I love curating a list of habits to try, instead of suggesting doing a one big reset. You can use these to break up your routines and try something new, or just ways of paying attention to a season that moves faster than we usually admit. Here’s what I’m trying.

Rebuild Your Morning Slowly

We love to try to rebuild our morning routines all at once, by setting an earlier alarm, adding movement, or journaling and it must be on a Monday. But it never makes it past day three. Our brains don’t read ten changes as identity, but it does find them overwhelming and this is where elaborate 5 AM morning routines end.

This year I’m adding one piece back at a time instead. A slightly earlier alarm for a week, nothing else. Then, once that feels normal, one more thing. It’s slower than you'd like, but you get to actually noticed which parts of a morning routine make you feel ready for the day, instead of which parts just look great on social media.

Keep One Summer Ritual

I always miss summer when the seasons change, the light especially, but also the pace of it. So this year I’m picking one thing I loved and keeping it going, even as the calendar fills back up. For me it’s walking outside, even once it’s cold enough that I need a jacket for it.

It has to be small enough that it doesn’t ask much of me, or it won’t survive the first busy week. But it also can’t be nothing, or autumn ends up feeling like summer just disappeared overnight. You get to decide which part of the season gets to stay.

Create a Landing Routine

I used to walk through my front door still holding the entire day, the email that went unanswered, the conversation that went sideways and sit down to relax while my nervous system was still running the last meeting. Now I give myself a small routine for the moment I get home.

Changing my clothes, putting my bag away before I open my laptop again or doing a task for the house. These sound small enough to skip, but they’re the signal my brain actually uses to register that one part of the day has ended. Without that signal, the day just keeps running in the background.

Track the Almosts

I used to measure my weeks by what I finished, which meant everything I almost did just disappeared. Things that you tried to do and almost finished, but because it didn't get crossed off your to-do list, it didn't count.

This month I’m writing those down for a week, just to see what’s there. They’re not failures and I’m trying not to read them that way. They’re the clearest evidence I have of where the friction in my life is actually happening, in places a to-do list will never show me, because a to-do list only tracks what I did, not what I kept almost doing.

Have a Weekly Reset Hour

Our brains also don't know the difference between an unanswered message and an unfinished project. Both just register as something still open and take up space whether we're actively thinking about them or not.

So once a week, set aside one hour for whatever’s been sitting there. Messages you've been avoiding, small admin, things in your house that you keep walking past. It’s not really about productivity, but giving your mind somewhere to put things down, so they stop taking up space you could be using for something else.

Give Your Evenings a Job

Also, if you're like me and like to sort activities into categories of productive or restful and then judge yourself depending on whether you ended up resting, this is a great way to overcome that guilt.

Decide in advance what each evening is actually for. One for friends, one for movement, one for doing nothing at all, on purpose. Once an evening has a job, there’s less room for that low hum of guilt that shows up when you feel like you should be doing something else with it. The evening isn’t wasted, it was always meant to be spent that way.

Start a “Later” List

Things can also start to feel more urgent, because there are suddenly so many things you could start. New season, everyone is back at work demanding things from you, maybe a conversation gives you new ideas about who you could be if you just began now. And most of them are worth having, but not all of them need to become a project.

So keep a running list instead, of ideas and habits you want to come back to. Most of what’s on mine never gets started and this list isn’t a plan. It’s proof that a good idea doesn’t have to turn into another commitment the moment it shows up.

Create a Restart Threshold

When I fall out of a habit, the habit was never actually the hard part, the negotiation with myself afterward was. Did missing two days mean I’d failed? Did missing four mean I should just wait until next month and call it a fresh start instead?

Now I decide the threshold before I need it. One missed workout is normal, two means it goes straight back on my calendar, no discussion. Having the rule already made removes the version of me that tries to talk her way out of restarting.

Keep a Curiosity List

I used to turn every “I wonder what would happen if” into a project before I’d even finished the thought, which made curiosity start to feel expensive. If every interesting idea has to become a commitment, it becomes hard to keep up with it all.

So I recommend writing them down instead and take some time away from it. Once a week, you can revisit the list and pick one thing to actually explore for twenty minutes, nothing more. It gives your curiosity somewhere to go without asking every passing thought to justify itself first.

None of these are meant to be added to your own routines all at once. But the habits worth keeping are usually the ones you build slowly enough to actually start noticing a difference. Sometimes you need to do a full reset and other times it's fun to add one or two new things, to change your routine.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

Sometimes we can go through seasons that don't match the calendar. It can be the middle of August and you're still in your winter, with nothing blooming yet and you're not sure anything will be again. So if you too had an existential summer, I hope this can give you at least some words of comfort.

What I Didn't Expect

Nobody warns you that this kind of reflection comes with grief attached to it. I thought questioning things would feel clarifying, maybe even exciting, the start of something new, but it can also feel like loss. Because when you start to outgrow the identity you built your life around, you don’t get to keep the comfort of it while you figure out what’s next. You lose the certainty first and the new thing hasn’t arrived yet, so you’re just standing in the gap, missing who you used to be and not yet trusting who you’re becoming.

It Feels Like Instability

When identity shifts your sense of self isn’t some fixed idea in your head, it’s closer to a habit, built from years of repeated thoughts, decisions and roles you’ve played until they felt automatic. When you start questioning that identity, your brain doesn’t experience it as growth, but as instability. Research on identity-based change points to this exact pattern: real change rarely feels like momentum at first, it feels like disorientation, because the brain is still running old predictions about who you are, while your actual life has started moving somewhere else.

That’s the part nobody tells you about outgrowing something. You expect it to feel like excitement, relief, or like finally something different is happening. And instead it is grief, since you’re mourning a version of yourself that worked, even if she doesn’t fit anymore. You’re allowed to miss that version of yourself too, you built a whole life around it.

Don't Rush The In-Between

It can be tempting to resist that grief, especially when it's summer and I've been seeing everyone living it up on social media. I wanted the reflection to hurry up and turn into a plan. But it doesn’t work like that and pushing through it faster doesn’t get you there faster, it just means you arrive without having actually done the work of leaving the old version behind.

What I’m learning is that the reflective seasons are not the interruption to the growth. The discomfort of not knowing who you are anymore isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong, it’s usually a sign that something real is happening underneath, even when it doesn’t look like progress from the outside. You don’t get to the other side of an identity shift by avoiding the mourning part. You get there by letting yourself feel stuck for as long as it actually takes.

If You're In It Too

If you’re in your own version of this right now, an internal winter in the middle of everyone else’s summer, I don’t think you need to fix it or rush it. I think you need permission to be in it. To miss your old life without that meaning you made the wrong choice by leaving it. To not have arrived yet and let that be okay for now.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

I hadn’t decided to go back to it. My body just did it, the way you slip into an old habit without registering that you made a choice at all. If you’ve ever tried to build a different life and found yourself circling back to the version of you that already knows how to survive stress, you know how this feels.

Is it just old thinking?

I've been sitting with a lot of self-doubt lately, mostly worrying about the future and things that are not that easy to control. Change has felt harder to reach and I’ve caught myself wondering whether that’s old thinking patterns resurfacing or just plain anxiety about not knowing what’s ahead. Some days I can’t tell the difference and maybe there isn’t one. Maybe the uncertainty just keeps stirring the old thinking back up and I can’t tell anymore where one ends and the other starts.

Looking for the secret ingredient

What I've noticed when I'm in this negative mindset is that I tend to look for answers outward. As if reading another self-help book, or listening to a podcast episode will finally help make it all click and the change I want will arrive fully formed, overnight. As if there’s a secret ingredient someone else already has and I just haven’t found it yet.

There isn’t one. I know that and I still do it.

Why the brain reaches for what's familiar

During stress and uncertainty our brains tend to reach for whatever is most familiar, because a known pattern feels safer than an unknown one, even when the familiar thing isn't actually serving you anymore. Your nervous system isn't interested in whether the old routine is good for you. It's interested in conserving energy and avoiding the unknown and an old pattern, however outdated, costs less than building something new. That's what our brains are built to do when it senses threats, even vague, unnamed kinds like the ones we carry around about our future.

The gap between who you are and who you've become

This is where the gap opens up. You keep performing the routines of who you used to be, because they’re the ones your body already trusts, while some other part of you has already become someone different. You’ve had the insights but your habits haven’t caught up yet. But habits aren’t built on insight, they’re built on repetition and repetition takes far more energy than a moment of clarity ever will.

So change isn’t just wanting something different or understanding why you’ve been stuck. It’s the less impressive work of doing the new thing over and over, on days when you have nothing left to give it, until your nervous system stops treating it as a threat and starts treating it as normal. That takes patience most of us aren’t prepared to spend, especially when we’ve been raised to believe that real change should feel dramatic and immediate, one big decision rather than a hundred small, miniscule ones.

What needs to happen instead

So if you’re in a season where you keep reaching for one more resource before you finally act, it might be that some part of you is still waiting for permission to be someone new and no book or podcast can hand you that. Only doing the new, uncomfortable thing enough times can.

I don’t have this figured out. I still catch myself reaching for old routines when things get hard and some days I let myself have it, because forcing change while you’re already stretched thin rarely works either. But I’m recognising that it is my nervous system doing what it knows how to do. The work is noticing it and when I have the energy, choosing something different anyway.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

Preparation isn’t progress

I’ve spent far too much time believing I was making progress because I was preparing so well. Reading another book, watching a lecture video, or saving an idea felt like movement. Looking back, I can see I was often delaying the uncomfortable part, which was actually beginning.

Preparation feels rewarding because we’re still moving toward the goal, just without the risk of failing. It gives us the sensation of progress without asking us to risk anything. Eventually I had to admit that knowing more wasn’t the thing I was missing, but experience was.

Only productive months count

I also like to measured a good month by how much I managed to fit into it. If my calendar was full and my to-do list was getting shorter, I felt like I was using my time well. But not every month has to prove something.

I want to remember that a month can also be successful because I spent time with people I love, looked after my health, or enjoyed an afternoon without wondering what else I should have been doing. Some months are meant to be busy and some just lived.

Rest needs to be earned

I’ve noticed that I still catch myself thinking, I’ll rest when I’ve finished this. The problem is that the list keeps growing, so the moment never really arrives.

Research suggests our brains are much better at noticing unfinished tasks than completed ones, which is why there always seems to be one more thing asking for your attention. Rest isn’t something I’m earning after work. It’s what allows me to come back with enough energy to think well in the first place.

Collecting ideas instead of using them

I love learning, but I’ve realised there’s a point where collecting ideas starts replacing using them. My saved folder is a place full of potential rather than practice.

I don’t think I’ve ever changed my life because I saved a quote. The changes happened when I picked one idea, however ordinary it seemed and gave it enough time to become part of how I actually lived.

Predicting every outcome

I used to think overthinking meant I was being responsible. If I considered every possible outcome, maybe I could avoid making the wrong decision. What I was looking for was certainty and life rarely offers that.

I’ve found that most of the confidence I have today didn’t come before making a decision. It came afterwards, because I slowly learned that I could handle whatever happened next.

Familiar isn’t always right

Sometimes I tell myself something feels right, when what I really mean is that it feels familiar. Our brains naturally prefer what’s predictable because it’s easier to process, even when it no longer fits the life I’m trying to build. I’ve started asking myself whether I’m choosing something because it’s genuinely right for me now, or because it’s what I’ve always known.

Not everything has to be useful

One of the hardest habits I’ve been trying to unlearn is feeling like every interest needs to justify itself. Reading has to teach me something, a A walk has to become exercise, or that I should only take photos for content.

I have forgotten that enjoyment is reason enough. Creativity grows when it isn’t constantly producing something in return. It can just be.

Future me was never coming

I used to imagine there was a version of me somewhere ahead who would finally feel ready. She was more confident, disciplined, healthier and somehow life would properly begin once I became her.

I’ve realised that version of me only exists because I keep moving the finish line. The person I’m waiting for is built through the decisions I make today, not through waiting until I feel different first.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

Follow Your Curiosity

Lately I’ve been noticing how often I only learn things because they’ll be useful later. I’ll read a book because it’ll make me more knowledgeable, or watch a video because it might improve my work somehow, always looking for the return before I’ve even started. My curiosity has turned into another form of productivity, something I had to justify before I let myself do it and even rest started to feel like it needed a purpose attached to it.

This month I’m giving myself permission to follow one rabbit hole every week with no end goal, the way I used to learn before anyone asked what it was for. I’ve noticed that the ideas I actually remember are never the ones I studied on purpose, but ones I fell into by accident and followed because they interested me.

Delete Before Saving

Anyone else needs to clear out their camera roll this month? I’ve collected hundreds of saved posts over the years and most of them have become digital clutter rather than inspiration. Simply saving information can trick the brain into feeling like we’ve already done something with it, so the idea sits there unread while we go looking for the next one to save. I have no idea what's in my saved folders, which tells me the saving was never really about the content.

So for every new idea I save this month, I’m deleting an old one. It forces me to actually decide whether something still matters, instead of letting it disappear into a folder I’ll never open again. There’s a small discomfort in deleting something I once thought I needed, because it’s the same instinct that keeps us holding onto ideas we’ve outgrown, just because letting go feels like losing something.

Go on an Artist Date

I used to feel guilty doing things that didn’t immediately become content. Visiting a museum, or sitting in a café with my notebook, felt like it needed to justify itself somehow, as if creativity only counted when it was documented. I’ve been thinking about re-reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron again, mostly because I forgot how much permission that book gives you to do nothing productive with your attention.

This month I’m making space for things that refill my creativity before I ask it to create anything in return. When we’re constantly outputting, we run on the same well without ever filling it back up and then we wonder why the ideas stop coming or start feeling forced. An artist date works more like feeding the part of you that notices things, so it has something to draw from later.

Do Daily Yoga

I’m also doing yoga daily as a challenge, mostly to stretch and relax. It helps my nervous system settle and sleep come more easily and I’m only paying attention to consistency. Most days it’s fifteen minutes on my mat before bed, just enough movement to remind my body it’s allowed to soften.

I’ve noticed how stiff my body feels after sitting at a desk all day working and then lifting weights at the gym and how much tension builds up without me noticing, until I finally slow down enough to feel it. It’s strange how disconnected we can get from our own bodies while still living in them every day. What matters here is showing up daily rather than how deep I stretch, because it’s the repetition, over time, that eventually teaches my nervous system it’s safe to relax.

One Boring Evening

I’ve become so used to filling every free hour that doing nothing can feel deeply uncomfortable. The moment a gap opens up in my evening, I reach for something to fill it. I picked up the belief that unstructured time is time being wasted, when really it might be the only time that’s actually mine.

But boredom has always been where my mind starts making unexpected connections, the ones that never show up when I’m actively trying to think. Instead of treating every evening as an opportunity to catch up on something, I’m leaving one completely open each week and seeing what pulls at my attention.

Old Fascinations

There are parts of ourselves we leave behind because they stop feeling useful. We grow out of them without really deciding to and then one day we notice the space where they used to be. I’m choosing one thing I used to genuinely enjoy and spending time with it again this month.

Identity gets built from what we keep choosing to do and sometimes rebuilding it means going back for a piece we left behind rather than reaching for something entirely new. For me that’s picking up a sketchbook I haven’t opened since university, mostly to see if I still enjoy it or if I only miss the person I was when I did.

Keep a Friction List

Instead of tracking habits this month, I’m writing down every tiny thing that annoyed me during the day. None of these things feel worth mentioning on their own, which is exactly why they’ve been sitting unresolved for so long.

Most of us think stress comes from big events, but it often accumulates through tiny moments of friction we never bother fixing because none of them feel urgent enough by themselves. Written down, they stop being background noise and start looking like a list of small, fixable things.

One Small Upgrade

Every week, I’m improving one tiny part of my life I’ve been tolerating for too long, taken straight from that friction list. For example, I need to upgrade my desk chair, because it's uncomfortable and not made for sitting in all day.

Tiny improvements reduce background stress more than we realise, because the brain stops repeatedly registering the same unresolved problem every time it crosses our path. Fixing something doesn’t feel like much on its own. But a mind that spends less energy cataloguing thirty small annoyances a day has more room left for everything else, including the things we actually want to be thinking about.

August has always felt like a threshold to me, the month before things reset again, even when nothing on the calendar actually changes. These habits will help you pay attention to what’s already been asking for space.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

Where Else It Shows Up

It shows up everywhere. A slightly off meal turns into a day of not caring what you eat at all and the not caring doesn't stay contained to food either, it bleeds into whatever else you had planned for the day. There's no room in your head for a version of the week that includes one missed morning and four good ones. It's either the streak or nothing, either the plan exactly as written or no plan at all. And each time you end up at nothing, it feels less like a choice and more like the only place left to go, because the good version has already been ruined.

Calling It High Standards

I used to think this was just how my standards worked, I have high expectations. It took years of watching this happen the same way, in the same shape, across completely different parts of my life, before I asked a different question. Not why do I have such high standards, but why does my brain reach for the same extreme conclusion every single time, regardless of what actually happened.

The Route Your Brain Has Already Built

This kind of thinking isn’t a personality trait or a flaw in your character. It’s a pathway and they are built the same way as habits, through repetition. Every time your brain jumps from one missed thing to the whole thing is ruined, it isn’t making a fresh judgment. It’s following a route it has taken so many times that the route has become the fastest one available.

In your brain, the connections between those thoughts have been reinforced enough that they fire together automatically, the same mechanism that makes a habitual route home feel effortless compared to a new one. All or nothing thinking is a shortcut your brain built because you used it, over and over, until it stopped requiring effort at all.

Why Knowing Better Isn’t Enough

This is also why it’s so hard to argue your way out of. You can know, logically, that missing one morning doesn’t undo four good ones. That knowledge sits in a different part of the brain than the one running the shortcut and the shortcut doesn’t care what you know.

What actually changes it is the same thing that built it in the first place: repetition, but in the other direction. Each time you notice the extreme conclusion arriving and choose, even briefly, to sit in the middle instead, missed the morning and still went for a walk in the evening, off on the plan and still made a reasonable dinner, you’re not resisting your nature. You’re wearing a new path into ground that’s been walked one way for a long time. It doesn’t feel as natural at first, because it isn’t yet.

If This Sounds Familiar

If you recognise this pattern in yourself, I don’t think it means you’re too hard on yourself, but that your brain found an efficient route a long time ago and has been using it since, probably because at some point, all or nothing felt safer or clearer than the mess of partial effort. What you can do is notice, the next time one thing goes sideways, that the whole day hasn’t actually gone with it. That noticing is the beginning of a different path.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

For a while I thought the problem was time. That if I could just find two hours instead of one, it would all click into place. But the real problem wasn’t the hour. It was that I’d turned self-care into a second job, one that followed me even into the parts of the day that were supposed to be relaxing. I was managing my rest the way I used to manage my calendar at work and rest doesn’t respond well to management.

The all-or-nothing trap

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the belief that we need to show up fully for every part of our lives at the same time. Journal AND read AND move your body AND protect your friendships AND build the thing you actually care about, all in the same day, ideally before 9am. It sounds like ambition. What it actually is, is a condition for failure that we’ve disguised as self-improvement.

When you hold that many competing priorities at once, you don’t become more disciplined. You become more anxious. Your nervous system doesn’t experience five good intentions, it experiences them as five demands and it responds the way it would to any demand it can’t meet: by shutting down or checking out. The scrolling isn’t a failure of willpower. It's what happens when I gave my brain more than it could hold and asked it to hold all of it right now.

That word, today, is doing more damage than we give it credit for. The assumption that it all has to happen today, that anything left undone by midnight is a day wasted, is the actual problem.

Living in cycles instead of days

What helps is a longer timeline. Instead of trying to fit everything into every single day or even every week, I’ve started thinking in cycles, two or three weeks at a time. One cycle might be about movement. The next might be about writing. The one after that might just be about sleep, if that’s what the season is asking for.

This lines up with how the brain actually works. Research on habit formation highlights the same finding: sustained, focused attention on one thing builds stronger neural pathways than constant switching between many. Your brain gets better at what it repeats. The thing you step back from for a cycle is waiting, not being neglected and more often than not, when you come back to it, it feels easier to pick back up than it did when you were trying to force it in alongside everything else.

What actually makes a habit stick

Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough: the habits that compound aren’t the ones you do every single day without fail. They’re the ones you return to consistently over time, even with gaps, or imperfectly. Consistency and frequency get treated like the same thing and they’re not. You can miss four days and still be consistent, if you keep coming back.

So when you’re deciding what to do with that one free hour, the question isn’t “what should I be doing?” That question comes from outside you, from some imagined version of a person who has it all figured out. The better question is “what can I actually sustain right now, given who I am and what this season of my life looks like?” That question comes from inside you and it’s the only one that will actually change your behaviour long term.

Pick one non-negotiable

If I had to name the one shift that changed how my evenings feel, it’s this: I stopped trying to stack habits and started protecting one.

Pick the thing that, when you do it, makes you feel like yourself again. Not the thing you think you should be doing, but the thing that actually grounds you. For me it’s reading before bed, even if it’s only a few pages some nights. Everything else gets built loosely around it, without pressure or a checklist attached to it.

What I didn’t expect is that the other things started finding their own place once I stopped forcing them. I wasn’t spending all my energy managing five priorities at once.

You’re not behind

The version of you who journals every morning, reads every evening, moves her body, tends to her friendships and builds something meaningful, all in the same week, isn’t a future person you’re failing to become. She’s not waiting on the other side of some perfect system you haven’t found yet. She's someone you're building toward, slowly, in cycles, holding onto the one thing that keeps you steady while everything else moves around it.

What you need isn’t a better system. It’s a kinder relationship with the pace that’s actually available to you right now.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

Needing more time

I’ve realised that “I don’t have time” is often another way of saying “I’m afraid to start.” For years I treated this as a scheduling problem, something a better calendar or an earlier alarm would fix. It never did, because the real issue was never time. Most of the things I’ve been postponing don’t need another free weekend, they need twenty focused minutes and the willingness to begin before I feel ready. This month I’m testing what happens when I stop waiting for the version of me who has it all figured out and just start with the version I already am.

Perfect first drafts

I’m letting go of the idea that my first attempt should look like my final one. Somewhere along the way I started treating early drafts as evidence of who I am, instead of what they actually are, a starting point. Whether it’s writing, creating, or making a decision, progress happens through editing, not endless preparation. Finished will always teach me more than perfect, because finished gives me something real to respond to and perfect just keeps me circling the same idea in my head.

Overthinking decisions

Not every decision deserves hours of analysis. I used to believe that if I thought hard enough, long enough, I could reason my way to certainty before acting. But some decisions only reveal whether they were right after you’ve made them, no amount of analysis in advance changes that. I’m choosing to trust myself a little more instead of trying to predict every possible outcome before taking action. It feels less like recklessness and more like relief.

Feeling behind

It’s easy to compare your timeline to someone else’s highlights and decide you’re late. I’ve done this more times than I’d like to admit, scrolling through someone’s milestones and feeling my own progress shrink in comparison. But growth isn’t measured by how quickly it happens and a timeline that isn’t mine was never a fair ruler to begin with. I’m letting go of the pressure to catch up and focusing instead on moving forward at my own pace, which, it turns out, is the only pace I actually have access to.

Waiting for certainty

There will always be information I don’t have and outcomes I can’t control. I spent a long time thinking clarity was something that arrived before action, a green light I needed to wait for. If I keep waiting until everything feels certain, I’ll spend more time preparing than living. This month, I’m choosing action over assurance and trusting that clarity is something that tends to show up after you’ve already moved, not before.

Making it useful

Not every hobby needs to become content. Not every idea needs to become a business. I noticed how often I was filtering the things I enjoyed through the question of whether they were productive, as if curiosity alone wasn’t reason enough to keep doing something. I’m letting myself enjoy things simply because they make me curious, peaceful or happy. Creativity grows much more easily when it isn’t constantly expected to perform, when it’s allowed to just exist for me and no one else.

Controlling everything

Worrying has never guaranteed a better outcome. It has only stolen time from the present, time I could have spent actually living in whatever was happening instead of bracing for what might. I’m learning that I can prepare, make thoughtful decisions and still leave room for life to surprise me and that the surprise isn’t always the thing I need protecting from.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

These seven habits are what I’m working with this July.

Keep a no list

I have a note on my phone where I write down every time I say no to something I would have automatically said yes to before. Not what I accomplished that day, but what I chose not to do.

A to-do list can only tell you about output. It has no way of showing you where you’ve been overextending, saying yes to avoid the discomfort of disappointing someone, or where you’ve been giving your time to things that have nothing to do with what you actually want. A no list does. After a few weeks of keeping one, a pattern starts to emerge and that pattern is much easier to interrupt than feeling of being stretched too thin.

Finish before perfecting it

Choose one project this month and give yourself the shortest realistic deadline to finish it. Whether it's a portfolio, a piece of content, an application, or something else you’ve been refining for longer than it deserves.

What tends to happen with perfectionism is that it disguises itself as high standards, but it usually has more to do with fear than quality. The brain reads an unfinished thing as open, unresolved, still safe, because once it’s finished, it can be judged. Giving yourself a deadline that ends at done rather than perfect interrupts that. And what you often find on the other side is that finished was always good enough. You just needed the permission to stop.

Argue against your own opinion

Once a week, pick something you’re fairly convinced is true and spend ten minutes writing the opposite case as honestly as you can. You don’t have to change your mind, that’s not the point.

The point is that certainty can harden into rigidity without you noticing. You stop questioning your own assumptions because they feel like facts and when that happens, growth gets difficult because you’ve already decided what’s true. When you argue against your own position is that it loosens the grip a little. It reminds you that you chose this belief at some point, which means you could update it if the evidence asked you to.

Challenge your limiting beliefs with evidence

Every time you catch yourself thinking something like “I’m behind” or “I’m not the kind of person who finishes things,” your job is to find one piece of evidence that contradicts it. Show your brain something concrete that doesn’t fit the story.

This matters because the brain updates its self-image through proof, not affirmations. Telling yourself you’re disciplined when you don’t believe it doesn’t do much. But pointing to a specific moment where you showed up, finished something, or chose differently, even a small one, gives the brain something to work with. Identity shifts when the evidence shifts and the evidence only shifts when you start looking for it.

Revisit an idea you gave up on

Go back to one idea, project, or direction you dismissed sometime in the last year. Look at it again without the judgment you had when you put it down.

Most of us evaluate our own ideas badly in the moment we abandon them, because we’re too close to the effort it took and the disappointment of it not working yet. But distance changes what you can see. Sometimes the idea wasn’t wrong, you were just too early, depleted, or too convinced that it needed to be further along before it deserved more of your attention. It’s worth finding out which one it was.

Spend money on a skill instead of a thing

Before buying something that represents the person you want to become, ask yourself whether that money could teach you something instead. A workshop, lesson, or an hour with someone who knows something you don’t.

There’s a real difference between investing in becoming something and buying something that looks like you already are. The second one tends to feel good for about a week. The first one changes how you see yourself, because you’ve done something. Your self-image updates through action much faster than it does through acquisition.

Set a deadline for the decision you’ve been sitting on

Give yourself a deadline for something you’ve been unable to decide on. You don't need more time and probably had enough information for a while now and what you’re actually waiting for is certainty, which rarely comes before you act.

Perfectionism shows up in decisions the same way it shows up in projects. It keeps the thing open so it can stay safe. A deadline forces you to trust your own judgment before you feel completely ready and that’s usually the only way to find out that your judgment was sound. Most of the decisions you’ve been sitting on aren’t as complicated as they feel. They just require you to stop waiting for a version of yourself that already knows how it ends.

So for the second half of the year, we all need to be a little bit more honest with ourselves and what we've been avoiding and a few, deliberate choices, to do it differently going forward. Most of what's on this list is uncomfortable, but uncomfortable in the way that things tend to feel when you're actually moving rather than waiting to feel ready first.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

What I eventually understood is that I wasn’t bad at habits. I was building them on the wrong kind of foundation for the kind of life I actually have.

Most Habit Advice Assumes a Stable Life

Most of what gets shared about building habits is built around environmental triggers. The idea is that your brain, over time, learns to associate a specific context, like time, place, or sequence of events with a specific behaviour. Same cue, action and reward. Eventually the behaviour becomes almost automatic, because the brain is pattern-matching rather than making a fresh decision each time. And it works, because when your environment is stable, contextual cues are incredibly efficient. Your brain loves not having to think.

The problem is what happens when the context disappears. When you’re travelling, or are unwell and the morning looks completely different. The cue that was holding the habit in place goes with it and you’re left without a trigger, which means you’re back to deciding from scratch, which takes energy you often don’t have when life is already hard.

Another Kind of Cue

Internal cues work differently. Rather than living in your environment, they live in you, in a body state or a recognisable internal shift. Not “I journal at 7am at my kitchen table” but “I journal when my thoughts are moving too fast and I need somewhere to put them.” Not “I move my body on Monday, Wednesday, Friday” but “I move when I’ve been sitting in my own head for too long and I can feel it in my shoulders.” The behaviour is the same. What changes is what triggers it.

When you build a habit around an internal cue, the habit becomes portable in a way it simply isn’t when it’s based on a location or time. The trigger is with you, because it is something happening inside you rather than around you. A difficult week or a disrupted routine doesn’t remove it. The signal is still there, because the signal is you.

Structure Helps

I’m not saying that routines are useless or that you should abandon consistency entirely. If your life is relatively stable and your contextual cues are working, they’re working for a reason. The brain’s ability to automate behaviour through environmental association is genuinely useful.

But if your energy varies a lot, if you travel, are caring for someone, or if your work doesn’t follow a predictable rhythm, you might keep finding that habits built on external structure collapse the moment that structure shifts. And that’s a mismatch between the type of cue and the type of life.

The shift is a small, but it changes what you’re paying attention to. Instead of asking “when and where will I do this,” you start asking “what state am I in when this habit actually matters to me?” And that question teaches you something about yourself that a schedule never could.

How to Find Your Internal Cues

The first step is getting curious about the moments just before the habit, when do you actually want to do it, or when it feels like relief rather than obligation.

For me, journalling works in the evenings, rather then mornings, because when I feel overstimulated or unclear and there’s too much circling in my head, I need to slow it down on paper. Once I understood that, the habit stopped depending on a specific morning time block. I could write while travelling, during a hard week, or a season where life looked nothing like usual, because I was listening for the internal signal rather than waiting for the external one.

You might find yours is something similar, either feeling tired, restless, or like you've been in your own head for too long. It takes longer to learn than setting an alarm and it asks more of you in terms of self-awareness, but what it gives you back is a habit that belongs to you rather than to your routine and that’s the kind that actually sticks.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

The question I always start with is simple: am I making progress on my goals, or not?

Six months in, you have enough evidence to answer that honestly. And that’s the whole point of doing this now rather than waiting until the end of the year, when there’s nothing left to adjust.

What I’ve noticed is that most people avoid the mid-year review because looking back feels like it might confirm something uncomfortable. If January’s goals have been sitting untouched, or life went in a direction you didn’t plan for, opening that list again takes a certain willingness to be honest with yourself. And so a lot of people just don’t open it. They keep moving and let the year continue on its own.

But the discomfort you’re trying to avoid by not looking is already there. It tends to show up as a background feeling that you’re not quite where you wanted to be, without any real sense of what to do about it. The review just gives you something concrete to work with instead of carrying it vaguely.

It also gives you permission to change your mind, which I think is the most underused part of this whole process. The goals you wrote in January were written by a version of you that hadn’t lived this year yet. Some of them might still fit, but some of them might not and that’s not a sign that something went wrong. You’re allowed to put them down and choose something that fits better for the next six months.

The Prompts I Use Every Year

I work through these in order because the sequence matters. Seeing what you've actually built in the first half of the year is what makes the forward-looking prompts useful.

1. List all of your accomplishments from the past six months.

And I mean everything, not just the goals you formally set. Habits you kept, things you started, shifts that happened slowly. When we reflect is that the things that went wrong come to mind much more easily than the things that went well, because the brain is wired to track threat and difficulty more than progress. So this prompt takes more effort than it looks like it should. Write until something surprises you.

2. What are you genuinely grateful for from the past six months?

Not the answer you think you should give, be honest.

3. What do you want to improve in the next six months?

Write down one or two things. The real answer to where something hasn’t been working and you’ve been letting it go without addressing it.

4. What do you want to maintain?

This one is just as important than trying new things. Some of what you built in the first half of the year also needs protecting.

5. Which goals do you still want to carry forward and which ones are you ready to let go of?

Read each one slowly. Ask whether it still belongs to the direction you’re actually heading. If it doesn’t, release it and write something truer in its place.

This process takes about an hour, but you will have a clearer picture of where you are and what you actually want the rest of the year to be for.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

I know this feeling well, because it's what I've been experiencing for the past few months. I always treat it as a problem to fix, something that a new morning routine or a creative project or a change of scenery would sort out. But what I didn't understand and something that I think it's worth mentioning, is that the spark doesn’t disappear. It gets buried under the weight of ordinary life and the more you chase it, the deeper it seems to sink.

Why You Lose Your Spark in the First Place

The brain has a system for this. When we’re in survival mode, not life-threatening survival, but the low-grade version that comes from overcommitment, mental load, and not enough genuine rest, the prefrontal cortex goes a bit offline. This is where curiosity and creativity live. The nervous system prioritises getting through the day over feeling alive in it.

This is useful, in a functional sense. But it means that if you’ve been operating on stress and structure and obligation for a long stretch, the absence of spark is a physiological response to how you’ve been living.

The problem is that we interpret the flatness as information about ourselves. We think that we've lost our passion, or that we don’t know what we want, or that we're just not someone who gets excited about things anymore. And then we start building an identity around the absence, which makes it harder to find our way back.

How to Actually Get Your Spark Back

What tends to help is exposure. Small, low-stakes encounters with things that once felt like you: a book you loved in a different season of your life, a walk somewhere unfamiliar, ten minutes doing something with your hands. These things will remind your nervous system that pleasure and interest are still available.

There’s also something important about not requiring the spark to be productive. This is where a lot of people trip up, myself included. We want the inspiration to turn into something: a project, goal, or new direction. But early sparks are fragile and wrapping them in expectation too quickly tends to extinguish them. Sometimes the spark is just watching a documentary you’d normally skip, or cooking something new and it doesn’t have to become anything. It’s enough that it felt like something.

What's Actually Diminishing Your Spark

The harder piece is looking honestly at what’s been pushing the spark out in the first place. Often it’s not that the aliveness left, but that there was no room for it. When every waking hour is accounted for, rest is always earned rather than given, or when your own interests consistently sit at the bottom of the list, the brain learns that aliveness isn’t really on offer and it stops reaching.

You have to notice, with some honesty, where you’ve been treating yourself as a machine that just needs better inputs. The spark comes back when there’s a little spaciousness, unscheduled time and permission to not be doing something useful.

If You're in a Low Moment Right Now

If you’re not just busy but genuinely struggling to feel anything much, I want to say this carefully: the flatness often has more information in it than we give it credit for. It’s worth being curious about what it’s pointing to, rather than immediately trying to push through it. Sometimes the spark isn’t lost. Sometimes it’s protecting itself.

You don’t have to feel everything right now. But you might try leaving a door open.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

June is one of my favourite months of the year, because it has enough distance from the start of the year that you can see things more clearly, but you’re not yet in the sprint toward the end of it. There’s a kind of in-between quality to this month that I think is worth using.

These are six things I think are worth letting go of this month. Letting go isn't easy and I’ve not mastered any of them, but I’ve also noticed what happens when you hold on too long.

Waiting until it’s good enough

I kept a journal for years before I showed anyone a single page. I told myself it wasn’t ready, that I needed more time and that I’d share it when I felt more certain about what I was trying to say. What I understand now is that “good enough” was never really a standard. It was a moving boundary and it moved every time I got close to it.

This tends to happen because the brain uses your own self-awareness against you. The more you understand about craft, about quality, about what good work looks like, the easier it becomes to see all the ways your work falls short of it. And so the gap between where you are and where you feel you need to be stays constant, or even widens, as you grow. You can spend a very long time there if you’re not careful.

What actually helped me was asking a different question. Not “is this ready?” but “what am I protecting by keeping this to myself?” The answer, when I was honest, had very little to do with quality.

Needing a unique angle before you start

There’s a thought that sits underneath a lot of creative paralysis and I don’t think it gets named directly enough. It’s the feeling that everything worth saying has already been said and better, by someone else. So you wait for an angle that no one has taken yet, a way in that feels genuinely original. And while you wait, you don’t make anything at all.

But the angle was never the thing. What makes something worth reading is a voice that couldn’t have been anyone else’s. Your specific history, the particular way you connect ideas, the things you’ve lived through and the way those things changed how you see. None of that is replicable, even when the topic is familiar. You don’t need a new idea. You need to trust that your version of an existing one is worth something.

Performing confidence you don’t have yet

I used to think I had to be certain before I could say something out loud. That if I was going to share an opinion, I needed to be able to defend every corner of it. And because I couldn’t always do that I said nothing, or I softened everything so much that the actual thought disappeared somewhere inside the hedging.

What shifted for me was realising that the work I found most interesting to read came from people who were thinking in public, working something out on the page, rather than presenting a conclusion they’d reached somewhere else in private. Uncertainty, when it’s honest, pulls you in. It makes you feel like you’re alongside someone rather than being instructed by them.

If you’ve been waiting to feel ready before you speak, that feeling probably isn’t coming first, it tends to come after.

Comparing your process to someone else’s output

What you see on someone’s profile is the finished thing. The piece they’re proud enough to share, the project after two years of trying, the post that landed after thirty that didn’t. What you don’t see is the long stretch where nothing came, or the version of them that almost stopped in February and nearly did.

When you compare your process to that, you’re not making a fair comparison. You’re measuring your internal experience, which is messy and uncertain and full of doubt, against their external presentation, which has been edited and chosen and timed. That gap will always make your own work feel like it’s failing. Research on social comparison suggests this kind of contrast shapes how we evaluate ourselves in ways we don’t always notice in the moment. The comparison feels like useful information but it very rarely is.

The only version of the comparison that’s actually helpful is the one between where you were six months ago and where you are now. That one is at least looking at the same thing.

Needing it to mean something big

There’s a kind of pressure that comes with caring about your work, which is that each thing you make starts to feel like it needs to carry weight. It needs a point, a reason, a contribution to something larger. And that pressure, over time, becomes the thing that stops you from making anything at all. Because if every piece needs to matter, starting anything feels like too much.

Some of the work I’ve been most glad I made started as a small thought I wanted to think through. No plan for where it was going, or knowledge that it was worth sharing. Just something I was curious about, or something I’d noticed that week that felt like it deserved a few more sentences. That’s a legitimate reason to create something. You don’t need a mission statement before you’re allowed to begin.

The self-image that no longer fits

This one is the hardest to articulate but I think it’s the one that matters most this month.

A lot of what holds us back isn’t really about the thing we think it’s about. It’s about a version of ourselves that formed in a particular context and stayed. The girl who didn’t take up too much space. The person who wasn’t the creative one, or the brave one, or the one with opinions worth hearing. Those identities formed for reasons that made sense at the time and the brain is very good at maintaining them, even when the circumstances that created them are long gone.

What I’ve found and what research on identity-based change tends to support, is that the self-image doesn’t update through thinking about it. It updates through action of small repeated evidence that the old story isn’t the only one available. You don’t have to dismantle the old version of yourself all at once. You just have to act, slightly, like the new one. And do it again until you notice that it starts to feel less like pretending.

June is a good month to look at what you’ve been carrying and ask whether you actually need it anymore. Not in a dramatic clearing-out way, but honestly. Some things we hold on to because they’re useful, and some because letting go feels like admitting something we’re not ready to admit yet.

The ones in the second category are usually the ones worth starting with.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

What I’ve been thinking about this month is not how to do more, but why starting feels so hard even when you genuinely want the thing. Because for most of us it’s not a motivation or a discipline problem, but a friction and the friction is almost always more specific and emotional than we tend to admit. These six habits are about taking action by removing what’s in the way.

Schedule your disappointment

Most people don't avoid hard tasks because they're lazy, but because somewhere underneath the procrastination is a fear of how it will feel if it doesn't go well. This month, try putting "feel disappointed about X" in your calendar before you begin. When you make space for the feeling in advance, it stops being something to protect yourself from and the decision to start becomes a lot simpler.

Name your inner critic

I started calling mine Maria. She shows up right before I hit publish, or when I’m trying something I haven’t done before and she has a lot of opinions about whether I’m qualified to be doing it. Giving your inner critic a name creates a small but real separation between you and the voice, and that separation is where the choice lives. When the spiral starts, you’re not fighting your own thoughts anymore. You’re just telling Maria: not now.

Count down from five

The brain starts generating reasons not to do something within seconds of the idea arriving and the longer you wait, the louder those reasons get. Mel Robbins built an entire framework around this and the mechanic is simple because it works: when you know you need to start something, count down from five and move before you finish counting. The countdown interrupts the part of your brain that talks you out of things before you’ve even begun.

Track what you avoid

Instead of asking why you’re not disciplined enough, start noticing which tasks you repeatedly postpone and what feeling tends to come with them. Perfectionism is often emotional avoidance dressed up as high standards, not a character flaw. When you can see the pattern clearly, what you’re avoiding and what emotion is attached to it, the grip it has on you tends to loosen. Awareness changes more than self-criticism ever will.

Limit your revisions

Before you start something, decide how many times you’re allowed to revise it. One edit on the caption, or two reads of the email before you send it. Perfectionism expands to fill whatever room you give it and without a boundary around refinement, it can swallow the entire point of the work. The limit will help you recognise that, at some point, more time in does not mean better out.

Reframe the task

Before you start something you’ve been putting off, try shifting the language around it. Not “I have to write this” but “I get to figure this out.” Not “I need to finish this” but “I’m choosing to move this forward today.” It sounds small, but the brain responds differently to language that implies agency than language that implies obligation. You’re being more accurate about the fact that most of what sits on your to-do list is actually a choice.

June is a great month for honest reflection about what have you been putting off and what feeling is attached to it? Not to fix it immediately, but just to see it clearly. Because that, more often than I expected, is where things actually start to move.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

The Specificity Gap

What was actually happening had a name, psychologists call it the specificity gap: the distance between an intention that sounds complete and an intention that actually is. “I’ll journal every morning” is not a plan. It feels like one but when the morning arrives foggy and rushed, your brain goes looking for instructions that aren’t there. And in the absence of specific instructions, the default behaviour (phone, scroll, whatever requires the least decision) wins almost every time.

This is where implementation intentions come in and why they’re one of the more useful findings in behaviour change research. Forming an intention in the format when X happens, I will do Y significantly increases the likelihood that you’ll follow through. Because you’ve done the cognitive work in advance and pre-decided, the moment arrives and your brain already has an answer.

“I’ll journal in the morning” leaves your brain with a question every day. “When I’ve made my coffee and sat down at the kitchen table, I’ll open my journal before I look at my phone” doesn’t. That difference, which sounds almost embarrassingly small, is actually where most morning routines collapse.

Where Habits Actually Break Down

If you’ve ever broken the same habit at roughly the same point, it’s worth asking: where, specifically, does it fall apart? Not what do you do wrong but where. What’s happening in the ten minutes before you abandon it?

Usually the breakdown isn’t random and tends to cluster around transition points: the moment the alarm goes off and the warm bed argues back, or when you’ve finished one thing and haven’t committed to the next.

These are the gaps that specificity fills. The pre-answered questions that your half-awake brain doesn’t have to solve from scratch.

You're Designing Habits for Your Best Self, Not Your Real Wednesday

There’s something that tends to happen when we design habits and it’s worth naming: we design them for our best selves, on our best mornings. We imagine the version of us who slept well, has nowhere to be and genuinely wants to do the hard thing. That person’s routine looks very different from the one we actually need.

A morning practice that holds isn’t built for ideal conditions. It’s built for the Wednesday where you’re already behind before you’ve started. It asks: what’s the minimum version of this that still counts? What happens when I only have twelve minutes? What’s my if-this-then-that when the plan doesn’t survive contact with the actual morning?

Vagueness Is Freedom but Functions Like a Void

What I’ve come to understand mostly through noticing where my own routines kept breaking, is that vagueness feels like flexibility but functions like a void. The less specific your plan, the more energy it costs to execute it, because you’re making decisions in real time that you could have made in advance. And in the morning, when your prefrontal cortex is still coming online, decision cost is high. Your brain will take the path that requires the least.

Implementation intentions work because they shift the decision upstream. You make the choice once, when you have the cognitive capacity to make it carefully. Then the morning just runs the programme. It’s a small shift in how you think about planning, but it tends to be what actually holds.

If your morning practice keeps collapsing at the same point, it’s a specificity problem. And that, unlike willpower, is something you can actually work with.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

I caught myself mid-drag, closed the window and sat with the tab open for another forty minutes without touching it.

I know this version of myself. I’ve been watching her show up for years. She’s the one who cleans the kitchen before a difficult phone call. Who researches equipment for a project she hasn’t started yet. Who reads about writing instead of writing. Who makes the conditions perfect so that the actual thing, the thing that matters, or the thing that’s a little frightening, never quite has to begin.

What struck me that Friday wasn’t shame, but recognition. Like bumping into someone from a former life.

It's Not Laziness, But a Threat

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about this pattern, both from what I know about the brain and from living it: procrastination is almost never about laziness. It’s almost always about threat.

The brain’s threat-detection system, the amygdala, doesn’t distinguish particularly well between physical danger and psychological discomfort. The fear of being judged, or failing at something that actually matters to you, or trying properly and still not being good enough. These register in the body the same way a real threat does. And the instinct, when faced with threat, is to move away from it. Slowly, plausibly, in ways that look like productivity.

This is why the person who seems the most organised, the most researched and the most prepared, is sometimes the person most successfully avoiding the thing.

But there’s something underneath even that. Something that took me longer to see.

The version of me who reorganises desktop folders on a Friday afternoon isn’t just afraid of the essay. She’s operating from an older story, one that says something like: when I actually do the thing, it might not be good enough, which would mean I’m not good enough, which is the thing I’ve been working very hard not to confirm.

That’s not a productivity problem, but an identity one and no amount of time-blocking fixes it.

The Self-Image That's Running the Show

The self-image the brain is working from is often several versions behind who you’ve actually become.

This is something the research on identity-based behaviour change keeps circling back to. You act in alignment with who you believe you are, not who you want to be, and not always who you actually are now. The belief updates slowly. Behaviour, left to its own devices, tends to prove the existing story rather than write a new one.

So the loop looks like this: you avoid the thing because some older part of you is still convinced you might not be capable of it. The avoidance confirms the story. The story makes the next attempt a little heavier. And the folder icons are very easy to drag.

What breaks the loop isn’t motivation. Motivation is downstream of action, not upstream of it. What breaks the loop is making the identity shift slightly more real than the fear.

What Is Actually Helping Me

Here’s what’s actively helping me, not as a perfect system but as things I’m having to practice slowly and imperfectly.

Name the Version That’s Showing Up

When I catch myself reorganising instead of writing, I’ve started noticing it out loud: there she is. The older version. The one who needed everything to be right before she could begin. Naming her separates me from her just enough to make a different choice. She’s not me anymore, she’s a pattern I recognise and that’s a different relationship.

Shrink the Beginning Until It’s Almost Nothing

The threat response activates when the task feels significant, so make it insignificant. Not the whole essay, one paragraph. Not the whole project, open the document and write the date. The brain’s resistance is almost entirely front-loaded. Starting small is not cheating.

Change What You're Trying to Prove

The procrastination loop feeds on the question: am I good enough to do this? That question has no useful answer while you’re avoiding. Swap it for: am I the kind of person who shows up for the things that matter to me, even imperfectly? That question you can answer yes to right now. With a badly written first draft on a Friday afternoon.

Notice What The Avoidance Is Trying to Protect

This one is uncomfortable but worth sitting with. I avoid writing when I care about the writing. I avoid emails when the relationship matters. The avoidance is, in a strange way, pointing directly at what’s important. You don’t reorganise your desktop before doing something you don’t care about. The caring is the evidence that it’s worth starting.

Give Yourself a Named Window

An unstructured day doesn’t help me, it gives the avoidance too much room to operate. But a window, this specific hour is for this specific thing, changes the shape of the resistance. The brain can tolerate discomfort for a defined period. ‘I’ll write for one hour’ is a negotiation the older version of me can usually agree to.

She Doesn’t Need Outrunning

That Friday, I eventually wrote the first few sentences of this article. They were not good sentences and they didn’t need to be. They just needed to exist, so that the next ones had somewhere to follow.

I’m still working on this. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you solve once and then move on from. But I do notice it earlier each time, the folder-dragging, the excessive preparation, or the sudden urge to do laundry at 2pm and then you make a small, specific, imperfect beginning anyway.

The version of me I keep trying to outrun doesn’t need outrunning. She needs to know that we’re doing this whether it’s perfect or not. And that, so far, we have not been destroyed by beginning.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

The result was that I spent a long time feeling vaguely blocked without being able to name why. I had time, ideas and the intention to make things. And yet something kept getting in the way, that felt less like a practical obstacle and more like a background hum of not quite right. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realise that the thing in the way was mostly just a set of beliefs I’d never questioned.

So this month, alongside the five habits I shared for May, I wanted to write about the other side of that. Not what to add, but what to put down. These are five beliefs about creativity that I think are worth examining and if you find them in yourself, gently letting go of.

That Creativity Needs to Be Productive

This one is so embedded in how most of us think about making things that it barely registers as a belief anymore. Of course what you create should go somewhere. It should either serve a purpose, build something, or contribute to something. Why would you spend time making something that doesn’t?

But this logic, applied consistently, actually kills our creativity. Because the kind of creative energy that actually sustains you over the long term is not the kind that’s always oriented toward an outcome. It exists purely for its own sake. The drawing you made because you felt like drawing, or writing that was only ever for you. The thing you made in an afternoon that nobody saw and that you never intended them to.

When everything you create has an audience attached to it, making things starts to feel like performance. And performance, sustained long enough without a break from it, is exhausting in a way that’s hard to recover from. Protecting some creative space that belongs only to you, with no outcome required, isn’t indulgent. It’s what keeps the rest of it possible.

That Inspiration Comes Before Action

I believed this one for years and it cost me a lot of time. The idea that you need to feel it before you begin, that creativity arrives as a mood or a state that you then act from, that waiting for the right conditions is a reasonable strategy and a very effective way of never starting.

What actually tends to happen and what research on creative practice consistently supports, is that the feeling follows the doing rather than preceding it. You sit down to write something and the writing is flat for the first ten minutes and then something shifts and you’re in it. You start making something without knowing where it’s going and the direction reveals itself somewhere in the middle. The inspiration doesn’t arrive first. It shows up once you’ve already begun, usually when you’ve pushed past the initial resistance enough that your brain has stopped treating the task as a threat and started treating it as something to engage with.

Waiting for inspiration before starting is comfortable because it means you never have to face the discomfort of beginning. But that comfort is borrowed against all the things you didn’t make while you were waiting.

That Consuming Counts as Creating

This is probably the most relevant for anyone who spends a significant amount of time online. Scrolling, saving, bookmarking, watching, reading, all of it feels like creative engagement and some of it genuinely is. But it is not the same as output and treating the two as interchangeable is one of the more subtle ways we talk ourselves out of actually making anything.

You can spend an entire evening consuming content about creativity and end the night feeling simultaneously overstimulated and creatively empty, because intake and output use completely different parts of you. Consuming fills the space, creating requires you to clear it. And the more you fill the space with other people’s ideas, aesthetics and versions of what creativity looks like, the less room there is for your own.

This isn’t an argument for consuming less, necessarily. It’s an argument for being honest with yourself about which one you’re doing and whether you’re using one to avoid the other.

That Your First Attempt Should Be Good

I think this belief is responsible for more abandoned creative projects than almost anything else. The expectation that if something doesn’t come out well immediately, it’s a signal that you’re not meant to do it. That the difficulty is diagnostic rather than just being the beginning of the process.

What this belief misses is that the gap between what you can see and what you can currently make is not evidence of a lack of talent. It’s just evidence that you’ve started. Every person who makes things well has made a lot of things badly first and the only real difference between them and someone who gave up is that they stayed in the process long enough to get through the part where it’s uncomfortable.

The first attempt is not supposed to be good, it’s supposed to exist. And its only job is to give you something to work with, something to respond to, or something to push against. The quality comes later, through repetition and revision, never before you begin.

That Creativity is Something You Have or You Don't

This is the most fundamental belief on this list because it makes all the others feel fixed. If creativity is a personality trait, something some people are born with and others simply aren’t, then none of the other beliefs really matter. You either have it or you don’t and no amount of practice or permission or unlearning is going to change that.

But this isn’t how creativity works and it isn’t what the research on creative people shows. What it consistently shows instead is that creativity is less about innate talent and more about practice, specifically the practice of generating ideas repeatedly, tolerating the uncomfortable early stages, continuing through the resistance and doing it all again. The people who seem naturally creative have usually just been doing it for longer, or started in an environment where it was encouraged early enough that the discomfort never had a chance to calcify into a belief that they weren’t cut out for it.

You don’t find out whether you’re creative by waiting to feel like you are. You find out by making things, badly at first and then less badly, until one day you look back and realise you’ve been doing it all along.

On letting go

None of these beliefs are character flaws. They’re just the residue of a culture that has very specific ideas about what creativity is for, who it belongs to and what counts as doing it properly. And most of us absorbed those ideas before we were old enough to question them.

But they can be questioned. And putting them down, one by one, tends to create more space than any new habit or system or productivity strategy ever does. So much of what’s blocking the creative energy you’re looking for isn’t actually outside you, it’s just a story you’ve been telling yourself for long enough that it started to feel like the truth.

May feels like a good time to start telling a different one.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

But it doesn't, or at least it's not the same thing. Real creative energy comes from a different place entirely. It comes from paying attention to your own mind, following your own curiosity, making things that don’t need to go anywhere. And it's been a while since I practiced it myself.

May feels like the right month to change that. The days are longer and lighter, the weather is warmer and since I've been paying a lot more attention to myself, rather than to everything else. So this month, instead of habits about productivity or identity or getting more done, I wanted to share five that are purely about creative energy. These will give your mind room to wander and do things purely because they interest you.

One Honest Sentence a Day

You're not building a journaling practice. Instead, write just one sentence a day that captures something true: how you're actually feeling, what you noticed, what's been sitting with you that you haven't named yet.

The reason this works is that most of us move through entire days without ever stopping to register what’s actually going on inside them. We’re responsive, reactive, always oriented outward toward what needs doing next. One honest sentence is a small act of reorientation. It doesn’t take long. It just requires that you stop for a moment and actually check in with yourself, which turns out to be harder than it sounds when you haven’t been doing it.

I started doing this during a period where I felt creatively stuck, and what I noticed was that the sentences I wrote were often about things I hadn’t consciously realised I was thinking about. Writing them down made them real in a way that just thinking them didn’t. And from that honesty, something usually followed.

Let One Creative Idea Just Exist

This one is specifically for anyone who has noticed that every idea they have immediately becomes a task. You think of something interesting and within thirty seconds you’re already planning how to execute it, share it, turn it into something. The idea stops belonging to you almost as soon as it arrives.

This month, when a creative idea comes up, try resisting that reflex. Write it down and leave it there. Let it develop in your head without turning it into a project.

What tends to happen when you practise this is that your relationship to your own ideas starts to change. You stop editing them before they’ve had a chance to form. You start noticing more of them, because you’re no longer immediately converting them into work. And occasionally, an idea you’ve been sitting with quietly turns into something much better than it would have been if you’d acted on it immediately.

Walk Without Listening to Anything

No podcasts, music, or audiobooks. Just you and wherever your mind goes when it’s not being fed something from outside. I know this sounds uncomfortable and for most people it is, at first. We’ve become so accustomed to filling every spare moment with input that uninterrupted silence feels almost wrong.

But what tends to happen in the brain when you remove external stimulation during low-effort physical activity is that the default mode network becomes active. This is the network associated with imagination, creativity and making connections between ideas. It’s also the network that gets suppressed when you’re constantly consuming.

Your best ideas are probably not going to come while you’re listening to someone else’s. They’re going to come in the gaps. And this habit is about deliberately creating those gaps rather than accidentally filling them.

10 Ideas a Day

Every day this month, write down 10 ideas. They don’t have to be good, or related to anything you’re working on or anything you’d ever actually do. They just have to exist on paper.

The point of this habit isn’t to find a brilliant idea. It’s to build the creative muscle that generates them. Most people wait for good ideas to arrive and then wonder why they don’t come very often. But creativity works more like a muscle than a gift. The people who consistently have interesting ideas have usually just practised having ideas, including a lot of bad ones, for long enough that the good ones start showing up more reliably.

James Altucher, who popularised this habit, calls it idea sex, the process of combining unrelated ideas until something unexpected emerges. I’d wear that framing lightly, but the underlying mechanism is real. Volume creates variety and variety is where originality tends to live.

Consume Something Outside Your Niche

Pick one thing this month that has nothing to do with what you normally read, watch, or listen to. A documentary on a subject you know nothing about, a book from a completely different genre, or a podcast on something that has no obvious application to your life or your work.

This one is probably the most underrated habit on this list, because it doesn’t feel like it should do anything. But creativity doesn’t come from consuming more of what you already know. It comes from making unexpected connections between things that don’t obviously belong together and you can only do that if you’re taking in things that don’t obviously belong together.

Some of the most interesting ideas I’ve had came from something I read or watched that had nothing to do with anything I was working on at the time. The connection only became obvious later, when something I’d stored away surfaced in a completely different context. That’s how creative thinking actually works, less like a straight line and more like a slow accumulation of material that eventually finds its own shape.

Creativity doesn’t disappear. It gets crowded out by scrolling, consuming and always being switched on. And space is what brings it back, where your own mind gets to be the loudest thing in the room.

May feels like a good time to start.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

I grew up watching the first channels on YouTube and reading the first fashion blogs, so I always had an interest in building an online community. This was my chance to finally create something of my own. I was already taking beautiful notes for my lectures, so I thought why not post them online.

I always had that slightly anxious mix of wanting to be seen and not being sure what I even had to say yet. But I started posting and in my first year I gained 10k followers on Instagram.

Ten years later, I’m still here. My journey to get here wasn't all about consistency. In the beginning, I followed the same advice and picked a niche that I was posting in, because you “had” to find your thing and repeat it until people associate you with it. Thankfully, things are different now and I'm allowed to have multiple interests, so this is how I post about it.

The thread that runs through everything

I’m a neuroscientist who became a digital marketer and a content creator. I love experimenting with myself and I love strategy. I think about habits and identity and also about content trends and SEO. These things live in my brain and the same time, and I love that I get to use what I learn from others in my content and at work.

So the advice to niche down is about having clarity. And clarity doesn’t come from cutting off the parts of you that don’t fit. It comes from understanding the thread that runs through everything. For me, that thread is how people change: the brain, behaviour, identity, all of it. That's what I'm always actually writing about, whether it's a productivity reel or an article on personal growth, or something I noticed on a random Tuesday.

Why forced content never lasts

The content that I used to try to force, whether because it was trending or some “social media expert” told me that's what my audience wanted, I could never sustain making. It's fun to experiment and there is a time and a place for trendy content, if you can come up with an original spin that works for you. But I found that my brain genuinely doesn't perform well when it's disconnected from what it finds meaningful.

Motivation isn't a character trait that you have or lack, it's a response to relevance. So when a topic matters to you, the words will come. If it doesn't, it will be hard to write, or you will find yourself copying others. I still draw inspiration from others and if something catches my eye, I will analyse it and think of how I can apply it to my own content. But what I don't want is to blend into the masses because it's how a content creator should post.

What consistency actually means

When I started I posted every day because I thought consistency meant volume. So I showed up daily with anything to keep the numbers moving. It worked, because it allowed me to study what performed well and what didn't. But since I started the algorithms and social media apps have changed and it is exhausting to try to push yourself to post daily.

I came up with a system that works for me and the platforms that I'm active on. I try to keep my content pillars in mind whenever I'm making something, but also check in with my values. Sometimes it is better to take a day off, without guilt, instead of posting something half-done that maybe isn't the best quality. But also, having a schedule that I can stick to helps me stay accountable with myself.

Busyness in a different form

I think there’s something worth saying about that. The version of online presence I’d been chasing for years was really just busyness in a different form. Post more, grow faster, never disappear. But what’s lasted, what I actually feel proud of, is the work I make when I have something real to say.

I have two degrees and a job in marketing and a brand I’ve been building for ten years, and my days are genuinely never the same. I have flexibility and creative work and time that belongs to me. That didn’t come from following someone else’s content strategy. It came from building something that was actually mine.

You're allowed to follow the thing that interests you

If you’re somewhere in the middle of figuring out what your version looks like, I hope this is a small reminder that you’re allowed to follow the things that interests you. You don’t have to perform a version of yourself that fits better into a "content creator” category.

The internet has enough of that already.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞

It is strange work. You can want something genuinely, set the intention clearly, build the system carefully and still find yourself defaulting to the old behaviour without quite knowing why. Because some part of you hasn’t updated yet.

Why most habit advice skips the most important part

Most behaviour change advice operates at the level of actions. Do this thing at this time in this context, attach it to an existing habit, make it small enough that you can’t say no. And that advice is not wrong. Environment design and implementation intentions are genuinely useful. But they address the surface of the problem without touching the root.

The root is self-concept, which is the psychological term for the beliefs you hold about who you are. Not who you want to be, not who you are trying to become, but who you currently understand yourself to be at a fairly automatic, mostly unconscious level. Self-concept theory, developed across decades of research in social and cognitive psychology, proposes that human beings are strongly motivated to behave in ways that are consistent with their self-concept. We act, in other words, in alignment with who we believe we are.

This is why someone can decide to become a runner, follow a training plan for three weeks, and then stop without being able to explain exactly why. The behaviour and intention was there, but if the underlying self-concept still reads as someone who is not really an athletic person, the behaviour has nothing to attach to. It sits on top of an identity that keeps pulling in a different direction.

The belief runs deeper than the behaviour

There is a version of this that most people have experienced without having a name for it.

You try to eat differently, and it works until it doesn’t, and when it stops working you find yourself thinking something like, I am just not someone who can sustain this. You try to write regularly, or exercise consistently, or stop checking your phone first thing in the morning, and for a while the habit holds and then something disrupts it and you slide back.

That feeling of returning to your natural state is self-concept at work. The old behaviour is not a failure of willpower. It is a form of consistency. You are being consistent with who you believe you are.

This is also why identity shifts can feel so uncomfortable even when they are positive. Becoming someone who prioritises rest when you have always defined yourself through productivity. Becoming someone who asks for help when your self-concept has always included being capable and self-sufficient. Becoming someone who creates publicly when you have privately believed you are not quite ready yet. The new behaviour contradicts the existing self-image, and the brain reads that contradiction as a threat to resolve, usually by returning to the familiar.

How identity actually changes

The important thing that self-concept theory tells us is that self-concept is not updated by deciding to see yourself differently, it is updated by evidence.

Your brain builds and maintains its understanding of who you are through accumulated experience. Every time you behave in a certain way, you generate a small piece of data about the kind of person you are. Over time, enough data points in the same direction begin to shift the underlying belief.

This means that identity-based habit change works in a specific direction. You do not wait until you feel like a different person before you act like one. You act like the person you are becoming, repeatedly and in small ways and you let the feeling catch up to the evidence. The action comes first and the identity follows.

It also means that the smallest consistent behaviours carry more weight than they appear to. Writing one paragraph every morning is not significant because of what it produces, but it generates evidence, repeated daily, that you are someone who writes. Going for a ten-minute walk is not significant for its physical impact, but it tells your self-concept something about who you are and that story compounds.

What this looks like in practice

The shift that makes this practical is moving the question away from what do I want to do and toward who am I becoming.

It is a quiet orientation that informs small decisions throughout the day. When you are deciding whether to do the thing or skip it, the question is not whether you feel motivated right now, but whether this action is consistent with the person you are in the process of becoming.

And when you do skip it, which you will, the reframe that matters is not I failed today but what would the person I am becoming do tomorrow. Self-concept is not built on perfect streaks, but on the overall pattern of evidence and one missed day changes almost nothing about the story your brain is telling about who you are.

The inner work, there is no shortcut around this part, is getting honest about the self-concept you are currently operating from. Not the one you aspire to, but the one that is quietly running in the background, shaping what feels natural and what feels like effort, what feels like you and what feels like performing a version of yourself you haven’t quite earned yet.

That gap, between the identity you have and the identity you are building toward, is not a problem to solve quickly. It is the work. And it is worth doing slowly and honestly, because the behaviours that come out the other side of a genuine identity shift do not feel like discipline. They just feel like who you are.

Stay mindful,
Ieva🪞