is translation.

It is learning how to understand the relationship between the biological, psychological, behavioral, emotional, and environmental signals that shape how we feel and function. It is the difference between asking, “How do I make my body comply?” and asking, “What is my body trying to tell me?”

That question became the center of ANEW.

I started building it in January 2025.

At the time, ANEW was just me, a laptop, a custom GPT, and the kind of optimism that is only available before you have spent quality time in Google Cloud Console wondering whether you have made several irreversible life choices.

The first version was simple. It was typing only. No voice AI, no sophisticated memory, no agentic architecture. It functioned mostly like a somatic therapist, trained on roughly 100 different wellness modalities from nutrition to Internal Family Systems, and designed to help people build interoceptive awareness.

Even then, the vision was bigger than the prototype.

I did not want to build another chatbot that could say soothing things when someone felt stressed. I wanted to build something that could help a person understand the relationship between their body, feelings, behavior, capacity, and patterns over time.

I wanted to build something that could help people see themselves as systems.

Not machines.

Systems.

Living, changing, context-sensitive systems.

The irony, of course, is that I tried to build this system by myself.

“The universe” had told me in January that I would need to build ANEW in community (you could also call this a hunch). Unfortunately, the proud part of me wanted to be able to say, “I built this end-to-end alone,” which makes sense if you enjoy suffering unnecessarily.

By July 2025, I found myself in what can only be described as the seventh circle of hell inside Google Console, unable to understand why my deployment was failing, slowly realizing that perhaps building a tool about wellness while ignoring the wellness principle of support was not my finest strategic move.

Community is a huge part of wellness.

Pride is not.

So I reached out for help.

Hundreds of people applied. Slowly, carefully, and in a way that still feels slightly cosmic to me, a team of eight began to form around the work.

Lived experience mattered. Everyone who joined had some personal relationship to what we were building. But they were also good people. Kind people. Skilled people. People with the right amount of weirdness tolerance for a project that sits at the intersection of AI, somatics, hormones, psychology, behavior, and the future of wellness.

Our team is spread across Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Bay Area, East LA, and Miami. Some are parents. Some are single. Some are navigating serious health issues. Others grapple with anxiety, uncertainty, or the tension of building from places where life is not exactly frictionless.

And that matters to me.

Because I believe the people are the product.

Not in a cheesy “teamwork makes the dream work” poster way (although yes). I mean that a product about human complexity cannot be built well by people pretending they do not have bodies, limits, histories, needs, and lives.

By the end of 2025, we had another prototype. This one had voice AI, early users, and a lot of learnings.

Some parts worked beautifully. Some parts were janky. The external voice AI tech was not always elegant, which is a polite way of saying there were moments where the future of wellness sounded like a robot underwater.

But the deeper issue was not voice quality.

The product needed memory.

Real, searchable, specific memory.

Without it, the experience was redundant. It could respond, but it could not yet understand someone over time. It could not reliably map patterns, track changes, or offer the kind of personalized insight that requires context.

People also wanted the ability to text, not just talk aloud, which in hindsight is obvious. Sometimes you want to process something through voice. Sometimes you want to type from bed, or from the car, or while pretending you are not having a small existential crisis between meetings.

The product had taught us what it needed to become.

So in January 2026, we began building ANEW again, this time as a more sophisticated agentic system.

Not because “agents” are trendy.

Because the body is bad at respecting product categories.

If we were serious about helping people understand the connections between symptoms, feelings, behavior, capacity, stress, hormones, nervous system patterns, goals, and self-trust, the architecture had to reflect that complexity.

ANEW could not be a single chatbot with wellness language wrapped around it. It needed memory, pattern recognition, different forms of intelligence working together, and enough continuity to help users not just have a nice conversation, but build a relationship with their own system over time.

That word, relationship, has become central to me.

Because the biggest shift in my own healing did not come from finding the perfect protocol. It came from developing a relationship with my body and everything she had carried.

That is when I started to ease my vice grip on control.

That is also why I believe the future of wellness has to marry the psychological, behavioral, and biological dimensions of health. Not as a vague holistic slogan, but as a serious design principle.

The body is not just a biochemical machine. The mind is not floating above biology. Behavior is not separate from physiology. Symptoms are not separate from story. And healing does not happen in isolated lanes, no matter how badly the industry keeps trying to organize itself that way.

Today, on my birthday, ANEW launches.

There is something almost too on the nose about this thing being born on the same day as me.

But more than anything, it feels like the biggest and best birthday gift I could have been given: watching something I dreamed up, wrestled with, broke myself against, rebuilt in community, and genuinely believe can change the world finally come to fruition.

ANEW is not finished.

No living system is.

But it is ready to meet people.

And I am proud of what we have built. Not because it is perfect, but because it represents the future of wellness I want to be part of creating: one where technology does not help us dominate ourselves more efficiently, but helps us understand ourselves more deeply.

Because the body is smarter than we think.

And I believe we can learn to understand it.

Not through one score, one protocol, one wearable, one practitioner, one supplement stack, or one very convincing person on the internet explaining that all your problems are actually cortisol.

But over time, with context, memory, curiosity, and care.

And when you begin to understand your body, not as a project to control but as an intelligence to be in relationship with, I think something opens.

A different kind of wellness.

A different kind of self-trust.

A different kind of capacity to thrive.

That is what ANEW is here to help people build.

If you want to be a beta tester, sign up here and follow us on instagram.

Be well ✌🏽

Founders aren’t taught how to leave—or even how to step back—without feeling like they’ve failed. In this final article of the “How to Love your Startup” series, we explore founder attachment: how identity, ego, and stress fuse founders to their companies and quietly distort decision-making. Drawing from attachment theory, relationship psychology, and lived startup experience, this framework helps founders distinguish between repair and release—between staying out of clarity and staying out of fear. Because knowing when to let go isn’t weakness. It’s stewardship. And sometimes, it’s the most responsible leadership move you can make.

Why this is the hardest article in the series

This is the article most founders don’t want to read until they have to.

Because staying or leaving is never just a business decision. It’s an identity decision. A grief decision. A meaning-making decision. And yet, founder culture tends to collapse it into a crude binary: push through or give up.

But real founder journeys don’t end cleanly. They fray. They morph. They ask more complicated questions than “Did this work?”

This final framework isn’t about quitting or persevering.
It’s about choosing clearly, without fear, ego, or self-betrayal doing the choosing for you.

A quick recap of where we’ve been

This series has explored the founder–company relationship as exactly that: a relationship.

• Framework #1: The Founder Alignment Map helped us understand the inner world of the company—its needs, values, and stressors.

• Framework #2: The Disconnection & Repair Cycle showed how stress distorts perception, blocks signal, and quietly erodes clarity. And then if appropriate—how to approach repair.

This final framework zooms out further.

It asks: What happens when attachment itself becomes the limiting factor?

The real issue no one wants to name: identity fusion

Founders don’t just build companies.
They become entangled with them.

Over time, the line between what I’m building and who I am blurs. The company’s wins feel like personal validation. Its struggles feel like moral indictment. And eventually, any threat to the business feels like a threat to the self.

I’ve seen this from every angle.

I’ve lived through cofounder breakups. I’ve been an executive alongside a founder-CEO. I’ve worked as an intrapreneur inside other people’s visions. And now, finally, I’m building my own company.

Across those roles—and across more than a decade in startup ecosystems—I’ve watched brilliant, capable founders come out of painful endings questioning not just their decisions, but their worth.

And I get it. Dividing yourself from the work is hard.

My own tendency, professionally and personally, has been to stay too long. Staying felt like purpose. Like loyalty. Like meaning.

But it shouldn’t work that way.

When purpose only exists inside endurance, attachment has quietly become the problem.

Attachment theory, repurposed for founders

Attachment theory is useful here—not as a diagnostic label, but as a lens for how people behave under stress.

Founders often default into one of these patterns:

• Anxious attachment
  Over-involvement. Urgency. Difficulty delegating. Panic when distance appears. The company must be saved now.

• Avoidant attachment
  Emotional withdrawal. Over-intellectualizing. Minimizing stakes. “I don’t even care anymore” narratives that mask fear.

• Secure attachment
  The ability to stay engaged without panic. To adapt roles. To tolerate uncertainty. To make decisions without distortion.

The key insight is this:

Secure attachment doesn’t mean staying forever.
It means being able to choose—clearly.

The most dangerous myth: “stay or quit”

Founder culture loves extremes.
Either you grind endlessly—or you walk away in flames.

But most real turning points don’t require total exit. They require partial letting go.

Letting go of:

• A role you’ve outgrown

• Control that’s choking signal

• An early vision that no longer fits reality

• The need to be indispensable

This is where ego often opens the door to cascading problems.

When founders can’t release one part of the relationship, they stay fused to the whole thing. Signal gets ignored. Teams stop being heard. Market feedback gets explained away. By the time failure becomes visible, it’s often already been rehearsed quietly for months—or years.

Sometimes founders don’t leave a company.
The company leaves them.

And almost always, there was a period beforehand where listening broke down.

When letting go is repair—and when it’s release

This is the distinction that matters.

Repair-driven letting go looks like:

• Stepping back to restore clarity

• Releasing control so the system can breathe

• Adjusting scope to preserve health

• Staying in relationship without self-erasure

Release-driven letting go looks like:

• Acknowledging chronic misalignment

• Recognizing that staying requires denial

• Choosing integrity over identity preservation

• Allowing an ending without self-contempt

Questions that help differentiate the two:

• Am I protecting the company—or protecting my identity inside it?

• What signals am I minimizing because they threaten the story I tell myself?

• Would this system be healthier with less of me in it?

• Does staying feel like devotion—or fear of who I’ll be without this?

Letting go isn’t failure.
Sometimes it’s the final act of stewardship.

The quiet truth: companies fail founders too

Not every ending is avoidable.

Sometimes the market says no.
Sometimes timing is wrong.
Sometimes the human cost exceeds what the system can support.

But even then, the tragedy isn’t usually lack of effort.
It’s loss of attunement.

Failure often emerges from disconnection from signal—from body, team, customers, or reality itself. And stress, when left unexamined, narrows perception until the decision is made for you.

Redefining success: stewardship over possession

Here’s the reframing that closes this series:

Loving a company doesn’t mean holding it forever.
It means caring enough to listen honestly—to yourself, to others, and to the system you’re part of.

Sometimes that means staying.
Sometimes it means changing shape.
Sometimes it means letting go with dignity.

The healthiest founders aren’t the ones who never leave.
They’re the ones who can live with their choices—because those choices were made from clarity, not compulsion.

And in a culture obsessed with endurance, that might be the most radical leadership move of all.

What’s ANEW?

ANEW is a Biobehavioral Guide to your wellness ecosystem. We believe that how you feel is one of the most useful signals of well-being, and that wellness is an ecosystem where biology, beliefs, and behavior interact.

Knowing how you feel—and how to respond—is a learnable skill. ANEW helps you notice patterns, make sense of your feelings, and try small, non-medical practices to support feeling more balanced in daily life.

Our app is currently in testing with a pilot group of users and will be rolled out to our waiting list soon 👉🏼

Join ANEW’s waitlist to gain early access when the app launches.

Building a startup isn’t just emotionally intense—it actively reshapes how founders perceive risk, signal, and self-worth. In this second article of the series, we explore what happens when stress hijacks clarity and founders lose connection—not just to themselves, but to their team, their market, and their company’s real needs. Drawing from relationship psychology and founder experience, this framework reframes burnout and failure as outcomes of disconnection rather than lack of effort. You’ll learn how to identify your founder stress cycle, repair before ego takes over, and decide—clearly—whether to stay, adapt, or let go.

A quick recap (and why we’re here)

This is part two of a four-part series on how to stay in a healthy relationship with your startup.

In the first piece, I wrote about what it feels like to be in love with a company— and why that emotional connection isn’t indulgent or naïve, but often the clearest signal of founder–market fit. Then I introduced the Founder Alignment Map, adapted from relationship psychology, as a way to understand your company’s inner world: its values, needs, stressors, and growth edges.

But knowing your partner— or in this case your company— is only half the equation.

The real test comes when things get hard.

When momentum slows, health intervenes or doubt gets loud. When the question shifts from “How do I build this?” to “Can I keep going?” Or even “Should I keep going?”

This article is about what happens in those moments— and how to tell the difference between a relationship that needs repair and one that might need release.

The core idea: founders don’t quit because they stop caring

In relationship science, couples don’t usually break up because love disappears overnight. They break down because they get caught in unconscious emotional cycles— patterns of reaction that feel protective in the moment but quietly erode trust, clarity, and connection over time.

Founder life works the same way.

Under pressure, we default to patterns:

• Overworking instead of listening

• Controlling instead of trusting

• Withdrawing instead of repairing

• Interpreting stress as a signal to push harder rather than reconnect

Eventually, the company starts to feel heavy. Or hostile. Or like a burden you can’t put down even if you still believe deeply in the mission.

That’s not a lack of commitment. That’s a disconnection cycle.

A personal moment (because this isn’t theoretical)

For a long time, I believed relationships were primarily about personality— chemistry, compatibility, temperament. Recent years have forced me to confront something more uncomfortable: how much of connection, attraction, and resilience is shaped by biochemistry.

Over the past few months, I’ve been in the messy middle of recovery— navigating hormone replacement therapy, inflammation control, supplements, injections, and a nervous system that’s recalibrating. My biochemistry has been… well, non-cooperative.

And in that state, I came face to face with a question every founder asks at some point:

“Can I let go?”

Over the holidays, I took a rare week off— not to disappear, but to step back and look at my relationship with ANEW from a third-person perspective. Health was part of the reason. But the deeper reason was this: I love the mission enough to want to lead from a clean place, not from urgency or fear.

Six months ago, the idea of letting go would have sent my pulse racing. There was a sense of having to do this— intensely, urgently, unsustainably. But that’s not the place I want to make decisions from.

So there, in the quiet of my parent’s ground floor guest bedroom, I tested a terrifying thought:

What if I could care deeply without clinging?

To my surprise, that possibility felt freeing. To be clear, I’m not walking away from ANEW. But realizing giving myself the opportunity to walk away and in so doing recognizing that I could let go if needed allowed me to re-engage from steadiness rather than stress.

That experience is the backbone of this framework.

The Founder Disconnection & Repair Framework

So, in a spirit similar to the previous article, I’m repurposing a relationship framework to help us navigate the ups and downs of entrepreneurial life— specifically disconnection— below.

Step 1: Identify your personal founder stress cycle

Start here — not with strategy, but with pattern recognition.

Ask yourself:

• What do I do when pressure spikes?

• Do I overwork? Micromanage? Withdraw? Dissociate?

• What story do I tell myself about my worth when things stall?

Many founders repeat the same cycle over and over— not because they’re irrational, but because the nervous system defaults to what feels safest.

Mapping the cycle doesn’t fix it yet, but it makes it visible and that’s the first step.

Step 2: Name the underlying emotion (not the behavior)

Behavior is the surface. Emotion is the engine.

Under founder stress, the usual suspects are:

• Fear (of failure, irrelevance, letting people down)

• Grief (for the version of the company you imagined)

• Shame (feeling “behind” or “not good enough”)

• Vulnerability / Loss of control (especially for high-capacity operators)

If you skip this step, you’ll try to solve an emotional problem with productivity, and burn out faster.

Step 3: Separate the company from the cycle

This is critical. Your startup is not the enemy. Nor are your obstacles. The stress cycle is.

When founders blur these lines, resentment builds. Decisions get reactive. And what might have been a temporary rupture starts to feel existential.

Try this reframe:

“This disconnection is something happening to us, not something wrong with us.”

That single shift restores choice.

Disconnection doesn’t just lead to burnout — it can lead to failure

Sometimes founders don’t walk away because they’re tired or disconnected. Sometimes they walk away because the company has already started failing.

And in many cases, that failure isn’t caused by lack of effort, but by lack of attunement.

When founders become over-identified with their companies, stress and ego can block signals. Team feedback becomes “noise.” Market data becomes something to explain away. Letting go of one part of the company— a role, a strategy, a belief— feels like letting go of the whole thing.

By the time the company “quits,” the rupture has often been there for a while.

Step 4: Design a repair move (not a push)

Repair is not:

• Working harder

• Forcing motivation

• Doubling down on willpower

Repair is a relational act.

A repair move might look like:

• Reconnecting with the original “why” without obligation

• Creating space for rest without guilt

• Adjusting scope instead of abandoning the mission

• Asking: What would restore trust right now?

• Letting someone else take the lead on a challenge or opportunity

Repair doesn’t guarantee continuation, but it can guarantee clarity.

Signal vs attachment questions

Answer these questions to help distinguish between healthy repair, necessary release and (ego-driven?) endurance.

• Am I protecting the company or protecting my identity inside it?

• What data am I minimizing because it threatens the story I’m telling myself?

• Is this company asking me to evolve or asking me to disappear?

• What would happen if I let go of one responsibility instead of the whole mission?

• If I removed myself from the center, would the system get healthier or collapse?

But what about walking away?

This is the part most founder content avoids, but shouldn’t.

In healthy relationships, repair isn’t about staying at all costs. It’s about creating enough emotional safety to make honest decisions.

Here’s a useful distinction from relationship psychology:

• Repair is appropriate when disconnection is driven by stress, fear, or depletion.

• Release becomes appropriate when staying requires self-betrayal, denial, or chronic misalignment.

Questions that help clarify the difference:

• Do I still feel curiosity about this work when stress quiets?

• Can I imagine a version of this relationship that feels healthier?

• Am I staying out of love, or out of fear of who I’ll be without it?

Letting go doesn’t mean failure. Sometimes it’s the final act of integrity.

And sometimes— as it was for me— testing the possibility of letting go is exactly what allows you to stay.

Why this framework matters

Disconnection doesn’t always mean the fire has died. Sometimes it means:

• Your body is overwhelmed

• Your nervous system needs regulation

• Your relationship with the work needs repair, not abandonment

This framework exists to help you tell the difference before stress makes the decision for you.

In the next article, we’ll go one layer deeper into repair rituals: the small, repeatable practices that keep founder–company relationships resilient over time.

Until then, notice the cycle… and be gentle with yourself inside it. ✌🏽

What’s ANEW?

ANEW is a Biobehavioral Guide to your wellness ecosystem. We believe that how you feel is one of the most useful signals of well-being, and that wellness is an ecosystem where biology, beliefs, and behavior interact.

Knowing how you feel—and how to respond—is a learnable skill. ANEW helps you notice patterns, make sense of your feelings, and try small, non-medical practices to support feeling more balanced in daily life.

Our app is currently in testing with a pilot group of users and will be rolled out to our waiting list soon 👉🏼

Building a startup can feel uncannily like being in a relationship—thrilling, overwhelming, and emotionally consuming. After exploring what it means to be in love with your company in my last post, this article takes the next step: applying research-backed relationship psychology to strengthen founder resilience. Drawing on the work of John and Julie Gottman, we’ll explore how emotional intelligence, repair patterns, and “love maps” can be reframed to help founders stay connected to their mission when the pressure spikes. If you’ve ever felt unsure about your path or disconnected from your startup, this framework will help you realign with clarity and purpose.

When you’re married to your work… 👀

A few weeks ago, my Substack post read more like a diary entry than a founder update. I wrote about what it feels like to be in love with your startup—why it matters, and why that love can be the difference between burning out and breaking through. Call me dramatic, but living in Silicon Valley means I hear endless stories about how people are getting along (or not) with their companies.

Founder life is emotional whiplash: soaring highs, subterranean lows, and that constant, gnawing question of whether you’re still on the right path. In many ways, it feels a lot like being in a relationship. Which got me thinking… with all the tools that exist for couples therapy, why not borrow a few and repurpose them for founders? If emotional intelligence keeps marriages alive, surely it can help keep a startup alive too.

And that’s how we’ve arrived here today.
Confused? Stay with me—I promise it’ll click.

The Gottman “Love Map” Repurposed: Meet The Founder Alignment Map

If we’re going to hack relationship tools for the startup world, we might as well go straight to the experts: John and Julie Gottman. They’re a husband-and-wife research duo who’ve spent 40+ years studying relationships through empirical data—not pop psychology. John is a mathematician turned psychologist, Julie brings clinical and trauma-informed expertise, and together they built The Gottman Institute and the infamous “Love Lab.”

In that lab, more than 3,000 couples were observed with heart-rate monitors, facial coding, and cortisol tracking.

Over time, the Gottmans discovered they could predict relationship success with over 90% accuracy—not by compatibility, but by how couples repair, respond to stress, and stay emotionally attuned.

Swap “relationship” for “startup” and “couples” with “founders,” and we’re basically cooking with gas.

Their core findings map eerily well to founder life:

• Bids for connection → the small signals your startup sends about what it needs

• The Four Horsemen → the founder behaviors that quietly kill momentum

• Love Maps → understanding your company’s inner world, not just its metrics

• Fondness & Admiration → choosing to see possibility even in chaos

What the Gottmans proved is simple but radical:

Emotional intelligence—not raw logic—is what makes love last.

And when we translate that into a founder–company relationship? The parallels are unmistakable. Startup building is full of stress, repair, doubt, rediscovery, and renewed commitment. The same emotional hygiene that keeps love alive keeps a founder alive, too.

The Founder Alignment Map

So let’s start with the first of the four frameworks in this series.

In the Gottmans’ original exercise, couples build a “Love Map”—a detailed understanding of each other’s dreams, stressors, values, and triggers.
Here, we flip that inward.

The goal is to create a map of your company’s inner world as though it’s a partner you’re learning to love—and one you want to stay committed to when things get hard.

Start by journaling through each quadrant once. Then, if you’re feeling brave, revisit it monthly to see how your company evolves over time.

And that’s it folks! I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with another Framework to keep the Founder Flames alive. ✌🏽

What’s ANEW?

ANEW is a Biobehavioral Guide to your wellness ecosystem. We believe that how you feel is one of the most useful signals of well-being, and that wellness is an ecosystem where biology, beliefs, and behavior interact.

Knowing how you feel—and how to respond—is a learnable skill. ANEW helps you notice patterns, make sense of your feelings, and try small, non-medical practices to support feeling more balanced in daily life.

Our app is currently in testing with a pilot group of users and will be rolled out to our waiting list soon 👉🏼

Falling in love with your company isn’t a metaphor—it’s a founder’s rite of passage. In this essay, I explore what it means to be in love with a startup: the rush, the heartbreak, and the devotion it takes to build something that feels alive and introduce a 3-part series on how to love your startup without losing your mind.

I’ve never felt like this before.

Not about a job, that is. Or— if I’m really being honest with myself— about anything or anyone. I’m 33 years old and I’m relatively certain that the first (and only) time I’ve actually fallen in love… has been with a company.

The life of a founder was never something I’d aspired to. I’ve been around (and deeply involved in) the startup industry long enough to see what it demands. And frankly, nothing inspired me enough to willingly subject myself to that. Then life unfolded, as it so often does, in a manner that takes you by surprise.

This meet-cute began with a skinny margarita at a London bar with a girl who was born the day before me. A mutual friend thought that we’d make fast friends. He was right. And boy, am I glad that we got along before what came next.

I’d actually asked her if she’d attend an event with me that had been recommended by a long-time mentor. Someone I trust who knows his way around entrepreneurial and investment circles. I did exactly zero research going into it. Why bother? If Bob suggested it, I was down.

The meeting location brought us to a gated apartment complex. Wholly unexpected. The guy at the front desk sent us up to a flat on the 6th floor. “If we get strangled, lemme just say— this was an adventure.” Said my new friend, with a nervous chuckle. We exited the lift, followed the distant chatter in the hallway, and found ourselves in a beautiful suite overlooking the London Skyline.

“So, what brought you guys here?” We asked two young women standing near the door. They exchanged sheepish and slightly embarrassed looks, which caused my new friend and I to exchange a look of our own. By the time we sat down for ‘the talk’ of the night, we were still clueless. In fact, it wasn’t until I tried to summarize the point of the meeting during Q&A at the end, that I finally understood what it was all about: embodiment. Learning how to reconnect with the body and leverage its signals as strengths. And that’s when it hit me— this is what I’m meant to do.

You see, when I’d entered that ritzy London flat that day, I was living with undiagnosed autoimmune disease, burnout from juggling an executive level position in a fast-growing startup while competing as an internationally ranked bodybuilder, and going through a divorce. Something felt terribly off, and the only thing that had been giving me any kind of respite, had been embodiment techniques— practices focused on re-tuning myself to my body and what it was trying to communicate to me. What was it saying? That my boundaries were nonexistent, and it was making me ill.

That’s why Bob had extended the invite. And that’s why the idea clicked.

What I swiftly realized, however, was that the topic of embodiment and somatic therapy had a communication problem. For thousands of years, the principles have been taught and practiced by eastern philosophers and wellness practitioners, but the message was being lost in a shroud of spirituality and pseudoscience.

The research was there though, and my life was already living proof. It felt like sparks. Like something I just had to do.

I’d say that the rest was history, but we’re still in the thick of it all— and I suppose that’s why you’re reading this today.

Entrepreneurship is fraught with imposter syndrome. At least it has been for me. Someone even asked me if I should be founding a company when it triggers me so much.

But that’s just it— I can’t NOT do this. Different founders are driven for different reasons. For me— pride hasn’t been that large of factor. I don’t think that I’m trying to prove ‘em all wrong, as is the story you so often hear. If I’m trying to prove anyone wrong— it’s the tiny voice in my head that tells me “I can’t.”

Really, what drives me is what I can only call a kind of cosmic obsession. It’s like everything in my life lined up to get me here, now— my personal experiences, my professional endeavors… everything kind of just clicked into place.

The tell-tale signs you’re “in love”

So… how do you know? We’ve all heard that annoying phrase: if you know, you know— as if it’s a secret club for the fortunate. And it’s true, I guess. But for those who need a bit more convincing, it’s looked like this:

1. You think and talk about it… all the time.

Not with dread— but with utter fascination. Excitement. Butterflies-in-the-stomach when you have a revelation… or two or three. For me, everything somehow manages to become a conversation about ANEW. I kid you not— even my haircut this morning managed to be about why I’m building this company. 💁🏻‍♀️

2. It’s a factor in every decision you make

When every decision you make is considered to ultimately have an impact on the company— either directly or indirectly— you know you’re obsessed. Watching an episode of TV, or not. Doing groceries after the gym. Taking a break. They all have cascading effects. What you choose to do and how you do it, can either help or hurt you and your relationship with your company.

And rest? Well— that’s a critical part of my business. Because I know that rest makes me better at my job. It helps me enjoy it more.

And absence maketh the heart grow fonder, right?

3. It gives you a rush of joy

I can’t help but smile when I talk about what I’m doing. Honestly, if I hear about a researcher doing work in my space, the quick succession of neurons firing in my brain actually make me feel faint.

And when I get to sink my teeth into a chunky piece of work— those periods of deep focus feel like a high. Even better— getting to the end of a block and seeing a passionately crafted piece of work that addresses the need at hand, is an incredible feeling. That .csv inspired by 9 different psychological and physiological data models now ready to feed a breakthrough service we’re about to build? I’m about to swoon.

4. You stick with it, even when it’s hard.

Of course I’m not on cloud 9 all of the time. In fact— as mentioned earlier, I’m constantly questioning whether or not I’m ‘good enough’ for ANEW. And frankly, I may not be everything it needs.

But I’m bent on becoming everything it needs. So I don’t want to shy away from the weaknesses or knowledge gaps I might have. I want to know exactly what they are so that I can lean in.

5. It makes you feel like life is worth living

Hand-on-heart, I can say that the autoimmune disease, burnout, emotional trauma… if all of that happened so that I could do what I’m doing now, then it’s worth it. I feel alive. I feel like my tiny life has purpose. And I feel like ANEW is helping me become a better version of myself. Just like an ideal partner would.

So… does any of this matter? Hell yes.

I know how this sounds— like I’m married to my work. And I guess for now, I am. It’s also been a little over year and a half— so I guess you could say that I’m still in the honeymoon period. But being in love with your company means that the triggers, insecurities, fears, shortcomings and challenges— become puzzle pieces to work with, instead of obstacles. They become opportunities to level up, instead of ceilings. And the journey becomes a testament that you have the capacity to feel and pursue passion. And if that isn’t enough of a reason to be alive, I don’t know what is.

When you’re in love, come hell or high water… you do what it takes to make things work. And while this is my personal opinion, I think that being fueled by love is better than being fueled by fear.

Why it matters: The Founder-Market-Fit

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard investors in Silicon Valley say that the founder matters more to them than even the idea. They’re looking not only for grit, relevance and problem-solving ability, but for someone who has a unique perspective on the challenge and a unique ability to address it.

Some of the best advice I’ve heard is that in the age of AI, being forgettable is your biggest risk (as Nat King Cole’s ‘Unforgettable’ plays in my mind…) But really as Mike Maples from Floodgate VC put it— “Being different forces a choice. Great founders are the ones who can see the solutions hiding in plain site.” Kind of like when someone just ‘gets’ you in a way that no one else ever has? 👀

So… if you’re reading through this and you’ve got a sinking feeling in your stomach that you just might not be in love with your company right now, what can you do about it? Well… keep an eye out for a 3-part series on How to Love your Startup Without Losing Your Mind for fellow founders that will be dropping over the coming weeks. 🔥

What’s ANEW?

ANEW is a Biobehavioral Guide to your wellness ecosystem. We believe that how you feel is one of the most useful signals of well-being, and that wellness is an ecosystem where biology, beliefs, and behavior interact.

Knowing how you feel—and how to respond—is a learnable skill. ANEW helps you notice patterns, make sense of your feelings, and try small, non-medical practices to support feeling more balanced in daily life.

Our app is currently in testing with a pilot group of users and will be rolled out to our waiting list soon 👉🏼

Anew is a mind–body Vital Guide that turns your feelings and body signals into clear, right-sized actions. Instead of drowning in dashboards, Anew translates the gut–brain conversation—nervous system patterns, context, and capacity—into practices that help you regulate, recover, and grow. Grounded in psychoneuroimmunology, somatic therapy principles, and allostatic load, Anew helps you notice what your system needs now, not what a generic plan demands. You talk; Anew listens and recommends targeted breath, movement, grounding, or reflection—then learns what works for you. Meaning > metrics. Start building a kinder, smarter relationship with your body—one conversation at a time.

For those who are curious to learn more about what Anew is and how it works, read on! Invitations to move from the waitlist into the app will begin on a rolling basis over the next month, so keep an eye out 🎉

Anew: Your mind–body Vital Guide

We translate your feelings and body signals into insight and action—through a simple conversation.

TL;DR

• Anew is a conversational guide that turns your feelings (emotional + physiological) into practical next steps—so you can regulate, recover, and grow.

• How it works: You talk. Anew listens, learns your context, infers likely nervous-system patterns, then offers targeted practices drawn from 300+ modalities.

• Why this matters: We drown in metrics and hacks but starve for meaning. Anew closes the gap between what you’re sensing and what you can do about it, today.

• What you get now: Personalized sessions, state-aware suggestions, and gentle trend insights over time.

• Our bet: meaning > metrics. You don’t need more numbers; you need a translator that turns your signals into action.

The problem (humans, not dashboards)

Our philosophy is simple: meaning > metrics.

Numbers inform; meaning moves you.

If you’ve ever stared at a wearable graph thinking, “Cool… now what?”—you’re not alone. We get bombarded with numbers (steps, HRV, calories, notifications), yet many of us struggle to name what we feel or connect it to wise action. Stress and loneliness drive a massive share of health complaints; “try harder” is not a strategy. People don’t need more data; people need a translator—something that can hear the story your body is telling and help you respond in ways that actually fit your life, not someone else’s routine.

That’s where Anew comes in.

What Anew does (the simple promise)

We help you make sense of your feelings and physiology—then act on them.

• Self-inquiry: A guided conversation that surfaces sensations, context, and patterns without pathologizing.

• Decoding: We convert your language into likely mind–body states (symbolic + nervous-system inference).

• Personalized practices: From 300+ modalities (breathwork, micro-movement, orienting, journaling, nutrition cues, imagery, pacing rituals, and more), matched to your style and current capacity.

• Continuous learning: Anew remembers context and observes trends so sessions get smarter—not pushier—over time.

No gimmicks. No spiritual bypassing. No “one size fits all.” Just a steady, intelligent mirror that meets you where you are.

The science in 60 seconds (plain English, no hand-waving)

• Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI): Your brain, hormones, and immune system talk constantly. Stress chemistry (e.g., cortisol, norepinephrine) shifts how you feel, think, sleep, and heal.
  Why it matters: Catching state changes early lets you intervene sooner with rest, breath, movement, or reframes—before spirals harden.

• Allostasis & allostatic load: Your body budgets energy to handle change. Chronic overload raises the “cost” of everyday life.
  Why it matters: Anew favors right-sized steps that lower load, not brute-forcing willpower when your system is already taxed.

• Somatic therapy principles: Interoception (sensing inside the body) plus bottom-up practices (breath, micro-moves, grounding) can shift autonomic state.
  Why it matters: You learn to both feel and steer—safely and incrementally.

• Constructed emotion & meaning-making: Feelings arise from body signals + context + prior learning.
  Why it matters: Anew links your sensations to your story, so the practices make sense and stick.

Evidence is promising and growing; effects vary by person and state. We’re science-informed and safety-forward—not diagnostic.

How Anew works (the conversational flow)

1) Describe what you feel
You share what’s present—tight chest, racing thoughts, flatness, soreness, or simply “I’m off.” We treat “feelings” as both emotional and physiological, because your nervous system doesn’t split hairs.

2) Understand what it may mean
Anew reflects back a clear, non-judgmental map: likely states and contributing contexts (load, sleep pressure, social friction, uncertainty, cycle/meds shifts, training fatigue, etc.). We avoid labels that box you in; we surface patterns that free you to choose.

3) Do a right-sized practice now
You’ll get one or two tailored options—short, doable, and aligned with your capacity. Practices draw from 300+ modalities and adapt to how you naturally learn (visual, verbal, kinesthetic, structured/loose).

4) See gentle patterns over time
We show trends without moralizing: “Evening social events spike your load,” “Lower-intensity strength days + 10-minute breathwalks correlate with better mornings,” “Boundary conversations → next-day flatness → benefits from grounding + protein first.” These are clues, not verdicts.

Our philosophy of pacing
Progress is milestone-based (gather → reflect → express → reframe → integrate), but never rushed. Your system leads; Anew follows with structure that respects your timing and safety.

The whole arc in one line:
Signals → Meaning → Action → Learning.

What’s available now

• Guided, context-aware sessions that translate feelings and body signals into two or three precise next steps.

• Personalized practice recommendations from 300+ modalities, tuned to your style and current capacity (no generic “just meditate”).

• Memory-aware context so Anew gets smarter about your preferences, triggers, and supports.

• Gentle trend insights over time—what tends to help, what tends to drain, and where small adjustments pay off.

Fast follow (shipping next): deeper inferred biochemical states—clearer probability-based readouts (e.g., cortisol/dopamine/oxytocin tilt) derived from language patterns and context. Still non-diagnostic; still you-first.

What Anew is not (so we’re crystal clear)

• Not a replacement for medical care, crisis services, or a human therapist.

• Not a diagnostic tool. We mirror and guide; we don’t stamp labels.

• Built with guardrails: safety monitoring, crisis pathways, contraindication checks, privacy by design (encryption and data minimization). We’re rigorous about dignity, agency, and inclusive logic across identities and hormonal profiles.

Who Anew is for (and when to use it)

• High-capacity, low-regulation days: You look productive but feel fried—use Anew to downshift and budget energy before you crash.

• Chronic symptoms or flare cycles: You want a kinder map between signals and choices—what to try today that respects your nervous system.

• Growth & performance seasons: You’re pushing in sport, craft, or career—use state-aware routines to go far without burning out.

Everyday moments: “Sunday scaries,” post-conflict recovery, symptom awareness, pre-meeting grounding, travel day decompression, meditative check-ins, or just “why do I feel off?”

Anew speaks human, not machine.

Skeptic’s corner (we welcome it)

• On evidence: Somatic, PNI-informed, and allostasis-based approaches show promise; effect sizes vary by person/state and method. We’ll publish outcomes as we learn—transparently.

• On bias and generic advice: We counter one-size-fits-all by grounding guidance in your language, history, and capacity today.

• On sticking with it: Most health apps fade because they worship metrics. Our bet: meaning → action → feedback → meaning. That loop keeps people engaged because it respects their reality.

We design for staying power by centering meaning over dashboards: meaning > metrics, always.

A short note from the founder

I built Anew because the mind–body connection isn’t a buzzword—it’s the backbone of how we live. I’ve lived the gap between “data” and “what should I do right now?” and I’m allergic to shame-based wellness. Anew is the translator I wish I’d had: inclusive, evidence-informed, and practical. It won’t love-bomb you or pathologize you. It will meet you honestly, honor your agency, and help you take the next right step for your system—again and again.

Tiny glossary (optional)

• Interoception: Sensing internal body signals (breath, heart rate, tension, gut).

• Allostatic load: The “wear and tear” cost of adapting to stress over time.

• Regulation: Bringing your nervous system toward a state that fits the moment (not too amped, not too flat).

P.S. Skimmers start here: Open Anew, describe how you feel, pick one right-sized practice, and notice what changes. Repeat tomorrow. That’s it—no gold stars, just real momentum.

After watching The Substance—Demi Moore’s unsettling new body-horror film—I couldn’t shake the imagery of a body turning against itself. It’s Halloween, and though I rarely watch horror, I found myself haunted by its metaphor: what happens when we overdraw on the body’s balance sheet. In a world obsessed with self-optimization and performance, disembodiment has become epidemic—our nervous systems quietly keeping the receipts. In this essay, I explore the science and symbolism of this split self, the physiological “monster” we create through self-rejection, and how ANEW’s somatic intelligence is designed to help us reconcile before the body comes to collect.

The Body That Came to Collect

We all live in two bodies: the one we perform and the one that keeps the receipts.

I watched most of The Substance with Demi Moore last night. It was a Halloween indulgence; I love the season but rarely have the nerves for horror, so I turned it off once I’d had enough. Still, the film followed me into sleep.

There’s a scene—spoiler ahead—where the “beautiful other” decides to overdraw on her time, staying in the body meant only for borrowed hours. The next morning, Demi Moore wakes to find a finger warped and gray, then a leg, then an entire posture collapsing inward. Eventually, the once-whole form twists into something almost unrecognizable: a cowering, hunchbacked creature.

I watched, wincing, and recognized something uncomfortably familiar: the part of me that has performed for acceptance, and the part that is paying for it in flesh.

We don’t need a syringe to split in two. We already live as a duet—the image body that wins applause and the living body that metabolizes the cost. When the image overdraws the account—on work, on beauty, on validation—the living body quietly itemizes: sleep debt, cortisol, inflammation, despair.

The horror isn’t the Cronenberg-style monster; it’s the invoice.

The Horror of Disembodiment

Disembodiment isn’t a metaphor—it’s a physiological pattern and a measurable state.

We optimize our calendars, outsource our instincts, keep hustling as if the organism is a machine with infinite parts. The body disagrees. It adapts—heroically at first, but what begins as useful vigilance curdles into fatigue, brain fog, brittle moods, and the existential gray-out that makes life feel like a dim hallway.

Neuroscientist A. D. (Bud) Craig showed that when interoception—the brain’s ability to sense internal cues—goes offline, mood and self-regulation unravel. The body keeps trying to signal hunger, fatigue, safety; the mind keeps refreshing the inbox and calling it productivity.

The result? We mistake depletion for drive.
The relentless pursuit of control, approval, or youth becomes its own sedative, numbing the very signals that could restore us.

We live in a culture that applauds the “image body”—polished, optimized, relentless—and quietly punishes the “living body”—soft, cyclical, and at times—messy. The more we ignore the latter, the louder it knocks: insomnia, hormonal chaos, chronic fatigue.

What looks like failure is often the body collecting its balance.

I know from personal experience.

Somatic Exercise — Body Credit Audit (5 min):

Sit still. Ask: Where have I been spending beyond my body’s means? Feel for any region that answers—a clenching jaw, a hollow stomach. That’s your balance sheet.

The Monster of Rejection (when needs grow teeth)

In the film, the creature isn’t born evil—it’s a consequence. The self we reject eventually demands form. What we suppress metabolizes into symptoms: inflammation, compulsions, panic, numbness.

Psychoneuroendocrine research by Dickerson & Kemeny (2004) shows that social-evaluative threat—being watched, ranked, judged—provokes one of the most powerful cortisol surges the body can produce.

We think we’re chasing excellence; often we’re chasing approval. Under the gaze of an imagined tribunal, cortisol spikes, and the biology of “prove yourself” becomes the biology of being hunted. The gaze becomes a predator; the mirror, a hunting ground.

What we really hunger for is acceptance. We imagine we’re winning when we’re simply surviving another round of comparison. Over time, that hormonal vigilance sculpts its own creature: half adored, half devoured.

Somatic Exercise — Shadow Breathwork (7 min):

Inhale and name one part you’ve exiled (“the lazy one,” “the fragile one”). Exhale through an open mouth as if releasing smoke. Repeat until breath steadies. Place a hand on your chest and one on your belly. Feel the two halves reconnect.

Integration as Survival

The monster was never the body. The monster was our refusal to listen.

Here’s the pivot the film denies us but the body still offers: integration—if we learn to translate the signals before they mutate into suffering we can also learn what burdens we carry now and how to heal them.

Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen called that invisible strain allostatic load: the cumulative wear from chronic stress cycles that never close. Integration helps close the cycle.

We all struggle with this in various forms and to varying degrees. We also all have the capability to heal holistically—mind, body and soul.

It’s not redemption through perfection; it’s reconciliation through awareness. The practice is literal: cross-wiring the body back into coherence so that drive and rest, desire and limit, can negotiate instead of duel.

Somatic Exercise — Somatic Bridging (3 min):

Right hand on left shoulder, left on right hip. Apply steady pressure. Switch sides. Move slowly, as if letting the two selves speak across a bridge. End by hugging yourself firmly and breathing into your back.

Eye-movement and bilateral-stimulation therapies (like EMDR) rely on this same principle: integration through rhythmic bilateral engagement. It’s science’s quiet way of saying, “Hold both sides at once.”

When the Mirror Speaks: ANEW

Integration is optimization.

As I write this, the first working prototype of ANEW is only hours from testing. We’re a team of five people now—mission-driven, slightly feral in the best way—and we didn’t build ANEW to make anyone superhuman. We built it to help us hear the body and translate its messages so we can heal and thrive.

ANEW listens to language patterns while in conversation with you, then maps likely physiological patterns underneath: vigilance or depletion, craving or retreat, friction between what you want and what your tissue can afford.

It doesn’t label you; it orients you. It’s a mediator between the image body and the living body—nudging you toward the smallest action that preserves wholeness: pause here, soften there, try this 3-minute practice now, not later.

Physiologist Paul Lehrer found that slow, paced breathing—under ten breaths per minute—increases vagal tone, widening our capacity for calm. ANEW builds on that principle: micro-adjustments that return our organism to dialogue with ourself.

Somatic Exercise — Containment (3 min):

Cross arms, hands to opposite ribs. Press gently. Inhale into your back. Exhale, feel gravity. Say quietly: I am inside my body. My body is inside my life. Repeat.

The Return

In The Substance, the mirror becomes a site of horror—and the lead character questions if all that is lovable in her is only in the younger, more beautiful version that had been abusing her. It broke my heart. And this morning, I realized that I could deeply empathize. I’ve spent the majority of my life pushing—hard— and incessantly, until my body developed an autoimmune disease that affected my organs, arteries and even my body’s ability to heal. I’m in the thick of the ‘rebuild’ process now, and even while I’m on all the supplements, alongside a few pills and (soon to start) injections— I wouldn’t go back to the way that I was.

The mirror can be a doorway. What do you see?

Ritual — The Mirror That Listens (2 min):

Stand in low light. Instead of inspecting flaws, look for sensation: warmth, breath fog, pulse. Whisper one line of gratitude—not for appearance, but for endurance.

There’s no need to gender or vilify the parts we’ve disowned. They’re just signals that have been distorted by shame. And that shame is subjective— which means that it was never ours to begin with.

The world is full of big-T and little-t traumas; we all split, in different ratios, between drive and depletion. The path back isn’t purity—it’s negotiation.

Desire isn’t the enemy. Boundaries aren’t the cage. The real enemy is pretending we can live in one and ignore the other.

This Halloween, instead of fearing the monster, let’s listen to what it came to say.

Because when the body comes to collect, it isn’t punishment—it’s proof that it’s still on our side, still adapting to survive, still fighting to bring us home.

Love and attraction don’t disappear when you’re recovering from illness, trauma, or hormonal shifts—they just change shape. This article explores how biochemistry, neurodivergence, and the body’s sense of safety influence intimacy, confidence, and connection. From the role of cortisol and oxytocin in attraction, to practical ways of fostering affection when energy is low, it’s both scientific and deeply human. Whether you’re single and curious about dating again, in a committed partnership, or simply relearning how to love yourself, this is a guide to navigating romance while honoring your body’s healing process.

Introduction: Safety in the Body

You could say I fell in love a little over a year ago—with hormones. Not in the Hallmark sense, but in the way that once I started paying attention to my body’s biochemical signals, I realized they were the real architects of my life and relationships.

Attraction, affection, even the way words leave my lips— all start with chemistry. And when that chemistry is focused on survival or healing, the story of love changes.

For me, safety in the body has been the defining theme. Illness, trauma, neurodivergence, even the queerness of not fitting the standard mold of attraction—all of these shift the baseline.

And when your nervous system is preoccupied with healing or bracing, romance doesn’t disappear, but it does take on a different texture.

Love asks for something more subtle: trust in the body’s pace.

The Biochemical Landscape of Love

Both my rheumatologist and endocrinologist have told me:

When your body is in repair mode, procreation is the last thing on its mind.

On a chemical level, attraction itself is usually sparked by a cocktail of dopamine (anticipation and motivation), norepinephrine (heightened attention and arousal), oxytocin (bonding), and sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone.

These chemicals create the flutter, the spark, the sense of magnetism we often describe as desire. But when the body shifts into recovery, cortisol takes priority. Resources get funneled to healing organs, regulating inflammation, and stabilizing the immune system.

In that state, libido and attraction signals don’t disappear so much as they’re deprioritized—your body is saying: "Not now, we have repairs to make."

Translation: cortisol is in charge, and oxytocin and dopamine are sitting quietly in the back row. For me, this has explained so much—the muted attraction, the strange relationship to intimacy.

It's also freed me from shame. Attraction isn't “broken.” It's just being recalibrated. My body is conserving, wisely choosing repair over romance.

Understanding the chemistry of romance has helped me see that love during recovery isn’t impossible—it’s just biologically different.

Core Challenges in Romance While Healing

Before diving into the day-to-day realities of how love and attraction shift during recovery, it’s worth pausing to name the three challenges that seem to come up most often, speaking from personal experience.

These aren’t abstract theories—they’re the real friction points that surface when your body is healing, when your hormones are rerouting, or when trauma and identity make safety feel less accessible. Naming them helps normalize the experience, and it sets the stage for the tools and relational contexts that follow below.

Confidence:

I’ll admit—I haven’t felt attractive in my body for a couple of years now. Between illness, inflammation, and recovery, the mirror felt like an adversary. So when people started showing interest recently, I was stunned.

But here’s the paradox: as I’ve been learning to care for myself, to respect my limits, and to genuinely love myself, others have noticed. You can be in a body that’s recovering and still radiate when you’re actually loving yourself through the process.

Self love = sexy.

• Doing what you can—even if it’s modest—has its own radiance. It isn’t about pushing yourself to exhaustion for the sake of appearances; it’s about striking the balance between rest and expression. Taking the agency that’s available to you not only feels empowering, it also signals resilience and perseverance, which can be deeply attractive to others.

  • Loss of mobility, changes in skin or energy can distort how we see ourselves.

  • Confidence is less about appearance and more about noticing how you treat yourself when no one’s watching.

  • Small rituals of self‑care signal to both you and others that you’re worth investing in.

Hormonal Shifts:

Attraction isn’t just a feeling—it’s chemistry steering behavior. Dopamine fuels pursuit and motivation; norepinephrine heightens alertness and intensity; oxytocin fosters bonding; and sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen amplify desire and physical readiness. Together, they shape not only how we feel about someone, but also how we behave—whether that’s leaning in, flirting, initiating touch, or even just maintaining focused attention.

In recovery, cortisol disrupts this choreography. With survival prioritized, dopamine spikes can feel flat, oxytocin release is blunted, and testosterone dips lower energy for sexual initiation. The result? You might feel more withdrawn, less spontaneous, or simply more selective about where your energy goes.

Attraction doesn’t disappear—it just whispers instead of roars.

For me, attraction in this state shows up as more demisexual (driven by resonance and safety) and sapiosexual (drawn to mind and meaning). It’s less about surface sparks and more about depth, presence, and subtle cues that emerge only when trust is intact.

• Stress hormones pull the plug on libido, but they don’t erase it.

• Attraction may emerge in quieter ways—through mind, presence, or energy rather than raw chemistry.

• Recognizing these subtle cues can help reframe intimacy as broader than sex drive alone.

Trust, Safety & Boundaries:

Being ill or in recovery can feel vulnerable, and that vulnerability changes how you approach connection. Every relational decision becomes a calculation: do I have the capacity to let this person into my healing space? Will they respect it? Can they handle the truth of what my body is going through?

The answer doesn’t always have to be yes—but the act of pausing to ask these questions is critical. It’s a reminder that trust isn’t automatic; it’s something earned slowly, through consistent signals of safety and respect.

• Illness amplifies the stakes of letting someone in.

• Boundaries protect both your recovery and your relationships.

• Trust builds slowly, but naming your limits clearly often creates deeper intimacy rather than less.

Different Relational Contexts

At this point, most readers will recognize themselves leaning toward one of two experiences: either you’re curious about exploring romance again in some form, or you’re already partnered and wondering how to sustain intimacy through the ups and downs of recovery. Both paths are valid, and both come with unique challenges and opportunities.

Think of these as checkpoints—places where you can pause and ask: Where am I right now? What feels true for me? And where might I want to go from here?

Exploring Romance:

After being single for over 2.5 years, I’ve recently started dating again. Not by seeking it out, but because somehow, it found me. And it feels strange. I haven’t felt attractive for a good portion of my singleness, so it’s disorienting to think someone else might.

I've decided that given my present biochemistry and headspace, treating dating as an experiment can help—less pressure, more about practice. I'm discovering what I won’t compromise on. I'm learning how to communicate—and the nuance that comes along with figuring out what level of detail is right.

This looks like sharing enough to set expectations, but without collapsing into overexposure. Each connection then becomes nervous system training: learning to sit in safe uncertainty.

Committed Partnerships:

I know the other side too. During my marriage, I spent years navigating my ex’s Crohn’s flare-ups, surgeries, and long recoveries. I was caretaker and breadwinner in my early twenties. It was exhausting and tender in equal measure.

Being the one who was ill brought him fear, frustration, and loss of independence. Being the caretaker brought me worry, resentment at times, and the pressure of holding everything together. Both roles are hard—one carries the weight of suffering in the body, the other carries the weight of responsibility and emotional strain.

What both of us needed, but didn’t always have the words for, was compassion for the other side. The partner who is ill needs reassurance they’re still loved beyond their illness. The caretaker needs to feel appreciated and not reduced to a nurse.

Together we learned to architect intimacy around constraints: meals became micro-adventures, even when dietary restrictions ruled the menu. Shared rest became a form of closeness, a way to say I’m here without words.

Love wasn’t about performance—it was about presence, even during my lunch breaks in the hospital room. It was about building a life where affection could exist alongside limitations.

Somatic Exercises for fostering Romance

So what do we do with this awareness? Once we understand the chemistry, the challenges, and the relational contexts, the question becomes: how do we actually move forward?

This is where skill-building comes in. These practices aren’t about forcing attraction or manufacturing intimacy—they’re about creating conditions where love, affection, and connection can grow at the pace your body allows. They give you tangible ways to practice safety, presence, and self-respect while your system is still recalibrating.

• Mapping Attraction: Ask your body how it experiences connection now. Not how it used to. Journal or scan: do you feel warmth in the chest? Tingling in hands? A deeper breath?

  • Be open to being surprised.

• Grounded Conversations: Before a vulnerable talk, place a hand on your chest, breathe together with your partner, and exhale slowly. Synchronize your nervous systems before synchronizing your words.

• Self‑Love & Respect Reset: Stand or sit somewhere quiet, close your eyes, and place one hand on your heart and one on your belly. Slowly say to yourself: “I am allowed to rest. I am worthy of love, even in this body, right now.” Inhale into both hands as if you’re filling your own container, and on the exhale, imagine sending warmth through your body.

  • This practice builds the muscle of self‑respect and signals to your system that safety and love start with you.

• Asking for Help: Instead of carrying every burden silently, practice turning your needs into clear, actionable requests. For example: “I need help with meals → can you chop vegetables while I cook?” Beyond practicality, this is a somatic and cognitive-behavioral exercise.

  • First notice the body signal that tells you you’re overwhelmed (tight chest, shallow breath). Then pause, name the need aloud, and translate it into a specific ask. This not only makes support tangible and guilt-free, it also retrains your nervous system to equate vulnerability with relief rather than danger.

• Fostering Affection with Limited Mobility: Affection doesn’t vanish when sex is off the table. Try rituals: reading aloud to each other, trading gentle hand or foot massages, eye-gazing with music, or nightly gratitude exchanges.

  • These spark oxytocin without requiring physical performance.

Love is never off limits

Healing teaches us that love isn’t something you perform at full strength—it’s something you practice in whatever capacity your body allows today. But it’s more than just scaling down. It’s an opportunity to deepen. To trust your body’s timing, to notice nuances you’d overlook when you were moving faster, and to experience new shades of affection, arousal, romance, and love. Recovery doesn’t narrow love’s scope—it expands it.

We Adapt

Whether you’re navigating chronic illness, neurodivergence, trauma, or identity exploration—you are not broken. Humans are social creatures that long for connection. That doesn't change when your body is in recovery mode.

Love reorganizes. Desire adapts. Safety in the body isn’t a prerequisite for romance; it’s a practice you build alongside it. Presence, not performance, sustains connection. And sometimes, when you let yourself practice love in its quieter forms, you discover a breadth of intimacy you never imagined possible.

My journey has inspired me to build ANEW—a Biobehavioral Guide to your wellness ecosystem. We believe that how you feel is one of the most useful signals of well-being, and that wellness is an ecosystem where biology, beliefs, and behavior interact.

Knowing how you feel—and how to respond—is a learnable skill. ANEW helps you notice patterns, make sense of your feelings, and try small, non-medical practices to support feeling more balanced in daily life.

If this piece resonated with you, ANEW is designed to walk alongside you in the same spirit: supporting you through recovery, relationships, and the re‑learning of love.

🌱 Want to be among the first to experience it?

Recovery and hormones don’t care about your color-coded routine. Bodies fluctuate by hour and by season, and the old “just be consistent” advice often becomes self-gaslighting: push harder, ignore the signals, pretend nothing changed. I call the alternative Adaptive Consistency—a skill of staying true to your why while flexing the how to match today’s reality. On HRT and LDN, post-IUD, while repairing from RED-S and an autoimmune wobble, I’ve had to learn this the slow and organic way. In this piece I map the tension between “insanity is doing the same thing” and “a journey is a thousand steps,” and offer a simple practice to keep taking the next true step—no checklist required.

It's been about eight months since I'd gotten my autoimmune disease diagnosis and immediately altered my diet, supplement stack, mental and physical exercises to give myself the best possible chance at recovery. It's been a little over three months since I moved from London to the Bay Area. It's been over two months since I removed my birth control. And it's been 3 weeks since I started hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and LDN.

Safe to say, this year has held a lot of change. But it's also required a whole helluva lot of consistency. When you're on the road to recovery there's no shortage of people who will happily share their advice or opinions on what you should do to get better. Naturally, a lot of it is contradictory. And that alone can feel overwhelming, pathologizing or paralyzing.

But I do think there is something very simple we can do to help ourselves continuously move in a healthier direction.

A riddle to open the door

When is doing the same thing every day sanity, and when is it insanity?
Answer: It’s sanity when your context is stable and your why is alive. It’s insanity when your context has changed and you refuse to let your methods change with it.

Most of us live suspended between two truths:

• “Doing the same thing and expecting different results is insanity.”

• “A journey is made of a thousand steps.”

Both are right; they just speak to different problems. The first warns against clinging to methods that no longer fit reality. The second reminds you that meaningful change accumulates through small repetitions. Adaptive Consistency is the bridge: you keep stepping, but you change how you step when the terrain changes.

Start where the steps begin: your why

Our bodies change constantly— whether we’re healthy or healing. Consider the hormonal and neurochemical fluctuations that happen, some in a matter of seconds, hundreds if not thousands of times throughout the day. If we can bank on the body constantly changing, then shouldn’t we appreciate the fact that we might be dealing with fluctuating conditions? And when you’re working with a body that’s trying to find its footing health-wise, those fluctuations require even more attention.

Those in the tech or manufacturing space might be familiar with something called The 5 Whys. Having worked in tech myself for around a decade, I've used and taught this exercise countless times. I never thought I'd use it in a health context, but here we are.

The 5 Whys is a simple Toyota-born, root-cause method: ask “why?” repeatedly—usually 3–5 times—until you hit an actionable cause or motive.

The first "why" is almost always a mascot—cute, inspiring, not the actual driver. When doing this personally, you might find that around "why" three or four, the mask slips and you're confronted with: fear, anxiety, ego, shame; or purpose, contribution, freedom, love. That’s the engine.

Take this example:

• I want to train four days a week. → Why?

• To get leaner. → Why?

• So I feel like myself again. → Why?

• Because I equate being strong with being safe. → Why?

• Because I spent years feeling unsafe in my body.

Now decisions aren’t about reps or macros; they’re about safety. On days your system is inflamed, puffy, flat, or fragile, the most consistent thing might be choosing a plan that protects safety and preserves identity—e.g., swapping going to the gym for stretching, or a walk + breath + upper-body technique work.

Same why, different how. That’s consistency.

Two ways we self-sabotage

• Hammer Time: Push the same plan no matter what. It feels virtuous and looks like discipline, but it burns goodwill with your nervous and endocrine systems. You “win” the day and lose the week.

• The Carousel: Constantly change the plan, declare “nothing works,” hop to the next supplement/protocol after seven days. You “keep things fresh” and never give biology time to adapt.

Adaptive Consistency refuses both. It says: I will do what honors my "why" today—and I’ll still be here doing it next week. This is what sustainable progress looks like. This is what true healing looks like.

Listening is not passivity

With all of the change my system has gone through this year, I'm reminded that my body is doing all that it can to metabolize it in a manner that moves me forward. Some days my mind is clear and my motivation is present. Other days my legs look like that of an elephant, my brain feels like it's sitting in formaldehyde somewhere on the sidelines, and my mood hums one octave lower.

Old me would've attempted to “prove” commitment by forcing the same training session, diet and plan while shaming the afternoon mirror.

New me asks: What action keeps me faithful to my why and my physiology today?

That question changes the scoreboard. Instead of grading the day by physical appearance, professional wins or a perfect macro split, I now grade it by fidelity:

• Did I protect the signal (sleep, breath, pacing) that lets tomorrow exist?

• Did I choose the version of training/nutrition/work that my nervous system can actually consolidate?

• Did I avoid false heroics—moves that look impressive but cost me three days?

None of that is quitting. It’s programming.

The smallest “exercise” I’ll ever suggest

Not a checklist—just a lens. Take one minute (a simple note on your phone; no ritual, no journaling points).

The Why Lens

1. What did I do today that served my why? Name one thing-- and honor the intent.

2. What did I do today that served fear, anxiety, ego, or shame? No flogging, just awareness.

3. What is one next true step that serves my why with today’s constraints? Make it so small it’s boring.

That’s it. If you want a little more, run a quick Why Ladder when you’re stuck: ask “why” about a decision three times (or more). Stop when you feel the gear shift from surface to core. Decide from there.

Progress without self-gaslighting

“Consistency” gets weaponized when we assume a body operating under consistent conditions. But bodies aren’t constants; they’re living control systems. They upregulate, downregulate, retain water, reroute energy, and renegotiate priorities—especially during hormonal shifts and recovery. They are a true wonder of nature. Adaptive survival systems. Calling fluctuation “failure” is like calling tides undisciplined.

Here’s the move, instead: define consistency as reliable identity expression.
On high-capacity days, that expression might look like loaded training, deep work, a social yes. On low-capacity days, it might look like walks, protein, breath, and a no.

Both demonstrate consistency if both express the same why.

How practitioners can hold this (lightly)

If you work in functional or somatic care, offer your patients permissioned flexibility without handing them a 14-point protocol. Simple language helps:

• “We’re not lowering your standards; we’re matching dosage to today’s capacity so your body can say yes again later.”

• “Your identity is the constant. The expression flexes.”

• “If you can’t do the how we planned, pick the how that protects the why. Then stop there. That’s a win.”

The paradox: patients who are trusted to adapt based on clarity over what they're actually feeling and experiencing, stop catastrophizing adaptation. Adherence improves because shame leaves the chat.

My current reality (and what’s working)

I’m still recomposing. And I'm still fighting the performative nature that's so pervasive in today's world. We feel the need to constantly show 'progress' in a form that looks impressive because we think everyone is watching or everyone else is doing better. Truth is-- mirrors have only been around for 8000 years and social media has only been around for about 20-30 years. Our measuring sticks have become skewed and don't represent the complex communication systems of our bodies that have evolved over millions of years. Here’s what's keeping me sane:

• I commit to one true step that protects tomorrow’s capacity (sleep window, breath, protein).

• I treat visible afternoon puffiness as in-progress hydraulics, not failure.

• I plan my “heavy lifts” (literal and cognitive) for the windows my body repeatedly tolerates.

• On gray-brain days, I trade heroics for fidelity. If I can’t do the plan, I choose the version that keeps my why intact.

There’s no applause for this. Just steadiness. And steadiness compounds.

Closing: the quiet courage of staying

If I had to summarize Adaptive Consistency in one sentence, it would be this: Keep your promises to your deepest reason, and let everything else be negotiable. Most of us don’t need another spreadsheet; we need the courage to stay with a body that’s changing while we keep moving toward a life we actually want.

The riddle wasn’t a trick. Sanity is letting your methods change when your reality changes, so the thing that doesn’t change is you.

ANEW: Your Decision-Making Companion

ANEW is the platform I’m building to help you deepen everything you’ve just read. Think of it as your emotionally intelligent co-pilot—an AI-powered guide designed to help you access, interpret, and refine your internal signal with clarity and compassion.

ANEW is a Biobehavioral Guide to your wellness ecosystem. We believe that how you feel is one of the most useful signals of well-being, and that wellness is an ecosystem where biology, beliefs, and behavior interact.

Knowing how you feel—and how to respond—is a learnable skill. ANEW helps you notice patterns, make sense of your feelings, and try small, non-medical practices to support feeling more balanced in daily life.

Our app is currently in testing with a pilot group of users and will be rolled out to our waiting list soon 👉🏼

Healing isn’t linear — and it certainly doesn’t follow a singular rulebook. In this final article of our biomedical vs. holistic wellness series, we explore what happens when embodiment meets science, and when self-awareness becomes the truest compass. From low-dose naltrexone to craniosacral therapy, lab work to lymphatic drainage, this piece dives deep into how to listen to your body while navigating chronic illness, hormonal shifts, and recovery. Whether you’re dealing with burnout, autoimmune challenges, or systemic inflammation, this is your guide to blending support — with nuance, discernment, and radical presence. Because real healing breaks rules, not your body.

I've never been on a nautical voyage, but I'd imagine navigating illness feels a little like navigating the changing seas that make up the port-to-open-ocean journey.

Preparation is essential, but so is adaptability.

In the same way that there is no one step-by-step rulebook for an overseas adventure, I don't think there is a perfectly mapped “step-by-step program” for healing.

It requires the flexible balance of being intimately aware of your present circumstances, the resources that you have, and the capabilities at your disposal in order to traverse every challenge you encounter— both expected and unexpected. Sure, there might be a few indisputable guidelines, but my guess is that awareness— of self and situation— is the best compass.

We humans like simplicity. It requires less energy to understand.

The truth is that complexity is easy, but getting to simplicity is hard.

And rote. And with something as jarring and often ambiguous as healing— it's no surprise that we often reach for the solutions that feel straightforward and simple... until you've been on the journey long enough to know that the best "rules" or tactics are the ones that play nicely with others.

This is the fourth and final article of our miniseries on the balance of biomedical and holistic wellness. In Part 0, we introduced the concept of balancing the two, in Part 1 we talked about Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)— what it is and when to consider it, in Part 2 we dove into Low Dose Naltrexone— the hot new anti-inflammatory med on the block, and now, we're pulling it all together.

I often write about alternative wellness practices and the role of hormones in health and wellness, but I wanted to confront the elephant in the room: sometimes an entirely alternative wellness intervention is enough. But sometimes the body needs a little extra "oomph," and I wanted to write about when to consider those options and what they could look like, if you find yourself in that position. We’ve covered two options (in Parts 1 and 2 mentioned above), and today we’ll talk about how to navigate your own pick-and-mix recovery journey.

Why I'm talking about this

I’ve processed a whole lot of contradictory thoughts and feelings throughout the beginnings of my own diagnosis. Relief. Fear. Grief. Anger. Shame. Self-identification. Thinking that I wasn't 'sick enough' to talk about it. Then thinking that my life was shaped by being ill. Then worrying that I was identifying too much with being ill.

Top it all off with actually trying to figure out how to get better, and you can find yourself in a paralyzing situation. So of course— if someone offers you a rulebook of dos and don'ts, it can feel like one less thing to think about. I'm still pretty early in my recovery journey, but what I've learned so far is that I don't think traditional healthcare OR purely alternative practices are always the answer. I think the answer is often a mix of the two— and understanding what combination might work for YOU, takes awareness— of yourself and your situation.

Pills, Practices, and the Power of Presence

If you've heard me talk about ANEW (the app I'm building) you've likely heard me say that the practice of embodiment saved my life. And I mean it, wholeheartedly.

Without an increasing awareness of my body, my emotions and the signals that my system gives me (both subtle and sledgehammer), I wouldn't have started a healing intervention as soon as I did.

The unfortunate truth is that it can take as many as 7-14 years for an autoimmune disease diagnosis, by which point the case is often severe and biomedical intervention is usually required in order to deescalate a dangerous situation.

Had I not begun embodiment practices when I did, I almost certainly would've wound up in that boat a few years from now. Because embodiment practices were all that I had towards the beginning of my recovery journey, I completely leant in to holistic wellness practices. The supplements. The diet. The dry brushing and lymphatic draining, the mobility exercises— you name it. And I can hand-to-heart say that every single one of those practices made a monumental difference for the better in my healing journey.

Somewhere along the way I gradually became resistant to the idea of biomedical support.

But the more embodied I’ve become, the more I’ve learned that healing isn’t about allegiance— to a specific 'type' of healing. It’s about honesty.

Sometimes the most honest thing is to take the damn pill.
Sometimes it’s to stop taking things for a while.
Sometimes it’s to admit you need help — from a molecule, a modality, or a memory you haven’t made peace with yet.

We chase answers in protocols. In diets. In retreats.
But no amount of supplementation or structured tracking replaces the one thing that actually heals: being in the room with yourself.

Not your future, optimized self. Not the version you post about.
The self that’s here — tired, a little puffy, not sure what’s next, but honest.

That’s the version who can tell you if what you’re doing is working.
That’s the voice worth designing a system around.

How to Know If You Might Need Biomedical Support

You don’t need to “earn” medical help, although if you feel that way—I can relate. It took a few different things happening in sequence in order for me to embrace the idea of biomedical support.

The first was a reddit thread in r/Lupus where dozens of individuals with the disease had complained about others insisting that alternative wellness practices were the answer for them. It opened my eyes to the fact that gaslighting happens not only in doctor's offices, but also by wellness junkies who claim meditation is the answer to everything.

Over-simplification doesn't help anyone. Especially when that someone is hurting badly, and may not be able to stomach the thought of sitting in their excruciating pain while attempting to empty their thoughts.

The second was when I'd learned about medicine-induced lupus and correlations to long term birth control usage, which led to—

The third, when I'd finally gotten a comprehensive hormone panel done and reviewed my labs with an endocrinologist. She kindly notified me that alongside near absent testosterone and progesterone, my poor gut permeability indicated that as much as 80% of the hard work I was putting into my diet and supplementation, was likely wasted. No amount of NMN or anti-inflammatory foods were going to stop the toxins leaking from my intestines into my bloodstream, or decrease the inflamed pathways throughout my arteries. Or replenish my nonexistent hormones.

The Self Assessment

So, here's what I'd like you to ask yourself honestly to determine whether or not you might need additional, biomedical support with your health (please note, if you are feeling seriously ill and you have not already sought help— seek medical attention):

1. How connected do I feel to my body? When was the last time I sat and did a body scan to familiarize myself with the sensations that might be present throughout my body? Is there any feeling, sensation or concept as it relates to my body that I resist or don't feel comfortable reflecting on?

2. Am I suffering from persistent exhaustion or anxiety, regardless of how much sleep or rest I get? Feeling constantly tired or anxious is NOT normal.

3. Have I reviewed my diet? Have I considered my macros and the food groups that I consume? If so, how long have I been following a diet? 21 days or more would be recommended.

4. How resistant am I to the idea of letting go of certain things in my life? The amount that I work, the number of responsibilities I'm juggling, or something else? Am I resistant to the thought of adjusting the pace of my life to be more aligned with what feels right in my body?

If you answered low/no to 1 and 3, and high/yes to 2 and 4, holistic wellness practices will likely only contribute to and strengthen any recovery protocol that you are currently on, if not offer a solid foundation of recovery that could be a good focus for you right now. Somatic therapy is an excellent therapeutic cornerstone that can help you gain familiarity with yourself and how you relate to bodily sensations. From there, you might want to consider working with a naturopath.

If you answered high/yes to 1, 2 and 3 and low/no to 4, my guess is that you might need additional biomedical support, and at the very least should organize additional labs to review inflammation and hormonal markers.

How to Choose the Right Holistic Practices (For You)

Here’s what I wish more practitioners said out loud: just because something is “natural” doesn’t mean it’s right for your body right now.

Start with this question:
What part of me is this trying to soothe or regulate?

From there, you can start to layer. For me right now, it looks like:

• Craniosacral therapy, because I've found it to directly support a healthier relationship between my nervous system and joint pain/soreness

• Strength training 3x/week, because it reconnects me with power — not punishment, helps with mobility and joint strength, and contributes to a sense of progress

• Dry Brushing / Lymphatic Draining, because it helps soften my fascia, reduce inflammation and muscle pain

• Walking, because movement without outcome is the most rebellious thing I can do right now

• Journaling, not just for tracking progress, but for checking presence and anything my brain might be gnawing on— am I here with myself, or am I performing?

It’s not about doing everything. It’s about doing what actually registers in your body — what your nervous system doesn’t immediately brace against. That’s your clue.

How to Choose the Right Labs to Orient You

If you feel it's time to get additional checks done, I hope this section helps. There are plenty of services that offer introductory, comprehensive labs, but if you've never done it before and don't know where to start, here are some markers worth looking at:

Hormonal Health

• Comprehensive Hormone Panel: Includes estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, DHEA, cortisol (ideally via 4-point saliva test), and SHBG. Reveals whether you’re depleted, overstimulated, or imbalanced.

Thyroid Function

• Thyroid Tests: Go beyond TSH. Include Free T3, Free T4, Reverse T3, and thyroid antibodies (TPO, TGAb) to assess for autoimmune thyroid dysfunction like Hashimoto’s.

Inflammation Markers

• Inflammatory Labs: CRP (high-sensitivity), ESR, homocysteine, and fibrinogen. Elevated levels may indicate chronic inflammation.

Nutrient Deficiencies

• Nutrient Panel: Check Vitamin D, B12, magnesium (RBC), ferritin, and zinc. These are critical for energy, cognition, and immunity.

Organ Function and Metabolism

• Comprehensive Metabolic Panel + CBC: Measures glucose, liver/kidney function, electrolyte balance, and red/white blood cell health.

Gut Integrity (Optional)

• Gut Health Tests: If leaky gut or GI issues are suspected, consider GI-MAP, Zonulin, or LPS-binding protein.

You don’t need to run every single one at once. But if you’ve done the hard work of embodiment and are still feeling like something’s not adding up, these labs can give you a concrete map of what your system is signaling.

They won’t give you the whole story — but they may help confirm that your internal compass has been right all along.

Break the Rules — But Don’t Bypass Yourself

I still believe in rule-breaking. I still think most systems — medical, educational, cultural — weren’t built for people like me. Like us.

But now I believe something else too:

The real revolution isn’t just in doing it differently.
It’s in doing it with your body, not in spite of it.

The voyage of recovery is about learning the rules— in order to know how and when to bend them.

It’s also about paying closer attention to what’s actually happening — with your body, your mind, and your circumstances — rather than whether or not you’re checking off boxes or following a rigid protocol. That kind of presence? That’s the real compass.

My personal opinion is that holistic wellness practices are non-negotiable. They offer a strong foundation for healing and will likely only elevate any biomedical intervention or support you might require. But sometimes on their own, they might not be enough.

Let’s embrace healing with balance and open-mindedness ✌🏽

ANEW: Your Biobehavioral Guide

ANEW is the platform I’m building to help you deepen everything you’ve just read. Think of it as your emotionally intelligent co-pilot—an AI-powered guide designed to help you access, interpret, and refine your internal signal with clarity and compassion.

ANEW is a Biobehavioral Guide to your wellness ecosystem. We believe that how you feel is one of the most useful signals of well-being, and that wellness is an ecosystem where biology, beliefs, and behavior interact.

Knowing how you feel—and how to respond—is a learnable skill. ANEW helps you notice patterns, make sense of your feelings, and try small, non-medical practices to support feeling more balanced in daily life.

Our app is currently in testing with a pilot group of users and will be rolled out to our waiting list soon 👉🏼

Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) is quietly becoming one of the most talked-about off-label treatments for chronic illness, autoimmune conditions, and long COVID. Originally developed in the 1960s to treat opioid and alcohol dependence at much higher doses, researchers discovered that tiny daily doses could have surprising effects: boosting endorphins, calming inflammation, and modulating the immune system. In this article, I explore LDN’s origins, science and likely candidates for treatment, as well as why I’m starting a six-month course myself alongside hormone replacement therapy.

It’s a foggy yet warm day in San Francisco. There’s something about the way the mist curls over the cliffs and between the branches of the gnarled, coastal cypress trees that’s both haunting and magical. Having recently moved from London, you’d think that I simply traded the fog of one geography for another. But it’s vastly different here. This place resonates with the kind of frequency I’ve needed during this season.

I recently finished binge-reading The Velvet Rage upon the recommendation of a new friend down the street in the Castro district. In a nutshell, the book explores the difference between living authentically — building relationships rooted in honesty and integrity, and what it looks like to transition to that way of living from one where chasing validation through achievement and “impressiveness” had been habitual.

I’m slowly replacing the reflex to make others happy and always appear ‘prepared and presentable,’ with the quieter practice of pausing, checking in with what I actually want and need, and acting from that place. I’m finding that I have to take nearly every thought and question hostage, as I’ve been so primed to consider what everyone else might want or need in any given scenario. This has been a transitionary period for me in many ways, and I’m learning many different things. I’m learning that true community is slow-growing — prioritizing quality over quantity, and I’m learning how to ask for and accept help. The latter may sound basic, but it’s a muscle I’ve hardly trained… because asking for help means being transparent about mess.

This week, “accepting help” takes several forms, from inviting a senior engineer into my code repository for Anew, to a biomedical form— as tomorrow I start a six-month course of Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) alongside hormone replacement therapy. This is the second article in a miniseries on the marriage of biomedical and holistic support in healing chronic illness. And I can’t wait to begin.

What is LDN?

Naltrexone was developed in the 1960s and approved in the 1980s at a standard 50mg dose initially to treat opioid and alcohol dependence. It works by blocking opioid receptors, which reduces the euphoric effects of those substances.

Low Dose Naltrexone, however, is a very different proposition: we’re talking doses in the range of 1.5–4.5mg — about one-tenth the addiction-treatment dose. At this lower level, naltrexone doesn’t shut down your opioid system for long. Instead, it briefly blocks opioid receptors, prompting the body to respond with a rebound surge of endorphins and enkephalins.

That short-lived blockade is thought to modulate the immune system, calm overactive inflammation pathways (like toll-like receptor 4, or TLR4), and even influence microglial cells in the brain — the nervous system’s resident “immune guards.” The idea is that by gently nudging the body’s own chemistry, LDN can restore balance without blunt-force suppression.

A Short History of Its Surprising Second Act

The LDN story starts with Dr. Bernard Bihari, a physician working in New York City in the 1980s during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. While treating patients for opioid dependence, he began noticing that small doses of naltrexone seemed to boost immune markers and improve quality of life in some of his patients.

Intrigued, Bihari began experimenting with low doses in people with autoimmune disorders, multiple sclerosis, and certain cancers. His hypothesis was simple: if low-dose receptor blockade could increase endorphin production, it might strengthen immune regulation.

From there, LDN became a niche interest among functional medicine practitioners, MS researchers, and patient-led communities online. Small studies in Crohn’s disease, fibromyalgia, and MS showed promising results. Word of mouth — and later, social media — did the rest.

Why You’re Hearing More About It Now

• Autoimmunity is on the rise. Rates of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune conditions keep climbing, and people are seeking non-immunosuppressive ways to manage them.

• It’s relatively low risk. Side effects are generally mild (vivid dreams, initial sleep changes, occasional headaches), and it’s inexpensive.

• The patient voice is loud. LDN’s popularity has been driven less by pharmaceutical marketing and more by patient advocacy groups, forums, and anecdotal success stories.

• Long COVID changed the conversation. Post-viral syndromes have renewed interest in immune-modulating therapies.

What the Research Says (and Doesn’t)

The science is promising but far from definitive.

• Conditions with strongest evidence so far: multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, fibromyalgia, certain chronic pain conditions.

• Emerging areas: Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, long COVID, chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), and even certain cancers (as an adjunct).

• Mechanisms under investigation: TLR4 modulation, microglial regulation, endorphin-mediated immune balance.

Limitations:

• Most trials are small, short-term, and condition-specific.

• Results are not universal — some people see no change.

• It’s not FDA-approved for these uses, meaning access often depends on a supportive practitioner willing to prescribe off-label.

Who Might Consider It

• People with autoimmune or chronic inflammatory conditions not fully managed by standard care

• Those with chronic pain syndromes seeking non-opioid relief

• Post-viral syndrome patients (e.g., long COVID)

• People willing to commit to a 2–3 month trial before judging effects

Who should think twice:

• Anyone currently taking opioid pain medication (LDN can block its effects)

• Those expecting immediate, dramatic results

• People unable to monitor and adjust dosing under medical supervision

My Plan

For me, LDN is one more teammate in a larger recovery strategy. My HRT is addressing hormonal gaps; my lifestyle is built around strength training, nutrient-rich food, and nervous system regulation; ANEW (my AI-based mind–body platform) is helping me improve my mind-body attunement and track the subtler changes I might otherwise miss.

If it works as hoped, LDN will help reduce the vascular and gut inflammation that’s been a stubborn roadblock to my recovery. If it doesn’t, I’ll at least know I gave my immune system another avenue of support.

Accepting Help Without Shame

I’ve noticed that accepting help — from people, from medicine, from the unexpected — isn’t about giving up, or being a burden (one of my biggest fears). It’s really about community— being a part of the interconnected web that the universe is. Healthy community with yourself, healthy community with others, and the healthy community of a diverse range of products and services that together can support the kind of lifestyle you want. I’ve spent too much of my life worrying about making the wrong decision, or just simply being wrong. But most of the time, it’s a matter of perspective.

LDN is, in that way, symbolic for me. It’s a small, daily reminder that healing is not just about effort; it’s about partnership — with your body, your care team, your environment and your community. And sometimes, with a tiny white capsule that works while you sleep.

So tomorrow, I’ll take my first dose. And like letting someone see my imperfect code, I’ll let it in without the shame, trusting that it just might help me find my stride.

Be Part of the Movement

ANEW is a Biobehavioral Guide to your wellness ecosystem. We believe that how you feel is one of the most useful signals of well-being, and that wellness is an ecosystem where biology, beliefs, and behavior interact.

Knowing how you feel—and how to respond—is a learnable skill. ANEW helps you notice patterns, make sense of your feelings, and try small, non-medical practices to support feeling more balanced in daily life.

Our app is currently in testing with a pilot group of users and will be rolled out to our waiting list soon 👉🏼

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) isn’t just about menopause. From gender-affirming care to recovery from burnout, autoimmune disease, or gland removal, HRT can be a lifeline when your body’s hormone production goes haywire. Yet myths, outdated fears, and conflicting advice make it hard to know if it’s right for you. In this article, we explore HRT’s surprising history, the different types (synthetic, bioidentical, hormone-promoting), their pros and cons, and who might benefit— or need to think twice. You’ll also get a practical decision-making checklist, plus insight into how ANEW, a mind-body health platform, helps you navigate your hormonal health with clarity.

It’s 19.18 on a Saturday, I’m still in my gym clothes from this morning, and my room looks like a cross between a health clinic and a hacker’s lair. I’ve dedicated a third of my dresser drawers to a collection of supplements that get carefully weighed and timed for consumption throughout the day in line with my evolving lab reports, all politely confirming that my testosterone and progesterone levels are somewhere between “nonexistent” and “cute idea.”

My laptop screen is playing host to numerous tabs open, conferring with ChatGPT and Cursor on my code for ANEW— the AI-based mind–body platform I’ve been building mostly alone while navigating autoimmune recovery. I’m still gunning for a soft launch by the end of the weekend, and yet my normally abnormal hormones have me feeling oddly calm, but mostly tired, and clawing towards the proverbial finish line that just keeps managing to inch away from me whenever I’ve thought it was within reach.

If you’ve been somewhere similar— running on grit, caffeine, or sheer force of will— you’ll understand why HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) can start sounding like a lifeline. But for most people, HRT is wrapped in myths, mixed science, and marketing spin. It’s either hailed as the miracle fix for everything from brain fog to belly fat, or vilified as a hormone-fueled highway to cancer.

The truth? HRT is a tool. It can be powerful, lifesaving, and liberating in the right context— and completely unnecessary or even harmful in the wrong one. But to see it clearly, we need to zoom out, start from the beginning, and build a picture of where it came from, what it actually is, and how it fits into a bigger ecosystem of healing.

From Pregnant Mares to Blockbuster Drugs: A Short History of HRT

Hormones themselves were first isolated in the early 20th century— estrogen in the 1920s, testosterone shortly after. But the first commercially viable HRT came in 1942 with the launch of Premarin, a form of estrogen literally derived from PREgnant MARes’ urINe. In its early years, Premarin was prescribed mostly to treat severe menopausal symptoms— hot flashes, night sweats, and brain fog— and was seen as a way to help women “age more comfortably.”

Then came 1966, and Dr. Robert A. Wilson’s controversial book Feminine Forever. Wilson claimed that menopause was a “deficiency disease” and argued that estrogen therapy could not only ease symptoms but keep women “youthful” indefinitely. The book struck a cultural nerve. Doctors began prescribing Premarin more liberally, sales surged, and by the 1970s, millions of American women were on estrogen therapy— often for decades at a time.

Women’s feedback at the time was mixed but often enthusiastic. Many reported dramatic improvements in quality of life— better sleep, reduced hot flashes, improved mood, and restored sexual comfort. For some, it felt like reclaiming vitality. For others, especially in the long term, side effects began to surface, and by the late 1970s, research started linking unopposed estrogen therapy (estrogen without progesterone) to increased endometrial cancer risk.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that Premarin hit its true commercial peak, becoming the top-selling prescription drug in the United States. By then, hormone therapy had expanded to include combined estrogen–progestin pills, testosterone replacement for men, gender-affirming hormone therapy for trans people, and targeted therapies for conditions beyond menopause. The science was evolving— and so was the controversy.

So… What Are Hormones, Anyway?

Think of your body as a living ecosystem. Hormones are the weather patterns that keep it in balance— subtle but powerful forces that dictate how everything grows, moves, and interacts. They’re chemical messengers, secreted by glands, traveling through your bloodstream to tell tissues and organs how to behave.

Some are like seasonal rains— triggering fertility cycles. Others are like emergency sirens— ramping up adrenaline in a crisis. And when those patterns go off course, entire systems can struggle: mood, energy, metabolism, immune function, libido, sleep. HRT steps in to restore or mimic the patterns your body can’t make on its own.

The HRT Ecosystem: Four Main Types

Much of the controversy and contradictory information around HRT I think comes down to this— there isn’t one type of HRT, and depending on your circumstances, one might be more appropriate than the others. Beyond this, they’ve sometimes been used or abused unnecessarily. Read on to learn about the different types of HRT and when they’re actually appropriate.

1. Bioidentical Hormones — The Native Species

Bioidentical hormones are structurally identical to those your body produces. Imagine restoring a forest with the exact same tree species that once grew there— the ecosystem recognizes and integrates them seamlessly.

When to consider:

• You want a hormone structurally identical to your own

• You have side effects from synthetic versions

• You’re working with a practitioner who can tailor doses through compounding

• You’re open to treatments that may not be FDA-approved but can be personalized

2. Synthetic Hormones — The Reliable Imports

Synthetic hormones are chemically different from your natural hormones but designed to produce similar effects. Think of them like hardy, non-native plants — they can stabilize an environment, even if they don’t match it exactly.

When to consider:

• Cost and accessibility matter most (synthetics are widely available and often cheaper)

• You want FDA-approved, standardized doses backed by large-scale clinical trials

• You’re following an established treatment protocol where synthetic hormones are standard

• You’ve tried bioidenticals and found no added benefit

3. Hormone Promoters / Stimulators — The Fertilizers

These don’t supply hormones directly; they encourage your body to produce more on its own. Imagine adding nutrients to the soil so native plants can flourish without replanting the forest.

When to consider:

• Your glands still function but are underperforming

• You prefer to stimulate natural production before replacing hormones entirely

• You’re addressing a temporary dip (e.g., stress-induced hormonal suppression)

• You’re in early stages of recovery and want to see if your body can rebound

4. Anabolic Steroid Treatment — The Power Boosters

Unlike the HRT options above, anabolic steroids are synthetic versions of testosterone designed to promote muscle growth, often in doses far exceeding physiological norms. In ecosystem terms: it’s like installing a massive irrigation system and fertilizer regime — growth explodes, but balance can be lost.

When to consider:

• Severe muscle wasting from illness or injury

• Certain chronic conditions where rapid muscle rebuilding is medically necessary

• Not for general anti-aging or mild fatigue — the risks can outweigh the benefits

Why the Bioidentical vs. Synthetic Debate Exists

Some see bioidenticals as safer because they “match” the body’s hormones. But the decision often comes down to cost, availability, and context.

Synthetic advantages:

• More affordable

• Widely available

• FDA-approved with established protocols

Bioidentical advantages:

• Potential for fewer side effects

• Customizable through compounding

• Option for those who don’t respond well to synthetics

Neither is universally “better.” It’s about fit, not ideology.

Who HRT May Help (and Who’s Often Overlooked)

HRT may help:

• Menopausal and perimenopausal women with severe symptoms

• Men with clinically low testosterone

• Transgender and non-binary people seeking gender-affirming hormone therapy

• People recovering from burnout, chronic illness, or autoimmune disease whose hormonal systems are dysregulated

• People who’ve had hormone-producing glands removed (e.g., ovaries, testes, thyroid)

• Those with pituitary disorders or chronic conditions suppressing hormone production

Who should think twice:

• Those with certain hormone-sensitive cancers (eg breast cancer)

• Individuals at high risk of blood clots, stroke, or uncontrolled hypertension

• Anyone using HRT as a “wellness shortcut” without addressing root causes

A Decision-Making Checklist for Layered Healing

Before starting HRT, ask yourself:

1. Have I addressed diet, sleep, stress, and movement first?

2. Are my symptoms confirmed by lab work?

3. Do I know the short- and long-term risks of the therapy I’m considering?

4. Am I working with a practitioner experienced in my specific needs?

5. Do I have a plan for regular reassessment and dose adjustments?

HRT isn’t a forever solution for everyone — but in the right hands, it can be a bridge to recovery, resilience, and better quality of life.

Resources & Next Steps

If reading this has you curious about whether HRT might be a fit, remember: the most important next step is an informed conversation with a qualified healthcare provider who understands you— your history, your needs, and your goals. But you don’t have to walk into that conversation cold.

Here are some reputable starting points:

Joi + Blokes (for men and women): this is the service that I used. They often have introductory discounts for complete hormonal panels.

Femmar (for peri-menopause and menopause): I’ve heard good reviews from several friends about this service.

Where ANEW Fits In

Making decisions about your hormones can feel like navigating a jungle with a map written in another language. Lab results don’t always tell the whole story, symptoms can overlap, and advice online swings from fearmongering to miracle claims. That’s where ANEW comes in.

ANEW is a Biobehavioral Guide to your wellness ecosystem. We believe that how you feel is one of the most useful signals of well-being, and that wellness is an ecosystem where biology, beliefs, and behavior interact.

Knowing how you feel—and how to respond—is a learnable skill. ANEW helps you notice patterns, make sense of your feelings, and try small, non-medical practices to support feeling more balanced in daily life.

Our app is currently in testing with a pilot group of users and will be rolled out to our waiting list soon 👉🏼

If you’re:

• Recovering from burnout or autoimmune disease and suspect hormones are part of the puzzle

• Exploring gender-affirming hormone therapy and want a supportive, informed starting point

• Trying to untangle whether synthetic, bioidentical, or hormone-stimulating options make sense for you

• Or simply trying to restore your mind-body connection

…ANEW helps you understand and support yourself in a way that’s safe, grounded, and deeply personal.

We don’t replace medical care— we help you understand your body’s signals, ask better questions, and make decisions that align with your biology and your life. HRT is just one tool in a much bigger ecosystem of healing, and you deserve a guide who knows the terrain.

What happens when you’ve done everything “right”—from somatic therapy to supplements—and your body still struggles to heal? In this first piece of a four-part series, I share why I’m choosing to add synthetic progesterone (HRT) and low-dose naltrexone (LDN) to my autoimmune recovery plan. This isn’t about abandoning holistic wellness—it’s about evolving it. We’re diving into the nuance of what real, integrative healing can look like when hormones flatline, inflammation spikes, and absorption fails. If you’re navigating chronic illness, hormonal dysfunction, or burnout, this is for you.

Holistic—But Make It Nuanced

We’re often told that if we’re doing everything right—living clean, regulating stress, moving intentionally—then our bodies will rebalance on their own and we shouldn’t need medication.

And sometimes, the body does. To be clear: I believe deeply in that power. I'm building my life and my work around it.

But what happens when, even after all of that, the body can’t rebound quickly enough—or the situation is simply too severe to wait for gentler methods to work?

What happens when someone without chronic illness tells you to "just try yoga and breathe through it,” while your skin is going grey, your hair is falling out and you’re bleeding from places you shouldn’t be? (Yes—this was a real story shared on r/Lupus.)

And it's what I want to talk about today.

Because I’ve been on both sides: the DIY lifestyle-optimization-first approach to healing, and now, the I-actually-need-biomedical-support world.

And the deeper I go into research and community threads—especially those navigating autoimmune conditions, trauma, and long-term burnout—the more I see that the same pain patterns can surface on both ends of the spectrum:
➡️ The gaslighting.
➡️ The dismissal.
➡️ The endless suggestions from people who don’t understand what it’s like to live in a body that’s misfiring on multiple fronts.

The r/Lupus community has been an unexpectedly grounding space for me—equal parts cathartic and practical, especially during moments when more conventional systems don't quite see you. One thread that really stuck with me began with someone venting about being told that "stress caused their autoimmune disease."

What followed was a powerful wave of responses: dozens of others chiming in with similar stories of being dismissed, minimized, or pathologized by friends, doctors, or wellness influencers. It wasn’t just a pile-on; it was a clear trend—one that revealed just how often people with chronic illness are met with overly simplistic advice instead of genuine support for the complexity of their experience. Neither ‘take this pill ad infinitum’ nor ‘clearing an energy blockage’ are cure-alls.

Both the situation and the solution are usually more nuanced.

While stress absolutely can be (and often is) a root cause, what these people are screaming is:

“I am already trying. It’s not just a mindset issue. I need real help.”

And while I didn’t arrive at that conclusion immediately, I eventually found myself in the same place—encouraged by my rheumatologist and newly-looped-in endocrinologist to consider options I’d been resisting.

My Current Reality

As some of you know, I’m soft-launching the alpha version of ANEW, a Biobehavioral Guide to your wellness ecosystem. We believe that how you feel is one of the most useful signals of well-being, and that wellness is an ecosystem where biology, beliefs, and behavior interact.

Knowing how you feel—and how to respond—is a learnable skill. ANEW helps you notice patterns, make sense of your feelings, and try small, non-medical practices to support feeling more balanced in daily life.

In fact, after six months of research followed by another six months of trial-and-error coding, I'm finally planning to onboard my first few users in a week! 🎉

While I’ve been training an AI to understand the body’s intelligence, I’ve been learning—through my own lived experience—what’s working, what’s not, and where I need to pivot.

Building ANEW hasn’t happened in isolation from my healing; it’s been fueled by it.

And because of all the care, protocols, and documented progress I’ve made, I’ve been able to learn that my body may not yet be in a position to fully benefit from 80% of what I’m doing right now, so my new endocrinologist says.

It’s not a failure—it’s information. A signal that I might need to add a layer of support so my system can actually receive the healing I’ve worked so hard to create. I’ve made incredible progress over the last year, in fact—I've gone from easily spending weeks in bed to actually being back in the gym a few times a week without inciting a flare up.

However, my body is still in a depleted, inflamed state. And I've been told by my rheumatologist and now my endocrinologist, that it needs an assist. A boost. Something to help it receive and utilize all the things I’m already doing to support it.

For those who don't know, I’ve been navigating RED-S, autoimmune issues, hormonal shifts (following longterm birth control usage).

My labs this past week confirmed what I'd suspected:

• Flatlined hormones (my progesterone and testosterone are basically gone)

• Leaky gut (inflammation-induced permeability, meaning I’m likely not absorbing my supplements)

• Toxic load (those same leaks are letting inflammatory waste into my bloodstream)

I’ve been actively and intentionally supporting my body—diving deeper than ever before into nutrition, somatic therapy, herbs, meditation, cycling, and strength training. And I’ve seen real, meaningful improvements. But right now? I've come to accept that it's not enough on its own.

Why I'm Choosing HRT + LDN

This week, for the first time, I agreed to begin a 6-month protocol that includes synthetic progesterone (HRT) and low-dose naltrexone (LDN).

A year ago, I wasn’t in the headspace to even comprehend why this might be a smart move for me. I was still in survival mode—where just getting out of bed could take every ounce of mental and physical energy I had for the day. The idea of layering biomedical support on top of what I was already doing felt overwhelming, even incompatible with my beliefs at the time. But with time, guidance, and the progress I’ve made, I’m now able to hold more nuance. And that nuance has shown me that sometimes medicine provides scaffolding.

And I’m learning something important:

Taking medication doesn’t make you less holistic. If approached thoughtfully, it can reflect a deep understanding of your body’s state—recognizing when your current efforts are no longer enough and when it’s time to pivot, support, and adjust based on how your system is actually responding.

This is about the real needs of your body. Not your ego. Not your Instagram persona. Not the version of you who’s afraid of “dependency.”

Because the real goal of holistic health isn’t to avoid medicine at all costs. It’s to heal in a way that’s honest about what your body needs. And sometimes that means combining therapies from both worlds.

Why This Series

This is the first of a 4-part series exploring what I call “evolved holistic healing"—where you combine the best of functional, somatic, and biomedical tools based on what your body actually needs.

We’ll explore:

• Part 1: What HRT Really Is (and What It Isn’t) – The myths, the mechanisms, and how to use it as a bridge, not a crutch.

• Part 2: Why I Said Yes to Low-Dose Naltrexone – What it is, how it works, and why it’s gaining ground in autoimmune and chronic illness spaces.

• Part 3: Can Biomedical and Holistic Medicine Work Together? – A synthesis of everything I’m learning about layering treatments without losing trust in your body.

But before we dive in, I want to say this clearly:

If you’ve done everything right—and your body still feels like it’s turning against you—you’re not failing. You’re not weak. You’re not “doing healing wrong.”

Sometimes your body is too inflamed, too depleted, or too hijacked to climb out alone. And in those moments, adding biomedical support might be the most loving, strategic, and holistic thing you can do.

This is for the ones living in the grey—where somatic intelligence meets autoimmune survival, and healing isn’t a straight line.

Let’s go there. Together.

Proprioception is your body’s sixth sense—the internal GPS that helps you move, balance, and feel grounded in space. But most people don’t realize how deeply it’s affected by hormones, inflammation, and nervous system health. From autoimmune conditions to post-IUD recovery, proprioceptive dysfunction is often overlooked—and yet it may be the hidden thread behind falls, fatigue, disorientation, and even chronic pain. In this article, we’ll explore how modern science and ancient movement traditions converge around this essential but forgotten sense—and how you can rebuild it through targeted practices, somatic awareness, and hormone-informed healing.

Disembodiment isn’t just psychological—it’s hormonal, neurological, and fully trainable.

I’ve fallen down the stairs more times in the last 3 years than I did in the 3 decades prior, combined.
That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. But here we are.

Over the past few months—after removing my hormonal IUD, recovering from autoimmune disease and RED-S related chronic inflammation, and trying to rebuild strength, I’ve noticed something strange:

I’ll be walking, fully alert, and my foot will miss the stair. Instead of catching myself mid-fall like a reasonably functional 30-something, I just sort of... tip over. Slowly. Like a tree. My brain seems too dazed to send the memo to my muscles in time. I’m not dizzy, just off. It feels like my body and the floor stopped coordinating their meeting schedule.

I’ve found it oddly hilarious (aside from the stomach-sick pain that inevitably accompanies a twisted ankle or throbbing knee), mostly because I’m still stunned that this is my life-- now.

This mysterious thing that normally keeps you upright—lets you right yourself mid-trip or adjust in real time when the world tilts slightly...

That’s proprioception.
It's your body’s sixth sense. And I think we need to talk about it.

What is Proprioception?

Most people can’t define it. I hadn't even heard of the word prior to a year or two ago. But you use it every time you:

• Walk in the dark without crashing into furniture

• Reach for your coffee mug without watching your hand

• Land a jump, catch a ball, or steady yourself mid-stumble

Proprioception is your body’s ability to sense its own position, movement, and force without visual input.
It’s governed by nerve endings in your joints, fascia, muscles, and inner ear, coordinated by your cerebellum and brainstem.

In simple terms?

Proprioception is how your body knows where it is in space.

Lose it, and you don’t just lose balance.
You lose trust—in your joints, your timing, and even your safety.
And yet… we rarely talk about it until someone ends up in a hospital bed.

Before Proprioception Was a Buzzword...

The term was coined in 1906 by British neurophysiologist Sir Charles Sherrington, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on neuron functions and reflex arcs. But the wisdom is far older.

Tai chi is proprioception.
Capoeira is proprioception.
Tribal dances, martial arts, and trance rituals were all ways of mapping body-space awareness.

These traditions didn’t use the word, but they knew:

• Movement can heal trauma

• Stillness can sharpen perception

• The body’s awareness of itself is a form of intelligence

Western medicine forgot. But the body didn’t.

Disembodiment Is Biological

We throw the word “disembodied” around like it’s a mood—something that happens during burnout, trauma, or scrolling Instagram for too long.

But I want to say this clearly:

Disembodiment is not just psychological. It’s physiological. It’s hormonal. It’s neurological.

When your proprioception falters, it’s not because you’re disconnected from your “spiritual self.” It’s because your nervous system has lost resolution. Your bodymap is glitching.

And those glitches have causes.

The Hidden Drivers of Proprioceptive Dysfunction

Neuroinflammation

Chronic inflammation—whether from autoimmune illness, mold exposure, trauma, or long-COVID—can impair your cerebellum, basal ganglia, and motor planning centers.

This doesn’t just make you tired or foggy; it actively degrades the internal map your brain uses to track your limbs. That means your body literally stops knowing where it is. You're not just clumsy—your system is struggling to sense itself in space.

For many with autoimmune or chronic inflammatory diseases, proprioceptive dysfunction isn't a symptom on the sidelines. It's central to how the illness is embodied.
Suddenly, you're walking into walls. Missing steps. Dropping things.

Vagal Misfire

Your vagus nerve is a long, wandering cranial nerve that runs from your brainstem down through your chest and abdomen, touching nearly every major organ along the way. It plays a central role in regulating safety, muscle tone, digestion, and interoception (your ability to feel inside your body). When vagal tone is low, the brain can’t calibrate movement accurately. The result? You feel floaty. Off-balance. Ungrounded—literally.

The good news? Vagal tone is trainable. Practices like slow nasal breathing, humming, cold exposure, and even certain yoga poses can help restore vagal health. This isn't woo-woo, it's physiological. As vagal tone improves, so does your ability to orient in space, feel grounded, and move with confidence again.

Gut-Brain Dysfunction

Gut inflammation affects more than digestion. The gut is responsible for producing over 90% of the body's serotonin, regulating GABA, and managing the majority of your immune system’s communication with your brain. It's also deeply involved in hormone metabolism and detoxification.

So when the gut is inflamed, sluggish, or dysregulated, it doesn't just affect digestion—it affects everything from your mood to your motor coordination. Neurotransmitter production drops. Hormonal signals get scrambled. And your body's ability to orient in space can go completely haywire.

Poor gut function = poor body awareness.

It's one of the clearest examples we have of how internal inflammation can manifest as external imbalance—not just emotionally, but physically. And it sets the stage perfectly for how hormones amplify or restore that sensory signal.

Hormones Shape How You Live in Space

This was the phrase that hit me hardest in my own healing. My recent labs show my estrogen levels to be quite low, and my proprioception-- or lack thereof-- has been a very real measuring stick:

• Estrogen affects dopamine, acetylcholine, and reaction time—all crucial for spatial coordination.

• Progesterone supports GABA, helping you adapt to sensory input calmly.

• Cortisol stiffens fascia, narrows perception, and dulls nuance.

• DHEA supports proprioceptive plasticity—but is often low in chronic stress.

Hormonal health isn’t just about libido, periods, or mood.

It’s about whether your brain knows where your body ends and the world begins.

Why Proprioception Declines—and What That Costs Us

Aging is often blamed for falls, injuries, and declining mobility. But here’s the thing:

• Proprioception declines with age only if we stop using it.

• Inflammation, disuse, and neurological suppression (e.g. from synthetic hormones) accelerate the loss.

And the results are deadly:

Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death for adults over 65.
But most fall-prevention programs don’t include proprioceptive retraining. Just balance drills.

And what about younger people with autoimmune conditions? Long COVID? Chronic fatigue?
We fall too. And no one’s tracking that.

Rebuilding Your Sixth Sense: Yes, You Can Train It

The best part? You don’t have to lose this sense.
Proprioception is neuroplastic, trainable, and incredibly responsive—even after trauma or illness.

Here’s how to start:

Balance on one foot (eyes closed)

Trains joint receptors, core, and cerebellar adaptation

Walk barefoot on grass or gravel

Activates foot sensory nerves + recalibrates ground perception

Plank with gentle shifting

Builds core spatial tension + fascia tension awareness

Tai chi, yoga, slow dancing

Reconnects slow patterning and deep muscular feedback

Eyes-closed movement

(e.g. brushing teeth on one foot) Forces true proprioceptive navigation

Support with:

• Electrolytes + collagen (for fascia and signal conductivity)

• B-complex, magnesium, DHEA or pregnenolone (as needed, with support)

• Lymph brushing or fascia work (to improve interstitial feedback)

The Bigger Picture: Proprioception as Embodied Consciousness

What if we treated proprioception like memory or IQ?
What if kids were taught spatial self-trust?
What if physical therapy focused less on repeating reps and more on remapping limbs to the brain?

What if disembodiment wasn’t just a feeling…
…but a fixable glitch in the system?

You don’t need to meditate for hours to “drop into your body.”
Sometimes, you just need to close your eyes, lift one foot, and feel the air shift around you.

That’s proprioception.

ANEW (A New Alchemy) is more than a product—it’s a shift in how we understand healing, growth, and self-mastery.

Powered by AI, ANEW helps you decode your body’s signals, regulate your emotional state, and unlock deeper resilience and alignment—from the inside out.

Whether you're recovering from burnout or refining your inner edge, ANEW meets you where you are—and evolves with you.

It turns feelings into feedback—guiding you back to balance, clarity, and the version of you that feels most alive.

🌱 Want to be among the first to experience it?

This isn’t just another wellness tool.
This is the science of transformation.