That is why I’m starting from the ground up with these posts about anxiety. I am of the belief that anxiety (and nervous system regulation) is still quite misrepresented across the social media forums, and I would like to offer what I can to expand the understanding of these things with practical relation and application.

So, with that, let me ask you to think about the last time anxiety caught you off guard.

For some reading this, you might not have a clear understanding of what anxiety feels like or what it looks like when it manifests in your life. So maybe think of the last time you felt frozen, stuck, numb, overwhelmed, unable to think clearly, desperate to change your immediate situation, uncomfortable and/or unbalanced within your body, agitated, or feeling like you need to flee (to name a few).

What you’re looking to reflect on is not likely to be the slow-building kind that you could feel coming; something like the stress of a project or test. What you’re looking to recall is the kind of anxiousness that seemed to appear out of nowhere. One moment you were fine, and the next your heart was pounding, thoughts were racing, and body was bracing for some sort of imminent impact.

If you’ve ever been in that kind of situation—one where, one minute you were fine and the next you awash with anxiety—it can be confusing, alarming, and downright terrifying (depending on the scenario). I speak from experience. I was once on vacation with a group of friends and we were staying in a casetta (a small house) at the water’s edge on Italy’s Amalfi Coast and awoke to a overwhelming wave of anxiety that flew into a full blown panic attack. I felt like I was going to die right then and there. I needed my friends to carry my luggage up the 300 stairs to the road side and then help me walk those very steps, get into the van, to the airport, checked in, and onto the plane, all while I felt like I might pass out and die at any minute.

At the moment, I felt like the whole experience came out of nowhere. But here’s what I want to offer you: it probably didn’t come out of nowhere.

For me, the signals were there. The body was sending them, they just weren’t being received. And I bet it was the same for you.

This is one of the most common patterns I see in the people I work with, and it’s also a topic that is often glossed over when it comes to conversations about anxiety. We spend enormous amounts of time discussing what to do when anxiety hits. We talk about what anxiety is and the tools to use when it comes up, and package everything up with a nice bow that leads us to believe that this knowing will keep us safe. Unfortunately, we seem to spend very little time implementing a skill that can help you catch it before it does.

That skill is interoception; the perception or awareness of the inner state of your body. And there’s a high likelihood that it is an overlooked tool in your toolbox.

The Skill That May Change It All

Maybe you can relate to this; I grew up with “authority figures”—teachers, relatives, coaches, parents—telling me to manage my thoughts and my behavior. They didn’t always say it such a clear and refined way, but I feel fairly confident in assuming that you, like me, were directed to think before you act; to control your feelings feelings, “keep a lid on it”, calm down.

While some may have been lucky enough to learn mindfulness, behavioral, and somatic techniques to feel into their experience (with the intention of tapping into the body’s wisdom), the majority of us did not. Teaching youth, adolescents, and even adults to sense and track their body’s internal state in real time—to notice what’s actually happening inside the body, as it’s happening, before it becomes overwhelming—is not what I would call a common practice within modern western society.

And that, my friends, is a fucking tragedy.

Instead we are all fed various ways to become further removed from our body’s experience, whether that be through video games, or social media, or streaming… the list goes on.

Yet nearly every effective anxiety tool—whether it be breathing exercises, grounding practices, somatic techniques, or even cognitive approaches—works better when you can feel what’s happening in your body early enough to actually use them. In other words, before you find yourself hijacked by a mind full of anxious thoughts and panic. Without that awareness, the awareness of what is happening within your body, the most you can do is react to the anxiety after it is already there.

But there is a skill that can change this whole experience. And that skill is interoception.

What Interoception Actually Is

In the simplest of terms, interoception is your brain’s ability to sense what’s happening inside your body. Let’s give it a try.

Note that I am not referencing where your body is in space. That is an entirely different system and process known as proprioception. Since the names are so close to one another, its worth noting their differences. Proprioception is how you know your arm is raised without looking at it. Interoception is how you know your chest is tight, your stomach is unsettled, or your heart rate has climbed.

As referenced earlier, interoception encompasses the body’s internal landscape, including: heart rate, breath, muscle tension, temperature, gut sensation, and the broad range of physical experiences we might loosely call “how I feel.”

Researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose work on emotion and the brain has reshaped how many scientists understand the relationship between body and mind, describes the brain as fundamentally a prediction machine—one that relies heavily on interoceptive signals from the body to construct emotional experience. In her framework, what we feel emotionally is shaped, in significant part, by what the brain perceives the body to be doing. In other words, your emotional experience isn’t just generated by your mind, it is also built partly from the body’s running report.

Researcher Sarah Garfinkel at the University of Sussex has spent years studying interoception across three distinct dimensions: interoceptive accuracy (how well someone actually senses their internal signals), interoceptive sensibility (how much someone believes they do), and interoceptive awareness (how well those two things align). Her research has shown these dimensions to be statistically independent of one another—and all three relate meaningfully to anxiety, emotional regulation, and wellbeing.

While these three facets may seem similar, Garfinkel’s research has shown that they are statistically independent of one another. As well, the research coming out of this area consistently points in the same direction, noting that people with higher interoceptive accuracy tend to have more emotional flexibility and a greater capacity to regulate their nervous system while people with lower interoceptive accuracy tend to be caught off guard by their own emotional states more often.

The good news; interoceptive accuracy is not a fixed trait. It can be learned, and strengthened.

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Why Low Interoceptive Awareness Makes Anxiety Worse

Here’s the cycle that plays out for a lot of people:

The nervous system picks up on something—a stressor, a perceived threat, an unresolved tension—and begins to mobilize. Heart rate inches up. Jaw tightens slightly. Breath shortens by a fraction.

On the surface, it may look like nothing is happening. Under the surface, the body is already in motion. But if interoceptive awareness is low, none of those signals register consciously and they stay below the threshold of attention. So the body’s signals go unacknowledged while the activation continues to build and the nervous system, not getting any response to its communication, keeps signaling—louder, then louder.

By the time anxiety finally registers consciously, it isn’t a signal anymore. It’s a GD fire alarm. At that point, the window for an easy, early intervention has closed, and you are left managing a full stress response rather than catching a whisper.

This is why so many people describe feeling blindsided by anxiety; like it came out of nowhere. In most cases, it didn’t. The early communication was there, but the receiving end wasn’t tuned in.

There’s also a feedback loop worth naming. When anxiety does arrive at full volume, the experience itself is often frightening or disorienting. That fear of the feeling adds another layer of activation on top of the original one. The body sounds an alarm; the mind panics about the alarm; the body responds to that panic with more activation. The stress response cycle, which I explained in the article below, keeps spinning.

This is the benefit of strengthening interoceptive awareness. Better interoceptive awareness helps interrupt the cycle before it gets started. Catching the early signal means you can respond when the nervous system is still whispering, before it breaks out into a full on 5 alarm siren.

What the Research Says About Building It

The research here is genuinely encouraging, and worth saying clearly: interoception is a trainable skill, not a fixed personality trait.

That means being in touch with what is going on within your body isn’t like being tall; it isn’t something you either have or you don’t. It’s a capacity that can be developed through practice—the same way any other skill develops.

For me, body scans have been the most beneficial and supportive practices for growing interoception. A body scan practice guides the practitioners to bring intentional attention to different areas of the body’s internal experience in a structured way, and they have been shown to provide measurable improvements in interoceptive accuracy across multiple studies. Two of my favorite types of body scans are Yoga Nidra (Non-Sleep Deep Rest) and a traditional mindfulness based body scans. Mindfulness-based interventions, many of which incorporate body-centered awareness as a core component, show similar results. Somatic therapies, which work directly with the body’s sensations and responses, are built on this foundation. Even regular physical movement (such as walking, running, jumping, swinging), which requires continuous internal body feedback to execute, appears to support interoceptive development over time.

This doesn’t mean you need to meditate for an hour a day or invest in years of somatic therapy to see any benefit. Nor does it mean you need to hop on the latest and greatest work out trend. The research suggests that consistent, relatively brief practices (3-5 minutes)—when done with genuine attention—can shift interoceptive awareness meaningfully over time.

What matters more than duration is regularity and quality of attention. Five honest minutes of body awareness practice, done daily, will build more than an occasional longer session done infrequently.

Remember, the skill is built through consistent repetition.

How To Get Started (Now)

As cliche as it is; the first step is always the hardest step. So, let me help you out. You’re going to start right now. Don’t even give it a second thought. Your first step will be done in less than 3 minutes and will be set up for the rest of your week. Remember, there is no perfect or “getting it right”, none of these require more than a few minutes, and all of them compound over time.

The 30-second body scan: Once a day (this week)—morning works well, but any consistent time is fine—take a single slow breath and move your attention slowly from the top of your head down through your body. Forehead, jaw, throat, shoulders, chest, stomach. You’re not looking for anything in particular. You’re just taking inventory. Notice what’s there without trying to change it. That’s the whole practice. Try it now.

The 3-point check-in: If you can, set an alarm to go off every hour to pause and ask the three questions that follow:

• Where is my breath right now and how is it flowing—chest or belly, full or shallow?

• Where am I holding tension?

• What’s my overall energy feeling like within my body—activated and wound up, tense and stuck, flat and checked out, balanced and settled?

If you can’t do every hour, then set 5 alarms throughout your day; morning, mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon, early evening, and before bed. If you can’t do that, then aim for 3 times a day. All you’ll need is ten seconds for each pause and to remember you’re not fixing anything, just answering honestly. The thing to note here is that the value is in the repetition—you’re building a habit of checking in before the body has to get loud to get your attention.

Research suggests that simply labeling internal sensations—even if briefly and silently—helps the brain process them more effectively. Noting things like “tight chest” or “shallow breath” or “rigid muscles” or “restless” helps create a small but meaningful gap between sensation and reaction, and it is that gap that we grow our ability to regulate. You don’t need to analyze the feeling or trace it back to a cause. Just name it.

What This Makes Possible

I think it is important to point out that none of these practices are lengthy or dramatic. The goal isn’t a transformation in one sitting, it’s a steady, cumulative development of the ability to feel what’s happening inside you.

When you can feel the early signals of anxiety rising and moving within your body, you have options. You can breathe into it. You can move. You can name it, acknowledge it, and ask what it needs. You can make a choice, rather than being swept along by a response that was already well underway before you noticed.

That’s what this skill gives you back; the capacity to respond instead of just react—to be in conversation with your nervous system rather than at its mercy.

Next week we go deeper into the nervous system’s safety response — specifically how to create the felt sense of safety in the body, even when the circumstances around you haven’t changed. I’d love to hear what this week brought up for you.

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For years, decades even, I believed that if my anxiety would just go away, I could finally focus, commit, and live my life freely and without burden. Anxiety felt like a ghost haunting me, its hands around my neck, pushing and pulling on my body and mind.

Like many, I fell prey to a belief that most anxious people carry — if only I could stop feeling this way, then everything would be fine.

I could finally make the decision I’ve been putting off, show up fully for the people I love, complete the thing I keep almost starting, and live beyond the confines of this hidden oppressor. Maybe you relate to some (or all) of these thoughts.

You see, when anxiety is framed in such a way, it becomes an obstacle that must be overcome. It becomes a problem; the thing standing between you and the life you want. And while I do not find truth in this belief anymore, it is a belief that I understand—because I lived it.

Now, coupling my own experience along with years of working with people through some of the most uncertain, destabilizing seasons of their lives, I’ve come to think that this is one of the most costly misunderstandings there is—seeing anxiety as a problem to conquer.

This misunderstanding isn’t stupid. If anything, it’s understandable. Anxiety feels like there is always something constantly in your way from fully living. How would that not feel like a problem?

But it is that very thought that takes me to the reframe I keep coming back to: what if anxiety isn’t the problem?

What if it’s information waiting for you to learn?

What Anxiety Actually Is

Let’s start with the basics, because “anxiety” is one of those words that gets used to describe everything from excitement to mild nervousness to full panic—and that range can muddy up your understanding of anxiety.

At its core, anxiety is a stress response. It’s your nervous system doing what it evolved to do: detect potential threats and mobilize the body to respond. Faster heartbeat, shallower breath, muscles on alert, attention narrowed to whatever seems dangerous. When this happens, it isn’t a sign that your system is broken. It is the workings of an ancient, elegant survival machinery—the same system that kept your ancestors alive in a genuinely threatening world.

The problem isn’t that you have this system. The problem is that it didn’t evolve to distinguish between a predator and a performance review. Between a physical threat and a difficult conversation. Between actual danger and a mind future tripping on a seemingly infinite amount of unknowns.

No matter if the threat is clear and present and real, or a “what if…” you’ve drawn up in your mind, your nervous system treats all of it the same way: sound the alarm, prepare to survive.

So when anxiety shows up—when it really shows up and is not just a moment of stress (or indigestion)—what’s happening is that your body is trying to protect you. It’s doing its job. The question isn’t how to make it stop. The question is: what is it responding to, and what does it actually need?

Why Thinking Your Way Out Doesn’t Work

If there is one bit of bad advice that is passed around all too often and causes a whole bunch of problems, it is that you can think your way out of your anxiety. This is why so many intelligent, self-aware people feel genuinely baffled that they can’t seem to logic themselves to calm. But when you learn that your nervous system’s response to threats isn’t processed through the thinking brain first, but rather through the body, it all starts to make sense.

Neuroscientist Stephen Porges, whose work on the autonomic nervous system has become foundational in both clinical and coaching contexts, describes a process he calls neuroception—the body’s ability to scan for safety or danger beneath conscious awareness. Under the premise of neuroception, your nervous system is making its threat assessment faster than your prefrontal cortex can weigh in.

This means that, by the time you’re aware you’re anxious—by the time you can name it, analyze it, or try to reframe it—your body is already in motion. Your heart rate is already up. Your muscles are already braced. Your chest is already tight, throat already constricted, and breath already shallow.

Your inner alarm is already sounding well before you realize what is happening.

That is because thinking is top-down processing, meaning the communication goes mind to body, while anxiety often arrives bottom-up; body to mind. And you can’t reliably override a bottom-up process with a top-down tool.

This (often) makes thinking the second step, not the first. The body needs to feel safe enough before the thinking brain can do its best work. When the body doesn’t feel safe, the brain is likely spinning out—which then leads to the continuation of the body not feeling safe, and the cycle continues.

It is through working directly with the body, and (therefore) the nervous system, (through breath, movement, sensation, and body awareness) that we can create space for balance and safety. We’re not ignoring the mind; we’re starting where the signal actually originates.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, And (the Lesser Known) Fawn.

When the nervous system registers a threat, it doesn’t have an unlimited menu of responses. Rather, it has a few well-worn options it defaults to, and you likely have already heard of them: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn. What you might not know, however, is that you almost certainly have a preferred one.

Fight is the body preparing to confront. Given the name, you might imagine fingers curled into fists, ready to strike. But in a modern context, it rarely looks like actual aggression. Instead, the fight response more often looks like irritability, snapping at small things, or an overall restless tension that needs somewhere to go. When acted out, it can look like wanting to argue, or prove a point, or pushing back on everything.

Flight is the body preparing to escape. In daily life it looks like over-planning, constant busyness, and an urgency that never quite settles. One of the sneaky ways the flight response shows up is through procrastination—which is an action to get away from the discomfort of starting.

Freeze is the body preparing to endure overwhelming threat by becoming still. It can look like numbness, brain fog, or an overwhelming paralysis that shuts down all movement. If you’ve ever felt like you’re watching your own life from a sleight distance without the ability to explain why, that could be a freeze response.

And then there’s fawn, the response that doesn’t always make it into the textbook summaries (even though it’s one of the most common—especially among people who grew up in unpredictable or demanding environments). Fawn is the body preparing to survive by making itself agreeable and can take form through over-apologizing, abandoning your own needs, or managing everyone else’s feelings to keep the peace. It turns out people-pleasing is less of a personality trait and more of a survival strategy.

It may go without saying, but I believe it is important to note—none of these are character flaws. They are adaptations. They were learned because at some point, in some context, they worked. There is no benefit to be found in shaming yourself (or others) for them. Instead, the goal is to recognize your default pattern clearly enough that you can make a different choice when the actual circumstances call for one.

The Stress Response Cycle — And Why It Needs to Complete

One of the most clarifying ideas I’ve encountered on anxiety comes from researchers Emily and Amelia Nagoski, whose work on the stress response cycle reframes something most people misunderstand.

Our minds often work in a linear fashion, which means we tend to think that resolving stress means resolving the stressor—whether that be fixing the problem, handling the situation, or removing the source of anxiety. And while that matters, the Nagoskis point out that it’s separate from completing the stress response cycle itself.

Here’s what this looks like in practice: you receive a message that induces a stress response. Your body mobilizes—heart rate increases, jaw clenches, and chest tightens. Then, you respond to the message and the brain says, “Problem handled. Stressor gone.”

But the physiological responses that got activated haven’t gone away. They didn’t get the signal that the threat has passed, so they’re still present. So even though the brain says “problem handled”, the body stays in a low-grade state of alert—continuing to scan and readying itself for the next threat.

This is the feedback loop that stops the stress response cycle from completing. Trigger → activation → narrative → more activation. The mind picks up the body’s signals, creates a story about them, the story fuels more arousal, and that generates more story. Around and around we go.

What completes the cycle isn’t resolving the stressor. It’s giving the body what it needs to register that the threat is over. That can be movement, breath, physical release, connection, genuine rest, open space, and/or cold water (to name a few). These aren’t practices reserved for some $4000 “better you” masterclass. They are biological mechanisms that close the loop.

Somatic work—a body-centered therapeutic approach—is largely about interrupting this cycle at the level of the body rather than waiting for the thinking mind to resolve it from the top.

A Different Kind of Relationship With Anxiety

What I’ll say about building a new relationship with anxiety (and your body as a whole) is this: the shift I see change everything for people is rarely a new technique. More often than not, it’s a new relationship with what they’re feeling within their body.

Anxiety, approached with judgment, is framed as something bad; a problem that needs to be eliminated. But when approached with curiosity, anxiety becomes something to be understood and learned from.

This shift (from this is wrong with me to what is my body trying to tell me ) is not some form of slight of hand semantics or spiritual bypass. It’s not telling yourself everything is fine when it isn’t. It’s the genuinely practical act of treating your nervous system as a source of information rather than a problem to be solved.

If it sounds simple, it is because it is. But simple doesn’t mean easy (and I can attest to that). Building this new relationship (and seeing the benefits) takes practice and time.

But there is good news in that, because that means it’s learnable. Interoception—the ability to sense and interpret your body’s internal signals—is a skill that research increasingly shows can be trained. You get better at it the same way you get better at anything; through repetition, guidance, and paying attention.

What This Changes

The goal, as I see it, isn’t to become a person who never experiences anxiety. To be honest, I don’t think that is possible (and I gave up on that years ago).

Anxiety is part of being alive, and is likely to show up wherever there’s something real at stake—a relationship, a threat (physical, financial, familial, etc.), a creative risk, or a life-changing event. In that sense, anxiety (to some degrees) is a sign that you’re engaged with what matters.

The goal is to become someone who can read what their nervous system is communicating, and respond with intention rather than just reaction. Rather than being controlled by the alarm, or ignoring it (consciously or unconsciously), the goal is to be able to hear it, translate it, and decide what it actually calls for.

To me, that’s what nervous system regulation actually means. It’s not about finding and maintaining some sort of permanent calm. If anything, that goal is more likely to cause anxiety rather than quell it. No, nervous system regulation is finding the space of genuine balance and flexibility. It is the capacity to move through activation and come back to center, over and over again.

That capacity is built. It is not a personality trait you either have or don’t. And if you’ve spent years convinced that anxiety is just how you’re wired, and that there is nothing you can do about it, then I offer you this different possibility.

Maybe anxiety isn’t the obstacle you’ve always thought it to be. Maybe it’s the beginning of the conversation your body has been trying to have with you for a long time.

If this resonated, the next piece in this series goes deeper into body awareness and tracking — specifically how to catch anxiety early, before it has the wheel. I’d love to hear what this brought up for you.

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About six months ago, I took an indefinite hiatus from Instagram. I came to this decision after the following scenario occurred. I picked up my phone to check the weather, and then twenty minutes later, I found myself aimlessly scrolling through Instagram and wondering how I ended up there in the first place.

Maybe you’ve had a similar experience.

You open your phone for one thing and, before you know it, find yourself emerging from a TikTok, Reddit, or Instagram doom-scroll hole. Twenty minutes have passed. You’re now late to the thing that you meant to be doing, and you’re wondering what on earth were you doing and where the time went.

For some, this seemingly blanked out loss of time might startle you, frustrate you (if you’re like me) deflate you, and even scare you. It’s not scary because it happens, it’s scary because of how normal it has become.

We often think our lives are shaped by major decisions: who we marry, what career we choose, where we live, whether we have children. While those decisions certainly matter, it is more than clear to me that our lives are equally shaped by what we place our attention on.

What we do and why we do it. Where we go and how we get there. How we feel and what it means about us. Who we become and who we think we are. All of these things are shaped by our attention.

Or, put another way:

The quality of our lives is deeply influenced by the quality of our attention.

Life Happens Where Attention Goes

Over a century ago, psychologist William James wrote:

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

I find such wisdom and beauty in the simplicity and directness of this quote. It points to something that is easily overlooked. Our attention is not just the act of observing our lives. It is the maestro that actively shapes our experience of them.

What I am presenting here is not a new topic; not by any means. In fact, this is considered to be one of the core principles in Buddhism, making it over 2,500 years old. Buddhist philosophy explains that attention is the foundational mechanism that creates your reality. What you focus on and how you direct your mind shapes your inner experience, drives your actions, and builds your external circumstances. In fact, it is highly likely you’ve heard one of the sayings listed below that embody this very same idea.

Think about it; if your attention is constantly focused on what is wrong, you’ll experience more frustration. If your attention is repeatedly drawn toward threats, you’ll likely experience more anxiety. If your attention is invested in meaningful relationships, creativity, learning, and growth, your experience of life will naturally reflect those investments.

Attention shapes experience. Experience shapes beliefs. Beliefs shape identity. And identity shapes what we believe, what we engage in, how we see ourselves and how we see others, and how we move through the world.

This means that every day we are unconsciously building a life (and reality) through what we repeatedly pay attention to.

If this sounds dramatic, consider it for a moment. If I spend three hours a day consuming shock / outrage-driven content, my experience of the world will likely become more threatening. If my experience of the world becomes more threatening, my beliefs about people, safety, and the future begin to shift. And if those beliefs become reinforced long enough, they eventually become part of my identity. In which case I continue to seek out that type of content to validate my identity.

We can apply this same idea to consuming content that validates our belief about a certain group of people, or way of life, or ideology, or exercise plan, or diet, or even opportunity. None of this is inherently bad, but when it is consumed without question, we can easily lose sight of how it shapes our lives. That is because attention doesn’t just influence how we spend our time. It influences who we become.

It doesn’t only influence who we become, but how we experience life. This relationship between attention and experience becomes especially important when we look at anxiety.

Research has consistently shown that anxious individuals tend to display what psychologists call an attentional bias toward threat. In other words, when anxiety is present, our attention becomes increasingly drawn toward danger, uncertainty, problems, and worst-case scenarios. The more our attention becomes occupied by perceived threats, the more anxious we tend to feel.

This creates a feedback loop.

We notice a threat. Our attention fixates on it. The fixation increases anxiety. The increased anxiety causes us to search for more threats. And the cycle continues.

This is one of the reasons mindfulness practices have been shown to reduce anxiety symptoms. Mindfulness trains our ability to recognize where our attention has gone and gently redirect it. Rather than becoming trapped in every fearful thought or catastrophic prediction, we learn to notice the experience and choose where to place our attention.

This doesn’t mean we ignore problems or pretend everything is okay. It simply means we become more intentional about what receives our mental energy.

If attention shapes experience, then learning to work skillfully with our attention may be one of the most important skills we can develop for our mental and emotional well-being.

The Cost of Living Distracted

The challenge, then, is that we live in a world filled with distractions competing for our attention.

Researcher Gloria Mark, who studies attention and digital behavior, found that after an interruption it can take an average of more than 20 minutes to fully return to a task. Every notification, email, text message, or social media check creates a cognitive cost.

Psychologist Sophie Leroy’s research on “attention residue” found that when we switch from one task to another, a portion of our attention remains attached to the previous activity. In other words, we don’t leave distractions behind as cleanly as we think we do.

This is important because distractions don’t just affect productivity, they affect our overall presence. Even if you believe you are able to multi-task and pay attention to two things at once, something that research consistently shows is not possible for the human brain—our brain is a serial processor and not a parallel processor (which means the brain engages in rapid task switching)—the reality is that your brain is constantly tending to your cognitive load and what you pay attention to takes up a large amount of that load.

How often have you sat with a loved one while mentally scrolling through tomorrow’s to-do list? How often have you gone for a walk while simultaneously checking messages, listening to a podcast, and thinking about work? How often have you watched a movie while also looking at your phone?

Many of us are physically present but mentally elsewhere, and this cost of distraction isn’t just lost time. It’s lost life. Not only is it affecting what we show up to, but also how we show up.

So, if we know this, why do we continue this cycle? If distraction carries such a cost, why is it so appealing?

Because our brains are wired to seek novelty, and distraction feels good.

Every notification carries the possibility of something rewarding: a message, a compliment, a piece of interesting information, a social connection, something to numb the discomfort of the present moment.

Neuroscientists have found that dopamine is involved not only in reward, but in anticipation. Much of our digital behavior is fueled by the possibility that something interesting might be waiting for us.

Social media platforms, news outlets, and countless apps understand this dynamic well. Their business models depend on engagement, and engagement depends on attention. This isn’t necessarily a conspiracy. It’s simply economics.

Your attention has value.

The challenge is making sure you are consciously deciding where to invest it.

Conducting an Attention Audit

One of the simplest exercises I’ve found is something I call an Attention Audit.

Most people are surprised by what they discover.

We often assume we’re directing our attention when, in reality, our attention is being directed. We also assume that the areas we place our attention are in alignment with who we want to be and the life we want to have, when, in reality, these behaviors reaffirm beliefs and an identity that keep us stuck.

Bringing awareness to this process is the first step toward reclaiming our attention (and our life).

How Does This Leave Me Feeling?

The second practice is equally simple.

There can be a tendency to label things as good or bad, but this practice isn’t about judging activities. It’s about gathering information. Some things nourish us. Some things drain us. Some things bring us closer to who we want to be and the life we dream of, and some things keep us stuck or take us further away.

Many of us have become incredibly skilled at managing our time while paying very little attention to managing our energy. By tuning into how we are feeling, we unlock wisdom and insight that lives within. The body often tells us what the mind has overlooked.

The tricky thing is that there are things we engage in that we consider to be part of who we are that also happen to be the very things that are derailing us from what we want. Since we believe these things to be part of our identity, we often choose to not question them and thus overlook their effects on our lives.

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Reclaiming Your Attention

The good news is that attention can be shifted, and trained.

This is one of the main tenets of meditation and, as a meditation teacher, I often explain that this is what mindfulness meditation is all about.

Meditation is not about emptying the mind or achieving some mystical state of bliss. It is the simple act of being present; of intentionally placing your attention on a single point of focus—often the breath—and witnessing when and where your attention goes. It is attention training through an accepting and compassionate lens.

Each time you notice your mind wandering and gently bring it back to the breath, you are strengthening your ability to choose where your attention goes. Not only that, but you are practicing self-awareness by seeing where your attention goes and noticing how that affects your experience.

While mindfulness meditation is an amazing practice, and one that I would recommend to almost anyone, it is not the only tool that you can use to strengthen your attention skills.

Deliberate Attention Blocks

Single-Tasking

Digital-Free Time

The Life You’re Building

Every day, whether consciously or unconsciously, we are casting votes for the life we are creating. We cast those votes with our attention.

What we repeatedly pay attention to becomes what we repeatedly think about. What we repeatedly think about shapes our beliefs. Those beliefs shape our identity, and that identity shapes our lives.

The question isn’t whether your attention is creating your life. We know it is.

The question is: Are you paying attention to what is creating you?

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One of the most common misconceptions I hear about change is that it's a discipline problem. I’ll let you in on a little secret. It’s not.

The belief seems to be that if they could just become more motivated, more consistent, or more mentally tough, then everything would finally click into place. It usually sounds a little something like this:

“All I need to do is be more disciplined and I’ll wake up early, exercise regularly, eat better, see my friends, do my hobbies, save money, and follow through on my goals.”

Maybe you’ve heard something like this before; maybe even from yourself. And, for a little while, this strategy might work.

You decide that this time it’s different. This time you’re serious. This time you really mean it; you’re (finally) going to change your life (because that’s not daunting at all).

So, you buy the planner. You download the app. You schedule the reminders. You set the alarm. You prep the meals. You create the routine. And, for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, you feel unstoppable.

Then—as it always does and always will do—life happens.

Family, finances, world events, traffic, and an overcommitted todo list.

Cognitive overload, a lack of sleep, overexertion, and a dysregulated nervous system.

Work deadlines, toxic organizations, overpromising, and a lack of boundaries.

This is often interpreted as a lack of discipline, but that is likely not the case (and research would agree).

What is more likely to be happening is a culmination of psychological and neurological friction points, one of them being the collision between behavior and identity.

Psychologist Daryl Bem proposed something called Self-Perception Theory. The basic idea is that we learn who we are by observing our own behavior. In other words: we don’t just act based on our identity—we also build our identity from our actions.

Let me give you an example:

The more often I write, the more evidence I collect that writing is part of who I am. Over time, that behavior becomes incorporated into my identity, making it easier to continue.

This matters because most people try to change their behavior without changing the story they tell themselves about who they are. If you continue to believe you are someone that is counter to the changes you are trying to make, then you will inevitably fall back into the patterns of behavior that align with who you believe you are.

So when someone trying to exercise still sees themselves as “lazy”, or when someone trying to save money still sees themselves as “bad with finances”, or when someone trying to write still sees themselves as “not really a writer”, then every action they take is fighting against an existing self-concept. And quite quickly, that fight exhausts and depletes the energy to change.

For this reason, it can be extremely beneficial for someone to implement the concept of “possible selves”. Researchers Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius called these future identities "possible selves." These possible selves act like psychological north stars. They help guide behavior, but only when the future version feels believable. If my goal is to become a writer, the first step isn't imagining myself publishing a bestseller. It's imagining myself sitting down to write today.

And this is why identity is such an integral part of change.

If I tell myself I’m a writer but never write, my brain won’t buy the story. But if I write every day for six months, eventually my brain starts saying: “Well... I guess we are a writer.”

The same is true for confidence. Discipline. Courage. Financial responsibility. Exercise. Meditation. Reading. Cooking… the list goes on.

Identity is not built through reciting affirmations. They might help along the way, but ultimately identity is built through accumulated proof.

When behavior aligns with identity, effort decreases. As effort decreases, actions become normalized.

You don’t need extraordinary discipline to brush your teeth. You don’t need motivation to put on a seatbelt. And you don’t need a vision board to wear clothes before leaving the house.

Why? Well, because for most people, they aren’t goals. They’re expressions of identity. They’re actions that are already connected to who you believe you are.

(Note: brushing your teeth may be a goal for some people and, if so, that is awesome and this in no way discredits that goal)

Research on Identity-Based Motivation by Daphna Oyserman suggests that people are more likely to pursue behaviors when those behaviors feel congruent with their sense of self. In other words, we naturally move toward actions that reinforce who we believe we are.

Social media would have you believe that change happens overnight. It doesn’t. Our self-identities have deep roots and require consistency to prune the old roots and grow new ones. What it does mean is that you can begin collecting evidence that challenges the old story.

Every time you write, you cast a vote for being a writer. Every time you move your body, you cast a vote for being someone who cares for their health. Every time you have a difficult conversation instead of avoiding it, you cast a vote for being courageous.

Contrary to the stories our brains’ often tell us, the goal isn't perfection. The goal is evidence. So let me give you a simple practice you can implement to start gaining evidence.

Over time, those small pieces of evidence will accumulate until, eventually, your story changes.

The person who once said, “I always quit,” starts saying, “I follow through.”

The person who believed they weren’t disciplined starts seeing themselves as someone who honors commitments.

The person who thought they couldn’t change begins to realize they’ve been changing all along.

Before you ask how long this takes, there isn't a universal timeline for behavior change. But I can promise you this: it will happen faster once you start than if you don't.

And if you’ve gotten this far and still aren’t bought in to the role identity plays in behavior change, let me provide you with one more theory. Self-Determination Theory, one of the most researched theories of human motivation, found that lasting behavior change tends to occur when actions align with personal values and intrinsic motivations (rather than external pressure).

This means sustainable growth is rarely about forcing yourself. It’s about becoming increasingly aligned with what matters to you.

The truth is that most of us aren’t suffering from a lack of discipline. We’re suffering from outdated stories. Stories about who we are and what we’re capable of. Stories that may have once protected us but no longer serve us.

If I can give you one takeaway, let it be this.

Discipline isn’t the problem, and it likely never was. The problem is that we’ve spent years rehearsing an identity that no longer fits, and we’ve become so entrenched in that identity that we can’t see that it’s the very thing getting in our way.

Change doesn’t begin when you finally become disciplined enough, it begins when you start questioning whether the identity you’ve been carrying is helping you get to where you want to go. Because sometimes the greatest act of personal growth isn’t learning how to force yourself into change, it's learning how to see yourself differently.

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Every time I come across someone talking about people being asleep or the collective waking up, I have a momentary lapse in patience. It generally is a mixture of two or more of the following: a scoff, side eye, sigh, face palm, grumble, “stop”; or something similar.

I’m not trying to be a snooty asshole. I don’t think I know better—well, maybe I do, but I (generally) check myself on this type of thinking. But the reason I have this response is because I find that the premises of people being “asleep” or “the collective waking up” are quite small minded (which is ironic since they are most often shared by “enlightened” individuals.)

If you’re still with me—which I thank you for—allow me to explain.

I am a Californian (yes, I say Californian and not American because America is a hemispheric region and the name given to the “New World” by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller who inspired by the first name of the Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, and the United States is a republic of states that do not own the moniker “American”… but I digress).

Where was I? Ah, yes—I am a Californian, so when I hear someone refer to people “being asleep” or “waking up”, it is generally related to the “western world” population. I am making this assumption based on the fact that our algorithms are really only showing us people that we’re somehow connected to and that those who post these types of things are of the western, white imperialized world. And this, for me, is where these ideas fracture.

Think about this; the majority of the world’s population lives outside of western society. So when we say, “people are asleep” or “people are waking up”, who are we talking about? Are we talking about our small demographic; the white, western imperialized nations that only take up 9-11% of the world population? And are we using the limited reach of our experienced population to validate our story of the world “sleeping” or “waking up”, or do we really mean to say that the world—the majority of which we know nothing about—is “asleep” or “waking up”.

I try hard not to apply unfounded assumptions to my thinking, though it is hard not to do so here. Do I know who people are referring to when they speak of a population being asleep or waking up? No, I don’t. But do I think that it is a limited view being used to support said positions? Yes, I do.

That said, this doesn’t mean that I don’t think people are “asleep” or that people are “waking up”. I believe both to be true, though not in the way that that is often referred to. I hear people talk about red pills, blue pills, the matrix, 5D, sheeple… the list goes on. This is the side of being asleep and waking up that I find cute, cinematic, alluring, whimsy, but not real.

I tend to align with the idea of sleeping and waking up that is found in Buddhist philosophy. Buddhist teachers often refer to our deluded experience of life as a “waking sleep”, and the idea of “waking up” is highlighted by Siddhartha Gautama reaching enlightenment under the bodhi tree and becoming the Buddha upon “waking up”. Though one of the most powerful teachings the Buddha ever gave was the Heart Sutra, wherein Aveloketshvara—also known as Kwan-Yin, the Buddha of compassion—spoke the famous lines, “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form, form is not other than emptiness.”

What the Heart Sutra is pointing at—at least, what I think it is pointing at—is that the categories we use to make sense of our experience are themselves empty of fixed meaning. Being “asleep” and being “awake”; ignorance and enlightenment. These are not opposites sitting at either end of a line; they are inseparable and each of the same. One is contained within the other.

The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, a true G if there ever were one, explains this much more succinctly than all my paragraphs have done this far. He says, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” In other words, the moment we decide we have woken up, we may have simply traded one dream for another.

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Now, you may be thinking, “Okay Sean, thats a nice little quote and all, but what does it have to do with being asleep or waking up”. Well, for me, it means that, even in my waking up, I am asleep. And even in my sleep, I am waking up. I can not have one without the other, and while both exist, neither exist. So to say that people are asleep, one must ask, “in relation to what, and who, and when?” And to say people are awake, one must ask the same. One person’s awake, is another person’s asleep. And just because one person seems to be asleep in one area of life wouldn’t mean that they aren’t awake in another area of their life. There clearly are layers to this shit.

And, much like the layers of an onion, we will find that under our “awakeness”, we are asleep, and under our “asleepness”, we are awake. Invariably, we have to continue to pull back these layers until there is nothing less, no sleep and no awake… though the jury is still out on that one for me.

Okay, now back to the initial focus about people being asleep and waking up. I don’t think people in western society are necessarily “asleep”, I think they’re desperate. I think, by in large, we are a society desperate to feel good, to live the dream, to not feel the pain and the suffering and the ache that is a natural part of living. In that desperation, we may close our eyes, numb ourselves, put ourselves “to sleep”, but who is to truly say that people are unaware? There seems to be this idea that awareness would mean action—it doesn’t. I think many people are aware of their deluded ways, and yet they carry on with them because that is the only way they know how to function and survive.

And how could it be any other way? We have been conditioned from the earliest age to keep moving, keep producing, keep performing. To push through the discomfort rather than sit with it. To answer “fine” and “good” when asked how we are, regardless of the truth. Western society in particular has built entire economies around the avoidance of pain—pharmaceuticals, entertainment, social media, alcohol, busyness itself—all threads of a web designed to keep us one step ahead of whatever is chasing us. And what is chasing us, more often than not, is simply the raw, unmediated experience of being alive. The grief. The uncertainty. The tenderness of being human in a society that rarely makes space for tenderness.

This is not laziness. Nor do I think it is ignorance. This is survival. When you have been taught your entire life that discomfort is a problem to be solved rather than an experience to be moved through, you do not wake up one day and simply choose otherwise. The conditioning runs deep—deeper than motivation, deeper than intention, deeper than any red pill or podcast or Reddit rabbit hole or spiritual retreat can reach in a single sitting. Thich Nhat Hanh called this our “habit energy”—the deeply worn grooves of thought and behavior that carry us forward on autopilot, not because we are asleep, but because the groove is simply easier to follow than to climb out of. (If you’ve read any of my other pieces, this is also another labeling for those well worn neural pathways).

In that sense, I think it is less about waking up and more about donning a raw, “awakened” acceptance. One that is observant, compassionate, honest and slow to react. Maybe I’m just playing the semantics game here, and I’m sure some will say I am, but it isn’t that people are waking up, but rather they are opening the aperture on their lens and taking more in. And an open aperture doesn’t mean you suddenly see everything clearly—it means you are willing to let more light in, including the light that illuminates the parts of yourself you’d rather leave in the dark. From this point of view, it is not about waking up; it’s about the willingness to stay honest and open.

And still, I can only speak from an assumption I am applying that is influenced by a small majority of the world. So, is the world asleep or waking up? I have no idea, but I am willing to bet that humans have been saying the same thing for generations while referring to their small locus of knowing.

Maybe the more honest question isn’t whether people are asleep or awake—but whether we are willing to be present to our own experience without immediately reaching for the nearest exit. Whether we can sit in the discomfort of not knowing, of being somewhere in between, of being, as the Heart Sutra suggests, both and neither all at once.

Though, if waking up from sleep means that people are opening their hearts up to the true raw experience of humanity; the one that is painted in pleasure and pain, love and fear, joy and sorrow, well then, I’m here for the waking up.

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So, I’m going back to school to become a licensed therapist, and today is technically my first day.

I don’t want to turn this into some cliche, “I’m 40 and starting over” post — because, if I’m honest, I believe starting over is a constant in life, and not an exception. That said, I feel lucky (and blessed) that I have the opportunity to go back to school and go after a goal of mine — and that I’ve gotten to a place where I am choosing myself and taking a leap of faith.

I put off this pursuit for my MFT for 13 years, putting other things in front of it and backing out from fear of choosing the wrong path — one of my well-worn neural pathways and fear responses.

The fear of getting it wrong. The fear of getting left behind. The fear of failing at the things I care about. All these fears often led me to second guessing myself out of the things I cared about and led to me shielding myself with half commitment (because you can’t fail if you never try).

The ironic part about this is, if you never try, your inner critic is likely to still call you a failure. And the idea of wasting time on an unknown path becomes time wasted on not taking the path in the first place.

This isn’t to say that I regret my choices. I don’t. It was this path that allowed me to travel around the world. It was this path that led me to becoming a yoga teacher, meditation teacher, earning a masters degree in Organizational Psychology, become a mindfulness & somatics coach, and experience the longest romantic relationship of my life.

Each of these was a choice of mine and they all have brought a fruitful bounty to my life (at one point or another). But I also know myself well enough to know that some of the decisions were made in alignment with doubt and fear. When you make decisions from this place, it doesn’t mean that you’ll be rewarded in grief. On the contrary, you can be rewarded in miraculous and unexpected ways. Though, for me, I have found that the more decisions I made in doubt of my own wishes, the harder its been to embody a sense of trust in my actions and decisions.

The Tyranny of Imagined Deadlines

If there is anything that age gives us, it is the opportunity to see how time flows. There is a lyric from the song “Birch Tree” by the band Foals that says,

“Come meet me by the river
See how time it flows
I'll meet you by the river
See how time it flows”

I love this quote because it encapsulates time in such a beautiful way. If you’ve ever sat at the edge of a river and watched it flow, you might come to the realization that it is always flowing and that the drops that were once in front of you are now well beyond you now. And yet, still, the river is happening all at once; at the mouth of the river, the spring, the lake, the tributary. It’s all happening, its all happened, and it continues on.

When it comes to our own lives, we get to watch ourselves move through time and see how our decisions play out and, through it all, we witness that — just like the river — time keeps moving along. Life keeps moving along.

As a child, everything feels like forever because we have nothing to reference the passage of time against. The idea of school sounds like a lifetime. I remember being in 1st grade thinking that 6th grade was lifetimes away. Then, in 6th grade, I remember thinking to myself, “I still have another 6 more years of this until I graduate, and that doesn’t even count college. I’ll be in school FOREVER.”

Though, with each passing year — especially once I hit 30 — time has seemed to warp in an unexpected way. While time seems to “fly by” faster and faster, the weight of time (for me) has dissipated. I’ve realized that we spend so much of our lives racing against imagined deadlines: finish your degree by 22, get married, have kids, and establish your career by 30, and have everything figured out by 40. These arbitrary timelines become invisible prison bars, keeping us from acting on what we actually want because we’ve “missed the window” or we’re “too late.” (It is important to note that the want that I am referring to here is not a rush of blood to the head but rather a full bodied declaration of the head, heart, and soul).

But here’s the understanding I’ve reached through witnessing my own life: the pressure of these deadlines is entirely self-imposed. Time will continue its march regardless of whether I start my MFT program at 27 or 40 or 55. The question isn’t whether I’m “on time” — the question is whether I’m living in alignment with what matters to me. Do I want this thing? Does it matter to me? Do I trust the aim of my arrow? When the answer is yes to these, then the idea of being “on time” becomes a non-factor (or at least the pressure dissipates).

There are parts of time that we cannot erase — namely death. While I know that I have an expiration date, albeit an unknown one, I am more inclined to do the thing that I want because, no matter what I do, time is going to keep ticking into the future (so why not fill the space between now and then with what I want).

When we release ourselves from the tyranny of imagined deadlines, something shifts. We stop measuring our lives against some external rubric of “should” and start measuring them against our own values. We may find that we stop questioning our decisions based on timeline related fears and start asking “Am I moving toward what matters to me?”

The Work of Self-Awareness and Agency

Now, part of this does rely on self-awareness. Over the majority of my “adult” years, I have built a very good relationship with myself, and that has gifted me with the insight and understanding of what I value (and what I don’t). I won’t pretend that this was easy. The road of self-awareness is a long one with no true beginning or end, and the fruits of this personal relationship often emerge without announcement or acclaim. Rather, they usually arise quietly and can often ben overlooked since the changes are subtle.

I also believe that there is a sense of privilege found in my self-awareness. Not privilege in a guilt-driven way, but privilege in the sense that life has presented me with the tools and resources to arrive at this point (again, gratitude).

And this is where I think about the work I want to do as a therapist, and how it connects to the coaching work I’ve been doing. I believe deeply in the importance of understanding pathologies and the real challenges people face. But I also believe we don’t need to pathologize everything and diagnose everyone. There’s a middle ground where therapy and coaching meet — a space where we help people develop self-awareness and agency within their own lives without making it about striving for some curated life of perfection.

Through the slow practices of self-development — mindfulness, somatic awareness, reflective practices — people can begin to understand their own patterns, their own values, their own relationship with time and choice. This doesn’t mean everyone will go back to school or make some dramatic life change (nor do they need to). But I do think there is a sense of okayness that comes with it. A settling. A capacity to feel more balanced, equanimous, and sure of ourselves and our decisions.

And through that, there is a sense of joy and contentment that arises from living a more fulfilled or purposeful life — not because we’ve achieved some external marker of success, but because we’re living in alignment with what we actually care about.

Living in the Space Between

So here I am, going back to school because it is something that has been on my heart for over 2 decades. Here I am taking the risk to step into a new unknown because I have gotten myself to a place where I can listen to myself, trust myself, and following my values; my desire to be of service and to further the integration of therapeutic knowledge and practices into our society.

And the funny (and slightly morbid) thing is, I’m actually okay if I never made it to my end goal. Sure, I pray that is not the case and I don’t spontaneously combust upon posting this essay, but if I’m living out my days the way I want — with honest intention and meaning — then my fulfillment isn’t coming once I reach the end of my road, but is with me for every step of the way.

This is what I want for the people I’ll work with: not necessarily that they’ll achieve every goal or reach every destination, but that they’ll develop the capacity to live with intention in the space between where they are and where they’re going. That they’ll stop measuring themselves against imagined deadlines and start measuring themselves against their own sense of rightness. That they’ll find the courage to act despite the pressure of time, despite the fear of being “too late,” despite the uncertainty of the path ahead.

Because, if there is a truth to be found here, then may it be that we’re never really too late for what matters. We’re only too late if we let the fear of being too late keep us from beginning at all.

Okay, so maybe this did turn into one of those “live, laugh, love” age-based encouragement posts. If it did, then I hope the inspiration is to remove the weight of imagined timelines and encourage you to act out the values and wishes of your heart-mind, even if the road feels long and unknown. Time will pass anyway. The question is what you’ll fill it with.

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Sometimes an ‘a-ha’ moment is as good as sex (if not better). I know that comment just got some eye rolls, but let me make my case. When the ‘a-ha’ moment is potent enough, your hair stands on end, your heart rate increases, your eyes dilate, your body electrifies, and your hormonal levies break, sending a rush of serotonin and dopamine flooding into your brain. Suddenly, time stops, the planets align and you can see your future as clear as the stars strewn across an unobstructed desert sky. Everything suddenly makes sense. You see the patterns, the behaviors; all the things that kept you stuck, and what you need to do next. You might sigh, or cry, or squeal, or even flip over a fuckin’ desk because you’re feeling so unstoppable.

Maybe the ‘a-ha’ was born from a book you read, or something you heard on a podcast, or something you learned in a course, or a workshop, or a post on IG or TikTok (or Substack). Wherever it came from and whatever it was, it has you lit up — inspired and ready to tackle your future and take on the challenge with a renewed vigor and excitement. You take the ‘a-ha’, journal on the idea, and create a plan with actionable steps.. You say to yourself, “this time is different; nothing is stopping me now”. You feel ready to take on the world.

Fast forward to three weeks after the ‘a-ha’ moment, and you find yourself floundering in familiar waters.

The wind has left your sails and you’ve begun to float aimlessly (yet again). “How on earth did it happen again?”, you ask yourself. This time felt so different. You had the insight, the inspiration, the plan, yet now you find yourself wondering, “Where did the drive go?” and “What am I doing wrong?”, and thinking that something must be wrong with you.

If you can relate to any of this — this feeling of being caught in a cycle of inspiration, action, and quickly depleted motivation, there is a pretty good chance you are experiencing the Inspiration-Action Gap.

The bad news is that this behavior barrier between inspiration and action is getting in your way of alchemizing your knowledge and insights into wisdom and tangible action. The good news is that you don’t have to let this gap sabotage you any longer.

The ‘A-ha’ Addiction

Attaining knowledge can be addictive. Each time a new knowledge bomb drops in that sexy little brain of yours, your neural synapses get flooded with dopamine and you get high. It feels great. You’re satiated, (imaginary) cigarette in hand, lying back in the afterglow. But then the feeling fades, leaving you wanting more.

This is something I speak on from experience. I used to eat self help books like a kid throwing back candy after halloween. For a good 8-10 years, that was the prominent genre of book that I chose to ingest, and, for a while, it felt like I was really putting the insights into play. I was taking what I learned, scribing it into my own words and shining those words through the stained glass of my own life to share my own reflections. It felt like true character growth and behavior change. Though after each book — or course, or class, or workshop, or webinar — I was left hungry for more, convinced that I was still missing “something”, and that the next one would finally be enough.

I would learn something new, put a plan together that used the new insight; a plan that was sure to change my life — (because) finally, this time it would be different (famous last words). Then, like clockwork, my drive would drop and the plan would fizzle out (only to be re-inspired by a new ‘a-ha’ moment from a new book). Finally — after countless highlighted paragraphs and underlined sentences and dog eared pages — I realized that, while I had seen some changes, I was barely integrating the knowledge I was taking in. I grew tired of always feeling like I was broken; like I was doing life wrong and stuck to repeat the same pattern again and again, but I didn’t have an answer for myself. Then, as luck would have it, while having a chat with a friend, I was introduced to the idea of the inspiration-action gap and the role dopamine was playing in my ‘a-ha’ moments.

The Anatomy of Excitement

That initial rush of insight isn’t illusory. When you encounter a compelling new idea or have a meaningful experience, your brain’s reward system activates. Dopamine floods your neural pathways, creating genuine motivation and emotional energy. You don’t have to know the science behind it to know the feeling. This is the same neurochemical that drives you toward food, connection, and accomplishment — it’s your brain’s way of saying “this matters, pay attention.”

In those moments, you’re in what is known as a “hot state” — you’re emotionally engaged, energized, and capable of imagining a different future with unusual vividness. Your brain simulates the changed version of yourself easily because you’re riding a wave of neurochemical support. (sup, Johnny ‘neuroscience’ Tsunami). With the chemicals whispering delusions of grandeur to your brain (ain’t nothing wrong with a well placed delusion), the new behavior doesn’t just feel possible, it feels inevitable.

But evolution saw to it that dopamine be designed to respond to novelty and anticipated reward, not to sustain ongoing behavior. You can think of dopamine as what starts the car, not what keeps it going. Once the newness wears off; once the book is finished or the course is over or you come home from your retreat, your dopamine levels naturally decline and the neurochemical brain bath that framed change as effortless dissolves like mist in the summer heat.

The Return to Baseline

What follows the high (and can feel like a smack back down to earth) is what researchers call “cold state” reality. You’re back in your regular life, facing the actual friction of implementation without the confidence inducing emotional elevation. The long day at work. The late start to the morning. The missed work out. The overlooked hunger. The competing demands. The absence of that catalyzing high. The brain is no longer sipping on its hormone cocktail, and new behavior that seemed so obvious now requires conscious effort, discipline, willpower, regulation — cognitive and nervous system resources that are fundamentally limited.

This regression toward baseline, albeit expected and natural, has several overlapping causes. One is simple memory consolidation. Without active rehearsal and application, even profound insights become just another memory. This is not a sign of a weak brain, it is a normal function of one. Your brain deprioritizes what it deems as not important to make sure it gives attention and energy to where it is needed most.

The insight doesn’t disappear, but it loses salience, fading into the background noise of everything else you’ve ever learned (along with Bing Bong). ← plus 10pts if you get the movie reference

That’s not all. There’s also hedonic adaptation at work. Hedonic adaptation sounds like a skill I’d give my lvl 10 high elf, ranger (shout out to my gamers, iykyk), but it is actually the psychological tendency to return to a stable baseline level of happiness or functioning regardless of positive changes. Your brain is remarkably good at normalizing new circumstances, which serves you well in preventing both chronic misery and chronic mania, but which also means that even genuine improvements lose their motivational charge over time.

The Implementation Intention Failure

Perhaps most importantly, there’s what happens when intentions formed in hot states meet cold reality. In that moment of inspiration, you form a genuine intention to change. But intentions formed when you’re emotionally elevated systematically underestimate the challenges of execution.

(If you’ve ever seen someone talk about a business plan whilst on cocaine, you’ll know what I’m talking about here. And if you’ve never seen that, you don’t need to. It doesn’t change the point — you’re high, and you’re making plans).

You imagine yourself meditating (or exercising, or journaling, or whatever) every morning without accounting for the morning you’re running late, or when your child is sick, or when you have to start early, or when you simply just forget.

The inspired version of you operates in a frictionless simulation where all things are possible and nothing is pulling you back or getting in your way. The actual version of you operates in a world full of friction (and we’re not talking the sexy kind) — where established neural pathways (with their heavy myelinated sheaths) offer the path of least resistance. Where habits are literally encoded in your basal ganglia — that sweet group of subcortical nuclei located deep within the brain thats heavily involved in habit formation, reward processing, and motivation — as automated sequences that run without conscious thought. Where change requires more than just wanting something different, it requires building an entirely new neurological infrastructure.

Why Your Brain Resists

From an evolutionary perspective, this return to baseline isn’t a bug — it’s a feature. (There is my tech background cutting through). Constant heightened motivation would be metabolically expensive and psychologically exhausting.

(if you didn’t read my last post, check it out. I discuss cognitive load and its effect on change).

Your baseline exists because it’s efficient. Your brain’s default is to conserve energy, and established neural pathways require far less glucose than forming and strengthening new ones.

Those old patterns aren’t just habits; they’re deeply grooved neural highways that your brain travels automatically. Creating new patterns means building new roads from scratch while the old highways remain perfectly functional and infinitely easier to use. Your brain will default to efficiency every time unless given compelling reasons not to.

This is why the inspiration-action gap persists even when the insight is genuine, even when the motivation is real, even when you truly want to change. You’re not weak-willed. You’re not broken. You’re experiencing the entirely predictable result of neurological systems working exactly as designed.

Bridging the Gap: Riding the Wave of Insight

I realize that while writing a piece about the inspiration action gap and the pitfalls of an ‘a-ha’ moment, someone might have an ‘a-ha’ moment over the content in this essay. I actually hope for that — and, no, the irony is not lost on me. Understanding this mechanism doesn’t make change easy, but it does reframe what change requires. The key is capturing and channeling that initial burst of dopamine-fueled motivation before it dissipates. Here’s how to ride the wave of the “aha” moment into actual integration:

1) Strike While the Iron Is Hot

The moment you feel that spark of inspiration is your window of maximum leverage. While it can be alluring to soak it in, don’t just bask in the feeling. We’re not here for happy hour and a tan. Act immediately — while you’re still in the hot state. If you finish a book with an insight about morning routines, don’t wait until tomorrow to “start fresh.” Set your alarm right now. Lay out your clothes. Walk through the motions as if it were morning. The inspired version of you has energy the future version of you won’t have.

This is when to make specific commitments concrete. Instead of “I’m going to meditate more,” commit to “I will meditate for five minutes at 7am in my bedroom corner.” Specificity matters because it creates a clear retrieval cue for your future self — when 7am arrives and you’re in your bedroom, the behavior is more likely to trigger automatically.

2) Reduce Future Friction Immediately

Use your current enthusiasm to remove obstacles for your future self. If the insight is about eating more aligned with your body, clean out your pantry now, shop for groceries now, prep tomorrow’s meals now. If it’s about learning a language, download the app, schedule the first lesson, and delete the social media app you’ll be tempted to use instead.

Environmental design is more powerful than willpower. Your inspired self can restructure your environment in ways that make the desired behavior the path of least resistance.

Have a time with it, and let the inspiration lead you. There is often a sharpened eye and whimsical attitude that comes with inspiration — let the restructuring be honest, intentional, and playful. Once the dopamine fades, you won’t have the energy for this restructuring, but you’ll benefit from having done it.

3) Create Immediate Accountability

Share your insight with someone; ideally someone who shows an investment into your wellbeing. Share what you’re committing to and, if it is available, ask them to check in on you and your progress. Or maybe take it one step further and find a way to create public accountability or add financial stakes. Sign up for the class, book the session, join the group, schedule the appointment. Make it costly to back out. (Note: cost doesn’t need to equate to money. Think more along the lines of energy/effort/relations).

By implementing a sense of , it shifts the decision from “should I do this thing I said I’d do?” to “I’ve already committed, the decision is made.” You’re using your hot state self to constrain your cold state self’s options.

4) Start Absurdly Small

This is something I will continue to shout from my soap box. I cannot stress the life changing power of simplifying actions and starting small. The most common mistake that I made in my past, and that most people make when pursuing change, is using inspiration to fuel unrealistic commitments.

You feel amazing, so you commit to meditating 20 minutes a day every day, or writing three full pages every morning, or working out for an hour, daily. And while, at the time, these commitments seem completely realistic, when the dopamine crashes, these commitments become anchors that drag you down.

Rather than going full blown Avenger, ‘save the world’ level with the change, commit to something laughably small — so small that even your most exhausted, unmotivated future self can do it. Two minutes of meditation. One sentence written. A five-minute walk. This isn’t your forever goal; it’s your minimum viable habit for the neural pathway you’re trying to groove. Once the pathway exists, you can expand it. But if you never build the pathway because your initial commitment was too ambitious, the insight dies.

5) Capture the Insight Externally

Your brain will not remember how profound this insight felt, so make sure you write it down in detail. Not just the insight itself, but why it matters to you; what it connects to, how you’re feeling right now. If it works for you, maybe record a voice memo you can refer back to, or create a visual reminder that you can see and reference daily.

Put this reminder somewhere you’ll encounter it during the difficult moments. When you’re three weeks in and the initial fire has cooled, you need something external to reignite the memory of why this mattered. Your future self won’t feel what you’re feeling now, but they can read about it and be re-inspired by your past self. Think of this as a way to directly support your future self. You’re basically a time traveler (punch it to 88).

6) Build in Reviews and Reflections

Schedule a specific time one week out and one month out to review your progress. Put it in your calendar now — again — while your motivation is fresh and palpable. These checkpoints serve two functions: they create moments to re-engage with the insight before it fades completely, and they allow you to adjust your approach based on what’s actually working rather than what you imagined would work.

Research on goal achievement consistently shows that people who build in regular review periods are more likely to sustain behavior change. These aren’t guilt sessions; they aren’t meant for you to lambast yourself over all the ways that you have come up short so far, they are calibration points. Remember that.

7) Expect the Fade

While this is likely to be inferred by this point, and it might not need to be said, perhaps the most important thing to remember is this: know that the motivation will fade. Expect it to. Plan for it. When you hit week three and you’re tired and the new behavior feels hard and outside of your reach and you start questioning your tactics, motives, and character, remember that’s not failure — that’s the predictable neurochemistry of being human.

The difference between people who integrate insights and people who don’t isn’t that some people maintain permanent enthusiasm. It’s that some people build systems that continue to work for them even when enthusiasm is gone. They show up on Tuesday when it’s raining and they’re tired because they’ve made showing up automatic, and they’ve made showing up automatic because they’ve removed the friction, they’ve started absurdly small, they’ve set their future self up with the notes and reminders and follow-ups to support the change, and they’ve created accountability that doesn’t depend on how they feel.

The Architecture of Change

The books and courses and experiences that spark inspiration aren’t useless, so please don’t misconstrue this message as me saying throw them out. We all need inspiration, and these avenues often provide the initial vision and direction that lights the fire within. Hell, I’m still a sucker for a book or course that will expand my knowledge. But what I want you to remember is that the gap between inspiration and integration is where the actual work of change happens, and that work must begin immediately, while the dopamine is still flowing, while the vision is still vivid, while you still have the energy to build the scaffolding your future self will need.

Recognizing the gap — seeing clearly how your brain moves from excitement to equilibrium — allows you to work with your neurology rather than against it. Not inspiration alone, but inspiration channeled into immediate action. Not motivation as a permanent state, but motivation as a catalyst for building structures that outlast it. Not a better idea, but a better process for turning ideas into integration.

The gap isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a terrain to navigate — and the best time to start navigating is the moment the insight strikes.

Hey, y’all. I’m back at it again with another piece aimed at removing the influencer attitude from self development. In light of us (almost) being 2 weeks into the new year, this little bit sub-snack is dedicated to all my people out there working on behavioral change and new habit formation.

Yeah, I know, another article talking about how to set yourself up for success when setting goals, instilling new behaviors and forming new habits. But if I can catch you before the eye roll and dismissal, I want to welcome you to stick around for a little bit—this isn’t going to be another copy paste post about micro-habits and manifestation (I promise).

I don’t have to consult the bones or the tea leaves to know that there is a high likelihood that you have a goal right now. Matter of fact, there is a high likelihood that you have multiple goals right now. Maybe they’re goals that you've been carrying for years—finding your person, getting in shape, meditating, journaling, volunteer work, financial security, starting a business, starting a new career, starting (and finishing) a creative project, quitting a vice, finally dealing with that pattern that keeps showing up in your relationships—the list goes on. And maybe you’ve become frustrated by your past progress because, no matter what you’ve done so far, the new behaviors don’t seem to take shape into a new habit and the goal isn’t achieved.

The reality is that I have no idea what your processes have been like and what has or hasn’t worked for you, but I would be willing to say that, for a large majority, one of the reasons the new habits aren’t forming and the goals aren’t reached is because you are trying to fulfill too many goals at once. If you want to reach your goals, it is likely they will require big changes to your already instilled behaviors and to your identity. That alone is a challenging process, but when you add multiple goals that require multiple changes, you’re setting yourself up for a surefire recipe for maxing out your cognitive load and returning to the “safe” baseline that your system knows.

There are a few things that I would call “must remembers” when it comes to goal setting and setting yourself up for success; the role of your identity is one of them.

The Identity Paradox Nobody Talks About

There’s this weird chicken-and-egg situation at the heart of every behavior change, and while there is a good amount of advice that touches on it, most advice diminishes the value of this little bit right here: You need a new identity to support new behaviors, but you need new behaviors to create a new identity.

I swear I’m not trying to be pithy (even though I did put the above sentence in italics). But go on a take a second to think it over. If you want to become “someone who runs,” you need to... Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? (yes, I just dated myself). That’s right; you need to run. But if your brain’s entire predictive model of who you are says “I’m not a runner,” then every time you lace up your shoes, you’re fighting against your own neural architecture. Shoot, you might not even make it to lacing up your shoes. You might feel the pressure as soon as you wake up early to go on the run you said you were going to do.

Think of it as a negotiation with your own neural architecture. (sounds fancy, huh?) You envision the you that you truly want to become—not the you that you think you’re supposed to become. (This is imperative because, if embodying this new identity doesn’t mean anything to you, then it will be hard to find the pull and drive to embody this identity). Now, with your clear and meaningful vision of your new identity, you announce to your brain: “This is who we’re becoming”. The brain will say, “cute, that’s nice, but I only see through behaviors, not words”, so you prove it through action, one small repetition at a time. (just curious, what did your brain’s voice sound like?).

Each time you show up, even imperfectly—in fact, almost always imperfectly—you’re adding a data point to your brain’s growing file of evidence. Eventually, the accumulated evidence reaches a tipping point where your brain updates its predictive model, and the new identity becomes neurologically encoded as truth. But this isn’t just any truth, this is your truth.

Let’s talk about the predictive model I mentioned above. Psychologist Daryl Bem’s self-perception theory shows us that we actually infer our own identities by observing our behavior. In other words, you become who you repeatedly do. This theory posits the idea that your brain is constantly asking, “What does someone like me do in this situation?” and it answers based on historical data—using what you’ve actually done, not what you say you want to do. So, when you wake up to go for that run, your brain applies the predictive model of what it knows from your past, and, since your identity does not hold being a runner as part of it, it returns to what it knows—not running.

So now, you may be thinking, “Well that’s all fine and dandy, but how do I override this loop and install a new process?”

You don’t. Just kidding. One path that you can experiment with is to start by declaring directional intent while simultaneously giving your brain small pieces of evidence. You want to become a runner, so you are moving in the direction of becoming a runner, and you are providing your brain with small, achievable, repeated wins to use as evidence for this new identity.

You’re not trying to convince yourself you’re already a runner. I realize that this might be counter to some of my manifestation maestros, but, alas, it is not as easy as telling yourself that you are the new thing you want to become. Your brain sees through actions, not words. So while it doesn’t hurt to tell yourself that you’re the thing you want to become, in this case, “i’m a runner”, it is the evidence that you are amounting in small wins that shows your brain: “This is the direction we’re moving. Here’s proof.” One run. Then another. Then another. Eventually, the evidence accumulates to a tipping point where your brain updates its operating system, and the identity shift happens almost without you noticing.

But here’s the crucial bit—because what would this be without the crucial bit—you can’t force the timeline of that tipping point. It happens when it happens. Look, you are unique in countless ways, and there is no change advice that I nor anyone else can provide that works in a timely, systemic, linear way. Your timeline is based on your unique neural wiring, life circumstances, and your nervous system capacity. Which takes me to the next “must remember” of behavior change: cognitive load and your capacity to handle stress.

Why Most Change Attempts Crash and Burn

Back to what I said at the beginning: there is a high likelihood that you have multiple goals right now, and that some of them you have had for quite some time. Yet, try as you may, they have not come to full fruition. And, because of that, you may think that you are in some way broken or weak and lack discipline to achieve said change. Well, let me be (possibly another) one to tell you that that is not true. I know there is a chance that you might not fully believe that, but, for the moment, at least pretend in believing that your inability to succeed with these goals is not due to you being broken or weak or lacking discipline. What is likely happening is that you’re asking yourself to try and change too much at once.

I think we all know the feeling of biting off more than we can chew. If you think about this in context with your approach on achieving goals, you may relate. You go from zero workouts to planning to work out six days a week, one hour each day. From no structure to rigid perfection. The gap between who your brain believes you are and who you want to become (notice how I didn’t say “the gap between who you believe you are”) is so wide that every single attempt requires maximum effort, and maximum effort is metabolically expensive. It’s only a matter of time until your brain taps out. And it will.

Incoming smarty pants paragraph!

Your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain handling conscious decision-making—runs on limited metabolic resources (so eat your complex carbohydrates for your brains sake). Research on ego depletion—the idea that self-control or willpower is a limited mental resource that can be exhausted after use, leading to impaired performance on subsequent self-regulatory tasks—suggests that self-control draws from a finite pool. When you’re simultaneously trying to overhaul your diet, start exercising, meditate daily, and fix your sleep schedule, not only are you asking your brain to don 4 new identities, but you’re also asking one part of your brain to override four different automatic systems. It can’t sustain that.

On top of that, there is a high likelihood that your environment is working against you. I am not saying that your environment specifically is problematic. It could be, or it could be magical—I wouldn’t know. What I’m sharing is that your brain is a prediction machine, and these predictions are based on what was encoded with the behavior. When you walk past the couch where you always scroll your phone, your brain isn’t neutrally observing—it’s already activating the neural pathway for scrolling because that’s what usually happens in that context. So, if you suddenly feel the urge to plop down and pull out your phone, it might be a neural pathway coming on line.

Studies on context-dependent memory show that environmental cues automatically trigger associated behaviors. The idea behind context-dependent memory is that your memory recalls encoded information when your current environmental, physical, or situational surroundings match those at time of learning. So, if you’re headed to a festival and you’re telling yourself that you’re not going to do mdma, but you usually do mdma at festivals and you know mdma will be around you, then there is a high likelihood that your context-dependent memory will trigger the behavior to do mdma. In these situations, you’re using willpower to fight your entire surroundings, and even those with David Goggins like willpower will always lose that battle eventually.

You also might be running into walls because you’re operating outside your window of tolerance. For the past few years, nervous system regulation has been having its time in the limelight (and for good reason). There are so many articles and TikToks and IG Reels dedicated to teaching tools and sharing information that I would never begin to pretend that I have an idea of what is and isn’t discussed out there. Though, in my own experience, I have not seen much written about the role your window of tolerance plays in successful behavioral change. You see, you cannot sustain new behaviors when your nervous system is dysregulated. And while regulation is great, the goal is not simply to regulate yourself but to grow your window of tolerance so your system has the resistance to support your changes

The Window of Tolerance Needs You to be More Modest

The “window of tolerance”— a concept that was introduced by Psychiatrist Dan Siegel and researcher Stephen Porges— is the zone where your nervous system allows you to think clearly, regulate emotions, and pursue goals. It is the space of balance found between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Inside this window, change is possible. Outside it, and you find yourself entering a zone where your actions will resort to survival mode.

When demands exceed your capacity, you exit your window in one of two directions (or yeet yourself depending how over-stacked with changes you are). There is Hyperarousal, a state where you may experience anxiety, racing thoughts, panic, and the feeling of being completely overwhelmed. This is a sign that your sympathetic nervous system has kicked in for fight-or-flight. Or Hypoarousal, a state of shutdown, numbness, dissociation, and the feeling of being completely checked out. If this is the direction you go, then it’s a sign that your dorsal vagal system has activated freeze mode.

In either state, your prefrontal cortex—remember, the part you need for conscious behavior change—essentially goes offline. Let me save you some time and tell you that, if you’re in hyperarousal or hypoarousal, there is not much transformation that will be going on. No sir or ma’am. In that space, your brain is prepped for survival and, when in survival, it’s going to choose the things it knows

This is why you can have perfect clarity about what you need to do and still find yourself completely unable to follow through. It’s not a character flaw. It’s likely you’re either overriding your cognitive load, located in a triggering environment, or are in an out of balance nervous system state—or a combination of the three. (Very quick note: balance isn’t walking a tightrope, balance is the space between the open ocean and the beach. There is room to play between the push and pull)

The last thing I’d want to do is paint some unrealistic picture that you’re not supposed to experience friction when you’re going after change. Friction is good; some of it (at least). Friction is productive—it’s the “sore muscle” discomfort of neuroplasticity; of your brain being forced to build new pathways. The goal is to learn the difference between the productive friction and the nervous system friction. The productive friction is the forming of a new identity (in action), whereas the nervous system friction is the alarm bell telling you that you’re outside your capacity. If you learn how to move yourself back into the window of tolerance when you shift out of it, then you can continue to take on the productive friction. By learning to support your nervous system, your nervous system is able to support your cognitive load.

I could go into a “building your regulation toolkit” section, but, honestly, there are so many articles already written about the 5 best soothing tools or 10 ways to regulate your nervous system that I feel like I’m beating a long dead horse (sorry Seabiscuit). I’m going to give a few ideas, but, if you’re reading this and you really want more information on nervous system regulation tools, you can message me privately and I’ll do a personal toolkit for you—how’s that sound?

Building Your Regulation Toolkit

So what on earth does “supporting your nervous system so it can support you cognitive load” even mean. In a practical sense, it means that, in order for you to reliably change behavior, you’ll likely need tools to expand and maintain your window of tolerance so you have the resilience needed to sustain change.

The specific tools that work are highly individual—what regulates one person’s nervous system might do nothing for another—so I’m just going to lean on the the research points to several evidence-based options:

Breathwork. There are various breathwork techniques that can mobilize energy in the body, or regulate it. Fast exhales will upshift your physiology and activate your sympathetic nervous system, while slow exhales, box breathing (inhale-hold-exhale-hold in equal counts), or simply extending your exhale longer than your inhale will downshift your physiology and activate your parasympathetic nervous system.

Movement. This one is great because it can be done in so many ways. Though the use of movement you can discharge stress hormones and bring yourself back into your window. While this can be exercise, it doesn’t have to. The common movement practice for regulating your nervous system is shaking out your arms, but you can dance, going for a walk, a run, or even do some stretches.

Co-regulation. This one is often overlooked but connection is HUGE, and you can come to co-regulate your system through safe connection. When setting a goal, it can be extremely powerful to share the goal with a person who can support you and root you on. If this is someone you find comfort and connection with, be it family, friend, partner, etc, then you may be able to co-regulate with them. Your nervous system is evolutionarily designed to regulate through relationship, so by being around people who feel safe can literally shift your physiological state.

Sensory input. If you remember the cold plunge craze that swept over the wellness world a few years back, this tool is related (but not limited) to that. Temperature (splashing cold water on your face), texture (a weighted blanket, a soft fabric), sight (like locating 5 green things in your direct surrounding), sound, or scent can all provide neural regulation through direct sensory pathways.

Like I said, I was going to keep this section simple. The key is finding what actually works for your system and practicing these tools when you’re already regulated, so they’re available when you’re not.

Get Rid of the Social Media Image of Success Living in Your Head

There’s this cultural narrative that gets propagated via self-help speakers and social media influencers that “sell” their success with change. I’m not saying that they do it on purpose, but, more often than not, they’re only selling you on their current image and place in life. After they’ve done the big changes and achieved the things. While you might logically know that each individual had their own path to where they are now, your brain sees where they are and what they have now, and encodes the message that ambitious goals are virtuous and small goals are somehow settling or lacking commitment. (I swear, our brains are so amazing, and insane).

For those of you who might not know, when you’re trying to build new neural pathways, small and consistent new behaviors beats large and sporadic every single time. While any person or program that tells you habit formation happens in 21 or 66 days is absolute bollocks, studies on habit formation show it can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days for a behavior to become automatic (depending on the person and the complexity of the change). Your new neural pathways need myelination—the way your brain wraps neural pathways in fatty insulation to make them faster and more efficient—and this is a biological practice unique to each person and one that you cannot rush. In other words, you can say absolute fuck it all to any timeline for your change and just let it ride.

There is something you can do. First, if you haven’t realized it already, pick one goal to start with. (I get it, this in itself might be a struggle. If it is, may I suggest that you pick a low stakes goal). Once you have your goal, break it down to the smallest meaningful increment. (I’m trying my best not to insert a drug innuendo here). By breaking it down, you accomplish several things for yourself. (Look at that, you’re accomplishing things already)

It conserves your prefrontal resources for one clear focus instead of spreading them across multiple demands. It is more likely to keep you in your window of tolerance. One manageable challenge can create the productive discomfort we want. Five simultaneous challenges is bound to grip us with the heavy hands of overwhelm. It generates early wins, and who doesn’t love getting a W. I get that acknowledging your wins might sound silly, but your wins provide your brain with evidence of the emerging identity. (I know it’s been a few minutes since I mentioned identity, but just remember the identity shift is important). And it sets you up to prevent the burnout cycle. You know, the one where you go too hard, crash, and then spend weeks recovering before trying again (and I’m not talking about going to a music festival in your 40s. Go ahead zoomers, talk your shit).

Start absurdly small. Smaller than you think. Honestly, if you don’t laugh to yourself at the simplicity of the goal, it’s probably not small enough. If you want to write, start with 50 words a day. If you want to get fit, start with a 10-minute walk. If you want to meditate, start with three conscious breaths. I get it, you’re thinking, “how is something so small going to get me to where I want to go?” You’re not going to be at the training wheels level forever. The point at the beginning isn’t to hit a home-run tomorrow, it’s to build the new neural pathway and identity pattern through repetition. Once that foundation is solid, expansion happens naturally (and often speeds up) because you’re building on established architecture rather than constantly starting from scratch.

Throwing Out the Timeline

One more thing. Since I briefly mentioned throwing out the timeline earlier, I want to give it a little more attention. Quick personal anecdote. For the majority of my life, I let timelines get in the way of me starting down the paths of my desires. From music, to academics, to finances, to career. I also found myself lamenting the question, “How long will this take?” Now, I’m not going to pretend that I’m batting 100% with this reframe, but something that helped me is to shift from asking “How long will this take?” to asking “Am I showing up consistently and giving my brain evidence of change?”

I’m not going to lie—I stole this next little bit from my manifesting embodiment delulu ladies (shout out). Once you become clear on the identity you’re moving towards, you can use it as a reference when checking in with your actions. When you define the identity you want to grow into; to embody—not as a future destination but as the direction you’re actively moving towards—you can release the artificial timeline entirely. Once you’re clear on the direction you want to go, it is no longer important to ask yourself, “when is this going to happen?” because it is already happening. Instead, you can shift your focus to questions and statements that support your future/now identity.

This is not to say that setting time goals is a bad thing. After all, the T in SMART goals is Timely. However, for those who are at the beginning of a behavior change. Setting too large or lengthy of a timeline might set you up for a pass/fail type of checkpoint. When you throw the timeline out, you can focus on the ways you are showing up to your new identity and the opportunities you have.

I will say, there is a little mental sleight of hands with this shift that can pay off in a profound way. By setting aside the timeline model and working in a directional way, you reframe what “failure” means and take a little pressure off your nervous system. Research on self-compassion by Kristin Neff shows this approach—treating yourself with kindness rather than harsh self-judgment—actually increases motivation and persistence. The traditional model of using self-criticism as fuel is neurologically counterproductive because it activates threat response and pushes you outside your window of tolerance.

Miss a workout in the timeline model? Sucks to your ass-mar, (name the reference?), you failed. But miss a workout in the directional model? Not a worry in sight. You simply return tomorrow because you’re still becoming that person. The identity remains intact even when individual behaviors are inconsistent.

What This All Means Practically

If you’re looking to instill a dramatic transformation by sheer will alone, that’s probably not going to happen. But since you’ve made it this far, kudos to you, the least I could do is give you a nice little round up. Remember, while you are an absolute legend of a human being, your brain prefers to use gradual neural restructuring through consistent actions that support the identity (and change) you want—especially when that action feels awkward and uncomfortable. The more awkward and uncomfortable, the more pressure on your window of tolerance.

The good news is you don’t need to fully believe you’re different to act in accordance with your new identity. What you need to do is repeatedly behave differently, while staying within your capacity to do so, until your brain accumulates enough evidence to update who it thinks you are. Trust me, it will. And remember, it’s supposed to feel uncomfortable. The discomfort you feel isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong—it’s the sensation of neuroplasticity happening. (It’s science). If it does something for you, you can remind yourself that your brain is building new pathways, and that requires metabolic resources and challenge (I challenge you to pop that fun little fact out at your next dinner party).

You are going to experience resistance, and you’re going to mess up. When you do, it’s not a sign of failure or weakness—it’s your brain trying to conserve energy by defaulting to established patterns. This is a temporary thing (like our president, Lord willing), and, as time goes on, with steady consistency, the resistance will dissipate.

The most important thing you can do is start. Start with one behavior. Just one. Get clear on it, and get clear on the identity that aligns with this behavior. How does this behavior help you further become the person you wish to be? After you have that, become curious about your environment, design your environment to support your change. Be absolutely unwavering in your honesty of what will and won’t trigger an old pattern—remove the cues that trigger the old patterns, add the cues that make the new behavior easier. If you’re trying to play less video games and you want to read a little more, remove the system from the room and place the book where you place your controller. Find the regulation tools that actually work for your nervous system (not the ones that look aesthetic in a reel) and practice them regularly (and not just when you’re out of your window of tolerance). Show up, even when it’s imperfect. Especially when it’s imperfect. Track your wins, no matter how small they seem. Release the timeline and trust the process. And don’t white knuckle it. If something isn’t working, make adjustments based on what works for your actual system, not what works in theory or for someone else. Remember, this is your life, your change, your identity. Make it yours. And if you find yourself struggling and going beyond the capacity of your cognition and nervous system, take that as a sign to simplify.

k, that’s the end of the show. I hope you enjoyed, and shout out to anyone who made it this far. You are so very appreciated!

References

Baumeister, R. F., & Tierney, J. (2011). Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Penguin Press.

Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 6, 1-62.

Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.

Neff, K. D., & Germer, C. K. (2013). A pilot study and randomized controlled trial of the mindful self-compassion program. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(1), 28-44.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Siegel, D. J. (1999). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press.

Walker, M. (2017). Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Scribner.

I don’t usually do New Year’s resolutions. I’m not against them—despite their notoriously low success rates. If someone wants to call in an intention for their year to come, or bring about meaningful change to their life, and New Year’s Day is the starting line they choose, who am I to shoot down the idea? Though, what I will say is that—all too often—the goals people choose are much too large to make it through this new doorway into the future. If I have a problem with New Year’s resolutions, that would be it: they’re often much too large and negate all of the habits and behaviors currently at play that keep us stuck. Simply put, it’s hard to instill new behaviors and change our habits. And while many of us know this, New Year’s seems to make us forget.

A Sum of Our Programming

Everyone struggles with this; I know it’s one of those universal truths. Our lives are, theoretically, the sum of programs playing out beneath conscious awareness. I don’t want to dive too deep into the habits and behaviors pop psychology spiel—I know it’s been done thousands of times over—though, a quick note if you will.

Habits and behaviors are programs constantly running in countless varieties of order and repetition. They keep us moving. They keep us alive. They are a product of evolution, rooted in survival. Research shows that when we repeatedly perform a behavior in a particular context, we develop implicit associations in memory between contexts and responses. Our brains are wired for efficiency, and through this repetition, what begins as conscious, goal-directed action gradually becomes habitual, requiring less cognitive effort each time we do it.

Our habits and behaviors are in all of our work, all of our play, all of our relationships, all of our interactions. They shape what we feel, what we think, what we say, what we see. They live in our muscles, our nerves, and our minds. Studies suggest that approximately 43% of our daily actions are performed habitually—while we’re thinking of something else entirely. Generally, we are not aware of this programming, and even when we are aware of it, that doesn’t mean it is easily changed (oh how I wish it did).

On top of all of that, all the cutesy TikTok and IG pop psychology will have you believing that a 7 day “mess to success” webinar series or 3 week manifestation workshop will have you changed and thriving in 21 days or less. Hate to rain on the parade, but studies tracking real habit formation found that automaticity (the condition of being done without conscious thought or attention) actually plateaus around 66 days on average. And lets not forget that individual variation ranges from 4 to 335 days depending on the person and the complexity of the behavior. So while the myth persists, the science tells a different story—one that might explain why our ambitious New Year’s goals so often crumble by February.

My Resolution (If I Had One)

BUT, if I were to have a New Year’s resolution, it would be this:

Simplify, and make it meaningful.

Let me break down what I mean when I use the term “simplify.” Towards the end of 2024, I began to witness a shift in me towards simplicity. I think it might have all started with turning 40 this year. The funny thing about turning 40 (for me, at least) is that you’ve lived enough years to know that years are often shorter than the days that fill them. “A long time” doesn’t hold the same weight that it does in your youth, and while looking forward can feel like the days will never come, looking back is often paired with dazed eyes that beg the question “where did the days go?” The more years I’ve seen pass, the more I realize that they just keep coming. And while I do not have some pre-defined lease on the years to come, I now know that, if I’m going to be living them, I might as well choose the path that is meaningful to me.

In that thought, a sense of life wisdom appeared to me. This all came to me after a meditation on lovingkindness. If you’ve never done a lovingkindness meditation, it is a type of meditation where you send well wishes of health, happiness, safety, and peace to people you deeply care for, people you don’t know, people you have a hard time caring about, all beings throughout the world, and to yourself. Anyway, the thought that appeared in my mind asked me, “What do you want for the next part of your life?” And my answer was, well, simple.

When I think about what I want for the next part of my life, these are the things that arise: health, happiness, safety, and peace and love. I want to feel good, do good, give good, and be good. I am willing to bet that, if you were to really think about what you want, the majority of your desires would have their roots planted in health, happiness, safety, and peace and love.

So, there it was, I was asking myself to simplify—weed out all of the half-truths and half-desires that float around taking up time, energy, and effort. I don’t need to do a million things or change a million things about myself to be better or enough, and I don’t need the changes to happen now because the future feels out of reach and lightyears away.

A (somewhat) ironic note: when you’re doing things that are meaningful to you, the weight on the finish line decreases. Sure, it is still important, but it isn’t the sole holder of meaning. Meaning permeates throughout all the actions being done on your path. That doesn’t mean you’re always aware of them, or that there aren’t bad days, hard moments, or relapses or frustrations, but it does make it easier to sustain.

I want to do meaningful work. I want to share meaningful connection. I want to build meaningful relationships. I want to do meaningful things for myself. Things that align with my inner fire, my inner drive, my inner calling—my dharma. And I want to make it easier for myself to succeed in doing these things. And, while it might sound a bit counter-intuitive, to succeed at this intention requires that I simplify my world and do less.

The Science of Why Simplicity Matters

Okay, so I know I said I wasn’t going to dive to deep into the habits and behavior sciences, but I need to touch them lightly one last time. There’s actually a neurological basis for why this shift towards simplicity feels so necessary. Our brains have a limited capacity for processing information, what psychologists call “cognitive load.” When we’re bombarded with excess—whether it’s clutter, an overflowing to-do list, or too many competing goals—our cognitive resources become depleted. We feel mentally drained and overwhelmed because we literally are.

Research on decision fatigue shows that when faced with too many choices, we don’t just get tired—we actually make worse decisions or become paralyzed into making none at all. In a famous study, shoppers presented with 24 varieties of jam were far less likely to purchase than those offered only six options. (I myself am a suck for good packaging). Our brains weren’t designed for infinite choice; they were designed to efficiently process essential information for survival.

This is why simplifying isn’t just aesthetically pleasing or organizationally neat—it’s cognitively necessary. Studies on minimalism and mental health have found that adopting simpler living can decrease stress levels by up to 75% and improve life satisfaction by 80%. When we reduce the clutter in our physical environment, we also reduce the mental clutter. A cleaner space literally signals to our brains that it’s safe to rest.

Accessing Ease Through Simplicity

I don’t believe that we can make all of life easy, so I do want to state that I am in no way saying that, but I do believe that much of life can be made “easier” by simplifying. Cutting out the excess. Removing the unnecessary that does not hold the same meaning, that does not combust into motivation. Taking all of our huge, lofty goals and breaking them down into smaller pieces.

Maybe you can relate to the depletion of cognitive resources that was mentioned above—I know I can. I do too many things at one time and burn out. I know the story all too well. I try to change three big things in my life at the same time. I have one goal, but that goal is actually five different big goals lumped into one. And each of those five goals are a collection of three to five subgoals each. But here I am, thinking I’m some type of neuroplastic superhero of sorts. Clearly delusional, and possibly crazy, because here I come again, doing too many things at one time—trying to build five new routines and habits into my life all at once—knowing very well that it’s never worked before but thinking this time it’ll be different.

I make it for about three weeks. The first week starts strong. The second feels good. The third, I start to drag. And boom—burnout. One new habit formation path dies out. Then another. Then another.

The research on habit formation explains exactly why this pattern repeats. When we try to change too many behaviors simultaneously, we create massive cognitive load. Each new habit requires conscious attention and mental energy until it becomes automatic. Not to mention that some of the habits we may be pruning are connected to how we cope with discomfort (stress, boredom, nervousness, etc), and many might require a dopamine detox which could trigger withdrawal type symptoms in the habit change process. We’re essentially asking our brains to run multiple resource-intensive programs at the same time, and the system crashes. Studies show that simpler actions become habitual more quickly—and that successfully forming one small habit can actually increase our self-efficacy, making us more confident about pursuing additional changes.

The solution isn’t to give up on change. It’s to work with how our brains actually function rather than against them. In other words, stop making it so fucking hard for ourselves to change and feeding the story that we need to change all the things at once and start simplifying.

Pushing the Simplify Button

This is where simplicity becomes not just a cute philosophy to create a Substack post over, or New Year’s resolution to share with the world, but a practical strategy. Instead of me trying to wake up earlier, exercise, meditate, write and eat breakfast all before work, use a daily work planner, hydrate myself with 96oz of water a day, take minor breaks every 25 minutes to stretch and move my body, eat 3 meals a day, cut out coffee and social media, write at least 1 essay a week, read for 30 minutes a day, play guitar (bass) daily, record music weekly, go on one hike a week, and make plans to see friends weekly, and start dating all at once, what happens if I review them for meaning, note which ones will have the greatest friction, and break them all down into smaller goals that are easier to succeed at?

Instead of five goals, what if there was one? Instead of revolutionizing my entire life by March, what happens when I break down everything into its own true unique change path, noting the areas of overlap and the environmental influences that can make things easier or harder, and I focus on one meaningful practice that aligns with what is meaningful to me? What if I gave that practice what it needed to succeed; tending to my environment and removing obstacles that often get in the way; smoothing out the rough edges that often catch and cause friction and giving myself the time I actually need to weave this new behavior into the fabric of my daily life?

Simplicity, in this sense, isn’t about doing less for the sake of less. It’s about doing less so that what remains can be done with intention, presence, and sustainability. It’s about creating the conditions where meaningful change can actually take root rather than withering under the weight of my own ambition.

I’m not mad at myself for being overly ambitious, or for trying the same path countless times only to arrive at the same destination of no change—after all, that is just habits in action. If anything, it was those things that brought me to this point. Do I still want change for myself? Yes, of course I do. But now it is more about knowing what to let go of rather than trying to add more.

So, like I said, I don’t usually do New Year’s resolutions, but if I were to have one, it would be the intention of simplicity—choosing the meaningful over many, depth over breadth, and sustainable over spectacular.

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I was recently talking to a friend about the highs and lows that we experience on our path of growth and healing, and the desire to find (and stay) within in a middle ground that is absent of hurt and hardship. The idea of this middle ground that is absent of pain and struggle is a very attractive notion, and one that is easy to package and sell due to this intoxicating attraction. However, despite what social media influencers, coaches and marketing may allude to, there is no middle ground that exists that is absent of suffering.

There is a pervasive and seductive myth that exists in our culture; the myth that if we attain certain things in life, we can escape hardship, pain, struggle, and suffering. We see this myth often personified through marketing, political dogmas, and (influencer) lifestyles, and, over the past decade or so, we have seen this myth grow exponentially in the world of personal growth and healing.

We imagine that if we just work hard enough, meditate long enough, and process our trauma deeply enough, we will arrive at some promised land where pain no longer touches us. But this belief itself only creates more distress, dis-ease, and disillusion — more pain caused by false expectation, spiritual bypassing, or waiting for a life that will never come.

But when we look closely at the nature of growth and healing, the truth is both simpler and more profound: Healing does not make suffering disappear — it expands our capacity to be with it.

As Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us,

“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

The ocean of life continues its motion — storms still gather, losses still arrive, the body still ages and aches. What changes is not the presence of difficulty, but our relationship to it.

One of my favorite “mentors from afar”, Pema Chödrön, teaches that the fundamental ambiguity of being human never resolves. (I am always amazed by her ability to provide such depth and wisdom in her words. She has a way of conveying the human experience in a simple and approachable manner that is both digestible and inspiring.) Pema Chödrön writes,

“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”

Healing is not about transcending our humanness or eliminating vulnerability. It is about turning toward ourselves with honesty and compassion, again and again, even when — especially when — life brings us to our knees.

When we heal past traumas or expand our capacity to be with what is, we aren’t building walls to keep pain out. Instead, we develop what Jack Kornfield calls “a wise heart” — a heart that can hold both joy and sorrow, that understands suffering as part of the primordial texture of existence. We learn that we can be broken open rather than broken down, that our wounds can become sources of wisdom and connection rather than shame and isolation.

The healed (healing) person still grieves. They still feel fear, anger, loneliness. They still face illness, loss, and pain. They are still visited by stress, crash-outs, self-doubt, and craving. But there is a crucial difference between those who have accepted the true nature of healing and one who still fights against it. Those who have accepted the true nature of the path have learned to meet the experiences without adding layers of resistance; without exhausting themselves further by believing the narrative that something has gone terribly wrong simply because life is being life.

I like to remind myself that, even after attaining enlightenment, the Buddha was still visited by Mara, the malicious tempter that tries to steer us from awakening, and the Buddha still experienced pain in the body as the body aged.

Healing is not the absence of pain. It is the expansion of our capacity to be present with whatever arises. It is the cultivation of what Kabat-Zinn calls “bare attention” — the ability to witness our experience without immediately judging it, fixing it, or pushing it away. It is the radical acceptance that, as Kornfield says,

“the trouble is, you think you have time” to wait until everything is perfect before you fully show up for your life.

From this view, we remember that healing is a practice, not a destination. It is a daily choice to meet ourselves and our circumstances with tenderness rather than violence, with curiosity rather than condemnation. It is the understanding that being whole doesn’t mean being untouched by life, but being present for all of it, the bitter and the sweet alike.

For myself, I have found that my deepest healing was made possible when I finally stopped waiting for the hurt and hardship to end before I began truly living. Maybe you will find that, too.

In the garden of our days,
I allowed myself to get lost in pulling weeds from our flower-box,
letting the anthills that surrounded me
grow into the Andes and hinder my sight.

Foolishly, I continued to dirty my hands,
too preoccupied with my mess.
I did not look up to see you standing in the doorway of my heart,
bathed in light,
waiting.

I wish I would have set down my silly tools
and invited you to rest upon my lap.
If only I did, I might have seen the scriptures written in your eyes
and recited them line for line
as I bore witness to your holiness.

And maybe I would have caught a reflection of mine,
just as the moon sees itself in the ocean,
and heard the words your body spoke to me through movement,
just as the ocean tide speaks the mother tongue of the moon —
two lovers, pulled by a gravity older than words.

I wish I would have spent more moments
sweeping the dark veil of your hair behind your ear,
like drawing back curtains from a window at dawn,
to behold the temple of your face in its fullness —
every accent of your beauty bare and unobstructed.

I am embarrassed to acknowledge all the noontime hours we spent apart.
I was like a boy throwing coins into wells that held no water,
hanging wishes on echoes that never returned.

I now see all the times I could have broken bread with you beneath the open sky,
to have drunk the wine of your laughter
and shared the simple sacrament of a meal together.

I wish I would have spent more moments with my lips pressed to yours —
not as a thief stealing moments,
but as a devotee making offerings to the altar of love,
offering my whole self —
my hands entwined in yours like roots beneath the earth,
inseparable, nourished, bound.

But is this not how the story so often goes?
We hoard our days like misers counting gold,
believing there will always be more tomorrows;
more mornings, more afternoons,
more chances to finally say yes to the living moment standing before us?

We do not know we are starving
until the table has been cleared.

We do not know we are thirsty
until the well runs dry.

We always wish for more of what we could have had after it is gone.

This is the ache we carry,
the weight of all the love we left unoffered,
cramped and growing cold in the shallow space of an unblossomed heart.

And even still,
I am learning from the love that knocked on the door asking to be let in.

I am learning that longing is not always a memory of failure,
it is the sound of remembering what mattered.

And that this regret is not a white flag of defeat —
it is the proof that I loved you enough
to wish I had loved you better.

Okay, so maybe I should have seen this coming. If you’ve been keeping up with my last two posts, you know that I “quit” Instagram. If you haven’t read my two prior posts, here are the very abridged notes to catch you up to speed.

I quit Instagram because it was having a negative effect on my mindset, focus, and reward system.

After two weeks of quitting, I realized how small my actual circle of (IRL) friends is and felt the disconnect that was being masked by internet acquaintances.

Well, if you haven’t guessed it, I’m back on Instagram. Not fully. I’ve built some rules to guide my IG use so that it doesn’t go back to how it was. I’m on about 30 minutes a day for two days a week. And what drove me back? Loneliness, discomfort, and relapse.

When it comes to breakups, it’s not uncommon for a couple to drag the relationship on well past the breakup. I’m sure you know how it can go: A couple separates, then they get back together. Then they separate again. Then there might be a week or two of no contact followed by one of the two reaching out and then both talking again, and then seeing each other again. Then maybe going a long time not seeing each other only to be followed by seeing each other again before either a) getting back together, b) finally ending it once and for all, or c) staying in some form of a situationship until (ultimately) ending at a or b.

For me, whenever I’ve had a “long” breakup, it’s usually due to some mixture of missing them and what we had, navigating the discomfort of the breakup and looking back to the relationship to ease the discomfort, and seeking out the high of the relationship enough to “relapse” and dive back in. Well, guess what? It turns out that my breakup with IG wasn’t much different.

Loneliness in the time of mass connection

Let’s talk loneliness. Since the days of Myspace, I have been training my brain to use the internet to connect with people. For over a decade, I have used social media to connect with friends, with relatives, with acquaintances, and with strangers. I have self booked tours by connecting with venues around the US. I have booked yoga and meditation teaching gigs through my IG presence. I have met two of my previous partners through connecting on Instagram, and, possibly to my detriment, have met numerous long distance lovers, situationships, and flings all through the power of comments, double taps, and DMs.

Over the past 4 weeks of no IG, I have come to realize that this habituation of using IG to connect with individuals has weakened my connections outside of social media. While instagram interactions are often mere comments in passing, they have a way of making you feel seen. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with being seen that way. It makes sense, after all, that this level of being seen would come so easily through social media.

This analogy might be dated, but I’m still going to go for it… Instagram is kind of like a community pool on a hot summer day. Everyone is there, so you don’t have to do much to be seen. All you need to do is show your face (and not be a dickhead), and the hellos will (generally) come your way without much effort.

Now flip the analogy. You’re not at the pool anymore. Everyone else is still there. Sure, their connection might be surface level, but it’s with low effort. Meanwhile, you’re out here trying to make friends the old-fashioned way. If you’ve spent 20 years building well-worn neural pathways around social media use (let’s call it what it is — addiction), then working harder for connection is going to feel weird, unfamiliar, and probably stressful. Until you push through the friction of building connections without Instagram, you’re going to feel lonely and disconnected. At least that has been my experience.

The discomfort that was always there

Loneliness is uncomfortable. The way it weighs on my shoulders and permeates through my body. But the low feeling of loneliness is not the only uncomfortable feeling that has arisen from this Instagram breakup, nor is it the worst. The greatest unease I have felt from this experience is the craving to fill the space that IG used to take up in my day. It has become acutely clear to me that my brain was experiencing withdrawal from the instant gratification and over stimulation.

My body has been filled with an anxious buzzing that pulses through me and presses up against the back of my forehead, the inside of throat, and the walls of my chest and belly. It was (is) like the anxious buzz from too much caffeine. At first, I thought it was the withdrawal symptoms from a digital detox — and I believe it was. But after 3 weeks, I realized that this discomfort had always been there, but it had been numbed by the constant distractions of IG (and other quick dopamine fixes).

The reason why I was feeling such an unease was not just because I had quit Instagram, it was because I had removed my number one numbing agent. Instagram itself isn’t inherently bad, but my use of it had further accentuated the disconnect with humans in real life, and had masked over the general unease that lives within my body when I am still. This isn’t to say that stillness is the cause of the unease. Rather, the “need” to constantly be filling my day with doing is what perpetuates this unease. And the longer I’ve gone turning away from the stillness, the greater the unease is once I remove all the distractions of my day.

Ultimately, it was only a matter of time for me before I found myself searching instagram in the app store and downloading it again. Enter, relapse.

They always come back

Okay, I’ll admit, relapse is a bit dramatic when talking about instagram use. However, some of the withdrawal symptoms that I experienced do align with that of an addict. That being said — I’m back on Instagram. Like I said earlier, I’m not fully on Instagram. I am using it for about 30 minutes a day for two days a week. I hop on to keep contact, and then remove it from my phone. It kind of feels like a nicotine patch right now. I hop on to get my dose of digital “connection”, and that fulfills the urge. Though my plan is to continue to take large breaks from IG on the regular.

I have no intention of going back to how I was using the app. I don’t want to continue facilitating fake connections — I want real community and real connections in real life. I don’t want to waste my time and energy on mindless scrolling, and I don’t want to continue to harm my ability to focus or the dopamine function in my brain.

I may have come back to IG after breaking up, but we are definitely on different terms than before. Ultimately, this experience ended up shining light on something I knew was there but wasn’t paying attention to — my diminished focus and struggle with stillness. But that’s how breakups are, aren’t they? They often lead us to seeing things we didn’t see prior, and, if we honor the newfound insight, we’re likely to grow in ways that we couldn’t have unless the breakup happened.

There is a classic zen koan that goes a little something like this: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I’m sure you’ve heard of this philosophical thought experiment before. Koans are paradoxical anecdotes, or riddles, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.

Now, what I am about to share by no means is meant to be taken as a serious koan, though I will say that this thought (which materialized into my mind about one and a half weeks into my Instagram breakup) has left me a bit more enlightened than I was before it popped into my head. Here it is: If you die and no one is around to post about it, then did it even happen?

Okay, so maybe its not a great koan. To be honest, I don’t think its a koan at all. However, like I said, this thought did leave an enlightening impression on me. That impression? If I were to have died yesterday, the majority of people that follow me in instagram would have no idea.

These people might regularly watch my stories, like my posts, share a bit of banter back and forth, and, every now and then, check in to say ‘hi’. And while none of that is inherently good or bad, I would say that they are all forms of the customary performatives we’ve grown to engage in on the internet that make us feel like we’re staying connected without really having to stay connected.

But since the vast majority of my followers are not directly in my life, they would likely have no idea that I died. But even if I were to rule out all the random followers, there are a lot of old friends and acquaintances that I “know” and they “know” me because we knew each other in the past, but we are not connected at all. So, even for these people, if I were to have died yesterday, they would likely continue to think I was alive until they were told otherwise (which may never happen).

Now, I get that this (in general) is how the world works. We don’t know about the things that happen to people until we are told / find out. And, to be clear, there is absolutely nothing odd with that. What is odd is that internet relationships will have you feeling (and believing) that you are connected to people much closer than you really are. If I were to have died yesterday, I know that all the people closest to me would know.

It has been a long time coming, but I have officially broken up with social media. I don’t use Tiktok, Facebook, Twitter (because “X” is [still] a lame name), or any other social platform, so this really means I’ve finally sat down with Instagram and had “the talk”.

My relationship with Instagram is somewhere between a toxic relationship and borderline addictive behavior and, to be quite honest, I think most people would come to the same conclusion if they were to review their relationship with Meta’s dopamine destroying platform — that is, if they haven’t already come to that conclusion.

Am I assuming that most peoples’ relationship with Instagram is like mine? Yes. But lets just call it an educated guess. Who can really say the platform is enriching their lives, strengthening their bonds, opening new opportunities, stoking inspiration and expansion? Again, I am making an assumption here, but my guess is not many people would answer yes to the last sentence. But I don’t have to speak through assumptions, I can just tell my own story.

This is the third of fourth time I’ve found myself questioning my relationship with Instagram over the past 3 years. Though, this time, something was different. Two months ago, Charlie Kirk got murdered and the internet went mental. Literally, people went mental. The performative grief and uproar was worthy of an Oscar (and more dramatic than 80% of Netflix dramas).

I saw people posting about a man whom they had never posted about or mentioned in their lives; a man that had no direct relevance or effect on their lives. And yet, they were posting as if he was their family member or as if the Pope had been murdered; as if we had lost one of our best and brightest.

People who had never spoken up about any of the countless heartbreaking stories over the past 5 years (because ever since COVID, I swear they’ve multiplied by the nth degree) were suddenly aghast with horror by the state of the world — “how could something like this happen”. “Oh, the tragedy”. “Oh, the horror”. Oh… give me a fucking break. People were sharing false stories on the social sphere about something that, in a few days, would be less memorable to them than their 5th sip of coffee. (And I’m quite positive that 99% of the people who were up in arms couldn’t care less about the absolute bonkers conspiracy connected to the Kirk murder. But that is an entirely different can of worms, so I digress.)

So that was the first straw. The second straw came after I had arrived home from a 5 week vacation where my Instagram usage had been quite scant. Over the five weeks I had posted, but I hadn’t really scrolled, nor had I engaged too much. Upon hopping back on the social media brownstone (that is a drug reference for those who don’t know), all I came across was advertisements and people posting advertisements for their business or life.

Staring at the screen, a thought sprouted somewhere from deep in my psyche, like a rose from the concrete, and that thought was, “This is dumb. Why am I even here? What benefit is this giving me?” And, not so much to my surprise, an answer arose quite quickly — “This is dumb. It is a vampire on your life. It drains time, attention, and energy, and it gives but a sliver of what it takes in return.”

So, right then, I decided that I had enough. This relationship was no longer serving me, and it hadn’t been for quite some time. And, quite honestly, it wasn’t me. It was Instagram. It was the updates, the algorithms, the advertisements, the rise of shitty mental health influencers, pop psychology, and coaches talking about how much money they made. It was the silo-ing, the keyboard heroes, the echo chambers, and the disconnect from community. It was the constant feeling of not seeing people and not feeling seen, and the knowing that the software had been developed to play mind games and hook you like that first hit of brownstone (we call that a “call back”). Is Instagram as bad as heroin? No. But is it as bad as a manipulative toxic partner? Yes.

The reality is that I’ve been on Instagram for the past fourteen years. That is longer than most of my relationships in life; longer than friendships, longer than job tenure, and longer than hobbies. There is no other social media platform I’ve used more, and quite likely, no other internet based application that I have logged more hours on than Instagram. So it’s no wonder than its place in my life had become habitual. Much like a relationship that had been long overgrown but settled into the space of comfort, Instagram and I were on auto-pilot — sharing a bed but empty of substance and benefit.

So, I chose myself and what I believed was best for me. I packed its bags and kicked Instagram out — a.k.a, I deleted the app from my phone and went cold turkey. What transpired after that was both illuminating and troubling.

As the first week away went by, I quickly noticed that, while it was easy for me to stay away from Instagram, there was a growing fidgeting within my body to fill the space. I could feel my brain calling out for stimulation. Instagram had been my mainstay for instant gratification and attention robbery, and my brain had become accustomed to the dopamine depleting habit of grabbing of my phone and clicking on the app — only to close it and re-open it again later that hour. I noticed how I filled the space with opening the ESPN app and checking scores that had absolutely no importance to me. Or downloading games because my brain was calling out for a new instant gratifying distraction to stress and boredom.

Seeing this offered me a great insight to just how conditioned I had become to scratching the itch of boredom and stress with digital distractions, and to the depleted state of my attention and dopamine system.

The second thing that I quickly noticed was that social media lets us believe that we are connected to people that we are not connected to at all. And that takes me to part two: The Odd Reality of Internet Relationships…

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Taking risks has been on my mind a lot lately. As someone who is officially one year past mid life (since 78 is the average life expectancy of men in the US), the act of risk taking seems ever more urgent — you know, the whole “time is running out thing”.

To be honest, this idea of risk taking, or lack there of, has been on my mind since COVID. (Remember that little society stopper?)

Cue background story montage…

In 2016, I decided to pursue a master’s degree in Organizational Psychology. Organizational Psychology was not the path I desired. I wanted to become a licensed therapist, but the MFT path seemed long, and expensive, and daunting. On top of that, in the summer of 2016, my partner (at the time) and I were planning a world trip that we were to partake on starting in the summer of 2018. Coincidentally, the Organizational Psych program ended in May of 2018. So, I decided not to take the risk of the long, expensive, and daunting path, and not to take the risk of telling my (now) ex that our plans to travel the world would have to wait because I would still be in school.

It’s odd; for decades I’ve wanted to pursue being a therapist, but I allowed stories about the time and money it would take to pursue such a career to get in the way of taking the risk. Sadly, over time, it became easier to turn away from this desire (and other meaningful risks), because turning away became the habit.

It is true about what they say, what you practice grows stronger. For me, I have spent decades second guessing the meaningful risks of my life from the fear of failure. Notice how I said “meaningful risks” and not just risks. I don’t have a problem with taking risks in life. Traveling the world, hiking alone, booking a US tour before iPhones were invented, getting a master’s degree, and doing illegal things that put me in jail — this is a small example of the risks I’ve taken. But I am talking about risks that are also callings of the heart.

Take for instance the master’s degree I earned. While I am proud of myself, it isn’t the actual degree I wanted. Instead of taking the leap of faith and starting the path to an MFT, I decided to go after a Master’s in Organizational Psychology because I thought it was “safer” and a “quicker route”. I now ask myself, “a quicker route to what?” To completion —sure. But also to personal let down.

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Taking Meaningful Risks

What I now understand is that when you do not take the meaningful risks in your life, you slowly break down the trust you have within yourself, and you degrade your ability to be your authentic self. And while I think that people have thrown around the phrase “be your authentic self” so much that it’s almost lost meaning, I now understand what ‘authentic self’ truly means (to me). It’s not a solid, unchanging, perfect version of yourself that you are supposed to reach, and it’s not about broadcasting who you are. Rather, its about aligning your actions with your values and embodying the honesty that it takes to do so.

Psychologist Carl Rogers called this congruence — the degree to which our outer life matches our inner truth. He wrote, “The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.” That’s what living authentically feels like: not a fixed identity, but a daily practice of choosing alignment over performance.

What I’m learning about this process is that you can only embody an authentic version of yourself if you are taking meaningful risks. Not just once, but continuously. It is through taking risks that we learn about who we are at a given moment in life, and it is through taking risks that we are able to decide who we want to be.

I appreciate the way Brené Brown put it: “Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.” This quote always gets me. I have spent much of my life trying to prove, please, or fit some mold, but I’m finding that courage and clarity come when I’m willing to risk being seen for who I actually am, and not the role I’ve been performing.

When we take meaningful risks, we are showing ourselves that we are worthy of the actions we are taking. These meaningful risks are generally aligned with our values, or what we think we value at the time. So, by living out our values through action, we embody our values which fills us with intrinsic value and gives us purpose. We are also showing ourselves that we can do hard things, and that we are worthy of our dedication. Ultimately, we are showing ourselves what we are capable of. The more risks we take, the more we learn about ourselves and find out what aligns with us, what doesn’t; what we want, and what we don’t.

Impermanence as a Gateway

I think it is safe to assume that the longer we go without taking risks, the harder it is to take risks. I don’t have any data on this, but if you apply the idea of “if you don’t use it, you lose it”, I think you’ll come to the same conclusion. The longer we go without taking risks, the more friction we’re likely to feel when we do take a risk. But good news is, life and all that it is made of is impermanent. Meaning everything is changeable.

Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote, “Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.” Impermanence is what allows us to begin again. It is because of impermanence that that growth, healing, and transformation are all possible. Even if we haven’t in our past, we can dedicate ourself to ourself, now. It means we can take small meaningful risks that are aligned with our heart and dreams, and that we can come into alignment with an honest, authentic version of ourself.

I realize that impermanence can feel heavy at first, given the nature of acknowledging that all things have an expiration date. But what if you let be an invitation to stop deferring your desired life; to speak the words now, to take the risk now, to be yourself now. Because if nothing is permanent, then, no matter what you do, you are always changing. And if you are always changing, then as long as you live, you can change in the direction of authenticity. I find a wellspring of freedom and optimism in that truth.

The Dance of Taking Risks and Impermanence

As I type this, I’m realizing that this dance between risk taking and impermanence is one as old as time. I’m reminded of Bronnie Ware’s work with the dying. She recorded the following as one of the most common regrets at death: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” That’s impermanence speaking. That is the longing for meaningful risks never taken.

You know when people say, “if you could go back in time and give your younger self advice, what advice would you give yourself?” Well, I would tell my younger self to take more meaningful risks; risks that are guided by heart, soul, expression, and dreams. Take risks that are aligned with what your inner calling yearns for. Make mistakes. Celebrate wins. Get to know yourself through this process, and, through this process, build a deep inner trust with yourself that you can rely on time and time again. See how it all feels, and let that be the guiding light to who you want to be.

Though since I don’t have a Delorean, phone booth, hot tub, or other time machine that can take me back to my younger years, I’m giving this advice to myself now.

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There you are, being a human. Doing human things. Going about your life while navigating this wild and wondrous human experience. Regardless of wherever you are or whatever it is that you do, something happens and a stressful situation arises. Maybe it’s a looming work deadline, or a car accident, or a difficult conversation. Maybe it’s spilling coffee on your white shirt, or worrying about rent, or something you heard on the news. Whatever it is, suddenly a cascade of stress hormones are released, triggering physiological changes throughout your body and, before you know it, your breath quickens, your heartbeat increases, your muscles tighten, and your body starts to perspire.

What happened? Well, your stress cycle was triggered by a perceived threat. That threat could be internal, external, or relational, and you could be conscious or unconscious of it. Whatever the perceived threat is, once the stress cycle is triggered, your autonomic nervous system (ANS) kicks on and engages the fight–flight–freeze response.

I’m sure you’ve heard the anecdote of how our ancestors required this fight or flight response in order to properly react to life threatening situations. If it weren’t for this evolutionary response, our ancestors probably wouldn’t have survived, and we wouldn’t be here. Unfortunately, the ANS doesn’t always recognize perceived threats correctly, making it possible for the body to overreact to stressors like traffic jams, work pressure, and family difficulties.

While stress is a normal and sometimes helpful experience, prolonged activation of the stress response cycle can lead us to chronic anxiety.

The “Ideal” Stress Response Cycle

In an ideal situation, the stress response cycle would look like this:

• Stage One - Perception of threat

  • Threat detected: External (e.g., work deadline) or internal (e.g., worries, trauma).

  • As stated earlier, it is not just the external world that can cause threat. There is also an underlying level within our physiological state that can cause threat

• Stage Two - Autonomic nervous system (SNS) activated

  • SNS activation leads to the release of adrenaline and cortisol, hormones that prepare the body for quick action

• Stage Three - Physiological Reactions

  • After the SNS is activated, the body experiences physiological changes:

    • Increased heart rate

    • Shallow breathing

    • Muscle tension

    • Physical discomfort or agitation

  • These responses are designed for immediate action but can become problematic when stuck in a chronic, prolonged state.

• Stage Four - Attempted Resolution

  • Ideal outcome: We have addressed the thing that needs our attention, e.g., respond to an email, drink water, tend to the task at hand, and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) comes back online.

However, when we don't attend to the stressor — when stressors continue, or they are not processed — or when the external world is not giving us a break for us to down regulate, we tend to get stuck in the stress cycle and our bodies stay in hyperarousal mode. This hyperaroused state is often referred to as anxiety, and the stress response cycle is the cycle of anxiety.

Why the Stress Cycles Gets “Stuck”

Unlike the stressors of our ancestors, many modern stressors have a tendency to linger since they don’t have a natural “completion” point for the nervous system. We can see this with things like financial worries, overworking, current events, social media, and perceived cognitive threats. Since many of these stressors can repeat on an open loop, the stress hormones (like cortisol and adrenaline) are likely to remain elevated since the cycle isn’t completed. And, since many of these stressors are part of our everyday interactions, we can come to normalize these stressful states and impact they have on our lives.

How Anxiety Manifests

From my personal experience, anxiety is most commonly talked about as a mental/emotional experience; something that manifests itself in the following forms:

• Fear and Unease: Anxiety tends to bring up thoughts and feelings of fear or dread, often about future or uncertain events and, with that, feeling a lack of control.

• Cognitive Influences: Anxiety can trigger worrying thoughts and rumination, which lead to emotional distress. This can look like worrying about the future and trying to control what is outside of our control.

• Emotional Dysregulation: Intense emotions like irritability and frustration increase anxiety and make it hard to stay calm.

But anxiety also shows in the body in various forms, including: muscle tension, increased heart rate, shallow breathing, gastrointestinal discomfort, throat tightness, sweating, dizziness, and hot or cold sensations. While the mental/emotional experiences often get discussed the most, the physical symptoms are what often show up first. This means that we can catch the stress cycle earlier on if we build a relationship of awareness with our body.

For me, it was through bringing attention to the ways anxiety shows up physically that truly changed my relationship with anxiety and my ability to close the stress cycles.

It is important to remember that for each stressor we experience, there is a stress cycle. While some of them we may never experience, others will get stuck in an open cycle. So while the bad news is we all likely have many open cycles, the good news is we have the power to close them and the first step is through a regulated nervous system.

Completing the Stress Cycle

Stress is not the problem — it’s part of being human. The real issue arises when stress responses get stuck halfway through, looping without resolution. This incomplete cycle keeps the body in a state of tension long after the stressful event has ended.

To truly reset, we need to help the body complete the story of stress. Just as a song feels unfinished if it ends mid-note, our nervous system feels unsettled when stress has no closure. That’s why “thinking your way out” isn’t enough — the body needs to do something that communicates, the danger has passed, you are safe now.

This is where closing the stress cycle comes in. By engaging in simple, intentional practices, we can give the body the completion it’s looking for — a way to discharge the energy, restore balance, and shift back into calm presence.

Completing the stress cycle is a process, and needs its own series of articles to be properly explained. However, I’d like to give a few ideas to lead you to the next steps. By no means is this an exhaustive list. While there are many ways to complete the stress cycle, there is no one practice that fits all. This means that it really comes down to choosing different techniques and trying them out for a while to see if they work.

All of the following techniques are body-based, somatic practices. (In my next article I’ll explain somatics on a greater scale).

Physical activity

When your body enters fight, flight, or freeze, it gears up for movement. Exercise is a way to complete that loop, signaling to your nervous system that the threat has passed. This doesn’t have to mean high-intensity training — moderate movement works just as well. Try jogging, dancing, hiking, playing a sport, pilates, resistance training, or even something as simple as shaking out your body.

Creativity

Engaging in creative expression gives your body and mind a channel to process and release stress. Activities like painting, writing, playing music, gardening, cooking, or knitting can help restore energy and provide a sense of renewal. What matters most is choosing something you genuinely enjoy.

Laughing

Laughter acts like a reset button for the nervous system. It allows pent-up tension to be released while shifting your emotional state. You can invite more laughter into your day by recalling a funny memory, watching a comedy, or spending time with friends who always know how to make you laugh.

Crying

Tears are a natural and powerful way to move stress through the body. Suppressing them can interrupt your recovery process. Allowing yourself to cry — whether from sadness, frustration, or even relief — is an important and valid way to release what you’re holding.

Breathwork

Your breath is a powerful tool that can help you move energy and down-regulate your nervous system. An energy boosting breath such as circular breathing can help move any stuck anxious energy, while a breath such as the physiological sigh can help down-regulate your nervous system and move you back into your parasympathetic nervous system.

Life is inherently filled with stressful moments, and sometimes these events can lead to dysregulation and an open anxiety loop. But through understanding how the cycle works and through bringing awareness to how anxiety can manifest itself, we can learn how to regulate our nervous systems and close our stress response cycles.

It was the summer of ’98. I was thirteen, wedged in that awkward space between seventh and eighth grade. My family and I were crammed into our light-blue 1991 Volkswagen Vanagon, headed to June Lake for our annual trip to the Eastern Sierras. I was in the back seat with my boombox (six D batteries locked and loaded), listening to Goldfinger’s Hang-Ups on CD.

I must’ve played that album 20-plus times during the trip. Something about the heartbreak and the breakup songs resonated with me — despite the fact that I had never been in a relationship. Somewhere in my preteens, I’d already decided I was “the nice guy,” the one who never got picked. And anything that tugged at that thread felt deeply relatable.

While on the trip, I went for an afternoon bike ride around the lake. At the far end of the lake, I pulled off onto a dirt outcrop that overlooked the water; the Mono craters standing tall in the distance. There in the dirt, I sat down, stared across the lake — my face suddenly dawning my most pensive, thoughtful, introspective expression.

Like most teenagers, I was marinating in emotional angst — puberty, parents who “just don’t understand,” the need to be cool, and girls, girls, girls. But in that moment, with the smell of chaparral, pine, and dust in my nose, the sound of swaying trees in my ears, and the sun cutting through the thin, alpine air, a dull, nagging pit opened up inside me. It was the feeling of being alone. Unseen. Unpicked.

Years of being bullied in elementary school for being small had written a story in my head — a story I started to believe. That story became my identity: small, unseen, unpicked. And as the saying goes, nice guys finish last.

While I’m sure there were other moments before this when I felt that hollow sadness, it was there — looking across the lake — that I first shook hands with depression.

For 25 years, I wrestled with depression. Depression became a reoccurring enemy in my week. It whispered that I was lonely, unlovable, a failure. That something was wrong with me. And every time it appeared, I condemned it. I questioned why. I wondered if this battle would be for the rest of my life. And I fought back. Hard.

But two years ago, I stopped fighting.

Not because I gave up — but because I realized fighting wasn’t working. If anything, it made things worse. So I decided to try something different: stop treating depression like a threat and start treating it like an experience.

For me, that changed everything.

It doesn’t mean depression doesn’t still knock me flat sometimes — lying on the bedroom floor, staring at the wood grain on my dresser. There are still mornings I can’t get out of bed, afternoons that feel muted and gray. But I don’t label those moments as proof that something’s wrong with me. I see them as temporary states; like anxiety, like a headache, like being dehydrated.

No, I am in no way stating that depression can be treated with a simple action such as drinking more water. And I completely understand if people vehemently disagree with my statement above. But for me, shifting from “this is me” to “this is something I’m experiencing” created a space that wasn’t there before. A space that is non-combative; non attacking, nor defensive. A space that allows me to ask: What does this part of me need right now? A space to meet it with curiosity and compassion instead of panic and resistance.

Not only did this shift change my attitude, it also conserved my energy. I stopped burning fuel trying to push depression away, condemning it like a curse, and started letting it pass through.

I know not everyone will relate to this. That’s fine. This is my story. My point is simple: we are not our emotional states. They come and go. We are fluid — constantly changing, constantly evolving. And the less we grip onto identities that don’t serve us, the easier it is to let them go.

(working on my creative writing)

I catch my reflection in the mirror one last time before a hurry out the door. My eyes gazing back at me as if saying “Oh, I didn’t see you there”. I pause, give my shoulders a slight shake, and wink to my doppelgänger, as if we both mutually agree that I look good. Lets see how long that opinion lasts.

Fifty seven seconds. That’s how log it took for me to question my fashion choice. As soon as I entered the front seat of my friend’s car and got a glimpse of what he was wearing, I was reminded of how I don’t keep up on fashion trends. Don’t get me wrong, I still thought I looked good, just not LA chic. And we were headed to LA for the night.

This is generally how it happens. A little, seemingly harmless thought sneaks into my mind. At first, it seems innocuous. But before long, the little parasite lingers and plants itself throughout my mental chatter.

Here’s the thing, I am no fashionista. I’m far from it to be honest. But no one expects me to be. Still, that youthful need to be accepted still cries out; he still fears rejection and being ostracized.

This is the part of me that I wonder if people see? Do they know that this has been the pattern that has overrun much of my life. Do they see? Do they notice that I’m in my head. Do they see the way my body tightens or mannerisms shift when I’m second guessing my words, questioning my actions, and overthinking my existence. I wonder if they can see my discomfort in being perceived; if they know that I’m judging myself through their eyes.

For a moment, I black out, but then I bring myself back. A familiar face; something comfortable, non-threatening, disarming. The cyclical patterns of a trauma response that continues to echo through life is draining (to say the least), especially when you’re aware of it. But awareness is good. At least, it can be; providing the voice narrating the awareness is compassionate and not an inglorious dickhead.

I have to ask myself, “So what if someone rejects me? Why waste my time and energy over someone that doesn’t accept me for who I am?” It makes me consider my values and how much worth I put on living my values. If I find my values to be valuable, and if I am living a life aligned with my values, then I am of great worth and those who matter will see my worth… That is why it behooves me to share more of my authentic self. The more I share my honest self, the more I can test my hypothesis above—and how else am I going to find out if the cute tattooed blonde is into me or not if I don’t share this authentic self of mine. (Note: I realize that my authentic self isn’t some stagnant version of myself and more so is me showing up without limiting myself or shrinking myself from the fear of rejection a la trauma cycle).

And while I do think it would be fun to express myself a little more through the clothing I wear, I did check myself in the mirror when leaving the bathroom, and I still looked good…

There is an intimate silence filling the air, as if the morning cleared its calendar and opened for me and me alone. The growing light in the sky has been heralding the coming of the sun for a half an hour now; the birds chirping their morning hymns of praise. Finally, the sun is emerging between the dip of the hills, as if being birthed from the spread legs of Mother Earth. As the radiance of the sun’s gaze finds my face, I think to myself, “And just like that, another day is born. I close out my fourth decade of life, and open to my next.”

If there’s one thing the last ten years have taught me—and they’ve taught me many—it’s this: There is no correct version of life you’re supposed to live. No blueprint to follow. No universal path to success or worth. There is your life—and it will continue to change, shift, and begin again. Over and over again.

I’m finding that, if I’m not careful—if I don’t intentionally reflect on the life I’ve lived—I miss out on my own story. I miss out on what I’ve done, where I’ve been, who I’ve been, who I’ve become, what I’m grateful for, what I’ve created, what I’ve overcome.

Sitting back in the chair, I close my eyes and let my mind open up to the reflection of my life. At first, I smirk as the memories slowly begin to bubble to the surface. My smirk grows into a smile, which breaks out into a laugh. The sheer amount of life I’ve lived in this past decade fills me with awe, and as I breathe it in, the laughter subsides and out comes an exhale of completely disarmed satisfaction.

In the last decade, my story has seen me:

Traveling clear across the world.

Living in the heart of L.A. and in a small casita on the beach.

Falling passionately into the deepest and richest love I’ve ever experienced.

Grieving after that love aged past its expiration date.

Grieving the death of a family member.

Earning a master’s degree.

Surviving a global lockdown.

Living with roommates, then living alone.

Starting a business—and “failing” at it.

Building successful teams across multiple companies.

Becoming a meditation teacher, with tens of thousands listening to my voice.

Spinning out in a three-month mental health crisis, and coming through it.

Befriending chronic pain and anxiety.

Losing friends and making new ones.

Becoming a cat dad.

Returning back to school to earn my MFT.

The list goes on. And yet… I’m not married, I don’t have kids, I don’t own a home, and I’m in the middle of a career transition. None of which I would have imagined twenty years ago. Yet none of which make me a failure, or less than, or unsuccessful.

I have lived a life that many would dream of. I say that not to boast, but to honor what’s been given and what I’ve made of it.

Maybe you can relate to this:

I’ve realized that if I’m not careful, I can get caught up in false narratives about what life should look like—and overlook the bounty of the life I’m actually living.

The false narratives of having your career figured out, or that “starting over” means that you’ve wasted the years that came prior. Or the false narratives that if your business didn’t scale, you failed, or that real success means financial security and upward trajectory. Or the false narratives that if you’re single at 40 it means you’ve missed your window, or that something is wrong with you. Or that you should have it all figured out and that life should be easy.

All of these are stories, and, historically, when I have been pulled into these stories, I find myself catastrophizing with self-doubt. In doing so, I have stopped myself from pursuing what truly fulfills me. Luckily for me, and for you (if you relate), is that we’re not stuck here.

The more life I live, the more certain I am that I decide what it means to live a life well-lived.

Cheers to 40 years—and to all the life that made them possible.

And cheers to the life still coming.

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I wrote this poem back in the spring of 2024, and it has popped up in front of me again and again. While it still feels incomplete, it has always been more than just a poem. I wrote it as a question out to the ether:

What do we do with our anger so that we don't become it?

Fury of the Gods:

What do I do when I want to burn down the world?
When the rage of millions boils under my skin,
Crawling up my throat, yearning to be unleashed,
As a guttural war cry before taking its revenge?

What is this anger—this taunting of violence that seethes within?
My hands trembling, rolling into clenched fists,
Wishing for nothing more than to be thrown like hammers,
And crash down upon the heads of the wicked.

Let me be the fury of the gods,
Let me be the retribution against those,
Who toil in putrid delight,
Against the wellbeing and peace of others.

Let me smite these callous hyenas,
Laughing and smirking from behind their gates,
Feasting upon the backs of the downtrodden,
With ill regard and malicious intent.

What do I do with this fiery vengeance,
That wishes to dress these cowards in smoke and flame,
Knowing that for them to burn,
I must use my own body as the kindling for the fire?

How do I quiet the calls of my fingers,
That wish to become claws to tear them asunder,
Knowing that for each rip of their flesh,
I would tear into mine too?

How do I take back what was taken,
Without staining my heart?
How do I quiet the beast,
And still let it rage?

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