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>

  ---

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

Let me save us both some time, because I have done all of it.

The meal-replacement shakes for lunch. The fat-free biscuits eaten by the sleeve because fat-free meant they didn’t count, right? Noom. MyFitnessPal. Weighing every single thing I ate. Tracking calories burned as if my life depended on it.

And when none of it worked in the long run, which it never did, I did the only thing any of us were trained to do.

I assumed I was the problem.

I clearly just didn’t want it badly enough.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out the truth, so I’ll hand it to you for free: the problem was not that I was uniquely weak. And if you grew up in this too, I doubt it was you either.

It was the game. The whole rigged, expensive, unwinnable game, and the people quietly getting rich off you believing you were the broken part.

I honestly thought the game was over now.

Surely body positivity won, we all did the work, we’re terribly evolved, right?!

It didn’t end.

It rebranded.

It got a glucose monitor, a protein target and a longevity podcast, and it started calling itself wellness.

The diet culture I grew up with had exactly 1 virtue: it was rude enough to be honest about what it wanted.

Heroin chic was the trend, and “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” was printed on actual posters, for actual sale.

Whole magazines built pages around circling a stranger’s cellulite. It was cruel and it was loud, and the only mercy of loud is that at least you could hear it coming.

The 2026 version is sneakier, because it doesn’t say “lose weight”.

It talks about gut health. Hormones. Longevity. Cortisol, which is suddenly everyone’s emergency. It says, “I’m not dieting, I’m just being really intentional about my protein,” over a lunch that is identical to the sad desk salad of 2004, except now there’s a ring light on it.

And the genuinely annoying part is that some of it is real.

Vegetables are good. Lifting is great. Protein matters. Sleep matters. Health matters.

That is what makes it so fucked up.

The same plate of food can come from looking after yourself or from quietly policing yourself, and from the outside nobody can tell which. Sometimes the only difference is the weather inside your own head.

The wellness industry stopped telling you to be smaller and started telling you to be better, which is a much harder thing to say no to.

Nobody wants to be the one standing against “better”.

You want proof of how hard-wired this is? After pressure from regulators, TikTok blocked searches for #SkinnyTok, a hashtag linked to unhealthy weight-loss content and extreme thinness, especially among young adults.

Within days, people were using slightly different spellings.

You can block a hashtag. You cannot block the wiring underneath it.

Then the weight-loss injectables arrived, and everyone lost the plot in both directions at once.

So, carefully.

GLP-1 drugs are not a 14-day cleanse. They are real medicine that genuinely helps a lot of people, including people with diabetes and serious health risk. If one of them has helped you, that is your business and I am honestly happy for you.

Nobody is cheating.

Wanting to feel better in your body has never once been a moral failing, and I’ll fight anyone who says it is.

This is not an “Ozempic bad” newsletter.

It’s that a genuinely useful medical tool landed inside a culture that still reads thin as proof of character, and the culture did exactly what it always does.

It ate it.

Thin came quietly back into fashion. Runway size diversity went backwards. Some retailers scaled back plus-size ranges again. We invented the phrase “Ozempic face,” then a whole second industry to fix the thing the first industry supposedly caused, which is honestly the most 2026 sentence I have written this year.

And the “right” body has always cost money, but it used to be a cheaper con: a diet book, a gym membership, a cupboard of sad cereal.

Now it can be a prescription, a subscription, a stack of supplements, a glucose monitor on someone who has never been near diabetes. The acceptable body comes with a monthly bill. If you’ve got the money, you buy your way in. If you haven’t, you get judged from the cheap seats, same as ever.

And before the blokes reading this get comfortable: it came for you too.

Looksmaxxing. Jawline tutorials. Testosterone clinics. 75 Hard. The Oura ring scoring your sleep like a quarterly review you can fail while unconscious. Lean, hard, tracked, optimised, never soft in any direction.

Same assignment, translated into a different language.

Everyone is tired, and not just of dieting. Of optimising the entire experience of being alive.

Food is data. Sleep is a score. A walk is “zone 2.” Rest got rebranded as “recovery,” so even lying on the sofa is now a performance metric.

At some point, ordinary life starts arriving with homework attached.

And when the self-improvement to-do list is infinite, people don’t get motivated. They go flat. They scroll somebody else’s protein at 11pm, feel worse, and quietly think: fuck it.

That is not laziness, and I will not have it called laziness.

That is what happens to a normal person who has been told since roughly age 9 that their body is a problem to be managed, and that the managing never, ever ends.

Eventually the road just runs out.

The nihilism isn’t a flaw in you. It is a completely sane reaction to a game you were never going to win.

So let me say the thing this whole newsletter is built on, because I think some of you need it tonight.

You are not weak.

You did not fail at wellness.

You are tired because you were handed a rigged game as a child and told that losing was a personality defect, and you’ve been paying the entry fee ever since.

The exhaustion is not the problem with you.

It might be the most reasonable thing about you.

So here is what I’m actually burying.

Not health. Not strength, or good food, or medicine, or wanting to feel good in your skin, or wanting help, or changing your life.

Keep all of it. It’s yours.

I’m burying the old contract underneath it.

The one nobody signed but everybody absorbed.

That your body is public evidence.

That your appetite needs a chaperone.

That what you eat is a readout of your character.

That you have to get the body sorted before you’re allowed to rest, relax, or take up room.

That’s the part I want in the ground.

You can care about your health without spending your one life apologising for the shape of it.

And because I’m not going to leave you with a feeling and no door handle, here is the one small thing.

This summer, don’t add a rule.

Take one away.

Pick a single food you’ve quietly filed under “bad” and stop filing it there. Eat it at a normal table like a normal person, and notice that your life does not, in fact, fall apart.

No good foods, no bad foods. More variety, less purity. Less “what will make me acceptable,” more “what actually makes me feel good, in the body I’ve got, in the real summer I’m actually in.”

Two to sit with this week, men included:

1. What’s one “healthy” rule you’re carrying that, if you’re honest, is just diet culture in a better outfit?

2. If you fully trusted yourself with food, what’s one thing you’d stop doing tomorrow?

Reply and tell me the first one.

I read every single one, and saying the thing out loud is most of the work.

You don’t owe anyone a smaller plate this summer.

Noemie X

P.S. If this hit a nerve and you want help turning it into an actual system, I have x2 Summer-Proof 1:1 Coaching spots left before I close enrolment tomorrow. Over 4 weeks, we build a personalised wellbeing system around your real life: food, movement, rest, stress, travel, busy weeks and the moments that usually knock you off track.

No meal plans, restriction or optimisation theatre, just 4 private coaching sessions with support between them, and a practical blueprint you can keep using.

I’m closing because I’ll be travelling through Peru, Bolivia and Chile next month, and I only coach when I can give clients my full attention.

First step: book a free 20-minute discovery call to see if we’re a fit ➡️ Book a discovery call.

You probably do not need another morning routine. Or another tracker. Or another “science-backed” protocol from someone selling a supplement stack, a nervous system reset PDF, and a suspiciously expensive mushroom powder.

You need space.

Space to notice what is actually going on, space to stop building habits on top of a life that is already at capacity, and space to design wellbeing around your actual life instead of around the Fantasy Self who sleeps 8 hours, meal preps, strength trains, journals, stretches, replies to everyone, drinks enough water, and has apparently never once woken up in a mood.

Fabulous human. Very aspirational.

Does that person exist on a random Wednesday after 6 hours of sleep, back-to-back meetings and 100 unread emails? Unclear.

And this is not just a vibe.

Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace found that 41% of employees worldwide feel a lot of stress every single day. That is 4 in 10 of us, already at capacity, and still being told the answer is one more morning routine.

“I’m Noemie, and this is Unwritten Potential: a newsletter about behaviour change, evidence-based wellbeing, and why the wellness industry keeps making simple things weird. I write for smart, health-curious people who want to feel their best without making it a full-time job”

If that already made your shoulders drop by 3%, hello. You’re probably in the right place.

You’re in the right place if...

You know what to do when it comes to your wellbeing, but real life keeps eating the plan.

You care about your health, but you cannot bear one more person telling you to optimise your morning before you have even had coffee.

You want evidence without the academic cosplay, and practical tools without a giant system that becomes another thing to maintain. And you are so tired of treating your body like a performance review.

You have tried the apps, the books, the podcasts, the habit trackers, the clean eating phases, the accountability partners, and the beautifully organised Notion templates. Some of it helped, some of it became another chore, and some of it quietly made you feel worse.

And now you are standing there thinking: I know enough. So why does this still feel so hard??

That question is the whole reason this newsletter exists.

What is Unwritten Potential about?

Unwritten Potential is a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing, and health behaviour change, written by me, certified health coach Noemie Mooney, for smart, health-curious people who want to feel their best without making it a full-time job.

In plainer terms: every week, I write about the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.

And not from the “wake up at 5am and master your life” angle. No fucking way!

I write about behaviour change for real life. Stressy life, travel life, work life, bad-sleep life, too-many-tabs-open-in-the-brain life. The kind of life where your Sunday Self makes a beautiful plan and your Wednesday Self looks at it like, “absolutely NOT happening.”

The main themes:

• Behaviour change for real life: habits, motivation, self-trust, follow-through, all-or-nothing thinking, tiny experiments, and why discipline works better when the design is not fighting you.

• Wellbeing without the performance: movement, sleep, food, stress, mental wellbeing, social connection, and the boring basics that keep winning even when the internet tries to make them deeply unsexy.

• Wellness industry critique: biohacking, optimisation culture, pseudoscience with affiliate codes, productivity theatre, cold plunge content as personality, and anything that turns health into a moral ranking system.

• The overloaded modern brain: phones, attention, information overload, decision fatigue, open loops, invisible load, and the quiet exhaustion of being expected to have an opinion, a routine, a side quest, and a regulated nervous system at all times.

• Personal field notes: what I am learning from coaching, travel, sobriety, marriage, corporate life, legaltech, DJing, yoga, and being a 43-year-old woman who has no interest in becoming palatable for the algorithm.

The tone around here is warm, sharp, practical, occasionally sweary, and allergic to wellness theatre. We are evidence-informed, and we are not joyless about it.

What I stand for (and against)

Let’s be honest about what’s happening out there.

Modern wellness is a multi-billion-dollar machine with one business model: make you feel inadequate, then sell you the fix. The detox teas. The $100 superfood powders. The “what I eat in a day” purity content.

The 75-day discipline challenges and the longevity bro lecturing you about your mitochondria. Same scam, different packaging.

And the anxiety it creates? Not a side effect. It’s the product.

So for the record: I’m against wellness as an aesthetic. Against optimisation as a full-time job. Against marketing that manufactures anxiety so it can sell you the cure. Against pseudoscience with a discount code, and anti-science with a podcast. Against your health being recruited as a political identity. Your body is not a team jersey.

What I’m for is less glamorous but it actually works. Sleep. Movement. Real food. People you love. Less noise. Behaviour change that’s designed for your actual life instead of demanded from it. Medication when it’s clinically right, with zero moralising. Subtraction before addition. Joy. And you, trusting yourself again.

Why this exists

I spent a lot of my 30s in Singapore being great at my job and terrible at looking after myself. Smoking 20 a day, drinking in a way that had stopped being fun, running on 5 hours of sleep. Very functional on the outside, a bit of a dumpster fire on the inside.

And because I had a corporate-trained, high-achieving, project-management brain, I did what people like us do: I tried to fix it with more. More systems, more trackers, more books, more rules, more fresh starts on a Monday.

Without realising it, I was basically project-managing my own collapse. Very professional. Beautifully formatted. Absolute nonsense.

This led me to SPECTACULAR burnout, The Great Debacle (yes, I branded my breakdown…)

The problem was not that I lacked information (I could have coached someone else through it). The problem was that I kept trying to add healthy habits into a life that had no space for them to live.

The thing that eventually changed everything was not a dramatic reinvention. No epiphany, no mountaintop, no 30-day glow-up montage with tasteful linen trousers.

The thing that changed everything was subtraction.

I stopped asking “What else should I add?” and started asking “What needs to go?” What is draining me? What am I pretending is fine? What am I carrying that was never mine? What would make this easier?

Over time, that changed everything. I quit drinking, stopped smoking, lost 20 kilos, and rebuilt my relationship with movement, food, sleep, stress, work, and myself.

Then I retrained as a health coach and behaviour change specialist and built the framework I now use with clients, in my writing, and in my own life.

Not because I have everything figured out. Please.

I still overthink, I still over-optimise, and I still occasionally create a plan so ambitious it should come with its own operations team.

The difference is that now I catch the pattern faster, I work with myself instead of against myself, and I have tools that actually survive contact with real life.

What is the MAKE SPACE Method™?

The MAKE SPACE Method™ is a subtraction-first approach to behaviour change, created by certified health coach Noemie Mooney, who trained in design thinking at the Stanford d.school.

It takes that human-centred design discipline and points it at personal change. Rather than piling new habits onto a life (and mind) that is already full, it works through four phases, UNCOVER, SUBTRACT, DESIGN and SUSTAIN: clear the space first, then design habits that actually survive real life.

It is built around a simple idea: your life is already full. Stop building on top of a life that was already at capacity.

Most habit advice starts with what to add. Add the workout, add the meditation, add the meal prep, add the sleep routine, add the journalling, add the app, add the system. Cool. Fabulous. No problem.

Except you already have a life. A body, a job, relationships, responsibilities, moods, travel days, bad sleep, hormones, stress, a phone full of messages, and possibly a deep ancestral urge to lie horizontally and be left alone.

This is why so many habits collapse. The design was built for your Fantasy Self, not your Actual Self.

And forget the 21-day myth. When researchers actually tracked habit formation in the real world, it took an average of 66 days for a new behaviour to become automatic, and anywhere from 18 to 254 days depending on the person and the habit. So if it has not become automatic in 3 weeks, nothing went wrong. The timeline was always longer, and it was always personal.

The method has 4 phases, and the order matters.

UNCOVER: what is actually going on? Not what you think “should” be happening, not what your planner says, and not what the productivity guy with the podcast mic thinks your morning should look like. What is actually happening in your life, body, energy, attention, environment, and schedule.

SUBTRACT: what needs to go before you add anything else? That might mean removing friction, shrinking the goal, pausing a commitment, clearing digital noise, lowering the standard, or admitting that a habit was borrowed from someone with a completely different life. Subtraction is the move almost nobody makes. It is also the one that changes everything.

DESIGN: what would make this easier? This is where the habit finally comes in. By now it is not a fantasy routine floating above your actual life, it is one small intentional thing designed around the reality you just uncovered and the space you just created.

SUSTAIN: what is the plan for when life gets loud? Because it will. Travel happens, work explodes, sleep goes weird, motivation disappears, and your schedule laughs in your face. The wobble is not a failure. It is a design requirement, and Sustain is where you plan for it without turning every disruption into a full personality crisis.

This is the method I use with 1:1 clients, the engine behind my live cohort Wellbeing by Design, and the backbone of this newsletter. Not because it is flashy. Because it works with humans: annoying, complicated, tired, hopeful, inconsistent, brilliant humans. My favourite kind.

It’s where most people start: one full lap of the method on one habit, done over a weekend, as a self-coaching course ($97).

By the end, you’ll have more than a habit plan. You’ll understand what’s getting in the way, what actually works for you, and how to create change that fits your real life instead of fighting against it.

From there, it’s Wellbeing by Design.

What is Wellbeing by Design?

Design thinking plus coaching: that combination is the whole thing. I call it Wellbeing by Design.

Wellbeing by Design is design thinking applied to wellbeing. It is a framework and a mindset. The framework: understand what’s really going on, subtract what’s draining you, design one small thing that fits your life, then keep it going when life gets loud. The mindset: treat your wellbeing like an interesting problem to solve, with curiosity instead of judgement, experiments instead of perfection, enthusiasm instead of shame, and an open mind instead of a rulebook. There’s a problem. We get to go and solve it.

It runs as a live cohort twice a year, in January and September and you can join the waitlist to get more info when it opens.

What do you get if you subscribe?

Every Tuesday morning ET, a new essay on behaviour change, wellbeing, or why the wellness industry keeps making simple things weird. Every Friday morning ET, a podcast episode (currently on a summer break, returning in September). Same energy, different format.

You’ll get evidence translated into plain English, practical experiments you can actually try, essays that help you understand your patterns without drowning you in shame, and the occasional coaching question that makes you go quiet for a minute.

You’ll finally understand why that Sunday-evening “I’m NEVER drinking/scrolling/skipping the gym again” voice keeps letting you down, and what to design instead. And when travel or work derails everything, you’ll know how to restart in minutes rather than months, without the shame spiral.

What you will not get: “become unrecognisable” energy, shame dressed up as empowerment, or wellness that makes your life worse.

The goal here is not to become a perfect person with a perfect routine. The goal is more self-trust, more energy, more clarity, and more habits that actually survive the life you have.

Subscribe now

Want to start right now?

Subscribe and I will send you the Bullshit Audit, completely free. It is a 20-minute exercise to help you see where your energy, attention, time, and capacity are leaking. It is also Module 1 of the MAKE SPACE Method™, which makes it the obvious place to start.

The MAKE SPACE Reading List comes tucked inside: the 8 best essays behind the method, matched to each phase, so you can go deeper without disappearing into 47 tabs.

No glow-up challenge, no 12-step morning routine, no homework disguised as liberation. Just a practical place to start.

Subscribe now

New here? These 6 podcasts will show you exactly what this place is about:

1. If you keep planning for a version of yourself who does not exist:

Stop Planning for a Person Who Doesn’t Exist

2. If being hard on yourself has not magically produced a better life: Why Being Hard on Yourself Isn’t Working

3. If sleep has become another thing to fail at: Sleep Anxiety: The Counterintuitive Fix That Works

4. If you are tired of wellness making simple things weird: 3 Books the Wellness Industry Doesn’t Want You to Read

5. If you know what to do, but cannot seem to do it consistently: The One Thing Nobody Tells You to Do First

6. If your brain is being deeply unserious: The Audacity of Your Own Brain

Who is Noemie Mooney?

⚡ Former Queen of Bad Habits turned Certified Health Coach. I write for smart, busy people exhausted by wellness culture but still want to feel good. Behaviour change science + design thinking, minus the BS.

Before the coaching, I spent ~20 years in Singapore corporate, innovation and legaltech, and I still work in the industry today. I trained in design thinking at the Stanford d.school, and the MAKE SPACE Method™ is what happened when I pointed those exact tools at the hardest problem of all: getting a real, tired human to change their own behaviour on a normal Tuesday.

That part matters. I am not writing about burnout and behaviour change from a perfect little wellness bubble. I am still close enough to the machine to know exactly how the machine works.

I am French, from the Alps originally, lived in Singapore for nearly 20 years, and am currently travelling through Latin America with my husband Liam (which sounds glamorous until you realise I still have deadlines, bad WiFi, laundry, hormones, and the occasional existential crisis in an Airbnb kitchen). I have been sober since March 2023, I am an electro DJ who has played the Singapore Grand Prix, I swear, and I cry at dog videos.

Disciplined and chaotic, soft and hard, professional and wild. The contradictions are not confusion. They are what happens when you stop trying to fit your whole self into one polite little box.

The point

I do not want wellbeing to become another thing you are behind on, and I definitely do not want you outsourcing your self-trust to trends, apps, protocols, or imaginary future versions of yourself with perfect discipline and no unread messages.

I want you to have tools that help you come back to yourself, understand your patterns without turning them into proof that you are failing, and build habits that make your life feel more yours. Not smaller, not stricter, not more impressive online. More yours.

That is what we do here. We stop adding more to a life that is already full, we clear space, we design for reality, and we keep going when life gets loud. All without making wellness another performance review.

Welcome to Unwritten Potential. I’m so happy you’re here.

Noemie x

Key Sources

Gallup. (2024). State of the Global Workplace: 2024 Report.

Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674

I am writing this from Mexico City during a very football-heavy month.

My laptop is open. There is football on in the background.

My phone is close enough to keep checking the group chats every time something happens in the match, which is apparently every 18 seconds.

Technically, I am working.

Technically, I am also watching the football.

Technically, I am also keeping up with friends commenting on the match, because apparently none of us can simply experience one thing at a time anymore.

And this is the annoying part: every screen has a decent excuse.

The laptop is work.

The match is fun.

The group chat is friendship.

The phone is maps, bookings, messages, match commentary, photos, travel plans, family updates, work notifications, weather, tickets and restaurant links.

So when someone says “just use your phone less”, I want to ask: which part?

The useful part?

The social part?

The admin part?

The “I need the address” part?

This is why detoxes have never worked for me, and I’ve tried, with full ceremony, more than once.

I announce it (usually online, which in hindsight was the tell). I picture some calmer, slightly smug version of myself emerging phone-free with better posture.

Then real life turns up. I need a boarding pass, or a bank code, or to actually reply to a human being. I pick the phone up, and 40 minutes later I surface from a comment war between two strangers about a restaurant I will never go to, having achieved nothing and learned less.

The detox was always going to lose. The setup was the problem, every time, however much willpower I threw at it. A detox treats your phone like a vice you give up. Fair enough for some of it.

But the phone is also where half of modern life is actually run, and that’s never more true than in summer, when the plans multiply and the routines go soft around the edges.

There’s a 2017 study, led by Adrian Ward at the University of Texas, that I think about a lot. People were given tasks that needed real focus, with their phone in one of 3 places: on the desk, in a bag or pocket, or in another room.

The further away the phone, the better they did. The ones with it on the desk did worst, even with it face down and switched off. It didn’t need to buzz or light up. It just had to be there.

That’s the uncomfortable bit. Your phone doesn’t have to be in your hand to be in the room. It can be face down on the table and still be in the conversation, or sitting by your bed and quietly setting the tone of your morning before you’ve properly arrived in it.

Which is also oddly freeing, because it puts the whole thing back in your hands. The lever is the room: where the phone sits, what it can reach you through.

And moving a phone into another room is a much smaller ask than overhauling your character into the tidier, more disciplined person who, let’s be honest, was never going to show up.

That’s the idea behind the way I coach this, the MAKE SPACE Method™: you change the setup, not the person. It’s also why I start by clearing what’s in the way before adding anything new.

A few boundaries worth trying this summer

None of these needs a 30-day challenge, or deleting every app, or becoming the kind of person who says “I’m not really online much” while replying to everything within seconds. They’re boring on purpose, and a boring boundary is the kind that survives a real week.

None of them touch what’s actually on the phone, which is its own rabbit hole. I went into that side, curating your feed so the scroll is at least worth something, in an earlier piece on becoming the curator of your own attention. This one stays one level simpler: where the thing physically sits, before you even get to what’s on it.

• Put the phone in another room. This is the one I’d start with, because it does the most for the least effort. When you sit down to do the thing that actually matters, the phone goes in another room. Not face down, not on silent, not tucked under a notebook (adorable, fools nobody). Give it a real shape too: “when I sit down to write, the phone lives in the bedroom until the timer goes” beats “I’ll use my phone less”, because a boundary needs a moment, a place and a thing you actually do. Without those it’s just a good intention in nicer clothes.

• Let one screen win at a time. If the match is on, watch the match. If you’re with someone, be with them, not your notifications. One thing gets the room for a defined stretch: one half, one work block, one meal, one walk. Most of us aren’t really multitasking, we’re switching fast enough that we can’t feel the cost until the evening ends and we’re oddly tired and not actually satisfied by any of the things we were half-doing. The group chat will still be doing the most at half-time.

• Give logistics a window. The phone is genuinely useful, so the smart move is to give the useful stuff a slot of its own and let it stay there. The booking, the address, the score, the “where’s everyone meeting” message: batch them. 10 minutes before you leave, one check at half-time, one afternoon planning block, instead of 47 tiny checks that leave your attention looking like it’s been through airport security. Logistics stops leaking into everything else.

Your Unwritten experiment this week

Look at where your phone is right now. Like for real, actually look.

On the table, in your hand, on the bed, in your pocket and quietly available. Then put it in another room for the next hour. Not as a personality transplant. Just an hour.

Then notice what happens. Maybe it’s calmer. Maybe you go a bit twitchy and produce 4 urgent reasons you need it back immediately, one involving a delivery, one a family emergency, and one a thing you have genuinely never cared about until this exact second. Notice that too. Either way, you’re getting a clear read on how much of your attention an object can quietly claim while it sits there doing nothing at all.

Because this was always about the thing underneath screen time, which is what the screen keeps pulling you out of. The meal you’re half in, the walk you’re barely clocking, the match you’re watching through everyone else’s commentary instead of just watching the match.

Your life is happening in the room you’re actually in. So this summer, see if you can let yourself be properly here for more of it.

The phone will still be there in an hour.

With love from Mexico City,
Noemie x

P.S. If you’d like to actually do this rather than nod along and forget by the weekend, I made The 7-Day Phone Boundaries Reset. It’s a $17 practical guide for people who want their phone to stop running the room, without pretending it isn’t part of modern life.

Source: Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140-154.

I finally did the thing I’ve been dreaming about for months: I stopped moving.

After 6 months of packing and unpacking and working out which adapter goes in which wall, Liam and I landed in Mexico City for a full month!

A full month with the same Airbnb, the same morning walk, the same gym, the same Walmart Express, the same café across the road.

And I love it here. I had really high expectations and CDMX has cleared every single one of them.

The World Cup vibe is electric, the city is beautiful, the people are so warm and fun and kind, and the food. THE FOOD! I could write you 5,000 words on the tacos alone but you’d probably quietly unsubscribe, so I’ll restrain myself.

There’s just 1 thing I did NOT see coming. The altitude!

I genuinely didn’t expect it. CDMX sits around 2,240 metres, which is high, yes, but nothing next to somewhere like Cusco (where we’ll be in a few weeks).

I’m fit, I’m strong, I assumed I’d be totally fine.

Instead I’ve spent the past week lethargic AF, foggy, heavy legs, out of breath from simple movement.

I’ve been so zonked that I have only a hazy memory of my work calls, a couple of coaching calls, and an ENTIRE Substack Live.

A whole live. I hosted it, I was present, I have the recording so I know i was there, and I could not tell you 90% of what came out of my mouth.

(to the absolute legends who showed up and stayed to the very end: you are my rock in my moments of self-doubt, and yes, I am re-recording the session this week so the replay can star a version of me who appears to be alive 😂)

Now, the old me, pre-2023 me, would have done one of 2 things:

Powered straight through it, running on caffeine and denial , with too much red wine most evenings, going out when I had nothing left, then wondering why I felt worse. And do this on a loop over and over again.

Or worse, I read the flatness as a kind of moral failing, proof that I was undisciplined and falling behind, and I bullied myself for not keeping up with a plan I had made back when I had more energy in the tank.

What I did instead was quieter, and honestly it took me YEARS to learn: I backed my own judgement over the plan’s.

A calendar I’d filled in weeks ago, back when I had working lungs, was telling me to keep going. But I was the one actually living in this body at 30%, so I let myself, not the calendar, make the call. I eased off, walked slowly, dropped the workouts, and re-recorded the live rather than forcing it.

That sounds like a small thing, but I promise you it’s the whole entire thing.

Because this is what coaching is really about, and it’s sitting right there in the word Unwritten. You are the author of your own story, and the expert on your own life. Not me, and not your fitness tracker, your protocol, social media, or that dude on the podcast either. The whole foundation this work is built on is that you already hold the answers.

My real job is to ask the question you haven’t thought to ask yourself, then shut up while you answer it. Done well, you say something out loud that you didn’t know you knew.

And it’s rarely about something as obvious as rest. It’s the sleep you keep sacrificing, the training that stopped fitting your life, the eating that’s quietly become a second job, the boundary you can’t seem to hold. The topic is different every time. The move, you arriving at your own answer, is not.

And this, exactly here, is where the wellness industry has its hand in your pocket.

The entire business model depends on you not trusting yourself. On you believing the real expertise lives in the next purchase, the better app, the next “30-day programme”, the stricter regime, the influencer who has supposedly cracked a code your own body can’t.

Every protocol sold as the fix is whispering the same thing: you are not the authority on you. Someone else is, someone who knows better what you need, all payment methods accepted.

Coaching makes the opposite assumption. That you already know far more than you’ve been allowed to believe, and that you’ve simply been talked out of trusting it, over and over, by people with something to sell.

And honestly? I watch creators who started around the same time I did, now way further along and way more successful than me, well at least on paper. Building a business on integrity is not always easy. Some days it is sooooo tempting to think, fuck it, I’ll package up some bullshit and watch it outsell the real thing.

But I don’t, and I won’t. I actually believe this, deeply, that you are the author of your own story and you already know more than the industry has let you believe. So I’ll keep saying it, slower growth and all. The real thing is the only thing I’m willing to put my name on.

It’s also why my MAKE SPACE Method™ opens with subtraction instead of addition. Adding more is the industry’s move, and it assumes the answer is out there in one more thing you haven’t bought yet.

Making space assumes the opposite: that you already have most of what you need, and it’s just buried under all the advice, apps and rules you’ve been sold. (I forgot my own first rule here, for the record. It took altitude flattening me to remember it. The irony is not lost on me my friend)

So here are 2 questions worth sitting with this week, wherever you are and whatever your oxygen situation.

1. What’s 1 area of your life where you’ve quietly handed over the pen?

One corner of your health, your fitness, your wellbeing, where you’re following a plan, a number, a rule, or a voice that isn’t yours, even though some part of you suspects it doesn’t fit the life you’re actually living.

Then ask yourself the question I asked myself this week, flat on the sofa in CDMX with the football on:

2. If I genuinely trusted that I’m the expert on my own life, what would I do differently?

Maybe the answer arrives straight away. Maybe it doesn’t, because it is genuinely hard to see your own life clearly from the inside, and close to impossible when you’re running on empty. That’s not you failing. That’s just the view from in here.

And it’s the whole reason coaching exists.

You can absolutely do this on your own, and I hope you do. But it’s hard to read a room you’re standing in the middle of, especially when you’re fried.

That’s all a coach is: a second pair of eyes on your own life, asking the questions you wouldn’t think to, until the answer you couldn’t find is suddenly so so obvious.

You don’t leave with my answers. You leave with yours, plus a way of looking after yourself that actually fits your real life, not one more plan you’ll abandon by July.

That’s the work I do 1:1.

I’m still totally zonked, and the altitude and I remain in active negotiations. But I’m tired in a way I’m allowing, rather than tired in a way I’m fighting and judging and trying to optimise into submission.

Whatever your version of that calendar is, the plan, the tracker, the rule you keep dutifully obeying even though it doesn’t fit, you are allowed to overrule it.

Take the pen back. It was always yours.

With love from Mexico City (where I’m walking slowly, eating spectacularly, and letting my lungs catch up in their own time),

Noemie X

P.S. If you want a hand with it, that’s exactly what Summer-Proof 1:1 Coaching is! Over 4 weeks, we build you a way of looking after yourself that survives real life, the busy weeks, the travel, the weeks you’ve got nothing left, so you stop starting over every single Monday. You walk away with a plan built around your actual life, not someone else’s morning routine, and the confidence to trust it. 4 spots, $987, open until 30 June so we can do the sessions before I head to Machu Picchu in August. The first step is just a free 15-minute call to see if it’s a fit. ➡️ Book a discovery call here.

P.P.S. The re-recorded replay of last week’s workshop, The Bare Minimum Habit Plan, goes up this week (now starring a version of me who has clearly slept!) It’s the smallest version of looking after yourself that survives your actual summer, worksheet included. Keep an eye out here Friday morning.

Key Source

The coaching approach here is built on motivational interviewing, the client-centred method from Miller & Rollnick that draws out your own reasons for change rather than instructing you. For a recent review of the evidence across diet, physical activity and other health behaviours, see Motivational Interviewing to Promote Healthy Lifestyle Behaviors (2025).

It is 36°C in Mérida and my Fantasy Self had plans.

She had a morning movement routine, a hydration system, a reading habit, a Spanish practice block, and the kind of sleep schedule that assumes the sun sets when you tell it to.

Beautiful woman. Super organised. Apparently unbothered by the fact that walking outside here at 2pm feels like being gently poached.

Then, life... Up late watching Netflix, a late long lunch that became a longer one, getting lost in beautiful Merida, and by 5pm the only habit still standing was the one where I lie under the aircon, sunburnt, and quietly question my life choices.

This is the part nobody tells you about summer.

Summer gets sold as the season of the reset. New light, new energy, the vague sense that this is finally the moment you become consistent.

And then summer actually arrives, with its travel days and its heat and its barbecues and family obligations and its general refusal to follow your calendar, and the whole reset falls over by the second week of July.

So we do the most human thing imaginable. We respond to a season that breaks routines by forcing it and building a bigger routine. More habits. More structure. More ambition, stacked on top of a life that already has a heatwave and 3 social plans in it.

It does not work, because the plan was built for a version of you who is not the one actually living through August.

Your summer plan is written by your Planner Brain. Your summer is survived by your Survivor Brain.

Planner Brain sketches the gorgeous 6am routine on a calm Sunday afternoon.

Survivor Brain has to execute it on 5 hours’ sleep in a kitchen that is somehow already 30°C before you have found the coffee. They are not the same person, and only one of them is here in July.

Here is the bit I care about

Habits do not usually fail on the hard days. The dramatic, everything-is-on-fire days have a strange clarity to them.

Habits fail on the ordinary disrupted day, the one after the travel, the one where the routine got interrupted exactly once and your brain quietly filed the entire thing under “ruined, start again Monday.”

And the start-again-Monday move is the real problem. Not the missed day.

Phillippa Lally and her team tracked people forming new habits in real life and found 2 things worth tattooing somewhere visible. First, habits take far longer to settle than the tidy 21-day myth suggests, anywhere from 18 to 254 days, with massive variation between people. Second, and this is the one for summer: missing a single day did not meaningfully derail the process.

Read that again. One missed day does not break the habit. What breaks the habit is deciding that the missed day broke it.

Which is exactly where the bare minimum comes in.

The bare minimum is not the lazy version. It is the floor.

A bare minimum habit is the smallest version that still counts as a yes. The one you could do on your worst summer day without negotiating with yourself.

Not “30 minutes of strength training,” but 5 squats while the coffee brews. Not “8 hours of flawless sleep,” but the phone out of the bedroom. Not “a 20-minute meditation,” but 3 slow breaths before you reach for your phone in the morning.

The small version is not as good as the big one, and nobody is pretending it is. On a normal day, do the big one, absolutely. The point of the floor is that it keeps the thread unbroken when life gets loud, so there is no Monday to start again from. You were never not doing it. You were doing the floor.

This is subtraction-first thinking, which is the spine of how I coach. Most people trying to get through a summer with their wellbeing intact do not need to add a single thing. They need to find the floor of what they already care about and protect that, savagely, while everything else flexes around the heat.

And give the floor somewhere to live. New behaviours are much easier when they are pinned to something already happening, so “I’ll move more this summer” becomes “after my morning coffee, 5 squats.” After the thing you already do, the tiny thing you want to keep. The heat can take everything else. It cannot take the 90 seconds after your coffee.

Your honest audit for the week

In keeping with the deeply unsentimental energy of mid-year, here is the one thing to sit with.

Pick a single habit you actually care about keeping this summer. Just one.

Then ask the uncomfortable question: what is the version of this I could do on the worst day, the 36°C, badly-slept, 3-plans-already day, without it feeling like a defeat?

That version is your real plan. The ambitious one was never the plan. It was the fantasy. Write the floor down, attach it to something you already do, and let the rest be a nice-to-have.

Your summer does not need you at your most optimised. It needs you still in the room come September, thread unbroken, mildly smug.

For now, go and find your floor. It is lower than you think, and that is precisely why it will hold.

With love from Mérida, where the bare minimum is most of what is on offer and I have made my peace with it,

Noemie x

P.S. I’m opening 4 Summer-Proof 1:1 coaching spots this month, at $987, closing on 30 June. It is for people who are tired of figuring this out on their own and want someone properly in their corner while they build it. If that has been quietly on your mind, this is me mentioning it. Have a look here whenever you’re ready.

Key Sources

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

I have a running joke with my husband that I’m my own little ecosystem, tough on the outside but really fragile on the inside, so my entire job is to disturb it as little as possible.

And for the past few years it was soooo easy. I lived in Singapore, a 3-minute walk from literally the best gym, with trainers who built my programme so I never had to think, just show up.

Same bed, same breakfast, same daily habits, my whole little life arranged around keeping the system purring on auto-pilot.

Then we packed it up, and I’ve spent the past 6 months dragging my little fragile ecosystem around the world.

And obviously it’s been an absolute blast of adventure and discovery. But with a new country every few weeks, a different bed and pillow every time (and a fresh fight with the light and the aircon in every new place), it’s taken real effort to adapt.

New food everywhere, all of it delicious, but nobody doing the thinking but me.

It IS work, more than it ever was back home in Singapore with my own place and my own bed.

And it’s safe to say, my little fragile ecosystem has NOT been thrilled.

Here’s the bit I’m slightly mortified to admit…

Somewhere between Uruguay, Brazil and Colombia, I put on 3kg. And I hated it.

The 3kg wasnt really the problem. It’s the story underneath, where my brain goes: This is it. The slip. You’re sliding back to the worst version of yourself.

So here’s what I actually put down on this trip, and it wasn’t the 3kg (those came off the moment I got a bit more intentional with food).

It was the catastrophe story. The one where a few relaxed months on the road somehow means I’m one tortilla away from being a trainwreck again.

I’m an elder millennial. I came of age when skinny was the entire personality of the early 2000s, and that wiring is so fucking DEEP. So let me be clear about what this is NOT: a “get summer-ready” piece.

I have a body. It’s already ready. It’s summer. The audacity of an entire industry telling us otherwise every single year.

There are 2 ways people do summer:

1. Full “fuck it, it’s the holiday,” vanish for 8 weeks, start again in September with a heavy heart.

2. Turn the holiday into a joyless military operation.

The real skill sits in between, and it’s quieter than either: not abandoning yourself the second life gets loud.

Now, most of you aren’t living out of a suitcase. But summer is everyone’s version of the road: heat, houseguests, kids off school, holidays, the lot. The routine that held all year suddenly has to survive all of it.

After six months on the road, what actually survived wasn’t some perfect routine.

It was three embarrassingly basic things:

• Moving most days (with a backup plan for the days the original plan fell apart)

• Eating enough protein without turning it into a part-time job

• Walking as much as humanly possible

That’s it.

No challenge. No transformation. No “summer body” project.

Just enough structure to stop a disruption becoming a disappearance.

And that’s the bit I think we get wrong. People assume healthy routines collapse because they weren’t disciplined enough. Most of the time they collapse because they expected them to survive unchanged.

Summer isn’t a test of consistency.

It’s a test of adaptation.

Here's what I see over and over again. Summer wrecks routines for a really boring reason, and it isn’t weak willpower.

Disruption is simply when habits are most likely to wobble, the most fragile part of the whole thing. What turns a normal wobble into a write-off is one sneaky pattern, all-or-nothing thinking.

One tortilla becomes “well, I’ve blown it,” becomes the whole basket, becomes a write-off week. The slip is never the real damage. The story you tell yourself after it is.

This is one of the ideas that eventually became part of my MAKE SPACE™ framework, and it’s the one almost nobody reaches for: subtract before you add.

When summer knocks you sideways, every instinct says add. More discipline, a stricter plan, a clean-slate Monday to claw it all back.

But your life probably already has a lot going on, is probably already full. The thing dragging on you isn’t a missing habit, it’s the all-or-nothing rule you’re hauling around, the one that says if it isn’t the whole thing it doesn’t count.

That rule is the heaviest thing in the bag. Put it down first.

In practice it’s tiny. Next time you catch yourself doing the all-or-nothing maths (one tortilla, whole week ruined), recount. Not “I fell off,” but “I moved 4 days out of 7, on holiday, in 35 degrees.”

Same week, truer story. That recount is the subtraction: you’re not adding effort, you’re dropping a standard that was never real.

After 6 months of a new country every few weeks, I’m finally slowing down!

One week here in Mérida, then a whole month in CDMX to soak up the World Cup atmosphere (🇫🇷allez les bleus!), then slow travel around Mexico before Peru and the Inca Trail, Bolivia, Chile.

Staying put for a bit means I can actually be somewhere at the same time as you, live, for a few weeks running. I have been looking forward to this more than I can say.

So that’s what June is: 3 Thursdays, 3 of the things summer reliably wrecks. The plan that falls apart (11 June), the rest you can’t seem to actually take (18 June), and the phone that quietly eats the whole holiday (25 June). Each one is 45 minutes, one real tool, no homework. We start on the 11th with the building part: designing the one summer non-negotiable that fits your actual life, not your fantasy one, and what it shrinks to on a rough day. Come build yours with me.

Some people will get everything they need from the workshops. A few of you will realise you'd rather have someone in your corner while you rebuild the whole thing. So I'm opening 3 or 4 founding coaching spots for June only, at $987. More info coming next week (or just reply to this and I’ll tell you how it works).

The ecosystem, for the record, is doing great. A bit wobbled, well looked after, currently kept alive by interpretive dance to newly discovered Brazilian disco in a flat in Mexico. Which is sort of the whole point.

See you on the 11th.

With Love,
Noemie x

P.S. First up is the Bare Minimum Habit Plan, Thursday 11 June. The workshop I wish someone had handed me at the airport in December. Bring your summer, we’ll build you something that survives it ☀️💛

P.P.S. The newly discovered Brazilian disco in question, in case your own ecosystem needs reviving:

I’ve downloaded, deleted, and redownloaded the meditation app Headspace so many times, it should come with a loyalty card.

I’ve also done 200-hour yoga teacher training. I am literally certified to teach people how to be more present.

And I still catch myself treating mindfulness like a performance metric.

I can’t help it, I turn everything into striving.

Meditation, nutrition, sleep, exercise, even rest.

Part of it is just how I’m wired, the Type A brain that wants to optimise everything.

There’s also something else underneath: I spent years being a complete trainwreck.

And now that I’ve rebuilt myself into someone who has her shit mostly together, there’s a quiet fear that the smallest leeway means sliding back. That if I’m not monitoring, tracking, improving, the old version of me will somehow creep back in.

She won’t. I’m a completely different person, but the fear doesn’t care about logic. So I grip. I optimise. I turn being well into a full-time job and then wonder why I’m exhausted by it.

“Fun is serious business”, former Singapore minister George Yeo said in 1991.

That energy, that’s me with wellness.

I wrote about mindfulness last year in Mindfulness Without the Bullshit, and the gist was: it doesn’t need to be complicated. Just be here, on purpose. I still believe that.

But I skipped over the reason most of us can’t actually do it, and it’s not because we don’t have time. It’s because we approach it the same way we approach everything else: as a project to win at:

Download the app > set the schedule > track the minutes > feel good on day 3 > miss day 4 > feel guilty > decide you’re just “bad at meditation” > quit > redownload 6 months later > start the cycle again.

So why does this keep happening?

The one that makes Type A people squirm

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the researcher who essentially brought mindfulness into Western clinical practice in the 1970s, identified 7 pillars of mindfulness: non-judging, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go.

I could write about any of them, but there’s one I keep coming back to.

Non-striving.

Kabat-Zinn describes it as the absence of striving toward an outcome. Being with yourself, moment by moment, without needing the moment to produce anything.

The idea is this: stop trying to get somewhere with it. Just be where you are and pay attention to what’s actually happening.

For someone who’s built their entire identity around striving toward outcomes, that’s not just a wellness concept. It’s a full existential crisis in two words.

Non-striving doesn’t mean giving up or becoming someone who lets everything slide. It means the thing you’re doing right now doesn’t need to serve a future outcome to be worthwhile. You’re allowed to just be in it.

"But isn't your whole thing about growth?"

Well, here’s where it gets complicated.

Because I built this whole newsletter on the idea that you’re a work in progress. I called it Unwritten because I genuinely believe we’re always becoming.

The MAKE SPACE Method™ is a framework for change.

My entire thing is: you can do this differently.

So how do I square that with “stop striving”?

I think about this a lot. And honestly, I don’t think it’s a contradiction you solve. It’s a tension you hold.

You can want to grow and still give yourself permission to be where you are right now. Aspiring to something better doesn’t mean treating who you are today as a problem to fix.

Are you moving forward because you’re curious about what’s next? Or because you’re terrified of going back?

Because that second one is the grip. And the grip is exhausting.

The white bear problem

In 1987, psychologist Daniel Wegner ran a study that’s become a now-classic study in psychology.

He told participants: whatever you do, don’t think of a white bear.

Then he asked them to ring a bell every time the thought of a white bear came up.

The result? Well obviously the people who were told not to think about it thought about it significantly more than the control group.

Wegner called this the ironic process of control: the harder you try to suppress or control a mental state, the more likely you are to produce exactly that state.

This is your brain on striving.

This is also why “try to clear your mind” is the worst meditation instruction ever given.

You sit down, try to think of nothing. Your brain immediately produces every thought it’s ever had.

You decide you’re terrible at this, open your eyes, and check your phone. The whole thing lasted ninety seconds.

Wegner’s research explains exactly why: the act of trying to control the thought is what creates the thought.

If this sounds familiar, it should.

Paradoxical intention, the sleep technique from last week’s piece, works on the same principle.

You stopped trying to sleep, and sleep came.

Non-striving is the same insight applied more broadly: stop forcing the outcome and the thing you’re reaching for gets closer, not further away.

So what does non-striving actually look like?

Non-striving sounds dangerously close to “just relax” or “stop caring so much.”

Which is useless advice and not what I mean.

You can still try hard. What changes is where you’re pointing that effort.

Going for a run because it feels good to move your body versus going for a run because you need to hit your step count. Same action, completely different relationship to it.

Or cooking a meal you actually want to eat, rather than cooking because it’s on your habit tracker and you’ll feel guilty if you order takeaway.

Your Fantasy Self has a perfect morning routine with 20 minutes of meditation, journalled gratitude, and a green smoothie.

Your Actual Self has a meeting at 8:30 and hasn’t had coffee yet.

Non-striving says: the two minutes you spend actually tasting that coffee, noticing the warmth, being in your kitchen before the day swallows you, counts.

That IS the practice. The full routine was never the point.

The one-week anti-practice

I almost didn’t want to give you a “thing to do” this week because the irony of assigning homework on non-striving isn’t lost on me.

But I know you, and “just be more present” as advice is about as useful as “just relax” when you can’t sleep.

So here’s what I want you to try:

Once a day, for one week, do nothing. On purpose.

Pick an existing moment in your day and use my Rooted Routine format: after I [thing I already do], I will sit and do nothing for two minutes.

After I pour my morning coffee. After I park the car at work. After I close my laptop at the end of the day. Whatever anchor makes sense for your life.

Two minutes. No phone, no podcast, no breathing exercise, no app. Just you, sitting with whatever’s there. If your brain starts planning dinner, fine. If it starts worrying about work, also fine. You’re not trying to quiet it. That’s the whole practice: the absence of trying.

And when your brain says this is pointless, I should be doing something productive, which it will, usually within thirty seconds, just notice that thought and let it pass.

That’s non-striving in action. The thought that this moment needs to produce something useful is exactly the thought you’re practising not following.

Two minutes. No outcomes, no tracking, no way to fail at it.

I’m still working on this. Probably always will be.

Non-striving doesn’t come naturally to someone who spent 20 years in corporate treating every day like a performance review, and it definitely doesn’t come naturally to someone who’s quietly terrified that one lazy Tuesday means my whole life unravels.

But I’m learning that the grip is the thing making me tired. Not the wellness. The monitoring of the wellness.

The moments I manage to let go of it, the ones where I’m just here without needing the moment to be useful, are the ones I actually remember. The still ones. Always the still ones.

With love,
Noemie x

P.S. If you missed it, Mindfulness Without the Bullshit covers the basics of how to actually start: https://www.unwrittenpotential.com/p/mindfulness-without-the-bullshit

In Episode 47, certified health coach Noemie Mooney explains why nearly half of workers globally are burned out and why individual wellness fixes can't solve what's structurally broken at work, drawing on BCG's 2024 burnout research, Singapore Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon's "push factors versus pull factors" framing, and the concept of ethical fading from Tenbrunsel and Messick (2004).

Subscribe now

In a 2024 survey, the Boston Consulting Group found that 48% of workers across eight countries are grappling with burnout, which means we’re well past the point of calling this an individual problem.

In this episode I unpack what Singapore’s Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon recently named at the Legal Profession Symposium 2025: people aren’t leaving careers because they’re being pulled to something better, they’re being pushed out by what work has become.

In This Episode

• Why is workplace burnout structural rather than personal?

• What is ethical fading and how does it degrade your judgement at work?

• Why don’t wellness apps and resilience training actually fix burnout?

• What are push factors versus pull factors when people leave their careers?

• What did BCG’s 2024 burnout research find across eight countries?

• Why does workplace culture stay broken even when leaders say they want change?

• How do you tell the difference between coping and actually solving burnout?

Timestamps

00:00 Intro
02:17 Welcome from Rio
03:20 Push factors versus pull factors
05:13 BCG and the 48% statistic
06:10 What ethical fading really means
07:53 Why wellness apps fall short
10:45 What this means for you

Mentioned in This Episode

• Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, Opening Address at the Legal Profession Symposium 2025 (Singapore, 29 July 2025)

• Ethical fading, Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick, Social Justice Research (2004)

• BCG, “Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout” (2024)

Your Experiment for This Week

Notice one workplace habit that your industry, your team, or your company treats as completely normal. Name it. Then ask yourself who that habit actually serves. Not the work, not the people, but the inherited idea of professionalism it might be propping up. You do not have to fix it. You just have to see it clearly for one week.

What is one workplace habit your industry treats as normal that is quietly making everyone exhausted?

Noemie x

Imagine being in a ballroom, listening to Singapore’s Chief Justice deliver an opening address, and somewhere around the middle of it, having to physically restrain yourself from jumping up and down.

That is basically what happened to me last July at the Legal Profession Symposium.

Not because anything shocking was said.

But because the quiet part was FINALLY being said.

Out loud, in public.

By one of the most respected voices in Singapore’s legal community.

The line that got me was this: young lawyers are not leaving private practice because they are being pulled towards something better.

They are leaving because they are being pushed out by what practice has become, by “push factors rather than pull factors” rooted in growing dissatisfaction with legal practice itself.

So yes, I kept my symposium face on, but inside, I was absolutely losing it.

I have been thinking about that moment again this week from Rio de Janeiro, where I’ve just been speaking at a legal conference about Singapore’s work in legaltech, AI policy, and judicial innovation.

Different country, different room, same question underneath: what does it take for a profession to evolve without quietly burning out the people inside it?

That’s a question every single industry should be paying attention to.

For context, 1 in 3 newly admitted lawyers may leave the profession within 3 years and among those considering leaving their current place of practice, around 80% cited excessive workload or poor work-life balance.

52% cited the impact on their mental wellbeing. 35% cited poor workplace culture.

And the diagnosis was not that young people are fragile, unwilling to work hard, or lacking resilience. The diagnosis was much more uncomfortable.

They want to escape a version of practice where commercial pressure, workload intensity, thin mentorship and constant responsiveness have made good work harder to sustain.

Which is a completely different problem to solve.

And if you are thinking, “OK Noemie, but why should I care if a bunch of young lawyers are unhappy and leave the profession?” fair question but I bring you this:

Ethical fading.

Chief Justice Menon warned that unsustainable workplace practices can contribute to ethical fading, where high-pressure work environments lead employees to make judgements that fall short of high professional standards.

In law, that shows up as worse advice for clients.

In medicine, it shows up as worse diagnoses.

In leadership, it shows up as worse decisions.

In any profession, it means the thing your organisation is paid to be good at starts to degrade because the people doing the work are depleted.

The consequences show up in the work, in the output.

That is why this is not just a young-lawyer problem.

It is not even just a legal-industry problem.

It is a quality problem, a judgement problem, a leadership problem, and since organisations often become very fluent when money enters the chat, eventually a commercial problem.

Subscribe now

This Is Bigger Than A Wellbeing Programme

Most workplace wellbeing conversations fail because they start too low down the system.

They ask: “what support can we offer individuals?”

They do not ask: what is the profession repeatedly producing, rewarding, tolerating, and calling normal?

So the answers become predictable: a coaching app, a lunch talk, a resilience webinar, maybe a wellbeing week with a beige graphic and the word “thrive” somewhere in the title.

I am not against support, I am a wellbeing coach after all.

Coaching can help, therapy can help, better recovery habits can help, and a good workshop can absolutely shift how people see themselves and their work.

Both need to happen at the same time.

Because when the drivers of burnout are built into the operating model of a profession, individual support can’t be the whole answer.

Globally, this is not niche.

BCG’s 2024 research found that 48% of workers surveyed across 8 countries were currently grappling with burnout.

So maybe the issue is not that millions of people suddenly forgot how to cope.

Maybe work has been designed in ways that make coping the baseline.

Which is exhausting, because eventually even coping starts to feel like another job.

That is the part leaders have to own.

Not just HR, and not just individual organisations trying to do the right thing around the edges.

This is where industry leaders, professional bodies, regulators, and senior people with actual authority have to say: this is not a private struggle. This is a structural risk.

Because if the work of a profession depends on judgement, and the conditions of that profession degrade judgement, wellbeing is not soft or fluffy.

It is professional infrastructure.

A lot of what we currently call “law firm culture” is inherited suffering dressed up as rigour.

The always-on responsiveness. The prestige attached to endurance. The mentorship everyone says matters but nobody properly protects. The quiet belief that if you survived the system as-is, the next generation should too.

Most of this is not designed by villains. It is inherited, copied, rewarded, and repeated until it starts to look like common sense.

That is why culture is hard to change.

Culture is what keeps happening when nobody intervenes.

If junior lawyers are told wellbeing matters but the reward system still favours the person who is always available, the reward system wins.

If firms say mentorship matters but the business model does not protect time for mentorship, the business model wins.

If everyone agrees the pace is unsustainable but the people who model unsustainable behaviour keep becoming the most powerful people in the room, the room has already voted.

And I say this as someone who has absolutely mistaken instant responsiveness for professionalism.

This is where leadership matters. The kind that changes what gets measured, rewarded, tolerated, and repeated.

Because you cannot ask juniors to be more resilient while leaving the machine untouched. You cannot tell people to set boundaries in a profession where boundaries are still quietly treated as lower ambition.

That is not empowerment. It is outsourcing the problem to the people with the least power to solve it.

The cost of burnout is never paid only by the people burning out.

It is paid by everyone who depends on their judgement.

Which, eventually, is all of us.

With love,
Noemie x

P.S.: What is one workplace habit everyone accepts in your industry, even though it is quietly making people exhausted?

Key Sources

Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, Opening Address at the Legal Profession Symposium 2025: “The Future of the Legal Profession: A Shared Vision” (29 July 2025).

Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, Speech at Mass Call Ceremony 2026 (20 April 2026).

Channel News Asia: “IN FOCUS: 1 in 3 new lawyers want out, can the industry fix the burnout before it’s too late?”

Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick, “Ethical Fading: The Role of Self-Deception in Unethical Behavior”, Social Justice Research (2004).

BCG, “Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout” (2024).