I’ve always lived life on fast forward.

Pedal to the metal, as they say. I thought it would get me to my destination faster. Makes sense right? But what’s your destination when you’re an 18-year-old rushing through the things that you’ll always reminisce on, wishing you could have simply slowed down and enjoyed the ride.

I’m not 18 anymore. I’m 31. I’ve only just realized that life is passing me by. But I still wake up with the same impatient energy — feeling as though I’m late for something.

What that ‘something’ is, I’m not sure. But it feels a bit more abstract now. Less late-for-school and more late-for-success—like if I rush really really fast, I might get the accolade of success a bit quicker. My bank balance might reflect my speed, maybe.

My life has been progressively slowing down since I got pregnant at 26. My husband and I rushed through dating, getting married just a year after meeting. Soon after came a baby. We’re happy about it. That’s the paradox of speed — going fast isn’t always bad, it can be equally as beautiful and rewarding as going slow and smelling the roses.

But anyway, I digress.

When I had my child, I started learning the beauty of slowing down. At first, it caused a lot of anxiety and even agitation. A breastfeeding session that lasted an hour, getting nap trapped (parents iykyk), or even having to cancel your meetings for the day because your child needs your undivided attention.

Slowing down can be hard. It’s more than hard if you’re a type A triple virgo like me — it’s f*cking hardcore annoying.

Learning to slow down is a complex process.

It’s learning how to embody the present moment with a fullness that has previously only been directed toward future endeavors. It’s savoring the present moment like a ripe peach that you suck the juice out of, as it drips down your chin.

What if I died right now? I think to myself, more regularly than I ever have. Proof:

What if I died — what life would I be leaving behind? I want to remember the midnight feeds, the smell of the jasmine blooming in spring, the sound of the rain splattering on the roof — even if it’s a day you wanted to play outside.

Slowing down is about becoming whole in the present moment, accepting that it might be all you’ll ever have. That ripe juicy peach only exists today — tomorrow it might have gone bad.

My daughter taught me that.

Now is what matters.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m not an earth mama who rolls around in the grass as her children eat grass and the like.

I’m still a worker bee, full-time mama of two, opening my own business. I’m busier than ever. From the moment I open my eyes, I’m on shift. I’ve clocked in for a job that’ll never pay me. But that’s the paradox of speed.

The Paradox of Speed

A few years ago, I wrote an article about the paradox of speed from a business learning perspective.

A study published in 2010 examined this “speed gap”. 343 businesses were evaluated. Some businesses followed initiatives that had them continuously moving forward to try and get an edge. Others followed initiatives that took intentional pauses to assess their next move.

After three years, the researchers observed that the businesses that slowed down improved their top and bottom lines, with 40 percent higher sales and 52 percent higher operating profits.

It’s pretty simple: Slowing down makes you more effective at speeding up, whenever necessary.

You can’t always live your life pedal to the metal.

If you try, you’ll burn out. More importantly, life will pass you by. You’ll be 80, wishing you were 21. How far did it take you? The only place: Towards death. Morbid? Sure. But it’s true, no?

From a health perspective, living life too quickly is a clear symptom and cause of nervous system dysregulation. My fave topic.

If you’re someone who watches murder documentaries or horror movies to “unwind,” you might be at risk. (no shade lol used to be me).

Or if you’re someone who always seems to be involved in drama, someone who forgets the drive to work because you’re on autopilot, or someone who feels restless on vacation. You probably have nervous system dysregulation. I gotchu!

Nervous system dysregulation 🤝 always rushing

If you’re like the rabbit from alice in wonderland, always late, not sure for what — you need to realize that the perpetual rush is really killing your vibe.

No, for real:

Always rushing is one of the clearest signs that your nervous system is in fight or flight. Take a breath. Intentionally slow down everythuing you do. As though you’re a sloth.

Feel free to skip this bit if you don’t care about the science but for all my pals that do…

Here’s how nervous system dysregulation can impact you over time

It keeps your body stuck in fight or flight

Aka sympathetic dominance. No bueno. Your heart rate stays elevated, cortisol remains high, digestion slows, and your brain stays hypervigilant. In the short term, this helps you meet deadlines. In the long term, it leads to burnout, sleep issues, and chronic inflammation.

It blunts your ability to recover

Research shows that a healthy nervous system flexibly switches between sympathetic (go mode) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) states. But when you’re chronically stressed or overstimulated, your ability to access parasympathetic recovery diminishes. You get stuck “on,” and your body forgets how to turn “off.”

It rewires your baseline

Studies on neuroplasticity show that repeated stress reshapes the brain—especially the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus. Over time, your brain starts interpreting neutral things as threats. You become more reactive, more anxious, more avoidant. Rest feels unsafe. Stillness…. oofffff that becomes unbearable. IYKYK!

It erodes your health at the cellular level

Chronic sympathetic activation has been linked to shortened telomeres, reduced heart rate variability (HRV), and impaired immune function. One study even found that prolonged stress exposure alters gene expression linked to inflammation, immunity, and longevity.

It renders you ineffective

When you do everything so fast that your system gets totally dysregulated, it’s only a matter of time before areas of your life start falling apart. It might be that you can’t stop arguing with your spouse, or maybe you start drinking excessively to try and relax. Whatever goes first, the chips will fall.

The beauty of slowing down

The easiest way to regulate your nervous system: Do things slowly.

Unclench your jaw. Drop your shoulders. Roll your neck. Take a deep, slow breath with a long exhale. Remind yourself that you have time. Life will wait.

It can (and should) include everything: from brushing your teeth to eating dinner. The things you’d typically rush through, do them with intention. Don’t think about your to-do list in your morning shower, think about the water. Think about things that make you feel happy and inspired.

I hate mindfulness. I think every “fast” person on the planet scoffs at the idea of ✨thinking about the water✨ — and trust me, I get it. But you don’t have to view this as some wellness exercise.

You don’t have to think about the water at all. With the same mental energy used to think of all the stressors of life, think about all the beauty in it. It’s that perspective shift that helps you reintegrate into the present moment.

You don’t have to dawdle or become directionless. You can still be driven and effective. That’s the paradox of speed. When you only know how to go fast, you forget the benefit of slowing down.

How I implement the notion of the speed paradox in my daily life

I think of my day in chapters and associated speed limits.

Chapter 1: Slow. Wake up. Get children ready for the day. Eat breakfast. No phones, no screens, just good music and good vibes,

Chapter 2: Fast. Work. Lock in, run through tasks, interrupt me at your peril.

Chapter 3: Slow. Coffee break, sit outside, get some sun, perhaps read some feel-good or inspiring articles.

Etc.

That’s how I’m implementing the speed paradox in my life, and it’s helping me feel more energized and more fulfilled than ever.

I’m learning to enjoy slow moments and step into relaxation in a way that used to previously make me feel anxious and guilty. I’m excelling when I choose to go fast, in a way that feels exciting.

I guess this is maybe what normal people have already well-established. The concept of knowing when to relax. But it’s a foreign notion to me.

I used to think slowing down meant falling behind. That stillness was laziness. That rest was earned, not essential. But the paradox of speed is this: the more you resist the slowness, the more you lose touch with the moments that make life meaningful.

Now, I slow down because I want to, not because my body demands it. I’ve seen what rushing through life costs. I’ve felt the difference between living fast and living well.

Speed has its place. But so does stillness.

The key is knowing when to shift gears.

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Thank you for reading <3

If you want some help regulating your nervous system, here’s my 30-page protocol.

If you liked this, subscribe or comment as it gives me a nudge to write more content about this. Thnx friends big love! xox

Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole.

I thank whatever Gods may be, for my unconquerable soul.

That’s my favorite poem. It was also my first tattoo.

Out of the worst adversity, despair, or hardship, comes light, hope, and new beginnings. You are the only one constant in both scenarios.

Realize that you are responsible for the character and outlook of the person who lives in bad times and good times. On hard days and easier days. You are the one through-line in your life. And that should be a source of hope — the lighting of a match. Your life can burn with enthusiasm, excitement, and greatness. Or it can burn to the ground, ashes to ashes.

I’m awfully poetic this morning, but I decided a long time ago that I was going to live my life like I was about to lose it. Because on a couple of occasions, I felt like I was.

I realized that the darkest night brings the brightest day. But only if you recognize the pitch black, connect with yourself in that moment, and remember it in your mind’s eye when the dawn meets day, and the sun shines on you.

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To put it less poetic: You can only live a good, fulfilling life if you remember how bad the bad days were. Two options here:

1. You either find yourself a victim of all the bad days you’ve ever lived – an energy that only ever brings in more darkness.

2. You remember the darkness, and use it to contrast the light. The light becomes brighter — the good days become more fulfilling, more enriching, more amazing. You keep the darkest days close enough to remind yourself how great your life is, which, as a consequence, prevents the darkness from creeping in.

Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature is my favorite book. It’s not a light read, so don’t bring it on your next beach getaway. Instead, read it like a textbook. Read one chapter at a time, reflect on it, journal on it. Then move onto the next.

His final “law” is the law of death denial. He talks about the vital importance of confronting your own mortality. Be aware that you’re going to die. One day, all of this — the good and the bad — will be over, never to return. Contemplate it, journal on it. Then move on.

Instead of avoiding thoughts of your own death out of fear of being “dark” or “depressing,” he advises the reader to spend a healthy amount of time simply thinking about all the elements that may occur in the instance of your death.

Think about the people who will mourn you, what you will leave behind. How people will describe you, what you will take from your life. Reflect on the type of life you are living right now, and assess whether it corresponds with the type of life you’d be happy you lived upon your deathbed.

Get granular with it. Are you really happy? Are you really living?

While, of course, you don’t want to bring in the energy of death, you can leverage the paradoxical death effect. This contrast between life and death and awareness that it will all end can be the fuel to make your life more productive, meaningful, and joyful.

Death is the end of all life. The complete antithesis to life, of course, is death. Yet so many of us are not truly living.

We’re working dead-end jobs, we’re addicted to screens, we scroll dating apps and watch porn instead of connecting with other humans in the real world. We complain about the weather, taxes, and the neighbor’s annoying dog. We destroy our health with fast food, expensive medications, and cheap thrills. We never truly take a moment to pause, nourish, and appreciate the abundance of nature – the nature that we’re currently destroying.

On the other side of death is life, a life well-lived, well-loved, and greatly experienced. I want you to experience everything that life has to offer, with the awareness of someone who has experienced what it truly means to die.

True death is the absence of all pain, but the absence of all love.

True death is darkness, pitch black. The absence of all light.

True death is forgotten misery. The absence of any joy, possibility, or hope.

True death is permanent, while life — right now — is beautiful in its impermanence.

The impermanence of life is where all meaning is found.

I miss my daughter being a newborn, but if she stayed a newborn forever it wouldn’t have meant anything. I miss living in California, but I chose to leave for a reason. If I stayed, that reason would have still remained. I miss being free to travel the world, but if I spent my life traveling, all I would crave would be a home.

Life only has meaning when it can be lost.

So live like you f*cking enjoy your life!

Stop eating shit. Stop not moving your body. Stop complaining about shit that’s in your control. Stop making yourself the victim of circumstance. Stop putting yourself down. Stop acting like your dreams are too big. Stop devaluing yourself, your capabilities, your life.

Life is a gift! You get to live it!

So treat yourself with abundant respect. Nourish your body. Challenge your mind. Feed your soul. Deepen your practice with the present. Find yourself at home, wherever you go. Treat yourself with care. Dive into the ocean of life. Find peace there. Read books. Fall in love. Hug trees. Eat vegetables. Tune into the frequency of nature. Feel gratitude!

Gratitude for everything!

Gratitude for the pain, the misery, the despair that you once felt. And decide, no more. I’ll keep you safe — memories of despair. I will use you to remind myself how bad it can be.

Because without remembrance of pain, joy seems like a boring baseline.

Life is the antithesis of death, yet so many of us are barely living. Confront your mortality — make eye contact with the Grim Reaper. And then turn the other way. Run in the direction of the light.

Live.

Thank you for being here. This is my ode to life, a life that I wake up from every single morning with immense gratitude. Not because I’m blessed or lucky, but because I know what it’s like to wake up with deep sadness and utter despair. And I decided one day, I choose life.

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Yesterday I shared my favorite alignment exercise. It got me thinking about alignment in general. I wrote in yesterday’s post that I think alignment is the most underrated contributor to happiness. This may sound odd, but I want to use today’s article to explain my reasoning :) Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Let me start with what I mean by alignment, because I think the word gets thrown around in wellness spaces in a way that makes it sound more esoteric than it actually is.

Alignment, to me, is simply this: your present behavior matches your future self. What you do today reflects who you’re trying to become. Your words and your actions are the same thing.

For example: You say you care about your health so you eat vegetables and go to the gym. You say you want to be an entrepreneur so every day you work on your business even when it’s hard and especially when nobody is watching.

That’s alignment. Think of it as integrity, manifested as a daily habit.

When you live in alignment, people are drawn to you. The magnetic pull of being in total alignment. Something inexplicable starts to happen — opportunities find you, people want to be around you, things start to cohere.

The frequency of alignment

Before you think this is woo-woo, pause — don’t exit this post! Let me explain why the frequency of alignment is actually supported with science.

You’ve probably heard the idea that you attract what you are, not what you want. Or that you vibrate on a certain frequency and the world responds accordingly.

Here’s what’s actually happening.

When your internal state and your external behavior match — when you genuinely believe in what you’re doing and you’re doing it consistently — you emit a coherence that other people read almost instantly, below the level of conscious thought.

Research on social perception shows that humans are extraordinarily good at detecting incongruence. We pick up on micro-expressions, inconsistencies between what someone says and how they say it, subtle mismatches between a person’s stated values and their demonstrated priorities.

Sometimes this is conscious, but by and large, it’s done unconsciously, within seconds. Intuition baby!

This is sometimes called authenticity bias in psychology — humans are wired to trust people whose words and behavior are consistent. The inverse is also true. Inauthenticity, even when you can’t articulate it, sounds the alarm bells.

Being around someone who is inauthentic (out of alignment), makes you naturally more guarded. YOu just don’t vibrate at the same frequency as them, even though you can’t exactly pinpoint why — it’s just “off.”

One of the most magnetic qualities a person can have is the simple, underrated act of doing what they said they were going to do.

Think about how rare this actually is.

Most people talk about what they want, what they’re working on, what they’re going to do. They do a lot of talking. Not much follow-through. As a triple virgo, it gives me the ick.

Be the person who follows through. Be the person whose daily behavior aligns with your overarching goals, morals, and values. Be the person who shows up, even when you don’t want to. Be the person who can be described the same by every person in your life. Be transparent in your authenticity, but deep in your integrity.

This idea is backed by research on self-efficacy — your belief in your own capacity to do things. Every small promise you keep to yourself compounds. Every small promise you break erodes it.

The person who consistently keeps small commitments to themselves has a fundamentally different relationship with their own potential — not because of talent, but because of what they’ve proven to themselves through repetition.🫳🏻🎤

Alignment is a compounding investment in your own self-concept.

Don’t chase your tail — make strides towards your dreams

Misalignment is exhausting. And ineffective. Cognitive dissonance! When what you say you want and what you’re actually doing point in different directions, it costs you something.

It leaks low-level anxiety into the background of your life. It shows up in how you present yourself. You can hear it in how people qualify their ambitions, hesitate before describing what they’re working on, are quick to explain why it probably won’t work.

You cannot broadcast on two frequencies at once and expect a clear signal.

How to get aligned (the unsexy version)

step 1) tell yourself the truth about what you actually want. Not what sounds impressive or what your family expects. What you genuinely want. This is harder than it sounds.

step 2) take one action today that reflects that. Just one. Your future self would recognize it as the behavior of someone who is serious.

Identity follows action, not the other way around

You don’t become a writer by believing you are one. You become one by writing. You don’t become a healthy person by wanting to be one. You become one by making the daily choices that a healthy person makes. The belief catches up. The identity solidifies.

Be magnetic. Live in alignment.

Thank you so much for reading, I hope you like these posts <3

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Hi!

I was going through the Notes on my phone today and I came across an alignment exercise that I used to do every six months or so. I really attribute it to the overall direction and alignment of my entire life, so I wanted to share it with you.

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“Anxiety is my superpower,” I said, to a candlelit table of faces looking at me, only a few of which I knew. There was a distinct pause, as I expectantly knew they’d be assuming I would fill with an explanation. I didn’t. I let the awkward air settle.

We had been asked to share our “hot take.” I was aware that mine was more of a controversial take.

Anxiety disorders affect an estimated 4% of the global population — that’s around 301 million people worldwide. In the US alone, anxiety is the most common mental disorder, affecting 40 million adults. About 31% of adults will experience anxiety at some point in their lives.

Among younger people, the picture is even more striking — the global incidence of anxiety disorders among those aged 10–24 increased by 52% between 1990 and 2021.

Its unpleasant symptoms include racing heart, palpitations, shortness of breath, chest tightness, sweating, dizziness, nausea, trembling, muscle tension, insomnia, and a persistent sense that something is wrong — even when nothing is.

So to call that my superpower is a lukewarm, strange take at most, right?

Take a seat, grab a tea, let me make my case🫡.

My own journey with anxiety

My mom has always called me a worrier. I’m a triple Virgo ☾☼↑ — IYKYK! And someone can only be described as type A.

I was always been the type of child who would rush home from school to do her homework, because I vividly remember feeling like I couldn’t relax until I had done that. I even remember occasionally being at friends houses, worrying that I still needed to do my homework. The worry extended into my schooling in general, I was worried that I would say the wrong thing in class, get something wrong, fail a test, end up a poor, hopeless, and jobless adult.

Sure, the worrying wasn’t a particularly pleasant feeling. It prevented me from enjoying aspects of my school and social life growing up. But what was the benefit of all of this? I got straight As, never failed a test, went to a good University.

My point being is that yes, it’s very easy to harp on the negative side of anxiety — because trust me, there are many. But much like the new pop phenomenon of saying ADHD is my superpower, I’d also like to believe that anxiety is mine.

Of course there are two sides to every coin, but I’ve experienced both. When I was about 16 I started developing social anxiety which snowballed until the age of around 21. It got so bad that I struggled leaving my house, I would have panic attacks outside University lecture rooms, and I essentially lost all my friends because I wasn’t able to socialize with them, nor express to them what I was going through.

When I hear people talk about the golden years of their teens, I think a) lame, life gets way better when you have money and freedom lol. But also b) I simply cannot relate.

My teens were the worst time of my life, and it was all due to anxiety. I actually barely attended sixth form — my attendance record was about 30%! And this was all due to anxiety. But on the flip side, my anxiety also drove me to study outside of school and get straight As!

I think that in 2026, mental health conditions like anxiety, ADHD, and even Tourette’s (!) have become trendy. I know this is controversial to say and I hope — if you’re reading this — you know that I’m not trying to rage bait a half-baked opinion.

In fact, the eagerness to understand and explain can lead people to take on their diagnosis as a label, and even internalize it as a full-out identity. In universities across the US, mental health conditions are growing at a rapid pace, interestingly, disproportionately among teens from wealthier families.

I’m not here to debate whether people are fabricating their mental health issues, that’s really not the goal here. I’m just here as an attempt to make a positive spin on something that really ruined many years of my life.

What anxiety is, and what it isn’t

Being anxious and desperately trying to navigate it, led to years of research into the condition. I learned about what it is and what it isn’t.

First, what it is:

• A physiological state driven by your sympathetic nervous system — the fight-or-flight branch of your autonomic nervous system.

• Your amygdala fires a distress signal, triggering a cascade of stress hormones including cortisol and adrenaline.

• Your heart rate rises.

• Your breathing becomes shallow and rapid.

• Your muscles tense.

• Your prefrontal cortex — the rational, decision-making part of your brain — goes partially offline.

Now, what it isn’t:

• A death sentence

• Something that will affect you for the rest of your life

• Something that you have no control over

• Something that needs to be medicated

• Something that needs special treatment

• A disability

I say this with the intention of spreading hope and love. If you are currently experiencing anxiety and feel like it’s a serious impediment to your happiness and ability to live — I’m not trying to lessen your experience. I’m trying to give you hope that it doesn’t always have to be like that.

Anxiety is a condition characterized by physical symptoms that originate in the body, not just the mind. Thus, as I wrote here, you can’t effectively “manage” your mind. So trying to think your way out of anxiety is never going to work. What can you do instead? Focus on the physiological symptoms, get into your body, focus on regulating your nervous system.

Because after all, anxiety is a condition of sympathetic nervous system dominance.

Thus, one thing I always start with when I talk about anxiety: I never ever say that “I have anxiety.”

From a neuroscience and behavior change standpoint, the language we use to describe ourselves shapes the identity we inhabit — and the identity we inhabit shapes the behaviors we unconsciously repeat.

When people take on their diagnosis as a label and internalize it as a full-out identity, it can actually entrench the condition rather than help them move through it.

If you say “I am anxious,” your brain files that under who you are, and your nervous system obliges by staying there. Instead, if I say anything about it, I’ll just say “I’m experiencing anxiety right now.”

I think the first thing you can do is to separate your identity from this condition. As Fight Club’s Tyler Durden famously said:

You are not your f*cking khakis.

This line literally radiates in my head whenever I say “I am X.” Like no, I am a soul having a human experience. I am nothing and everything at the same time, my identity is created around the words I say. So no, best believe I will never be caught saying I am anxious.

Anyway, slight detour, let’s get back on track.

When you learn how to work with rather than against your anxiety, it can become your superpower.

How I learned to work with my anxiety

This is definitely a topic for another day, as it’s a long one. Fun fact before I wrote my book about gut health, I actually got 30,000 words into a book titled This is Your Body on Anxiety. And yes, before the days of ChatGPT. (Publishers hit me up!)

Anyway, what I learned from years of studying the physiological component of anxiety, I learned a lot about how to work with the condition so you’re not in constant tension with yourself.

Because one thing I KNOW to be true about anxiety: It’s like a perpetual game of tug of war. You want to be happy and chill, but your brain wants you to be stressed. The thoughts never stop, you even get angry with yourself, as an attempt to stop the rumination and worry.

So how can you stop being at war with yourself? That’s where this all begins.

Like many things, it starts with understanding your nervous system, and what actually happens when you experience anxiety:

When you feel anxious, your amygdala fires before your prefrontal cortex even has a chance to assess the situation — meaning the emotional brain responds faster than the rational brain.

Cortisol and adrenaline flood your system.

Your heart rate increases, your breathing shortens, your digestion slows. Your attention narrows.

You are, physiologically speaking, in a state of threat — even if the only threat is your own thoughts🫳🏻🎤.

You may notice that sometimes you start feeling anxious out of nowhere, with no clear trigger.

This is a very obvious sign that your nervous system has picked up imperceptible cues in your environment — maybe a change in temperature, a particular smell, a tone of voice, even a memory that surfaced subconsciously.

Instead of jumping into “oh god now I’m anxious” and trying to find rational explanations for it, you simply just override the nervous system cues with cues of safety.

One of my anxiety triggers would be getting hot (temperature-wise, not appearance-wise because that definitely wasn’t on the cards for me at this phase in my life lol).

So when I speed walked to my university lecture and found myself in a hot room, I started to sweat (of course, a very normal physiological reaction). The feeling of sweaty palms and a red face triggered my anxiety, which then snowballed.

How I overcame this snowball was simply intentionally responding to that physiological trigger. Oh, I’m sweating, I’d think. Better take off my jacket, maybe wash my hands with cold water, or step outside for a second.

I wasn’t catastrophizing — I was responding. This prevented my nervous system from spiraling.

I’m actually not going to share all the other ways I learned to work with my anxiety rather than against it because honestly we’ll be here all day.

Let’s get back to the main point of this essay: How anxiety is my superpower.

How the hell can anxiety be a superpower

These are the traits that “anxiety” brings out of me:

conscientiousness

• drive

• health consciousness

• self-awareness

• empathy

• perfectionism

• rumination

• catastrophizing

• control-seeking behavior

Not all good, but it def ain’t all bad… no?!?!

1. It’s all about perception

Your perception of yourself is the only real thing that exists in your world. Dr. Joe Dispenza tells you to break the habit of being yourself, and this is better than I ever could have put it. If you have the perception that you’re someone desperately struggling with anxiety, that is where you will remain.

I chose to not identify with the negative aspects of anxiety. I chose not to accept the label of “generalized anxiety disorder.” I chose not to medicate myself, because this is who I’ve always been, and I wanted to live out my truth, accepting all the struggles and opportunities that my core personality would offer me.

Research backs this up: when we fuse our identity with a condition — when “I have anxiety” becomes “I am anxious” — we unconsciously adopt the habits, avoidances, and behavioral patterns that reinforce it. It’s called engulfment.

I used to say I was anxious, so I said no to social plans out of the assumption that I would be anxious at the point of following through with the plan. What a dreadful loop to find yourself in.

2. There can be positive aspects of anxiety

Some of my friends who experience anxiety are some of the most thoughtful, empathetic, self-aware people I’ve ever come across. They make sure they remember birthdays, make everyone at the table feel seen and heard, and overthink their way to being genuinely really good, solid people. DESPITE their internal warfare.

If they submit themselves to lives of torment at the hands of anxiety, that would be an awful shame. Because in all the ways their anxiety hurts them, it contributes to so many beautiful parts of their personality too.

You’ve got to focus on the good in your life, and even the good in the areas of your life/personality that you deem to be bad.

It’s not being delusional, it’s directing your intention to growth — that’s how you flourish. When you focus on the good, the good grows.

3. I overthink. That’s what makes me a good thinker.

I’m about to have 10,000 subscribers on Substack. I get up to 150,000 - 200,000 reads on every post (not all posts lol!).

But my point being, people are actually interested in what I have to say. That is the biggest compliment. I’m not getting engagement by posting pics of me in a bikini or making rage bait prank videos — I’m literally just typing away at my laptop in bed on a Sunday morning and people care about what I have to say.

This is a gift of my anxiety. I overthink like f*ck. I wake up at 4 am thinking about an essay I should write. I can’t get through the day without writing at least something; my mind won’t let me rest. All of these things could be perceived as detriments. But let it work to your advantage!!!

Out-think and overthink everyone in the room!! Let your overthinking make you intelligent, driven, interesting, considerate!!

4. Anxiety is just energy

Hippie take: Anxiety is an abundance of energy. When it’s undirected, the energy becomes negative. When it’s directed, it becomes drive.

When I was trying to overcome my own anxiety, I realized that I felt noticeably less anxious after waking up and going straight to the gym and crushing a really intense workout.

That lower level of anxiety persisted throughout the day, and I felt like instead of getting caught in negative thought loops, I was instead feeling balanced, creative, and focused.

You have to step in to manage your anxiety so that it doesn’t get in the driver’s seat of your life. You need to burn anxious energy every single day, first thing.

Whether that’s through somatic shaking, breathwork, cold plunging, running, jumping, laughing, writing — you are gifted with an abundance of energy. Put it to use!

Check this out for inspo:

5. Anxiety makes you deeply attuned to other people

Because your nervous system is constantly scanning the environment for threat, you pick up on things that other people miss. The shift in someone’s tone. The tension in a room. The look on someone’s face that doesn’t quite match what they’re saying.

Anxious people are, by design, hypervigilant — and while that’s exhausting when it’s misdirected at imaginary threats, when it’s channeled into human connection it becomes something rare and genuinely valuable.

Empathy isn’t a soft skill. In a world of increasing disconnection and distraction, it’s one of the most powerful things a person can offer. And anxious people, almost by default, have it in abundance.

6. Anxiety is incompatible with mediocrity

Lol but no seriously! Genuinely average outcomes are not really available to someone running on the kind of internal drive that anxiety produces.

The same force that kept me up worrying about a test also kept me studying until I understood it completely. The same compulsion that made me replay conversations in my head also made me a more precise, more considered writer. The same restlessness that made stillness feel unbearable also made me allergic to wasting time.

There is real research behind this — what psychologists call “facilitating anxiety,” a moderate level of arousal that sharpens focus and drives performance rather than shutting it down. The Yerkes-Dodson law, established over a century ago, shows that performance peaks at a moderate level of arousal — meaning a little anxiety, well-directed, is not just tolerable but optimal.

The people I know who are truly excellent at what they do — writers, athletes, surgeons, entrepreneurs — are almost never the most relaxed people in the room. They care too much. They can’t help it. And that caring, that inability to switch off, is what makes the work actually good.

Final words

YES I GET IT: Anxiety can be cripping and debilitating. But it also can be something you use to your advantage!

When you learn to work with your anxiety — in the same way that you have to learn to work with any of your inherent character traits — you can have a really good life.

In fact, you can learn to drop all the negative aspects of anxiety and just ride the coattails of the good parts.

This ended up being extremely long :’)

But I’m really passionate about this topic. Anxiety was very close to ending my life.

Instead it became one of the features of my personality that has facilitated all my greatest gifts. If you’re in the trenches of anxiety right now, you can dig your way out. You’ve got this.

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Hi friends!

This is week two of my new column: Ask Emilina. In which I answer your burning questions about health, personal development, moving country, Substack writing… whatever it is that you are pondering!

Last week was all about following through. Let’s see what we’ve got today.

If you want to submit your own question, you can do so here.

Question

I would really like advice on stopping myself from being glued to my phone. Even on days where I’m doing other things, I end up scrolling in bed to sleep for hoursss. My problem is, I still need to access to messaging loved ones and other things. I hate that this is the only way since I’m in a whole different continent as well. And if it’s not my phone, it’s my laptop.

I do have some things I’ve started working towards to at least be more aware of what I do on it and not be mindlessly binging or scrolling, but I do still end up doing both. I did start reading more and am off instagram and facebook for the most part, which is great. Rarely use TikTok as well. Summer is coming so more of me being outside is possible, but I truly can’t go past this addiction.

[The outcome I’m hoping for is] Not waking to grab my phone or going to sleep with it. Having screen time of maybe 3 hours a day vs 7-9.

Answer

First, you’re not alone. The world has changed. While it’s true that too much screen time is objectively not good for you, it’s also a reality that many of our modern lives revolve around screens. And not just for entertainment!

The average person now spends 6 hours and 37 minutes per day looking at a screen — and that’s not counting work. Globally, people check their phones an average of 58 times per day, with the first check happening within 9 minutes of waking up for most people. Crikey.

In the US, adults spend more time on their phones than they do sleeping. Sleeping!!!! And among 18–34 year olds, average daily social media use alone sits at around 3 hours. So when you say you’re spending 7–9 hours on screens, you are not an outlier. You are, statistically speaking, pretty average. Which is simultaneously reassuring….aaaand deeply concerning.

Many of us spend 7 hours a day sitting a desk working on our laptops. When we want a break from our laptops, we look at our phones. When we want a break from our phones, we watch TVs, and when we want a distraction from the TV, we look at our phones! Screen time is like quicksand, and many people find themselves very quickly stuck.

So what can you do?

I think firstly, it’s important to give yourself some grace. Like any behavior change, science shows that being able to accept your current position, remove self-judgement, and take small steps towards change, is the most effective way to actually alter your situation.

That’s why I wanted to start by sharing some of the global screen time statistics — not to justify excessive use, but to begin where every behavior change needs to begin: at the point of acceptance. We need to be realistic with ourselves, non-judgmentally, so that we can take the first step in improving our lives.

So what’s next?

I hate to sound like a broken record but you’ve got to pay closer attention to your nervous system.

When you use screens, especially social media, you get a lil dopamine boost. The addictive qualities of these algorithms can not be understated. And while a dopamine boost seems nice in theory, in reality, it interacts with your sympathetic nervous system to keep you itching for a fix.

Here’s what’s actually happening physiologically

Every notification, every like, every swipe to a new piece of content triggers a small release of dopamine in your brain’s reward circuitry — specifically the nucleus accumbens, the same region activated by food, sex, and addictive substances.

Neuroimaging studies show that social media use activates the same neural pathways as cocaine.

The platforms are designed to exploit this. I can scroll TikTok for 5 minutes and go from crying at a child reunited with their parent from war video to then being angry at a video about domestic violence to then laughing at a funny prank video. Lol these were terrible examples and not reflective of my actual algorithm I swear 😂

This is called variable reward schedules — basically you never know if the next scroll will bring something good. This is the single most powerful mechanism for creating compulsive behavior. Think about it this way: Slot machines and TikTok share the same fundamental design principle.

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Aza Raskin, who invented the infinite scroll feature on social media platforms actually feels bad about it. Much like slot machines, this feature is designed to make you keep going. Keep hedging your bets. Keep getting that dopamine boost. That’s why you express that you’re “scrolling in bed to sleep for hoursss.” It’s DESIGNED to make you do that! It’s not an incompetence on your side, you’re just simply being manipulated.

All of the features involved in social media work by removing friction and hijacking user attention. Raskin himself has compared the feature to adding “sugar to food,” stating that, like the casino, “the house always wins.”

Every time you get that hit — a notification, a funny video, something that makes you feel briefly seen or entertained — your sympathetic nervous system activates slightly.

Small spike of cortisol. Small spike of adrenaline. Heart rate marginally elevated. Attention narrowed. Your body is in a low-grade state of arousal, which feels like engagement but is physiologically indistinguishable from a mild stress response.

Do this 58 times a day and what you’ve created is a nervous system that never fully comes down. Your baseline state of arousal creeps up.

Genuine rest starts to feel boring (hence why many people mindlessly scroll socials while watching TV — even TV has got boring!) — not because you’re a bad person with no discipline, but because your nervous system has recalibrated to expect constant stimulation. Stillness starts to register as uncomfortable. Silence starts to feel like something is wrong.

This is why you scroll in bed for hours even when you’re exhausted. Your body is tired but your nervous system is still activated. You’re not looking for entertainment at that point — you’re self-regulating.

The scroll is doing the same job that a physiological sigh or a cold shower would do in a regulated person.

It’s giving your nervous system something to do with its arousal. The problem is that it makes the arousal worse, not better, which is why you end up in a loop.

So that leads me on to my actual advice for you.

What you can do

Sorry I feel like this has dragged haha but I’m just trying to give you the context so you understand that this is NOT a moral failing on your side. It’s really really tough out here. I don’t know how old you are, but it’s particularly tough for people 25 and under, whose frontal lobes haven’t fully developed and find it way easier to get sucked into these insidious algorithms.

The answer is not more restriction.

You’ve already tried that. App timers don’t work when you’re dysregulated because willpower requires a calm prefrontal cortex, and yours is competing with a limbic system that has been trained to expect dopamine every few minutes. You cannot white-knuckle-discipline your way out of a nervous system problem.

What works instead is rebuilding your tolerance for stillness — slowly and without judgment. Give your nervous system alternative inputs that are genuinely regulating rather than stimulating.

Here’s how:

Replace, don’t restrict.

Everyone who tells you to “just delete the app” might not be onto a winner. The most robust recent evidence comes from a 2023 randomized controlled trial — the Digital Detox Study — which found that just 3 weeks of reducing smartphone use to 2 hours per day produced small to medium improvements in depressive symptoms, stress, sleep quality, and overall wellbeing.

Sounds awesome right? Well.. until you read the follow-up finding: screen time increased rapidly after the intervention ended, and by six weeks later, usage was approaching the original baseline again.

In other words — harsh screen time restriction works while you’re doing it. However, there’s nearly always a rebound affect. Which tells us something important: the goal can’t be to reduce screen time through willpower or hard limits alone. You have to change the underlying state that’s driving the behavior.

Think of it like a crash diet. You may lose 10 lbs, but you’re definitely going to regain it quickly. What’s better is adding in more veggies, moving a bit more, and reducing sugary snacks. It’s the same concept for social media addictions.

Instead of telling yourself not to scroll, give yourself something else to do in those moments. Ideally something that is a known nervous system regulator. Herea re some examples:

• 5 minutes of box breathing before bed

• Putting your phone in the other room and try some coloring in, I like those mandala coloring books haha

• Try a hobby that involves using your hands like knitting — can be a great distraction

• You said reading is helping, so try to get a stack of books that you’re excited to read and carry them around with you so that you can replace 5 mins of scrolling (in any situation!) with 5 mins of reading.

Think of it like you’re not removing the behavior (this creates a lot of friction and pressure) — you’re just replacing the cue-response loop.

Make your bedroom a dead zone.

I know you’ve heard this before. But the reason it works is not about willpower — it’s about removing the cue entirely. Make this a non-negotiable.

At this point,your nervous system has probably been conditioned to associate your bed with stimulation. Breaking that association requires removing the trigger, not resisting it.

Charge your phone in another room. Get an alarm clock. This is the single highest-leverage physical change you can make.

Acknowledge that some of your screen time is legitimate and stop punishing yourself for it.

You’re on a different continent from your loved ones. So am I, I get it. Your connection to them runs through a screen. That is not the same as doomscrolling. Separating meaningful use from numbing use — consciously, without judgment — is more effective than trying to reduce all of it indiscriminately. A useful question to ask yourself before you pick up your phone: am I reaching for connection, or am I reaching for escape?

Work on your baseline nervous system state.

This is the long game. The reason your phone feels so compelling is partly that your nervous system is dysregulated in the first place — which means the brief hit of stimulation it offers is disproportionately attractive.

A regulated nervous system finds stillness tolerable, even pleasant on a good day lol. Getting there takes time — and I won’t lie: A lot of time. But the good news is that the tools are simple: consistent sleep, morning light, movement, breathwork, time outside, real human connection, yadda yadda.

When you do the basics every single day, you may notice that you don’t need the same regulatory benefits from scrolling.

Start here with my vagal tone training framework.

You’re already doing more than you think. You’re off Instagram and Facebook. You’ve started reading. You’re asking the right question. That’s not nothing — that’s actually a lot. The goal from here isn’t perfection. It’s just a slightly lower baseline of arousal, practiced consistently, until stillness stops feeling like something to escape from.

I hope this helps!!

If you want to submit your own question, you can do so here.

Your phone might be the symptom. Your nervous system is the problem.

REGULATED is the fix — a science-backed protocol for people who are too wired to rest and too tired to keep going.

→ Get it here :)

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Since learning about AI, I’ve always been somewhat against it. Sure, times always change and you have to evolve but at the same time, do you?

From what I’ve seen, AI seems to be dangerous — from both a data sharing perspective and a cognitive health standpoint. People are literally outsourcing their thinking to AI. A recent survey found that 62% of people use AI to make “most decisions,” with 66% of the world’s population using AI every single day.

Yes, it can be helpful. My friend made her entire business plan and website from scratch with AI in one afternoon. But at what cost?

Well, for starters, Grok is producing nearly 7,000 sexualized images per hour — many of children. There’s ChatGPT psychosis, deep fake videos, cyber attacks, carbon footprint, and an 83% reduction in memory retention, lower critical thinking, and roughly 50% lower brain activity during tasks.

Working as a writer in the AI generation

When I lost my full-time writing job at the end of last year, I felt like I was fighting an uphill battle trying to look for other writing jobs.

All the job offers I had received while I still had my job were no longer open. In fact, many of the contacts of previous employment offers told me that the job no longer exists. It had, in part, been replaced by AI. And not because they were depending solely on AI content, but also because SEO was bust, and marketing budgets were being better used when funneled into AI.

One manager told me that the writing advice they had for wannabe writers: Find a different career path.

Harsh, but I think given the times, pretty accurate.

So instead of trying to find another job, I decided to focus all my attention on Substack.

It felt amazing to finally be writing in my own voice, not the voice of a big brand. I was able to research and write about topics that interested me, and learning that other people enjoyed my chosen topics and the way I conveyed them was deeply motivating and satisfying.

For months, I have been putting out articles almost daily, which take me anywhere from two hours to two to three days to plan, write, and research for. I replaced my full-time job with Substack more or less.

For all of this content, I never used AI. Not only am I the least techy person ever, I’m also a creative to my core. So why would I? It defeats my entire purpose. I love writing. I love creating. I love learning. So much so in fact, that I’m willing to continue writing as a career choice even when it’s a rapidly dying industry.

Until.

I tried AI

The weekend before last, I went to my friend’s house, who happens to be a very successful tech wizard. She uses AI very effectively in her new business. She knows how much stress I am under with two young kids, a business, a job loss, you name it. So she was giving me examples of how I can use AI in the backend of the wellness studio I’m opening.

I was intrigued.

She then started explaining how I could take my writing to the next level by using AI — idea generation, creating more clickworthy titles, feeding AI my previous content so it can replicate my voice, etc.

My firm stance against it started to slip.

Maybe I could try it.

Not to write, but maybe to help with formatting perhaps?

Oftentimes, my longest (and thus most time-intensive) articles don’t do very well on Substack. Here’s an example. And while the validation from strangers online shouldn’t be important to me, if I’m being very honest, it does sting when I spend a day or so writing an article only to get 5 likes 🥲.

I had, like any good writer, asked for feedback from friends on why these long articles weren’t doing well, when way shorter ones were. They said I need to break them down more effectively.

So when I wrote my recent Wellness Things That Are Not BS piece on red light therapy and the subsequent red light protocol piece, I decided to use AI to help me with the formatting for the latter, to see if there would be any improvements in readability.

It couldn’t hurt, right?

The feedback, the blowback, and the sadness

After I wrote the red light protocol guide, I fed it into Claude and said, “Reformat this so it’s easier to read.” I can’t lie, it did a good job. Check it out if you want to see. I thought, yeah, good, add it in.

Although I forgot to take out where it prompted me to add my own personal supplement recommendation.

A few of my readers clocked it. And I am happy they did. It was the universe trying to keep me on the straight and narrow.

After my readers clocked it, I immediately felt so extremely guilty. I actually cried lol. I felt like I had betrayed my subscribers. I felt like an idiot for letting the desire for efficiency get the best of me. I had broken my promise that I would never use AI for my content.

The dopamine wasn’t dopamine-ing

What’s also interesting is that typically after I write an article, I get a lil dopamine boost. I feel proud of myself. And that actually doesn’t go away even if I get only 5 likes on a post. I still feel a sense of pride that I spent my time to research, write, and create content to help people improve their health.

When I used AI, even for something as small as reformatting, I did not feel the same sense of achievement. On the contrary, I actually felt a sense of sadness.

I was outsourcing my creativity to a machine — the same machine owned by selfish, power-hungry billionaires, the same machine used to create child sexual abuse content, deep fakes, and trigger psychoses. The same machine that took my job and that broke my hope for my own future in writing.

It really is that deep.

I have promised myself never again. Genuinely fuck AI. I don’t care if you can build a website in 10 minutes. I don’t care if AI gives you more clickworthy titles than I could ever conjure up. I don’t care if my articles take me two days to research and write, versus you, who can do it in 5 minutes with a little help.

Because what I’ve come to realize is that a huge part of why writers write is not for the end result, but for the process of self-exploration and creative expression.

Writing isn’t about what you make. It’s about what you move through.

There’s a reason why I feel proud when I write: I’m proving to myself that I’m a capable, competent, passionate, and determined person. I get smarter by reading scientific research. I become more interesting when I learn to write about it in a digestible way. I get a sense of fulfilment when I create a piece of content that can help someone improve their health. That’s my WHY.

So WHY would I outsource it to AI? What are humans here for but to live out their why?

I hope you know that in my sharing this I’m just trying to be honest with what I’m going through right now. It is hard and scary to be a writer in the AI generation. I do feel hopeless a lot of the time. But I’m always continuing to try.

My promise to you is that my Substack will continue to be a place of human inquiry. It will always be me speaking, me researching, me. Not machine.

Thank you for being here <3

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I think we could all benefit from loving ourselves a little more. Sure.

But my — perhaps controversial — opinion, is that hating yourself juuuust a little can be really effective too.

Every successful person I’ve met in my life (not just financial or career success) has some degree of self-hatred.

Why?

Because being somewhat critical of yourself can be an effective vehicle for self-growth and self-improvement.

And one thing is for sure: The people who are willing to grow and improve themselves are the types of people you want in your life. Not the people who think they’re already perfect.

The delusion of the faultless individual

I have a person in my life, through default, not choice, who is perpetually faultless. They are always right, across their intentions, actions, and outcomes. This type of individual reeks of narcissism. They reek of arrogance. Ignorance. Vainglory.

Contrary to their own self-image, they are not magnetic, endearing, or inspirational.

They are more stagnant than a frozen lake, whereas people who hate themselves just a little are in free flow — they are a waterfall of abundance.

Their self-concept is fluid, their awareness is deep, and as a result, they become a person in motion. And it’s this, that is magnetic. Those are the people that I want in my life.

The belief in the faultless self is one of the oldest intellectual traps in the book.

Socrates famously argued that wisdom begins with recognizing one’s own ignorance. His line “I know that I know nothing” wasn’t meant to be poetic modesty. It was a method. When you assume you already possess truth, learning stops.

When you assume you might be wrong, curiosity begins.

Aristotle later built on this idea with the concept of practical wisdom (phronesis) — the ability to continually refine one’s judgment through reflection and experience. The common thread across classical philosophy was this: the examined life is dynamic. The unexamined life is rigid.

Psychology backs this up.

Research on self-enhancement bias consistently shows that most people believe they are above average in intelligence, morality, competence, and even driving ability — which is mathematically impossible. It’s called the better-than-average effect, and it’s one of the most robust cognitive biases in social psychology.

The famous Dunning–Kruger effect, described in a 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, showed that individuals with lower ability in a domain often lack the metacognitive awareness to recognize their deficits. In other words, the people who are the least competent are often the most confident in their competence.

Ha!

You’ve probably heard the phrase confidence is silent, insecurities are loud and this is basically that. My development of this:

The people who are actually awesome, believe in part, they suck. But the people who actually suck are the ones who believe, in full, that they are awesome.

If you cannot perceive nor accept your own shortcomings, you cannot improve them. You will stay in that stagnant frozen lack of your own demise. While the people who hate themselves just a little will swim to oceans of abundance.

The productive edge of self-hatred

I think that when someone possesses the capacity to hate themselves just a little, they have the fuel to overcome the discomfort required to improve themselves.

Before you say “oh but hating yourself ruins your life!” This is something I’ve said before, so I’ll say it again: Self-hatred may be an effective fuel to get you going, but it’s not an effective fuel to keep you alight.

That’s why I think just a little sprinkle of self-hatred is enough to propel you to greener pastures. And Nietzsche agrees with me. He talks about “self-overcoming” — the idea that human flourishing comes when you continually transcend the current version of yourself. Your current vehicle will only get you so far, you then overcome it with a bigger, better, more competent vehicle, and that’s what gets you far in life.

You can see it in everyday life. The people who read content like this (hi and thanks!), who train in the gym, who reflect on their habits and their ingrained beliefs, who go to therapy, meditate, change their minds, who apologize, who pivot careers, who refine their habits — they all share one underlying trait:

They are not entirely comfortable with themselves.

Not in a destructive way. But in a constructive way.

I recently met a friend of a friend who was so far deep into the self-love rabbit hole that she was absolutely incapable of noticing any gaps in her behavior. She had actually hurt quite a few friends in our group in one way or another — all pretty minor things that could have easily been overcome — but when addressed by the hurt individual, she was completely unable to acknowledge her faults.

She then posted some deep quotes on Instagram about ✨not letting people with bad vibes dull your sparkle ✨— as though feedback from a friend is anything other than a bid for relational accountability.

Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset versus fixed mindset illustrates this beautifully. Individuals with a fixed mindset interpret mistakes as threats to their identity. Individuals with a growth mindset interpret mistakes as data.

If you can acknowledge gaps or limits in your behavior or capacity, you are already on the way to healing them and become better and more competent.

Whereas people who see themselves as faultless cannot tolerate mistakes. Sure, this eliminates cognitive dissonance. You never have to experience the discomfort of being wrong. You never have to apologize. You never have to revise your worldview. Your identity remains perfectly intact.

But growth requires identity flexibility. A sprinkle of self-hatred can get you far.

The magnetism of self-awareness

The people I choose to have in my life have one-through line: self-awareness.

Self-awareness creates humility ➜ Humility creates curiosity ➜ Curiosity creates growth ➜ and growth is magnetic.

We are all drawn to people who are in motion. Who are fluid. Adaptable. Willing to grow.

You see it across the board in mentors, founders, artists, athletes, great thinkers of the world. They are people who tend to be their own harshest critics. Not because they actually hate their own guts, but because they are so deeply committed to becoming their best self that they are willing to hate themselves just enough to fuel positive change.

Final words

Self-hatred is an effective fuel, but if it overtakes your life, it will – without question — ruin it.

If your entire identity is built on feeling inadequate, eventually you burn out.

If I had to put a number on it I’d say the sweet spot is 90% self-love 10% brutal self-honesty.

You need enough dissatisfaction in yourself that you keep things in motion. Not for proof that you are broken. But evidence that you are unfinished.

Keep going. 🤎

If you liked this, def check out this:

• How to Not Hate Yourself in 2026

• Master Your Body and Your Mind Will Follow

• How to Live a Life with Teeth

🤎Let’s chat about this idea:

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I’m at a phase in my life that feels very similar to drowning. I have recurring dreams of drowning, and I wake up, and it doesn’t feel that different.

I expectantly lost my job just before Christmas. That meant an immediate loss of the income that I used to look after my family, including my two young kids. My husband has been building our wellness studio for the past year and a half. An endeavour that has now cost 300% more than what we expected or budgeted for. And taken a whole year longer. And because of the nature of the business, it’s a huge upfront investment with absolutely fuck all to show for it until it’s finished.

I feel like I’m always at 100 miles per hour. The only time I can rest is when I’m asleep, but then again, not because my baby wakes me up five times a night to breastfeed.

Anyway, this isn’t meant to start off with a pity party.

And that’s kinda the whole point of this.

I don’t have the luxury to be pessimistic. And that’s a good thing.

Pessimism, at its core, is the expectation that things will go badly. And when you choose to adopt that narrative, you will always be the victim of your life. Things will always go badly, because that’s the energy you are welcoming in.

Optimism is tied to resilience, grit, and choice. And that’s a choice we all have the power to make. While it’s often positioned as a personality trait of the privileged, I want to make the case that everyone has the capacity to choose to be more optimistic, and that doing so, can truly transform your life.

I want to explain why being pessimistic is nothing more than a self-indulgent luxury and a counterproductive defense mechanism. And that, when you start to frame it like this, you get off your soapbox and start to embody your life with more conviction and agency.

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The root of pessimism

From an evolutionary standpoint, pessimism makes sense. Humans evolved with a negativity bias — the tendency to attend more strongly to threats than opportunities. If you underestimated a rustle in the grass, you died. If you overestimated it, you survived. The cost asymmetry favored hypervigilance.

In small doses, this bias is protective. It keeps you cautious. It prevents reckless risk-taking.

But modern life is not the savannah. Chronic anticipatory fear doesn’t save you from lions. It just activates your sympathetic nervous system 24/7 and convinces you the future is already lost. It also makes you really negative to be around. Think of the person in your life who lights you up, who makes you laugh, who inspires you — I can absolutely guarantee that if you had to psychoanalyze them, they’d be considered more “optimistic” than “pessimistic.”

Why? Because optimism is an appealing, magnetic choice.

And I call it a choice because that’s what it is. It’s not so much a personality trait, than a daily commitment. In the same way you aren’t just born a fit person, you practice becoming fit until it’s less of a practice and more of an ingrained behavioral trait.

It’s the same for optimism.

When you’re in the depths of pessimism, you think you know something that other people don’t know. Pessimism feels realistic, intelligent, almost. It feels like you’re seeing through an illusion. That you know how to exit the matrix.

But here’s the thing: Chronic pessimism doesn’t just predict failure. It engineers it.

To put it bluntly, research consistently shows that pessimistic people have worse lives. Pessimism is associated with obesity, worse metabolic health, depression, self-harm and suicide, greater all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality, lower cognitive ability, lower career progression, lower life expectancy, weaker social ties and lower resilience… I could go on. But I won’t.

The point is, being pessimistic isn’t a hidden sign of intelligence. It’s actually a pretty overt sign of a shit life.

Is pessimism a luxury?

When I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, it changed my life. This was a man, in a concentration camp, who had seen his entire family die, who didn’t give up. He didn’t succumb to the pain and defeat.

On the contrary, he advocates for “tragic optimism.” The idea that you can maintain hope and find meaning in the depths of despair and the “tragic triad” (pain, guilt, and death).

A few killer quotes from Frankl that may change how you look at pessimism:

“I speak of a tragic optimism, that is, an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life’s transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.”

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

If he can have this mindset in the most desperate of circumstances, then so can I. And so can you.

Optimism is not something you are gifted with when your income exceeds $100,000. Of course, it may be easier to feel positive when all your fundamental needs are met.

But where does the buck stop?

I live in a wealthy expat enclave in Portugal with some of the most successful people I’ve ever come across. But the more time I spend with them, the more surprised I am to hear the constant barrage of pessimistic complaining: we’ll never be able to afford that house, I hate my housekeeper, but I’ll never be able to find a replacement, my business will never find an investor, etc.

I volunteered in an extremely poor town in East Africa when I was 17 years old. I spent my days there giving people much-needed medicine, working with children whose parents had died, and even working at a children’s hospital. It was something that absolutely changed my life.

The BIGGEST take-home of the month that I spent there was the fact that everyone I met was so happy. Even the people who were struggling the most. They were optimistic. They were funny. They were friendly. Of course, I’m not braindead — I understand that there may be reasons to explain why I had this impression.

But overall, the people I met in this town were optimistic despite challenging circumstances. They sang together, danced together, prayed, and maintained their faith that everything would be just fine.

My point being, optimism has absolutely zero correlation with the current status of your life. It only correlates with the trajectory of your life.

If you want to enjoy the present moment while continuing to improve the circumstances of your life, there is no other path other than optimism.

Pessimism is a heavy weight, dragging you into the past as you let life pass you by. Your thought patterns loop, your behavior reinforces these loops, and you ultimately find yourself having dug a very deep hole with no way to get out.

Optimism is simply making lemonade out of lemons, and that is something that every individual on the planet has the capacity to do.

The relentless power of delusional optimism

Research shows that people with “unrealistic optimism” — the tendency to believe positive outcomes are more likely for oneself than for others — is surprisingly protective.

Optimistic bias is associated with greater persistence, higher goal attainment, and even improved health outcomes.

Research shows that optimistic individuals tend to engage in more problem-focused coping strategies. They plan. They seek solutions. They persist longer under stress. They recover faster after failure.

Being optimistic is difficult. Remember — humans have an ingrained negativity bias. Just trying to be more optimistic overall requires intention, resilience, and grit. It’s not something that just happens.

Pessimism is easy; it closes the doors to possibilities. Optimism is challenging, but rewarding. In the same way that going to the gym is difficult and you may not get the results straight away, but that doesn’t mean you should just give and succumb to a life of bed rotting and GLP-1s.

Optimism often puts you in the firing line; it puts you in the arena of life. Because it’s a practice that requires persistence, it’s proactive, and it’s agentic.

Toxic positivity is not optimism. Toxic positivity is the denial of reality — the forced insistence that everything is fine when it isn’t, leaving no room for grief, fear, or complexity. It’s actually just another form of emotion suppression.

Optimism welcomes in the spectrum of emotions, and in spite of all of that, chooses hope and positivity.

Final words

I’ve got to keep swimming because I’ve got bills to pay, children to look after, and work I’ve got to complete. I don’t have the luxury of burying my head in the sand. I don’t have the luxury of inertia. I simply cannot infect those around me with negativity, because otherwise the whole system will collapse.

I have to choose to be positive in spite of challenging circumstances.

Optimism — especially in hard seasons — is not naive. It’s oxygen. It’s life force energy.

And right now, I am choosing to breathe.

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When I was at the peak of my anxiety, I found solace in the gym. For that hour (sometimes two) of the day, I wasn’t in my mind. I was in my body. The effort of picking up really heavy things and putting them down, somehow relieved me of the metaphorical weight I was carrying on my shoulders.

I would typically feel better — less anxious, more embodied — for a few hours after my workout, before the anxiety started creeping in again.

That was until I learned about somatic healing. If you’re new to this word: somatic healing is essentially the practice of working with the body — rather than just the mind — to process stress, trauma, and stored emotional states.

For people who are type A, analytical, and tend to intellectualize their emotions (me, probably you if you’re reading this) then somatic work may just change your life. Talk therapy won’t — you’ve already explored every possible avenue of why you act the way you do. In fact, talk therapy can make healing way harder and more convoluted.

Put it this way: You can understand why you’re anxious and still feel anxious. Insight doesn’t automatically equal regulation.

That’s why I’m a somatic advocate.

“Soma” simply means body. The premise is this: not all stress is cognitive. Not all trauma lives in words. Some of it lives in muscle tension, posture, breath patterns, heart rate variability, inflammatory tone, and reflexive nervous system responses.

It’s why I always talk about the nervous system, and the various modalities of improving health and wellness – because for me, it saved my life.

This is grounded in nervous system science. When you experience chronic stress, the autonomic nervous system shifts toward sympathetic dominance (fight-or-flight). Muscles tighten. Breath shortens. Cortisol rises. Your body prepares for action, even if there’s nowhere for that action to go.

If the stress isn’t resolved — through movement, discharge, completion — that state of “activation” lingers. Over time, it becomes your baseline.

Somatic healing works by completing that loop.

Anyway, enough chat. Here’s what you can do.

Use the gym as therapy

Lifting heavy things is one of the most accessible and effective somatic exercises you can do.

It’s physical, but if you put a little bit of intention behind it, it can be a powerful mind-body, trauma-releasing exercise.

Go to the gym. Pick a weight that challenges you (requires effort). Before you lift it up, visualize the weight as everything you’ve been carrying — the stress, the resentment, the overthinking, the expectations, the guilt, the grief, the things you never said.

Get specific. I wrote here about quantum leaping, and this, in a weird way, is very similar to that. You need to visualize the metaphorical weights in your life — maybe it’s something that happened when you were 14, or maybe it’s a recent argument you had with your spouse. You need to imagine all the emotions, the energy, the memories, and feelings surrounding that experience.

Visualize the weight of your pain. You then need to visualize condensing all of that into a dumbbell, a kettlebell, or a plate. You need to stack it up — everything that you’re carrying, every ounce of trauma, or pain. You need to disconnect these experiences from your current physical form as you go to pick up the weight.

Then lift. Feel your feet press into the ground. Feel your breath stabilize your spine. Feel your muscles engage.

Confront the weight. Whether you’re squatting, overhead pressing, deadlifting — you need to imagine that you are carrying around all the painful experiences. You need to feel the weight of it. Feel the struggle as you try to move with this resistance weighing you down.

And then, when you can’t carry it anymore, drop the weight. Rerack the barbell. Let it go.

Let it all go.

Do that as many times as you need.

Leave feeling lighter.

Why this works (psychology + physiology)

I’ll break it down into three key mechanisms:

1) physical exertion discharges stress hormones.

Exercise is a nervous system workout.

Acute exercise reduces circulating adrenaline and cortisol, increases endorphins, boosts dopamine and serotonin, and enhances vagal tone post-workout. Multiple studies show resistance training reduces anxiety symptoms and improves mood regulation.

2) trauma and chronic stress are often linked to muscular bracing.

Research in somatic therapies and body-oriented trauma approaches (e.g., sensorimotor psychotherapy, somatic experiencing) suggests that completing defensive motor patterns — pushing, pulling, bracing, exerting force — can help resolve stored threat responses. Your body finally does what it prepared to do.

Heavy lifting is literally a controlled fight response.

You’re exerting force. You’re pushing against resistance. You’re metabolizing activation.

3) visualization amplifies neuroplasticity.

Mental imagery activates many of the same neural circuits as physical action. Sports psychology research shows that combining movement with visualization enhances motor learning and emotional processing.

When you pair physical exertion with intentional imagery — “this is my burden, this is me releasing it” — you’re integrating top-down cognition with bottom-up physiology.

That is undeniably extremely powerful.

Studies on guided imagery and embodied visualization show reductions in perceived stress, improved emotional regulation, and even measurable changes in inflammatory markers in some contexts.

You’re essentially teaching your nervous system a new association:

Activation → Effort → Release → Safety.

Instead of:

Activation → Rumination → Suppression → Chronic tension.

Final words

This is why you felt better after the gym before you ever knew what “somatic” meant. Physical effort discharges energy — including the negative energy associated with painful experiences and memories.

Everything is energy, remember.

The reason it sometimes creeps back later is because if the cognitive layer isn’t addressed, the stressors return. But even temporary relief tells you something important:

Your body wants release and your nervous system wants completion.

Add the intentional visualization, and you turn a workout into an emotional processing session + integration.

Don’t get me wrong: You can train every day for the rest of your life and not ever process trauma. That’s because you’re just going through the motions. You need to embody this exercise. You need to treat it like a healing therapy.

Make it symbolic. Lift something heavy. Drop it with intention. And walk away lighter.

Hope this helps you <3

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When someone shouts at you, they lose their power.

This is the reframe you need to make.

Growing up, I had a parent who shouted a lot. It made me feel very uneasy around people who raise their voices — even if they’re just excited, not angry. I speak pretty quietly. I have issues expressing my needs. I keep a lot of stuff repressed. An energy healer told me yesterday that my throat chakra was blocked. Tracks for me.

Why have I made this a trauma dump?

Because after being told my throat chakra was blocked, I started looking into how this relates to vagal tone. I’ve talked a lot about vagal tone and the nervous system on the whole recently. [Check out those linked posts if you’re interested.]

As you’ll know if you read those posts, the vagus nerve has important branches in the throat (pharynx) and voice box (larynx). That’s why you can stimulate the vagus nerve by humming, singing, or chanting.

In fact, the vagus nerve and your ability to openly express yourself, stand up for yourself, and speak with authority — all links directly to your nervous system and how balanced your chakras are.

[I’m not going to focus on the chakras in this piece, as I’m not sure how much you want to know about them. Let me know if you do and we can chat — link below!].

This led me to vagal authority.

Here’s why you need to know what this is and why it matters.

What is vagal authority?

Going back to how I started this post: When someone shouts at you, they lose their power. Why?

Because vagal authority is all about the idea that true authority is reflective of a regulated nervous system.

It means you can express yourself in a calm, regulated, and responsive way. You’re not shouting, screaming, or swearing. You can actually express your needs whilst in a parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) state.

If you’re like me, even just the idea of expressing my needs to someone makes me feel a lil queasy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m tuff. But there’s something about confrontation that really triggers me. Stemming from being yelled at all the time, probably. But I’ll save that for a therapist (drop recs).

Vagal authority is authority that lands because the speaker’s nervous system is regulated enough for the other nervous systems to relax.

Remember, we’re all co-regulating, constantly. That’s why, if you’re with someone who is constantly agitated, restless, and able to fly off the handle at the flick of a switch, you get into a similar sympathetic (fight-or-flight) state.

And I think something I’ve learned, that I wish everyone would also learn, is that the people who do fly off the handle at the smallest inconvenience are people with deeply dysregulated nervous systems.

I’ll show them some grace and say they’re probably just mirroring patterns that they experienced in their own childhoods. Life is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. [Don’t get me started on causal determinism, we’ll be here all day!]

If anything, the people who try to demonstrate authority by screaming, shouting, manipulating, or saying mean things are, paradoxically, the people with the least authority. They’re the ones who need a hug and to read my nervous system guide.

Threat, fear, anguish, sadness — all show up in the voice. Remember dat.

Why shouting actually loses authority

When someone raises their voice, what they’re really broadcasting is: I am no longer regulated enough to influence you through safety.

When you flip into a fight-or-flight state, one of the first things that changes is the voice. It becomes louder, sharper, faster, less melodic, more forceful. It deceives the speaker into thinking they are in control, but the act of it signals a loss of regulation. And your body knows this instinctively. Remember, communication is supposedly 90% non-verbal (even though shouting is verbal, it’s not WHAT is said, it’s HOW it’s said).

Let me give you some examples of how vagal authority shows up in the world:

1. Paramedics don’t run

Paramedics are trained to walk briskly, not sprint, even in life-or-death situations. Why? Because running signals panic.

A calm, deliberate pace stabilizes the patient, signals competence to bystanders, and keeps the responder cognitively sharp (which only really happens in a moderately regulated state — some sympathetic activation is good but not dysregulated).

If the medic panics, everyone panics. And panicked people don’t cooperate, process instructions, or heal well.

2. Surgeons speak quietly in operating rooms

If you’ve ever been in the ER, or an operating room, you’ve probably noticed (unless you were under general anaesthetic, which I’m guessing you were if you were in an operating room lol) are not loud environments.

Surgeons don’t bark orders — they calmly say hey pass me the stitches or whatever it is they’re messing with. Everything is calm and precise. Even if it’s an extreme, life-or-death situation. Volume ≠ leadership.

3. Military commanders slow down under fire

I have Navy Seals in my family, who have told me about an important part of their training: Slowing down. Intentionally slowing the breath. Lowering their voices, or being totally silent. Barely moving. Narrowing commands.

It’s all about keeping your nervous system calm.

Okay I’ll stop with the examples, but I want you to think about it. There’s a reason why in movies, they create caricatures of the “most powerful” person as someone who is quietly spoken, who makes eye contact with everyone, who doesn’t talk excessively, who is calm. And thus, makes other people around them feel calm.

They are in total control, because they can control their own nervous system, so other people co-regulate with them.

It’s backed by research on vocal prosody (the rhythm, tone, and modulation of speech): these studies show that people unconsciously associate:

• lower variability and steadiness with competence and leadership

• excessive intensity or unpredictability with threat

“Speak softly and carry a big stick.” — Theodore Roosevelt

You don’t have to speak so softly that you melt into the energy of others. You can still carry your own big stick. Being soft isn’t being weak. Being soft is being regulated, and that is powerful.

Look. It’s a spectrum: You don’t want the expression of your voice/throat chakra to be vicious, angry, loud or excessive. You don’t want to talk over people, put other people down, or set so many boundaries that you shut the entire world out.

You want to be able to express yourself from a parasympathetic state. You want to be calm, cool, and collected. That’s kinda reflective of how you should set boundaries. It’s not about telling other people what to do, it’s about watching how people move and adjusting yourself accordingly.

For example, if someone is consistently trying to take advantage of you, don’t desperately cry for them to stop. Just remove yourself. Not today satan.

Vagal authority is about speaking from your truth. Authority in its true form is about authentic expression. And authentic expression isn’t angry, nor is it weak. It’s regulated, boundaried, and calm.

Hope you got something from this. If you did, like comment n subscribe as it really helps me as a writer! God bless. Happy friday!

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Let me start with a question.

Let’s say you went on holiday to Mexico.

While driving to dinner, you were pulled over by the police. They dragged you out of your car, put you in handcuffs, and — despite having done nothing wrong — drove you to jail. Thrown into the jail cell, you’re scared and alone. You can’t speak the language.

They tell you that you can make one phone call.

You realize that this phone call is a matter of life or death. It’s not just who’s likely to answer you, but who actually has the competence to get you out of there, quickly.

Who would it be?

This is what George Mack calls “the golden question.” Essentially, the person you choose in this scenario is the person you view as having the highest agency in your life.

What does it mean to have high agency? It means having the capacity to act independently and make competent choices, guided by a strong internal locus of control.

Below, I’m going to share 11 key psychological markers of a high agency person, so you can see whether you fit the bill — or what you can do to become more agentic.

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What is agency?

Someone I recently met described me as a high agency person. I was complimented, knowing the implications of agency, but I wasn’t entirely sure what it was about me that gave them that opinion.

Thus, being crazy, I decided to do a deep dive into the research on agency: where this concept came from, which psychological or behavioral traits are associated with agency, and whether it actually has any correlations with living a better life (compared to someone who is low agency).

For example, a lot of people draw connections between being type A and being agentic. But does being type A just correlate with anxiety and neuroticism? Is it actually better to be type A than the big chillers of type B? Anyway, I digress.

High agency people are people who just get shit done. Which tends to do quite well within a capitalist society. But what does that actually look like? Let’s see. I’ll be referring to Albert Bandura’s concept of human agency. You can read the full article about this here if you wanna be a lil extra <3.

1. They make intentional choices

High-agency people explicitly decide how they spend their time and energy. Intentionality, the first pillar of agency according to Bandura, explains that intentions are tied to outcomes.

So as an example, that’s the difference between saying “I want to be healthier,” vs. “I will go to the gym every weekday for six months to improve my health.”

High agency people feel like life is happening for them, not to them. Which brings me on to my next point…

2. They follow through with commitments regardless of external circumstances

Intentionality is just one part of this. You can be great at making intentional decisions, but if there’s no follow-through, you’re not really a high-agency person — more a daydreamer.

High agency people are not defined by their circumstances. They’re agentic because they’re able to make choices in spite of them.

For instance, growing up, Jim Carrey lived in a van with his family who was experiencing financial hardship. In 1985, while working as a struggling comedian, he wrote himself a check for $10 million for “acting services rendered,” post-dated for Thanksgiving 1994.

This wasn’t just an intentional goal (earn $10 million through acting), it was a commitment to growth despite his current circumstance. Aka, agency.

3. They don’t succumb to instant gratification

The second pillar of Bandura’s research on agency is forethought. Agentic people understand that today’s actions shape tomorrow. Humans are notoriously bad at long-term thinking (present bias). But agentic people keep long-term rewards in mind when decision-making.

On the other side, low agency people constantly compete with present impulses. They’re essentially just driving donuts — regardless of how fast you’re going, you don’t get very far.

Examples:

• Choosing to watch tv instead of going to the gym because you’re tired

• Choosing to spend rent money on gambling because you want a dopamine boost

• Choosing to get drunk with your friends rather than getting a good night’s sleep in advance of an important meeting

People who struggle to resist impulses are usually low agency. Agency shows up when the future has enough psychological weight to override the present. You choose to go the gym because you know that it’ll help you live a longer, healthier life. You spend your money wisely because you’re investing in your future. Etc.

4. They’re not offended by feedback

High-agency people don’t collapse and cry in a corner when someone gives them some constructive feedback.

I once knew a girl who sued two employers (from two separate companies) consecutively. She claimed she was getting bullied at work. In reality, she had received some bad feedback during a review and ran with it.

Having a victim mindset is low agency. High agency people don’t take criticism as a personal attack. Their identity isn’t fued to outcomes, so they’re actually willing to self-reflect (another pillar) and update their behavior.

Low agency people take things personally and think personality traits are fixed. High agency people have a growth mindset, are willing to adapt, and don’t perceive critiques as a referendum on their worth.

5. They don’t outsource decision-making to consensus

Next time you’re wondering who is high agency in your friend group. Ask the group where you want to go for dinner, see who in the group gives their opinion vs. the people who just say “I don’t mind!”. Look, I’m guilty of this too. Most women, like me, have spent a lifetime being told to be nice, a good girl, and a people pleaser. The result: Low agency.

Stop being so concerned about how other people will feel if you give your honest opinion. You don’t have to go around telling people they look like shit or they gained weight, but if someone asks where you want to eat dinner — say how you really feel!

Stop outsourcing your decision-making to consensus. Don’t wait for permission, reassurance, or social proof before acting.

6. They can tolerate discomfort

Things that are uncomfortable in life: working hard, asking for a promotion, staying healthy, going against the crowd, not giving into peer pressure, going to bed early, asking someone on a date, being emotionally vulnerable.

These are all the same things that make you healthy, happy, and successful in life.

High agency people are willing to tolerate discomfort in the present moment. Low agency people view discomfort as a warning signal. That’s why low agency people are always looking for sympathy, trigger warnings, and acknowledgement of effort.

7. They act on principle rather than emotion

This doesn’t mean that high agency people are emotionless. Got to throw that out there. It’s so opposite. Being agentic means that you’re comfortable experiencing all emotions — you let them wash over you. You’re not drowning in the sea of strong emotions. You’re fluid, adaptable, and act aligned with your own moral code and principles.

For example, you have an argument with your partner and experience anger and sadness. A low agency person might go out and cheat, because they can’t bear the feelings of anger and sadness. They throw away their own morality because they are completely unable to experience strong emotions. WEAK.

Agentic people aren’t swayed by emotions. They still do what’s authentic for them. Whether they’re sad, happy, motivated, tired.

They understand that feelings are transient, noisy, and often unrelated to what needs doing. They don’t wait to “feel aligned,” “feel inspired,” or “feel ready.” They act authentically, regardless.

8. They close loops

Now, writing this, I’m realizing what that person called me high agency. I close loops. I’m a daydreamer, sure. But if I say I’m going to do something, I do it.

I said I wanted to learn more about breathwork, so I studied it for a year and got my certification. I said I wanted to write on Susbtack, so here I am 7,000 subscribers and 100s of posts later.

High-agency have ideas about doing things. Then they take action. Then they finish them. In short: They get shit done. It’s not about doing it perfectly. It’s about doing things decisively.

They send the email. Book the appointment. Have the difficult conversation.

Low-agency people live in open loops — endless drafts, almost-decisions, self-doubt, perpetual preparation. Mental clutter masquerading as thoughtfulness.

Agency shows up in action, completion, and self-trust.

9. They don’t wait to be rescued

High-agency people don’t expect institutions, systems, partners, or fate to save them.

They may leverage help — gratefully — but they don’t rely on it or think other people owe it to them. They behave as if no cavalry is coming. When they do receive help, they take it seriously — whether it’s taking notes in a meeting, implementing advice, or even just truly valuing help.

On the contrary, low agency people walk around the world thinking they inherently deserve things. They are envious, judgemental, and entitled. No bueno.

10. They maintain a positive outlook

High agency people have rational optimism: They maintain a positive attitude and approach, being solution-focused and always identifying potential opportunities, even amidst obstacles.

That doesn’t mean they’re delusionally happy, it means that their belief in their own internal locus of control is so strong, that they know they can get through anything.

Instead of having a negative bias, they have a self-fulfilling bias: essentially, believing that their actions determine their fate. So why be grumpy and negative? That’s only going to impede foward movement, enjoyment, and the possibility for growth and development.

Low agency people = negative nancies, Karens, and woe-is-me types.

11. They keep promises to themselves

This is the quiet foundation underneath everything else.

High-agency people trust themselves — not because of self-esteem, affirmations, or confidence — but because their internal track record is solid. They’ve built an undeniable stack of evidence that they are who they think they are.

They said they would do the thing. Then they did it. Repeatedly. This builds self-esteem and you guessed it — agency.

Thank you for reading this friends :) If you have comments or questions, drop them below and I will get back to you.

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Ask anyone who knows me well to describe me, and I can almost guarantee one word that’ll come up: impulsive.

I’ve always made choices quickly. Passionately. If I want something, I go after it. If I have an idea, I’m more interested in bringing it into existence than in carefully mapping every possible outcome.

I don’t always think things through. Often, t…

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You’ve never had an original thought. Creativity is about ACTION, not IDEATION.

Michael Jackson famously said that when an idea came to him at night, he would get up immediately and record it — sing it into a tape recorder, write it down, whatever it took. If he didn’t, he believed the idea would leave him and go to Prince.

I believe that ideas and creativity are received. They’re almost downloaded. To the people who are tuned into the frequency of receiving them.

If this is too woo-woo for you, I implore you to keep reading because I’m going to take you on a journey through the science and the mystical, to make my case that if you want awesome cool fun innovative ideas, you need to work on your energetic frequency and mindset so that you can — just like me 😉— have an abundance of awesome ideas without force.

What happens in your brain when you have an idea

From a neuroscience perspective, ideas emerge when your brain is quiet enough to recombine what it already knows. (That’s why most of your good ideas come in the shower).

Specifically, as explored in a 2020 study published in Cerebrum, ideas don’t come from “effortful thinking” (forcing yourself to think of cool stuff — white-knuckling creativity).

E.g.:

Instead, they emerge when you’re not trying, e.g. when you’re going for a little stroll, showering, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, watching paint dry. All the stuff that’s totally redundant in an era of screens and complete overstimulation.

That’s because when you’re not trying, the default mode network (DMN) and the executive control network in the brain switch on.

The DMN is the system responsible for memory, imagination, future simulation, and mind-wandering. It pulls together fragments of past experiences — people, places, emotions, concepts — and recombines them in new ways.

Another key player here is the hippocampus, a memory structure that helps reconstruct the past and simulate the future. The hippocampus activates not only during remembering and imagining, but also during creative idea generation — meaning your brain literally uses memory to build new ideas.

Ideas strengthen only when encoded

Let’s go back to what MJ was saying that ideas would “leave him” if he didn’t act.

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I know you’ve heard of Charlie Munger’s inversion principle. It’s pretty basic, really. If you want to problem solve, you should invert the question. It forces you to think differently about the question or topic at hand.

An example: Instead of asking yourself how to succeed, ask yourself what failure would look like. Then, do everything that isn’t that.

…

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I was invited to a dinner party a couple of weeks ago. I only knew the host, who started a group chat with all the people she was inviting, nearly all of whom happened to be strangers.

A few years ago, there would have been no way I would have shown up to this party. To be honest, I wouldn’t have even considered it. I wouldn’t have stayed on the group ch…

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Stop worrying about the state of your mind. Anxious, stressed, depressed, critical, obsessive, cynical. Quit worrying about it.

Sounds counterproductive, I know. Self-help advice always centers around the idea that you can change your life if you just think about it enough.

But the best thing you can do for mental health is to jump off the merry-go-round.…

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I’ve read every productivity book under the sun. I’ve listened to every productivity podcast, studied every theory, and probably written about every mental model that promises enhanced productivity.

Here’s my take: If you’re someone who seeks and studies productivity, you’re probably not the type of person who actually needs it.

My guess is, you’re a type…

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It’s Thanksgiving in America today. Enjoy — if you celebrate.

I’m not American, but I did live there for seven years before moving to Portugal, where I currently reside. My husband and my daughter are both American, so for this one day a year, I am Mrs Token USA.

When you put aside the historical realities of this holiday, I actually really like it. After…

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I want to share a story with you.

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), into a Jewish, German-speaking middle-class family.

He worked a normal job as a clerk at an insurance office. When he wasn’t working, he was writing. Friends knew him as a man who “journaled obsessively.” He had complicated relationships, c…

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