Some news.

This October, I’ll be facilitating a Think Tank session at the AI & the Future of Education Conference (AIFE) in Bangkok: “Beta-Testing Childhood: Why School AI Policy Needs a Neuro-Biological Anchor.”

If you’ve been reading this Substack, you’ll recognise the title. Beta Testing Childhood started as an essay arguing that schools are running an uncontrolled experiment on developing brains: deploying generative AI into classrooms during the most sensitive windows of executive function development, with no framework for asking whether the cognitive effort being displaced was effort children actually needed to spend.

Tech Policy Press published it. Now it’s a conference session. And the argument has sharpened considerably since the original piece, because in March we went and counted.

What the audit found

In March 2026, I conducted a systematic audit of 14 major international accreditation bodies, including CIS, IB, and COBIS, and 50 leading international schools.

The results:

100% of major accreditors have no mandatory AI governance framework. Not weak frameworks. Not voluntary guidance with teeth. None.

92% of the schools we investigated have no publicly visible AI governance policy at all.

This is the Governance Vacuum. It’s not a metaphor. It’s a measured absence, and it sits directly on top of the developmental window (roughly ages 3 to 12) when executive function is being built through exactly the kind of effortful cognition that AI tools are designed to remove.

Most school AI policy, where it exists, is plagiarism policy wearing a governance costume. It asks whether the student cheated. It does not ask what the tool is doing to the cognitive architecture of a seven-year-old. Those are different questions, and only one of them has anything to do with how brains develop.

From vacuum to framework

I wanted to start building an alternative: an age-banded framework for generative AI use across the compulsory education range, grounded in what the developmental neuroscience and learning-science literature actually supports, and honest about what it doesn’t.

The short version runs in four bands:

Ages 3 to 6: no generative AI exposure in educational settings. This is when the foundations of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility are being laid down (Diamond, 2013; Best & Miller, 2010). The evidence base for generative AI in this age group is, in practical terms, empty. The restriction reflects the absence of data, not a moral panic.

Ages 7 to 10: AI literacy through observation and explanation, not personal use. Children learn what AI is, how it works, and why its output sometimes looks right but is wrong. They do not use it to complete schoolwork, because this is the period when retrieval practice and the generation effect are most needed and most easily bypassed.

Ages 10 to 13: narrow, supervised, task-specific use that preserves student retrieval and generation. The model here is the guardrailed tutor configuration in Bastani et al. (2025): hints, not answers. The same study showed unrestricted access produced a 17% performance deficit once the tool was removed.

Ages 13+: supervised independence within an institutional governance framework. Worth being blunt about this one: the age 13 floor adopted by UNESCO derives from data-protection law, not developmental neuroscience. It’s the band where independent use becomes defensible, not the band where it becomes unproblematic.

The framework states its own limitations openly. It has not been validated as an intervention. The band boundaries are pragmatic groupings, not neural thresholds. And the evidence base is asymmetric: strongest for adolescents, most reliant on inference for the youngest children. A longitudinal study designed to close exactly those gaps is currently being prepared for ethics submission at King’s College London.

That honesty is the point. School leaders are drowning in vendor certainty. What they need is a defensible position with the reasoning shown.

What the session covers

The Bangkok session is a facilitated 30-minute Think Tank for school leaders and coordinators. We’ll move past the comfortable “this is just the internet revolution again” analogy (it isn’t; the internet didn’t volunteer to do your thinking for you) and examine AI as a potential cognitive surrogate.

I’ll be introducing the Neuro-Behavioural Governance Model (NBGM), the framework JAI Behavioural has developed to fill the vacuum, built on two principles:

• Informed Delay: the deliberate, evidence-based sequencing of AI exposure against neurodevelopmental milestones, rather than deployment at the speed of procurement.

• Cognitive Guardrails: age-stratified constraints that protect the effortful cognition developing brains need, instead of treating all “engagement” as a win.

Attendees will leave able to identify the Governance-Development Gap in their own institution, define Cognitive Effort Displacement and what it means for primary-aged learners, and explore the NBGM audit process for evaluating their school’s AI governance against actual neuro-biological milestones rather than vendor promises.

Why this matters beyond one session

Schools are not waiting for the evidence base to mature. The EU AI Act’s high-risk education provisions don’t bite until December 2027. Accreditors aren’t asking the question. Which means right now, the only thing standing between a developing brain and an unexamined deployment decision is the judgement of individual school leaders, who are mostly being advised by the companies selling them the tools.

The session is designed for exactly those leaders: the ones who want to move from reactive plagiarism policies to proactive, neuro-informed governance that treats student cognitive health as a non-negotiable institutional mandate.

If you lead an international school and you’ll be at AIFE Bangkok, come and argue with me. That’s what a Think Tank is for.

AI & the Future of Education Conference 31 October to 1 November 2026, Bangkok Session details: aife.community

Ryan Lee is the founder of JAI Behavioural and an MSc candidate in Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health at King’s College London. For the full age-banded framework or a governance consultation, contact ryan@jaibehavioural.com.

In September 2012, my first Instagram post was a giant crumpet I’d seen in a coffee shop. The caption was “cool.” A friend had told me about an app where you posted photos. Filters were the thing everyone was talking about. I didn’t have the time or money for film photography yet. I had photos. I posted one.

The crumpet is gone now. My archive doesn’t go back that far. What survives starts a little later — my beloved Moog Rogue, a snowy car park, a screenshot of a Steve Cutts animation I liked at the time, the Trevi fountain, the inside of a rehearsal room. The grain of the early Instagram filters is on most of them.

Nobody, in any context, would have called the act of posting that crumpet brave. The platform was small. The act was small. There wasn’t a word for what I was doing because what I was doing didn’t need one. You saw a thing. You posted it. You moved on.

Lying awake, intently tuning in on you
If I was young, it didn’t stop you comin’ through

We are still lying awake, but the signal we are tuning into is no longer a distant radio tower; it is a backlit glass rectangle held inches from our eyes. With the average adult now tethered to a screen for upwards of seven hours a day, this relentless exposure does far more than just anchor our attention spans—it is actively re-authoring the way we talk to one another offline. The hyper-inflated, emotionally heavy vocabulary of the creator economy and the sterile, predictive patterns of generative AI are no longer safely quarantined inside our apps. They are bleeding directly into our everyday speech.

This isn’t just a paranoid hunch; the empirical data has caught up to the lived reality. A massive study mapping the influence of Large Language Models on human spoken communication analysed over 740,000 hours of unscripted audio and spontaneous podcast dialogue. The researchers discovered a staggering, statistically causal surge in AI-preferred syntax and algorithmic vocabulary propagating straight into real-life human interactions. We are unconsciously internalising and imitating the very machines built to mimic us, closing a flawless cultural feedback loop.

At the same time, recent computational linguistics papers tracking hundreds of millions of digital comments show a near-universal reduction in text length and a sharp decline in lexical richness. We are trading a broad, nuanced human vocabulary for a flat, pre-packaged dialect engineered entirely to win a battle for screen time.

In 1979, the video killed the radio star. The radio star was real talent rendered obsolete by a more visual medium. The content creator killed the video star. The AI prompt is now killing the content creator. Each generation of talent gets called something more inflated than the last while doing something measurably less. The radio singer needed a voice. The content creator needs a phone. The prompt needs a sentence.

The language inflates as the substance deflates. That’s the pattern this piece is about. And nowhere is it more visible than in the word that has quietly taken over the entire conversation about being online.

Last week I watched a video of a man on Instagram. He’s built an app he’s calling ‘LinkedIn for creators’. He was interviewing someone whose video about language pronunciation had gone viral. The video was subjectively funny. The conversation pivoted, almost immediately, to bravery. How brave it was to post yourself online. How much courage it took to hit record. There were the viral piano loops of Golden Hour playing, an all-too-familiar refrain.

This is what we call influencer culture in 2026.

The video itself was about how a word sounded. The framing around it was suffering and triumph. The gap between content and presentation was so wide it stopped being funny and became something else. Two adults treating a 15-second clip about phonetics as if it were a war memoir.

The word brave used to mean something. Running into a burning building. Standing up to power and telling the truth at personal cost. Now it means filming yourself for fifteen seconds and putting the result on an app. The vocabulary of genuine human struggle has been redistributed across the most trivial possible acts, and we’ve all collectively agreed not to notice and, in most cases, take part.

I used to find this irritating. Now I just find it sad. The bravery is sincere — the people using the word genuinely feel they’re being courageous. The vacuum it’s being performed into is total. Both things are true at the same time.

The bravery framing is recent. I know because I was inside this machine before it had the vocabulary it has now.

I spent the band era of my life on these platforms, before they called themselves a creator economy. From around 2013/14 onwards, engagement metrics became part of being in a working band. Promoters would ask for follower counts before they’d book a show. Some number of followers was supposed to translate to some number of tickets sold. Soundchecks where we discussed what to post that night. Studio sessions planned around content capture. A photographer booked for the rehearsal because the rehearsal was no longer just the rehearsal. It was material.

Nobody called any of it bravery. It was just the system you had to participate in to play shows, get more opportunities and appear like you were doing something. This phenomenal rewrite of your own personal history and others is actually the subject of a song I wrote (I know, shameless self-promotion amidst a Substack about shameless self-promotion, who’d of thunk it), “If I can see it, I will believe”, felt very much the mantra the whole industry had shrouded itself in.

It felt impossible to warm to this part of the job, but we tried to embrace it as part of the creative practice. Eventually it got tedious. The slow boredom of having to think like a content creator before I’d played a note.

We wheeled away from it as much as we could. Put on our own shows. Did our own content. I taught myself how to use and edit with Final Cut Pro. We worked with a friend who shot mostly on film, and an artist from Manchester School of Art who designed the album artwork and booklets. For one record we got so sick of digital churn we made physical objects instead — wax-sealed envelopes containing download codes, left in places we’d actually been, in brown envelopes that looked like they’d come from a different century. People found them. People kept them. People talked about them with their actual mouths.

The instinct that the platforms were the wrong vehicle was already there. We just didn’t have a vocabulary for the wrongness yet. And nobody was telling us we were brave for posting either way; in fact, if you weren’t posting, it was like you were something of a leper. The system was the system. You played it, or you didn’t.

The pandemic gave everyone language for personal struggle. Mental health awareness expanded into the mainstream. Therapy speak became common vocabulary. Vulnerability was framed as virtue, and sharing as a kind of healing. Most of this was earned. The world was actually broken. People genuinely needed language for what they were going through, and it’s a good thing that language became more available.

Then the world reopened, and the vocabulary stayed. The platforms absorbed it. The language that had been forged in genuine collective hardship started being applied to anything that happened in front of a camera. Vulnerability became currency. Sharing became courage. Posting became an act of self-disclosure that demanded recognition. People came back to social media speaking about their content the way you’d speak about getting through something genuinely hard.

This isn’t a critique of the original vocabulary. It’s a critique of what happens when a vocabulary forged in genuine struggle becomes the default register for trivial acts. The platforms didn’t invent the language. What ends up on screen is a sales pitch for human connection. Look how vulnerable I am. Like, comment, subscribe.

The data is now catching up to what the lived experience has been telling us for years.

Petter Törnberg’s 2026 paper in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media tracked U.S. social media use between 2020 and 2024 and found overall platform use declining. The youngest and oldest cohorts are increasingly abstaining altogether. As casual users disengage and polarised partisans remain vocal, online discourse becomes “smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.”

Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine, has tracked attention spans on screens for the better part of two decades. In 2004 the average person could focus on a single screen for two and a half minutes. By 2012 it had dropped to 75 seconds. Her recent measurements put it at 47 seconds. The platforms designed to hold attention have demonstrably destroyed our capacity to give it.

The format has shifted to match. Reels. Shorts. Endlessly scrolling vertical feeds engineered to keep the brain ticking over and the thumb moving. The platforms didn’t just respond to shrinking attention. They rebuilt themselves around it. The shorter we got, the shorter the content got. A closed loop they profit from at every revolution.

A 2024 EEG study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience examined what short-form video does to attentional networks at a neurological level. The findings were not subtle. The platforms aren’t just changing behaviour. They’re changing the underlying brain function that sustained behaviour requires.

The casual users are leaving. The remaining users can’t focus. The neurology is being measurably altered by the thing we keep insisting is bringing us together.

This is the hollow underneath the bravery. The substance these platforms claim to deliver — connection, attention, community — is being eroded by the platforms themselves. The language has had to inflate because what it’s describing has thinned. You don’t need to call something brave when the substance speaks for itself. The escalation in vocabulary is the most honest signal we have that the underlying thing is in trouble.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. If your feed is full of AI rubbish, that’s because something in your engagement told it to. The algorithm isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed.

The bravery framing is part of this too. Sad piano under a phonetics video isn’t a creative choice. It’s an engagement strategy. The algorithm rewards emotional language. Vulnerability captions outperform neutral ones. Triumph framing converts better than observation. The system has trained creators to package themselves as survivors of their own existence because survival narratives hold attention longer.

I’m not exempt. The first five videos on my feed when I opened my phone just now: Phoenix playing 1901 live, an archaeologist explaining how the pyramids were built, a newsletter telling me pints in London have hit £10 for the first time soundtracked by Only Love Can Hurt Like This, a video offering me a house and a job in a Spanish village, and a POV piece in which it is 1985 and I am reflecting on my lonely existence after pulling off a major bank heist, while a man plays a Korg X3 in a very expensive studio.

Some of that is genuinely interesting. Some is the algorithmic equivalent of microwave food. The algorithm doesn’t distinguish between them. Neither, apparently, do I.

When I open social media now, I want two things. I want to see my friends doing well wherever they are in the world. I want to keep up with football. That’s it. That was the original use case, more or less. A way to keep loose contact with the people I know and the things I care about.

The platforms have made this harder. Friends’ updates are buried. Football pages I follow are throttled in favour of accounts I don’t. The feed is engineered to interrupt what I came for with what the algorithm thinks will keep me longer. What I want isn’t boring; it’s just simple. I don’t need overwhelm and overload from a tool that’s meant to be social. I need easy access to the people and things I actually care about.

Nobody calls this brave. Nobody films themselves opening Instagram to check on a friend and frames it as an act of courage. It’s just what the platform was originally for, and the platform has made it harder to do because what I want from it doesn’t generate enough engagement to be worth surfacing.

It isn’t connection. It isn’t community. It isn’t creativity.

Influencer culture isn’t dying. The version of it people still picture — actual humans filming themselves, however inflated the language around it has got — is being quietly hollowed out and replaced. The bravery captions and the sad piano are still there. What’s underneath them increasingly isn’t a person. It’s a prompt. The corpse is being puppeted by something that was never alive to begin with, and the vocabulary of human struggle is being draped over output that no human made.

The captions will continue. The sad music will keep playing under videos about phonetics and beer. The algorithm will keep serving you Phoenix live and a man pretending to be a 1985 bank robber playing a vintage synthesiser in equal measure. Increasingly, the man won't exist.

The fix is the most embarrassingly simple thing imaginable. Leave the house. Phone a friend. Go to the pub. Watch the football in a room with other people watching the football. The world existed before the platforms did. The people you actually care about are still in it.

And the language we use should match what we’re actually doing. Posting a video isn’t bravery. Sharing a thought isn’t courage. Making something and putting it online isn’t survival. It’s just posting. It’s just sharing. It’s just making.

In September 2012, I posted a crumpet because I saw a thing I liked and wanted to share it. Nobody called it brave. Nobody needed to. The point was always going to be the crumpet.

Crumpet photo taken 23/5/2026.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, EU legislators agreed to push the Artificial Intelligence Act’s high-risk provisions back to December 2027, over a year later than the original schedule, and explicitly including AI systems used in education. More than forty civil-society groups had warned, in writing, that the delay would expose children. The deal went through anyway.

EO 14277 in the US and the Department for Education’s parallel rollout in the UK have already authorised generative AI in classrooms for children aged 3–12 without neurodevelopmental impact assessments, a point I argued last month in Beta Testing Childhood. Yesterday’s EU decision is the latest in a pattern, not the start of one. What I didn’t fully unpack last month is what fills the vacuum these decisions create. The answer, increasingly, is the professional judgment of individual teachers. And the data on what that judgment is being asked to absorb is now impossible to ignore.

The “future-ready” mandate has no destination

We are told this is all in service of preparing children for an AI-shaped economy. NACE's most recent Job Outlook describes the Class of 2026 entering a "fair" job market, the weakest characterisation since 2021, with overall hiring growth concentrated almost entirely at firms with over 5,000 employees. In the UK, entry-level job postings have fallen 32% since ChatGPT's launch, with McKinsey reporting that AI-exposed sectors saw the steepest declines. The Institute of Student Employers' 2026 Student Development Survey found 87% of employers expect AI to reshape graduate and apprentice roles within three years, with 43% saying entry-level work has already changed. The destination of "future-readiness" is being demolished by the same systems that schools are being told to install in primary classrooms. We are training a generation in the use of the tool that is reshaping the bottom rung of the ladder they are being prepared to climb.

That mandate is then handed to the people asked to deliver it.

The workforce being asked to govern

The TES Teacher Wellbeing Report 2026, drawing on responses from over 2,800 educators across 196 countries, paints a picture of a profession at the edge of its capacity. Only 4% of teachers can complete their work within their contracted hours. 63% work six or more hours over their standard week; 14% routinely clock 69-hour weeks. 73% cite workload as their primary source of stress, and 42% describe themselves as “very or extremely overwhelmed.” Half do not plan to stay in teaching long-term, with stress (55%) and workload (54%) as the leading reasons.

This is the workforce currently being trusted to make real-time, case-by-case judgments about AI use with minors' data. To "anonymise" student work before uploading it to private models. To assess the developmental appropriateness of tools they've had no time to evaluate. To distinguish between AI-as-scaffolding and AI-as-substitute for a child's cognitive effort, often within a single 45-minute lesson, alongside a class of thirty.

51% say lack of time is the biggest single barrier to their own professional development. Asking that same workforce to invent classroom-level AI policy on the fly isn’t autonomy. It’s abandonment dressed up as trust.

The loop is the symptom, not the system

If a teacher uses AI to plan a lesson because they’re too burnt out to think, and a student uses AI to generate the response because they’ve been taught it’s an “efficiency tool,” and the teacher then uses AI to mark that work via an uploaded scheme, the question isn’t whether this happens in any individual classroom. It mostly doesn’t, yet. The question is whether each of these moves is a locally rational response to the same governance vacuum. They are. Every actor is making a sensible decision, given their constraints. The aggregate is something nobody chose.

What governance actually requires

In June 2023, UNESCO surveyed over 450 schools and universities globally and found fewer than 10% had any formal AI guidance. 40% of those that did had policies that were unwritten and communicated orally. Three years on, the pace of deployment has rocketed past the pace of policy, and the vacuum is being filled by default. In Thailand, a Microsoft-led initiative recently reported that 88.6% of participating schools have an AI policy “in place or in progress.” The catch is in the framing: the cohort being surveyed is the cohort being trained by the vendor whose tools the policies are about to govern. Within the most actively trained cohort in the country, “in progress” is doing extraordinary amounts of work.

This is what I have spent the last six months building an alternative to. The Neuro-Behavioural Governance Model is a three-layer architecture. A fixed evidence base grounded in developmental neuroscience, contextual modules that adapt to a school’s curriculum and national data law, and an implementation layer that treats adoption as a behaviour change problem rather than a paperwork exercise. Its first application is the JAI AI Governance Framework for international schools.

The single non-negotiable across the model is age-banded exposure. Ages 3–6: no AI exposure. Ages 7–9: computer literacy without AI. Ages 10–12: narrow, supervised use. Ages 13+: supervised independence within a governance framework. The prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until the mid-twenties. Ages three to twelve are a critical and irreversible developmental window. No current educational AI policy I have surveyed reflects this — not in the EO, not in the DfE rollout, not in the Microsoft-Thai MoE collaboration, not in international school accreditation requirements. Governance that doesn’t outsource decision rights to the most exhausted person in the room is possible. It just isn’t being built.

Case Study: Thailand

The pattern shows up clearly in Thailand. Up to 80 private schools are projected to close this year — closures have surged from an annual 30–50 to 70–80, driven by demographic decline, rising operating costs, and what the Bangkok Post explicitly named last month as the disruptive cost of investing in AI-driven educational models with unclear returns. Meanwhile, the international school sector is booming. Net profits across the sector rose 71.76% between 2022 and 2023. New education business registrations have nearly doubled since 2020. Top-tier international schools now charge over a million baht per year.

International schools in Thailand are accredited by ONESQA and by recognised international bodies, including WASC, CIS, and the IB. What no major accreditation body for international schools has yet published is a mandatory AI governance standard rooted in developmental neuroscience. The audit I have run across schools in Southeast Asia and the UAE finds, consistently, policies addressing academic integrity and effectively nothing addressing what unrestricted AI interaction is doing to developing brains. Accreditation is happening. AI governance specific to children’s neurodevelopment isn’t part of it yet.

Who is in the room

In the early hours of yesterday morning, EU legislators pushed the AI Act’s high-risk provisions back to December 2027. The category they postponed explicitly includes AI systems used in education. The forty-plus civil society organisations who had warned about exactly this, about biometric identification and AI in schools, saw their warnings acknowledged in the negotiating room and overridden in the final text. The law is also non-retroactive: AI systems placed on the market before December 2027 may, as legal experts now note, remain outside its scope indefinitely.

So when we ask who is in the room when AI policy for children gets made, in Brussels, civil society was. They were heard. They were ignored. In Washington and London, the answer is the executive branch and the technology firms it consulted. In international schools, the answer is a workforce in which only 4% can finish their work within their contracted hours, and half are planning to leave.

Asking those teachers to use their best judgment isn’t autonomy. It’s the sound of a system quietly transferring liability to the people least equipped to bear it. Governance with humans actually in the room is possible. The question is whether anyone with the authority to build it is interested in starting.

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If your school is interested in piloting the JAI AI Governance Framework, the diagnostic audit is free and takes ten minutes: ryan@jaibehavioural.com.

Friends and Colleagues,

I am thrilled to share that my investigation into the neuro-governance vacuum in education is officially live today in Tech Policy Press.

For the past few months, we at JAI Behavioural have been digging into a question that the current EdTech rush is ignoring: What is the biological cost of the AI classroom?

The piece is a clinical audit of the gap between “efficiency” and “development.” As a practitioner and researcher, I’ve been investigating the 17% capability deficit that emerges when students outsource their executive function to automated tools. In this investigation, I break down why we are currently in a “Neuro-Governance” vacuum—and why the burden of protecting children’s brain development shouldn’t fall solely on exhausted teachers.

You can read the full piece here: https://www.techpolicy.press/beta-testing-childhood/

The Core Argument: We are currently witnessing a “Shadow Learning Loss.” We know from the fallout of the pandemic that when cognitive struggle is removed or mediated through low-resolution digital tools, developmental delays follow. By introducing unregulated AI as a standard classroom tool, we are at risk of replicating those same conditions.

This TPP piece serves as the foundation for what we’re building at JAI Behavioural. It isn’t just an article; it’s a call for a Neuro-Safeguarding standard that treats the developing brain with the same legal and ethical rigour we use for physical safety.

I’d love for you to read the piece and share it with any school leaders or policy-makers in your network.

Ryan Lee, Founder, JAI Behavioural

I’m Ryan. I’m finishing an MSc in Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health at King’s College London. I live in Thailand. Neither of those things was the plan.

I write about what happens when institutions ignore the science of how people actually work. Sometimes that’s about burnout and why the wellness industry exists to protect employers, not employees. Sometimes that’s about AI and what it’s doing to children’s brains while schools write policies with no evidence base. Sometimes it’s personal.

If you want to know what this Substack sounds like before you commit, start with these two:

He Would Have Laughed — about grief, time, and the things that stay funny when everything else stops being funny. This is the personal side of what I write.

Why Don’t You Just Meditate? — about the neuroscience of burnout, why your employer’s wellness programme is designed to protect them, not you, and what an evidence-based alternative actually looks like. This is the structural argument side.

I publish roughly weekly. If something resonates, reply to any email. I read everything.

If you’re a teacher or professional experiencing burnout and want to do something about it beyond downloading another meditation app, I’m currently running a neuroscience-grounded pilot. You can find it at jit.jaibehavioural.com.

Ryan

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Sometime in the early hours of March 29th, a doctor told me I’d fractured my orbital bone and Zygoma. Something in me, and I want to be clear this was involuntary, reached immediately for a fake cry. Not tears. Not genuine distress. A performance of distress, lasting approximately two minutes, directed at nobody in particular in a hospital hallway in Chiang Mai.

I then spent the better part of the following days laughing at myself for doing it.

Not at the fracture. Not at the plate and screw they’d put in my cheek, adding to the existing metalwork in my jaw from a previous surgery. At the performance. At the fact that some part of me, faced with actual misfortune, instinctively reached for the version of grief I’d seen other people do rather than anything resembling a genuine reaction.

The genuine reaction, for the record, was being annoyed I’d missed my friend’s leaving do.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. The first time my jaw required surgical intervention in 2020, it carried weight. This time, I ended up with a plate in my cheek from a motorbike in Thailand and caught myself performing grief for an audience of none. Marx didn’t have this specific scenario in mind, but it is holding well.

Before the surgery, they left me in a weird, transitional waiting room, flat on a bed positioned next to a stranger, both of us covered solely by a hospital cloth.

All I could see above me were two halogen lights, one blindingly bright, one dim. On the underside of the dim one was a small, hand-written sticker that simply said: Ry. My name is Ryan. In a hospital with hundreds of beds and thousands of staff, the universe had managed to label the specific lightbulb I was staring at while my face was broken. It felt less like a coincidence and more like a poorly rendered Easter egg in a video game.

What’s strange is that when the doctor originally told me the news, my reaction was almost identical to the one I had years ago: Nahhhh. Surely not. Not because I was in denial, more because I genuinely wasn’t in that much pain and the information didn’t compute.

I’ve filed enough of these away that my system stopped spiking. Not gradually, not through any conscious effort. Instantly. When the doctor told me about the fracture it felt like hearing a conductor call out train times on a platform. Fresh information. Received, processed, next. Psychologists talk about habituation but what I’m describing isn’t repeated exposure slowly dulling a response. It’s the absence of a response from the offset. Being sad about it won’t change the result. Digging myself out won’t help in the long haul. Holding on to what went wrong won’t make it go away any sooner than it arrived. So why should I care, and in what way should I care?

I’ve noticed something about my life since my early twenties. Not a pattern exactly, patterns present themselves neatly and coherently, and nothing I’d describe in my life does that. More like a recurring texture. The specific feeling of things arriving sideways. And more specifically these recurring stings I would describe as a ZAP. The moment that arrives precisely when everything feels like it’s finally working. When I expressed this to a friend after the accident, what I said was that for once everything felt like plain sailing, like I was doing everything right, and then ZAP. Wake up. This is the real world.

When they finally wheeled me into the operating room, I expected the immediate, merciful blankness of the countdown. Instead, I was treated to forty minutes of pre-op surrealism. A group of nurses were dancing to songs playing on their phones, shifting between tasks with a rhythmic casualness that felt entirely at odds with the fact that they were about to screw metal into my skull. Directly next to me was a monitor displaying a 3D map of my own shattered face. I spent the best part of an hour staring at the geometry of the damage while the staff practiced their choreography.

When the blink finally happened and I woke up, the system didn’t spike. It nodded.

Waking up was a different kind of nightmare. I was in a recovery room under the brightest lights I have ever seen in my life, lay next to a snoring elderly Thai man. The nurses were engaged in a ferocious, high-speed debate about what they were going to eat, gin arai dee, as if the clinical environment around them was just a noisy canteen.

The fake cry from earlier was the ghost of a response I used to have, the briefly uncalibrated part making a two-minute appearance before the actual operating system reasserted itself. I wasn’t laughing at the situation. I was laughing at forgetting, just for a moment, which version of me I actually am.

There’s a type of goal in football, the open goal missed from six yards, the geometry of it almost impossible. Everyone in the stadium laughs because what else do you do. The player watching the ball sail over the bar knows it isn’t funny. They’ll think about it longer than any goal they ever scored.

I’m simultaneously the crowd and the player. A few days after the surgery, I found out the rental company knew something was wrong with the motorbike before I got on it. First reaction, what the fuck. Second reaction, a shrug. That is so me. Not self-pity. Not anger. Just the quiet recognition of a familiar feeling arriving again.

That’s what I’m actually laughing at. Not my flaws, not my failures, not the plate in my face. The consistency of it. The fact that after nearly 33 years I’ve stopped being surprised, except for the two minutes in a hospital room in Chiang Mai when I briefly, genuinely forgot.

People perform the laugh at themselves constantly. As credential, as signal, as proof of some lightness they want you to believe they carry. I’ve watched it for years and always wondered the same thing, where is it actually coming from. Not the laugh. The need for it.

I’m expressly proud of who I am and everything that made me. Not despite the costs, including them. That pride wasn’t given to me and it doesn’t need the laugh to hold it up.

Sarcasm is supposed to be the lowest form of wit. I think self-deprecation might actually be.

I’m laughing at myself. Just not at anything you’d expect.

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I’ve had the same conversation more times than I can count.

Someone tells me about the latest thing their workplace has introduced. A mindfulness session on a Wednesday. A resilience workshop delivered by someone who has never worked in their industry. A wellness stipend that basically covers a gym membership nobody has time to use. They describe it with a specific kind of exhausted sarcasm, not angry, just tired of pretending it’s helping.

And then three months later, they’re having the same conversation. Same symptoms. Same cycle. Different initiative.

This isn’t a motivation problem. It isn’t a gratitude problem.

Most workplace burnout interventions treat burnout as a single condition. One solution for everyone. A meditation app for the whole team. A day off when things get bad. The logic being that stress goes in, recovery comes out, and the nervous system resets like a phone on charge overnight.

Except it doesn’t work like that. And once you understand why, the inadequacy of most interventions becomes almost impossible to ignore.

When stress is chronic, not occasional but week after week, your nervous system doesn’t spike and recover. The baseline shifts. You stop operating from a state of equilibrium and start operating from a state of managed depletion. The allostatic load stays elevated. You can sleep eight hours and wake up exhausted because sleep isn’t the problem. The system regulating your capacity to recover is the problem.

And that system isn’t one thing. It’s four.

Burnout looks different depending on which neurological system is carrying the heaviest load. Emotional burnout is cortisol dysregulation, the exhaustion that comes from managing your own emotional responses all day while also managing everyone else’s. Cognitive burnout is working memory failure, reading the same email three times and still not processing it, and making simple decisions feel disproportionately hard. Motivational burnout is dopamine depletion; still doing the work, but the biochemical reward for finishing it is completely gone. Relational burnout is social engagement system fatigue; every interaction feels like a tax, including the ones you used to look forward to.

These require different interventions. Giving someone whose working memory is overwhelmed an emotional regulation exercise doesn’t touch the problem. Telling someone with relational exhaustion to go to a group yoga class is actively counterproductive.

This is the gap. Not in effort or intention, most organisations are genuinely trying, but in precision. Burnout gets one generic response because nobody is measuring which domain is actually depleted.

That’s what I built JIT to address. Fourteen days. A baseline assessment across all four domains. One targeted tool per day matched to your specific profile. No generic advice. No one-size-fits-all recovery plan.

In the first pilot, participants saw a 15.6% mean reduction in burnout scores across all four domains in fourteen days. Zero negative responses to the protocol.

Pilot 2 is open now. Free to participate. Any sector, any role.

If you’ve had the conversation I described at the start of this piece, with a colleague, a friend, or yourself, this is worth fourteen days of your time.

Sign up at JIT

To find out more, visit JAI

Burnout is one of the most discussed and least solved problems in professional life. Everyone agrees it exists. Most organisations respond to it the same way: a wellness app, a mindfulness session, a reminder to take breaks. These are not solutions. They are gestures in the direction of a problem that requires something more considered.

The question that motivated this work was simpler than it sounds: what would actually help?

Not a programme. Not a policy. Not another layer of expectation dressed up as support. Something grounded in how the brain actually works under sustained occupational load, and small enough that an already-depleted person could actually do it.

JAI Behavioural was not built from a business plan. It was built from a problem that kept showing up: the gap between what the research supports and what workplaces actually do about it. The name came later. The question came first. JAI builds evidence-based tools to close that gap.

NEU (Neuroscience and Education Unified) is the first framework to come out of that question. It measures burnout across four domains: Cognitive, Emotional, Motivation, and Relational. It assigns tools matched to a person’s specific profile. And it asks for fourteen days and a few minutes a day.

Across February and March 2026, I ran the first pilot.

What we did

Sixteen participants were recruited across five organisations: four international schools and one non-school professional context, spanning multiple countries. Each completed a short burnout profile at Day 0, received a two-component toolkit matched to their profile, and completed the same profile again at Day 14.

Component A was universal: a 2-3 minute end-of-task reset routine grounded in what neuroscience tells us about the cost of constant context-switching. Component B was personalised, a tool selected based on whichever burnout domain was highest at baseline.

No supervision. No financial incentive. No institutional mandate. Just a PDF pack, a willingness to try, and two weeks.

Ten participants completed the full protocol. That is the dataset this piece is based on.

What the data showed

Mean total burnout score reduced from 19.0 at Day 0 to 16.1 at Day 14, a mean reduction of 15.6% across ten completers. All four burnout domains were reduced. No domain increased on average.

The most significant individual finding: the participant with the highest burnout profile in the sample, scoring 28 out of 36 at baseline with the Emotional domain at ceiling, reduced by 6 points in 14 days. That is a 21.4% reduction from the heaviest starting point in the dataset. The framework produced its strongest effect where the need was greatest.

A separate anonymous Google Form, completed after the pilot closed, returned ten responses. Zero respondents said No to toolkit endorsement. Mean perceived workload sustainability increased from 6.67 to 7.78 out of 10. Four of ten respondents indicated they were considering leaving their current role within two years, a retention risk signal that the named data alone would not have surfaced.

These are not large effect sizes. They are not designed to be. A 14-day self-administered Tier 1 intervention is not supposed to resolve burnout. It is supposed to move the needle, to demonstrate that a structured, low-burden behavioural tool can produce measurable directional change in real professional conditions. That is what happened.

What the qualitative data added

Numbers tell part of the story. The qualitative data tells the rest.

The most consistently effective component across all profiles, roles, and contexts was Pack-Down and Reset, the universal end-of-task transition routine. Participants from different schools and countries, with different domain profiles, independently described the same effect: smoother transitions, less accumulated tension, and a clearer boundary between one demand and the next. One participant described less dread around lesson transitions once the routine was familiar. Another noted that the classroom energy felt calmer and more structured when both teacher and students reset together.

What was equally notable was how participants adapted the tools. One participant with no fixed classroom translated the reset into digital hygiene, closing irrelevant browser tabs into bookmark groups at task transitions. The function was preserved. The form was theirs. The participant who adapted most autonomously across multiple tools showed the largest score reduction in the sample.

Communication boundary tools produced a different kind of finding. Scheduled send worked. The 48-hour window was harder. School culture demanded faster responses than the boundary allowed. Participants who could not fully implement it still reported something: a cognitive reframe. Nothing drastic happens if you don’t respond immediately. That shift in relationship to communication pressure, even without perfect behavioural change, is not nothing.

The data also surfaced what individual tools cannot do. Several participants accurately identified that their burnout was driven by structural conditions: duty overload, enforced proximity, and lack of recovery space during the working day. They were right. No individual habit tool resolves a structural problem. The NEU framework operates across three tiers: individual tools are Tier 1, school-level structural change is Tier 2, and organisational culture and leadership are Tier 3. This pilot tested Tier 1 only. The ceiling participants hit is a designed boundary, not a failure of the framework.

What this means

The gap between what the research supports and what most workplaces actually do about burnout is not closing on its own. Wellness programmes measure nothing. Mindfulness sessions change nothing structurally. The problem compounds quietly until someone leaves, breaks down, or stops caring.

What Pilot 1 established is that a structured, neuroscience-grounded, low-burden intervention can produce measurable change in real conditions: across different organisations, different roles, different profiles, and without any institutional support or financial incentive.

That is a beginning. Pilot 2 is in design, incorporating a waitlist control group, a readiness indicator at intake, digital delivery, and a target sample of 40-60 participants across a minimum of six organisations.

The full NEU Pilot 1 Findings Report is available on request.

Years ago, I worked as a packaging operator and junior brewer for a well-established British brewery.

One afternoon, the floor staff received an email from something called “Happy Healthy Beavers.”

“In today’s ever-connected ‘always on’ world, it’s more important than ever that we can disconnect in our home surroundings and take care of our mental and physical health.”

Read that again.

The email acknowledged we were living in an “always on” world. Then, immediately positioned the solution as something we needed to do at home, in our own time, to manage the mental and physical toll.

Attached was a document: “50 Ways to Take a Break.”

The working conditions that necessitated this document? Heavy labour with minimal breaks. Repetitive tasks. Guilt for leaving on time. Pressure to move incredibly fast against mass demand for the product.

We worked on a factory floor where contamination was a serious concern, where every second counted, and where falling behind meant the entire line backed up.

And inadequate safety training. I was put on a night shift and asked to flush a fermentation tank despite never having been shown how. Boiling water mixed with chemical cleaning traces was sprayed directly into my eye. I couldn’t get out of bed for two or three days.

The company’s wellness solution?

“Pet a furry creature.”

“Move 2x slowly.”

We laughed about those two the most, but the real punchline came later.

We were given a half day and told about a staff party—bowling, then drinks afterwards. Attendance was framed as optional. I had my second job that evening, so I went to work at the bar instead. The entire staff showed up. Including my floor manager. Drunk.

He didn’t say much to me that night. But he reported me to HR for a formal warning. The party had been mandatory, I learned. After the fact. Mandatory “fun” that we were expected to pay for ourselves. Bowling. Drinks. On our own time. With a formal warning if we didn’t attend.

Think about that sequence. Here are 50 individual ways to manage your stress at home. Also, socialising with your colleagues outside work hours is compulsory and at your expense. Also, if you don’t comply, we’ll discipline you. Why aren’t you taking care of yourself?

They made it clear I wasn’t wanted. I quit before they could make it official.

This is the wellness industry in miniature. Systemic problems created by the organisation, individual solutions pushed onto workers, and punishment when those solutions don’t fix what was never the worker’s fault to begin with.

The brewery wasn’t unique. I’ve seen this pattern everywhere since.

Mindfulness sessions. Yoga. Meditation apps. Staff wellness initiatives that arrive via email require no structural change and cost nothing beyond someone’s man-minutes to search “corporate wellness ideas” and forward the results.

Why? Because they’re cheap.

Creating a “Happy Healthy Beavers” initiative costs nothing but administrative time. Implementing systemic change? That requires money, time, and buy-in from every level of management and senior leadership. It requires admitting that the structure itself creates the problem. It requires investment with no immediate measurable return.

Much easier to send an email. Much easier to offer a mindfulness app. Much easier to frame burnout as an individual resilience deficit than an organisational design failure.

Some companies do it as legal cover. “We offered wellness programmes” looks caring in documentation when employees break down or quit. Some do it to maintain the “we’re a family” mythology while structuring work like you’re disposable contractors.

What the wellness industry actually sells—and this is crucial to understand—is not sold to you. It’s sold to your employer, and it is an easy sell. Your employees’ stress is fixable individually. You don’t need to restructure workloads, hire more staff, or redesign impossible expectations. Just teach them to manage their response better.

The underlying message when your employer offers meditation instead of reducing your hours is brutally simple.

It’s your problem.

To be clear, mindfulness meditation has legitimate uses. A 2015 review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience found evidence that meditation can improve attention regulation and emotional processing. When done consistently, it can help people manage stress responses.

But there are issues with how this research translates to workplace wellness.

First, the research itself has significant limitations. Most findings haven’t been replicated. There’s a strong publication bias toward positive results. And many researchers are enthusiastic meditators themselves, which raises questions about objectivity.

Individual differences matter enormously. Meditation helps some people and not others, depending on personality, life circumstances, and stress levels. We don’t fully understand why.

Second, workplace implementations consistently fail. A 2019 study examined a mindfulness app intervention for work stress.

Participants were given 8 weeks to complete meditation sessions. The average completion was 16.6 sessions, but that masked enormous variation. Thirteen participants never used the app at all. Ten of them cited the same reason: lack of time.

Think about that. Workers are too stressed and time-pressed to benefit from a stress-reduction programme designed for time-pressed workers.

Of those who did complete sessions, only 2% finished the full programme. Only 23% made it through the basic course.

The key finding from this study was that when participants reported reduced “job strain,” it wasn’t because their workload decreased. Job demands remained unchanged. What increased was their sense of job control—their perception of being able to manage.

Mindfulness helped them feel more in control of the impossible workload. But it didn’t make the workload less impossible.

The fundamental problem with individual wellness solutions for systemic problems is that they treat the perception of stress, not the source. They help you manage your response to cognitive overload. They don’t address why you’re cognitively overloaded in the first place.

So what would addressing the source actually look like?

First, we need to understand what’s actually happening. Cognition is the set of mental processes that deal with knowledge—how we understand and interact with the world around us.

When these processes are overloaded, we see stagnation in emotional regulation, motivation, and decision-making. This isn’t a weakness. This is a neurological capacity being exceeded.

This is happening at scale. According to the 2025 State of Global Workplace Report, 83% of workers are experiencing at least some degree of burnout. The top drivers? Overwhelming workload (48%), working too many hours (40%), and difficulty balancing work obligations with personal and family life (37%).

The modern workplace creates cognitive overload through mechanisms that didn’t exist a generation ago. Constant connectivity means workers are never truly out of work—40% cite working too many hours as a primary burnout driver, but “too many hours” now extends beyond the office into evenings, weekends, and holidays through email and messaging platforms. Context switching across multiple platforms and projects fragments attention. Many employees wear multiple hats in roles they weren’t trained for, managing demands—both emotional and physical—they didn’t anticipate when they took the job.

The adaptation required to be a “successful” modern employee is incompatible with human cognition that has developed over millennia to handle certain types and volumes of information processing. It has not developed to manage the demands of the contemporary workplace. We’re running evolutionary hardware on software it was never designed to run.

This is why individual solutions fail. You can’t meditate your way out of structural cognitive overload any more than you can meditate your way into needing less sleep. The brain has limits. When those limits are consistently exceeded, the system breaks down.

Disengagement from burnout cost the global economy $438 billion in 2024. That’s not a wellness problem. That’s a structural failure with a price tag.

What would a neuroscience-based approach look like instead?

It would start with workload reduction—not perception management, but actual reduction of cognitive demands. It would be grounded in understanding where burnout comes from and how it develops over time, based on brain science rather than corporate mythology about resilience.

It would acknowledge that individual variation exists. Some people are affected by stressors that others aren’t, not because of character defects but because of neurocognitive differences. Understanding this allows for systemic interventions that account for how people actually work—both individually and as teams.

It would inform how we design training, structure roles, and build workplace environments. Not around assumptions about what workers “should” be able to handle, but around what human brains can actually process.

This isn’t theoretical. I’ve developed a framework for addressing teacher burnout that’s grounded in neuroscience rather than wellness mythology. It’s currently being piloted with teachers across multiple international schools.

The core principle is simple. Mandatory cognitive load reduction paired with domain-specific interventions. Not “here are 50 ways to take a break,” but “here’s a required practice that actually reduces the processing demands on your brain, plus targeted tools based on which type of burnout you’re experiencing.”

The difference is structural. Wellness programmes ask individuals to manage their response to impossible demands. Neuroscience-based interventions reduce the demands themselves.

So why don’t organisations make these changes? If the evidence is this clear, and the alternative exists, what’s stopping them?

Because they would have to admit something is broken. Systemic interventions require acknowledging that the structure itself creates the problem, not individual workers’ inability to cope. That admission is uncomfortable. It suggests leadership failure, not employee weakness.

The short-term costs feel unbearable.

Reducing workload means hiring more staff or doing less with current resources. Redesigning structures means investing time and money with no immediate measurable return. Individual wellness programmes are cheaper and safer.

They’re a hands-off approach to a systemic issue that still lets companies say “we know there are problems, but we’re all in this together.”

What that approach fails to recognise is the need for a deep understanding of the scientific underpinnings that cause burnout. It treats symptoms with platitudes rather than addressing root causes with evidence.

The evidence for systemic change is overwhelming. The same report showing $438 billion lost to disengagement in 2024 estimated that $9.6 trillion could be added to the global economy with a fully engaged workforce. That’s not a wellness problem. That’s a structural opportunity being ignored because the path to it requires uncomfortable admissions and short-term investment.

What would actually need to change? Workload and task reduction that addresses where burnout develops. Manageable expectations without micromanagement. Structural redesign—not overhaul, but thoughtful restructuring—of how workplaces operate and who they operate for. Recognition that staff retention is vital to running a successful organisation.

Because here’s what happens if nothing changes: burnout levels continue rising internationally. The economic cost compounds. Companies lose talented, well-regarded, established employees because they refuse to care for their well-being. Who loses? Everyone. But mostly, business owners are too ignorant to see that systemic changes retain talent and improve performance.

We’re approaching a point where this becomes unavoidable. As AI development accelerates and more cognitive work becomes automated, we need to demand that workplaces reclaim what makes us distinctly human.

Burnout is a global epidemic in the workplace. The solution isn’t more mindfulness apps. It’s real interventions that benefit the one thing that defines us as humans: our brains and our cognition.

I want you to think about what your workplace actually offers you beyond salary and benefits. Because salary and benefits are the basics. They’re what you’re entitled to. They’re not perks. They’re not compensation for impossible workload or toxic culture. They’re baseline requirements for employment.

If all your workplace offers beyond that is a meditation app and an email about taking breaks, they’re not solving the problem. They’re asking you to manage the consequences of their refusal to change.

I quit the brewery. I’ve watched colleagues quit schools, hospitals, corporations—all citing burnout, all offered meditation apps on their way out the door.

The pattern holds. The wellness industry profits. Employers save money. Workers collapse quietly.

And somewhere, right now, someone is being told the solution to their impossible workload is to breathe more deeply.

The wellness industry will keep selling individual solutions to systemic problems because it’s profitable. Employers will keep buying them because it’s cheaper than admitting failure.

Will you keep accepting it?

I was in two hospitals that day. First, I was at the Royal Liverpool Hospital in the city centre—sat on one of those fold‑out ambulance beds—when they showed me the X‑ray and said I’d fractured my jaw in two places and needed surgery. I asked about my missing tooth.

“What tooth?” the doctor said.

“The one I gave to the ambulance driver.”

“That wasn’t a tooth. That was a piece of your lower jaw.”

I laughed—small and involuntary, the kind that hurt enough to make me laugh again. He looked at me like I was reacting wrong—which, to be fair, I probably was. But that reaction made complete sense to me. It didn’t feel emotional. It felt… factual. Like being informed a component had fallen off and needed putting back on.

Then they moved me to Aintree—the best hospital in the country for maxillofacial surgery, I was told—for same-day surgery and an overnight stay. A bit of luck on my behalf. Everything there felt surgically bright, like the lightbulbs were engineered for this exact room, and the air had that dry, clean hospital smell. A nurse asked if I was okay. The police came briefly to take a statement, and their attempts to find out who did it went nowhere. Their failure didn’t bother me; it just reinforced the sense that the whole thing was random and already moving past me.

They wheeled me in on the bed. My head felt heavy, my body was strangely light. The doctor was rambling about something—calm, professional filler—and then he started the countdown. We didn’t get to one. I was already gone.

I’d been terrified of being put to sleep. First time in my conscious life. But it was necessary, so it was happening whether I liked it or not. I don’t remember thinking anything. I don’t remember much of the room either—just the sense of loads of doors, white and green everywhere, and five or six people standing around me like a small orbit.

Then the lights went out.

Waking was movement. I was being wheeled somewhere—post‑op, I suppose, and it all felt like a blink, seconds at most. Inside that gap, there was music. Deerhunter’s He Would Have Laughed - just the intro riff - looping with a hazy, dreamy quality. I still don’t know why. Was it actually playing in the room? A memory surfacing? Something my brain pulled up to fill the blank? The title feels almost perfect now. It didn’t feel like a soundtrack; it felt like something I was inside. When I came back, it was still there. For a moment I wondered if I might be dead, because surely nothing real could feel that surreal.

Deerhunter - He Would Have Laughed

I remember feeling vividly dry. No pain. Just… nothingness. The first words out of my mouth to the nurse were, “Do I still look handsome?” It wasn’t a joke - it had been my biggest concern since the accident. Not just vanity, though that was part of it. More that visible damage would become how people saw me first. A permanent marker of this random event written across my face. I got lucky - the scars aren’t visible, the plates aren’t obvious unless I point them out. But that fear of being redefined by what happened to my face was real. She said yes, lovingly, and I wanted to believe her. And of course, post‑surgery, I did look different. Like I’d had my face stood on by a rhino. The colours were hospital colours—white, clinical green—and the hospital gown didn’t help. Why do they all look faintly ridiculous? Surely someone could design a decent gown.

What struck me most about the isolation was how ordinary it felt. By that point we were five months into COVID; being alone in a hospital room didn’t register as unusual. If anything, I think being surrounded by people would’ve made me process the whole thing differently. The solitude suited me. It created a kind of emotional neutrality — nothing pushing in, nothing pushing out.

The morphine added its own haze. One morning I remember looking out of the tiny hospital window at a sky that was grey in the exact way northern England specialises in: colourless, low, resigned. I felt a strange detachment from reality, like I was watching my own situation from the outside. Not frightened. Not sad. Just… separate.

Then my Mum called and asked if I wanted anything. I was sick of water, so I asked for apple juice — cold, from a carton, arguably my favourite drink in the world. What she sent in wasn’t a carton. It was an uncountable number of cartons, delivered in a Tesco bag so heavy the nurse had to hoist it with both hands. When she handed it to me, I found it profoundly funny. There I was, wired up and stitched together, sitting in bed with an entire week’s worth of apple juice like I’d won a raffle. Somehow it made everything feel even lighter.

The messages from people were the opposite. “Oh my god, are you okay?” “This is awful.” “How could someone do this?” All the expected variations of shock and sympathy. And it wasn’t that they were wrong. It’s that I couldn’t feel what those messages assumed. The empathy — the sadness on my behalf — felt like too much weight being pushed onto something I didn’t internally experience as heavy.

I was in a strange limbo. The rational part of me understood that this was a serious event. Another part of me was tired of being sad. The years after graduating, after stopping music, had been full of disappointment and self‑pity. I was bored of feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t want this to be another burden I had to carry. I didn’t want the narrative of the experience to be bigger than the experience itself.

It wasn’t pressure to perform the victim—it was the opposite. I felt compelled to perform the anti‑victim.

To show people—quietly, instinctively—that this wouldn’t define me. That it couldn’t. That I refused to let it become the undercurrent of who I was. I think it shocked people, especially the way I tell the story now, with humour and distance. I’ve even said, more than once, that it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. And most of the time, I actually mean it.

I was standing by the window when my Dad called, looking out again at the grey northern sky. The room was quiet, and for the first time all day, I felt relatively clear-headed. When my Dad spoke, it felt like he was just stating something factual. Reasonable. Something that made sense.

The closest wording I remember is: “You can choose to be sad, or you can find a way to move past it now.” Not exact—but that was the shape of it.

The meaning landed instantly. Option A: Carry it. Option B: Walk away. I can’t live in emotional limbo; it feels like being held underwater. So, the decision made itself.

After a short pause, I said something like “yeah, that makes sense.” And I meant it completely.

I don’t know why it worked so well, coming from him specifically. I don’t think many people could have said the same thing and had it land the same way. But what he said felt like absolute truth to me. Maybe I already had that impulse in me and just needed it affirmed by someone I trusted completely. Whatever the reason, it felt like a switch had flipped. One moment I was hovering between what had happened and what it meant. Then the whole thing was categorised and closed.

Sorrow gone. Not repressed, not ignored. Just… done.

I’d made my choice.

People ask, “why me?” after something like this. I have, too, on occasion. But every time I do, I come back to the same question: why does the why even matter? If I knew the answer - if someone sat me down and explained exactly why I was in that spot at that time - what would it actually change? Nothing. The event happened. The outcome is the outcome.

What I can say is that the benefits were genuinely life-changing. Not in the way people expect when they hear that. Not some deep spiritual awakening. Something far more practical.

The doctor told me early on that I wouldn’t be able to eat solid food for nearly two months. He warned me I’d lose a lot of weight. And he was right.

But here’s the thing: I’d put on a lot of weight since moving to London. I was unfit, unhappy with how I looked, and had no real motivation to change it. And then, overnight, the choice was made for me. I couldn’t eat solid food. So, I ate what I could.

Which brings me to the blended roast.

It started as a joke - sort of. Obviously, any food can be blended. But the idea of a Sunday roast becoming a pint of gravy felt absurd enough to be funny. Chicken, potatoes, vegetables, all of it liquidised and drunk through a metallic straw. It wasn’t quite liquid either - there were parts of the chicken that hadn’t fully broken down, so it had this strange, almost solid texture going down. It tasted like a big pint of gravy with slivers of chicken and bumps of potatoes. Slightly buttery texture. Dense, warm; it was against the moral fibre of what a roast is.

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But it worked. And I started seeing the whole thing as an opportunity. A reset. Over the two months before I could eat solid food again, nine or ten kilograms dropped. I remember the first solid food I had - a packet of Skips in Birkenhead Park. It was freezing, but it felt like reincarnation. As soon as I could move properly, I started running. It felt amazing. It became routine - running, then football, which I hadn't played regularly since high school. I am now fitter at 32 than I was at 22.

The metal plates don’t bother me. I’ve got a reasonably strong jawline, and the scar sits right along it - barely noticeable. The only lasting thing is the numbness. The right side of my lower jaw - the side where the piece of bone fell out, the one I handed to the ambulance driver thinking it was a tooth - has never fully come back. The doctor said it might not. It feels strange sometimes, like that part of my face is slightly behind glass. But I’ve gotten used to it. It’s just part of the hardware now.

My Dad’s words - ‘You can choose to be sad, or you can find a way to move past it now’ - worked instantly. But why? What made that framing stick when it might not have for someone else?

Here’s what I think actually happened, stripped back to its mechanics.

In 2000, psychologists Adrian Ehlers and David Clark published a cognitive model of PTSD that fundamentally changed how we understand why some people develop it, and others don’t. Their central argument was this: trauma itself doesn’t cause PTSD. The appraisals you make about the trauma do.

Ehlers and Clark identified two key appraisals that, when made, keep trauma alive in the mind. The first is about the event: “The world is dangerous. This could happen again.” The second is about yourself: “I deserved this. I am broken. I will never recover. Something is permanently wrong with me.” When both of these appraisals take hold, PTSD develops. When they don’t, it largely doesn’t.

What’s interesting is that the model doesn’t say trauma is harmless. It says trauma is neutral until you build a story around it. The event is the event. The meaning is yours.

Looking back at my own experience through this lens, I can see exactly where the appraisal process short-circuited. The attack was random - no motive, no personal targeting, no lesson to extract. So, the first appraisal - “the world is dangerous; this was meant for me” - never gained any traction. It just didn’t fit the facts. And my Dad’s words arrived at exactly the right moment to prevent the second one. Words that essentially closed the door before the appraisal had a chance to walk through it.

Ehlers and Clark’s model has its critics. Some argue that trauma is too biological, too somatic, and too complex to be reduced to appraisals alone. That the body keeps the score in ways cognition can’t access or control. They might be right. But when I map my own experience onto their framework, the fit is almost uncomfortable in how precise it is. Maybe that’s anecdotal. Maybe it doesn’t generalise. But it’s what happened to me.

This is where I think people get it wrong about resilience. They treat it like a personality trait - some people are just built to bounce back. I don’t think that’s accurate. Ehlers and Clark’s model suggests it’s far more mechanical than that. It’s about which appraisals you make, and whether you have the emotional toolkit to make different ones. That’s a skillset. It can be learned. It can be developed. It isn’t fixed.

The difficulty is that most people don’t make clean binary choices about how to frame their experiences. They sit somewhere in the middle - processing gradually, carrying it quietly, letting it exist without fully resolving it. For many types of trauma, that’s probably the right approach. But for events born out of pure randomness - no motive, no meaning, no lesson to extract - the middle ground is a trap. It keeps you tethered to something that was never about you in the first place.

Framing is everything. Not just in trauma, but in how you experience your entire life. The story you tell yourself about what happens to you is the story you live inside. Ehlers and Clark showed us that scientifically. What I’d add is this: you have far more control over that story than most people realise. The event stays the same. The meaning is yours to assign - or refuse.

The attack happened on July 22nd, 2020. The same night, Liverpool lifted the Premier League trophy for the first time in 30 years.

I should probably have complicated feelings about that. The day one of the best things in my football-watching life happened is also the day I got my jaw broken in two places. But I don’t. The memories are separate. Liverpool won the league. I watched it in a pub with friends, walked home, got attacked, and ended up in the hospital. Those are just the facts, in order. Neither one contaminates the other.

The story of how it actually happened - the full sequence, the details, the chaos - is slightly longer and more complex. That’s a tale for another time. What matters here is what came after.

If I’d known then what I know now - the reset, the fitness dividend, the blended roast, the strange mechanical clarity of the whole thing - I think I would have laughed. Not at the attack itself. At the absurdity of how it all turned out. The fact that one of the worst things that’s happened to me also became one of the strangest gifts.

Nearly six years on, it’s a closed file. I talk about it freely, often with humour, and I think that shocks people sometimes. But massively negative life events can be genuinely funny. They don’t all have to be doom and gloom. Sometimes a piece of your jaw falls out, you hand it to an ambulance driver thinking it’s a tooth, and years later you’re fitter, healthier, happier, and more productive.

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Thanks for reading. I write about psychology, meaning‑making, and the strange ways we interpret our experiences. If this resonated, consider subscribing or sharing it with someone who’d appreciate it.

I left sixth form college at 17. Not voluntarily - they asked me not to come back. I’d spent the better part of a few months falling asleep in classes. Psychology, English Literature, Business Studies, Sports Science. Didn’t matter the subject; I couldn’t stay conscious. The college had run out of patience.

So there I was: no A-levels, no clear path forward, and a persistent inability to stay awake through the conventional route. What do you do when the system has essentially told you it’s done with you?

I picked up a guitar.

I’d been playing a bit already, nothing serious. But suddenly it was the only option that made sense. Or rather, the only option at all. For nine months I practiced six to seven hours a day. No musical background, no formal training. Just necessity and time. I applied to a music college in Liverpool for a National Diploma - still not entirely sure how I got in - and suddenly I was a music person. From nowhere.

I started a band at 17. Got serious about it. Really serious. And here’s the thing: I got good. Quickly. That speed felt like validation. Like proof this was the right decision. If something clicks that fast, if you improve that rapidly, surely that means you’ve found your thing?

For nearly a decade, music was my identity. Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist. Albums released. International distribution. This was who I was.

Then at 25, I stopped performing. Stepped away from bands entirely.

And immediately: who am I now? What skills do I actually have? Can I do anything else?

Looking back now, at 32, the music decision feels almost absurd. A late-developer with Aspergers, kicked out of college for falling asleep, who decided to become a professional musician by sheer force of practice. My mate and I used to joke: if we’d have been 21 in 1964, we’d be world famous. Wrong talent, wrong era. It’s a comforting thought, even if it’s probably what everyone tells themselves.

But here’s what I can’t figure out: was it a bad decision, or just the right decision at the wrong time? Because at 17, with no other options, what else would I have done? Music gave me something school never did - a way to express myself without feeling constrained by rules I couldn’t follow anyway.

And now I’m 32, doing an MSc in Psychology while teaching music in Thailand, wondering if this degree is the right choice. Because I can’t see immediate rewards, I’m already questioning it. “Did it work?” I ask myself, while still in the middle of it.

Maybe I never learned how to trust my own judgment. Or maybe the problem is simpler: tomorrow’s me can’t trust today’s me, just like today’s me doesn’t trust yesterday’s me.

The MSc felt necessary. I couldn’t see a clear path from elementary music teacher in Thailand to... whatever came next. Consulting, behavioral science, something that used my brain differently. Without the degree, the transition seemed impossible. With it, maybe doors would open.

There was also something personal. I was diagnosed with Aspergers at 7 or 8. Spent years in CBT as a kid. Psychology and neuroscience weren’t just intellectual interests - they were attempts to understand my own experience. To make sense of why school was such a battle, why I felt like I was treated like a science experiment in primary school, why the conventional path never worked for me.

So at 32, while working full-time, I started a part-time MSc at King’s College London. Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health. Distinction average so far. The work is good. I’m capable.

But earlier this month, after a few internship rejections, I started questioning it. “Did it work?” I found myself asking, while still in the middle of it. No placement secured yet. No concrete proof this is leading anywhere.

And suddenly I recognised the pattern.

With music, I believed if I pushed myself to the highest level I was physically capable of - practiced harder, performed better, wrote stronger songs - people would have no choice but to love it. Talent plus effort equals success. That’s how it should work.

Turns out, that’s not always the truth.

Now with the MSc, I’m running the same equation. Distinction-level grades plus behavioral science knowledge should equal job offers. Is it adding up? I’m already in my doubting phase.

Maybe I’m questioning quicker this time because I’ve learned from music. Or maybe it’s just fear. I live a life of quiet extremes - things always feel like they have to be this way, and so be it. All in or nothing. The middle ground doesn’t register.

But here’s what I can’t figure out: am I getting better at recognising bad decisions early, or am I just getting worse at committing to anything?

At 26, I moved to London because “that’s what I have to do.” No real plan, just action. Decisions felt clear because I didn’t think about them long enough to doubt them.

At 32, I’m more deliberate. I consider options, weigh consequences, try to predict outcomes. But the deliberation has created a different problem: I’m paralyzed by the idea that I can’t control what happens next. Progression paralysis - moving forward feels impossible because I can’t guarantee the result.

Have I gotten better at making decisions, or have I just gotten better at talking myself out of them?

The truth is I don’t trust my judgment across time because the person I’m deciding for is never quite me.

What hasn’t changed is the binary nature of my thinking. Music wasn’t a hobby at 17 - it was a National Diploma, a band, developing in to bigger shows, bigger recording studios, total identity. The MSc isn’t casual interest - it’s distinction-level performance while teaching full-time. All in or nothing. The middle ground doesn’t register.

I notice I micromanage the small things now. Food, especially. Every meal calculated, controlled. I wouldn’t describe myself as anxious - I can’t feel those feelings in me - but the behavior suggests something else. If I can’t control whether the MSc leads to a job, at least I can control what I eat.

And here’s the core problem: the decisions I make today may not be the ones I need or want tomorrow. It’s a preemptive distrust of my own judgment. I don’t know if today’s choices serve future-me, so I question everything before I’ve even seen the results.

Meanwhile, I'm operating at high intensity. Teaching full-time, an MSc that feels full-time even though it's technically part-time, extra learning beyond coursework, applications, writing, dating, maintaining a social life, exercise, managing money, and the endless admin of just existing. I barely have room to blink. Things pile up. I do things that probably aren't necessary just because they're in the flow of everything else happening. And that constant motion affects the decisions I make - or don't make.

I like my life. I’m happy with my choices, even if the balance is off. But I’m starting to wonder: am I making decisions consciously, or am I just responding to whatever feels most urgent in the moment?

There’s a concept in psychology called the “end of history illusion.” People recognise they’ve changed dramatically over the past decade but believe they’ll remain mostly the same in the future. We underestimate how much we’ll continue to change.

But I think there’s something deeper: the person I was at 17 wouldn’t recognize me now. Not just “I’ve changed” - I mean if that kid met me, he wouldn’t know me. And I wouldn’t know him. We share memories and a name, but we’re functionally different people.

So how did 17-year-old me really know what - or who - he was making decisions for? He couldn’t have imagined most of what’s happened. The music degree, the band years, moving to London, teaching internationally, living in Thailand for five years, doing an MSc at 32. He made choices for a future self he had no way of understanding.

And here’s my current problem: I want future rewards, but I want them immediately. This isn’t standard hyperbolic discounting - where we simply prefer immediate rewards over delayed ones. I’ve accepted the work. I’m putting in the hours, doing the degree, building toward something years away. But I want validation now. I want proof today that the bet I’m making on future-me will pay off. The behaviorists would call this a mismatch between high achievement motivation and the brain’s desperate search for progress signals. I need evidence the investment is safe, even though the returns won’t materialise for years.

This is compounded by modern choice overload. Walk into a supermarket. Go to the washing up liquid aisle. Fifty bottles. Surely I can’t be aligned with a brand of washing up liquid? That’s bizarre. But I have to choose. And whatever I choose feels arbitrary, like any of the other 49 would’ve been equally fine or equally wrong.

And if I can’t confidently pick washing up liquid, how am I supposed to trust myself on career decisions? On life direction? On whether the MSc is “working”?

The paradox of choice doesn’t just make decisions harder. It creates a fundamental distrust of your own judgment. Every choice could be wrong. Every path not taken haunts the one you’re on.

I think about the choices 17-year-old me made. They shaped who I am - this person he wouldn’t recognise but helped create. And current-me is making choices that will shape 42-year-old me, who I won’t recognise either.

This is not liberating information, but feels important to know.

Last year, I started accepting my past self’s decisions. Not celebrating them, not defending them - just accepting that they happened, and they led here. The music years, the moves, the career pivots. Some went well. Some went horribly. Equal measure of both.

What I’ve realised is that this acceptance builds something: internal resilience for when things go badly again. Because they will. The MSc might not lead where I think it will. The career transition might take longer than expected. Future-me might look back at current-me’s choices and think “what was he doing?”

Here’s what I think: trusting our judgment across time is ultimately flawed because we never truly know the person we’re making decisions for. That 17-year-old didn’t know me. I don’t know 42-year-old me. We’re making choices in the dark, hoping they’ll make sense to someone we’ll never meet.

But commitment beats paralysis. Not blind commitment - just choosing something and seeing it through, even when you don’t know if it’s right. Because the alternative is standing still, waiting for certainty that will never come, for a future self you can’t predict.

Self-trust matters, even when your brain has banked a list of decisions past-you royally fucked up. Especially then. The paralysis doesn’t protect you from making wrong choices - it just guarantees you make none at all.

So if tomorrow’s me can’t trust today’s me, that’s okay. They don’t know each other. They never will. But today’s me still has to choose something. And maybe that’s enough - not knowing if it’s right, just knowing it’s chosen.

The music degree felt necessary at 17. The MSc feels necessary now. Were they the right decisions? Ask me in ten years. Or don’t. By then, I’ll be someone else anyway.

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It happens at Rimping, my local supermarket in Chiang Mai. It happens on Lazada during the monthly sales (aptly named 10.10, 12.12, etc.). The logic is always the same: if I buy in bulk now, I won’t have to shop later. I’m saving future time, and time is money. My Internal Accountant - the part of my brain running cost-benefit calculations - is convinced this is smart planning.

Except, when I actually calculate what this ‘smart planning’ costs, the numbers don’t work. My Internal Accountant operates on a Base Rate—a flat hourly value assigned to my time. Let’s set that rate at a conservative £15. When I spend eight minutes browsing Lazada, fifteen to twenty times per month, I’m clocking roughly 2.5 hours of ‘overhead.’ At my base rate, that is £37.50 in time cost per month, or £225 over six months. Add the actual money spent on products I haven’t used, and my ‘savings’ start looking like a failed business venture.

This is what behavioural economist Dan Ariely dubbed the zero-price effect, and it reveals something fascinating about how we make decisions. My Internal Accountant isn’t uniquely incompetent - he’s predictably irrational in ways we all share.

Labor-to-Value Schema

Before we can understand why the Internal Accountant fails, we need to understand the rulebook he’s working from. We aren’t born understanding money - a five-year-old doesn’t grasp why a £20 note is worth more than a £5 note based on the paper itself. But we are born understanding effort. We know instinctively that lifting a heavy box is harder than lifting a light one, that running is more exhausting than walking.

As we grow, we learn to map effort and time onto value through conditioned learning. This process aligns with Relational Models Theory, which describes how we switch between different frameworks—like “Market Pricing”—for social and economic interactions. Drawing on this and Ariely’s research on decision-making, I’ve come to call this specific pattern a “Market Schema” - an internal ledger we’ve been conditioned to keep, where we automatically appraise experiences through an economic lens.

This schema becomes so ingrained that we start evaluating everything in market terms: Is this worth my time? What could I do instead? What’s the return on investment? The Internal Accountant is born from this schema - he’s the cognitive system running these calculations automatically, weighing what we gain against what we spend.

Most of the time, he’s useful. He stops us from spending three hours driving to save £2 on petrol and helps us decide which phone carrier may be more beneficial in the long term. But the schema has a critical flaw: the Accountant measures costs and benefits in discrete, visible transactions. He’s excellent at calculating “I earn £X per hour, this costs £Y, therefore it takes Z hours of work to afford this.” He’s terrible at measuring costs that don’t present themselves as clear transactions. This is where my skincare problem begins.

The Two-Stage Appraisal

So, how does the Internal Accountant actually operate? When I see “Buy One Get One Free” on Lazada, two things happen almost instantly. This aligns with what psychologists call a two-stage appraisal process - the brain’s way of evaluating situations and deciding how to respond.

Primary Appraisal: The Reflex

The first stage is automatic and fast. My brain sees “FREE” and immediately categorises it as a resource gain with no risk. Ariely’s research shows that we don’t treat “free” as simply “very cheap” - we treat it as categorically different. When something costs £0.01, we calculate whether it’s worth a penny. When something costs £0.00, the calculation breaks. There’s no pain of paying, so the Accountant flags it as 100% profit margin. The market schema activates: this is a transaction with an infinite return on investment.

Secondary Appraisal: The Strategy

The second stage is where the Accountant gets strategic - and where the failure begins. He assesses his resources: Do I have money for this? Yes. Do I have time to browse and purchase? Yes - I’m standing in line at football, or walking out of work, or on my lunch break. These are “dead time” moments anyway, so using them to shop feels efficient.

The Accountant runs his calculation: buying in bulk now means fewer shopping trips later. Future shopping trips will take time - time I could spend studying, exercising, or doing anything more valuable. By spending my current time browsing Lazada, I’m saving future time. And because time equals money in my Market Schema, I’m effectively saving money. The logic is sound. The calculation is wrong.

The Invisible Cost Problem

The Accountant’s fatal flaw is that he can only track what presents itself as a discrete transaction. Those scattered eight-minute browsing sessions never accumulate in his ledger because each one is too small, too brief, happening in moments that feel like dead time anyway. But invisibility doesn’t eliminate cost. Over six months, those moments add up to dozens of hours - time worth £180-225 that I could have spent on my MSc, making a sandwich, or sleeping. The Accountant optimised for hypothetical future convenience while killing time that doesn’t need killing.

The Variable Ratio Trap

Even when I have lightbulb moments - when I catch myself browsing and think “I value my time, I should be doing something more important” - I’m back on Lazada the same day. Or on Grab, scrolling through restaurant deals when I just needed to order dinner. This persistence is fueled by variable ratio reinforcement—the same mechanism that makes gambling addictive. Because the costs are invisible, but the reward (the “win” of a deal) is highly visible, the Accountant’s ledger stays skewed. I don’t know which browsing session will yield the best deal. The 12.12 sale might be incredible or disappointing. Sometimes I hit the jackpot - an amazing BOGOF on something I genuinely wanted. Sometimes the offers are mediocre. The unpredictability is what keeps me checking back.

Small time investment, occasional big reward, unpredictable timing - this is slot machine psychology. The Accountant isn’t just making calculation errors. He’s caught in a reinforcement pattern specifically engineered by retail platforms designed to keep people spending and browsing.

The Bankruptcy

This is what I mean by the bankruptcy of the Internal Accountant. Everyone has spent three hours trying to save five pounds, only to realise later they would have gladly paid the five pounds to have those three hours back. One explanation could be that the Accountant is failing not because he’s incompetent, but because he’s designed to track discrete, visible costs in a world increasingly built on distributed, invisible ones.

The box under my sink isn’t just unused skincare products. It’s physical evidence of systematic time misallocation - hours I’ll never recover, spent on deals I didn’t need, creating clutter I now must manage instead of the time savings I was promised.

The Audit

I think the Internal Accountant’s real problem isn’t bad math - it’s that he only values time when there’s a paycheck attached to it. He only values time when it is “scheduled”—like a work shift—treating “dead time” (queues or boredom) as a currency with no exchange rate until it is spent on consumption. This leads to “consumption for consumption’s sake,” where the value of the self is traded for the perceived value of an object.

The solution isn’t to fire the Internal Accountant - he’s too deeply embedded in how I make decisions. Instead, it’s about giving him better data. This is where metacognition comes in: thinking about how I think. The Consultant is an older, more skeptical presence who’s seen the Accountant make these mistakes before. He sits quietly in the back office, observing, letting small miscalculations pass. When the Accountant starts wasting serious time on something obviously flawed, the Consultant intervenes. His job isn’t to replace the Accountant’s calculations, just to audit them with a more sophisticated lens.

Sometimes this intervention is sudden, like someone snapping their fingers. I’m absorbed in Lazada at the football, attention captured, and suddenly I snap back to awareness of the match in front of me. Other times it’s quieter, more gradual - I’m watching myself browse in real-time and recognise “I don’t actually want to keep doing this.”

This is cognitive restructuring - the Consultant teaching the Accountant to revalue his assets. Dead time isn’t dead - it’s just unfocused time, and unfocused time has value too. That BOGOF deal for products I won’t use immediately gets reclassified as clutter debt, not savings. And the claim that browsing today saves time tomorrow gets deleted as speculative - future availability is unquantifiable, but the focus I’m losing right now is real.

When I see ‘FREE,’ the Consultant intervenes with a question: ‘Is this an asset or a liability for my time?’ When I successfully catch myself, I actively redirect myself. Close the app, reply to the message from my mum I was supposed to send, or just put the phone away and move my attention to something genuine rather than letting it stay captured by engineered rewards.

The Honest Reality

But here’s what I have to acknowledge: this doesn’t fix the problem. Even when I catch myself and redirect, I’m often back on Lazada the same day. The goal isn’t perfection or complete elimination of irrational behaviour. The goal is to increase the frequency of those metacognitive moments - the snaps and the observations. Each time I catch the automatic thought and restructure it, I’m training a competing pattern.

Perhaps the most astute thing the Internal Accountant can do is recognise when it’s time to close the ledger - to stop appraising life as a series of transactions and simply watch the match. Not because the math says it’s optimal, but because some moments aren’t meant to be optimised.

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I remember staring at the King’s College London application form, arrow blinking in the “Previous Qualifications” field. BA (Hons) in Songwriting, University of Sussex. A primary school music teacher in Chiang Mai, applying to study Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health at one of the world’s leading institutes for psychiatric research felt a bit silly.

I’d told people my original course had been cancelled and I felt stuck. When I decided to apply for King’s, I told pretty much everyone within arm’s distance, maybe as a defense mechanism. A lot of people told me I’d be fine. A fair few told me I wouldn’t. I was curious about what else was possible beyond the classroom. I loved teaching, still do, but I found myself wondering what a different path might look like.

The problem was, I had no clear idea what else to do with a music degree, four years of teaching experience, and a long list of peculiar jobs that didn’t match much of a pattern.

The first MSc I’d been accepted to — Psychology, Music, Well-being and Education, felt safe. Adjacent to what I already knew. When it was cancelled, I panicked. It was late in the cycle, and suddenly the path had disappeared. That’s when I found the MSc in Psychology & Neuroscience of Mental Health at King’s. Everything about it felt like exactly what I wanted and absolutely nothing I was qualified for. I applied anyway.

Then I got in.

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What surprised me most once I started wasn’t the difficulty, it was how mentally prepared I felt. I didn’t have this looming fear of “big science” I couldn’t understand. The first module was Techniques in Neuroscience. I remember when I was 17 my college tutor showing me a Maj7th chord on guitar, the way those four notes stacked together felt like discovery, like being let in on a secret. Learning about mitochondrial dysfunction in drosophila, or how electrophysiology lets us listen to neurons fire, gave me that exact same feeling.

What did surprise me was the hours needed to really get into the heart of the reading.

I think back to filling out that application form, embarrassment mixed with desperation, and I barely recognise that version of myself. Not because I’ve become some neuroscience expert, I’m still learning, still bewildered by dense papers — but because I’ve learned what happens when you take a swing at something that feels ridiculous.

I didn’t know a year ago this would happen. I couldn’t have predicted a cancelled course would lead to studying neuroscience, or that a songwriting degree would somehow prepare me for understanding mitochondrial dysfunction. But here I am, genuinely loving learning in a way I never experienced during my BA.

I’m just finishing up my second module. Come January, I’ll be back doing it all again. There’s a lot I’m learning that I’m curious to explore and share. And honestly, I’m looking forward to it.

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