It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks, but I’m SO happy to be back in Asia!

I’m in Thailand after the most epic celebrations for my best friend’s wedding, now enjoying a bit of R&R before I go back full time to my legal innovation role in Singapore next week.

I’m writing this from the pool, my heart full of love and my head full of ideas, and I’m soooo ready to get started!

Anyway, this week’s issue is shorter than usual because it’s been a little busy over here.

At the wedding, a friend told me about a simple visualisation that helped her make 1 of the biggest decisions of her life: whether she wanted children.

She imagined 2 chairs. In 1, she pictured her life without children. In the other, her life with them.

She sat in both, in her head. And it became obvious to her that she wanted a family.

Until my coaching training, I always found visualisations a bit too woo woo for me.

Then I did one before my marathon, to prepare myself for the tough moments on the course. And honestly? It was super helpful.

(Fun fact: dreamy visualisation can actually backfire. In 1 study, graduates who daydreamed most about their dream job got fewer offers and were earning less 2 years later. What helps is picturing the hard bits, which is exactly what I’d done.)

My friend did something different again. She stepped into 2 possible futures and met the woman she’d be in each one.

Future you is a stranger, so it’s worth getting to know them

I often imagine being old, looking back, and wondering what 80-year-old Noémie would think of me in this present moment.

Would she be proud?

Would she be grateful for the choices I’m making for us right now?

Would she laugh at the things I’m stressing about?

Would she thank me for the body I’m looking after for her?

Would she wish I’d been a little braver?

And it turns out there’s actual science behind my little chats with 80-year-old Noémie (phew, it’s not just me being woo woo again).

Researchers at Stanford put people in a brain scanner and asked them to think about themselves 10 years from now, and their brains reacted more like they were thinking about another person than about themselves. ANOTHER PERSON!

Basically, future you is someone you’ve never actually met. Of course you don’t make choices for them.

Go and introduce yourself, because it changes what you do today.

In another study, people spent 2 minutes writing a letter to themselves either 3 months or 20 years in the future. The ones who wrote to their 20-years-older self said they exercised about 40% longer over the next few days.

All from a 2-minute letter!

That’s exactly what’s changed for me.

I used to work out for my bikini body. Now I move for 80-year-old me.

I eat well and look after myself so she’s mobile and healthy in the future. And honestly, that matters to me more than any bikini ever did.

Regretting some of your past is different from regretting your life

80-year-old Noémie won’t only care about how she moves, though. She’ll also care about what she gets to look back on.

Living without some regrets is kind of inevitable. I certainly have plenty.

Still, I’ve thought about this a lot this year.

If I died tomorrow, I’d be grateful I lived the life I did.

I went on adventures, loved deeply and wholeheartedly, danced and laughed and explored the 4 corners of the world.

In short, I’d die with no regrets.

Which sounds a bit rich from someone who just told you she has plenty of them.

But here’s the difference.

I absolutely regret some of the shit I did in the past, and that’s done, it’s part of the story now. But these days I’m trying to live in a way that 80-year-old Noémie would be proud of, and honestly, that changes a LOT of my choices.

You can’t undo the shit you’ve already done. But you totally get to choose what 80-year-old you looks back on.

So, want to meet yours? It’s 1 of my favourite coaching exercises and it only takes 10 minutes.

Your life doesn’t need to be perfect, or regret-free (mine certainly isn’t!). It just needs to be one you’ll be glad you had when you’re blowing out those 80 candles.

I’d LOVE to know what 80-year-old you said. Hit reply or leave a comment, I read every one.

Pull up a chair. Actually, make it 2.

With love,
Noemie x

What did 80-year-old you say?

Leave a comment

Key Sources

Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer, ‘The Motivating Function of Thinking About the Future: Expectations Versus Fantasies’ (2002) 83(5) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1198 <https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1198>.

Hal Ersner-Hershfield, G Elliott Wimmer and Brian Knutson, ‘Saving for the Future Self: Neural Measures of Future Self-Continuity Predict Temporal Discounting’ (2009) 4(1) Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 85 <https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsn042>.

Abraham M Rutchick, Michael L Slepian, Monica O Reyes, Lindsay N Pleskus and Hal E Hershfield, ‘Future Self-Continuity Is Associated With Improved Health and Increases Exercise Behavior’ (2018) 24(1) Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 72 <https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000153>.

Every morning, I make a coffee and read about the end of the world.

Wars, elections, the planet slowly cooking, AI coming for our jobs (and also very possibly for mankind, no biggie).

Then I put my cup in the sink, brush my teeth and go on about my little day like nothing happened.

It’s honestly so Black Mirror, right??

I’m very much a recovering news addict.

The Guardian app lives on my home screen and my thumb often opens it on its own.

It’s also on a 20-minute daily timer, but it’s not been very helpful because I usually just add an hour when the timer runs out 🙃

Obviously I still believe staying informed is super important, and there’s still some brilliant journalism out there. But the endless news we consume all day isn’t really about being informed. It’s about people’s opinions, it’s for our entertainment (horrible entertainment but still) and it’s becoming seriously unhelpful.

The news starts a stress response that your day rarely processes

So, after the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, a team of psychologists asked nearly 5,000 Americans how much of the coverage they’d watched in the week after.

People who followed it for 6 or more hours a day were more stressed than people who were actually at the marathon.

Yep, more stressed than the people who were actually there.

How mental is that?!?

That’s because our stress response evolved to help us deal with an actual threat, not to absorb a whole planet’s worth of crises before we’ve even finished our coffee.

Think about it: something stressful happens, you see it, your body gets ready to run or fight, you deal with it by maybe telling your tribe around the fire, you rest.

The news hands your body every fucking threat on the planet, all before breakfast. How are you supposed to process that?

And you can’t exactly run away from a headline about AI, no matter how dystopian it is.

So the stress from the headlines can hang around long after you’ve closed the news app.

Emily and Amelia Nagoski, who wrote Burnout, explain it really well: dealing with the thing that stressed you isn’t the same as dealing with the stress itself.

Basically, the stress gets stuck in your body: your heart’s going a bit faster, your breathing’s all shallow and your shoulders are somewhere up by your ears. It has to go SOMEWHERE. And no, closing the Guardian app doesn’t count (trust me, I’ve tried). What does count is doing something that shows your body the danger is over. (I wrote more about this back here.)

You can carry on like nothing happened. But your body doesn’t always get the memo.

Staying informed and consuming the news all day are 2 different things

When we were travelling, we didn’t have the news playing in the background for hours like we used to in Singapore. Instead, we’d put on a 10-minute news podcast with our morning coffee: The Economist’s The World in Brief, Reuters, Bloomberg Daybreak.

And do you know the best part of a news podcast: it ends. After 10 or 20 mins, the podcast actually finishes.

So we can get on with our day.

By nature, 24-hour cable news (and their horrible panels full of horrible screaming people) never ends, literally.

So yes, 10-minute news podcasts from now on and I feel as informed as ever.

I’m just not marinating in it.

That way you still know what’s going on in the world, and you still care (obvs), but your body isn’t stuck on high alert till lunchtime.

For better or worse, the end of the world will still be there after your coffee.

With love,
Noemie x

What does your news habit look like right now?

Leave a comment

Key Sources

E. Alison Holman, Dana Rose Garfin and Roxane Cohen Silver, ’Media’s role in broadcasting acute stress following the Boston Marathon bombings’ (2014) 111(1) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93 <https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1316265110>.

Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle (Ballantine Books 2019).

Is it just me, or is the last week of a trip always the best one?

Suddenly, you want to do EVERYTHING, and you’ll figure out how to fit it all in.

Well, I’m in that week right now.

After 10 months and 13 countries on the road, we’re finally flying home to Singapore!

And I’m currently in Los Angeles trying to figure out how to squeeze our entire life into 3 suitcases (it’s barely going to fit. The airport this morning should be fun…)

So this week we’ve been doing ALL the things.

Spending hours zooming around the city in Waymos (LA’s driverless taxis) to try and visit everything.

Coffee and shopping in West Hollywood, the Warner Bros Studios, the Grammy Museum (the Daft Punk Helmets!!), hiking in the Hollywood hills.

Stuffing ourselves at the Whole Foods hot food bar.

Going for 1 last run along Venice and Santa Monica beach.

And also earlier today, a little tear, followed by a little boogie to Mexican music. Obviously.

Knowing something is about to end makes you pay SO much more attention to it.

There’s actually some psychology behind this.

In a study of university students, those who were encouraged to think of graduation as coming soon ended up doing more college-related activities and reported feeling happier over the following 2 weeks.

Same campus, same amount of time left.

Me in LA, basically.

But in normal life, we often save the good stuff for when things “calm down”.

Spoiler: they NEVER calm down.

And then it’s suddenly the end of October and you’re wondering WTF happened to the year.

There are only about 10 weeks left of 2026.

That’s 10 more Sunday mornings. 10 more Friday nights. And at least 1 friend you’ve been texting “we HAVE to catch up!!” since about February.

And no, this is NOT another challenge. You already know how I feel about those.

I just want you to steal a tiny bit of that last-week-of-the-holiday feeling, because it’s honestly the best one.

Loved it? Do it again next week. Didn’t love it? Fine, at least you got a nice coffee out of it.

As for me, I’m taking Holiday Mode home to Singapore, because I’d quite like to enjoy living there WITHOUT having to leave the country for 10 months first.

And conveniently, our apartment is still rented out, so we’re moving into hotels (3 suitcases and all) and keeping the adventure going in our own city.

I’m SO curious, what’s on your list? Hit reply or leave a comment, I read every one!

Pray for our zips.

With love,
Noemie x

I’m SO curious, what’s on your list?

Leave a comment

Key Sources

Jaime L Kurtz, ‘Looking to the Future to Appreciate the Present: The Benefits of Perceived Temporal Scarcity’ (2008) 19(12) Psychological Science 1238 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02231.x>.

You’ve probably never smiled through an earthquake (I hope). But you’ve almost certainly said “I’m fine!” when you weren’t. This week is about why we do it, and why admitting how you actually feel doesn’t mean giving up on changing anything. As I put it in the episode: “I can admit how I feel, and I can still hold the pen.”

In this episode

• Why “I’m fine” comes out on autopilot, even when it isn’t true

• What hiding your feelings costs you: you’re busy managing how you look while also trying to take in what’s happening

• Why accepting a feeling isn’t the same as accepting the situation (from a study of more than 1,000 people)

• Why waiting to feel better before you do anything can keep you stuck

• The little exercise from Tuesday’s newsletter

Chapters

00:00 Smiling through an earthquake
01:21 Hello, and what’s a samba smile?
03:14 The automatic “I’m fine”
04:01 What hiding your feelings costs you
06:16 Accept the feeling, not the situation
07:25 Why waiting to feel better keeps you stuck
08:39 Try this week’s exercise

Mentioned in this episode

• The exercise: Smiling Through an Earthquake Is Not a Wellbeing Strategy

If you liked this one, listen to

• Why is trying to be healthy so exhausting? (episode 49)

Sources

• Richards and Gross, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000: Emotion regulation and memory: the cognitive costs of keeping one’s cool

• Ford and others, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2018: The psychological health benefits of accepting negative emotions and thoughts

Follow the podcast: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or right here in the Substack app.

What’s the first thing you’d do if an earthquake started while you were on a video call?

Apparently, I’d keep smiling.

Here’s how I know: a few weeks ago, I was in Santiago de Chile on a group call with the fabulous and from (if you’re building a newsletter, check them out, they’re brilliant!)

I’d just asked a question, so I was unmuted with my camera on while Chenell was answering my question. Then the ground started shaking.

We’d felt a few small tremors travelling through Peru and Chile (turns out seismic activity is pretty common in the Andes), but this one was strong enough to make me think WTF is happening?!

But did I say anything? Did I change my expression?

Nope.

Instead, like a fucking weirdo, I kept my crispée rictus smile on, and all I could hear was “everything’s fine” rather than the answer to my question.

I actually blame samba.

When I learnt it for fun a few years ago, the cardinal rule was to keep your samba smile on, however tired you were.

And trust me, samba is CARDIO!! Keeping that smile on is a workout in itself.

So apparently my brain decided the rule also applied to seismic activity.

I was the This Is Fine dog, calmly sipping coffee in a burning room.

With better Wi-Fi.

Pretending everything is fine is surprisingly hard work

An earthquake is an extreme example obviously. But I’ve pulled the samba smile PLENTY of other times.

Saying everything was great when it absolutely wasn’t. The automatic “I’m fine!” when someone asks how I’m doing (samba smile included, obvs).

Sometimes that’s politeness, or not being ready to talk. Nothing wrong with that.

Here’s the weird bit though. We talk about mental health more than ever. In general.

Just not ours, and definitely not before 10am on a Monday.

But hiding how you feel all the time comes at a cost.

In a series of experiments published in 2000, psychologists Jane Richards and James Gross found that people told to hide their emotional reactions remembered less of what they’d just watched than people who weren’t hiding anything.

Translation: keeping a straight face is really hard work for your brain.

Which probably explains why I didn’t hear a single word of Chenell’s answer.

My brain was too busy managing my face. Through an ACTUAL earthquake.

Admitting things are shit doesn’t mean giving up

I’ve always been fiercely attached to the idea that we’re the authors of our own stories.

I literally named my newsletter and coaching business Unwritten because I believe we hold the pen.

And I really, REALLY don’t ever want to see myself as a victim of my circumstances (this mindset probably cost me extra money in therapy).

But I’ve sometimes taken that too far. As though admitting something was wrong meant giving up control over fixing it.

At one of the lowest points of my life, I finally admitted to my best friend that things weren’t fine.

In fact, everything was shit.

And honestly? The relief of saying it out loud was ENORMOUS.

I still remember the exact moment all the pressure I was holding just dropped off my shoulders.

Nothing magically changed. But for once, I wasn’t trying to convince myself that everything was okay.

And that’s actually good for you. People who accept their difficult feelings tend to have better mental health.

The feelings, not the situation causing them.

Accepting that you’re angry doesn’t mean accepting what made you angry.

Admitting you’re unhappy doesn’t mean you’ve decided to stay unhappy.

You can hold the pen AND admit that the current chapter is a bit shit.

You don’t have to turn every difficult feeling into another personal development project.

And you certainly don’t have to smile your way through everything.

On Friday’s podcast, I go further into why waiting to feel better keeps you stuck.

I’d love to know: when was the last time you caught yourself pretending everything was fine? Hit reply or leave a comment, I read every one.

I still loooove samba by the way!

But next time the earth moves, the smile gets the night off.

With love,
Noemie x

When was the last time you caught yourself pretending everything was fine?

Leave a comment

Key Sources

Brett Q Ford and others, ‘The Psychological Health Benefits of Accepting Negative Emotions and Thoughts: Laboratory, Diary, and Longitudinal Evidence’ (2018) 115(6) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1075.

Jane M Richards and James J Gross, ‘Emotion Regulation and Memory: The Cognitive Costs of Keeping One’s Cool’ (2000) 79(3) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 410.

After a long summer break, and 10 months and 13 countries on the road, new episodes land every Friday. Follow so you never miss one: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or right here in the Substack app.

I’m bringing deep dives, interviews and video, so let me know how I could make the podcast better and the type of content that would be the most useful to you.

This first one was recorded in the wardrobe of an Airbnb in Mexico City, so apologies for the poor sound quality!! There was construction noises outside and a massive echo in the living room so that’s the best I could do.

This week’s question: when did trying to be healthy turn into a second job?

Most of us are doing more for our health than ever, and somehow we’re more knackered by it, not less. My theory is that the workouts aren’t the tiring part. As I put it in the episode: “The tiring part of being healthy isn’t really the doing, it’s the constant checking.”

In this episode

• Why the constant checking wears you out more than the workouts

• What happened when 631 people saw too much conflicting nutrition news (it didn’t end well for broccoli)

• The illusory truth effect: why “seed oils are poison” starts to sound true the 10th time you hear it, even when you know better

• How fibre went from “eat a few more veggies” to fibermaxxing and a mac and cheese with added fibre

• The Grain of SALT Test: 4 quick questions to decide whether a health trend deserves a place in your life

Chapters

00:00 When did being healthy become a second job?
00:54 Back from 10 months on the road
02:23 What happened to my routines while travelling
04:20 The tiring part isn’t the doing
06:13 What conflicting health advice does to us
07:13 Why your brain believes what it hears twice
08:29 Every health trend starts with a grain of truth
10:42 What happened when I let go
11:39 The Grain of SALT Test
13:00 Find the grain, count the salt

Mentioned in this episode

• The full Grain of SALT Test, with what each score means: Not Every Healthy Thing Deserves a Place in Your Life

If you liked this one, listen to

• Why Wellness Apps Can’t Fix Workplace Burnout

• Why Everything Feels So Hard (It’s Not Just You)

Sources

• lululemon Global Wellbeing Report, 2024 (16,000 people, 15 countries)

• Global Wellness Institute, Global Wellness Economy Monitor, 2025

• Nagler, Journal of Health Communication, 2014

• Fazio and others, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2015

• University of Colorado Anschutz, on fibermaxxing, 26/1/2026

• Kraft Heinz, PowerMac launch, 17/3/2026

• Global Wellness Summit, The Over-Optimization Backlash, 16/3/2026

I've fallen for a lot of wellness bullshit over the years, but the most cringe was probably when I avoided any coloured vegetables for MONTHS.

A nutrition programme I'd joined in Singapore claimed they had way too much sugar. So that meant no tomatoes, no carrots, no beetroot. Don't even get me started on fruits.

I know, I know...

WHAT. THE ACTUAL. FUCK?

Over the years, I've tried so many diets, workout programmes, 'advice' from podcasts.

I consider myself pretty smart, and I'm sure you do too, which is why it feels sooooo rough when we fall for wellness BS.

There's ALWAYS something new we're supposed to be doing.

Right now it's fibermaxxing, peptide injections and gadgets that promise to "regulate your nervous system".

And the annoying bit is that every single one of those trends has a little something true in it. That's exactly what makes them so believable.

Every health trend starts with a little grain of truth

Most health trends aren't TOTALLY made up.

There's always a little grain of truth somewhere. But then it gets coated in BS, layer after layer, like a little M&M, until you can't even see the grain anymore.

Fibre IS a genuinely important nutrient most of us don't eat enough of. Fibermaxxing didn't invent that.

Same with protein. It IS genuinely important, especially for keeping your muscles as we get older.

But now protein is in literally everything (protein water is the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard, and a lot of protein bars are just the nutritional equivalent of cake).

And when we hear the same claim often enough, it starts to sound true.

Psychologists call this the illusory truth effect. A claim you've heard before is easier for your brain to process, and your brain mistakes easy for true.

So the first time you hear it, you might raise an eyebrow and be like WTF, but by the 10th time, it just starts to sound true.

And the wildest part? In a 2015 study, this happened even when people already knew the right answer. Isn't this mental?

That's how we got "fat makes you fat" in the 90s, "carbs are the enemy" in the 2000s and "seed oils are poison" now.

And a lot of the salt goes on before it even reaches your feed. In 2014, a group of researchers compared 462 health press releases from 20 UK universities with the actual studies behind them, and found that 40% exaggerated the advice to readers. 33% took a simple link between 2 things and sold it as cause & effect.

And guess what? When the press release exaggerated, the news coverage usually did too. Which is exactly how we ended up with headlines like "A glass of red wine is the equivalent to an hour at the gym". The study was on RATS. And there wasn't even any wine in it, just a compound found in grapes (sorry to everyone who cancelled their gym membership).

So by the time a friend or colleague sends a link to a study or news article in your group chat, it's probably already been 'seasoned' a few times.

(wow, I'm really embracing the whole salt analogy...)

You don't have to bin the trend. Just scrape off the SALT.

Take fibermaxxing, and the grain of truth here is massive because most adults really don't eat enough fibre.

Then it got amplified: some influencers now push 50 to 70 grams a day, though intakes that high haven't been studied well enough.

Then it got taken over: earlier this year, the food company Kraft launched a high-protein, high-fibre mac and cheese.

Because nothing says gut health like a box of orange pasta...

So here's the 1-minute test I use now to question health trends and claims:

Fibermaxxing, for example, scores a 2: Amplified and Taken over. Keep the grain (eat more plants), definitely leave the maxxing.

You honestly don't have to keep up with every new health trend. You definitely don't have to try them all to find out (ask me how I know). You just have to count to 4.

On Friday's podcast (YES, it's BACK!), I go further into why trying to be healthy is so exhausting.

What health trend have you fallen for, and what's its SALT Score? Hit reply or leave a comment, I read every one!

For the record, that weird diet with no carbs and no coloured vegetables? Max SALT Score 4.

I owe every baby carrot in Singapore an apology.

With love,
Noemie x

P.S. Last Christmas I wrote you a list of wellness trends that need to die. The 2026 edition is already writing itself.

What health trend have you fallen for, and what's its SALT Score?

Leave a comment

Key Sources

Vernon W Dolinsky and others, 'Improvements in Skeletal Muscle Strength and Cardiac Function Induced by Resveratrol during Exercise Training Contribute to Enhanced Exercise Performance in Rats' (2012) 590(11) Journal of Physiology 2783 <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3424731>.

Lisa K Fazio and others, 'Knowledge Does Not Protect against Illusory Truth' (2015) 144(5) Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 993 <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26301795/>.

Petroc Sumner and others, 'The Association between Exaggeration in Health Related Science News and Academic Press Releases: Retrospective Observational Study' (2014) 349 BMJ g7015 <https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g7015>.

Debra Melani, 'Can a Fibermaxxing Social Media Trend Reverse America's "Abysmal" Intake?' (University of Colorado Anschutz, 26 January 2026) <https://news.cuanschutz.edu/news-stories/can-a-fibermaxxing-social-media-trend-reverse-americas-abysmal-intake>.

Kraft Heinz, 'The Best Thing Ever Just Got Better: Kraft Mac & Cheese Unveils PowerMac, Offering Added Protein and Fiber with the Same Cheesiness Fans Know and Love' (Business Wire, 17 March 2026) <https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260317869993/en/The-Best-Thing-Ever-Just-Got-Better-Kraft-Mac-Cheese-Unveils-PowerMac-O>.

'Peptides Promise Longevity and Healing. Does the Science Back Them Up?' (Scientific American, 2026) <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-behind-the-peptide-craze/>.

Emilee Coblentz, 'Tech, Sleep Tracking, and Social Fitness: Where Health and Wellness Is Heading in 2026' (Outside, 8 March 2026) <https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/health-and-wellness-trends-2026/>

Everyone has had the fantasy.

You disappear for 6 months, work on yourself somewhere nobody knows you, and walk back into your life a COMPLETELY new person.

New and improved. Like a pimped up car.

Well, I kind of get to do that.

After almost a year of travelling and working from anywhere, I'm flying back to Singapore in less than a month!

Which is, let's be honest, the perfect set-up for a Winter Arc.

If you've missed it, well done! You're clearly spending less time online than me.

The Winter Arc (also called the fall rebrand) is, as the New York Times explains it, a self-improvement challenge that pops up on social media every autumn: you get a head start on your goals before the year is over, instead of waiting for January.

But wait, are we trying to optimise New Year's resolutions by starting 3 months earlier?!?

The fucking AUDACITY.

And TikTok has a name for the whole mood: the Great Lock-In.

To be fair, the lock-in crowd has a point.

January is probably the absolute WORST time for self-improvement: the weather is miserable (in the northern hemisphere, anyway), plus we're all skint and a bit blue after the holidays.

So I get it, I feel the pull too.

Meanwhile, the other half of the internet is already heading for the exit.

After a year of backlash against optimisation, and a fucking lot happening in the world, I wouldn’t blame you for wanting to hibernate for the next few months.

My audiobook for the flight home is The Case for Quitting by Lindsay Crouse, who argues that quitting is a tool of perseverance rather than its enemy.

So me? Right now I’m somewhere in the middle. After a year of trying to keep my health routine going through hotel gyms, 6-hour bus journeys and altitude sickness, what I'm actually craving is to land, chill, and put my energy into my new sexy role at work.

But I also have big goals personally and professionally and I’m all up for trying to get a leg up.

So how do you ‘lock in’ without it becoming a full-time job, or your whole personality??

The quitters and the lock-in crowd are both half right

The Winter Arc is mostly about adding, and if you’ve been here for a while you know how I feel about that.

One 24-year-old in the NYT piece described it as the urge to add something else to your routine.

The problem is that every new goal lands on top of every other goal you already have. And every goal is fighting for the same little pot of time, energy and attention.

A 2026 meta-analysis in Nature Human Behaviour pulled together 235 studies on what happens when people adjust their goals as life gets hard.

• Being flexible with your goals was linked to MORE progress, and to better wellbeing.

• Letting a goal go was linked to less stress and anxiety.

• Choosing a new goal was linked to less stress too, AND to feeling better.

So the quitters are right: letting go takes the weight off. And the lock-in crowd is right: choosing what's next is what lifts you. You need both.

Most goals you shelve will still be there in January

And if letting something go feels like failing, relax: not every goal needs binning. Some just need a date.

A 2025 study followed 251 students who put a personal goal on hold to focus on their degree. 3 months later, only 2% had dropped it for good. Most had simply left it on the shelf, where it waited for them.

So "not now" is a proper decision in its own right.

So here's my own Q4 edit.

Keep #1: my workouts. I always joke that I like me better after a workout, and I'm pretty sure my husband does too. Even on the road, the Les Mills app on my iPad got me moving 4 or 5 times a week: press play = feel instantly better.

Keep #2: this newsletter. I'm writing this week's on my iPad in the back of a taxi, on a 6-hour drive through Ecuador (so yes, it's a little late). But whether it's early mornings or Sunday afternoons, it stays, because it brings me so much joy! (Oh and the podcast is back NEXT WEEK!)

Shelve: Ableton. Making music goes on the shelf until March. I loooove creating sounds, but I also have to pick my battles.

Build: showing up on Instagram from early November (let's connect here!), with 1 thought or idea every single day, unpolished and unfiltered. I'm building the habit first, I can polish later.

My trade: by saying yes to growing Unwritten on Instagram, I'm saying no to my evenings in Ableton. I’m ok with the trade off for a few months.

First step: writing down 10 ideas for my first posts, and capturing new ones every time I think of something.

Also binned: seeing ALL my friends in my first month back, clean eating (hello, I'm going back to South East Asia after 10 months away from its flavours) and any big fitness goals, well apart from the Singapore half marathon I signed up for in a moment of madness 3 months ago. I already regret it 🙃

So no, you don't need to walk into January a completely new person.

You get to walk in with 2 things still going well, 1 thing that's actually moved and 1 thing waiting patiently on the shelf.

And you still get to enjoy the rest of your year while you do it.

I've shown you mine, now show me yours: what's in your Q4 edit? Leave it in the comments, and if you're stuck between 2 things, I'll help you decide which one to prioritise.

As for me, I'm flying home after almost a year away as pretty much the exact same woman, with a much better idea of what deserves my energy.

Changing less, on purpose, and actually enjoying my year??

The fucking AUDACITY.

With love,
Noemie x

I've shown you mine, now show me yours: what's in your Q4 edit? Leave it in the comments, and if you're stuck between 2 things, I'll help you decide which one to prioritise.

Leave a comment

Key Sources

Lindsay Crouse, The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out (HarperOne 2026).

Zita Mayer and Alexandra M Freund, 'What Happens to Goals That Are Shelved? A 3-Month Longitudinal Experience Sampling Study' (2025) 49 Motivation and Emotion 495 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11031-025-10143-z.

Hugh Riddell and others, 'A Meta-Analytic Review and Conceptual Model of the Antecedents and Outcomes of Goal Adjustment in Response to Striving Difficulties' (2026) 10(2) Nature Human Behaviour 317 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02312-4.

TikTok, 'TikTok Next 2026 Trend Report: Irreplaceable Instinct' https://ads.tiktok.com/business/en-US/next.

Gina Cherelus, 'Are You Ready for Your "Winter Arc"?' The New York Times (New York, 27 September 2026) https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/style/winter-arc.html.

I cried during a spinning class.

If you're unfamiliar with the concept of indoor group cycling, think lights so dark that not tripping on your way to your bike is an achievement in itself, absolutely banging music, and usually a lot of tiny, high-ponytailed women in colour-matched Spandex looking like they're having the time of their fucking life.

And honestly, right before the tears, I was having the time of my life!

It was during COVID, when little moments of joy were few and far between, and at the time these workouts were the closest thing we had to going out with friends.

So my bestie and I did A LOT of spinning at that time.

Anyway, on that particular day, the instructor (who, blasphemy aside, I had nicknamed Spin Jesus) gave the class a spiel about all of us coming together as one, linked in our shared humanity by sweat, 1 pedal at a time.

It was both incredibly corny and really lovely and inspiring.

A room full of people, my darling bestie beside me, all together trying not to lose our fucking minds. I felt all the feels, hence the tears.

Getting healthier with someone beats having someone healthy around you

I doubt I'm breaking any news to you by sharing the idea that we change best when surrounded by others. “Accountability partners”, workout buddies and support groups are super common tropes, and for good reason.

We’re social creatures, so behaviour rarely happens in isolation. The people around us shape what feels normal, what feels possible and sometimes whether we actually end up even doing the thing at all.

But what I think we often miss is that having a healthy person around you isn't the same as getting healthier with someone.

A 2015 study followed more than 3,500 couples over 50.

If you weren't active and your partner stayed on the sofa, you had about a 1 in 4 chance of getting moving.

If your partner started moving too, you had a 2 in 3 chance of getting moving.

Surprisingly, that even beat having a partner who was already active.

Turns out, getting your shit together is contagious.

When someone like you does the thing, it suddenly looks doable. And every tiny win you share makes the next one easier.

Someone in it with you helps more than someone keeping an eye on you

The best person to do the healthy thing with might not be the person who's already good at it. Sometimes, it's the person who’s still figuring it out too.

Think about it. It's less intimidating. You'll go to the class or join a programme because you know they're going too, it's social and more fun. You both celebrate the small wins.

This isn't just having an accountability partner. You're not reporting to anyone here.

Because the best kind of accountability is the kind that you choose. Support is awesome until you start to feel like you’re being scolded, monitored or told what to do.

So you don't necessarily need someone stricter than you are, someone who will “motivate” you, who has done this before.

You need someone doing it WITH you.

Sometimes the best 'hack' for a healthier, richer, more joyful life is just another person beside you who's trying too.

You go because they go, they go because you go.

Maybe Spin Jesus was onto something after all.

With love,
Noemie x

What’s one healthy thing you’d be more likely to do if someone was doing it with you?

Leave a comment

Key Sources

Sarah E. Jackson, Andrew Steptoe and Jane Wardle, 'The Influence of Partner's Behavior on Health Behavior Change: The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing' (2015) 175(3) JAMA Internal Medicine 385 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2091401.

Andrew Prestwich, Mark T. Conner, Rebecca J. Lawton, Jane K. Ward, Karen Ayres and Rosemary R. C. McEachan, 'Randomized Controlled Trial of Collaborative Implementation Intentions Targeting Working Adults' Physical Activity' (2012) 31(4) Health Psychology 486 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027672.

I spent years wanting to smoke while also wanting to quit smoking.

Both at the same time. All the time. For years.

I’d wake up craving a cigarette. I’d go buy a packet and a lighter, only to throw everything out after 1 or 2 sticks because I felt so disgusted with myself. Until the next day, when the cycle would repeat.

I don’t even want to think about how much money I wasted over the years given the price of tobacco in Singapore.

Hopefully your unwanted habits are less expensive than mine used to be.

But you probably know what it’s like to want 2 opposite things at the exact same time.

And you might recognise this feeling in other areas of your life:

• You want to get fit AND you resent sacrificing your evenings to it.

• You want to eat healthier AND you don’t want to cook every night (and really don’t want the washing up).

• You want to drink less AND you don’t want to be the one explaining why at dinner.

• You want to be in bed by 10pm AND you also want the 1 calm hour of the day when nobody is asking you for anything.

In behaviour change we call this ambivalence, meaning that you want to change and don’t want to change at the same time.

Wellness culture only ever lets one side speak.

“Of course you want to be healthier, so then why aren’t you?!?”

Except... maybe part of you doesn’t?

Recognising our own ambivalence is helpful, and definitely worth paying attention to.

When a goal feels like something we ‘want to’ do, we face fewer obstacles and feel less pressure from the things competing with it.

When a goal feels like something we ‘have to’ do, we see more obstacles and more temptations everywhere around us.

And suddenly the mildest inconvenience becomes a perfectly good reason not to do the thing you said you would do.

For me it’s usually because it’s raining, I’m tired, the class is at a weird time anyway and there’s nothing in the fridge. Sounds familiar?

A goal can be yours, and the resistance can be yours too.

So what do you do with the part of you that doesn’t want the healthy thing?

You get curious about it!

Maybe exercising 4 times a week sounds great until you realise you’re giving up 4 evenings you actually quite like.

Maybe eating “better” means thinking about food even more than you already do.

I’ve written before about goals that were never yours in the first place but this is different.

In this case you do want the goal, you might just not want everything that currently comes with it.

All of that is useful information.

Once you embrace the dissonance and understand what’s pulling you, you can design better habits around honest goals.

So here’s the deal: you don’t have to win the argument with yourself every time.

You just need to hear both sides of the argument and pick a plan you can actually live with.

Much better deal than a packet and a lighter in the bin every single morning, if you ask me!

With love,
Noemie x

Key Sources

Milyavskaya, M., Inzlicht, M., Hope, N., and Koestner, R. (2015) ‘Saying “no” to temptation: Want-to motivation improves self-regulation by reducing temptation rather than by increasing self-control’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(4), pp. 677–693 <https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/2015_Milyavskaya_etal_JPSP.pdf>.

Have you ever found yourself on your couch at 7pm, watching Netflix after a long day at work, totally zonked, after getting the bus home instead of the gym?

Or with a full Uber Eats order in front of you instead of the meal you’d told yourself you’d cook tonight.

Or scrolling your phone in bed at 1am instead of getting a decent night’s sleep as you’d planned.

Because if yes, same.

This is issue 2 of my Wellbeing by Design Rentrée series. Last week I invited you to ask yourself what to take off your wellbeing load.

This week we take one habit worth keeping, and look at where and how it actually falls apart.

“How do I stay consistent with healthy habits when life gets busy?”

That’s probably the most common question I get as a Health Coach.

The thing is when we think about consistency, discipline and self-control (or our lack of), we picture those last seconds, the moment we cave: the bus stop, the Uber Eats checkout, the phone at 1am.

But the couch is only the end of a timeline. You actually had options all day.

You can change the situation early (leave the biscuits at the shop), you can try to shift your attention to something else, you can talk yourself out of it, or you can try saying no at the last second in the heat of the moment.

The earlier you act on that timeline, the less it costs you.

Leaving the biscuits at the shop is easy. Not eating them once they’re on the counter is not.

Researchers followed 159 first-year university students for a week. Their phones buzzed a few times a day to ask what they were tempted by and whether they resisted. At the end of term the researchers checked how their goals had gone.

Resisting temptation did not predict who reached their goals. What predicted it was how many temptations people ran into in the first place. Each one wore them down a little, whether they gave in or not.

The study only followed students for 1 term, so it shows a pattern rather than proving cause and effect. But it’s a pattern I see all the time.

Translation: you don’t reach your goals by resisting more temptations. You reach them by running into fewer temptations.

Which means that you’re looking at the wrong moment.

You replay the couch, the takeaway, the scroll, and feel like shit about that.

But the moment actually worth auditing is probably 2 or 3 steps before that.

It was the 4pm meeting that overran which meant you had zero energy or headspace for the gym after work (despite knowing it would make you feel soooo much better).

It was the fact there was nothing in the fridge to actually cook with.

It was the fact you picked up your phone to check something real quick at 8pm, but you’re still scrolling mindlessly 3 hours later.

Nobody feels guilty about a 4pm meeting, which is exactly why you don’t notice it taking over your evening.

I wrote about the plans we make on a calm Sunday in one of my favourite essays.

This is about what a busy Wednesday afternoon does to our cute little Sunday plans.

So next time you find yourself on the couch at 7pm watching a Netflix show instead of going to the gym, skip the lecture.

That’s just the last domino.

What would be more useful?

Go find the first one and knock that bitch over.

With love,
Noemie x

Key Sources

Angela L. Duckworth, Tamar Szabó Gendler and James J. Gross, ‘Situational Strategies for Self-Control’ (2016) 11(1) Perspectives on Psychological Science 35 <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26817725/>.

Marina Milyavskaya and Michael Inzlicht, ‘What’s So Great About Self-Control? Examining the Importance of Effortful Self-Control and Temptation in Predicting Real-Life Depletion and Goal Attainment’ (2017) 8(6) Social Psychological and Personality Science 603 <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550616679237>.

The French do September better.

We have turned the end of summer into an epic national event:

La Rentrée.

I loooove La Rentrée, which roughly translates to “the return” or “the re-entry”.

Every September, the nation collectively returns to life. It’s a major cultural and societal reset.

Kids go back to school.

Grown ups go back to work.

The arts come back from holiday too, with the publishing world dumping 500 novels on us in the space of 6 weeks.

Basically, we all get back to real life.

But with enthusiasm and energy rather than the post-summer blues.

The Rentrée energy is brilliant and September in general is a great opportunity to refocus on our goals.

But when we decide to “get back at it” after the summer, we nearly ALWAYS default to “let’s add more!”. More routines, more rules, more targets, more optimisation.

More, more, more.

And September is primetime for this. Apparently the improved autumn version of you gets up at 5am, drinks matcha, knows her sleep score for the past 6 weeks and possibly tapes her mouth shut at night.

I was thinking more cute notebook and “right, let’s sort ourselves out”, but OK.

But what if this September, we spent the energy differently?

Because September does feel different.

But also Spring. And New Year. And big birthdays. And Mondays.

Dai, Milkman and Riis figured out that those temporal landmarks help create a so-called “psychological boundary” between an old time period and a new time period.

Basically, these time milestones gift you a separation between an old version of you, and a new version of you.

And that separation can help increase so-called aspirational behaviour.

That’s awesome. We want to use that energy!

Though it is worth noting that these temporal milestones are great at getting us to start, and sure, getting going is half the battle won in some cases.

But they don’t really help us figure out whether whatever action we choose is wise, sustainable or actually useful in the long run.

They don’t tell us whether what we’re starting deserves the effort.

So to me the more interesting question is this: what are you going to spend that September energy on?

Because chances are you’re already doing so so much.

According to a Lululemon survey of 16,000 adults in 15 markets, 89% of respondents said they were taking more action to improve their wellbeing than they had been a year earlier, while almost half were experiencing “wellbeing burnout” and 61% felt overwhelming societal expectations to appear well.

And those wellbeing scores have not moved in 4 years.

There’s a specific (and exhausting) kind of mental labour that comes with wellbeing these days.

It’s about tracking, planning, checking, maintaining, evaluating, consuming, and sadly, a lot of second-guessing.

To me there’s something utterly absurd about stressing about your sleep score from a fitness tracker before you even check in with yourself to check how you feel.

There’s something ridiculous about the stress we put on ourselves to “do” self-care.

And clearly I’m not alone because there’s been a huge backlash against over-optimising everything, against the constant, competitive self-surveillance that seems to come with trying to look after ourselves.

The Global Wellness Summit, an actual wellness industry body, named the “over-optimization backlash” one of its trends for 2026. The wellness industry has apparently had enough of the wellness industry. Incredible.

Last week I wrote about dragging my Singapore routine around Latin America and what happened when it finally fell apart.

Here’s the part I left out.

Even when I wasn’t doing the routine, I was still mentally managing it. New city, new little calculation: when am I training, what time are we eating, what moved where, what am I supposed to be doing today?

Very efficient. Beautiful little internal operations department. Absolutely nobody had hired that little terror.

And when I finally stopped trying, I got something much better than a perfectly maintained routine: I got to just “be”.

To have a day without constantly asking myself whether I was doing health right.

Maybe yours isn’t a travel routine. Maybe it’s the app, the target, the eating rule, the recovery score, the account you keep checking because surely there is one more useful thing you haven’t learned yet.

None of these things need to be terrible to be costing you something.

Most wellbeing advice has one thing in common: it tells you to add.

Add a new programme, some habits and routines, a new protocol, systems.

We’re massively biased towards addition, I wrote about this here and here.

But chances are you already have a lot going on with a full life and work and family and trying to get to the gym and read books and have a great social life and generally be a decent human.

You can’t shove good habits in a life that has zero room for them.

Plus, adding feels so productive, you’re taking action. While removing doesn’t feel productive. It feels like you’re quitting, you’re lowering the bar of expectations, or worse, doing nothing at all.

But I don’t particularly want to become exceptionally efficient at wellness. I would quite like all this looking-after-myself stuff to leave me with MORE life, not less of it. More energy for people, work, movement, music, dinner, travel, fun. You know, the actual point.

So before we use all this lovely September energy to build something new, I want us to look at what is already there.

Less is not automatically better, but anything taking up space in your life and in your wellbeing deserves to earn its place.

So my question to you is this: what is taking up wellbeing bandwidth without earning it?

Here we are again, my friend! New season, fresh clean page ahead of us.

I’m not opting out of la rentrée (I love it way too much) but I’m definitely opting out of treating September as a shopping list for a new me. The current me is imperfectly existing, thank you very much.

September can keep the new me. I quite like this one. She just needs less admin.

With love,
Noemie x

P.S. And that is the idea behind this month’s series: the Wellbeing by Design Rentrée.

For the next 5 Tuesdays, at the end of each article I will share some tools, exercises and small experiments designed to make your wellbeing work a little better in actual real life.

Remember that experiments are not a judgement of our characters, we’re simply collecting data: we try something, see what works, keep what helps, tweak what doesn’t, and hopefully learn something useful about ourselves along the way.

This week, we’re starting with subtraction.

Right. Let’s goooo!

Next Tuesday

We’ll take one thing that is worth keeping and ask a different question:

Was your plan designed for the life you actually have?

New here? You’re reading Week 1 of the Wellbeing by Design Rentrée, a 5-week series of small experiments for making healthy living work better in real life.

Each week stands completely on its own, so you haven’t missed anything and there’s nothing to catch up on.

Subscribe free and I’ll send the next experiment straight to you next Tuesday.

Key Sources

Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman and Jason Riis, ‘The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior’ (2014) 60(10) Management Science 2563 <https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901>.

Global Wellness Summit, ‘The Over-Optimization Backlash’ (16 March 2026) <https://www.globalwellnesssummit.com/blog/the-over-optimization-backlash/>.

lululemon athletica, ‘lululemon’s Global Wellbeing Report Shows the Pressure to Keep Up with Wellbeing is Making People Feel Unwell’ (press release, 23 September 2024) <https://corporate.lululemon.com/newsroom/press-releases/2024/09-23-2024-120019912>.

I’ve started to feel the itch.

I usually feel it after a long weekend, or a holiday, or, in this case, at the end of a happy, sloooow summer.

I’m talking about the itch to “get back at it”.

Is it just me or do you feel it too?!

September is approaching fast, and with it the pull to get serious is kicking in hard. I can’t help it, making lists and planning getting back to a post-summer routine.

Especially since, in my case, autumn also means my impending return to Singapore.

It’s a bit like cleaning your house before the housekeeper arrives. I want to make sure I arrive back in Singapore looking absolutely fabulous. Refreshed eyes and clear skin, and like I haven’t spent the last 8 months eating my body weight in tacos.

But honestly, it’s not really about tacos. What I’m really doing is checking-in: did I let go too much? Did the old version of me sneak back in while I wasn’t paying attention?

Because there is a real, specific terror that comes after getting your life together.

I wrote about it a few months ago:

“I’ve rebuilt myself into someone who has her shit mostly together, but there’s still a quiet fear that the smallest leeway means sliding back. That if I’m not constantly monitoring, tracking, improving, the old version of me will somehow creep back in. She won’t, because I’m a completely different person now, but the fear doesn’t care about logic.”

So when we left Singapore back in December last year, I was committed to bringing my perfectly designed little routine on the road with me.

Strength training on Mondays and Fridays. My newsletters & podcast production on Mondays and Wednesdays. Cardio Tuesdays. No food after 8pm daily. I tried REALLY hard.

I’m a health coach, I help people with that stuff, surely I need to show that I can maintain great habits, right?

But it’s not that simple with a heavy travel schedule. With flights and packing/unpacking/repacking, with shitty hotel gyms, or being in the middle of nowhere with only 1 restaurant, and very much at the mercy of what they’re going to feed me.

So when we arrived in Mexico City for a whole month in early June, I was totally ready to have some fun!

I decided I was going to fall off the wagon, on purpose. To allow myself to just be, to chill, to let go of constant control and monitoring.

Basically, to have an absolute bare minimum summer.

I was bracing for the consequences. The physical ones, the mental ones, the “ohh I knew this would happen” ones.

But none of that happened.

We had the best time in Mexico, exploring beautiful old towns and eating the best food (I still have dreams about chile en nogada).

We chilled in the Peruvian Sacred Valley (no other option given how DEAD I was from altitude), enjoying the cinematic landscapes while sipping mint tea.

We also did the Inca Trail, which meant not giving a fuck about washing or brushing my hair for 5 days (delightful).

And now we’re chilling in Arequipa before flying to Lima (though I’ll be on a plane to Lima when you read this).

Turns out that letting go was wonderful, and nothing actually happened.

The fear has a name in the relapse research: the abstinence violation effect.

A lapse only cascades when you read it as a verdict on who you are (“I have no willpower, this is just who I am”) rather than information about a situation. The progression from lapse to relapse is not inevitable.

From my experience, the people most committed to all-or-nothing rules, the ones who felt the most guilt after a lapse, are usually the most likely to relapse fully.

This comes from addiction research, which I’m extending to ordinary habits here. Though as someone who gave up alcohol 3 and 1/2 years ago, I feel it explains a lot about my patterns honestly.

It’s been super freeing to realise, this summer but also this year in general, that I can let go. And that I’ve often been bracing myself for something that will never come.

Which is exactly the reason to enjoy the last few weeks of summer.

We’ll have enough time to worry about going full steam ahead over the next few weeks, so let’s enjoy the last few weeks of a happy, joyfully bare minimum summer.

I’m still learning and unlearning a lot of patterns from this. I try to practise giving myself some slack. And every time I do and nothing dramatic happens, my brain collects a little more proof that slack isn’t equal to sliding back.

That I can smash some carbs, miss a workout, go to bed without washing my face, and that it’s not an indication that I’m slowly returning to my old ways.

When I introduced this summer series in A Health Coach’s Case for a Less Impressive Summer, I said that to me a bare minimum summer was not about trying to optimise summer, but not abandoning yourself either:

“You can enjoy the summer meal and keep a tiny sleep anchor. You can travel and still move your body in a way that feels good. You can miss your routine without turning it into a personality crisis. You can have days that look nothing like your usual life and still feel connected to yourself”.

And while I start feeling the pull of September energy, I’m also hoping that we can bring a little bit of that energy to our rentrée.

Which leads me to this:

So report card verdict: passed with FLYING colours! ;)

The tacos didn’t break me this summer.

Honestly, they might have made me better.

Refreshed eyes and all.

With love,

Noemie x

P.S. How was YOUR summer? Fun? Exhausting? Full on? Chilled? I’d love to hear from you, let me know in the comments below!

Key Sources

Mary E. Larimer, Rebekka S. Palmer and G. Alan Marlatt, ‘Relapse Prevention: An Overview of Marlatt’s Cognitive-Behavioral Model’ (1999) 23(2) Alcohol Research & Health 151 <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6760427/>.

Nobody has ever asked me to work on holiday as much as I have asked myself to.

I’ve answered emails from poolsides and beaches, taken calls on trips, and worked 8 solid hours on long-haul flights on my way to actual holidays.

A few years ago I parked by Hutt Lagoon in Western Australia, the most amazing bubble-pink lake I have ever seen.

I honestly looked at it for about 15 seconds.

And then I called my colleagues.

A client back in Singapore was unhappy about something (I can’t even remember what now). My team was already handling it, everyone was completely fine without me.

Literally nobody had asked me to call.

But I just needed to know what was happening, to check, to make sure, to feel like I was still there. Maybe to feel like I was important?

Honestly most of my holidays have looked like some version of this and it might be a version of yours too this summer.

Which is why I got very interested when I came across a study about what being available for work actually does to our ability to recover.

In 2022, psychologists Thörel, Pauls and Göritz pulled together 121 studies on being available for work outside normal working hours.

Staying reachable was associated with worse recovery, worse wellbeing and worse private life, which won’t come as a surprise to anyone who had to ditch their partner in an exotic location for a Zoom call with the mothership.

And look, staying reachable does help some things at work, which is why people do it.

From my experience it gets you brownie points and it makes the post-vacation work catch-up less painful when you get back home.

But this is the interesting bit: they found no systematic difference between the effects associated with being expected to be available and actually being available.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ever be reachable, and some jobs genuinely require someone to be on call.

Maybe you’re the emergency contact, or there’s something super important happening while you’re away, or you work for yourself so disappearing for 3 weeks just isn’t realistic.

But there is a difference between that and everyone vaguely assuming you might be available, all the time.

The awkward part for me is that a lot of this research looks at expectations coming from employers, but mine mostly aren’t.

For the past couple of years I’ve split my working life between a company in Singapore with genuinely good leadership and work-life balance, and Unwritten, where I get to be my own boss.

And turns out I’m a really shitty boss to myself.

I’ll be the first person telling colleagues to log off, enjoy their holiday and deal with something when they get back.

Apparently those excellent working conditions do not extend to my own self.

And I think I learned a particular version of what being “good at work” looked like over the years.

I moved to Singapore at 23 years old and have spent most of my working life there.

It’s a fast-paced, competitive environment, and we never really thought of ourselves as fancy expats floating around Asia. We were immigrants.

And if any of you have ever worked in a different country, you know the drill: you worked hard, tried to keep your job, maintained your visa status and made yourself useful.

But somewhere along the way, “useful” became “reachable 24/7”.

Turns out being reachable 24/7 has a bill attached, and mine arrived in 2022 as a spectacular burnout.

Which is why France’s famous “right to disconnect” laws have always sounded VERY French to me.

Despite growing up in the Alps, I’ve never really worked there. Growing up, August basically meant the country was closed and everyone was on congés payés.

I assumed this law meant bosses couldn’t email employees after hours but unfortunately, it’s way less dramatic than that.

The whole point of the law is to get companies to define what ‘disconnecting’ means, and things like when employees can be expected to be reachable and when they’re not.

And that’s something I hadn’t really thought about for myself.

A couple of weeks ago I had to set an out-of-office because I was going to be completely offline in the Andes for 5 days of hiking on the Inca Trail.

Mine said, verbatim:

I am currently overseas with no internet access until the 6th of August. I will respond to your email when I return.

Notice how I didn’t say “responses will be delayed” or “I will respond as soon as possible”.

Like, no. I will respond when I come back online in a few days.

Obviously I’d given my colleagues in Singapore the heads-up. Plus the boundary was easy to maintain because I genuinely had no internet access on the hiking trail (It’d be a lot harder to do exactly the same thing with perfect WiFi...)

So before your next holiday, set some healthy availability boundaries with one of your colleagues.

It could be something like:

“Hey, I won’t check email while I’m away but text me if something urgent comes up”, or “Let’s do 1 check-in while I’m away, otherwise I’m offline”.

Obviously you may need to adapt these based on your job, just remember that “I’ll try not to work” ends up keeping your mind focused on the inbox.

Or like me, you can head somewhere with no 5G or WiFi for a week so you can realise by the end of it that you’re not indispensable after all.

And that’s a really good thing.

The Unwritten Check-In

This week’s bare minimum: Before your next vacation, agree on 1 availability rule with a colleague. Let them know when you’ll reply, what qualifies as genuinely urgent, and how to contact you if it is.

Ask yourself: Do people really expect me to be available, or have I made myself too available?

With love,

Noemie x

P.S. I am SO curious, what’s the most ridiculous place you have answered a work email from?

Key Sources

Eberhard Thörel, Nina Pauls and Anja S. Göritz, ‘The Association of Work-Related Extended Availability with Recuperation, Well-Being, Life Domain Balance and Work: A Meta-Analysis’ (2022) 12(4) Organizational Psychology Review 387 <https://doi.org/10.1177/20413866221116309>.

France, Code du travail, art L2242-17 (in force 1 January 2017).

Law Library of Congress, ‘Telework and the French “Right to Disconnect”’ (In Custodia Legis, 2020) <https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2020/08/telework-and-the-french-right-to-disconnect/>.

It was the night before the trek.

10 of us crammed into a little briefing room in Cusco, listening to our guides run through what the next 5 days would look like.

A family from Colorado and California, a couple from Chicago. Everyone decked in proper hiking gear, asking intelligent questions about the trek and the camping.

Liam and I were very much not asking intelligent questions.

We felt so intimidated, everyone else looked like legit experienced hikers!

Honestly, my main and only concern was the toilet situation (bush baños, it turns out, aren’t that bad, I just didn’t know that yet)

You could feel the nerves and the excitement bouncing off the walls, until someone cracked a joke about avoiding meat because of gas at altitude (I WILL NOT elaborate further, just google HAFE…it’s a thing).

The whole room burst out laughing. That was it. That was the moment.

We were off at 4.30am the next morning, the 10 of us and guides in a minibus for 2 hours heading to Kilometre 82, the start of the Inca Trail.

By the time we took our first steps, everyone was already chatting. By that evening’s dinner, it felt like we had known each other for a lot longer than a few hours.

I’ve been travelling for 8 months now, and if I’m being honest, I haven’t really felt uncomfortable.

My hubby and I are lucky enough to be able to do a lot of travels together. We always had a nice hotel or Airbnb to get back to, a nice hot shower.

But despite coming from the French Alps and hiking on the foothills of Mont-Blanc as a kid, I’ve lived in cities since I’m 20 years old. Plus Singapore isn’t exactly full of challenging peaks (fun fact: Singapore’s tallest ‘mountain’ is 163.6 metres or 537 feet above sea level).

This was really different. 5 days of trekking, 4 nights of camping, no mobile coverage, with 8 other strangers plus our tour guides.

We had never done a multi-day hike like this, and honestly we absolutely LOVED it!

The funny thing is that a group trek gave me what fancy luxury retreats usually promise, right? No phones for a few days, some daily movement, real food, sleep by 8pm and actual human connection.

We paid $1,000 per person. I’m pretty sure a similar experience in Bali or Tulum would be 4 times the price (ok but maybe with nicer toilets…)

Maybe some of you already know this feeling.

I didn’t know it until the Inca Trail. Which tells you something about how comfortable my life has been.

Here’s what was happening in those 5 days: climbing at altitude where the air is thinner and everything feels a little harder, breaking bread together as a group in our little tent at the end of each day. The food was genuinely fabulous, we even had CAKE!

People encouraging each other up the steep bits, waiting at the top, handing over snacks without being asked.

Small little things, but they add up so fast when there’s nowhere else to go.

Researchers call this pain as social glue. It’s the idea that shared physical challenge accelerates bonding between strangers. Brock Bastian, Jolanda Jetten and Laura Ferris published it in 2014: strangers put through mildly uncomfortable tasks together reported more bonding than groups doing the same tasks painlessly. Although when a Slovak team re-ran the cooperation half of that study in 2022 with 158 students, that effect didn’t hold. So, a good description, to be taken with a pinch or 2 of salt. What isn’t shaky: in 2010, Holt-Lunstad, Smith and Layton pooled 148 studies covering 308,849 people and found strong social relationships associated with a 50% higher likelihood of survival.

Basically: we survived the same hill = ok, we are family now.

After this experience, I think there’s a lot to be said for doing something hard together.

Now you’re probably not reading this from the wilderness. Maybe you’re allergic to the very idea of wilderness.

But you don’t need to quit your job and fly to Peru for the Inca Trail.

What the trail had that normal life doesn’t:

1) something hard happening to everyone at the same time, with the same people, more than once

2) no way to leave early without everyone noticing

Two conditions, that’s it.

A running club works. An actual group, usually with a WhatsApp chat, where people will notice if you don’t show up. The shared suffering of the last kilometre is always a great bonding experience!

My point is, the hard thing doesn’t have to be a mountain, it just has to be shared.

Machu Picchu was never on my bucket list, it was more of a “we’re spending a year in Latin America, how do we not go?” kind of decision.

On night 2 of camping, I was freezing on a mountain top, genuinely unsure how 5 days could possibly feel like anything other than forever. It did not feel like it was going to go fast.

But it went fast. So fast. TOO FAST!

When we got to the Sun Gate and Machu Picchu appeared below us, I actually cried.

I was so emotional because of the 5 days it took to get there, and the 9 people I got there with.

Machu Picchu was spectacular. But I had already had the best part.

The Unwritten Check-In

This week’s bare minimum: put yourself in one situation this week where something mildly hard is happening to everyone at the same time, with the same people, more than once. A group run. A class you commit to weekly. A dinner you actually stay for. Let the hard bit happen.

Ask yourself: what am I opting out of that I could stay for? And who would I be closer to if I did?

With love,

Noemie x

P.S. If you want to build more of this into your everyday life without overhauling everything, the Bare Minimum Habit Plan is exactly that: small anchors that actually stick. You can find it at unwritten.coach/summerplan

Key Sources

Brock Bastian, Jolanda Jetten and Laura J. Ferris, ‘Pain as Social Glue: Shared Pain Increases Cooperation’ (2014) 25(11) Psychological Science 2079 <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614545886>.

Jakub Prochazka and others, ‘Pain as Social Glue: A Preregistered Direct Replication of Experiment 2 of Bastian et al. (2014)’ (2022) Psychological Science <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35129413/>.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith and J. Bradley Layton, ‘Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review’ (2010) 7(7) PLoS Medicine e1000316 <https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316>.

What I wanted to say was: “Because I’m busy BEING”

But she’s a dear friend and a sweetheart and also someone who posts A LOT so I wanted to be careful with my response.

And honestly I felt a bit defensive, like there is something wrong with me for not wanting to post every landscape, every tourist site, every experience, every cafe, etc.

I have to justify why I am not using something which I believe isn’t very good for me.

Because, though it sounds dramatic, I’ve totally redefined my relationship with my phone and with social media the past couple of years. I’m really proud of it and I am so much happier for it.

Living your life and documenting your life are 2 separate jobs, and right now I only have time and headspace for one.

Especially if the invisible audience in my head is changing how I experience my own life.

Like, who are the moments we’re documenting for?

Are you taking a picture because you want to remember a beautiful moment, you want to capture something unexpected, or you think it would look great on Instagram?

I’m living a once-in-a-lifetime experience (writing this from the most beautiful village in the Sacred Valley in Peru).

I don’t want to be in the most beautiful scenery with my nose in my phone, because I’m editing reels and videos, or checking if my posts got enough likes.

I want to be fully present with my hubby, I want to be fully present in the experience.

So from the get-go I was very intentional that I didn’t want to spend my life on Instagram, or worse, trying to engineer experiences so I could take pictures or videos of them.

Taking a photo because you plan to share it can actually make you enjoy the experience less, while taking the exact same photo just for yourself doesn’t have that effect.

That’s because the moment you plan to post it, you switch off from whatever is currently happening and start thinking about that invisible audience in your head.

Barasch, Zauberman and Diehl found this across 5 separate studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2018.

The same researchers also found that taking photos makes a positive experience more enjoyable since we’re paying more attention to what’s in front of us.

But the problem isn’t the camera, it’s who you’re already performing for.

And I’m not pretending to be a monk here. I’m trying to be all grown and evolved and matured, but this is not coming from a smug place, this is coming from someone who was admittedly addicted to Instagram and still finds it so hard to resist the urge to look at the data. Did people see it, did they like it, etc.

I got hooked during the pandemic: memes, music, news, etc. I did not have the energy to keep in touch with people, so that was my way of expressing my fears, my frustrations, without actually messaging people.

The rethink didn’t come from some clean “aha” moment.

It came slowly, messily, from therapy and journaling and, the big one, giving up alcohol.

I had drifted, from myself, from my goals, from my actual life, and the correlation was obvious: every hour on the app was an hour I wasn’t spending on what actually mattered to me.

I don’t blame the platform entirely, these were strange times.

So I stopped performing for it, started redirecting that energy inward, and I slowly shifted my focus from what others were doing to what I was doing.

That’s when things started to change.

I have had a million incredible experiences on this trip, it’s been everything I was expecting but so much more: farniente on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, carnival in Barranquilla, celebrating Mexico’s goal with my new favourite people, being in the Andes now trying to figure out if it’s an alpaca or a llama.

Honestly at times I felt like I was living in a movie.

Back in April in Guatemala, my hubby and I were having a coffee outside a church when a female tourist set up her tripod and did the full Sound of Music twirl with her skirt.

And my first instinct was that cringe, you know?

But then I caught myself. Because she’s not the problem. She’s just responding to a system that told her that her experiences only count if they look a certain way.

That the memory only sticks if it gets likes, that she needs to perform the joy, feeling it is not enough.

I’ve been her. Most of us have.

People probably feel a lot of that pressure when choosing their vacation destination spots, being instagrammable, the outfits they bring, where they stay and go for dinners, so they can post content.

I find the idea so sad.

So I have taken thousands of photos and videos over the past 7 months, but I’ve barely had the time to look at them. We’ll be back in Singapore in less than 3 months, and there’ll be plenty of time then to go through pictures and make pretty reels. For now I just want to be.

So if you’re feeling the pressure for your summer to look, rather than feel, a certain way, this is your cue to zoom out.

You’re still allowed to take the photo, the question is simply: who is the photo for?

Take it because the light is insane and you want to remember that exact moment.

Take it because your hubby is laughing and you never want to forget that face.

Take it because YOU want it, not because someone else is waiting for it.

Notice which is which.

Post the reel, make the pretty grid, AND still have had the day fully for yourself.

And if you’re like me, that means mismatched outfits, silly hats, no makeup, a little gut hanging out joyfully, with the biggest smile on your face, absolutely not a camera flash in sight.

The Unwritten Check-In

This week’s bare minimum: Let 1 thing go 100% undocumented this week, or take 1 photo of the experience but don’t post it online (buy a frame and print it instead).

Ask yourself: Would I still choose this, wear this, visit this or photograph this if nobody else would ever see it? Am I here, or am I already posting this?

With love,

Noemie x

P.S. I’d love to know! What’s 1 experience you’ve kept just for yourself lately? No caption, no likes, just 100% yours. Hit reply, I’m all ears from my little corner of the Andes :)

Key Sources

Alixandra Barasch, Gal Zauberman and Kristin Diehl, ‘How the Intention to Share Can Undermine Enjoyment: Photo-Taking Goals and Evaluation of Experiences’, Journal of Consumer Research, 44/6 (2018), pp. 1220–37 <https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucx112>.

Kristin Diehl, Gal Zauberman and Alixandra Barasch, ‘How Taking Photos Increases Enjoyment of Experiences’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111/2 (2016), pp. 119–40 <https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000055>.

I can’t plan a long travel journey without immediately thinking: How am I going to use the time productively?

So when my hubby booked a 6-hour bus journey going from Oaxaca to Puebla, Mexico, you bet that I had the most productive plan for it.

I made sure all my files were available offline on my MacBook. I had a week of Substack Notes to write. 2 newsletters to finish. Emails for my LegalTech job to draft. All types of cables to charge my devices while on the bus. A killer playlist to get me in the zone.

How romantic! The life of a coach and content creator on the road. Right?

Wrong. I lasted about 30 minutes.

Then I closed the laptop, stared out of the window, got annoyed there was no 5G, listened to the killer playlist, opened the laptop again, achieved very little, closed it again, and spent the rest of the journey doing several things (badly) while doing nothing. Counting the minutes until we arrived (the playlist remained excellent, I am a DJ, after all).

The scenery was absolutely stunning too, which somehow made me even more annoyed with myself for not being able to simply look at it and enjoy it like a normal person.

I’m a health coach, I write about wellbeing, I speak about mental wellness, and being present and mindful.

The problem wasn’t that I had failed to work, the problem was that I could not let the time become anything else.

I had already assigned those 6 hours a purpose, so once the work stopped happening, the journey felt wasted.

Looking out of the window was not rest, it was evidence that I should be getting more done.

I think a lot of us do this.

We are fine with stopping, but only when stopping has a job.

Rest so you can perform better tomorrow.

Take a walk to clear your head.

Meditate to improve your focus.

Read something educational.

Lie down, but only if it’s while listening to a podcast that will make you more informed, emotionally intelligent and also possibly fluent in Español.

Even the pause needs an output.

I’ve written about this before, but bringing podcasts in the shower was probably not my proudest to be honest.

I’m so allergic to the productivity bros, but I also realise how much of the bullshit I’ve internalised and need to unlearn.

And the wellness industry has not exactly helped, right?

Rest now comes with sleep scores, recovery metrics, breathwork green streaks and evening routines with 10 steps and a scented candle.

Somehow, we have managed to turn switching off into another area in which we can underperform.

Then there is the other version of stopping, where you collapse onto the sofa and lose 2 hours to your phone. I’ve done that too, you can read about it here.

I am not here to judge or prosecute scrolling. Sometimes watching complete nonsense is exactly what the evening requires (Netflix dating shows being my favourite not-so-guilty, guilty pleasures).

But I know the difference between 20 minutes that gives my brain a break and 2 hours that leaves me blinking into the darkness with a sore neck and no idea what I have been looking at.

The difference isn’t whether the activity is worthy enough to “count” as rest.

It is how you feel afterwards.

In 2015, over 18,000 people from 134 countries participated in the Rest Test.

The test asked individuals which activities they considered restful and the most popular answers were painfully ordinary ones: reading, being in nature, being alone, listening to music, doing nothing in particular.

Notice how there’s no fancy protocol or measurable return here, just old school ways to chill. None of these require you to produce anything either.

Which is also why doing nothing can feel soooo uncomfortable at first.

When we’re used to filling every pocket of empty space with something, a pause doesn’t immediately feel peaceful.

It’ll likely feel boring, restless or vaguely wrong at first.

So the answer isn’t to become brilliant at resting, it’s to be ok being slightly bad at resting.

Allowing yourself to stare out of the window without a podcast in the background.

Letting yourself listen to music without pairing it with a task.

Or in my case, taking a shower without feeling the urge to use the time to learn something.

So I did waste those 6 hours to Puebla. Just not by failing to write the newsletters.

The Unwritten Check-In

This week’s bare minimum: Do 1 restful thing that produces absolutely nothing. No learning, tracking, documenting and definitely no earning it first.

Ask yourself: What would feel restful if it didn’t have to be useful?

Noemie x

P.S. If your summer has turned into travel days, screens and “I’ll just rest when things calm down”, check out my Summer-Proof workshop. It’s free, 45 minutes, and helps you build a few anchors that survive heat, travel and a 10pm dinner.

Get the workshop →

Key Sources

• Claudia Hammond and Gemma Lewis, ‘The Rest Test: Preliminary Findings from a Large-Scale International Survey on Rest’, in Felicity Callard, Kimberley Staines and James Wilkes (eds), The Restless Compendium (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK453237/>

• Wellcome, ‘Results of World’s Largest Survey on Rest to Be Announced’ (press release, 27 September 2016) <https://wellcome.org/press-release/results-worlds-largest-survey-rest-be-announced>

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I’ve eaten very, VERY well in Mexico.

Tacos. Mole. Big breakfasts. Late dinners. Food I’d never tried before and immediately wanted again.

For years, I could have sat at those exact tables and missed half of the experience.

Not physically. Mentally.

I spent years being physically present at wonderful meals while mentally somewhere else, calculating what they meant. I refuse to miss my life that way anymore.

Was that too much? Should tomorrow be lighter? Had I walked enough? Could I still be someone who looked after herself if dinner came with bread, fries and dessert?

Imagine travelling all the way to Mexico only to bring MyFitnessPal along as an emotional support animal.

What a boring use of a fabulous country.

I don’t do that anymore.

Not because I’ve stopped caring about my health or how food makes me feel. Because I care too much about being inside my actual life to spend a brilliant meal doing imaginary maths.

The best moments of the past 7 months have often happened around food. Sitting down somewhere new. Ordering the thing I’ve never heard of. Passing plates around. Laughing. Walking home full and happy.

Letting the meal be a meal instead of a referendum on my character.

That is what food guilt steals from you.

The food is over in 30 minutes. The mental invoice can last until breakfast.

Your brain opens a spreadsheet. Was it worth it? Should I be “good” tomorrow? Do I need to compensate? Is this what people who take care of themselves do?

And suddenly you’re no longer tasting the food. You’re defending it in an imaginary court.

Caring for yourself and enjoying food are not opposing teams.

Sometimes taking care of yourself looks like ordering something fresh because that is genuinely what sounds good.

Sometimes it looks like eating the tacos, full stop.

Sometimes it means stopping when you’re comfortably satisfied. Sometimes it means eating the whole dessert yourself with full commitment because sharing would be a personal tragedy.

You are allowed to consider your appetite, your body and how you want to feel without turning the meal into a test you can pass or fail.

The question that changed this for me was brutally simple:

What would I choose if I didn’t have to justify it tomorrow?

Not what is technically healthiest. Not what would earn approval from the invisible wellness committee in my head.

What do I actually want from this meal, besides getting it right?

Maybe you want pleasure. Maybe you want to try something you cannot get at home. Maybe you want connection, satisfaction or enough energy to keep exploring afterwards.

Maybe you want the bread while it is still warm.

And once you’ve chosen, you get to stay at the table.

No mental negotiations. No promising to be better tomorrow. No turning breakfast into penance because dinner was large.

The point isn’t to get every meal right.

It is to stop making every meal mean so much.

Some meals will be light. Some will be enormous. Some will be worth travelling back for and some will be a disappointing croissant you abandon after 2 bites.

None of them needs to become a verdict.

Eat the bread while it’s warm. Tomorrow is allowed to be an ordinary day, not a repayment plan.

The Unwritten Check-In

This week’s bare minimum: let 1 meal end when the meal ends. No compensation maths, no moral debrief, no plan to make up for it tomorrow.

Ask yourself: what would I choose if I didn’t have to justify it tomorrow?

Noemie x

P.S. If summer has turned into late dinners, unfamiliar food and vague calculations about whether you are still “on track”, I re-recorded my Summer-Proof workshop. It’s free, 45 minutes, and helps you build the few anchors that can survive heat, travel and a 10pm dinner.

Get the workshop →

The last few weeks have been a lot, in the good way.

Wrapping up a fabulous month in Mexico City, where I ate the best food of my life and watched the World Cup in packed bars (we don’t talk about France and the semi-final...) Then on to beautiful Oaxaca, where I’ve mostly been swimming in mole.

In between: packing, moving, and closing out sessions with my coaching clients.

And despite having access to a genuinely great gym this whole time, I have not visited it anywhere near as often as the version of me who arrived had planned.

There’s a very specific kind of guilt that shows up when you miss a workout.

As if: workout missed = routine compromised = identity under full review.

Dramatic? Yes. Familiar? Also yes.

Because of course I was going to train.

Then the day got hot, the time made no sense between coaching and football, dinner moved to 9pm, and the workout quietly vanished.

And because the workout vanished, my brain filed the whole day under “fell off”. Let’s go again tomorrow.

Which is a bit rude, because on days like that you may not “exercise”, but you DO move.

You walk to breakfast, climb 3 flights of stairs, wander a market, carry your bags.

That’s 100% movement. It just doesn’t come with a mat, a timer, or someone shouting “last set, team”.

I’m a health coach, and I love a proper workout. On the road, mine is basically press play on a workout video, follow the plan, feel smug for the rest of the morning. Beautiful.

But summer isn’t always built for beautiful. Summer is heat, travel, late dinners, weird gyms, and the kind of humidity that makes a strength session feel like a negotiation with your will to live.

Here’s where the wires cross. We think: I didn’t work out today, so I didn’t move.

But your workout and your movement aren’t the same thing.

Your workout is the structured bit: the gym session, the spin class, the run, the video I press play on because designing my own session in a 34°C Airbnb is a tax I’m no longer willing to pay.

Your movement is the bigger category: the walk to dinner, the stairs, the swim, the dancing, the long route home because the evening finally cooled down.

A workout is one kind of movement, not the whole thing.

And this isn’t me being generous. In a study of more than 25,000 people who did no formal exercise at all, around 4 minutes a day of incidental movement, climbing stairs, carrying shopping, rushing for a bus, was linked to a 26 to 30% lower risk of early death (Nature Medicine, 2022).

The stairs and the bags weren’t the consolation prize. They were doing what the workout was supposed to do.

That means most of the health benefits of being active come from your total movement across the day, not the structured session. You could, in theory, never do a formal workout again and still collect the vast majority of them. The workout builds fitness on top. Lovely to have but not the foundation.

That matters, because summer and travel will absolutely mess with the structured bit. They won’t always let you train. They rarely stop you moving.

So here’s the only split worth making this summer. Your workout gets to flex. Your movement is the thing you protect.

For me, the baseline is steps. The workout videos come and go with the Airbnb, the gym, the wifi and the heat. The steps don’t. (I've made the full case for walking before, including why the magic number is lower than you think).

Your baseline might be totally different. A walk after dinner. Swimming whenever there’s water. Taking the stairs without turning it into a moral event.

The point isn’t to make movement impressive. It’s to make it something that survives your actual week.

On a good week, do the workout too. On a melted, jet-lagged, fully booked week, protect the movement that still fits.

You haven’t fallen off anything. You were moving the whole time.

So the question isn’t “how do I keep my training plan intact through summer”. Good luck with that.

The real question is quieter: what movement still happens on a day when the workout doesn’t?

Name it. Protect it. Let everything else be a bonus.

The Unwritten Check-In

This week’s bare minimum: pick your 1 movement baseline and write it down. The smallest thing that happens whatever the day looks like, so a missed workout stops counting as a fallen-off day.

Ask yourself: what movement can still happen on a day when the workout doesn’t?

Noemie x

P.S. If you want the bare-minimum version of all of this, the anchors that survive heat, travel and a 10pm dinner, I re-recorded my Summer-Proof workshop. It’s free, it’s 45 minutes, and it’s built for the weeks when workouts don’t happen.

Get the workshop →

Every year, summer arrives with the same weird pressure.

Relax, but make it meaningful.
Have fun, but don’t lose your routine.
Be present, but also document everything.
Rest, but come back glowing.

Eat the ice cream, but somehow also maintain the body, the habits, the steps, the sleep, the inbox and the version of yourself who had a very sensible plan in June.

Honestly, it’s exhausting.

And the best parts of summer are usually the ones you can’t post, track, or sell as a $100 protocol.

The late dinners. The long walks. The slightly feral travel days.

The cold gasp when you get in the sea. The lunch that runs into the afternoon because nobody checked the time. The dance floor where, for once, nobody is filming.

That’s the whole point of The Bare Minimum Summer Series, which runs here on Substack through July and August.

Not optimising summer, but not abandoning yourself either.

Just finding the few tiny anchors that help you still feel like you when life gets louder, hotter, later, messier or more social than usual.

Because the choice isn’t between becoming a wellness robot and letting the whole thing go to hell until September.

There’s a middle.

You can enjoy the summer meal and keep a tiny sleep anchor. You can travel and still move your body in a way that feels good. You can miss your routine without turning it into a personality crisis. You can have days that look nothing like your usual life and still feel connected to yourself.

That’s what we’re doing here. This isn’t a reset or a challenge or a laminated plan for becoming your best self by September. It’s just the bare minimum, built for real life.

So before you decide what you’re “sticking to” this summer, ask a better question:

What are the 3 things that help me feel like myself?

Not impressive things or Instagrammable things or things a health coach on the internet would approve of. Your ACTUAL things.

Maybe it’s one proper breakfast. Maybe it’s a swim. Maybe it’s walking after dinner. Maybe it’s sleeping enough twice a week. Maybe it’s one phone-free meal with someone whose face you like. Maybe it’s doing the bare-minimum version of your workout and calling that a win, because it is.

Pick 3.

Those are your summer anchors, and they’re allowed to be deeply unimpressive. Everything else, the streak, the challenge, the 5am club, the colour-coded meal prep, you get to shrink, pause, or quietly let it die.

I don’t know about you, but I’m craving more analogue experiences. Phone-free, real, the kind that aren’t immediately turned into content, proof or evidence that I’m living correctly.

And I don’t think I’m the only one. People are tired. Tired of feeds, prompts, dashboards, optimisation, everything becoming content, everything becoming data.

One of my favourite things about being in CDMX during the World Cup, with the Mexican team doing so well so far, has been watching the games in packed pubs, phones face-down or in pockets, everyone losing their minds at each goal, strangers hugging, nobody trying to optimise the moment because we were too busy being inside it.

I’ve done less this June than I have in years, on purpose, and I’ve rarely felt more like myself.

A summer the internet would file under “lazy” might turn out to be the one you actually remember.

Fewer screens, more sand, and a version of you who gets to September rested instead of needing to be scraped off the floor.

So if there’s water nearby, go and jump in.

And if there isn’t, find the thing that brings you back into your actual life. That counts too.

The Unwritten Check-In

1. This week’s bare minimum: pick your 3 summer anchors. Choose the small things that keep you feeling like yourself, write them down, and let everything else be optional.

2. Ask yourself: what are the 3 things that help me feel like me, even when the routine’s gone?

With love,
Noemie x

P.S. If your routine has fully left the building and you’d like the bare-minimum version that survives heat, travel and a 10pm dinner, this is your week. My Summer-Proof workshop, The Bare Minimum Habit Plan, drops Friday morning: free, 45 minutes, and basically this idea with an actual plan attached. Register now and it lands in your inbox the second it’s live. Register here → unwritten.coach/summerplan