“Do it,” I said.

“But really do it. Give yourself full permission to be a greasy, slobbering degenerate! But keep letting go through that… And let’s see what’s on the other side.”

This student had already meditated, yoga’d and therapy’d himself to exhaustion. None of it had broken his years-long pattern of depressive spells. He was desperate. So, with great scepticism, but a willingness to try something drastic, he did lie on the sofa and he did sample the entire McDonald’s menu thrice over.

He called one week later and told me he was back on top of his team, back in the gym, and meeting his boss’s neuroses with a smile. But now he’d shed the “obligation layer” and found, in its absence, all kinds of reasons why his life was more aligned than he’d thought.

He actually found his boss’s psychology fascinating, and wanted to see if he could adapt to complement it. He felt his body’s natural inclination for movement. But most of all, he discovered great joy in nurturing his team—not just so they’d hit their KPIs but so they’d become better men.

He abandoned his meditation, biohacking and complex gym program. He no longer needed them because the conflict he was trying to fix had dissolved.

1. Cleaning Shit With a Smile

Another student said he meditated so much he destroyed his desire to work.

For weeks, he fantasized about escaping capitalism by becoming a monk. I recommended he visit a monastery before handing in his notice.

The monks, he found, were working harder than he was—scrubbing toilets, sweeping floors, catering for dozens—and they weren’t getting paid a cent. The monks don’t scrub toilets for personal gain. They scrub toilets as service; because it’s beneficial.

The monk who cleans shit in the morning teaches awakening in the afternoon. But that monk isn’t debating this with himself before he gets out of bed. There aren’t two selves in the monk battling it out. In fact, there isn’t even one self: the mental-emotional process we call “identity” simply isn’t running. There’s just a toilet and a brush. Then there’s a community that needs wisdom. The monk is quiet enough to respond to both on the basis of compassion, and this is a vastly more potent fuel than discipline.

2. The Two Selves Delusion

We were all conditioned to believe that we have two selves: one lazy, one disciplined. Thus, every productivity hack, every self-help protocol, and even much of meditation begins on the premise of an internal battle.

From an app founder in my research cohort:

“When I get into burnout mode from trying to be hyperproductive, then I go into release mode: give me whatever food tastes good, smoke up a little bit... Running away in some manner; give me an outlet for this anxious energy.”

No-one I interviewed wants to spend thousands a month on retail therapy or analyze their biomarkers or give 10 days at a time to meditation retreats. But they don’t know how else to relieve the pressure. And afterward, they berate themselves for taking time and resources away from their work.

Hours of cognitive capacity are being drained by the two selves delusion:

My interviewees were all high-agency people—all “doers”. They cycled through state-management protocols for years, but never considered that they could stop creating the conflict in the first place—because they never heard this was possible.

Discipline is a Limited-Time Offer

When you say “I’m procrastinating,” you identify as both defendant and prosecutor.

Dropping the hammer worked here, for a season. But you’re not struggling to get out of bed anymore; you’re at max capacity. Still, habitually, you apply the same blunt force—and the conflict occupies the only remaining capacity into which your work can expand.

3. How I Drained My Dirty Fuel

As a young adult I wanted to become the best drummer in the world.

My “first self” felt deeply inadequate. So I wanted to impress people. So I overefforted. So I stressed myself out. So I created enormous tension in my body. So I ended up in chronic pain. So, often, my first self would curl up under a blanket, indulge in cheap pleasures and hide from the world.

In the end, I couldn’t practice for 5 minutes without my back feeling like it was on fire—and it didn’t feel much better when I was in bed. Somehow, despite this, I ended up performing with celebrities. Nonetheless, “best in the world” was unlikely from the start. Unconsciously, though, I’d made “best in the world” impossible. Because even after a weekend of touring around Europe, my “second self” would feel that I should be up and doing something on Monday morning—even though I couldn’t say what that something was. This only compounded the stress, the pain, the burnout cycle until, approaching age 30, I was in crisis.

Then one day, my first mindfulness teacher—who was a monk for 8 years—asked me something I’d never forget:

“Dan, everything you do, you do because you’ll feel bad if you don’t do it. What if, instead, you start doing things because you’ll feel good when you do them?”

I realised right then that I’d conducted my entire life on the dirty fuel of negative motivations. This triggered a total collapse of identity. The musical ambition I’d clung to fell like a house of cards.

I was disintegrating a tyrannical inner government. A government that had gotten shit done, but at severe cost to my peace and my health. But as I learned to truly relax at the deepest level, a benevolent government came to rule instead. And it is vastly more efficient. No stress, no pain, no civil war, no state-management; my entire capacity free for making meaningful contributions.

Like the monk scrubbing the toilet, I now run on the fuel of compassion. And this compassion could never have filled my tank while it was filled with the stress of the battle between my two selves.

4. One Moment of Peace. Then Another…

So how do you stop the battle?

You don’t.

If you try to stop it, that’s another battle.

You only recognize, right now, whatever tension is present, and the aware space in which it comes and goes. The urge to turn all of this into something you do is your “discipline” self preparing to hammer you again.

So, once more, just recognize...

Is the awareness perceiving your tension, itself, tense? Or is it merely the space in which that tension occurs?

This is the difference between “I am tense” and “there is tension”; between “I am lazy” and “there is laziness”.

When you experience laziness as a mere mental-emotional process, it’s no longer an identity you must fight. The battle is over, if only for a brief moment, and capacity opens up. Perhaps in the next moment, you “zoom in” and identify with laziness once again. So, once again, “zoom out”.

Another founder was sceptical:

“The more ‘nondual’ you are, the less drive you have.”

Yes—less of the drive that comes from a tyrant, less of the drive that perpetuates cycles of burnout.

But in each brief moment you see that you are neither the tyrant nor its victim—in each moment you see that these identities come and go like reflections in a mirror—you free up the capacity you’ve been giving to the battle between them (even if only a little).

This is almost never a one-time insight. The recognition deepens and stabilizes as you gain evidence of its benefit in your own experience.

Even if you had a eureka moment here, you’ll catch yourself running your two selves again. My McDonald’s-eating student did, but he always returned to the simple act of recognition:

“I have only continued to gain more evidence for the safety of letting go. There is always something enormously potent on the other side of it.”

He didn’t lose his edge. He stopped oversharpening it until it went dull.

P.S. If you want to stop fighting yourself, I have one more space open for one-to-one dialogue in September. Email or DM and tell me where the conflict is. I’ll ask a few questions and tell you what the ceasefire looks like.

Ding. A potential client.

You could use the cash flow. Now you’re being sucked into a side quest while your better self pulls on the back of your collar.

…And now it’s midday. You stare at the deep work block on your calendar that just ended without your participation. As the red line approaches your clients’ names, you wish you’d never taken them on. So if you don’t want more clients, why did you lose the battle with your phone?

It wasn’t a simple failure of willpower.

You’ll Never Slay the Dragon if You Keep Hunting Deer

In March, I interviewed an app founder—we’ll call him Charlie—for research I was conducting with my wife (neuropsychologist). Charlie told us he wanted to be working on his own project: the one that’s deeply aligned yet full of challenge, risk and uncertainty. But he also wanted a quick paycheck.

“I think it kind of makes you feel trapped or helpless because there’s one part that’s trying to maximize income... And there’s another part that’s like—and this gets buried… ’I know this isn’t the right thing to do, given my actual goal.’”

We interviewed 34 more ambitious founders, leaders and builders, and confirmed that this is a pattern.

Side-questing is not laziness, lack of discipline, nor poor time management.

Charlie calculated he was losing around 60 hours per month to side-questing. But that’s just going by the clock. We all know that an hour of deep work on an “important-not-urgent” task is worth multiples more than an hour spent on an “urgent-not-important” task. Charlie saw this pattern and resolved to stop sacrificing his vision for the comfort of predictable client work.

But he only made it worse.

Charlie spent years experimenting with Wim Hof breathwork, Joe Dispenza meditations, performance coaches… And eventually, he managed a degree of focus on his main quest—but only in proportion to the time he invested in managing his state.

It wasn’t enough to move the needle. Charlie realized he’d reached a stalemate: to earn back time in his work, he had to step away from his work. And this pattern was represented strongly across our research cohort.

Adding state-management protocols to your routine was the correct strategy when you had capacity to spare:

But now that you’re established, those same protocols are occupying the only remaining capacity into which your work can expand:

“When extraneous cognitive load from monitoring, self-regulation, and secondary management systems exceeds available capacity, total cognitive processing collapses...”

—John Sweller, 1988, Cognitive Science

Many state management practices claim to be about “letting go”. But I know you’ve felt the contradiction inherent in those practices, themselves, requiring effort.

The paradigm shifts when you align with a simple but overlooked neurobiological fact: the body’s initial stress response clears remarkably quickly when left alone.¹ When stress extends beyond a few minutes, you aren’t dealing with one long stress response; you’re continuously triggering new ones:

In neuroscience, this is called perseverative cognition.² And it’s so normalized that the possibility of stopping it is severely under-represented. Our culture is severely biased toward additive solutions: when we underperform, we try to fix ourselves.

Discipline Has Become The Disease

The self-help stack that got you into momentum ran on effort and willpower, but these are inefficient fuels. They got you into orbit but they can’t get you to the moon.

The thrust you need now is only achieved when you acknowledge:

1. Stress is an autonomic sensation, not a mandate.

2. You are now mature, aligned and stable enough to simply allow stress to run its natural course and dissolve.

But you must first suspend your state-management campaign because at your level, effectiveness is no longer about doing more; it’s about doing less.

So how do you do less?

Notice what your mind is doing right now. A well-tuned psychological engine is already in first gear, trying to operationalize what I’m telling you.

Do you see the trap?

“Doing less” is not something you do. The immediate, habitual urge to turn subtraction into addition, here, is the mechanism perpetuating your stalemate. The substitute is a simple recognition: just notice whatever physical tightness or subtle urgency is present in your body as you read the word “client”.

Now, is the awareness observing that tension, itself, tense? Or is it merely perceiving tension?

This is the difference between “I am stressed” and “there is stress”.

Deepening and stabilizing this recognition—until it’s your baseline—is how you reclaim the capacity you’ve been allocating to state management:

What’s occupying that capacity in you right now? I’m listening.

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¹ NIH StatPearls / NCBI Bookshelf: Epinephrine
² Psychological Bulletin Meta-Analysis