The weekend after my fourth ketamine session I felt magnificent. I adapted to every twist and turn with ease, never getting caught up in an outcome that didn’t go how I wanted it to. I could always let go of the need to figure something out and just let it be.

But then Monday rolled around and I was trapped in my head during the week of my fifth and sixth sessions, gripped by anxiety and perfectionism. So much so that I didn’t sleep much at all Monday night into Tuesday’s session.

I could tell that the part of me that feels the compulsion to intellectualize and figure everything out—to disconnect me from my emotions and give me a felt sense of control it believes protects me—had taken over.

It was disappointing after feeling exactly how I’ve longed to feel over the weekend and hoping it was ketamine’s effects that would last.

Yet, I also felt this inner knowing hanging on from the weekend that there was a reason I felt this way, a reason that would dissipate and I would return to feeling how I was over the weekend. That inner knowing kept me grounded, rather than spiral in panic because the weekend feeling was gone and the anxiety was back.

So, I showed up to the fifth session on almost no sleep, stuck in my head, and pumped full of cortisol, with the intention of exploring that it is safe to let go and sleep.

The session took place. I was there. But it didn’t feel like anything really happened and I couldn’t even remember much of it at the end.

On to the Sixth Session

I showed up still feeling high-strung, and frankly, it felt like I didn’t even want to be there. I had been lost in my head all week, in another world, and I felt unprepared, like other things mattered more, like I was wasting my time because I had gotten all I was going to get out of ketamine therapy.

It was weird. I was used to being excited and open and curious before a session.

But then this state I arrived in led to my most emotionally powerful, impactful session yet.

Typically, ketamine brought on the altered state of consciousness in about 5-10 minutes and then I was deep in that state.

It felt so much longer in this session.

I waited and waited and nothing happened. I wondered if I was too strung out for the effects to take hold, like when the sleepings pills didn’t pull me into sleep so long ago.

I took off my sleeping mask and felt like I was just sitting in the room. Still nothing.

It began to feel like a part of me was scared to enter that altered state. So I tried to comfort that part, reassuring it that we had not only been okay, but really enjoyed the past sessions.

And with that reassurance, I felt the altered state slowly coming on.

Thoughts started flowing, reflecting on all that I had done over the past decade, until I heard this statement:

And then the response came from a second, different voice:

An inner knowing hit me right then with that exchange: the intellectualizing part of me had not experienced a ketamine session yet and it had been scared to enter the altered state of consciousness. Now it understood.

The visualization I have of this is the intellectualizing part slowly walking down the decline towards the deep end of a pool as I reassured it to keep going. The altered state came about once it was fully submerged in the water, and its assessment of what it experienced came to me as: “I really am something, aren’t I.”

Then another part of me, or perhaps my body, that has known this all along said as much in response to the intellectualizing part’s realization.

I broke down crying, hard, eventually finding myself in the fetal position on the chair, rubbing my leg.

This was a reconnection between two parts that had long been in conflict, not talking to each other for likely decades. It was like two siblings, or a parent and child, reconnecting after at least one side chose not to speak or see the other for many years.

It was beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that a full body energy took over me, and I felt like I was emitting light.

I knew that energy was love.

Love between these two parts of me. Love for myself. Love for what this reconnection meant.

For the rest of that session, I alternated between basking in that love and cathartically releasing the years of pain between those two parts through tears. Right up until it felt right to go home.

What’s Next

With my six-session loading phase complete, next comes maintenance sessions, with my first one being two weeks after my sixth session. The goal is then to increasingly spread out the following maintenance sessions until I feel that I don’t need them anymore. More on that next time.

Feel like you could benefit from coaching? I’m offering 5 free 45-minute sessions to two more clients. Message me for more details.

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Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

Last week, the mere thought of writing about my ketamine sessions caused my body to tighten and my mind to go blank.

So, I didn’t write about them.

My third session in particular felt like I didn’t come away with any insight to write about or anything new from the previous session.

Why would anyone want to read about that, a worrying part of me reasoned.

For instance, during the session, flashes of recent memories appeared that I felt comically unsure of whether they had happened in real life, a dream, a previous session, a book, or a movie.

Interesting experience, sure, but all I could pull from that is a belief that ketamine would be great for people suffering from the effects of a specific traumatic moment. They could re-experience it during a session, edit it, and their brain might latch on to the edited version as what really happened.

I also felt like I was in the greatest place in the world again while dancing to the music in my chair. And, towards the end, feelings of having immense power grew inside me.

But then as I was coming out of it, panic arose that the session was ending before I was told what I was supposed to do with all that power.

It felt unfinished in an unsettling kind of way.

And that was all I could really remember from the session.

Yet, my intention going into my third session was to broadly focus on the power my inner world holds. So, I left the clinic thinking that maybe the immense power I felt was the power of my inner world.

Compassion then flowed through me as I walked home seeing everyone else that was out, hoping everyone walks around feeling that kind of power, including myself.

Somewhere along the way I also remembered a paraphrase of what my therapist told me recently:

A lot of your anxiety seems to come from analyzing things and trying to figure them out when there isn’t an answer for you to know. Notice when you start analyzing and just let it be. There is nothing to analyze, nothing to figure out. Just feel what your body wants to tell you.

My body clearly did not want to try to dissect my third session any further, so I left it at that, hoping my body was internalizing the power of my inner world.

Nothing to Prove. No One to Convince.

I felt the same resistance against writing about my fourth session, like I just wanted to leave it alone without any analysis. Allow my body to internalize the feeling and that’s it. So, I let it be last week.

It also felt somewhat delusional and embarrassing to share.

But here it is.

It felt like I was being shown that my words are divine. They were given to me by a higher power, making them sacred. And I felt that people need to hear what I have to say even if they don’t realize they want to until I share it.

Depending on your beliefs, that can seem delusional, right?

Except that’s only if you’re taking a strictly literal approach to understanding it. We’re talking about ketamine here that is a dissociative anesthetic with psychedelic properties. Not everything I saw was literal.

What brings the picture into focus is that my intention going into the session was to focus on my worth being based on my inner world. Very similar to my third session’s intention, but a bit more focused after the third session seemed so unclear and unfinished.

Specifically, the intention was based on the belief that my thoughts, emotions, and feelings are uniquely mine from my combination of experiences and genetics. No two people have the same combination.

For me and everyone else, that’s one-of-a-kind worth, being able to offer what no one else can—yourself.

Back to my fourth session, knowing that my words were divine had me feeling excited, eager, confident, secure, warranted, worthy, etc. towards the idea of sharing my perspective with the world.

Those are the same feelings that result from knowing just how valuable the unique combination of experiences and genetics forming my perspective truly is.

One approach is spiritual. One approach is secular. Both capture the same feeling.

And now, because of my fourth ketamine session, I have felt that feeling. I know my brain can produce it, my body can feel it, and nothing bad happened as a result. And I know they can do it again.

Powerful stuff.

More on my fifth and sixth sessions coming soon.

Missed parts 1-4? Navigate to them here:

Ketamine Part 1: I Know Exactly Why I’m Anxious. It Hasn’t Helped.

Ketamine Part 2: I Now Know Why People Do Hard Drugs

Ketamine Part 3: The Moment Everything Disappeared

Ketamine Part 4: Ketamine’s Collision Course

Feel the desire to talk more about my ketamine experience? Send me a message and we’ll set it up.

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Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

Nothing demonstrates a public demand for an item quite like an FDA crackdown on illicit sellers trying to take advantage of that demand.

That’s what happened on July 7, 2026, when the FDA sent out 14 different warning letters to online sites selling non-FDA-approved ketamine for therapeutic purposes.1

It is unquestionably important that people can trust what they put in their bodies. But I think there is a greater story here on which the FDA’s actions comment.

That is, there wouldn’t be sellers trying to bypass the rules if the sellers didn’t see a demand they thought they could make money from. The public demand for ketamine therapy is there and growing.

And unlike many of the health and diet fads out there, ketamine therapy has research and clinical trials to back up that demand, some of which I shared in Part 1.

The greater story then is the collision between a critical societal health issue, a growing demand for the promising tool that ketamine could be, governmental regulation, and money.

And since my sessions got canceled this past week due to the clinic’s ketamine provider having a personal emergency, I thought I would share the CliffsNotes version with you.

The FDA’s Partial Action

As I shared in Part 1, ketamine has been FDA-approved for anesthesia during surgery for over 50 years, but only for that purpose.

In 2019, the FDA approved the nasal spray esketamine—a component of the ketamine molecule—for treatment-resistant depression in adults.

I didn’t want to receive esketamine, however, and instead chose to receive generic ketamine through an IV, because a psychiatric nurse I spoke with shared that in his practice he has seen quicker, more lasting improvement in people receiving IV ketamine compared to the nasal spray esketamine.

Others in the space share his same beliefs, though it is not a universal belief among all medical professionals.2

Yet, the FDA has never approved ketamine for any use other than anesthesia.

The Big Pockets of Big Pharma

The picture becomes clear once you know that a pharmaceutical company holds multiple patents for esketamine and sells it under the brand name Spravato^®.

On the other hand, ketamine is a generic drug that cannot be patented (i.e., not a money-maker) and thus no company has made the effort to push it through the FDA, though it’s not like the FDA needs a company with money for the FDA to do its job.

The lack of FDA approval, however, doesn’t mean that receiving ketamine for any purpose other than anesthesia is illegal. It can still be legally prescribed by a doctor for off-label use.

But what that difference in FDA approval does mean for the general public is that insurance companies cover Spravato^® but not ketamine.

And the insurance companies only cover Spravato^® when a doctor prescribes it for treatment-resistant depression, since that is all the FDA has approved it for.

If you don’t have insurance, or you need help with something other than treatment-resistant depression, and you don’t like the idea of an IV? Well, then the total out-of-pocket cost of Spravato^® is six times that of ketamine treatment despite having comparable or worse results.3

The U.S. is Anxious

Here’s why the above is important.

According to the Anxiety & Depression Association of America, Generalized Anxiety Disorder affects 6.8 million adults (3.1%) of the U.S. population, but only 43.2% of those people are receiving treatment.4

And that number is only going up because a whopping 31.9% of adolescents between 13 and 18 years old are affected by anxiety disorders.5

With so many people needing help, the barriers to potentially more effective and quicker solutions because no one can make money off it is frustrating.

The more suffering people there are that are aware of what is available to them now, and what could be available to them if progress is made, the greater the existing demand will rise for advancing promising psychedelic treatments and gaining access to them.

And the greater the demand, the more likely someone will figure out how to make money off it and get it in the hands of those who need it.

Because let’s be real. Money will always determine the actions so long as the actions cost money.

Just remember: We can be curious. We can ask the questions to educate ourselves. We can drive progress by having the conversations with others.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

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The moment everything went silent and all went black during my second ketamine session was the moment I understood some of the pain I’ve been carrying for much of my life.

The day of my second ketamine session started much like my first, which surprised me. After the first session, I was excited for the next one. I couldn’t wait.

But the morning of the second session I again felt tense and nervous. A part of me clearly didn’t want to do the session. It was afraid of what I might see, what it might mean, and whether I could handle it.

It persisted even after the session began. That is, until I promised it this one thing.

And I know how this might sound to some of you—woo-woo, childish, weak—but it was spot on in the moment.

I told that part of me that everything was okay, my intent was to heal, and I’d hold its hand from when we got taken over by the ketamine until the session was over.

While not thrilled, it agreed to those terms, telling me so by softening the tension at the back of my head.

The Moment

The start of the session was pure peace for a couple songs. I was floating in the air. Some uncontrollable laughter came again.

Then I was part of a tribe on an island jungle. Part of a group of men around a fire. Living in my own small hut.

I felt the deep bond between me and everyone else in the tribe. Connected in a way there are no words for. We were together.

I saw the trees, the plants, and knew I was completely one with nature.

I experienced a felt sense that I was the soil from which anything could grow, and funny enough, I became the soil.

But then suddenly everything vanished and the music cut out.

All that was left was a completely black, silent space.

Nothing.

I thought it was just the end of the song, and a new one would start, but the black silence continued.

Confusion was the main emotion to start. At first, I wondered in my head where everyone and everything went, then I started asking it out loud.

No answer came.

I wondered if I somehow paused my music or my headphones disconnected, but I was sure I didn’t and they didn’t.

Intense feelings of being alone were next. Combined with feeling scared about what was going on, I was increasingly panicking.

I had been abandoned.

And that’s when the thought appeared: “This is what you’ve been feeling all this time?!?”

I innately knew that the “you” in the thought was referring to a part of me from childhood. It was a goal to access that childhood part at some point and here it was showing me its pain.

Tears started flowing at the recognition and it felt like the release of all releases.

That moment taught me that the pain of feeling abandoned and alone is some of the pain that I’ve carried for much of my life. Not that I was abandoned and alone, but that I felt like I was.

After the session, I further connected this feeling back to other moments in my life when certain events brought up all those same feelings. I had never connected it before.

When the crying subsided, I found myself still in the black silence. But I was no longer scared or panicking. I just felt confused.

And that’s when it got weird.

The Decision

I didn’t want to remove my over-ear headphones and mask and open my eyes to look at my phone. It was this felt sense that maybe this was all part of the experience.

I had to try something though, so I turned my head and pushed my right headphone into the seat cushion.

The same music came back on that was playing before the black silence. The same music that made me feel a part of a tribe.

Surprising is an understatement.

I turned my head back to center and the music stopped. In its place came people laughing. Not sure if they were laughing at me or just laughing separately in the distance, like I was missing out on whatever was funny, but it was unsettling.

So I turned my head back to the right, pushing my right headphone into the cushion, and the music turned back on.

Shocking is an understatement.

Now I was curious and turned my head back to center. The music stopped and the laughing returned.

In that moment I decided that if my choices were between the distant laughing and the feeling I got from the music, I was choosing the music. I turned my head back to the right and kept it there until the song ended and a new one began.

Later, I recognized this sequence of events as representing the conscious choice I have, when I feel insecure and alone, between choosing to focus on what I want and need and focusing on what other people seem to have or what they might be thinking about me.

Experiencing that choice in this felt way was incredibly powerful. The felt sense of it remains in my body in a way that understanding the choice intellectually never could.

The Full Connection

“I am a bowl. Fill me up.”

I can’t recall whether it was before or after the music came back, but at some point, that thought kept repeating.

Enough times that I started repeating it out loud in unison with each repetition of the thought, while also saying I don’t know what this means as tears flowed.

What cracks me up now is that my body even felt the need to form into a bowl, my arms and legs lifting. It must have been important.

And in the days after the session, including while writing this article, it came together.

A part of me (it felt different than the childhood part in pain) feels like an empty bowl waiting to be filled with love and belonging.

I am the soil from which love and belonging can grow.

And it is my decision to wish I had the love and belonging other people appear to have or to grow that love and belonging and fill the bowl with it.

It’s a concept that I’ve understood intellectually for a long time. But I had never felt it.

I was numb to most emotions without realizing it, until I did realize it, and still couldn’t feel them.

That seems to be ketamine’s magic for me thus far. It has allowed me to feel what has been locked away for so long as pain and tension.

And that, I hope, is getting the emotions moving through my body again. Because life is too dull when we’re frozen.

Feel like you could benefit from coaching? I’m offering 5 free 45-minute sessions to two more clients. Message me for more details.

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Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

I’ve never done hard drugs recreationally and I never will, but I now think I understand why people do despite it ruining their lives.

The image I paired with this article is a joke, but it comes from the thought and feeling that landed the hardest during my first ketamine session:

More on why below but let me first take you back to the beginning real fast.

I was nervous walking into my first ketamine session. But I was also curious and a bit excited. I just didn’t know what to expect. It was all new.

(And I’m not a big fan of needles.)

Once it was time to start, I pulled down my eye mask and pressed play on my ketamine session playlist I found on Spotify.

For a few minutes it was a slow process. Did I feel any different? I didn’t really think so, but maybe? Or maybe the dose was a little low like they told me could happen the first time?

Then I had the need to move.

I needed to stretch out in my chair. Move left and right, like I was tossing and turning in bed at night. It kind of felt like I was wrestling with the feeling ketamine was washing over me.

And then I sort of felt like I wanted to cry, though it seemed forced, until I realized I wanted to laugh. A lot.

Full uncontrollable belly laughs at nothing in particular. And then at how ridiculous life felt compared to that moment.

Total freedom and peace. No anxiety, no worries, no negative thoughts, no pain, all in what felt like another room from where I started, possibly inside my head, while still conscious of where I actually was.

“This is exactly where I’ve always wanted to be.”

In a weird, cool, interesting, adventurous experience. Feeling like me without everything else.

And then I was at the mercy of the music.

I felt like I could take on anything, soaring in the sky with my arms and legs stretched out, during one song.

Then the next felt so sad and had me crying. But it was okay because all that sadness was now standing next to me in this space, a separate being that I was just spending time with.

The most challenging part of the session then happened—my nose itched.

I definitely did not feel like I was a part of my body. I swore I was barefoot even though I was wearing shoes, but also that my feet were hollow. So this felt like a monumental challenge.

I asked my body if it thought it could scratch it for me and my hand raised in slow motion until it reached my nose and scratched it, safely returning to the armrest afterward. I thanked my body profusely.

Certain songs felt like I needed to lean my head to the left on the chair. Others to the right. One even told me I could rest and I felt fully horizontal despite sitting in my chair.

More laughter at a computer screen getting smaller and smaller. More crying at a voice in a song telling me how much love there is in the trees and the plants and everything around us. I had to respond to that voice with my own words.

And then a song signaled to me that the end was near. I could sense it. But I was not ready to go and asked if I could stay.

“This is exactly where I’ve always wanted to be”

The song insisted though and I knew it was right. I gave in and released my grip.

It now felt time to open my eyes.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

P.S. more on what I’m getting out of this at a later date after more sessions.

Feel like you could benefit from coaching? I’m offering 5 free 45-minute sessions to two more clients. Message me or email me at alex@doselfishwell.com for more details.

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What is it like to feel dissociated or detached from your body?

I’m not sure, but I expect to be able to give you my experience of it later this week after I start my three-week round of ketamine infusions.

Why Ketamine?

You may be aware that ketamine is used for anesthesia during surgery. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved it for that purpose over 50 years ago.

But you might not have heard that research over the past 25 years has shown low-dose ketamine’s potential for fast-acting relief of depressive symptoms, anxiety disorders, PTSD, or alcohol or substance use disorder.12

Without diving too much into the science, studies have shown that the way ketamine does this is by promoting neuroplasticity in the brain and regulating what’s called the Default Mode Network—an area of the brain linked to overthinking, negative thought patterns, and rumination.345

Basically, brain cells are connected to one another, and ketamine helps break some of those connections while promoting the formation of new ones.

This all helps the brain rewire itself away from the responses causing issues in your life, such as excessive worrying or persistent negative thinking that are often linked with depression and anxiety.6

Of course, however, you need updated thought patterns and feelings you can consistently reinforce so that the new connections your brain forms last.

That’s why ketamine is best paired with coaching, talk therapy and/or strong mindfulness practices.

And while the FDA has not approved ketamine for anything other than use as an anesthetic during surgery (more on this and esketamine later), doctors can legally prescribe it for off-label use, such as to treat treatment-resistant depression or anxiety.

But as with anything medical related, be sure to consult your doctor before taking action. I want to make clear that none of what I write here is medical advice.

Come Along for the Ride

Not too long ago I realized it feels like my progress towards feeling unstuck has stalled for the past year or two. That’s partly why I’ve been quieter on Substack over the past month or so.

Sure, I’ve continued to learn information and make sense of feelings, but the difference that has had on my life has flattened.

It’s like I have all of this knowledge, but it hasn’t integrated into my body or my brain’s default programming.

I think I was just lost in the routine of it all. Waiting for the antidepressant to help what is probably Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and not recognizing that the timer to decide its effectiveness had gone off long ago.

So that’s why I’m trying ketamine infusions. To help my brain implement the changes that it understands intellectually so well.

And I want to share my experience with ketamine to demystify it and help move it towards normalization, even if it doesn’t have some life-changing result for me.

The general rundown is this:

• ~2-hour appointment

• 45-minute ketamine infusion with medical professionals monitoring

• Can’t drive yourself home

• 2x a week for 3 weeks

• Therapy session in the afternoon

And yea, one of ketamine’s effects can be feeling detached from your body during the infusion.

I’ll report what that feels like if it happens.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

Feel like you could benefit from coaching? I’m offering 5 free 45-minute sessions to two more clients. Message me or email me at alex@doselfishwell.com for more details.

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I quit my job as a patent attorney in February, after seven years in big law.

But what I walked away from wasn’t only a work burnout. It was a life burnout.

My neck hurt every day. My head hurt most of the day. I wasn’t sleeping.

I’d come home at the end of the day too wiped to want anything except the couch—and then the weekend would arrive and I’d realize I hadn’t spoken to a friend all week.

The way I’ve come to think about it is this: burnout is what happens when something is driving you to do more than you actually want to do.

The work was heavy, yes. But underneath the work was a low sense of self-worth I was trying to compensate for—with achievement, with status, with a salary, with perfectionism I used as a shield to hide the parts of me I believed weren’t worth anyone’s attention.

Sue and I get into a lot in this one:

• Why your boundaries crumble when your self-worth is shaky—even when you technically have boundaries in place

• The system that rewards it (“lunch is for wimps,” billable hours, this isn’t a nine-to-five job)

• Rest that isn’t actually rest—sitting on a break, waiting for the break to be over

• How your body starts enforcing what you refuse to give it

• What it actually took for me to leave: not courage, but self-care finally outgrowing the fear

Sue’s one tip: sit for ten minutes and do absolutely nothing.

Mine: get clear on what you want that you aren’t currently getting.

Notice the moments in your day when something makes your chest lift and you think I’d love that, but I don’t have time.

Write those down. You can’t make room for a life you haven’t named.

And if sitting still feels impossible when your mind is racing—that’s where I’ve leaned on EFT tapping.

I’m five months out and still catching myself falling into the same old patterns. Those that both led to burnout and are symptoms of it at the same time.

But I’m slowly teaching my brain it is safe to heal now.

Hopefully you can take at least a nugget or two from what Sue and I experienced with burnout in our lives.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

(#48 ISW) Brother – Tyler Braden (cover of Brother by NEEDTOBREATHE)

Two men sit across from each other at a bar. One of them is falling apart inside. The other has no idea.

They talk about the game. They talk about work in the way men talk about work—who got promoted, who’s an idiot, how busy everything is. They do not talk about the marriage that is quietly ending. They do not talk about the father who is dying. They do not talk about the panic that wakes one of them up at three in the morning, heart pounding, certain he is failing at everything.

The check comes. They split it. They go home.

I have been both of those men.

Women, more often than not, do this differently. They call each other when something hurts. They name what’s happening out loud. They have whole groups of friends who know the specific shape of their struggle, and who check in to see how it’s going.

Many men do not have that. We have buddies we joke with. We have guys we golf with. We have coworkers we vent about logistics with. But the deeper stuff—the fear, the shame, the grief, the question of whether we’re enough—often stays locked away. Even from the people closest to us. Especially from the people closest to us.

Tyler Braden’s cover of Brother captures the cost of this. He sings that he is “face down in the desert” with “a cage locked around my heart.” Then comes the part that landed for me: he “found a way to drop the keys where my failures was. Now, my hands can’t reach that far.”

Sit with that image for a second. The keys to the cage are buried exactly where a man is least likely to go looking—under his failures—and the pile has gotten so deep he couldn’t reach them now even if he wanted to. We don’t reach toward our failures. We hide them. We bury them. We perform the version of ourselves that doesn’t need anything from anyone. And the longer we do it, the further out of reach the way out becomes.

And then we wonder why we feel so alone.

The song answers it as plainly as it can: I ain’t made for rivalry. I could never face the world alone. No man is. We are not built to be islands, no matter how many of us were taught that being a man means handling it on our own.

The cost of that training is real. It shows up as exhaustion that no weekend fixes. As a temper that flares at the people we love. As the slow, lonely sense that no one actually knows us. As the suicide statistic that we know in the back of our minds and pretend we don’t.

Another Perspective

I wanted to add one other man’s perspective about this here, so I asked Dr. JC Doornick, who writes Makes Sense here on Substack. JC has worked with men who have built their lives around being capable, being the rock, being the one who has it handled—and he has seen up close what that costs them. JC, in your work, what does it actually take for a man to drop the performance long enough to let another man see him? And what changes when he does?

JC Doornick:

Love this, Alex:

The way I read this, you’ve just described what I call the MFTPSE Default Operating System in its most lethal form. We are conditioned from birth by our Mothers, Fathers, Teachers, Preachers, Society, and Evolution to care so much about the performance of strength that we’ve lost the power of presence. This is why we teach people to “unwrap” the present moment.

In the language of the IRS (Interface Response System), most men are trapped in a loop of perpetual Reaction. We Perceive a failure as a crack in our armor, and because we’ve been conditioned to fear inadequacy and the “judgment of the masses,” we skip the Pause. We go straight to re-ACTION, burying the keys, ordering another round, and talking about the game.

We bury the keys under our failures because we’ve been taught that failures are a sign of weakness and the end of our self-worth. But failure isn’t the enemy; the Automatic Reflex to Hide is.

The cage is real, but the lock is biological. When you feel that 3:00 AM panic set in, that’s your nervous system sounding an alarm. Most men try to silence the alarm with justification, logic, or distractions. I suggest a different path: Just say “Hmmm”.

When the shame of “not being enough” arrives, don’t react. Pause. Let out a curious “Hmmm.” Observe the shame like a cloud in the sky that’s just passing on by.

Remember, clouds don’t require our permission to show up, but they do require our participation to stay.

Mastery is the moment you stop caring about being “the man” the world told you to be, and start caring about being the human you actually are. Reclaiming those keys requires a Brother, not just for the heavy lifting, but to act as a mirror. To remind you that the cage only stays locked if you keep participating in the lie that you are alone.

Make sense?

Love, JC “Dragon” 🐉

Now, your turn.

If you are a man reading this, I want to ask you something. When was the last time you called another man—not to make plans, not to argue about a game, not to ask for a favor—but to tell him you weren’t okay? When was the last time another man called you for that?

If the answer is a long time, or never, that is not because it’s weird, just not what men do, or because something is wrong with you. It is because no one taught us this. Most of us watched our fathers not do it either.

But the keys are still down there, somewhere under all of it. Your hands might not reach that far on your own right now. That’s what a brother is for. To dig with you. To be the call someone else needs. To be the one who answers when the night winds are driving on.

Brother, let me be your shelter. And let yourself be mine.

Take care of yourself,

Alex

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I used to think shame was what kept me honest.

Not in a moral sense, necessarily. More like—if I still felt bad about something I did or didn’t do years ago, then the past version of me who did it would stay vivid. Bad enough, or weak enough, or small enough, that the present version of me would have something to push against. Something to not be.

The shame was a whip. The contrast between who I was and who I wanted to be was what gave it its sting. And I cracked it on myself, constantly, to stay in line.

What it actually was, I now think, is a straightjacket.

It held me in place. It kept me small. It made sure the version of me who messed up never got too far from the scene of the crime—because forgiving him would be like letting him off, and letting him off would mean I might become him again. So the straightjacket stayed on.

The problem is that nothing grows inside a straightjacket.

The Limitation You Couldn’t See at the Time

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: most of us, most of the time, are doing the best we can with what we have. Not the best that’s theoretically possible. Not the best in hindsight. The best with what we actually had in that moment—the awareness, the emotional tools, the regulation, the model of ourselves our brains were running on.

And sometimes what we had wasn’t enough to be the person we wanted to be.

That’s a hard sentence to sit with. It doesn’t feel as clean as “I should have known better” or “I should have been stronger.” But it’s closer to the truth. If I had truly had what I needed in that moment, I would have used it. I didn’t skip past those tools out of malice or laziness or weakness of character—I didn’t have them.

That’s not an excuse. It’s a description.

Once I started seeing my past self that way—as someone limited, not someone weak or bad—something shifted. Not the regret. The regret is allowed to stay. But the whip started to feel less necessary. Because the contrast I was using to crack it—past me as the cautionary tale, present me as the corrective—wasn’t really a moral gap. It was an information gap. And you can’t whip a person into having had information they didn’t have.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean I now like what I did or didn’t do. Releasing shame isn’t the same as endorsing the behavior. It’s just taking off the straightjacket. You can still wish you had done it differently. You can still let what happened inform who you want to become. You just stop using the contrast as a restraint device to make sure you never forget.

Now, Your Turn

Think of something you’re still ashamed of. Now ask yourself: what did I not have at that point in time that I would have needed to be the person I wanted to be? Maybe it was self-worth. Maybe it was the language for an emotion you couldn’t name. Maybe it was a brain that wasn’t in survival mode. Maybe it was simply having had this conversation already.

Whatever it was, you didn’t have it. And you can’t shame yourself into having had something you didn’t have. You can, however, take off the straightjacket and grow into having it now.

That’s the trade. Not approval of the past, just freedom of movement going forward. The shame doesn’t protect anyone. It just keeps the smaller version of you frozen in place while the larger version waits, patiently, for permission to grow.

Give yourself the permission.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

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Put a bowl of food in front of a Labrador and it’s going to eat it. All of it. Doesn’t matter if the lab already ate an hour ago. Doesn’t matter if it’s full, or if its stomach starts to turn. A lab will eat until it throws up—and then it will try to eat what it threw up.

That is my brain with a to-do list.

Put tasks in front of me and my brain wants to finish them all. Right now. Not later, not in pieces, not after a break. All of them, immediately. And it doesn’t check in with the rest of me to see how that’s going. It doesn’t care that my forearms are starting to ache, that my eyes are strained, that the fog is rolling in and I’m rereading the same sentence for the fourth time. It just wants to keep going—until I’m completely fried.

And here’s the part that sounds exactly like the lab: getting fried isn’t the stopping point. I’ll work and focus to the point of feeling completely wrung out—that’s the throwing up—and my brain still wants to keep going. It wants to get right back into it, no matter what’s left of me. Push past empty, then push again. That’s the loop.

For a long time, that loop wasn’t a choice. As an attorney, my to-do list stretched three months out and grew faster than I could shrink it. I had to keep going. If I stopped, I let a partner down, or a client down, or I put my job at risk. The drive made sense. My brain was doing exactly what the situation demanded, and it kept me afloat.

But that was the programming for a world I don’t live in anymore.

I have a list that stretches months out. But no partner is waiting on me tonight. Nobody’s job is on the line if I close the laptop at a reasonable hour. The threat is gone—but my brain never got the memo. It’s still eating like the bowl might be taken away. It’s running old software that was useful once and is now just hurting me. And like any old programming, it doesn’t update on its own. It has to be retrained.

So I stopped trying to argue my brain out of it. You can’t reason with a lab at the food bowl, and I’ve found I can’t reason with my brain mid-sprint either. What works with a lab is the same thing that works with me.

You control the portions.

A good lab owner doesn’t sit the dog down and explain the long-term consequences of overeating. They measure the food out ahead of time, before the dog is in the room and the begging starts. The decision gets made by the objective owner, not the hungry dog. That’s exactly what I’ve had to build for myself.

At the start of each day, I set a hard cut-off time. Not a soft one. Not a “we’ll see how it goes.” A real line. And it doesn’t matter if I’m almost finished, or in the middle of a thought I’m sure I’ll lose. When the time comes, I stop. The whole point is that the decision was made by the morning version of me who could think clearly—not the fried version at the end who would happily keep eating until he was sick.

Then, through the day, I use timers. Timers to rest my eyes before they’re already strained. Timers to calm my nervous system with some EFT tapping before the tension has fully set in. Timers to take a real, unfocused, get-up-and-leave-the-desk break—the kind my brain would never volunteer for on its own.

The timers aren’t there because I lack willpower. They’re there because willpower is exactly the thing my brain overrides when there’s a bowl in front of it. The timer makes the decision so I don’t have to make it in the moment, when I’m the least equipped to. It’s the measuring cup. It’s the portion control.

None of this is to say I’ve got it solved. I still feel the pull when a timer goes off and I’m in the middle of something good. My brain still protests. But I’ve learned to treat that protest as the lab whining at an empty bowl—real, loud, and not a reason to give in.

Now, your turn.

If any of this sounds familiar—if your brain also wants to consume the whole list the second it sees it—it’s worth asking what protective measures you could put between you and that drive. Not to fight your brain. To care for it, the way you’d care for a dog you love but wouldn’t let make its own dietary choices.

Do the timers appeal to you? A hard stop at the end of the day? Something else entirely—a walk that isn’t negotiable, a phone in another room, a person who pulls you away?

And if you already do something that works, I’d genuinely love to hear it. Leave it in the comments. I’m always curious for new approaches, because I’m still learning how to feed this thing without letting it make itself sick.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

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For years I climbed toward—and then arrived at—a career as a patent attorney. Then a full-life burnout culminating in 2023 made it impossible to keep climbing. I left law in February and am now training as a life coach and writing this Substack, do selfish well.

What I came to over those years of unlearning is what I believe to be a biological fundamental truth: your brain is self-serving—and that’s a good thing. Your brain is connected to you and only you. Its emotions, feelings, and automatic thoughts are chemical signals doing one job—trying to keep you alive and well. This is the first foundational piece of the framework.

That doesn’t mean those signals are always helpful—the second foundational piece. Your brain runs on programming from childhood, school, media, every experience you’ve ever had. The way I typically put it is this: picture the difference between a friend who’s genuinely trying to help but might get it wrong and one who’s purposefully undercutting you. You’d certainly have different feelings towards these two friends.

Most of us have been treating our brains like the second friend. When really, it’s the first.

The deeper move underneath that is the third foundational piece of the framework—you are not your brain. There’s you (your consciousness), there’s your brain, and there’s your body. Three different things. The thoughts and feelings that arrive aren’t you. They’re information your brain is sending. You’re the one who decides what to do with it.

There’s a distinction inside that one that matters even more. Uncomfortable emotions and automatic negative thoughts—the ones that fire within a hundredth of a second of a trigger—are not in your control. Voluntary self-talk, the things you actively choose to say to yourself, is. Once you can tell the two apart, you stop arguing with your own mind for producing thoughts, emotions, or feelings you never chose.

What lives on the other side of this distinction is the irony that makes me chuckle. And it had the chat at a loss for words: A refusal to be selfish means you are selfishly depriving people of the truest form of yourself.

If you want the whole framework, it’s laid out in my three-part series, The Gateway to Understanding Your Brain:

Part 1 — Why You Must Accept That Your Brain is Self-Serving

Part 2 — Your Brain Is Trying to Help, Here’s Why It Might Fail

Part 3 — You Are Not Your Brain (And That Changes Everything)

Start there.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

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Telling someone they shouldn’t feel an emotion they feel—or that they should feel one they don’t—is the most alienating thing you can say to another person.

And it’s the most alienating thing you can say to yourself.

Because nothing is lonelier than when even you don't accept the truth of yourself. When the world rejects what you feel, at least you can come home to yourself and find someone who knows. But when you reject it too, the real you has nowhere left to go. Completely, utterly alone.

I used to say it to myself, in some form, many times a day. “There’s no reason to feel that way.” “Feel calm. Feel peace.” “Just let it go.” It sounded like the inner voice of someone who had the answers. It was actually a quiet, constant rejection of my own inner world.

None of it worked, by the way. The feelings stayed. They even intensified. And underneath them, something worse was building: the slow, lonely sense that the real version of me—the one with the wrong feelings—was something to manage and hide.

That’s insecurity. And insecurity is a very stressful, lonely place to be in.

The Sentence That Stopped the Fight

The shift, when it came, was small and concrete. It was an awareness of how exactly I rejected my emotions and then changing how I talked to myself.

If I feel it, it’s the truth, and there’s a reason for it, even if I don’t like it.

The sentence sounds too simple to do anything. But it does the only thing that matters. It stops me from arguing with my own inner world about whether my inner world is allowed to exist.

To be clear about what I mean. If I feel scared that this article won’t be received the way I want it to be, the truth is that I feel scared. The truth is not that the article won’t be received the way I want it to be. The feeling is real. What the feeling is about is just my brain’s prediction, and my brain’s predictions can be wrong.

So the sentence isn’t “everything I feel is accurate about the world.” It’s “everything I feel is accurate about what I’m feeling.” That’s the part I had spent years arguing with.

Exhibit A: This Article

I might find it ridiculous that writing this article right now feels like I’m tiptoeing through a mansion at night in a horror movie—but it’s the truth. There’s a low-grade dread sitting in my chest as I type.

And it makes sense.

I was implicitly taught growing up that my inner world didn’t have value. Only what I did in the external world had value, and my value derived from what I did. So on the old programming, what matters isn’t that these are my own thoughts from my own experiences and the value that has. What matters is how many people read this and how many people like it—things my brain has no control over.

Of course it sends fear. It’s detecting a threat that what I write will end up indicating I have low value. That’s scary.

Old me would have argued with that fear. Tried to talk myself out of it. Tried to summon confidence in its place. Today, I’m doing none of that. I’m letting the fear be here, treating it as true, speaking compassionately to myself, and writing anyway.

That’s the practice. Validate what I am feeling, explain why it makes sense, show compassion to myself, and move forward with it. This respects my inner world.

Now, Your Turn

The next time you catch yourself saying “I shouldn’t feel this” or “I should feel that” or trying to force yourself to feel differently, try this sentence instead.

If I feel it, it’s the truth, and there’s a reason for it, even if I don’t like it.

Then notice what changes when you stop fighting the feeling and let it be true.

Knowing the sentence isn’t the same as being able to use it when your brain has spent decades doing the opposite. There’s a real practice underneath it—how to sit with a feeling without editing it, how to talk to yourself with empathy when the feeling is uncomfortable, how to teach your brain another way so the feeling’s intensity decreases in the future.

I’ve put that practice together as a guide with actionable prompts and exercises for my paid subscribers, titled, Honoring Your Inner World: A Practical Framework for Stopping the Fight with Your Own Emotions. The link to the guide is behind the paywall below. And for even more reasons to become a paid subscriber, see the exciting announcement I made here and updated here, all for $1.20 for a limited time.

$1.20 Subscription

For now, just the sentence. It does more than it sounds like it will.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

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(#47 ISW) Devil I Know - Aven

The instructor says it in a yoga class. A friend says it across the table. A self-help post tosses it out like a magic spell.

Just let it go.

And every time, some part of me wants to grab the person by the shoulders and shake them. How?!? Tell me how!

Because I’ve tried. To let go of the thought that keeps popping up. The tension in my shoulders. The anxiety I no longer want to carry. And my brain, somehow, is exceptionally good at holding on while I try to let it go.

Part of why is the white bear problem I’ve mentioned before.

There’s a classic study where you tell someone “don’t think of a white bear”—and of course, that’s exactly what they think of. “Let it go” works the same way. It sounds like instruction in the affirmative, but underneath it’s really telling my brain: don’t do this. Don’t feel that. Don’t hold onto that.

So my attention goes straight to the very thing I wanted to release. My brain, having been pointed at it, does what brains do. It focuses on it. It holds it tighter.

The other part is that my brain is holding on for a reason.

My brain is always trying to help me. Every signal it sends—every automatic thought, every emotion, every tightening in my body—is information it has been programmed to believe I need to hear.

I can’t just tell the seatbelt chime in my car to turn off. It’ll keep ringing until I buckle up. My brain works the same way. It won’t release a signal until I listen to what it’s telling me or the moment it’s signaling about passes—or until I address the programming sending the signal in the first place.

And it can be really frustrating. When I know what my brain is telling me, when I’ve gotten the message, when it’s told me a thousand times before—and yet it keeps telling me—I want to scream at it. I get it! Just. Let. It. Go.

But that frustration is just one more thing my brain now has to hold. It doesn’t help anything.

If you keep hearing “let it go” and you can’t do it, nothing about you is broken.

Every human has stood where you’re standing. Trying to force your brain to release something is, more often than not, counterproductive. Sometimes impossible. Not because you’re weak—because your brain isn’t built to drop a signal it believes is keeping you safe.

What does help is the slower thing.

Learning what your brain is actually telling you, if you don’t already know. Sitting with the signal long enough to process it—reassuring yourself, soothing yourself, speaking to yourself with empathy. Asking why your brain keeps sending the same message, and listening to the answer.

And if you genuinely need to set down what you’re carrying for a while—because right now isn’t the time to process it—redirect your mind elsewhere instead of telling it to let go. EFT tapping. A mantra. A quick yoga flow that drops you back into your body.

Not letting go. Redirecting to something else. There’s a difference. Your brain can focus on the orange, not on the absence of the apple.

Now, your turn.

The next time someone tells you to just let something go—and you feel that flash of frustration because you already know it doesn’t work like that—try this instead. Get curious about what your brain is still holding.

What is it trying to tell you? What does it believe you need? Has it told you a thousand times before?

Maybe what your brain needs from you isn’t to be dismissed—it’s just to be heard.

And if you already know all the answers to the questions? Then dealing with the faulty programming is tough. You deserve some compassion.

Would love to hear your thoughts on “just let it go” in the comments.

Take care of yourself,

Alex

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For most of my life, I thought I was a truly considerate person.

I genuinely cared about the people around me. I wasn’t out to take advantage of anyone. I wasn’t plotting ways to get ahead at someone else’s expense. By any conventional measure of selfishness, I felt like I was in the clear.

And then I read a book that described being self-involved and I instantly became aware of just how often I saw the world entirely through the lens of what it meant for me (my early writing was even based on this lens).

Not maliciously. Not consciously. But consistently. A friend would share something difficult, and without realizing it, I was already filtering their experience through my own—what it reminded me of, how I related, what it brought up in me. I wasn’t absent. I was engaged. I just wasn’t fully registering them.

That’s when I recognized a distinction I think we rarely talk about—the difference between being selfish and being self-involved. And more importantly, how self-involvement in even the most well-intentioned people can limit their connection with others in a similar way that selfishness can.

Selfishness, as most of us understand it, involves some level of awareness. I am aware of you, and I’m choosing myself anyway. There’s a trade-off being made.

Self-involvement operates differently. It’s not that you’re choosing yourself over others—it’s that others aren’t fully landing in your awareness to begin with. You’re genuinely engaged, caring even, but through a filter: what does this mean for me emotionally?

That filter has a side effect that’s easy to miss: projection.

When you’re primarily processing someone else’s situation through your own emotional lens, you can start attributing your feelings to them without realizing it. A parent worries about their adult child’s decision—not because he has expressed distress, but because they find it distressing. So they treat their adult child as though he needs helping. The adult child, who was actually excited, now feels unseen, possibly worried, and maybe like they have to comfort the parent’s feelings.

And the unsettling part? The parent felt caring the entire time. That’s what makes self-involvement so hard to catch—it can look and feel exactly like connection.

Nobody flags the actions of a worried parent the way they might flag the actions of a dismissive parent who just talks about their own life. Similarly, someone immediately sharing their own experience in response to a friend sharing their struggles can come across as relatable, even empathetic. The behavior doesn’t just blend in. It gets mistaken for something good.

That’s what made it so hard for me to catch in myself. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was engaged, I was caring, I was there. I just wasn’t fully seeing the person in front of me on an emotional level.

And when the connection doesn’t deepen the way we feel it should—when the child pulls away, when the friend stops sharing—it’s disorienting. Not knowing what went wrong, or what to do differently, is its own quiet source of stress.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: when I was seeing the world primarily through the lens of what it meant for me, I was not seeing what it meant through someone else’s eyes. That gap isn’t neutral. It shapes the quality of every conversation, every relationship, every moment of potential connection.

The Antidote

The antidote isn’t trying harder to care. It’s listening differently.

Empathetic listening isn’t just being quiet while someone talks. It’s actively placing yourself inside their experience as they speak—imagining what their words would feel like from where they’re standing, not from yours. Not what their situation reminds you of. Not what you’d do in their place. What is this moment like for them.

When you start from that place, the filter shifts. You’re no longer processing their experience through yours—you’re following theirs. The parent steps into their adult child’s excitement instead of projecting their own worry. You follow your friend’s emotions instead of redirecting to your own story.

The brain naturally pulls attention back toward ourselves. That’s not a character flaw, it’s biology. But the lens can be moved. Empathetic listening is how you move it—one conversation at a time.

Self-involvement isn’t malicious. But when we’re unconscious of it, it quietly limits how fully we can see the people right in front of us—and can leave us with that disorienting feeling of not knowing what went wrong, or what to do differently. Empathetic listening is what to do differently. And seeing people—really seeing them—turns out to be one of the more meaningful things we can do.

Hope to hear your thoughts in the comments. This can be an uncomfortable one to think about, but I believe it is so important.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

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In my last article, I wrote about why some people can’t hear what you’re actually saying—how their brain’s fear of self-reflection collapses everything into black and white to avoid the complexity your perspective introduces.

I ended with a question: why does it matter so much to you that they hear it?

I’ve been sitting with that one myself. And what I found wasn’t comfortable.

When someone dismissed what I said—shut the conversation down or cherry-picked the one part where they were right—it didn’t just feel like a failed discussion. It felt like something about me had been rejected. And that stung in a way that had nothing to do with the topic.

That’s when I realized I wasn’t just expressing myself. I was needing something back.

There’s a distinction I’ve written about before between wanting and needing. When we want something, it’s a desire—a driving force, but one we can live without. When we believe we need something, it becomes all-encompassing. Survival mode. And when that need is something we can’t control—like another person’s response—that’s not a powerful place to be.

I was needing someone else to agree with what I thought and felt to feel validated. That’s a lot of power to give someone who can’t even reflect on their own inner world.

The shift for me has been learning to separate two things I used to blend together—self-expression and influence.

Self-expression is mine. It’s the act of saying what I think, sharing how I see things. It doesn’t require anyone else’s participation. The value lives in the expression itself—in the courage it takes to speak honestly. That part is entirely within my control.

Influence is different. Influence requires the other person’s openness, their capacity to receive what I’m offering and do something with it internally. As I explored in my last article, many people don’t have the emotional skills for that.

When I blended the two, every conversation became a test. Did it land? Did they change? And when they didn’t, I felt like I had failed. But my self-expression didn’t fail. It was the goal attached to it that failed—a goal that was never mine to achieve.

I still say what I think. I haven’t gone quiet. But I’ve learned to notice the moment my brain shifts from expression to expectation. The tightening in my chest when the other person isn’t tracking with me. The urge to explain it one more time, differently, as if I just haven’t found the magic combination of words yet.

That’s my signal to let go.

I say what I want to say. I enjoy the act of expressing myself honestly. And then I set it down—like a stone on the table. What the other person does with it is their work, not mine. Unless they show me they’re capable of reciprocating an emotionally aware discussion—unless they can sit with discomfort and respond with curiosity rather than armor—I release any goal of influencing them.

Now, your turn.

Think about the last conversation you replayed in your head, searching for what you should have said differently. Were you frustrated because you couldn’t speak your truth? Or because you spoke it and didn’t get the reaction your brain wanted?

Notice which one was really driving the conversation. The expression or the expectation. Because expression is always within your power. The expectation—making someone else internalize what you’ve said—was never yours to control.

Let yourself speak. And then let it go. Not because the conversation doesn’t matter. But because your peace matters more than their agreement.

I hope to read your story of that last conversation in the comments.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

Do Selfish Well is a reader-supported publication. Thank you for reading. If you would like to help support the growth of Do Selfish Well and its message to reach more people, you can:

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I used to think the problem was my delivery.

If I could just find the right words, strike the right tone, present my perspective with enough patience and clarity—they’d hear me. They’d consider what I was saying. They’d at least weigh it against their own position.

But that’s not what happened. What happened, more often than not, was that they dismissed what I said entirely. Or they cherry-picked the one part of the conversation where they were right and ignored everything else. Or they shut the whole thing down—declared me wrong and moved on as if the discussion had been settled.

For a long time, I called this stubbornness.

I don’t think that’s what it is.

To genuinely evaluate both sides of a disagreement—to hear what someone else is saying and hold it up against what you believe—requires a specific skill that most of us were never taught. It requires the willingness to ask yourself: what role are my own emotional tendencies playing in how I’m seeing this?

That question demands self-reflection. And self-reflection terrifies a brain that has never learned it’s safe to look inward. Never learned how to process an emotion once produced.

So the brain does what brains do when something feels dangerous. It simplifies. It collapses a complex, multi-sided situation into something clean and manageable. Black and white. Right and wrong. I’m right, you’re wrong.

This isn’t a thinking problem. It’s a feeling problem. The complexity that comes with genuinely considering another person’s point pulls emotion into the equation—and emotion is exactly what their brain is trying to avoid.

Complexity means sitting with the possibility that their position isn’t as airtight as it feels. It means tolerating the discomfort of not being entirely right. It means feeling something they don’t have the tools to process.

So they don’t go there. They can’t.

Instead, they hold onto the parts of the conversation where they’re clearly right and let the rest fall away. Your good points—the ones that would require them to reflect—get dismissed. Not because those points are weak. But because acknowledging them would crack the simple story their brain needs to feel safe. It would introduce shades of gray into a world their brain has made black and white on purpose.

And if your points are too good to dismiss? They shut it down. Conversation over. You’re wrong. They might get louder or they might go quiet, but the message is the same—this discussion is closed.

Not because they’ve won the argument. Because the argument was getting too close to the self-reflection they’re afraid of.

I’ve been on the other side of this so many times. Saying everything I meant to say, carefully and honestly, and watching the other person walk away more entrenched than when we started. It’s exhausting. It’s confusing. And it leaves a specific kind of frustration that lingers—the kind that makes you replay the conversation over and over, searching for what you should have said differently.

But maybe the question isn’t what you should have said.

Maybe it’s this: why does it matter so much to you that they hear it?

Sit with that one. Let me know your answer in the comments. And come back for next week’s article where I’ll discuss my answer and what I’ve done in response.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

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I’ve been measuring the success of my days by my productivity for as long as I can remember. How many tasks did I get through? How much did I accomplish? Was the to-do list shorter at the end of the day than it was at the beginning?

For years, this felt like a fair metric. It felt like it should be how I judged whether a day was well spent.

But I recently recognized something that shifted my perspective: productivity was never something I had to work for.

I don’t say that to pat myself on the back. I say it because it’s the truth of how my brain operates. My discipline, my intense focus, my drive—these are features of who I am, and in some cases, features of how my brain is programmed to protect me. Perfectionism, the need to prove my worth, the fear that slowing down means falling behind—they’ve been fueling my productivity for years.

That means I’ve been grading myself on the one thing my brain was always going to deliver.

It’s like measuring the success of a fish’s day by whether it swam. Of course it swam. That’s what it does.

So what was I actually accomplishing by tracking productivity? I was reinforcing the pattern. I was telling my brain that its worth—and by extension my worth—depended on output. And my brain, eager to feel safe, was happy to comply. More tasks. More hours. More proof that I was enough.

But I wasn’t proving I was enough. I was proving I was scared.

And I was being unfair to myself. Not unfair in the way life is sometimes unfair, but unfair in the way that only you can be unfair to yourself. I had set up a system where the thing I was measuring could never actually make me feel successful, because the bar would just move.

Finish the list and the list should have been longer. Get it done early and I should have started something else. Productivity couldn’t give me what I was really looking for, which was permission to feel good about my day.

The real question became: what would be a fair metric? What is something that I can’t naturally max out—something my brain doesn’t already hand me on autopilot?

Fun.

That’s the answer I landed on.

Fun is not my default mode. It’s when I feel most like myself, but play, spontaneity, doing something just because it’s enjoyable—these don’t come naturally to a brain programmed on structure, discipline, and getting things done. My brain doesn’t prioritize fun right now because fun doesn’t check a box. It doesn’t produce evidence of worth. It doesn’t protect me from anything.

And that’s exactly why it’s a meaningful measure.

If I can look back on a day and point to moments where I laughed without thinking about my next task, or did something purely for the joy of it, or let myself be unproductive and felt okay about it—those moments were noteworthy. That was me working against my programming, not with it. To change it.

I’m not saying productivity doesn’t matter. It does. But for someone like me, it’s the floor, not the ceiling. It’s what’s already going to happen. The challenge—the real growth—is in the other direction.

So I’m trying something new. Instead of ending my day asking “what did I accomplish?” I’m asking “when did I have fun?”

It hasn’t changed everything immediately. But it’s started to change how I recognize the days that felt full because of how I lived them, not just what I produced during them.

The discipline isn’t going anywhere. The drive isn’t going anywhere. But maybe the scorecard can change.

Now, your turn.

Think about what you’re using to grade your day. Notice whether the thing you’re measuring is something that was ever really in question for you, or whether you chose it because it feels safe. And if that metric has never once left you feeling like you did enough, consider the possibility that the metric is the problem. Not you.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

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I promised I’d tell you.

In my last article, I shared that I discovered I am a Six on the Enneagram—the type whose core fear is being abandoned, left alone, without support. The type that scans ahead, anticipating where safety might be threatened. The type whose anxiety often doesn’t come labeled with a reason, just a hum. A restlessness.

And I told you that once I could name it, I could help myself feel more secure.

So here’s how I’m doing that.

The Enneagram offered me a starting point in the form of two questions it says Sixes should sit with: What is security? When will I know I have enough of it?

I had never asked myself either one. Not once. I had spent years chasing a feeling I’d never actually defined.

So I sat down and answered them in writing.

I started by writing down that I feel safe when there is no threat to my physical health or to my mental and emotional health, but my brain laughed in my face. I had to acknowledge my reality and go with little threat instead. I feel safe when there is little threat to my physical health or to my mental and emotional health.

It’s easy for me to grasp what constitutes little threat to my physical health, and how my brain treats physical threats indicates it understands it well enough. But what exactly is little threat to my mental and emotional health?

I can again grasp the answer logically, but my brain has not shown that it knows. I needed to define that for it as well by way of examples. What qualifies? What doesn’t? What is my brain genuinely right to alarm for, versus what is it dramatically overestimating? Getting specific about that distinction gave me something concrete—an internal gauge I could actually use in the moment.

And in the moment is exactly where this matters.

When I feel that familiar tightening—the one my brain defaults to when my core fear of being unsafe gets poked—I can now check it against my definition. Does this situation actually rise to the level of a real threat, based on what I’ve decided safety means to me? More often than not, it doesn’t.

That’s when I say to myself: Safe and Secure.

And I follow it with a deep breath in and a deep breath out.

It’s my mantra. Short by design. In a moment of anxiety, my brain doesn’t need a lecture—it needs a redirect. Something it can hold onto. A simple, direct message: we are safe right now. My brain might not believe it on the first rep, or the tenth. But I keep returning to it.

I’ve also layered in Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or “tapping” meditations centered specifically on safety. Where my mantra speaks to my brain cognitively, the tapping meditations help me reinforce the same message physically and emotionally.

Both serve the same purpose: slowly, patiently teaching my brain that it is safe more often than it realizes.

And the more often it feels safe, the less often my stress response fires.

That’s the goal. And the way to get there isn’t a cure or a hack—it’s a practice of showing up for your brain with a more accurate forecast than the one it’s been running on.

A Six’s brain learned that safety couldn’t be assumed. Mine did, anyway. But what’s learned can be retaught—one small, repeated moment at a time.

And while I've framed all of this around safety—because that's what my brain needed—the approach isn't exclusive to that. Whatever your brain has learned to fear or overestimate, you can do the same work. Define the thing you want it to believe. Name what actually qualifies as a real threat. Give it a mantra to return to.

The words change. The practice doesn’t.

Safe and Secure.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

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This post is one part of a collaboration with Dan Ackers of The Adaptive Human who writes reflective essays on adaptation, ambition, identity, family, and the recalibrations that shape a life in progress. When finished with this article, I encourage you to read Dan’s essay that reflects on a different experience with the Enneagram than I had. I link to his essay at the end.

I recently discovered that I am a number six.

Not the combo meal—that would be something. The six I’m referring to is from the Enneagram, a personality typing system describing nine types each defined by a core fear, a core desire, and behaviors that follow from both. When I read through all nine, I saw myself most in two: the One and the Six.

The One—The Reformer—is principled and self-controlled, driven by a need to be good and right, and afraid of being defective. A perfectionist at their core. I recognized myself there. The high standards. The inner critic that is never quite satisfied.

But then I read the Six—The Loyalist—anxious and skeptical, prone to imagining worst case scenarios, and fiercely loyal once trust is earned, yet paradoxically struggles to trust themselves.

What made it click for me was how they are compared. Ones have strong internal standards of correctness—they’re focused on what’s wrong right now and can appear tense and self-righteous under stress. Sixes, on the other hand, rely on outside standards of correctness. They’re less concerned with what’s wrong now and more consumed by what could go wrong next. Under stress, they appear anxious and fearful.

That distinction landed hard. I am a Six.

As a Six, the Enneagram told me that my core fear is being abandoned, alone, left without support. My core desire is to feel safe and supported.

Cue the lightbulb moment. I felt an instant softening in my body that told me these words rung true.

The mysterious hum of anxiety I could never quite explain has been the restless scanning of a Six—always looking ahead, always anticipating where my safety might be threatened.

My anxiety skyrocketing to the point of insomnia must have been triggered by this core fear as well. What I remember most viscerally from the pandemic is feeling so alone and abandoned by both my city and my friends who wouldn’t see me because of their precautions. My greatest fear must then have been compounded when I began questioning what was wrong with me.

I couldn’t have explained all that then. Now I can. And I wouldn’t trade any of it.

A lot of my stress, I now understand, comes from feeling that my safety and support is threatened—real or not. Now that I know that, I can recognize it when it’s happening and help myself feel more secure. I’ll tell you how in my next article.

So What Do You Do With It?

The Enneagram is a great tool for building self-awareness. You might not be able to describe your personality in detail if I asked you right now, but you can read descriptions of personalities and see how your body reacts to them.

With the Enneagram, the idea is that you might resonate with some traits from all the personality types but you have only one core type that you remain your entire life, though you may fluctuate between levels within your core type. Like any tool, however, you can use it in whatever way works for you.

One way to use it is how I did. Find the type that resonates most and sit with it over time. Let it be a lens. Notice whether what it describes has shown up, or begins to show up, in your life now that you have a name for it.

Here’s some irony though. The Enneagram says Sixes tend to feel nameless anxiety and then seek out solid explanations to make sense of it—clinging to whatever feels trustworthy once they find it. Which might be exactly what I’m doing right now. You might not feel as strongly about a particular type as I do.

If you feel strongly about two, or even three, types and the distinction descriptions don’t resolve that, try coming up with a name for your combination. See the names the Enneagram gives the types for examples.

Another way to use the Enneagram is to see pieces of yourself in the descriptions no matter which type they belong to. This can still put words to traits you’ve always had but never named. That works too. Greater self-awareness just requires being honest about what you see.

For an example of a different experience with the Enneagram, go now to The Adaptive Human to read Dan Acker’s essay I Recognized Myself Nine Times.

However you use it, see what the Enneagram shows you about yourself and what contributes to your stress. I think you’ll learn something.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

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The plan wasn’t about the work. I didn’t know that yet. But it wasn’t.

At the time though, it felt like it was. Whenever I had a lot on my plate at work, I would map out what needed to happen to finish it all on time.

If I finished the first task Monday, I could work on the second task over Tuesday, Wednesday, and part of Thursday. Then I could finish the third and fourth tasks by the end of Friday, so that I could start and finish the fifth task next Monday by the deadline. If I didn’t finish the third and fourth tasks Friday, then I would need to work over the weekend, which I didn’t want to do because I needed that to recover.

And then like a punch to the gut landed after a flurry of jabs a new task would hit my inbox on Wednesday that had to be finished by Friday.

Angry. Frustrated. Like someone was purposefully doing this to me. Why didn’t the partner or the client know that I was already too overwhelmed to take on this new work?

Of course, no one was doing this to me. They were just doing their own jobs in the normal course of business. But I would immediately slip into this state of feeling attacked, in desperate need of a reason to reject this new work and feel safe again without feeling guilty. My ability to view the situation rationally and objectively went out the window.

Asking about the importance of the new task? Didn’t cross my mind. Asking to hand off one or more of the first through fifth tasks to make room for the new task? Never thought of it. My sole focus was fighting off the attack, not collaborating with the partner to figure out how the new task could get done.

Once I became aware of this reaction—this desperate clinging to the plan—it became clear that something bigger was at stake than deadlines or working a weekend. It felt existential in a way I couldn’t yet explain.

What I later learned was that this reaction came from a need to control, which for me is a form of my brain’s perfectionism. Control the situation, control the outcome, my brain told me, so that there are no surprises.

Because if I took another hit, the version of me that was strong and capable and had everything under control might crack—and that version was the only one I trusted people to accept. The overwhelmed version, the one who couldn’t keep up and needed help, felt like something to hide. It felt like I couldn’t afford to let anyone see that. Not even a little.

But the only way I could control the situation was with my mind. Telepathically will the partner or the client to save it for another week.

I would rigidly grip the plan like it was the one thing keeping me upright. I would wish so hard against the unexpected that I began to fear the unexpected itself—waiting for it like a fighter who knows another punch is coming but can’t see where.

And that rigidity didn’t protect me. When you’re that tense, that braced, that unwilling to bend—when the punch finally lands, it hits harder than it needed to. That’s cruel enough on its own.

But the cruelest part? The punch itself wasn’t the worst of it. That anticipatory fear—the constant bracing—didn’t just sit quietly in the background. It bled into every ordinary Tuesday. It amplified the baseline stress I was already carrying, the stress that had nothing to do with a new task hitting my inbox. I was suffering the punch before it ever landed. And then I was suffering it again when it did.

The thing is, the next punch is always coming. That’s just life. And no amount of mind control has ever stopped it.

So I’ve been working on loosening my grip—on how things need to go, how they’re supposed to go. Becoming flexible enough to move with the unexpected instead of bracing against it. Absorb and adjust. Roll with the punches. Not because it’s easy, but because the alternative—the rigid stance, the constant bracing—costs more than the punch ever did.

Now, your turn.

Notice how tightly you’re gripping a plan or a string of events in your own life right now. Notice whether you’re trying to control what other people do—a partner, a coworker, a friend—so that your plan stays intact.

And when something doesn’t go according to that plan, notice the story your brain immediately starts telling. What do you feel? Is it anger? Fear? A sudden sense that everything is falling apart? If it happens on a day when you’re already running close to empty—when you’re already stressed—notice how that changes the intensity of the reaction.

The grip makes sense. It feels like the safest thing to do. But it wears you down. Noticing it is the first step toward holding on a little less tightly.

Take care of yourself,

Alex

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