A few years ago, I went on a yacht around the British Virgin Islands for a week. [I’m not in that tax bracket; my friend is a yacht captain lol.] We had a chef making us yummy meals. We anchored in crystal-clear aqua water; the weather was a beautiful 28 degrees, and I was sailing around the Caribbean.

I hated it.

I know I sound like an absolutely ungrateful wretch. But a couple things before you crucify me:

1. I was 7 months pregnant

2. I was looking after my 2-year-old toddler

3. I was working nearly the whole time

4. I wasn’t able to exercise (my mental health drug of choice!)

5. My nervous system absolutely could not relax

When I casually share this story with friends or strangers, I get a very similar response: I can also never relax on vacation!

What is it with driven, type A people and vacations? Why do we wish all year for a holiday and then feel tightly wound the whole time?

I know I’m not alone in this. It’s a phenomenon. So why does it happen? What does it mean? Are you destined to feel stressed during vacations forever, or is there an opportunity to pull the plug on your sympathetic nervous system and actually freaking chill?

Why your nervous system can’t relax, even when your calendar is on OOO

Your nervous system is a lot like a home security system. It gets calibrated based on your lifestyle, and what it expects that it needs to deal with. It’s why children who have very angry and volatile parents become very anxious and hyper-vigilant; their nervous systems are always waiting for a sudden crash-out.

You almost get addicted to the feeling of stress because it’s what feels normal, expected, and familiar. And familiarity, from an evolutionary standpoint, reads as safe.

If your nervous system has spent years responding to constant busyness (deadlines, notifications, a toddler, a never-ending to-do list), it doesn’t read chill and silence as safety. It may interpret it as a threat.

The mechanism: allostatic load and a shifted baseline

So why does this happen? It seems a bit counterintuitive, no?

Well, your body doesn’t operate on a fixed baseline. It operates on what’s called allostasis: your set point recalibrates based on what you’ve repeatedly asked it to handle. I already talked about this, and questioned why no one else is talking about it!

If you’ve spent years in a low-grade sympathetic state (deadlines, always-on, hyper-productive), your body starts treating that activated state as the new normal. AND BY THE WAY, this doesn’t need to be associated with bad things.

N.B: Baseline sympathetic activation can also come about from great and enjoyable things — having a full social life, being busy, putting in the hours at your dream job, staying consistent with workouts, staying up late laughing with friends. We always associate sympathetic activation with stress and negativity BUT I want you to also start associating it with busyness — activation.

But anyway, when you’re too busy and activated, too much of the time, cortisol and norepinephrine become your baseline hum, not an occasional spike.

So when you suddenly remove all the usual inputs — no kids, no gym class, no google cal — your body doesn’t downshift smoothly into rest.

It goes into something closer to withdrawal. Withdrawing from stress.

You’ll be surprised how many people get sick on the second day of a trip, feel unaccountably irritable without any clear cause, or feel generally flat and unhappy by vacation day three.

Stillness is only a safety cue if your nervous system has learned that stillness is safe. For a lot of high-achievers, it learned the opposite lesson a long time ago.

The second the activation drops, the alarm goes off instead, because an unmonitored, unstructured, unproductive stretch of time is exactly what the system was trained to treat as a threat.

Btw I talk about this here:

And here:

So how do you actually relax on vacation? And in life more generally?

You’ve got to work on your nervous system during your normal life first.

A few things that have helped me:

Stop rushing for no particular reason

I brush my teeth like I’m being timed. (I actually do time myself. Two minutes.) But you get the point haha.

Walk slowly

I’m from London, speed walking is in our DNA. I’ve recently learned to slow the f down. I don’t need to charge into my daughters school. I can take a leisurely stroll, look at the trees, enjoy her company. Peruse, as they say.

Try harder to be present

Okay okay I know it’s a bit contradictory to try hard at being present but if you’re a type A always on person, you probably do need to put a little bit of effort into unwinding. Set some guardrails for yourself: No phones while eating, phone on DND 2 hours before bed, drink your morning coffee in silence, no self-help podcasts while walking. Etc.

Maintain structure

People swing the pendulum way too hard when they’re on vacation. They go from a 6am wake up, cold plunge, HIIT workout, cold brew, work day, to a “cocktails all day” forced relaxation and intentional lack of plans. I believe that having a daily structure, goal, or plan is very healthy for humans. I see it with my young children: when they have some degree of continuity throughout their days, they’re happier. They know what’s happening, and when, and then within these larger plans they can experience freedom while feeling safe.

The point being, if you go on holiday — still workout, still eat breakfast at roughly the same time every day, still do something that requires you to use your brain. These aren’t restrictions, they are opportunities for presence.

Experience all emotions

One of the most mind-blowing quotes I’ve heard that I think captures this entire idea perfectly:

Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, she won’t come into your house if her children are not welcome. - Joe Hudson

You can’t push away your anger and sadness without pushing away your joy. When you repress emotions – any emotion — you are telling your body you are not safe. It may sound counterintuitive, but truly letting yourself feel sadness or anger reminds you that you are in charge – scary emotions are manageable. If you tell yourself that you can’t feel these emotions, think about what is in the subtext there.

Be a silly goose, on the loose

When you’re so ambitious, driven, determined, you’re probably also leaning towards a degree of seriousness. You’re so focused on doing the work, getting it done, and aiming for the future, that you float away from the present moment, you don’t let yourself get carried in the wind, you don’t laugh at laugh.

Silliness and fun is the entrypoint for nervous system regulation. It signals that you’re safe, it lowers cortisol, laughing helps to release trapped stress or emotions (and open your throat and heart chakra!!!).

Your daily life can become the vacation you always dreamed about

I used to crave holidays. I used to imagine myself taking a 3pm nap by the pool, mojito in one hand, a romantic comedy book in the other. It never actually happened. Because my nervous system wasn’t ready for that. It was the equivalent of going cold turkey from heroin.

Since working on my nervous system, I’ve learned to enjoy my daily life. I create mini vacations sprinkled throughout my day: something as small as drinking my morning coffee outside while I ponder the sky, or taking a 11am work break by reading a great book cuddled up on the sofa.

It’s about having pockets of presence within the busyness of a full life. It’s not about rushing through life as you desperately wait for your once-a-year vacation. It’s about experiencing each moment of your precious life: the joy, the sadness, the ups, the downs. The ability to feel. The gift of your energy.

Stop externalizing your happiness. Stop outsourcing your joy to a holiday you may or may not take, a holiday in which you’ll hate anyway.

Hope you enjoyed this. Drop comments or questions below, love to hear your thoughts about whether this is something you experience too. Or is it just me wth?? Haha. Thanks for reading <3

Exciting newssss: I’ve opened up my doors (finally!) and I’m offering a 1:1 3-month Resilience Coaching program for women to help them feel more deeply, regulate their nervous systems, improve their health and fitness, and create systems to serve them for life.

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One of the most common questions I get is whether I offer one-on-one coaching. For years, the answer’s been no. Today, it’s yes. 🙂

After I finished my master’s in nutrition and public health and was certified as a personal trainer, I worked for a few years as a holistic health coach. It was rewarding, but something wasn’t landing for me. I gave up coaching to pursue full-time health writing, and I’ve now done this career for almost a decade.

It feels crazy that I’m now reopening my offering for health coaching, but with a twist 😉.

In the past decade, I’ve learned a lot about what people want and need when it comes to improving their health.

I know that they don’t want too much information, but they do actually want to learn. They don’t want to have to spend a lot of money, but they want to know what actually works. Perhaps most of all, they want to feel as good as they can, for as long as they can, as easily as they can.

My approach to wellness has always been more than just “eat healthy, move more.” It’s why I wanted to study nutrition (not dietetics) and exercise concurrently, which I’ve since followed up with a certification in SOMA breathwork, and I’m about to start my training to become a Polyvagal (Nervous System) Practitioner under Dr. Stephen Porges.

True health is about the integration of mind and body. It’s about enjoying your life, feeling your best, and making this process a ritual more than a dogmatic rulebook.

That’s the coaching program I built. And it starts the week of September 14th. Apply now.

Does this sound like you?

You’re type-A. Driven. Busy. The one who gets sh*t done — business owner, mom, maybe both.

You’re effective at basically everything except regulating your own nervous system, which has been stuck in “on” for longer than you’d like to admit.

You may be experiencing gut issues — bloating, weight gain, brain fog, constipation, inflammatory skin conditions like acne, psoriasis, or eczema, food intolerances that came from nowhere.

Maybe it shows up in your nervous system directly — burnout, anxiety, stress, poor sleep.

You want to keep your drive. You just don’t want to keep sacrificing your health and happiness to have it. You need to build resilience.

I built this for you🫶.

What does Resilience Coaching entail?

My coaching program is built on these four cornerstones:

1. The Food + The Gut — It’s not just about learning what to eat. You probably already know that. Your gut is your second brain, and you can only truly benefit from a healthier diet once your gut is functioning well. We’ll start by assessing your current eating habits and digestive health. We’ll then work through practical, evidence-based nutritional interventions that are tailored to your body and current capacity to help improve gut health and build a more resilient system.
   

2. The Nervous System — The people that my work lands for are usually type-A, driven, and busy women. These women — maybe they’re business owners, moms, or both — are super effective but struggle to regulate their highly activated nervous systems.
   
   If that’s you, you’ll learn to recognize your own patterns and shift out of being permanently “on.” You’ll learn tools and techniques for life to help you return to regulation more easily.
   

3. The Movement — Exercise is essential, but what type of exercise you do and how you perform it makes a huge difference. For my audience — busy high-achievers — you’re not going to benefit from doing high-intensity, high-load exercise six days a week. We’ll find what works for you, specifically. So you can build muscle, recover well, and feel resilient.
   

4. The Breath — Your body is the way into your system, and we’ll practice together live. You’ll learn breathwork techniques that will help support digestion, exercise recovery, stress release, and of course, nervous system regulation.

We’ll be using wearable data (preferably Oura Ring, but can be any other type) to monitor your progress and assess your baseline. You’ll learn how to interpret your own data and will be armed with this knowledge throughout the program and beyond. [This is optional but recommended.]

The goal is to help you build nervous system capacity. To build RESILIENCE.

Interested but have specific questions? Message me directly.

The Process

How long will it be?

It will last for three months, starting w/c September 14th and ending in December. This is Q4, the last opportunity of 2026 to make real changes for your mental and physical health.

Will it be in groups or 1:1?

It will be one-on-one sessions. While I may open up opportunities for everyone to meet together, this will be more for community building than any coaching-related learning.

How many sessions will we do?

It will be a one-hour initial consultation where we’ll cover everything from eating habits to exercise, sleep, stress, hormones, lifestyle, and more. I will then create a personalized approach for us to work through.

Depending on your situation, it may involve following a low FODMAP protocol, developing techniques and routines to help you come out of fight-or-flight, an exercise routine to help support postpartum recovery, etc. That’s the joy of a personalized approach :) it’s designed for YOU, to help YOU!

We’ll then meet every other week to update on progress, check your data, adjust the program, and discuss any questions or feedback you may have.

You’ll be able to reach me directly via WhatsApp during the time between our meetings if you have any questions.

We’ll then do a final hand-off, one-hour meeting where we’ll discuss progress and suggest ways to integrate learnings into your life moving forward.

What will you gain from this?

In one word: Resilience.

1. Nervous system capacity + nervous system regulation.

2. A better understanding of nutrition and how to eat for your goals/body type

3. Actionable tools and techniques you can use in your daily life e.g., ways to stimulate the vagus nerve, specific breathwork techniques, supplements, etc.

4. A better way to move — an effective and intuitive exercise routine

5. The ability to read and track your biometrics

Who is right for this program?

Anyone who wants to feel more regulated, present, and healthy. You know that something needs to change in your current lifestyle, but you’re not sure where to start.

You want to work with a holistic health coach who considers the nervous system, nutrition, the role of the gut, movement, breathwork, and other science-backed modalities to make the process as optimized and natural as possible.

Additionally, you are able to commit to the three-month program beginning in September and ending in December.

Learn about cost on the application form.

Learn more about the program here.

Got questions? Just drop them below.

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A quick note: this program is coaching and education grounded in nutrition, movement, and nervous system research — it’s not medical treatment, psychological counseling, or therapy, and isn’t a substitute for care from your doctor or a licensed mental health professional.

This morning, I spoke with one of the yoga teachers who teaches at my studio. Aside from teaching yoga, she is a high-achieving woman, working as a chief marketing officer.

We were discussing a leadership/mindfulness event that we’ll be offering at my studio, and we segued into talking about other high-achieving women, who seem to all have a slightly “activated” nervous system. They’re people (me included) who struggle to be still, who have a mind that’s always “on,” and on the plus side — usually are goal-oriented, directed, and driven.

You might be like, why are you telling me this? Let me explain.

Our conversation then segued into talking about her bloating and gut issues that she has been experiencing.

These two parts of the conversation were not initially connected, but I immediately wanted to share with her the true depth of the connection.

Your gut is your second brain — you already know this. What you may not have fully known is that your baseline nervous system is partly formed by your gut, and the general health of your gut is partly formed/influenced by your nervous system.

So if you fit into the category of a high-achieving, driven, type A person, you’re actually more likely (statistically!) to struggle with gut issues.

And contrary to western medicine, it’s not a case of symptom → cure. If you are currently struggling with obvious gut issues like bloating, constipation, stomach pain, diarrhea, or less obviously but still gut issues like eczema, rosacea, brain fog, or acne, you can’t just treat the symptom. For example, you can’t just drink coffee to try and rid yourself from brain fog, if the source of the brain fog is related to your gut health, and by default, is also related to the overall state of your nervous system.

I hope this isn’t too complicated to explain! I’m trying to make it as simple as possible.

Basically: Your gut and nervous system are deeply woven together. If you are experiencing a symptom of the body or mind that you can’t easily explain, it very well may be caused by either one (and thus, both) of these bodily processes.

So let’s talk about it.

The biology of being type A

Okay so first, a quick myth-bust: your nervous system is not purely automatic. Yes, it’s autonomic — aka you don’t consciously decide to speed up your heart rate or slow your digestion. But your baseline — where your NS defaults to when nothing’s happening — is something you’ve been building since before you were born.

In utero (!), through childhood, through every friendship, every interaction at school, and every feeling that pops up when you don’t feel safe. Your nervous system has a history. It’s basically been in training this whole time, whether you clocked it or not.

So what does a “type A,” high-achieving, can’t-sit-still nervous system actually look like on the inside?

If you score high on the personality trait neuroticism (the Big Five trait, associated with being “type A” and is usually the personality trait that is studied in research), your baseline NS tends to sit in sympathetic dominance. Translation: fight-or-flight is your resting state, not your emergency state. You see how this could be problematic right?

Here’s what that actually feels like:

• High interoception — you’re hyper-aware of every internal sensation, which sounds like a good thing (body awareness! yay!) until it means you’re scanning for threat 24/7.

• Quick to intellectualize and/or repress emotions — feeling something → immediately turning it into a thought you can analyze, rather than just letting it move through you https://emilinalomas.substack.com/p/maybe-youre-too-self-aware

• A brain that’s always “on” — never bored, never quiet, never done. You probably don’t have lie-ins (“once I’m up, I’m up” vibes), and may struggle to get to sleep due to a racing mind.

• Physical tension — jaw (TMJ), shoulder pain, stomach feels like a rock.

And here’s the part most people never connect: this isn’t just how your NS is making you show up in the world. Being super “on” simultaneously and mechanically reroutes your gut function. And this – is no bueno.

How an activated nervous system impacts gut function

Part 1: how stress hijacks your gut — via the vagus nerve

The gut-brain connection isn’t a marketing phrase — it refers to an actual nerve, the vagus nerve. This nerve runs from yoru brainstem down into your gut.

Fun fact: it’s a mixed nerve, made up of roughly 80% afferent fibers and 20% efferent fibers — meaning it’s carrying way more information up from your gut to your brain than it is carrying commands back down. Your gut is talking to your brain more than your brain is talking to your gut.

When your sympathetic NS is activated (stressed, wired, “on”), your vagus nerve — the one responsible for “rest and digest” — gets sidelined. And that has knock-on effects that show up in your body in a few very specific ways:

Your gut motility slows down

When your sympathetic NS is activated, it releases noradrenaline at nerve endings throughout your GI tract — and that noradrenaline directly blocks the acetylcholine release your gut needs to contract and move things along (sympathetic activation as part of the acute stress response leads to the secretion of noradrenaline at peripheral sites including the GI tract, which inhibits intestinal motility through inhibition of acetylcholine release).

Chronic tension is a physiological brake on your gut motility and gastric emptying. That’s why you get bloated.

Digestion gets deprioritized

Your sympathetic nervous system’s job during a perceived threat is to get blood and energy to your muscles so you can run or fight. Digestion is not on the priority list. Your NS thinks you’re about to die! Don’t waste resources on digestion, right!?

The sympathetic NS exerts a predominantly inhibitory effect on GI muscle and provides tonic inhibitory control over mucosal secretion, while also regulating GI blood flow via vasoconstriction — so if your NS thinks it’s perpetually being chased by a tiger (even if the “tiger” is your inbox), your gut is perpetually being told: not now.

This is why you may have sudden food intolerances, stomach pain after eating, or even (after multiple years), you may start to have unexplained vitamin deficiencies. Basically your gut stops being able to absorb the nutrients from your food because it’s perpetually inhibited.

Part 2: the feedback loop — your gut can make your neuroticism worse too

This is the wild part. The bidirectional part.

It’s not just “stress hurts your gut.” Your gut composition appears to shape traits like neuroticism, too.

Rsearchers have identified specific gut bacteria that show a causal relationship with neuroticism, providing evidence for a gut-microbiota-mediated pathway in how this trait develops, not just the other way around.

So for example: A 2021 study of Korean adults published in the Journal of Personalized Medicine found that people scoring high in anxiety and vulnerability — two facets of neuroticism — had significantly lower gut microbial diversity than those scoring low, with specific bacterial groups tracking each facet.

And a 2023 study published in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity took this even further, mapping what they called a “brain-gut-microbiome signature” of neuroticism — involving emotion regulation, reward, and cognitive control brain networks, plus a gut metabolite tied to dopamine synthesis, inflammation, and anxiety.

In their sample, this signature was accurate enough to predict food addiction in high-BMI individuals with 89% accuracy.

Let that sink in for a sec — your gut-brain signature could predict a behavior.

So what am I actually saying here?

I’m saying poor gut health can make type A behaviors tip into something more extreme — the super neurotic, super anxious, can’t-turn-it-off version. If you get to the point where you literally cannot sit still, you cannot relax for even a second, you can’t enjoy vacations, you start feeling irritated by everything, you feel hyper-vigilant — it may not be a simple case of “oh I’m type A” — it may be no, you’re a type A person with serious gut issues.

How high achievers can help regulate their nervous system and gut function

Everything is always about finding balance — homeostasis.

Your gut microbiome needs a balance of bacteria, too much of one type and you have dysbiosis.

Similarly, your nervous system needs peaks and troughs of sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal, too much of one and it’s dysfunction.

And finally, your capacity to enjoy life requires your ability to oscillate between periods of being goal-oriented, focused, driven, and meticulous, and periods of being relaxed, easy-going, laissez-faire.

A healthy body and mind requires BALANCE. Let me help you find it.

If you’ve read my substack before, you know I hate the conventional nervous system advice of just meditate bro. Especially for people higher in type A traits, that type of advice is supeeeer unproductive.

What you need to do is give your NS and your gut evidence, over and over, that you’re safe — because that’s the only thing that actually shifts a baseline.

A few places to start:

• Extend your exhale. Longer exhale than inhale (try 4 in, 8 out) is one of the fastest ways to directly stimulate your vagus nerve and pull yourself out of sympathetic dominance. Do it before meals, not just before bed — it primes your gut to actually digest what you’re about to eat.

• Eat like your gut is listening (because it is). Fiber and fermented foods aren’t just “good for digestion” in the vague wellness-brand sense — they’re feeding the exact bacterial diversity the research above ties to lower neuroticism and anxiety facets. Your literally eating to change your personality can you even believe that :’) science is so cool.

• Notice the intellectualizing. If you catch yourself turning a feeling into a five-point analysis before you’ve actually felt it — good job, you noticed! That’s all you need to do for now. Don’t fix it, don’t analyze it, just feel it. Let it flow.

• Stop treating rest as a reward you haven’t earned yet. Your NS doesn’t know the difference between “I’m resting because I finished my to-do list” and “I’m resting because I’m choosing to.” It just registers: are we safe right now, or not.

Look, being type A is my superpower. It’s probably yours too. But if you’re struggling with an issue that you can’t seem to put your finger on — your body is trying to communicate with you. Your gut, most likely, is trying to communicate with you.

None of this advice is trying to change your personality; it’s about trying to fix the extreme version — the version where your body is so stuck in “on” that it’s not just costing you your calm, it’s costing you your gut, your sleep, your ability to actually enjoy the good things when they’re happening. That version isn’t a personality trait. That’s a nervous system (and a gut) asking for help.

If you want a more structured way to work through this — daily practices, not just “here’s the science, good luck” — that’s exactly what I built REGULATED for.

Comments? Questions? If you feel seen, share that with me :) it really helps me know what you’re interested in and what you’d like me to write about and research!

Thanks for reading. In good health,

Emilina x

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Very honest, a little bit embarrassing admission: I’ve been to therapy a few times, with different therapists. And every single time, I would leave feeling more frustrated than when I arrived — not because the therapist wasn’t good, but because I felt like I was the one explaining the links and associations between things, rather than getting those insights fed back to me.

In short, I felt like I already knew all the answers. Not because I’m smugly arrogant or think I’m smarter than the therapist. On the contrary, it was actually a pretty depressing feeling. Having someone explain something I was already very aware of just left me feeling like no one would ever be able to help me.

I had already read the books, done the research, understood the frameworks. I could identify my attachment style, trace my anxiety back to its origins, and articulate the cognitive distortions I was running in real time while experiencing them.

And yet. None of that information was making me feel any better.

This, I have come to understand, is something that a certain cohort of people experience. And I want to talk about how it relates to your nervous system, and, ultimately, what you can do about it.

You’ve intellectualized yourself into a corner.

There is a specific kind of high-achieving person — women in particular — who is extraordinarily self-aware and almost completely disconnected from her body at the same time. She lives almost entirely in her head. She processes everything cognitively — emotions, sensations, stress, relationships — before they have a chance to land anywhere in her physical experience.

You already know all your shortcomings. You already understand how it’s all linked to something deeper. You know you’re probably in fight-or-flight; you can even name all the key mechanisms.

But knowing this doesn’t mean you’re able to shift away from it. And that gap — between understanding your nervous system and actually being able to regulate it — is exactly what I want to talk about.

And btw, it is a detrimental baseline. Research shows that people (particularly women) who are more type A have higher neuroception/interoception, which is also linked with higher rates of depression and anxiety.

What is neuroception you ask? Coined by Stephen Porges as part of polyvagal theory [I talk about it here]. Neuroception is your nervous system’s automatic, subconscious scanning of the environment for cues of safety or threat. It happens below conscious awareness.

Your body is constantly asking: am I safe? Is this person safe? Is this environment safe? And it is answering that question through physiological responses — heart rate, muscle tension, breath pattern, gut sensation — before your thinking brain has registered anything at all.

Type A women are weirdly aware of all of that. I can feel when my muscles tighten, when my gut motility slows, when my cortisol rises. Not just like “Oh I feel stressed,” it’s a super intricate, visceral feeling. Interoception.

Interoception is your ability to perceive those internal signals. To notice what your body is communicating. To feel, from the inside, what your nervous system is experiencing.

A 2026 review published in Brain Sciences — titled “Feeling Like a Woman: Interoception and the Objectified Body” argues that interoception is not simply a detection skill. It is a constructed perceptual process — shaped by attention, by context, and critically, by where your attentional resources are being directed.

And for women who have spent years — often decades — in their heads, analyzing, monitoring, achieving, performing — the attentional resources required to actually feel internal bodily signals have often been co-opted by the cognitive overhead of all that self-monitoring.

You are so busy thinking about how you feel that you cannot actually feel it.

The hypervigilance paradox

This is the paradox in question: In research, type-A, high-achieving women often report the highest levels of body awareness — and simultaneously show some of the poorest ability to accurately detect and respond to what their bodies are actually communicating.

The Brain Sciences review touches on this directly — noting that women report noticing bodily sensations more often and show better understanding of the relationship between bodily sensations and emotional states, while simultaneously showing lower accuracy on objective interoceptive tasks.

IIn other words: you think you know what your body is telling you. But what you’re actually detecting is your interpretation of what your body is telling you — filtered through a cognitive framework built from years of self-analysis, therapy, reading, and intellectualizing.

Wait before you move on, read that again. It’s really important to understand.

Us hypervigilant folk don’t just say ah my heart is beating fast before this public speaking thing! We jump to: I have anxiety, this dates back to 2007 when I was humiliated on stage. That event led to my avoidant attachment wound. I now have performance anxiety, and subconscious shame.

You don’t actually FEEL your higher heart rate. You’re not present with it. You’re in your head.

Having such high neuroception is a super effective coping strategy that has most likely served you extraordinarily well. The problem is that understanding something intellectually and processing it somatically — in the body, where the nervous system actually lives — are not the same thing. And the former does not substitute for the latter.

Stop trying to think your way to feeling better

Here’s the thing nobody tells you after years of therapy, self-help books, and nervous system education: at some point, more information becomes the problem, not the solution.

Your brain has become so good at intercepting your body’s signals and translating them into narrative that the raw, physical experience of your nervous system barely gets a look in. The sensation arrives. The brain immediately explains it. And you never actually FEEL IT — you just think about it. On a loop, usually.

This is why so much conventional nervous system advice fails this particular woman. It’s why I hate meditating as a way to regulate my nervous system [and why I gave 18 alternatives for people like me!]. When I slow down too much, it basically just gives my analytical brain a megaphone. It’s why talk therapy makes me feel WORSE and why something like power yoga or just jumping up and down makes me feel infinitely BETTER.

What I don’t need: thinking, explaining, contextualizing, understanding. What I do need: RELEASE, FEELING, GROUNDING, FLOW.

Somatic work should not be optional for you. It should be essential.

Somatic work — body-based practices that bypass the thinking mind — is effective for this specific reason. It doesn’t give your brain anywhere to go. There is no framework to apply. There is no insight to extract. There is just the physical experience of your body, in real time, which you have to be present for because your cognitive commentary cannot keep up.

I started offering a somatic movement class at my fitness studio in Lisbon, the class is called FLOW STATE and I’m gassed about it. It’s so insanely powerful. You fully get out of your head and just experience. And no not experience something in particular. You just experience. SOmetimes you feel happy, sometimes you feel sad, sometimes you feel nothing, sometimes you feel EVERYTHING. And that’s the point!

Final thing I gotta add in here too, it’s why I hate people who say cold plunging is bad for women. Like who are you referring to exactly? Because for me, and other women like me, cold plunging can be transformative. For a woman who has been cognitively managing her emotional life for years, the “activation” is not the problem. The activation is the access point. The one way in that her brain cannot intercept.

The nervous system does not learn through understanding. It learns through experience. Repeated, embodied, somatic experience of activation followed by recovery — that is what builds genuine regulation.

The actual invitation

If you recognized yourself in any of this, hi! My invitation to you is not more reading or self-analysis.

My recommendation is to put it all down. Get up. Start moving, start jumping up and down, close your eyes. Feel the energy building in your body. Stop labeling it. Don’t set a timer. Just move.

This is a good entry point. After that, you can start doing more movement practices with greater presence, less optimization. Go for a jog. Not a run. A JOG. Don’t distract yourself with music or self-help podcasts. Listen to the noises of the world, feel the energy circulating in your body. When you’re tired, stop. Feel the energy vibrating around your body.

Less labels, more feeling.

In general, I want you to put down the frameworks. The protocols. The regimens. Tolerate the discomfort of not knowing.

You have built an extraordinary intellectual relationship with your own inner world. But your nervous system needs something your brain cannot provide — and it has been waiting, patiently, for you to figure that out.

Now you have :) Do the other thing. 🫶

Drop comments or thoughts below :) It’s Virgo season aka my time to shine xox any other virgos?? comment belooowww

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You are who you believe you are. And your life, is exactly what you think it is. And neither of these is true.

Everything in your world is just simply your perspective of it.

I used to believe in right and wrong, but now I just see grey. Of course, for all the contrarians — there are a few things that are objectively wrong. Things I don’t need to list, but things that hurt the young, the old, or the defenseless.

But when I studied anthropology, my entire perspective on life shifted. I realized that the opinions I hold were the walls of my worldview — and within these walls, I had convinced myself they hold universal truth. Yet when you look beyond these walls, you realize they are just a glass cage.

If you’re like what are you talking about? Let me put it plainer: your opinions are just that. They don’t hold objective, universal truth simply because you believe them. Everything you perceive is a reflection of the culture you grew up in, the privilege and opportunities (or lack thereof) you’ve had access to, the information you’ve been exposed to, and the specific, unrepeatable combination of experiences that shaped you.

My point being: Nothing is universally true. Everything is always becoming otherwise.

Dw, I’m not in the middle of a menty b x

I’m just an esoteric baddie and this is my tangent of the day. Let’s discuss.

We all succumb to cultural relativism

Introducing you to.. (drum roll)... cultural relativism. The first thing you learn in an anthropology bachelor’s degree.

It was developed by Franz Boas in the early 20th century and it’s one of the most important ideas in the history of social science. Read this if you’re interested in learning more about this!

The basic argument: you cannot evaluate a belief, behavior, or cultural practice outside of the context that produced it.

Every single opinion, every value, every moral framework makes sense from INSIDE the worldview that generated it. There is no view from nowhere. There is no neutral ground from which objective truth can be observed.

This doesn’t mean all opinions are equally valid or that ethics don’t exist. It means that the confidence with which most people hold their worldview is almost always inversely proportional to how much of the world they’ve actually seen.

It’s why the whole Americans don’t travel thing is actually an issue. I know that sounds privileged; I get it. But most Americans don’t have a passport. Thus, many Americans have never experienced life outside of America. Thus, is there any surprise that Americans disproportionately believe that the US is the greatest nation in the world, while outside the US, that belief is… not exactly that…

To be my anthropological, let me share the case study by Oscar Lewis that I return to again and again (in my mind) when I want to ponder cultural relativism. It’s a social theory called the Culture of Poverty, read it here if you’re interested.

The argument is this: Humans are largely rational and make rational decisions. WITHIN THEIR OWN WORLDVIEW.

His ethnography included societies in Mexico (especially Mexico City), Puerto Rico (San Juan), and the United States (New York City / Harlem). Which, during the time of the ethnography (the 1950s), were places experiencing a lot of poverty, racism, systematic exclusion, and social stigma.

Lewis argued — controversially, but with significant supporting ethnographic evidence — that people in these poor communities were not criminals, lazy, or morally weak. They were people who made entirely rational decisions. WITHIN THEIR OWN WORLDVIEW!

It is rational to steal food if your child is hungry and you have no other options. It is rational to distrust institutions that have historically exploited you. It is rational to prioritize immediate survival over long-term planning when long-term planning has never paid off in your experience.

Someone born into wealth looks at the same behavior and calls it irrational, irresponsible, or morally wrong — because from inside their experience, those choices genuinely don’t compute. Neither person is accessing objective truth.

Both are reasoning from within their own world.

This is the glass cage. You’re inside it, looking out, and calling what you see reality.

Why rigid beliefs are a sign of being a dumbass a rigid mind

There is consistent evidence in psychology linking cognitive rigidity to lower cognitive flexibility. And cognitive flexibility is an important part of overall intelligence.

Think of your local Republican housewife:

In addition to their near-identical appearance, they also hold rigid, unanimous beliefs. They call themselves “Republicans” as a blanket political identity. BY THE WAY! This is not anti-Republican; I could just as easy say the same for democrats and show a picture of anyone with purple hair who lives in Portland.

Blanket political identities are seductive. We’re psychologically wired to enjoy closure — we prefer clear, simple, definitive answers. But if we lean into this ease and comfort too much, our beliefs become rigid, and we get dumber.

It’s cognitively cheaper to join a team with pre-packaged positions — Republican, Democrat, left, right — than to do the harder work of evaluating each issue individually, holding contradictions, and sitting with uncertainty.

It’s why you see those funny viral videos online that show people at political rallies and the interviewer will unknowingly rage bait the interviewee by questioning them about their political beliefs or specifics.

Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory says that most people adopt their political identity based on intuition and tribal belonging first, and construct the reasoning afterward.

Read that again. MOST people make real-world decisions based on intuition and tribal belonging. Not careful reasoning. They do what they believe is rational — and rationality, as you now know, is just another word for “what makes sense from inside my particular cage.”

The most dangerous form of closed-mindedness is when you think you’re not

Most people consider themselves open-minded. They’re not.

This is the “bias blind spot.” We are better at seeing other people’s closed-mindedness than our own.

The more confident someone is in their own open-mindedness, the more suspicious of that confidence you should be.

These people, who are CONFIDENT that they are open-minded, fall prey to the most dangerous version of closed-mindedness. They’re not honest with themselves. They have performed open-mindedness so convincingly — to themselves and to others — that they have completely lost the ability to notice when they’ve stopped actually doing it.

I have someone in my life who says to everyone that they’re “willing to hear all sides,” that they’re “open-minded by nature,” that they “don’t judge.” And it KILLS ME! Because I know them well, and I know that they are so painfully rigid in their beliefs (despite their beliefs being generally “liberal”) that they don’t even consider another perspective when presented with one.

Hold everything loosely, even this

Oscar Wilde famously advised everything in moderation, including moderation, and it’s kinda the same thing for this. Your beliefs should be held loosely, but not too loosely that you don’t have a foundation for your values.

When I first had my mind changed by the concept of cultural relativism, I actually went too far in the wrong direction. I found myself in late-night debates with strangers about whether women should be allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia considering it’s “part of their culture.” Nowadays I’d say yes, women should be allowed to drive (duh), regardless of any cultural norm.

Basically: Don’t be so open minded that your brain falls out.

Quit your loyalty to the previously decided

I wrote this because I was thinking about the idea that some people are so tied to their beliefs that they become like cages.

You believe you can’t get fit, then you never will. You believe you’ll never be able to buy a house, then you never will. You believe that a certain political party will be the solution to your existential crisis, and then you’re surprised that it’s not. You argue with strangers about things that you can’t even explain why you care about it.

Your beliefs are trapping you into a glass cage — you can see the big wide world out there, but you’re stuck in your default state of presumed safety. Little did you know that the glass walls are suffocating you, and keeping you contained.

So examine your beliefs regularly. Don’t feel any loyalty to things previously decided. Have an open mind — inquisitive, but with rigor. Believe in things, but hold them loosely. Be comfortable admitting when you’re wrong when the evidence presents itself. And resist the seductive pull of certainty.

Thank you for reading this! If you have any questions please drop them below <3

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I lived in Southern California for six or so years, and let me just tell you — every single person I knew went on at least one detox in their lifetime. It’s not exactly an exclusively Californian endeavor, but jesus, there’s something in the water there when it comes to detoxing.

Maybe it’s because the US food system is pretty terrible, and when you spend most of your week in a bikini you’re more aware of having a fit body that reads “I’m sufficiently detoxified.”

But what does detoxing even mean?

[Detoxing can also refer to the process of coming off drugs or alcohol. This is not what I am referring to during this piece.]

When I studied a master’s degree in nutrition and public health, we actually talked quite a lot about the concept of detoxing. Not because of the physiological process of “detoxing,” but actually the way it had become a marketing buzzword. You’ve got detox tea, detox juice, charcoal supplements, not to mention other synonymous terms: cleansing, renewing, purging.

But let me just be clear on the outset: I’m not one of those health experts who shuts down any type of holistic health trend, labelling it silly or medically incorrect. Those kinds of “experts” also poo-poo traditional Chinese medicine, ancient healing practices, and esoteric wellness. And that’s not me. Duh:

It’s a fine line. Yes there is a lot of misinformation spread about the concept of detoxing. But no, it’s not complete BS. You can support your body’s detox pathways, and actually, that can be really important.

Let’s chat about it 🙂

What “detox” actually means — scientifically

Let’s start here, because this is where most wellness content gets it wrong.

Your body detoxifies continuously, every single day. Biological detoxification is an autonomic process — regulated involuntarily by your nervous system and metabolic feedback loops. Whether you’re doing a juice cleanse or eating fast food, it happens without your intervention.

The primary organ responsible is your liver, supported by your kidneys, gut, lungs, lymphatic system, and skin.

Your liver converts fat-soluble toxins — environmental chemicals, excess hormones, alcohol, metabolic waste — into water-soluble compounds that can actually be eliminated. Your kidneys filter approximately 180 liters of blood per day. Your gut eliminates conjugated toxins as stool. Your skin excretes small amounts through sweat.

This is your detox system. It doesn’t require a $300 juice cleanse to function. But it does require adequate nutritional support — this is where you have leverage!

The anthropology of the detox

Anthro grad clocking in 🫡

While detoxing seems like a particularly modern wellness phenomenon, cultures around the world have supported detoxification practices for millennia.

Ayurvedic medicine has practiced Panchakarma — a structured cleansing protocol involving dietary modification, herbal preparation, oil massage, and specific elimination practices — for over 3,000 years. The underlying principle: the body accumulates ama (metabolic waste) that impairs function, and periodic cleansing restores it.

Traditional Chinese Medicine uses bitter herbs, acupuncture on liver and kidney meridians, and dietary protocols to support what it calls the liver’s role in regulating the flow of qi — which maps directly onto the liver’s actual physiological role in metabolic regulation.

Indigenous sweat lodge practices across Native American traditions, Finnish sauna culture, and Roman thermae all share the same mechanism: heat-induced sweating as a route of elimination. Science caught up to confirm it was working.

The point: ancient wisdom beeeeen knowing. Even without RCTs to back them up, these practices weren’t obsolete.

With our modern lives and all the shit in our food, water, and beauty products, we need detox support more than ever. BUUUT! You don’t have to break the bank!

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How to achieve detox support from a scientific standpoint

There are four main mechanisms worth supporting:

1. Phase II liver detoxification

Liver detoxification is a three-phase process, including Phase I: processes fat-soluble toxins e.g. environmental chemicals, excess hormoens, alcohol, etc. Phase II: neutralizing intermediates, binding them to molecules like glutathione, sulfate, or amino acids — turning them into water-soluble compounds. And phase III is when it gets eliminated!

Anyway so phase II requires that you have access to specific amino acids and antioxidants, particularly glutathione, to neutralize toxic intermediates efficiently.

2. Elimination pathways

Bile flow, bowel regularity, kidney filtration, and sweat are all routes out. If elimination is sluggish, processed toxins recirculate.

3. Reducing the incoming load

Your liver has finite processing capacity. Every synthetic chemical it has to deal with — alcohol, food additives, emulsifiers, pesticide residue, synthetic fragrance from your skincare, chlorine from tap water — takes up bandwidth that could otherwise be used for clearing excess hormones, metabolic waste, and environmental toxins.

4. The gut-liver axis

Conjugated toxins excreted in bile can be reabsorbed through the gut wall if there isn’t enough fiber to bind them and carry them out. This is called enterohepatic recirculation and it directly affects hormonal balance and overall toxin clearance.

Science-backed ways to support your detox — for free or cheap

To support Phase II liver detoxification, try this:

• Eat cruciferous vegetables daily (broccoli, kale, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts) — contain sulforaphane which activates Phase II detox enzyme production

• Eat eggs, garlic, and onions regularly — rich in cysteine, the primary precursor to glutathione

• Consider NAC (N-acetyl cysteine) — don’t get angry at me because I suggested a supplement, you don’t HAVE to do this if you’re on a tight budget. But if you want an extra lil summin! This is one of the most evidence-backed and inexpensive supplement for raising glutathione levels. Here’s a rec.

• Consider milk thistle — it’s a cheap supplement and it’s another well studied supp — one of the most studied liver-protective herbs in western pharmacology, known to stabilize liver cell membranes and support regeneration.

To support elimination pathways, try this:

• Sweat regularly — This is the number one. sauna, hot yoga, vigorous exercise. Sweat contains measurable concentrations of heavy metals, BPA, and phthalates. Use it deliberately. Bryan Johnson said his #1 longevity protocol of 2025 was sauna. He is “the most studied human in existence,” so I’m backing him (as well as extensive medical literature).

• Dandelion root tea — stimulates bile production and flow, supporting Phase III elimination. 100 tea bags for $26, do the math! Cheaper than Starbs.

• Drink at least two liters of water daily — your kidneys need it to filter and excrete water-soluble waste

• Castor oil packs — You already know:

• Stay regular — bowel movements are your primary route for eliminating conjugated toxins. Fiber and hydration are your tools.

  ---

To reduce the incoming load, try this:

• Reduce alcohol — your liver prioritizes alcohol processing above everything else

• Reduce ultra-processed food — additives and emulsifiers add to hepatic processing burden

• Filter your tap water if poss

• Swap your most-used personal care products to fragrance-free — synthetic fragrance is processed through the same liver pathways as environmental toxins

To support the gut-liver axis, try this:

• Eat 30g of fiber daily — oats, flaxseed, legumes, vegetables

• Include soluble fiber specifically (oats, flaxseed, psyllium husk) — binds conjugated toxins in the gut and prevents reabsorption

• Support your microbiome with fermented foods — a healthy gut is essential for proper bile metabolism and toxin elimination

To support your brain’s detox system (the glymphatic system), try this:

• Sleep 7–9 hours consistently — the glymphatic system clears neurotoxic waste almost exclusively during sleep

• Sleep on your side — research suggests this position optimizes glymphatic clearance

• Reduce alcohol before bed — it directly impairs glymphatic function

I tried to include free, or at the least cheap, tips to help you support your body’s natural detox pathways. Note well that there’s no juice cleanses, charcoal, or other unscientific and largely BS suggestions.

That said, i do believe that your body does need a helping hand with detoxing in specific situations — mold exposure, heavy metal exposure, hormonal dysregulation (excess estrogen is cleared through liver detoxification pathways), post-antibiotics/medication periods, alcohol consumption.

My goal with my Broke Girl’s Guides are to remind you that you don’t have to spend a fortune to improve your health. I hope you enjoyed this! If you did, check out other ones in the series:

• The Broke Girl’s Guide to Nervous System Regulation

• The Broke Girl’s Guide to Gut Health

• The Broke Girl’s Guide to Fiber

Got questions? Drop them below!

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If you read my piece on Taoism — When Your World is On Fire, Be Water — you’ll know that a little over a month ago I encountered Taoist philosophy. It was 3am and I was unable to sleep, stressed, anxious, and for some unknown but undeniably divine reason, I typed “Tao philosophy” into Spotify’s search bar.

For the past month, I started reading the Tao Te Ching. I’ve additionally listened to podcasts, read books, found random Taoist blogs, watched YouTube videos, and learned a lot more about the thought process of Taoism.

It has been a uniquely rare intellectual experience in which the information I’m learning doesn’t seem new, but rather, like remembering something I intuitively have always known. But failed to put into practice.

It has been divine timing. Over the past month, as stressful as my life has been, I have discovered peace within the chaos. I have slowly started to practice the concept of being like water.

And if you’re new to Taoism like I was, the biggest perspective shift has been that being like water is not about being passive or apathetic. Water is about being strong, but being flexible. Being soft and effortless, but still moving forward in the direction of your goals. A river cuts through rock not because of its power but because of its persistence.

I immediately started integrating Taoism into my daily life. Not in an “optimizer” way or with stringent rules. I just started to work the ideas into my daily life in small, specific ways. And almost instantly I realized this was not a passing interest. I told my husband that I was certain that this was a rabbit hole I would be in for the rest of my life.

I started telling my friends what I was learning about and how – so quickly — it was changing my life in real time. I felt better equipped to handle the stress and overwhelm I was facing in my life, and I wasn’t even trying to “adopt” new habits, I was actually just letting a lot of things go, and allowing my grip on my life to loosen.

I love sharing new ideas, hence this entire Substack. So now I’m going to share my journey into Taoism here on Feeling Good with Emilina: The Dao Diaries.

I’ll aim for a post a week, perhaps with each article loosely connected to a chapter from the Tao Te Ching. But I’m going to move through it with ease, not tension. So let’s see what arises.

Why I believe Taoism will transform your life

Most of the “suffering” I observe in modern life — in myself, in the people around me, in the cultural mood generally — is not caused by a lack of information, resources, or opportunity.

In a way, for many people, it’s a problem of excess. It’s a fundamental misalignment. We live in tension, with tense shoulders and a clamped-down jaw. We walk, if we ever do, with our hands in fists. We yell at people in traffic, we compare ourselves to strangers online, and we are exposed to way too much information at all times.

We are exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix, because the exhaustion is not physical. It is the exhaustion of a life swam upstream.

Taoism breaks down the accumulated assumptions that you have about how you think your life ought to be. It gives you a framework for distinguishing between effort that is aligned with your nature and effort that is working against it.

This will change your life: The Taoist Life Audit

One of the first ways I started integrating these newfound lessons into my life was doing a comprehensive life audit. I wanted to figure out what I actually wanted my life to prioritize — not what I thought I should want, or what looked impressive from the outside.

So I worked through 10 questions inspired by Taoist principles. Things like what gives me energy? What am I forcing? What does “enough” actually look like for me?

I journalled my answers and then used AI almost like a mirror, asking it to find the patterns I couldn’t necessarily see myself. From there, I created my five real priorities, my personal hierarchy, a paragraph describing my Way, and a weekly structure for actually living according to those priorities — while accepting that there are still groceries to buy, children to parent, emails to answer and work that needs to get done.

Don’t get me wrong: My point is NOT to engineer some perfectly Zen existence. It’s to identify where my energy is going, what genuinely matters to me, and what I might be able to simplify, stop forcing, or simply let go of.

I loved the exercise so much that I turned the entire process — including all the questions and AI prompts I used — into The Taoist Life Audit.

My gift to you, my paid subscribers. A free download of this audit:

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Even before I chose to study gut health for my master’s degree in nutrition, the most common question I would always get from friends and clients was this: I eat healthy, why am I still always bloated?

If you look on the TikTok echo chamber, you’ll see performance reassurance in the form of comments like “bloating is super normal!” “If you’re a woman, bloating is to protect your womb!” and other comforting, but ultimately, half-baked and non-scientific ideas.

Look don’t get me wrong. It’s normal to bloat a bit after a big meal. It’s also normal to have a flatter stomach in the morning versus the evening — in the morning you’ve just gone an entire night without food. It’s also common to bloat more after drinking alcohol or eating a high sodium meal, for example.

But what’s not normal: painful, persistent, or extreme bloating — especially with no known cause.

I met with a friend last week who was close to tears. She was so painfully bloated that she had to buy a dress halfway through our lunch because her jeans were hurting her stomach so much.

“I’ve only eaten avocado toast and drunk chamomile tea. I didn’t even have coffee today. I’ve also cut out dairy and sugar. Why am I still so bloated?”

If this sounds like you, keep reading.

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When I fell in love with working out at age 21, it changed my entire life. My mind, my body, my attention span, my sleep, my confidence. Literally every aspect of my life was changed by my newfound love for lifting heavy things.

I won’t lie, I don’t lift super heavy weights anymore. I used to be able to deadlift over 100 kgs. I was training six times a week. I herniated a disc in my back, as well as having two babies. But my love for fitness and weight lifting remains!

And it’s served me well. This is me just a few months postpartum with my second baby.

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I know a woman who wants to be my friend. She invites me for coffee almost weekly. If it’s not coffee, it’s dinner. Or to her house. Or to a barbecue. Ordinarily, I would willingly oblige. Hell, I would love a barbecue! But every time she asks, I politely decline. Not only am I extremely busy at the moment (new business, two kids), I also hate spending time with her <3 why? Because she’s unable to converse.

For a while, I would agree to spend time with her. I’d ask her all about her life, her job, her children, her hobbies, her interests, her favorite foods. By the end of our interaction, I would have been able to write an essay about her — but am confident she couldn’t even write a tweet about me.

I’m someone who has struggled with social anxiety for the majority of my life, so this interaction felt oddly familiar. The dynamic is as follows: I try really hard to keep conversation flowing, at the expense of my own enjoyment or ease. My social anxiety has fortunately alleviated in the past five or so years, as I realized that most people don’t require a lot of effort to have an enjoyment conversation with. If you relax into it, it just flows.

But conversating with her is more of a hike than a meander. And I decided I can’t be bothered to hike.

Listen to understand, speak to connect

You guys never fell down the Steven Covey rabbit hole and it shows. In his oddly named yet astoundingly popular book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey talks about the power of dialogue. Your conversation should be rooted in curiosity. You should ask questions because you genuinely care about understanding the answer.

That’s the art of a good conversation. Curiosity, insight, and flow.

But it’s been lost, somewhere.

When I speak to this woman, she doesn’t want to know me. She just wants to be heard. Because of my anxious-skewing brain, I want to make her feel comfortable and heard. But no more.

Covey talks about what he calls the highest form of listening — empathic listening. Not listening to reply, not listening to evaluate, not half-listening while you mentally rehearse your next point. Actually listening to understand — to step inside the other person’s frame of reference and see the world the way they see it before you respond.

He distinguishes this from the four levels of listening most people operate at: ignoring, pretending to listen, selective listening (catching only the parts that interest you), and attentive listening (paying attention to words but still filtering everything through your own experience). Empathic listening is the fifth level. The rarest one. The one almost nobody does.

And that’s why conversationalism is dead.

I’m going to be that annoying millennial for a second and blame those damn phones. But for real. When I was a teenager, I vividly remember hanging out with a friend and spending six hours chilling in a park just talking. No phones, no distraction, just eye contact, vibes, and chats.

And this wasn’t rare… bear in mind I started this essay by also saying that I struggled with social anxiety. So even DESPITE this, I was still more than able to meander through a conversation with a friend for a good long afternoon.

I feel deeply that the age of the internet, intense accessibility, AI, and ever-reducing attention spans makes us real dumbasses to speak to. Everything is a “hot take,” personal branding, a story listened to on 1.5x speed, rage bait, or attention-trapping. In fact, we’re relentlessly encouraging self-expression, as a pure one-way street. You’re a talking head posting into the abyss, never even reading your comments.

No one reads anymore. Have you seen how bad the reading comprehension and literacy data is? Roughly 54% of American adults (about 130 million people aged 16 to 74) perform below a sixth-grade reading proficiency level, and recent federal surveys note that 28% of adults function at the lowest literacy levels.

I’m not trying to be mean but… we’re collectively getting dumber :’(

Comprehensive skills are not just about reading and writing. They are so closely tied to conversation.

Let me explain.

Comprehension — real comprehension, the ability to follow an argument, hold multiple ideas in tension, and update your position based on new information — is the foundation of good conversation. Without it, you are not conversing. You are just taking turns making noise.

And comprehension is being obliterated by a combination of declining literacy, shortened attention spans, and the specific intellectual habits that the internet rewards.

It’s why, I believe, more and more people are becoming contrarian, topic-hijacking, binary-thinking, intellectually dishonest (misrepresenting what someone said to argue against the easier version of it), and ultimately, becoming objectively more difficult to talk to.

The through-line of all of these conversational pathologies: they are failures of genuine engagement. They feel like conversation but they are fundamentally self-referential — using the presence of another person as a prop for your own internal monologue rather than as a genuine interlocutor.

Learning the art of a good conversation

Because I grew up with some social anxiety, I intellectualized the fuck out of it and took a head-first dive into the world of self-improvement. I read books about having good conversations, I watched reality tv (iykyk), I even studied HUMAN SOCIALITY for my DEGREE (anthropology!).

I identified the thing I struggled with (social interactions) and made it my whole focus.

The result was effective, I would say I’m a good conversationalist now.

I’ve learned the art of an enjoyable chat. Here are the cornerstones:

1. Be genuinely curious

One thing I never had to fake is my genuine curiosity in other people. Again, I literally decided to study this at uni. I’ve always been obsessed with understanding humans and how they act. Thus, I have a never-ending list of questions I’d like to know about someone else. This helps!

2. Make the other person feel heard

I sometimes do this too much — trying to make the other person comfortable. But it’s actually a good thing to try and do in general.

People enjoy chatting with people who make them feel listened to and truly heard. I think it’s why a lot of people open up to me — I don’t try and one-up them or interrupt with my own experience, I literally just listen to them.

3. Don’t interrupt

I grew up in an ADHD household. I married an ADHD man. I am used to getting talked over. I’m regularly mid-conversation, and someone will loudly talk over me, about something completely out of context. It’s truly fucking annoying. I used to just let it slip, which only reinforced my own self-belief that i wasn’t enjoyable to talk to. But now, I say, hey can I just finish my sentence.

People with ADHD probably don’t intend to make you feel like that, but either way, it does make conversation with them a little less enjoyable. It doesn’t matter if you have ADHD or not, stop interrupting people. Let them finish their sentence. Let them express their full selves without feeling consumed by your insatiable need to be heard.

4. Talk like tennis

I think one of the main reasons I don’t want to meet up with that woman ever again is because she can’t play conversational tennis. Here’s an example of what you should do:

Person 1: Hey, how was your dinner last night?

Person 2: It was great, did you do anything?

Person 1: Yep, I went to the cinema.

Person 2: What did you watch?

Person 1: I watched Shrek, have you seen it?

Person 2: Yes it’s one of my favorites.

This is good convo. Versus:

Person 1: Hey, how was your dinner last night?

Person 2: It was great thanks.

Person 1: Where did you go?

Person 1: To Mcdonalds.

Person 2: Nice, that place clogs your arteries :)

Do you see the difference?

You’re making person 1 do all the work. At the end of the interaction, they’re drained. They’re putting in too much work – drawing blood from a stone 101.

5. Allow for depth but don’t force it

I’m English, we love small talk. It’s popular to say I hate small talk x But actually, I like it. It makes most people feel at ease, you get into a flow of conversation, and then you can allow for depth.

People who hate small talk, why? Why do you feel the need to talk about your childhood trauma, your biggest fear, or your relationship with the Great Unknown? I feel like this is a conversational pathology that you may have not recognized yet.

It’s better to go swimming with someone on the surface of the water. When you’re bobbing along nicely and have build up some rapport, then you can put your feet into the deeper end of the pool. Don’t dive into the deep end and then wonder why that person didn’t jump with you.

6. Match their energy

If you’re happy and they’re grumpy, you don’t need to robotically lower your vibration. But, if someone is shy, don’t come at them loud and out of control. Good conversation has a rhythm. You can feel when you’re in sync with someone — the pace, the tone, the register are all calibrated to each other.

And no, this doesn’t mean being fake or performing an emotion you don’t feel. It’s about being present. Meeting someone where they’re at. Holding space for them.

If someone is being light and funny, match it. If someone has just said something vulnerable, don’t immediately crack a joke. The ability to read conversational energy and respond to it appropriately is one of the most underrated social skills.

7. Be open-minded

The most annoying people to speak to are as follows: contrarians, narcissists, debaters, intellectual peacocks, one-uppers, and stubborn people lacking conviction.

Open-mindedness is not the same as having no opinions. But when I studied anthropology, I learned that my OPINION is just that. An opinion. It doesn’t mean it’s objectively, universally true. It’s something I believe to be true based on my cultural background, my upbringing, my education, my experiences, and the specific slice of the world I have been exposed to. All of which are limited. All of which are shaped by forces I didn’t choose and can’t fully see.

Don’t be wishy washy — hold your beliefs with confidence but not rigidity. Have intellectual humility.

The contrarian (my dreaded opp) has solely outsourced their intellectual identity to opposition. Whatever you say, they find the counterargument. To them, disagreement feels like thinking. It’s exhausting.

Open-mindedness is what makes conversation worth having. It is the quality that transforms an exchange of information into an actual meeting of minds.

So anyway, back to this woman. I don’t think she’s a bad person. But I don’t want to set myself on fire to keep her warm — conversationally. I’ve asked enough questions about her while never feeling like she has any interest in knowing me, and I’m not a benchwarmer for a better friend to come along for her. Nor am I a chatbot who is only here to provide questions.

I can’t be fucked, frankly.

From what i’ve learned about her, I think she is the product of a culture that has conditioned us to believe that connection means being seen, being heard, being known. She’s forgotten that true connection only exists with reciprocity. You can’t receive it without also giving it.

The lost art of a good conversation is really the lost art of genuine interest in another human being. And I think we’ve lost it because we’ve confused self-expression with connection. They are not the same thing. One is a monologue. The other requires two people who are both, simultaneously, willing to be the listener.

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The other day I shared a post about why high-achieving people struggle with conventional nervous system advice. Every time I write, this included, is like a self-exploration. I don’t write because I’m a world-class expert, I write because I’m researching an idea/in a state of contemplation.

So, as with many of my articles, finishing writing the article was not the end — alas, it was just the beginning. After hitting publish I started reading more about polyvagal theory (which I’ll explain in a second), and listened to this awesome podcast episode about it (with the actual creator of the theory, which is quite rare!).

It led me down a path of learning more about why high-achiever, type A people really struggle to relax — and, most importantly, what techniques or practices they try that are better suited to their innate disposition.

Here’s what I’ve got.

A brief explanation of polyvagal theory

Polyvagal theory, developed by neuroscientist Stephen Porges, proposes that your autonomic nervous system has three hierarchical states: ventral vagal (safe, social, engaged), sympathetic (activated, mobilized, fight-or-flight), and dorsal vagal (shutdown, freeze, collapsed).

The system is constantly scanning the environment — and the internal body — for cues of safety or threat, through a process Porges calls neuroception.

Crucially, this happens below conscious awareness. Your body makes its assessment BEFORE your thinking brain has even registered what’s happening.

For most people, stillness and quiet are ventral vagal cues — signals of safety. Their nervous system reads the absence of stimulation as: nothing to worry about, you can come down now. That’s why meditation, for example, is so effective for them. But it’s not always the case (me…).

For a significant subset of people — particularly those with high baseline sympathetic activation, a history of having to stay alert to feel safe, or what psychologists call a high behavioral activation system — the opposite is true.

For these people, stillness is NOT a safety cue. It’s the withdrawal of all the signals the nervous system uses to feel oriented and in control (whether they’re objectively “helpful” or just self-soothing). And the lower brain interprets this dropping of activation as a warning signal.

This was more or less said verbatim from the podcast by Porges: Interoception of calm — the body starting to feel still and quiet — can itself trigger threat detection in people whose nervous systems learned early that vulnerability was dangerous.

You cannot override this by just meditating harder bro.

You can only work with it. Basically finding regulatory inputs that feel safe to your specific nervous system, rather than forcing it into a state it experiences as threatening.

I hope this is reaching the right audience, I’m actually going to put this as a free post because I genuinely feel that if I had learnt about this a decade ago I would have had a hell of an easier time. So if you’re reading this and feeling seen, that’s love <3

Type A-ers, here are 18 things you can do to relax

1. Listen to podcasts that have nothing to do with self-improvement

When I discovered podcasts it was game over. I was in the height of my self-improvement era and literally started obsessing over podcasts. I’d listen to them whenever I had a free moment, and probably listened to at least two (multiple hour long) podcasts a day. Even in the gym lol wth.

I thought I was crushing ✨habit stacking.✨ But in reality, I’ve come to learn that I was just stressing myself out more.

The type-A nervous system is particularly vulnerable to the trap of productive consumption — turning every podcast, book, and documentary into an optimization opportunity. This keeps the achievement-oriented part of the brain running even during supposed rest.

The antidote that worked for me: I started listening to podcasts that are random, distracting, or delightfully useless. I personally love Search Engine by PJ Vogt — it investigates questions that have no productivity value whatsoever, like why airplane coffee is gross, or “Why didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain?” lol.

2. Watch funny TV

If you’re type A, you probably don’t need to worry that you’re watching too much TV. I used to guilt myself for watching TV, and immediately turn it off and jump up from the couch if someone caught me watching it, as though I was snorting ellict chemicals up my nose or something.

TV is silly and fun. I like reality tv, real housewives. I find it funny. It’s distracting. I can unplug my brain for a bit while simultaneously relaxing my body.

Laughter activates the ventral vagal state through the social engagement system — the same neural pathway that meditation is trying to access through the back door, except laughter gets there without requiring stillness.

Find a funny show or movie and actually watch it – no dual-screen, scrolling socials concurrently, situation. Just watch it.

3. Watch a short series with an absorbing plot

I swear all my tips are not all about watching stuff but let me just stay with this topic for one more point!

Narrative absorption — the state of being pulled into a story — is one of the most effective nervous system regulators available because it does the work of quieting the default mode network (the brain’s rumination and self-referential processing center) without requiring any effort.

Any other type A-ers that hate movies or just me? Short series are better than films for type-A people because they provide natural stopping points that feel like completion rather than abandonment. Love Is Blind, The Bear, anything with enough plot momentum that you forget to check your phone.

4. Cook something that requires your hands and your attention

Not meal prepping. Not optimizing your macros. Cooking as an absorbing physical and sensory activity — something that requires you to chop, stir, taste, smell, and adjust in real time.

The combination of fine motor movement, sensory input, and gentle cognitive engagement hits a regulatory sweet spot for high-activation nervous systems.

You are doing something. Your hands are busy. Your brain has a task. But the task is low-stakes and pleasurable and produces something tangible at the end. For extra enjoyment, get a physical cookbook and turn the pages until you find a recipe that interests you :)

5. Move your body in a way that doesn’t count as a workout

Take off your Oura ring or whoop strap xx

We’re going for a walk that isn’t tracked. Dancing in your kitchen. Stretching while watching television. Somatic jogging (wait I can’t wait to write an article about this next week, it’s been life-changing for me haha).

The type-A nervous system often has a complicated relationship with movement because it has been co-opted by the achievement brain — every workout becomes a performance, a metric, a goal. Movement that is genuinely purposeless bypasses this. It is just sensation and body and the present moment, without the pressure of optimization.

6. Have a long, rambling conversation with someone you love

Co-regulation — the process by which two nervous systems regulate each other through social engagement — is one of the fastest and most evidence-backed regulatory tools we have.

A long phone call with a friend you can say anything to, a dinner that goes on too long, a conversation that wanders without destination — these activate the ventral vagal state through the same pathways that meditation is trying to reach.

For type-A people, the presence of another ENGAGED (key word) human is often the thing that makes coming down actually feel safe. If you’re trying to have a rambling convo with someone looking down at their phone, it will only exacerbate feelings of danger so be careful who you let into your circle!

7. Read fiction

Same logic as narrative absorption! Not self-help. Not business books. Not anything with a lesson or a framework. Actual fiction — the kind where you disappear into someone else’s world for an hour and come back slightly disoriented. The cognitive absorption is the mechanism.

8. Do something with your hands that produces a physical object

Pottery, knitting, drawing, woodwork, baking, gardening, building flat-pack furniture — anything that involves sustained, repetitive fine motor movement and results in something you can look at afterward.

The combination of flow state, sensory grounding, and visible completion is deeply regulating for high-activation nervous systems. It channels productive energy into something tangible without the pressure of professional output.

9. Get a massage or do self-massage

This is my number one tip! It works better for me than nearly everything else. As I’ve written about before in the context of polyvagal theory, physical touch activates the ventral vagal pathway through mechanoreceptors in the skin and fascia — directly and without requiring any cognitive buy-in.

I used to feel like I needed to “try” to relax during a massage. But after learning a bit about hte science of touch → vagal pathway, I realized that even without the element of mental “relaxation,” it still physically relaxes your body. Think about it like the physiology does it without your permission.

Self-massage works too: gua sha, a bamboo hairbrush across your scalp, foam rolling, a tennis ball under your feet. The input is the same — pressure, movement, sensation — your nervous system responds accordingly.

I’ve started using a massage ball on my back and rib cage for about 10 mins before bed and it has been major.

10. Take a bath or a long shower with no agenda

Another of my favorite personal tips.

Heat is a parasympathetic activator. The post-thermal parasympathetic rebound — the drop in activation that follows heat exposure — is documented in sauna research and applies equally to a hot bath.

Think about the sensory environment of a bath: warmth, enclosed space, reduced visual stimulation, buoyancy, candlelit for extra vibes. It hits multiple ventral vagal cues simultaneously without requiring stillness of the mind.

I like to scroll social media or listen to a dumb podcast in the bath. For some reason the heat and mental distraction is sooo effective for me.

11. Spend time with an animal

Humans and dogs co-regulate! Porges (polyvagal guy) actually talks about this on that podcast episode linked at the top of this article.

Petting a dog or cat measurably reduces cortisol and increases oxytocin — the same hormonal shift that social co-regulation produces with humans.

For type-A people who find human interaction activating rather than restoring (particularly introverts with high sympathetic baselines… meeee…), animals can provide co-regulation without the social performance demand.

The animal does not need anything from you. It just sits there being warm and present and unbothered <3

12. Listen to music that matches your current state and then gradually shifts

This one is surprisingly effective and it comes directly from polyvagal-informed music therapy. The iso principle: begin with music that matches your current activation level (not calm music when you’re wired — your nervous system will reject it) and gradually shift toward slower, lower, more spacious music. Your nervous system follows the music rather than being confronted by a mismatch it has to fight against.

For type-A people who find slow music irritating when they’re activated, this reframe is useful: start with whatever matches the energy. And then let it walk you down.

13. Interact with something beautiful

Awe — the experience of encountering something vast, extraordinary, or transcendent — is one of the fastest ways to quiet the self-referential default mode network.

Trees blowing in the breeze, a beautiful drive, a sandy beach, a nice building, art, the ocean… whatever it is that makes you feel like damn I’m lucky to be alive.

The experience of awe creates a specific neurological shift that researchers describe as a temporary quieting of the narrative self — the voice that is always narrating your performance and your to-do list. For five minutes, you are just a small person watching something magnificent. That’s the unlock.

14. Have a long self-care/unwinding routine

The type-A nervous system often dismisses long routines as frivolous. It is not.

Multisensory environments — warmth, scent, soft lighting, pleasing textures — activate the ventral vagal state through sensory pathways that bypass the cognitive resistance entirely.

15. Do something that makes you feel competent at a low-stakes activity

A sweeping statement but something I’d stand behind: For type A people, a lot of our self-esteem comes from achievement. Thus, for us guys, one of the most regulating experiences available is doing something you’re good at in a context where nothing is at stake.

A video game you’re skilled at. A recipe you know by heart. A craft you’ve done a hundred times. A sport you’re confident in. I got into making this specific chicken pasta dish that was super comforting and delicious and I made it so many times that I stopped needing to look at the recipe and making it became something really grounding and relaxing for me.

The combination of competence, flow, and low stakes hits the nervous system’s need for engagement without triggering the threat response of high-stakes performance. You are in your body, doing something you know how to do, and nothing bad can happen. That is ventral vagal.

16. Spend time in nature without an agenda

Touch grass!!! No, not a tracked hike with a step goal. Not a run with a 180bpm HR. Just… being outside, somewhere green or near water, without a destination or a timer.

For type-A people specifically, nature does something that nothing else quite does: it gives the achieving brain something to orient toward that asks absolutely nothing back.

The research on attentional restoration theory confirms that natural environments restore directed attention capacity by engaging involuntary attention (the part of the brain that responds to birdsong, moving water, dappled light) while resting the directed attention system (the part that is exhausted from work, decision-making, and self-monitoring).

17. Introduce deliberate novelty!

There’s something about novelty that just… gets me. Science explains it: high-activation nervous systems are often regulated by novelty — new environments, new experiences, new inputs — because novelty activates the dopaminergic reward system in a way that overrides threat detection.

A new restaurant, a new neighborhood, a new route home, a new museum, a new type of class. The activation is channeled into curiosity rather than anxiety.

18. Do absolutely nothing and call it what it is

This is the hardest one for the type-A nervous system and arguably one of the most important thing to build up to.

Do: Watch tv. Lay in bed. Read a novel. Touch grass.
Stop doing: Learning through digital media. N on-sleep deep rest. Reading self-help books. Get your steps in.

Just exist without optimization. Once you change the verbiage surrounding rest, it becomes easier to just relax into it.

If this piece hit close to home — I built a 3-month 1:1 coaching program around exactly this: your gut, your nervous system, and the resilience to hold both without burning out. Spots are limited. Learn more here.

I could share more but let’s just start here. I really struggle to relax so if you’re the same, i hope this helped you :) give it a try and lmk your thoughts!

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Last week I went to a pilates studio that was super basic. It didn’t have a connected specialty coffee bar, it didn’t have fancy shampoo and conditioners in the showers — in fact, it didn’t even have showers. It had one bathroom, no lockers, and bright overhead LED lights in their studio room that gave me a bit of a headache.

Nonetheless, I had a great class. The instructor is a master pilates instructor and the studio is actually a pilates school, with some world class instructors having trained there. They teach a very classical pilates — no music playing during class, no quirky sequences — just straight pilates, no frills.

My point being: I had a great experience despite the lack of frills.

As I pondered this, I thought about my own wellness studio. Terracotta microcement covering the entire studio, with a warm and dim backlit mirror that flatters everyone who sneaks a peek at themselves during class. The expensive and luxurious hygiene products, the Dyson airwrap, the beautiful coffee table books to mull over while you wait for a functional organic smoothie.

It sounds WANKY! I get it!

Wellness is performative, they complain. They complain that we’ve gone so far away from what wellness actually means. They complain that the girls only workout to post about it. That yoga studios are filled with tripods. That activewear is an industrial complex that’s bankrupting us. That true wellness isn’t about fancy gyms, expensive machines, or beautiful places.

Let me walk up to my podium… I object!

What if wellness is performative, and that’s okay?

I’ve been working in the wellness industry for more than a decade. I’ve worked for some of the more (arguably) “performative” brands, the things you don’t really need to be healthy but they look cool and help you ✨optimize✨. But something I learned from working for these brands is that they do actually help people. They bring a little sprinkle of enjoyment, insight, or support that can make an absolutely enormous difference to that individual’s life.

Similarly, from working in my own studio, I’ve heard people describe the studio as their “safe place,” their “peaceful sanctuary,” their “little slice of heaven,” or “touch of luxury.” And who doesn’t want that in their life?

Sure, going to Planet Fitness is cheap, but it might have poo and puke on the walls. Sure, taking a walk outside is free, but you may have to deal with humid weather or loud traffic noises.

So if you enjoy going to a beautiful place to get fit, if that encourages you to keep coming back, if you leave feeling a little bit happier or lighter, is that really an issue?

If you start feeling yourself and want to take a little selfie, or even to post the workout online because you finally feel confident in your body and proud of your new routines, is that really an issue?

I can agree to some extent that the more “performative” wellness becomes, the more inaccessible it becomes to the masses, but that’s not really my point here. [That’s an important point, and a point I will probably right another post about soon!] My point is directed more toward the critics – why is performative wellness really even an issue?

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From my perspective — the perspective of a registered nutritionist (MSc, R.Nutr.), personal trainer, public health communicator (MSc), and studio owner — what actually matters is people doing the work. Prioritizing their health. Being consistent. Enjoying the process. And if that involves some degree of performance, who cares?

I would like to ask these critics: Name something in life that isn’t, to a degree, performative? We are social beings playing an endless status game, perhaps not consciously, but it is playing in the background of our psyche. It’s why you buy new clothes when you don’t need them, it’s why you cut your hair in a certain style, it influences who you date, where you live, even how you have sex.

We are constantly performing.

It interests me that female-associated hobbies — wellness, in particular – are the ones that get flack for being performative. Why isn’t it considered performative for a man to wear a jersey of his favorite sports team to the bar on a Saturday night when his team is playing? Why don’t we take the piss and scrutinize that behavior in the same way we take the piss of the pilates princess wearing pink and drinking matcha?

Perhaps that’s a deeper conversation.

Does it matter if wellness is performative? In my eyes, if you’re into wellness — perform away. As long as it makes you feel good.

Share your thoughts, I’m intrigued.

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When I first became aware of the fact that I was most likely surviving in a “fight or flight” nervous system state, I did what most people do: start meditating.

I downloaded all the meditation apps, I set myself targets of “just 10 minutes a day,” I tried to follow all the advice like sitting in silence before I turn on my phone in the morning, not eating lunch while distracted, and generally trying to chill the F out.

The issue is, all the conventional advice didn’t work for me.

In fact, it almost felt like the more “nervous system regulating” boxes I was able to check, the worse I felt. It made me feel hopeless, in a way.

Like, I was meditating, reducing the inputs, and I still felt stressed. If anything, the forced silence made me feel agitated, anxious.

The more I dove into nervous system research, the more I understood that we all have different nervous system baselines.

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I remember when I first heard the Bruce Lee quote be water. I was in Bali. It was 2017. I was on the back of his motorbike — we were driving through rice fields in the middle of the night. The quote was written on his back, inky black and tattooed deep into his shoulder blade. I don’t remember his name, but I remember the words.

At the time, I remember questioning the meaning. I thought maybe it was because he was a surfer that it was somehow related. And to be honest, it probably was, at least in a way.

For me, the meaning revealed itself nearly a decade later.

As I traverse difficult terrain in my life, I have learned that meeting difficulty with resistance only creates a state of complete impossibility. I’ve been conditioned by Puritan ethics — taught that hard times require a tough approach. I meet fire with fire. I rise to the occasion, confront stress head on. Face my fears, feel the fear, and do it anyway. Yadda yadda.

But every time I push, the tension rises. Surely it should subside? It’s like swimming upstream, against the current. Surely if I’m a competent swimmer, I should make it to shore? But in actuality, it’s simply not the case.

I encountered Taoist recently.

It was 3am and I was awake, unable to sleep due to racing thoughts. I can’t tell you why, or where this concept had been lying in my subconscious, waiting to make an appearance, but on Spotify’s search bar I typed in Tao philosophy.

I started listening to podcasts, then audiobooks, then YouTube videos. All at once, I understood the tattoo I saw when I was 21 years old. Finally I was understanding why being like water was preferable to being like an immovable rock.

Let me share it with you.

Lao Tzu and the original water metaphor

Bruce Lee didn’t invent the water metaphor. He borrowed it — consciously, reverently — from Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher credited with writing the Tao Te Ching around the 6th century BCE.

The Tao Te Ching is one of the most translated texts in human history, second only to the Bible. It is also one of the shortest — 81 brief chapters, most of them a few lines long — and yet it contains some of the most structurally unusual wisdom I have encountered.

The water metaphor appears most explicitly in Chapter 78:

“Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it. The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid. Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice.”

And in Chapter 8, which is often called the Water Chapter:

“The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.”

I think when I first pondered the idea of being like water, I interpreted it as passivity. I thought being like water would involve being placid, chill, zen. But when I found myself trying to surf, getting caught in a riptide and hit over and over by my board, and each set that seemed to be relentlessly coming, I realized that water is not passive.

Water is extraordinarily powerful — it carved the Grand Canyon, it erodes mountains, it finds every crack and fills every void. But it does not fight. It does not push against obstacles. It goes around them, under them, through them. It adapts its shape to whatever contains it without losing its essential nature.

This is what Lao Tzu means by wu wei — often translated as “non-action” or “effortless action.” Not the absence of movement, but the absence of forced, unnatural, desperate, ego-driven momentum.

That’s what I’ve been doing recently. I’ve been desperate. Forceful. Intense. Puritan. I’ve set rigid rules for myself, encumbered myself with pressure, and endless goalposts. I’m not happy right now because I’m bracing myself for impact while telling myself this is what hard feels like.

Fuck hard, I’m tired of it.

I’m finally learning to accept the fact that I want an easy life.

I’ve spent too long in the watchtower, putting my fear in external judgmental forces who reward me for being tough and persistent.

In reality, after years of this, driving myself to pure burnout, I’ve realized that no one is rewarding me. Nothing is being gained, as I lose my sense of self. The harder I push, the more I relinquish my power.

What I’ve learned is that Yyu cannot meet fire with fire. And this isn’t just a cute metaphor — it’s physics. Fire fed with more fuel becomes a bigger fire. Conflict met with counter-conflict becomes a bigger conflict. Anxiety confronted with aggressive resistance becomes more anxious. The more tightly you grip, the more the thing you’re gripping struggles to escape.

Water doesn’t grip. It flows.

Why this is so hard in modern life

Here is where I want to bring in the anthropology, because I think the reason most of us find this so genuinely difficult is not a personal failing. It is structural.

Western culture — and American culture in particular, which has colonized most of the world’s dominant values through media and capitalism — is built on an adversarial model of progress.

You identify an obstacle and you overcome it. You identify an enemy and you defeat it. You identify a goal and you pursue it with relentless, grinding force. The Protestant work ethic, Puritan self-discipline, the hero’s journey, the comeback narrative — all of these are fundamentally about force meeting resistance and winning through superior force.

We even give the analogy of climbing a mountain. But what’s at the peak? Why do we sacrifice the journey in the hope of a nice view?

This model works, to a point. It built industries, won wars, and put people on the moon (debatably).

But to what end?

How does force and pressure impact your nervous system?

I can only speak from personal experience, and to me, persistent force and pressure have led me to complete burnout. I feel emotionally drained, irritable, anxious, angry, tired, guilty — all simultaneously. Ironically feeling everything and nothing at the same time. So tired that all I want to do is sleep, but paradoxically, completely unable to sleep due to a neverending mental script pushing me to get up and get shit going.

Learning more about Taoism came at the perfect time.

I can’t continuously meet fire with fire. I will only ever get burned.

I have to dissolve pressure, throw water on the fire. Step out of the furnace.

The uncarved block

The Taoists have a concept called pu — the uncarved block.

Original nature, before the grinding and shaping of external pressure changes the shape of who you are.

I think burnout, at its core, is what happens when you’ve been carved so aggressively and for so long that you lose track of the original grain. You can no longer feel which direction is natural because you’ve been forcing in so many unnatural directions for so many years that forced feels like normal.

Coming back to yourself — the real anti-burnout work — is less about adding new practices (breathwork, new workout routines, delaying caffeine) and more about removing the force in your life — wherever it stems from.

Less striving, less grinding, less meeting every challenge with a clenched fist. More allowing. More trusting. More water.

How to do the work, or should I say: How to simply release

After reading about Taoism, I have to stop myself from deep diving into every single Taoist text and theory. Because this is just another expression of force.

Instead, I will release. Unclench my jaw, relax my shoulders, breathe deeper. Ignore the email, take my time, allow for breaks.

I will let things unfold. Being water is not an optimization protocol. It’s simply what my nervous system requires.

I think about the tattoo on that surfer in Bali sometimes. I wonder if he studied Taoist text, or whether his interpretation of Bruce Lee’s quote was more literal. He was a surfer after all, and the best surfers have learned not to fight the wave. Instead, they read it, find its energy, and move without it. A wave resisted throws you, a wave that you dive into with ease and purpose, carries you onwards.

The resolution from difficulty doesn’t come through force, it comes through release. From the willingness to accept the shape of the container you’re in and fill it, rather than trying to break it with your insistence on being a different shape.

You don’t have to be hard to be powerful. You don’t have to be rigid to be strong. You don’t have to meet fire with fire to survive the heat.

You just have to let it flow. So be water, my friend.

I wrote this late at night, after listening to this amazing podcast episode. Highly recommend if you want a nice entry point into Taoism.

Do you know anything about Taoism? Or any thoughts you’d like to share? pls do, it means a lot to me,

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Why is everyone living the same life?

Why is butter yellow suddenly popular? Why is everyone going to Japan? Why did everyone suddenly want a Stanley cup, a Dyson Airwrap, a golden retriever, and an open plan kitchen with an island?

Because we are not, as we like to believe, the autonomous architects of our own desires. We are social beings. And social beings do not form desires in a vacuum. We form them by watching other people and wanting what they seem to have.

Don’t worry, you’re not a pathetic conformist. This is human nature. It’s a feature of our psychology that is so intrinsic that it’s hard to avoid but extremely interesting to study.

That’s what René Girard did. He studied it so deeply that he even gave this phenomenon its own name: mimetic desire.

But you’re not a powerless fool. You don’t have to succumb to the desires of the masses for all of eternity. You do have autonomy to make your own decisions — to create an anti-mimetic life, as such. Stay with me.

What is mimetic desire?

Mimetic desire is the observation that human desire is not an original experience. We do not decide that we want something by independently evaluating it and drawing up a profit and loss sheet. We don’t negotiate our desires, we just go after them. We’re mere primates in this regard. We want money, status, sex, dopamine. And at a very macro level, everything we do in our days corresponds to the pursuit of raw desire.

This unadulterated desire — where does it come from? From an evolutionary standpoint, for survival. From a psychological or perhaps philosophical statndpoint, also survival. It’s basic pack mentality: We want to stay part of the pack so we don’t get left behind (read: dead!).

Very basically: We want things because we see other people wanting them — and we unconsciously conclude that those people must know something we don’t. That the thing they have or want contains some quality — status, belonging, meaning, love — that we are currently lacking.

Girard called the person whose desire we imitate the model or mediator.

We don’t just want the object the model has for wanting’s sake. We want the object because we want the qualities we project onto the model.

When you see someone on Instagram living a life that sparks something in you — the apartment, the relationship, the body, the career — you are not simply admiring their life. You are using them as a model for a version of yourself you believe you should be. And the desire you feel is not really for the thing. It is for the self you imagine you would become if you had it.

Our thought pattern is: “Model/Mediator” is cool/rich/successful/your adjective of choice. Thus, having that car/house/shoes must be at least partly responsible for the coolness, richness, or success of the model.

Right?

Well I hope you know that the answer to that is clearly no.

And that’s why many people seek certain material things but when they get them, it never even feels good. The satisfaction is never as anticipated. That’s because the desire was never really about the thing.

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Why this matters more now than ever

Mimetic desire has always been a feature of human social life. Girard traced it through ancient mythology, through Shakespeare, through the Gospels. It is not new.

But the conditions for mimetic contagion have never been more extreme. Social media is a mimetic desire machine. It presents you with a curated feed of models — people whose lives, bodies, relationships, and choices are visible to you in a way that no previous generation had to navigate — and it measures your engagement with each one.

The algorithm learns which models produce the strongest mimetic response in you and serves you more of them.

When I was a young teenager, I was a scene kid. LOL iykyk. If you don’t know, please ignore this message haha. But anyway, when I was a teenager, we had different cohorts of people. It’s like the scene from Mean Girls when Cady Heron is being shown around the dining hall. It’s here if you live under a rock.

But nowadays, where all the emos? Why is everyone the same?

Our desires are being installed in us by the algorithm. We don’t even know that it’s happening. We just suddenly feel like we want something. We can’t explain why. We just want it, and we Amazon Prime it because we want it now.

How to live an anti-mimetic life

An anti-mimetic life is not a life without influence.

What you can do is become conscious of the mechanism. You can develop the habit of examining your desires rather than simply following them. You can ask, with genuine curiosity rather than self-judgment: is this mine, or did I borrow it?

Ask these questions:

When I imagine having this thing, what do I imagine it will make me? If the answer is primarily about how you will be perceived, or about becoming a version of yourself that others will recognize as successful or worthy, the desire is probably mimetic.

Who is the model for this desire? Can you identify the person or people whose wanting seeded yours? The influencer, the friend, the parent, the cultural archetype? If you can see the model clearly, you can start to separate their desire from your own response to it.

What do I want when no one is watching? This is the most useful question and the hardest to answer honestly. Not what you think you should want. Not what would make a good story. What actually makes you feel most like yourself when there is no audience for it?

What have I consistently wanted across the different contexts and chapters of my life? Mimetic desires tend to be volatile — they intensify when you’re around the models that produce them and fade when you’re not. Genuine desires tend to be more stable. They persist across contexts, survive changes in social circle, and don’t depend on others validating them to feel real.

Try these things:

Spend time in solitude deliberately. Learn what you actually think and want when the social feed goes quiet.

Reduce your “model” exposure. You cannot want what you cannot see. Curating your social media feed is a decision about whose desires you allow to plant seeds in your subconscious mind. Be careful who you give that power to.

Consider who you were as a child. I’m the same as my 7 year old self. like writing stories in my journal, I like flowers, I like the color pink, I like sports, I like food. Who were you before the world f*cked you?

Pursue things that make no sense to anyone else. The desires that are hardest to explain — the ones that feel slightly off-script — are often the ones most worth following. For example, my husband is really obsessed with having a van. He got a shitty Ford Transit van and it’s his most prized possession. Genuinely no idea why, but I’m happy for him that it’s clearly an anti-mimetic desire lol.

Notice where you feel envy and get curious about it. Girard was right when he said envy is a compass. It points toward what you want. To be clear it’s not like oh I saw someone with a range rover and got envious, so obviously I want a range rover. It’s more like: I was envious of that person because they have the money/financial security/resources to spend a lot of money on a car. When you realize this you can forget the flashy car and focus on being financially comfortable as an end in itself.

Define your own metrics. The most anti-mimetic thing you can do is decide, clearly and explicitly, what success looks like for you — and make sure the definition is robust enough to survive not being legible to the people around you. If you can only feel successful when others recognize it, the metric is mimetic.

I have suddenly taken an interest in butter yellow clothes, and yes — I wouldn’t say no to a Range Rover or a trip to Japan. Mimetic desire isn’t inherently bad, it’s just human nature.

But living an anti-mimetic life is about being clear with your own interests, passions, and values and ensuring that you’re living in alignment.

Choose your models wisely. Choose them consciously. Consider whether you want things because your models have them, or because they are in alignment with your soul.

The examined life, Socrates said, is the only one worth living. He didn’t say the original life. He said the examined one.

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If you liked this, check out:

• Living in Alignment is the Most Magnetic Thing You Can Do

• Try This Alignment Exercise I Do Every Six Months

• Every Version of Your life is Happening Right Now. Quantum Physics Says So.

If you read my deep dive into castor oil, you already know I’m a card-carrying castor oil girlie pop. I drank castor oil to stimulate labor with my firstborn (do not recommend!), I use it daily on my eyelashes and weekly as a hair mask, and every night to improve lymphatic drainage and digestion. And this is the area I receive the most questions — castor oil packs on the stomach. People don’t ask why I do this (how would they know about it?) — they ask how I have a flat stomach after having two kids.

When I tell them that my “skinny tummy tea” alternative (lol iykyk) is actually just like a glob of castor oil and a lil stomach wrap and then night night, I know how it sounds. Super esoteric, kinda dumb, definitely woo woo.

But alas, I am a science-backed wellness girlie first and foremost. Here is the research. I’ll keep this short, because like I said, I’ve already done a deep dive into castor oil:

What is a castor oil pack, quickly

For anyone new here: a castor oil pack involves pouring castor oil on your skin and covering it with a wrap, or it can involve covering a piece of flannel or wool cloth soaked in cold-pressed castor oil, applied directly to the skin. Some people use a heat source on top like a hot water bottle, which helps absorption. I don’t usually do this — my body heat alone is sufficient.

You leave these “packs” on for anywhere from 30 minutes to overnight.

When applied to the abdomen specifically, you’re targeting the digestive organs — the large intestine, small intestine, liver, and the complex network of smooth muscle, nerve endings, and lymphatic tissue that sits beneath the abdominal wall.

The active compound doing the work is ricinoleic acid — a unique omega-9 fatty acid that makes up around 85–90% of castor oil and behaves differently from almost any other lipid in nature.

It binds to EP3 prostaglandin receptors found on smooth muscle tissue, including the intestinal walls. When it does this, it triggers smooth muscle contractions — which is exactly the mechanism behind intestinal peristalsis, the wave-like motion that moves everything along.

The history of castor oil

Anthro girl clocking in!

Castor bean seeds have been found in Egyptian tombs dating back 4,000 years. The ancient Egyptians used castor oil as a lamp fuel, a laxative, and a topical remedy for eye irritation and skin conditions. The Romans called it Palma Christi — the hand of Christ — a name that tells you everything about how seriously they took it.

In Ayurvedic medicine, castor oil has been used for thousands of years as a treatment for digestive disorders, joint pain, and skin conditions — applied both internally and externally. Traditional Chinese medicine incorporated it into preparations for abdominal complaints and lymphatic congestion. Across West Africa it was used for wound healing and as a purgative. In India, nursing mothers have applied it to the abdomen for centuries to support postpartum recovery and digestion.

I could go on. I won’t. But read this if you want to learn about the importance of valuing these types of cultural significances:

What the research actually says

I’ll be honest with ya: the research on topical castor oil packs specifically — as opposed to oral castor oil, which is FDA-approved as a laxative — is limited. What there is, however, is enough to be genuinely interesting🧐.

A 2011 study published in the Journal of Complementary Medicine Research tested castor oil packs on elderly patients with chronic constipation over a monitored period. The results: packs didn’t increase bowel movement frequency but did significantly decrease stool consistency score, reduce straining during defecation, and improve the feeling of complete evacuation.

What this means in simple terms is that your bowels are being more effectively cleared — most likely through stimulating gut motility, lymphatic flow, and reducing inflammation.

A separate study on castor oil abdominal massage found significant reductions in constipation severity scores after 10 days of consistent application — with the authors noting that ricinoleic acid’s action on intestinal smooth muscle was the likely driver.

And StatPearls via NCBI confirms the mechanism clearly: ricinoleic acid causes the muscles of the intestinal walls to contract and push out stool — the same mechanism as oral castor oil, potentially delivered transdermally at a gentler, more sustained dose.

Putting something ON your skin (topically), may seem like an ineffective way to move the needle internally, but on the contrary. Did you know that your skin is the biggest organ?

It’s also a highly permeable one — your skin absorbs what you put on it and delivers it directly into underlying tissue, lymphatic vessels, and local blood supply.

It’s the same way why nicotine patches work, why hormone creams work, and why what you slather on your body every day is not as inert as the skincare industry would have you believe.

What I’ve personally noticed

Remember, anecdotes are a form of research too! And it worked for me. And all these people too — for conditions like PCOS, interstitial cystitis, IBS, kidney issues, emphysema, PMS, constipation, gastroparesis, and more.

Sure a random reddit thread isn’t the same as a randomized controlled trial, but it’s close (just kidding). It’s not super repeatable but when thousands of people have the same experience, it’s a good indication that there’s something worth investigating.

I started sleeping in a castor oil pack on my abdomen postpartum, mainly for the swelling and diastasis recti. What I noticed almost immediately was that I was waking up with a morning bowel movement — which, if you know anything about gut health, is a really good sign of healthy digestive function and not something I’d had consistently for years.

I also noticed my skin on my abdomen — which had become thin and loose from pregnancy — started looking noticeably more hydrated and toned. Whether that was the pack or just time and recovery, I can’t say for certain. But the timing correlated.

I’m not claiming it cured anything. Don’t come for me. But it did SOMETHING 🙂

The lymphatic angle

One more mechanism worth mentioning because I think it’s underappreciated: the lymphatic system.

Your abdomen contains one of the largest concentrations of lymphatic tissue in the body — including the cisterna chyli, a major lymphatic reservoir sitting just in front of your lumbar spine. Castor oil’s ricinoleic acid has documented effects on lymphatic endothelium — the tissue lining lymphatic vessels — including influencing lymphatic vessel tone and the permeability of lymphatic capillaries.

A small double-blind study found that castor oil packs applied to the abdomen produced a significant increase in circulating lymphocytes within 24 hours compared to placebo packs — suggesting a genuine immune and lymphatic response to abdominal application specifically. Small study but for sure an interesting finding.

If you’ve read my lymphatic drainage piece, you’ll know that sluggish lymphatic flow in the abdomen is associated with bloating, water retention, digestive sluggishness, and immune dysregulation. The pack may be doing something useful here that we don’t fully have the research language to describe yet.

How to actually do it

A few things worth knowing:

What you need: cold-pressed, hexane-free castor oil in a dark glass bottle. My recommendations:

• US audience: This castor oil and this wrap (organic cotton!) and this heating pad if you want a lil extra extra - it’s so good even without the packs!

• EU audience: This one and this wrap

What to do: pour a lot of castor oil directly onto your abdomen covering from your navel down toward your hip bones and place the wrap on. Option to place heating pad on top. Leave for a minimum of 30 minutes — ideally overnight.

Important: do not use if pregnant. Ricinoleic acid’s action on smooth muscle extends to uterine muscle — this is well documented and is actually why castor oil has been historically used to induce labor. Not something you want happening accidentally.

Consistency matters: one application is unlikely to produce dramatic results. Three to four times a week over several weeks is where people consistently report the most noticeable changes.

So is it BS?

Castor oil has been used on the abdomen across Ayurvedic, Egyptian, and Mediterranean traditions for thousands of years. The fact that western medicine is only now running small studies on it is not evidence that it doesn’t work. It is evidence that there’s no profit in patenting a bottle of castor oil.

As always: do your research, know your contraindications, and trust that it’s been used across cultures for centuries and it’s completely natural. 🫶

Thank you for reading <3 comment your questions if you have!

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I appreciate any subscribers or shares — I’m a full time health writer and I share a ton of content, like this, completely for free. It means a lot if you — or even just buy me a cawfeee!

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I have a deeply unfair advantage in life and I want to share it with you.

I am genuinely, pathologically curious. I find almost everything interesting. I read research papers for fun. I listen to lectures on my walks. I have approximately 47 open tabs at any given moment and I genuinely intend to read all of them (even if I don’t get that far😆).

I’ve always considered myself good “learner.” I did well at school because I learned how to pass exams. I knew how to retain information, learn new things, and connect the dots between things.

To be clear, I’m not a genius. I just feel like I have the perfect combo of curious nature 🤝capable of learning efficiently. Let me teach you my ways!!!

Here are 15 specific, evidence-based ways to make learning a permanent background process of your life.

First, a brief note on how your brain actually learns

Your brain does not store information the way a hard drive stores files. It stores it as patterns of neural connections — synaptic pathways that strengthen each time they’re activated and weaken when they’re not. This is what Hebb’s Law means when it says “neurons that fire together 🤝wire together.”

The implication: learning is not a single event. It is a process of repeated activation. You don’t learn something by encountering it once. You learn it by encountering it multiple times, in multiple contexts, with gaps in between.

Most of what school got wrong about learning can be traced to violating this principle. Cramming for an exam activates a pathway once, intensely, and then it fades. The exam passes and the information goes with it. Real learning — durable, transferable, usable — looks completely different.

1. Use the spacing effect — review things just before you forget them

The spacing effect is one of the most robustly replicated findings in cognitive psychology, dating back to Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 1880s.

The principle: reviewing information at increasing intervals — just before you’d naturally forget it — produces dramatically stronger long-term retention than massed practice (cramming).

This video explains it well:

A 2006 paper by Cepeda et al. analyzed 317 studies across 14,000 participants and confirmed that spaced practice consistently outperforms massed practice for long-term retention, often by a factor of two or more.

The practical version: use Anki. It’s a free flashcard app that uses a spaced repetition algorithm to surface cards exactly when you’re about to forget them.

2. Learn by teaching — even to an imaginary audience

When I worked as a full-time agency health writer and long before AI, I would spend 10+ hours a day researching and writing health topics. At the end of the day, I would have learned so many cool things that I’d explain them all to my friends and family. To the point they were all like okayyyy! But seriously, the process of me teaching them what I learned indirectly helped me retain that information.

The Feynman Technique, developed by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, is simple: take something you’ve learned and explain it as if you’re teaching it to someone with no background in the subject. Where you stumble is where the gap in your understanding is.

The neuroscience behind this is retrieval practice — the act of pulling information out of your memory rather than just recognizing it when presented strengthens the memory trace significantly more than re-reading. A 2011 study published in Science found that students who practiced retrieval after studying retained 50% more information after a week than those who re-studied the same material.

The practical version: after reading an article or finishing a podcast, explain the main ideas out loud to yourself, to your partner, to your kids, to your dog. Write a one-paragraph summary without looking at your notes. This Substack is, in part, me running the Feynman Technique in public lol.

3. Interleave your subjects — don’t master one thing at a time

This one feels deeply counterintuitive but the research is consistent. Interleaving — switching between different subjects or problem types during a study session — produces better long-term learning than blocking (mastering one thing fully before moving to the next), even though it feels less productive in the moment.

A 2014 study found that interleaved practice produced significantly better performance on later tests compared to blocked practice — despite participants feeling less confident during interleaved sessions.

The practical version: instead of reading one book cover to cover before starting another, read three books simultaneously in different domains. I often read a science book, a philosophy book, and a novel at the same time. The cross-pollination between subjects produces unexpected connections and the interleaving effect strengthens retention in all three.

4. Sleep on it

Sleep is not downtime for your brain. It is when consolidation happens — when the day’s experiences are transferred from short-term to long-term memory, with irrelevant information pruned and important information integrated into existing knowledge networks.

Research consistently shows that sleep after learning produced significantly better performance on motor tasks than the same amount of time awake. Ssleep actively replays newly learned information, strengthening synaptic connections in the process.

The practical version: if you want to retain something important, engage with it in the evening rather than the morning — and then sleep. Don’t cram and stay up. Engage substantively and then let your sleeping brain do the rest. This is one of the most underused learning hacks and it’s completely free.

5. Use the generation effect — struggle before you look up the answer

Do you know how quickly people use AI these days! God forbid you think about whether you know the answer for a couple seconds before immediately typing your question into chatgpt.

Trying to retrieve or generate an answer before looking it up — ! even if you get it wrong ! — produces significantly better retention than looking up the answer immediately. This is called the generation effect or the hypercorrection effect.

Research shows that when we confidently believe something incorrect and then discover the correct answer, we remember the correction more strongly than if we had simply been told the right answer from the start. The surprise and error activate the brain’s prediction error system, which flags the information as important.

The practical version: before you google or chatgpt something, take 30 seconds to try to remember or reason out the answer. Before you check a fact, guess first. When you read a headline, try to predict what the research will say before you read the article. This tiny friction dramatically improves retention.

6. Take notes by hand, not by laptop

Best believe I don’t go anywhere without my Moleskine and these exact pens from Temu lol (iykyk). I’m a WRITER baby! It helps with learning too.

Handwriting forces you to summarize and paraphrase, which is itself a generative act that deepens processing. Typing encourages verbatim transcription, which is essentially passive.

A widely cited 2014 study by Mueller and Oppenheimer at Princeton found that students who took notes by hand consistently outperformed laptop note-takers on conceptual questions — not because they wrote more, but because they wrote less.

The practical version: when you’re in a podcast, lecture, or meeting you want to learn from, have a notebook. Don’t transcribe. Translate — write the idea in your own words as if you’re explaining it to someone else. One line per idea. Diagrams or scribbles where useful.

7. Make it emotional — emotion is memory glue

You’ve probably heard this before: the reason we tell stories is that it helps our brains remember key info. Why emotive stories are so much more memorable than boring or one-dimensional stories.

The amygdala — your brain’s emotional processing centre — has direct connections to the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory consolidation. Emotional arousal at the time of encoding dramatically increases the likelihood that information will be retained. This is why you remember exactly where you were when you heard shocking news, but can’t remember what you had for lunch two weeks ago.

You can use this deliberately!

Connect new information to something you care about personally, find genuinely surprising, or have a strong reaction to. Write down why a piece of information matters to you specifically. Tell someone about it in a way that communicates why it’s fascinating.

The practical version: when you read something interesting, don’t just note the fact. Note your reaction to it. “This surprises me because...” / “This changes how I think about...” / “This connects to what happened when...” The emotional elaboration is the retention mechanism.

8. Walk while you learn

I am a walk and podcast girlie through and through!

Research from Stanford found that walking increases creative output by an average of 81% — specifically divergent thinking, which is the kind of lateral, associative thinking that produces insight and makes new information connect to existing knowledge. That’s major!!!!

And a 2022 meta-analysis confirmed that acute aerobic exercise enhances memory consolidation and retrieval.

The practical version: I listen to the most cognitively demanding podcasts and audiobooks on walks, not during passive time. The combination of light physical movement, increased blood flow to the brain, and the absence of screen stimulation creates an optimal state for absorbing complex ideas. Walking meetings also work — some of my best thinking happens mid-stride.

9. Use analogies aggressively

When you encounter a new concept, immediately try to find an analogy in a domain you already understand.

I know this sounds weird but sometimes I lay in bed at night and try to think of analogies of new things I learn. It’s so weird that these random analogies will help me retain information for YEARS. For example, it took me a while to fully understand heart rate variability. When I finally realized that it was similar to the ocean tide, it helped. Specifically, optimal HRV moves in and out with rhythm and force. An ocean with a constant catastrophic swell is not good, nor is a totally flat ocean. You need ebbs and flows.

Anyway back to this.

Analogical reasoning is one of the brain’s primary tools for encoding genuinely new information — it works by hanging the new concept on an existing conceptual hook rather than trying to create a new one from scratch.

This is why good teachers are disproportionately good at analogies. It is not just a communication tool. It is a learning tool.

The practical version: every time you learn something new, ask: what is this like? What existing thing does this behave like? What domain does this remind me of? Write it down. The stranger the analogy, the more memorable — the distinctiveness effect means unusual associations are retained better than obvious ones.

10. Embrace confusion — it means you’re at the edge

Desirable difficulties is a term coined by psychologist Robert Bjork at UCLA to describe learning conditions that feel harder in the moment but produce better long-term retention. Confusion, difficulty, and the feeling that you don’t quite understand something yet are not signs that you’re failing to learn. They are signs that you’re at the edge of your current understanding — which is exactly where learning actually happens.

The comfortable feeling of re-reading material you already know is the illusion of learning. The uncomfortable feeling of wrestling with something you don’t yet understand is the real thing.

The practical version: seek out content that is slightly beyond your current level. Read primary research rather than only summaries. When a podcast host explains something and you don’t quite follow, don’t skip forward — sit with the confusion and try to resolve it. The friction is the point.

11. Teach one new thing a week in public

The protégé effect is the well-documented phenomenon whereby people learn more deeply when they know they will have to teach material to others. The anticipation of teaching changes how you encode information — you pay more attention, organize it more carefully, and identify your own gaps more honestly.

A 2018 study published in Mind, Brain, and Education found that students who prepared to teach material retained it significantly better than those who simply studied it for themselves.

The practical version: this is the Substack strategy. Pick one interesting thing you learned this week and explain it to someone — in a post, a caption, a voice note to a friend, a WhatsApp to your group chat. AND DON’T USE AI!

The format doesn’t matter. The act of preparing to explain something to another human being is one of the most powerful retention tools available. It’s free and it makes you more interesting at dinner parties. Win.

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12. Change your learning environment deliberately

Context-dependent memory is the well-established phenomenon whereby information encoded in a specific environment is easier to retrieve when you return to that environment. This is why you walk into a room and forget what you came for (doors are portals but that’s a topic for another time lol) — the retrieval cue (the room) doesn’t match the encoding context (the room you had the thought in).

You can use this both ways. Varying your learning environments — a café today, a park tomorrow, your desk the day after — encodes information with multiple contextual cues, making it retrievable in more situations. This is called the encoding variability effect. [It’s also called the freelancer effect haha.]

The practical version: deliberately move around when you’re learning. Different environments for different subjects. Study your most important material in the environment where you’ll most need to retrieve it. And if you need to recall something in a high-pressure situation — a presentation, an interview — try to learn the material in a similarly activated state rather than in a completely relaxed one.

13. The two-minute rule for rabbit holes

Here’s the tension: deep learning requires following threads. But following every thread destroys your ability to finish anything. The solution I’ve landed on: the two-minute rule for rabbit holes.

When you encounter something interesting that you want to explore further, you have two minutes to decide: go now, or add to a list. If it’s directly relevant to what you’re currently learning, follow it immediately. If it’s tangential, add it to a reading list and return to it on a dedicated rabbit hole session — I do mine on Sunday evenings.

The practical version: I use a single note in my phone called “Rabbit Holes” where I drop links, book recommendations, and topics throughout the week. Sunday evening is when I process it — some things I actually explore, some things lose their urgency and get deleted. This prevents the fragmented, distracted learning of following every interesting thread immediately, while still honoring the curiosity that makes learning enjoyable in the first place.

14. Make your consumption environment do the work

The single highest-leverage learning habit I have is also the most passive: I changed what my default consumption environment exposes me to.

The algorithm learns what you engage with and gives you more of it. This is either the best or worst thing about the internet, depending on what you’re engaging with. Most people’s default feeds are optimized for entertainment, outrage, and FOMO. Mine is optimized for ideas.

The practical version: unfollow accounts that produce content you consume passively. Follow researchers, writers, and thinkers in domains you want to learn more about. Replace one podcast you listen to out of habit with one that consistently teaches you something. Add one newsletter from a domain outside your expertise. Make your default environment one where interesting ideas find you rather than one you have to escape from to think clearly.

Over time the compound effect of a well-curated information environment is extraordinary.

15. Research whatever you find fun — and stop intellectualizing everything

We associate learning with school. The result is that, for many people, it becomes serious, academic, and almost like a moral leverage. STOP TRYING TO BE SMART! Be curious, for the sake of curiosity. For the sake of FUN!

One of my favorite things about studying my bachelor’s in anthropology was learning about random shit. Like the cultural significance of graffiti, or why religious experiences are nearly always similar, regardless of who reports them and for which religion they are associated.

THE WORLD IS FUN! INFORMATION IS FUN! LEARNING IS COOL!

When you have learn about fun or interesting things, dopamine — your motivation and reward neurotransmitter — spikes. It spikes intensely during novel, unpredictable, curiosity-driven exploration. Your brain is literally designed to reward you for following your genuine curiosity.

Research on intrinsic motivation by Deci and Ryan — the same people behind self-determination theory — found that intrinsically motivated learning produces deeper processing, better retention, and greater creative transfer than extrinsically motivated learning. You learn more from things you genuinely want to know than from things you feel you should know.

Learning doesn’t need to be productive.

The meta-principle behind all of this

Learning is not a scheduled activity. It is a relationship with the world — a habit of attention, curiosity, and reflection that either gets cultivated or atrophied depending on how you live your daily life.

The 15 things above are not a protocol. They are a set of conditions. Create the conditions consistently and the learning happens almost automatically — in the gaps between other things, on walks, in conversations, in the margins of an otherwise ordinary day.

The people who seem to know the most are not the people who studied the hardest. They are the people who never stopped being interested in things.

Stay curious. 🫶

Drop in the comments: what’s one thing you’ve been wanting to learn more about? I’ll point you toward the best resources I know.

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There is a version of me that stayed in London.

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If you’ve ever been in a tough mental spot and have googled how to help, you’ve probably seen a lot of the same advice circling: start therapy, join a gym, consider medication, reach out to friends, improve your diet.

The reality is that a lot of the advice to improve mental health requires resources. “But you can workout for free!” Sure. But if you’re working three jobs and looking after two kids on one income, it’s really not a practicable solution.

Mental health is way easier when all your foundational needs are met: Food, shelter, water, clothing, and sleep. Needless to say, having money doesn’t guarantee mental health, but it’s definitely a helpful starting point.

When I write The Broke Girl’s Guide series, my goal is to make you realize that you don’t need to spend a fortune to improve your health. But I’ve written this with the awareness that most people who read my work are above a certain threshold — you’re probably not in crisis survival mode, you’re just looking for ways to improve your health without all the BS spewed by the wellness industrial complex.

Now we’ve got that out of the way; what are the most scientifically supported ways to improve mental health without spending money? I gotchu!

What’s actually driving poor mental health

PIcture this: You wake up with a startle to a blaring alarm in dark room. You snooze it, twice. When you finally open your eyes, you grab your phone and scroll TikTok. You then check your emails, including an email from your boss saying you missed a deadline.

Before you know it, you’re running late. You hit the Starbucks drive-thru before work, grabbing a venti iced latte, which unknowingly has 500 calories in. You eat at your desk, sitting there for the entirety of the 8-hour work day. The furthest you walk is to the vending machine, the coffee jug, and the bathroom.

At home, it’s tv time, scroll time, take out time. And finally, later than you should, it’s bedtime.

Is it any wonder why your mental health isn’t great?

This is an extreme example, but many people are engaging in detrimental habits that are destroying their mental wellbeing. Not because you’re lazy or want to see yourself struggling, it’s because modern life is structurally set up in a way that is fundamentally terrible for the human nervous system.

How to get the worst mental health possible

When you have a problem (poor mental health), rather than looking at what you can do to fix it — consider what would make the issue way worse (inversion!). These are some of the biggest drivers:

1. Sleep less than 7 hours a night

Bad sleep quality is the number one cause of low mood. Your brain literally cannot regulate emotion properly without adequate sleep. A 2020 meta-analysis published in Sleep examining the effect of sleep loss across the lifespan found large effects on positive mood and medium effects on negative mood.

Sleep deprivation leads to heightened amygdala activity combined with impaired connectivity with the prefrontal cortex, resulting in heightened emotional responses and reduced emotional regulation. Everything feels harder, heavier, and more hopeless than it actually is. Before you diagnose yourself with a mood disorder, fix your sleep.

2. Run on cortisol

Chronic stress keeps cortisol elevated, which over time dysregulates the HPA axis, disrupts sleep, impairs memory, reduces your prefrontal cortex’s ability to regulate emotion, and promotes anxiety and depression.

The modern lifestyle — screens at night, skipping meals, no movement, financial stress, no recovery time — is essentially a cortisol production machine.

3. Socially isolate

Loneliness is linked to a 26% increase in all-cause mortality, elevated cortisol, impaired immune function, and significantly worse mental health outcomes. It is not a feelings problem. It is a biology problem. And it is one of the most underdiscussed drivers of poor mental health in the west.

4. Have a sedentary lifestyle

Your body and brain are not separate systems. Movement is one of the most powerful mood regulators we have and most people are barely doing any.

5. Eat junk food

Junk food is highly processed and nutrient poor, and unfortuntely, it makes up more than 70% of the average diet in the US.

Nutrients from food are also the nutrients that create neurotransmitters — the chemical messengers that regulate your mood, motivation, and mental state.

• Serotonin is synthesized from tryptophan, found in eggs, turkey, oats, and legumes. Dopamine is synthesized from tyrosine, found in meat, fish, dairy, and beans.

• GABA — your primary calming neurotransmitter — is supported by magnesium and B6, both found in leafy greens, nuts, seeds, and whole grains.

You cannot make these neurotransmitters adequately from a diet built around ultra-processed, nutritionally depleted food. Your brain is downstream of what you eat, every single day.

So what actually works — without spending a fortune

Here’s where I want to reframe the conversation. The standard advice — sleep more, exercise, go outside, talk to someone — is correct. It’s also vague to the point of being useless if you don’t know where to start or what you can actually afford. So let’s get specific.

Pick a minimum of three of these things and do them every single day

1. Spend 5+ minutes outside, preferably in a natural environment

The catchy internet phrase “touch grass” is surprisingly actionable.

Going outside is the single highest-leverage free mental health intervention we have. A large-scale study published in Scientific Reports found that spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature was associated with significantly better health and wellbeing — with the benefits plateauing around that threshold. That’s 17 minutes a day. A park is great. Hell, a patch of grass counts.

Natural environments reduce cortisol, lower blood pressure, reduce amygdala activity (your brain’s threat-detection centre), and increase parasympathetic nervous system tone. We are human animals, designed to live in nature.

2. Move for 3 minutes before you do anything else

I remember watching a fitness YouTuber back in 2016 who had really serious depression. When she’d go through periods of bad mental health, she would stop going to the gym, but she knew she just needed to move somehow. So she’d set an alarm for three minutes and shake her body, dance, jump. At the end of those three minutes, she nearly always felt better.

This stayed in my mind once I learned about somatic work. Sometimes you’ve got to stop trying to fix your mind and focus on the body. You can change your entire mental state by changing your physical state.

A 2024 meta-analysis published in the BMJ covering 218 studies and over 14,000 participants found that physical activity was significantly more effective than antidepressants or therapy alone for reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety — with walking, strength training, and yoga showing the largest effects.

3. Get a good night’s sleep

Bad sleep = bad mental health, every single time.

Focus on:

• Consistent bedtime and wake time = sleep regularity is (to some extent) more important than sleep duration

• No screens 30 mins before bed

• Spend one hour winding down before bed: no screens, no stressful conversions, no intense activity or stimulating media

• Prioritize sleep over anything else in your life for a while to improve mental health

4. 5 minutes of controlled breathing

Your breath controls your nervous system. When you get stressed or anxious, you inevitably start breathing fast and shallow — entering into a fight or flight state.

When you intentionally override this response, and instead connect to your body and breathe slowly and deeply, you shift your nervous system out of sympathetic activation.

This costs zero dollars and takes five minutes. Do it before bed, before a stressful situation, or whenever you notice your system is activated.

5. Write for 10-15 minutes

A landmark study by psychologist James Pennebaker, replicated across dozens of trials, found that writing about emotionally significant experiences for around 15 minutes a day over three to four consecutive days produced measurable reductions in depression, anxiety, and physical health symptoms — with benefits persisting for weeks to months afterward.

The mechanism: expressive writing activates the prefrontal cortex and forces the brain to impose narrative structure on emotional experience, which reduces the amygdala’s threat response and measurably lowers physiological stress markers.

6. Eat home-cooked foods

Save your money on eating out, drive-thrus, and takeouts. Make all your meals at home, and I can guarantee they will be healthier. You can eat beans, rice, and broccoli and spend 40 cents per meal and it’s 100% healthier for you.

A 2018 meta-analysis covering 20 longitudinal and 21 cross-sectional studies — found that adherence to a healthy dietary pattern was consistently associated with lower risk of depression, with the Mediterranean diet showing the most compelling evidence: highest vs. lowest adherence was associated with a 33% lower risk of incident depression.

7. A few minutes on neural rewiring

A 2025 meta-analysis published in American Psychologist — covering decades of self-affirmation research — found that brief, standalone self-affirmation exercises produced significant improvements in both personal and social wellbeing, with benefits that were both immediate and long-lasting.

The mechanism: self-affirmation activates the ventromedial prefrontal cortex — the brain region associated with self-related processing and reward — essentially reinforcing a neural pathway that counteracts the self-critical, threat-focused rumination that underlies depression and anxiety.

The key is specificity. Repeating “I am confident” in the mirror is not what the research supports.

What works is reflecting on a specific core value or personal strength that is genuinely true for you — something like “I am someone who shows up for people even when it’s hard” or “I have survived every difficult thing that has happened to me so far.” fMRI research confirms that value-based self-affirmations activate reward circuitry in ways that generic positive statements do not.

Do it for 2-5 mins in the morning while your brain is plastic.

8. One act of service or genuine connection

All the advice online says reach out to a friend, tell your family, go to more social gatherings. If you’re anything like I was, I didn’t have anyone to reach out to. It was true social isolation.

And that’s an issue: Loneliness is linked to a 26% increase in all-cause mortality, elevated cortisol, impaired immune function, and significantly worse mental health outcomes.

The intervention isn’t complicated (connect with others), but it can be really difficult if you’re already in a negative headspace. So what should you do? Help others. Be of service to them.

I joined a charity and volunteered. I tried to help friends. I went to church more. I stopped prioritizing myself (not a long term solution but a good place to start) and began prioritizing others.

Just do one small act of service a day, whether it’s complimenting a stranger, helping an old lady with her grocery bags, or offering to pick something up for a friend in need. It’ll make you and them feel better!

Things to remove for better mental health

You’ll save money by removing these things and improve your mental health too!

• Cut out alcohol, at least for a while and then only enjoy a drink or two on special occasions

• Cut out takeouts, drive-thrus, and junk food. Just for a while, make everything at home.

• Reduce caffeine intake to avoid running on cortisol and adrenaline.

• Reduce sugar intake overall. Switch to sugar-free coffee and use a teaspoon of MCT oil in it to inhibit the cortisol blood sugar spike. Consider keto diet if you want to really lower neural inflammation!

• Cut out friends who don’t support you or bring you down.

• Quit spending so much time on social media — delete the apps for a while!

• Stop hating yourself. Specifics here:
  

Other evidence-based ways to improve mental health

Therapy

Therapy works. A comprehensive review of 269 meta-analyses published in PMC confirmed CBT is one of the most robustly evidenced psychological interventions we have — effective across depression, anxiety, PTSD, and a wide range of other conditions. The problem is not the evidence. The problem is the price tag.

Options:

In the UK: The NHS Talking Therapies service offers free CBT — you can self-refer online at nhs.uk/mental-health/talking-therapies.

In the US: Open Path Collective offers sessions from $30–$80 on a sliding scale. BetterHelp and similar platforms are cheaper than traditional therapy, though the quality varies — use them as a bridge, not a permanent solution.

Free everywhere: expressive writing as covered above, and the self-compassion practices which have RCT evidence behind them comparable to therapy for certain outcomes.

Exercise with others

Exercise alone is powerful. Exercise with other people is measurably more so. A 2017 study published in PubMed found that participation in regular group fitness classes led to a statistically significant decrease in perceived stress and an increase in physical, mental, and emotional quality of life compared with exercising alone — even when the solo exercisers were equally active.

But fitness classes can be pricey! Alternative:

ClassPass starts at around $19/month in the US and most of Europe and gives you access to studios, gyms, and classes on a rotating basis — it’s one of the best value fitness subscriptions available and far cheaper than a single gym membership.

YouTube has free strength, yoga, pilates, and HIIT workouts that are genuinely as good as anything you’d find in a studio. The Nike Training Club app is free and the programming is excellent (I used to write for it!!!)

Walking with a friend is also free — and combines movement with social connection, which is arguably the most cost-effective mental health intervention available.

Consider plant medicine

Microdosing psilocybin changed my life.

I’m not here to tell anyone to take drugs — I’m aware that it’s not for everyone and that in some people it’s not a good idea, for example, people with schizophrenia risk.

Psilocybin — the active compound in magic mushrooms — works by temporarily suppressing the default mode network, the brain region associated with rumination, self-referential thought, and the rigid thinking patterns that underpin depression.

A 2021 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that psilocybin-assisted therapy produced rapid and sustained reductions in depression scores comparable to escitalopram (a common SSRI) — with the added effect of increasing psychological flexibility and neuroplasticity, essentially allowing the brain to form new neural connections that chronic depression had made inaccessible.

Legality varies by country. Do your research.

Spirituality — connecting to something bigger than yourself

I’m very spiritual. I believe in God, the universe, the divine mother, the powers that connect us all to nature. Nature itself. I trust in my path, I believe that I am divinely protected. I know that my life has intrinsic meaning.

This trust and blind faith is a powerful anti-anxiety drug.

Research consistently shows that people with high spirituality had a lower prevalence of depressive symptoms — and the effect was independent of religious affiliation specifically.

Spiritual practice, in whatever form it takes, tends to reduce rumination by shifting focus outward and upward. It provides a framework for meaning-making during difficult experiences — which is one of the most evidence-backed buffers against depression.

It promotes acceptance of things outside your control, which directly reduces the chronic threat activation that drives anxiety.

And it tends to connect people to community, which addresses the loneliness driver simultaneously.

In practical terms, this could look like: prayer if that resonates with you. Meditation. Spending time in nature with genuine awe and presence. Trusting, even slightly, that things tend to work out. Letting go of the illusion of total control.

Sunlight and red light therapy

Morning sunlight — five to fifteen minutes outside within 30 minutes of waking — sets your serotonin synthesis for the day, anchors your circadian rhythm, and supports melatonin production at night. It is free and takes five minutes.

If you live somewhere with limited sunlight, a SAD lamp — available from around $30–$50 — has solid clinical evidence for seasonal depression and is worth the investment.

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to mental health. But if I had to distill everything in this article into the simplest possible daily baseline, it would be this:

Get outside for at least five minutes. Move your body in some way. Eat something real that you made yourself. Talk to or do something for another person. Sleep consistently. Breathe slowly when things feel hard.

The most powerful mental health interventions available to you are mostly free, mostly simple, and mostly ignored in favor of things that cost more and do less.

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If you want to go deeper on the nervous system side of all of this — the biology of why you feel the way you feel, and the specific protocols that move the needle most — REGULATED is my science-backed nervous system reset guide.

You have probably seen this symbol before: 🧿

It’s called the “Evil Eye.” I want to tell you a bit of the history of this symbol, and then I’m going to explain why worrying isn’t just a way to prepare for future circumstances, as many over-worries try to convince themselves. In actuality, worrying is praying for your own downfall. And worrying for another is praying for theirs.

But first, the evil eye. What is it? Where did it come from? And why is it such a popularly misunderstood symbol?

The history of the evil eye

The belief in the evil eye is one of the oldest, most geographically widespread superstitions in human history, with roots tracing back over 5,000 years to ancient Mesopotamia and Sumer. It appears in some form across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, and parts of Eastern Europe.

When a belief survives independently across that many disconnected cultures for that long, it’s usually pointing at something real about human psychology, even if the original explanation was mystical rather than scientific.

The core belief is this: a malevolent glare, often born from envy, jealousy, or excessive admiration, can curse the person it’s directed at — bringing them misfortune, illness, or bad luck, often without the giver even intending harm. This is the part most people get wrong.

The evil eye was rarely understood as something a villain does on purpose. It was something that could happen accidentally, through intense focus, attention, or — and this is the crucial bit for today — through worry.

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In Greek tradition, it’s called mati. In Turkish culture, nazar. In the Middle East, ayn al-hasud. Across all of these traditions, mothers were warned not to stare too long or too anxiously at their own children, for fear that their own worry, fixated and intense, could bring harm to the very person they loved most.

I have someone in my life who constantly tells me and my husband how worried they are about us. How they are worried we won’t be able to make our business a success, that we will get divorced, that we will get depressed from living in a foreign country without any family around us. I don’t appreciate their worry, nor do I perceive it as well-intentioned.

I view it as a curse: their conviction is so strong that we are going to fail, that it keeps them up at night. Their belief is fundamentally that we are not capable of success, persistence, resilience, or achievement. And THAT energy, is pretty fucking toxic.

And once I started researching the evil eye symbolism (I love anthro this is totally my jam), I learned a lot about the way all these cultures perceived “worry” and it was, as I also felt, perceived as a curse. Generally speaking, the idea was that, fixating intensely on someone — even out of love — functions as a type of curse. That the energy of worry, directed at a person, was not neutral. It was something you were giving them, whether you intended to or not.

Thus, the evil eye necklace, front door charm, etc., it’s all about protecting yourself from evil — it’s specifically about the EYE — protecting yourself from the consequences of intense attention, and the pure negative energy and chaos that this can bring about.

And if you know me from my substack, you already know ✨energy is everything✨

Worrying is assuming someone can’t

When you worry about someone — really sit with this for a second — what are you actually doing? You are running a simulation in your mind of a bad outcome.

My mom used to call me a “worrier.” In reality, I was anxious and depressed and rather than “worrying,” I was just letting my mind run with every negative possibility. I hated myself, so of course I felt like I was way more likely to fail than to succeed. Of course I worried that I would never have friends or a partner or a good life — because I had fundamentally already accepted that fate.

When I started to focus on treating my mental health, I stopped “worrying” about things. I started believing in myself, enjoying the process of inevitably achieving a happy life.

Do you get where I’m coming from? Do you see the reframe?

So think about the last time you really really worried about someone. Maybe you worry they can’t get a job. You worry they won’t pass an exam. You worry they’ll get hurt, get sick, get left, get hurt again.

Every single one of those worries contains, embedded inside it, a belief: this person is not capable. Not capable of succeeding. Not capable of resilience. Not capable of handling whatever life puts in front of them.

Worry, stripped down to its actual content, is a vote of no confidence. We say “it’s just because I love you,” but let’s be soooo for real for a second. It’s because you are so tied to an imagined future of that person failing, suffering, and falling apart, that you can’t HELP but let your mind run with negativity.

You don’t worry about things you trust, and things you believe in. For example, I moved country — to Portugal, with a 10-month-old baby, leaving behind a job, family, and friends. I DID NOT WORRY ABOUT IT, AT ALL! For someone “with anxiety,” that’s kinda crazy right? But it’s because I had 100% faith that everything would be okay. Thus, no need or space for worry.

The leak of extensive premeditatio malorum

Marcus Aurelius (Stoic philosopher) wrote extensively about the difference between preparing for hardship and being consumed by the fear of it.

The stoics overall drew a sharp distinction between premeditatio malorum — a deliberate, brief, clear-eyed visualization of potential difficulty in order to build resilience — and chronic anxious rumination, which they considered a corrosive waste of the only thing you actually control: your present attention.

While premaditatio malorum can be an effective tool to prepare for hardship, if you go too far with it, you will ruin your life. It’s a total energy leak.

So if you’re a chronic worrier reading this, convincing yourself that worrying is preparing for the future in some weird, twisted way, I want to tell you: It’s not productive. It’s detrimental. It’s praying for what you don’t want. It’s fueled by self-distrust. It’s a cancer.

If you’re reading this worrying about someone else, I want to tell you: It’s not productive. It’s detrimental. It’s praying for their downfall. It’s rehearsing their failure. With the full force of your attention.

So be stoic and think of it like a Stoic lol: premeditatio malorum. Live in awareness of possible adversities to effectively prepare. But then release it. Trust yourself, or the person in your life, to be able to meet whatever comes with the resilience they actually have. Stop catastrophizing.

Trust yourself. Let that energy grow in abundance. Rather than the energy and the curse of unbridled worry.

Hope you enjoyed this brief look into the evil eye lore and why worrying is ultimately negative af. Got comments?

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