How to Find Good Stocks

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I made a mistake like this back in 2020, with a solar panel company that isn’t even on the stock market anymore. I had heard someone mention it on a forum somewhere, and there was a lot of hype building around it. I fell into that hype and ended up buying over a thousand or so shares at a very low price, close to £13 per share. When I look back at it, I didn't do extensive research on the company, nor did I actually understand the company's goals down the line. I invested in the idea of what this company could give me in terms of profit but failed to actually look into if they could even give me that profit. What happened afterwards gave me an awakening.

My money ended up in the red because the stock was crazy volatile. Too many people were short selling it, which on its own is not the problem. The real problem was that the hype never matched the company’s actual results. The company kept on underdelivering, and once that became obvious, people started selling like crazy. I was down around £230 when I decided that was the end of my relationship with this company. And honestly, it worked out for the best because the stock kept dropping after I sold, and today it’s worth pennies.

I remembered something that A LOTTT of people do, especially beginners. A common mistake they make is panic selling the second a stock gets volatile. My advice is the complete opposite: hold, and understand why the it’s acting volatile before you react to it. A lot of the time, that volatility has nothing to do with the company and more to do with short sellers, people betting the price will fall so they can profit from the drop. Short sellers exist in every stock, and there’s nothing you can do about them. But sometimes they’re a blessing in disguise. When short sellers push the price down, they can hand you a discount on a stock you actually believe in, as long as you’ve done the homework I skipped back in 2020.

That’s really the difference between my solar panel mistake and the stocks I hold with confidence today. It’s not about avoiding the volatility altogether, because theres no way you can. It’s about knowing whether the company underneath the price swings still deserves your money.

If you want to know how I actually find good stocks to invest in these days, that’s exactly what I’m breaking down in Thursday’s post. It will be a step by step guide on picking stocks.

Misbah 🤍

Quick disclaimer: I’m not a financial advisor, and this isn’t financial advice. This is just my own experience and what I’ve learned from it. Always do your own research (or speak to a professional) before making any investment decisions.

The risks and the “early retirement” catch

The 4% rule is a great starting point, but we can’t ignore some of its blind spots, for example:

• The 30-year limit: The original study (The Trinity Study) only tested portfolios for a 30-year retirement. If you retire at 35, your portfolio needs to last 50 or 60 years. Over these periods, a 4% withdrawal rate has a higher historical failure rate.¹

• Sequence of return risk: Let’s say the stock market crashes in the first 2-3 years of your retirement. Pulling out fixed, inflation-adjusted sums forces you to sell your investments at the absolute bottom. This can permanently deplete your portfolio before it has a chance to recover.² ³

• Rigid assumptions: The original math assumed a portfolio of roughly 50% to 75% large-cap US stocks and the remainder in bonds. If your asset allocation looks different, the rule’s safety metrics change.⁴ ⁵

Adjustments I would make for FIRE

To counteract these risks, the majority of us early retirees don’t even follow the 4% rule strictly. Instead, we use safer alternatives:

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FIRE is a lifestyle and investment movement where people save and invest a huge part of their income, not the usual 10% a month we’re used to — instead it’s more like 50-70% of our income. The goal is so that we can stop working traditional jobs decades before standard retirement age. The financial independence (FI) bit refers to you having enough money saved and invested to pay for your living expenses from passive income alone, meaning you don’t need a job to survive. The retire early (RE) bit refers to us stopping working full time in our 30s, 40s, 50s, instead of our mid-60s.

You must be side-eyeing me right now, thinking “But Misbah, how do we actually get to the first step?” Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First we’ll talk about the different types of FIRE:

There are 4 popular types of FIRE:

• Lean FIRE: living on a very strict, minimal budget to retire on a smaller total savings account

• Fat FIRE: maintaining a standard or higher-end lifestyle in retirement, which does require a larger nest egg

• Barista FIRE/Coast FIRE: saving enough so you can quit your demanding career, but working a low-stress or part-time job (like at a coffee shop) to cover extra costs or health insurance

• Slow FIRE: prioritising work-life balance during the journey. Instead of saving 70% and living miserably for 10 years, Slow FIRE followers save 30% and take 20 years, enjoying the journey, taking sabbaticals, and working jobs they love along the way

Now let’s finally talk about how people aim to reach it:

1. High savings rate: saving 50% or more of take-home pay (this can be hard if you’re living pay cheque to pay cheque, so you can start off with a smaller amount, like 20-30%, or whatever works for you)

2. Extreme frugality: cutting unnecessary daily costs to boost savings (please stay clean when you do this — I have seen a couple of people maintain this lifestyle and their hygiene has gone down with it. Do keep up with hygiene and health.)

3. The 4% rule: investing heavily in low-cost index funds and assuming you can safely withdraw 4% of your total portfolio each year in retirement without running out of money

To expand on how the 4% rule works because it can be confusing, let’s imagine you retire with a £1,000,000 portfolio split between stocks and bonds:

• Year 1: You withdraw exactly 4% (£1,000,000 × 0.04) = £40,000. Your remaining portfolio is £960,000, which continues to grow in the market.¹ ² ³

• Year 2 (assuming 3% inflation): You do not calculate 4% again. Instead, you look at your Year 1 withdrawal (£40,000) and add 3% to cover inflation (£40,000 × 1.03) = £41,200.¹

• Year 3 (assuming 2% inflation): You adjust your previous year’s amount (£41,200 × 1.02) = £42,024.

Your FIRE number:

Although I did mention a £1 million portfolio in the example above, that retirement number, or better said “FIRE” number, could be anything. Because the 4% rule assumes your target retirement income is 4% of your total wealth, you can reverse-engineer the math. The inverse of 4% (100/4) is 25. If you want to find your target net worth, just multiply your desired annual retirement expenses by 25.

Desired Annual Income → Required FIRE Portfolio Size

• £40,000 × 25 = £1,000,000

• £60,000 × 25 = £1,500,000

• £80,000 × 25 = £2,000,000

• £100,000 × 25 = £2,500,000

The 4% rule sounds bulletproof on paper, but it’s got some blind spots that most people never look into before they quit their jobs. On Thursday I’ll break down where it can fail you, the adjustments to FIRE I made that you can apply to protect yourselves, and the specific UK accounts you need to actually pull this off, including where I personally still haven’t made up my mind.

References

1. Charles Stanley — What is the 4% rule for retirement income? — https://www.charles-stanley.co.uk/insights/commentary/what-is-the-4-rule-for-retirement-income-and-is-it-a-reliable-rule-of-thumb

2. Blue Spring Wealth — How long will my money last? — https://bluespringwealthcalifornia.com/retirement-savings-how-long-will-my-money-last/

3. J. Sevy — Variable Withdrawal Schemes — https://jsevy.com/wordpress/index.php/finance-and-retirement/variable-withdrawal-schemes-guyton-klinger-dynamic-spending-and-cape-based/

First, we need to make sure you have that emergency fund set up. You need at least 3 months’ worth of emergency funds that can cover living expenses. You need to make sure you’re committed to investing long term — minimum 5 years. And try to pay off any high-interest and expensive debts.

Now that that’s clear, you need to open up the stocks and shares ISA.

THE PLATFORM: I personally use Trading212, but there are many others like Vanguard and AJ Bell. I use Trading212 because there is more diversity with stocks. When you choose a platform, make sure it is FSCS protected (the platforms I mentioned are protected) — this means if the platform goes bust, your money is protected up to £85,000 (for UK-regulated platforms).

THE ACCOUNT: you can open up a stocks and shares ISA and there will be a form where you give your ID and do identification. It will ask you if you’re a US tax resident or UK resident. It will also ask you to fill out a W-8BEN form, which you can just fill out and sign — it’s a form that informs the IRS that you’re a UK resident.¹ You need it if you are going to invest in US stocks, and signing the form lowers the US withholding tax on any dividends you receive from US companies from 30% down to 15%.¹ Most UK brokers will prompt you to complete this digitally with a single click during your account setup.

STOCK TYPES: you have a wide variety of stocks you can invest in. So we have:

• Individual stocks, which are individual companies.

• ETFs — which are baskets of stocks together, for example the most popular is the S&P 500, which is 500 of the top companies in the US — so if you want to invest 500 USD in these stocks, you’re essentially distributing that 500 USD across those stocks at varying percentages.

• Bonds — which are loan agreements between an investor and a borrower (which could be the government or a corporation), and in return they promise to pay you regular interest and return your original investment when the loan expires.

• Property (REITs) — real estate investment trusts — these are companies that own, operate, or finance real estate, like shopping centres and apartment buildings.

• Lastly, cash — which is uninvested money sitting inside your stocks and shares ISA. For example, if I haven’t invested some of the money in my ISA yet, it doesn’t just sit there doing nothing — it earns interest per annum while it’s uninvested (the exact rate varies by platform and changes over time, so it’s worth checking your provider’s current rate).² Separately, there’s also a dedicated Cash ISA, which is its own ISA product entirely for money you don’t intend to invest at all — both count toward your £20,000 annual allowance.

What type of stocks you invest in is up to you. The majority of people like to do a combination of individual stocks and ETFs.

If you want the rest — how to actually screen and pick individual stocks, risk management rules, how much to invest and when, buying a stock, dividends, common questions like “can I lose more than I put in?,” and common mistakes to avoid —join the other paid subscribers who also get access to these posts.

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This set of money I have is what I like to call “f**k you” money. It is money that gives you the most important thing in life, which is freedom of time. If you want to go on holiday, you can just sell some shares. If you get ill and need to pay for private healthcare because it is quick, you can. If you get laid off from your job, you have that money to protect you in the time you find a new one. If you want to make big purchases, you simply can. If your managers and workplace are toxic, you can simply leave without needing to worry about finances. I’m telling you, money genuinely solves the majority of problems.

Let me tell you about my personal experiences with my ISA. I sold shares to fully provide for 3 trips, and partially fund 3 more, this year: 3 solo trips (Paris, Lille, Nice), 1 with my sister (Nice and Monaco), 1 with my dear friend (Spain), and 1 with my family (Oludeniz). I kid you not, I genuinely don’t worry about anything financial because I have a strong stocks and shares ISA, and I have built it from the ground up to what it is today, which is an economical powerhouse.

I really wish more people knew about stocks and shares ISAs, especially people from my generation — young Gen Z. Only around 35% of the UK population are investors; the rest rely on a poor-interest-rate savings account from the bank that grows slower than a bonsai tree. Which is why I am offering you a chance to learn from me on Thursday through my post, which will be released at 8pm, that goes through how you can start in great detail — not missing anything out — and a comment section where I am open to answering all of your questions. It is an environment where you have my unwavering attention. So please join Lazy But Ambitious so that you get the notification when the post comes out at 8pm BST on Thursday.

We shall see you on the other side.

Misbah 🤍

When we look at these outcomes, the difference is not luck, it’s simply knowing how to nap in the best way possible. Fear not. your sister here will teach you as someone with years of nap experience.

Firstly, you need to understand that sleep is not one flat state. It happens in stages, from light sleep, descending into a deep slow wave sleep. And how you feel once you wake up depends entirely on which stage you interrupt.¹ Wake up during light sleep and you feel refreshed. Wake up in the middle of deep sleep and you get hit with sleep inertia which is that thick, groggy, hungover feeling that lingers far longer than the nap you took²

This is the whole secret of napping, and it explains the two outcomes. The long but not long enough nap drags you down into the deep just in time for your alarm to yank you out of it. Once you get the timing right, that nap becomes one of the most efficient tools you have. Get it wrong and you would have been better off not napping at all.

So here is how to do it properly. The rest of this post is the exact protocol where I explain how long, when, and the one trick that makes a nap work far better than it should.

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The Dutch have a word for it: niksen; It means doing nothing, deliberately. Not meditating, which is a practice with a goal. Not resting so you can work harder afterwards. Simply being, with no purpose attached. And what looks like the ultimate laziness turns out to be one of the most useful things you can do for a working mind.

Here is why. When you stop actively focusing on a task, your brain does not switch off. It switches over. A network of regions quietly powers up the moment your attention drifts, and neuroscientists named it the default mode network, because it is what the brain defaults to when it’s not busy with the outside world.¹ This is the brain doing some of its most important background work.

While you sit there apparently doing nothing, that network is busy connecting ideas, processing what has happened to you, and making sense of your experience. It is where a surprising amount of creativity and insight comes from. This is why your best ideas arrive in the shower, on a walk, or as you drift off to sleep, and almost never while you are grinding away at the desk.² The insight needs the idle moment to surface. You have to stop looking for the answer to let it find you.

Now look at what we have done to ourselves. We have filled every gap. The queue, the walk, the wait, the moment between tasks, all of it plugged with a screen. We have deleted every one of the idle spaces the mind needs to do its background work, and then we wonder why we feel creatively empty and mentally frazzled. We have optimised away the very silence our best thinking depends on.

There is more. Constantly consuming leaves no room to process. Information goes in and in and in, and it never gets digested, because digestion happens in those pauses.³ Doing nothing is not the absence of productivity. For the mind, it is where a lot of the work quietly happens.

So how do you get good at it, because it is a skill and you have let it rust. Start small, you’re going to find it hella awkward at first. Take a walk with no podcast in your ears. Sit with a coffee and look out of the window instead of at a screen. When you are waiting somewhere, resist the phone and just let your mind wander. It will feel uncomfortable at first, even pointless, because you have trained yourself to need constant input. Sit through the discomfort. That is the muscle rebuilding.

You do not have to earn the right to do nothing by exhausting yourself first. The doing nothing is not the opposite of the work. It is part of it. The rest is where the thinking finishes.

Let yourself be idle. Your best ideas are waiting for the quiet to arrive.

Misbah 🤍

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References

1. Raichle, M.E. (2015) ‘The brain’s default mode network’, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 38, pp. 433-447. doi: 10.1146/annurev-neuro-071013-014030

2. Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M.D., Kam, J.W.Y., Franklin, M.S. and Schooler, J.W. (2012) ‘Inspired by distraction: mind wandering facilitates creative incubation’, Psychological Science, 23(10), pp. 1117-1122. doi: 10.1177/0956797612446024

3. Immordino-Yang, M.H., Christodoulou, J.A. and Singh, V. (2012) ‘Rest is not idleness: implications of the default mode network for human development and education’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(4), pp. 352-364. doi: 10.1177/1745691612447308

This approach where they go all out does not work because it treats the device like it’s the enemy. But you kinda need the device. You owning a phone is no problem, the problem is that it owns you. So don’t try to get rid of the phone or be the one getting pulled around by notifications. What you need, my friend, is a proper declutter. We’re gonna change your relationship with your phone by getting rid of everything that glues you to it. Here is a 2 week version you can put into practice starting today:

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My daily routine used to be; wake up, scroll, get ready, open up the stock market. But now instead of going on the phone straight away I give myself time to make my morning...well mine. And that is by avoiding the phone for the first hour i’m awake. Of course there is no harm checking your phone, but straight away doom scrolling is definitely a problem - it gives you constant dopamine hits and it keeps you scrolling for the whole day and before you know it your day is wasted.

From the scientific side, when you first wake up your brain is still coming out of slow-wave sleep patterns - the kind linked to grogginess and lower alertness, not full focus, so you’re already a bit foggy before you’ve even touched your phone.¹ On top of that, your body naturally releases a burst of cortisol in the first 30-45 minutes after waking, regardless of what you do.² That’s just how mornings work biologically, your body ramping itself up on its own. But if you load stressful content into that same window - emails, bad news, comparison-bait on social media - you’re stacking extra stress on top of a system that’s already ramping up by itself. so instead of easing into the day, you’re doubling down on it before you’ve even gotten out of bed.

And from a creative point of view - a lot of people find their best ideas show up in those half-awake minutes, right when they wake up or right before they fall asleep. Reach for the phone first and that window’s gone before you’ve even noticed it was there.

If you want to fix this, you need to simply avoid going on your phone for the first 10 mins waking up. I beg of you. You will feel much more refreshed doing this and you can avoid the above negatives I mentioned earlier. If you want a more practical tip; you can get one of those physical alarm clocks so that you can avoid going on your phone first thing in the morning whilst you’re still in bed.

Hope it helps and if you have any tips that have helped you, then please share them in the comments section.
Misbah ^_🤍

References

1. Marzano, C., Ferrara, M., Moroni, F., & De Gennaro, L. (2011). Electroencephalographic sleep inertia of the awakening brain. Neuroscience, 176, 308–317. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2010.12.014

2. Clow, A., Hucklebridge, F., Stalder, T., Evans, P., & Thorn, L. (2010). The cortisol awakening response: More than a measure of HPA axis function. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(1), 97–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.12.011

That is good news, because it means you do not have to wait until you are rich to feel calm. You can build the feeling of control now, at whatever number you are on. And the feeling of control is most of what you are actually chasing when you say you want more money.

On Monday I wrote about why being broke does what it does to your mind, how scarcity eats the mental bandwidth you would need to think your way out. This is the other half. This is the system that gives you back a sense of control even before the numbers change. This control will ease your anxiety.

First, we need to understand the principle. Anxiety thrives on the unknown. The dread is worst when the money situation is a vague, jumbled up mess in your head that you are too scared to look at directly. The moment you drag it into the light and read into it, it becomes a lot simpler. It is still a hard situation, but it is now a known one, and known problems are always lighter than unknown ones. Everything below is a way of turning the jumbled mess into something you can see.

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Here is the first thing you need to hear. That anxiety has nothing to do with your character. It is a documented psychological response, and understanding it changes how you carry it.

When money is scarce, it does something specific to your mind. Researchers have found that the mental strain of financial worry actually consumes your cognitive bandwidth, the same mental resource you use to think, plan and make good decisions.¹ In one study, simply getting people to think about a difficult financial problem measurably reduced their performance on reasoning tasks, and the effect was large. Being broke not only empties your bank account, it also taxes your ability to think clearly.

This is why “just budget better” is such useless advice. The scarcity itself is eating the very mental capacity you would need to budget better. You are being told to solve a problem with the exact tool the problem is jamming.

There is a second cruelty to it. Scarcity narrows your focus onto the immediate crisis. When you are worried about this week’s money, your mind tunnels in on right now and loses sight of next month, next year, the bigger picture.² It is not that broke people are bad at long-term planning. It is that scarcity forcibly shrinks your horizon down to the emergency in front of you. The mental space for long-term thinking has been taken over by the fire that needs putting out today.

And then there is the comparison. You are twenty-something in an age where everyone broadcasts their wins and hides their debts. You see the holidays, the flats, the effortless-looking lives, and you measure your messy insides against everyone else’s polished outsides. What you do not see is that a huge number of them are struggling behind the scenes, propped up by parents, drowning in credit, or simply better at hiding it than you are.

So what do you actually do with all this? The first move is not financial. Surprise surprise, it’s mental. You have to stop treating the anxiety as proof that you are failing, and start seeing it for what it is: a normal response to a real pressure, made worse by a mind that scarcity has forced. That change in mindset alone lifts some of the weight, because shame is heavy and you have been carrying it on top of everything else.

Then you protect your thinking. You make the big decisions when you are calm. You get the numbers out of your head and onto paper, where they stop swirling. You build even a tiny buffer, because a small cushion calms your mind far more than its size suggests.

Being broke in your twenties is hard, but it does not last forever. And the clearer you can keep your head through it, the faster you get through it.

Misbah 🤍

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References

1. Mani, A., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E. and Zhao, J. (2013) ‘Poverty impedes cognitive function’, Science, 341(6149), pp. 976-980. doi: 10.1126/science.1238041

2. Shah, A.K., Mullainathan, S. and Shafir, E. (2012) ‘Some consequences of having too little’, Science, 338(6107), pp. 682-685. doi: 10.1126/science.1222426

You conclude that something is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you. You just tried to fix the wrong thing buddy.

Understand what burnout actually is, because almost everyone gets this wrong. Burnout is not simply tiredness. Researchers who have studied it for decades describe it as having three distinct parts: deep exhaustion, a growing cynicism or detachment from what you do, and a creeping sense that you are no longer effective at anything.¹ Tiredness is only one of the three. A holiday rests the tiredness but does nothing for the other two.

This is the trap. You treat burnout as a fuel problem, as though you have simply run the tank empty and a week off will fill it back up. But burnout is not an empty tank. It is a signal from your mind and body telling you that something about how you are living cannot continue.

Think about it plainly. If you burned out because your workload is impossible, the workload is still impossible when you get back. If you burned out because you have no control over your days, you still have none. If you burned out because the work feels meaningless, a week on a beach does not hand it meaning. You return to the exact conditions that drained you, and so of course you drain again. The holiday paused the burnout but it’s definitely not the cure.

Researchers have found this directly. The good effects of a holiday are real but they fade fast, often within two to four weeks, and sometimes within days.² The holiday does not change anything about your job. It just removes you from it temporarily.

Now now, none of this means rest is pointless but it just means rest alone was never going to be enough. If you want burnout to go away, you have to change the conditions that produced it, not just retreat from them for a week or so. That is harder than booking a flight. It is unfortunately the only thing that works. The rest of this post is how you start.

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It was full on drowning.

The human brain evolved in a world of scarce information. Your ancestors knew a few dozen people, heard news that concerned their immediate surroundings, and went whole days without a single novel input demanding a response.¹ Your brain’s ability to handle information was built for that world. It is the same ability you are now running on a device that delivers more inputs before breakfast than your ancestors met in a month.

Here is the first thing draining you. Every time you switch tasks, even for a second, you pay a cost. You glance at a message mid-email, and part of your attention stays stuck on the email while the rest moves to the message. Researchers call this attention residue: a piece of your focus lingers on the previous task and does not fully arrive at the next one.² So you spend your whole day at partial capacity, never fully present on anything, always dragging a little of the last thing into the next.

You may think you are multitasking but what you are actually doing is switching rapidly between tasks and paying a small tax every single time. Do it a few hundred times a day, which is normal now, and the tax bankrupts you.

Then there is the sheer volume of decisions. Every notification is a micro decision. Reply now or later. Important or not. Open it or ignore it. Each one is tiny, but your capacity for decisions is finite, and it depletes as you spend it.³ By late afternoon you are not lazy or unmotivated. You have simply spent your decision-making budget on a thousand things that did not matter, and there is nothing left for the things that do.

This is why you feel exhausted after a day of no physical effort. Your attention was fragmented across hundreds of switches which depletes your energy. Your threat-detection system was pinged by every alarming email headline. None of it shows up as physical tiredness, but it is real, and it accumulates.

The answer is not to try harder. You cannot out-discipline a mismatch between this built in ancient ability and modern volume. The answer is to reduce the load.

Protect single-tasking like it matters, because it does. One thing at a time, with the other tabs and apps closed. It is how your brain was designed to work at full strength. Batch your decisions so you are not making them all day. Cut the inputs that do not serve you. Your brain will thank you for it.

Misbah 🤍

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References

1. Dunbar, R.I.M. (1992) ‘Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates’, Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), pp. 469-493. doi: 10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J

2. Leroy, S. (2009) ‘Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks’, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), pp. 168-181. doi: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002

3. Vohs, K.D., Baumeister, R.F., Schmeichel, B.J., Twenge, J.M., Nelson, N.M. and Tice, D.M. (2008) ‘Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(5), pp. 883-898. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.94.5.883

Do not blame your willpower. You are not weak. You are up against products engineered by some of the smartest people alive, whose entire job is to keep you exactly where you are.

Here is the mechanism, because you cannot beat what you do not understand.

Your brain runs on dopamine, and dopamine is not really about pleasure. It is about anticipation. It spikes not when you get a reward, but when you might get one.¹ That word, might, is everything. A slot machine is addictive not because you win, but because you could. The feed works the same way. Every swipe is a pull of the lever. Most posts are nothing. But every so often, one lands, and your brain remembers the hit and craves the next pull.

This is called a variable reward schedule, and it is the most powerful behavioural conditioning we know of.² It is why you cannot stop at one. The uncertainty is the addiction. If every post were boring, you would quit in seconds. If every post were brilliant, you would be satisfied and leave. It is the randomness that traps you.

Now add the second layer. Doomscrolling specifically pulls you toward bad news, and that is not an accident of your mood. Your brain evolved to prioritise threats, because the ancestor who paid attention to danger survived and passed on their genes.³ Bad news reads as threat, threat demands attention, and the feed knows this and serves you more of it. You are running ancient survival instincts on a machine designed to exploit it.

Understand this clearly. You are not scrolling because you are lazy or broken. You are scrolling because a hundred billion pound industry built a machine to make you, and willpower alone was never going to be enough.

So what actually works? Not deleting everything and going to a dumb phone. That is a fantasy most people cannot sustain, and it treats a design problem as a personal failing. The real answer is to redesign your environment so the machine loses its grip. That is what the rest of this post is about.

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If this happens to you regularly, you are not broken. Something specific is going on, and it is usually one of three things.

The first is cortisol timing.

Cortisol, your stress hormone, is supposed to start rising in the early morning to prepare you for waking.¹ It follows a rhythm: lowest around midnight, climbing steadily until it peaks shortly after you get up. But chronic stress shifts the whole curve. When your baseline stress is high, that early morning rise starts sooner and climbs steeper, and it can be enough to pull you out of sleep entirely. Your body is essentially firing the wake-up signal three hours early.

The second is blood sugar.

If you eat dinner early or your last meal is mostly carbs, your blood sugar can dip in the middle of the night. Your body treats a dip like a minor emergency and responds by releasing adrenaline and cortisol to bring it back up.² Those are the same hormones that wake you. So you are not waking up because of your mind at all. You are waking up because your blood sugar dipped.

The third is what happens after you wake.

This is the one people usually miss out on. Waking briefly at night is completely normal. Adults surface from sleep multiple times a night and fall straight back under without ever remembering it. The 3am problem is not the waking up. It is what your brain does with the waking.

You check the time. You calculate how many hours are left. You start worrying about being tired tomorrow. And that worry produces arousal, which is the exact opposite of what sleep requires.³ The frustration about being awake becomes the reason you stay awake. Researchers have found this loop sits at the heart of chronic insomnia where it is rarely the initial waking that does the damage, but instead it is the alarm we attach to it.

So what do you do at 3am? Do not check the clock. The number gives your brain something to panic about. If you are still awake after what feels like 20 minutes, get up, sit somewhere dim, and do something boring until you feel sleepy again. Lying in bed fighting it only teaches your brain that bed is a battlefield.

And in the daytime, work on the real causes: stress that shifts your cortisol, and eating patterns that crash your blood sugar at 2am.

The 3am wake-up that feels like a mystery is not a mystery, it’s your body sending you a message. Your job is to work out which one your body is sending.

Misbah 🤍

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References

1. Fries, E., Dettenborn, L. and Kirschbaum, C. (2009) ‘The cortisol awakening response (CAR): Facts and future directions’, International Journal of Psychophysiology, 72(1), pp. 67-73. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2008.03.014

2. Tkacs, N.C., Pan, Y., Sawhney, G., Mann, G.L. and Morrison, A.R. (2007) 'Hypoglycemia activates arousal-related neurons and increases wake time in adult rats', Physiology & Behavior, 91(2-3), pp. 240-249. doi: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2007.03.003

3. Harvey, A.G. (2002) ‘A cognitive model of insomnia’, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 40(8), pp. 869-893. doi: 10.1016/s0005-7967(01)00061-4

This has a name. Researchers call it bedtime procrastination: going to bed later than you intended, with no external reason stopping you.¹ No deadline. No crying baby. Nothing except you, refusing to sleep.

The internet gave it a better name. Revenge bedtime procrastination. The term took off in China among workers doing 12-hour days, who realised the only hours that truly belonged to them were the ones after midnight. So they stayed up. Not because they wanted to be awake, but because going to sleep meant admitting the whole day had belonged to someone else.

Understand this: you are not staying up because you love your phone. You are staying up because it is the only time nobody is asking anything of you. The scrolling is not the point. The freedom is the point.

This is why willpower advice fails here. You are not battling a bad habit. You are battling a legitimate need for autonomy that has nowhere else to go. Your brain would rather be free and tired than rested and owned.

The research backs this up. People who procrastinate at bedtime are not lazy or careless. They are usually the ones whose self-control has been drained all day by work, obligations and other people’s demands.² By 11pm there is nothing left in the tank to make the sensible choice. The same discipline that got you through the day is exactly what is missing when you need it to put the phone down.

And the cost compounds. You sleep less, so tomorrow drains you faster, so tomorrow night you need the revenge hours even more. It is a loop that tightens the longer you run it.³

The way out is not more discipline, it is a full on redesign. In the rest of this post I will give you the exact system I use: how to reclaim time earlier in the day so your brain stops demanding it at midnight, how to build a shutdown routine that requires zero willpower, and the one rule that makes your evenings feel longer without touching your sleep.

Read more

And someone is disappointed. They’re certainly not quiet about it. They make it known, with comments and silences and the particular energy of someone who expected something from you that you are no longer prepared to give.

You feel the guilt. The pull to explain yourself, to soften the change so they can still recognise you. The nagging question of whether growing is worth the disruption it causes.

It is.

Growth Means Changing. Some People Preferred the Old Version.

Personal growth involves multiple mental shifts over time, including self-awareness, openness to change, existential courage, and increasing autonomy, all moving a person toward authenticity and life satisfaction.¹

Growth means becoming more self-directed, more aligned with your own values rather than the ones expected of you. That process is inherently disruptive to the people around you, because they built their relationship with you on the version that existed before. Some people will grow with you. Others won’t. And those who won’t will often experience your change as a kind of rejection, even when it has nothing to do with them.

Why Their Disappointment Feels Like Your Problem

From a very early age, most of us learn that disappointing people is dangerous. Over time we internalise the lesson: keep people comfortable, manage how others feel about you.

Autonomy-connectedness, the psychological capacity for self-governance, is positively associated with self-esteem and better mental health. Those with significant autonomy deficits show consistently low self-esteem and high levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms.² The people most likely to shrink back when others are disappointed are often the ones whose sense of self is most tied to other people’s approval.

But their disappointment is not feedback about whether you are doing something wrong. It is information about what they expected from you. Their expectations are not your obligation.

What They Are Actually Disappointed By

It is usually one of three things. They benefitted from the old version of you — the one that always said yes, always showed up, always made yourself available at your own expense. Your growth holds up a mirror they didn’t ask to look into, highlighting something in their own life they haven’t addressed. Or they are genuinely losing something, and the grief in that is real.

None of these three things is a reason to stop.

On the Guilt

The guilt is real, and there is nothing wrong with feeling it. What matters is what you do with it.

Guilt that prompts you to communicate thoughtfully, to hold space for other people’s feelings without reversing your decisions, that is useful. Guilt that causes you to abandon your growth to keep the peace is not something to obey.

You are allowed to change. You are allowed to grow into a person that some people find harder to deal with. The people who are meant to be in your life will catch up. The ones who can only love the version of you that stayed still were never really loving you. They were loving your compliance.

Keep going.

Misbah 🤍

References

1. Maurer, M., Maurer, J., Hoff, E. and Daukantaité, D. (2023) 'What is the process of personal growth? Introducing the Personal Growth Process Model', New Ideas in Psychology, 70, article 101024. doi: 10.1016/j.newideapsych.2023.101024.

2. Kunst, L.E., van Assen, M.A.L.M., Clouth, F.J., Hunt, C., Abbott, M.J., Maas, J. and Bekker, M.H.J. (2025) ‘Who cares what other people think? A longitudinal investigation of the role of autonomy-connectedness in self-esteem change trajectories and instability’, Cognitive Therapy and Research, 49(6), doi: 10.1007/s10608-025-10604-2.

And you feel the doubt try to get in. It’s like a small shift, a moment where you were certain about something and now you’re slightly less certain. You carry it home. You turn it over. You let it take up space in your head that it didn’t earn and doesn’t deserve.

The question isn’t whether other people’s doubt will find you. It will. The question is whether it finds anywhere to land.

Why Other People’s Words Get Through

The reason negative comments, subtle digs, and other people’s projections land so hard is not because they’re true. It’s because of how our sense of self is constructed.

Most people’s self-concept, their internal picture of who they are, is more fluid and approval-dependent than they realise. Research shows that self-concept updates are strongly driven by social feedback, with people selectively integrating feedback that is congruent with their existing self-view while moderately favouring positive feedback to maintain a positively biased self-concept.¹ In plain terms: your brain is constantly taking in information from other people and using it to update how you see yourself. When that process is working well, it’s selective. You integrate what’s true and filter out what isn’t. But when your sense of self is shaky or unclear, the filter weakens. Almost anything gets in.

This is why some periods in life make you more vulnerable to criticism than others. When you’re uncertain about a decision, transitioning, or going through something difficult, your self-concept is less stable, and negative input hits harder. This is the natural consequence of being in this flux.

The Thing That Actually Protects You

The research on what makes people genuinely resilient to negative social input points consistently to one thing: self-concept clarity, knowing clearly and stably who you are.

High levels of self-concept clarity are associated with higher subjective wellbeing, lower levels of anxiety and depression, and greater emotional stability.² And crucially, when your sense of self is clear and stable, you become naturally more resistant to external attempts to destabilise it. Not because you’ve built walls, but because there’s simply less room for other people’s projections to take root.

Think of it this way. A seed can only grow in soil that’s receptive to it. When someone plants a doubt about you, whether through a comment, an implication, or an act of subtle undermining, it only takes hold if there’s uncertainty there for it to feed on. A person who knows themselves clearly doesn’t give it that ground.

This is where we get into the specific practices, how to actually build self-concept clarity, what to do in real time when a negative seed lands, and how to distinguish between feedback worth taking on board and noise worth releasing. If that’s worth a coffee a month, I’d love to have you inside. 🤍

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Twenty minutes pass. You put your phone down. You feel vaguely unsettled, maybe a little restless, maybe slightly worse about your own life than you did before, and you’re not entirely sure why.

This is what it costs to be constantly in other people’s business.

The Attention You’re Giving Away

Attention is finite. Every minute you spend tracking other people’s lives is a minute not spent on your own. This sounds obvious, and yet most of us dramatically underestimate how much mental energy goes into monitoring what everyone else is doing. Not just on social media, but in conversation, in the mental space we give to other people’s choices, opinions, and circumstances.

Research shows that on average, a person spends an hour per day talking about others.¹ That’s before you add the passive consumption which includes the scrolling, the checking, the quiet background hum of keeping tabs. The cumulative cost of all of that attention redirected away from your own life is huge. And most of it produces nothing useful. It doesn’t make you more informed about anything that matters to you. It doesn’t help you build anything. It just keeps you oriented outward, towards other people’s timelines, when your own is sitting there waiting.

What Minding Other People’s Business Actually Does

It keeps you in a state of comparison. Whenever individuals are confronted with information about others, they relate it to themselves. Social comparison is a fundamental psychological mechanism that affects judgements, emotions, attitudes and behaviour.² The more information you consume about other people’s lives, the more material you have to compare yourself against. And comparison, as we’ve already established, is not a neutral activity. It distorts how you see your own progress, your own choices and more importantly your own life.

It also creates a kind of mental noise that makes it harder to hear yourself clearly. When you’re constantly processing what everyone else is doing, there’s very little quiet left for figuring out what you actually want. Other people’s paths start to feel like data points about what your path should look like which is a problem, because their path has nothing to do with yours.

What You Get Back When You Stop

Those pursuing self-concordant goals which are goals that align with their own values and interests rather than external pressure, put more sustained effort into achieving them and reap greater wellbeing benefits from their attainment.³ The condition for self-concordant goals is that you actually know what you want, that you’re oriented towards your own life clearly enough to pursue it authentically.

That clarity is much harder to access when you’re perpetually absorbing everyone else’s. Minding your own business isn’t just about being less nosy. It’s about creating the conditions in which your own goals, your own instincts, and your own version of a good life can actually surface and be heard.

When you stop tracking other people so closely, things change. You become more genuinely curious about your own path. Less distracted by what everyone else is doing. More able to notice your own progress rather than measuring it against someone else’s highlight reel.

What It Looks Like in Practice

It’s not about becoming indifferent to the people around you. You can care about someone’s life without monitoring it. You can be interested in people without keeping tabs. The difference is in the energy and intention behind it; whether you’re engaging because it enriches you, or scrolling because you can’t stop.

A few small things that make a real difference:

When you catch yourself checking up on someone out of habit rather than genuine care — STOP. Ask yourself what you’re actually looking for. Often the answer reveals something about your own life that’s worth more attention than whatever you were checking.

Reduce the passive consumption. Not everything. Just enough that your attention has somewhere quieter to land.

When conversation turns to what someone else is doing, what they have, or what they’re up to, notice how much space it takes up. Notice whether any of it serves you.

Then redirect. To your own work, your own goals, your own life. Not because other people don’t matter, but because yours does too, and it doesn’t get the attention it deserves when you’re always looking sideways.

The Power Is in the Redirect

There is something powerful about a person who is focused on their own lane. Not reactive to every move everyone else makes. Not measuring their progress against someone else’s. Just building what’s theirs to build.

That focus is a choice, and it’s available to you every time you decide to redirect your attention from what everyone else is doing to what you’re doing.

Mind your own business. Not as a dismissal but as a practice.

Misbah 🤍

References

1. Pan, X., Hsiao, V., Nau, D.S. and Gelfand, M.J. (2024) ‘Explaining the evolution of gossip’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(9), p. e2214160121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2214160121.

2. Liu, D., He, B., Feng, R., Huang, X. and Liu, G. (2024) ‘How social media sharing drives consumption intention: the role of social media envy and social comparison orientation’, BMC Psychology, 12(1), p. 157. doi: 10.1186/s40359-024-01627-7.

3. Sheldon, K.M. and Elliot, A.J. (1999) ‘Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: the self-concordance model’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), pp. 482–497. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.76.3.482.