⚡ Most habit advice tells you what to add. I help you subtract first, so your habits actually survive real life.

Join 2,000+ burned-out humans learning evidence-based behaviour change without toxic wellness, hustle culture, or self-help BS.

I’m Noemie Mooney, ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, and creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™.

Subscribe for weekly tools that help you do less, better.

Subscribe now

The urge to fix, solve, and advise before someone has even finished talking has a name: the righting reflex.

In this episode, certified health coach Noemie Mooney explains William Miller and Stephen Rollnick’s work on motivational interviewing, why well-meaning advice often creates resistance, and why high achievers often turn the righting reflex inward.

Because sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is not fix.

It is to listen.

In this episode

• What the righting reflex is, and why the urge to help can make change less likely

• What motivational interviewing is, and why it has become such an important evidence-based coaching approach

• Why unsolicited advice often backfires

• Miller and Rollnick’s “dancing vs wrestling” metaphor for coaching, guiding, and behaviour change

• Why high achievers often struggle with self-compassion

• How the simple shift from “but” to “and” can change your relationship with difficulty

• A practical experiment to try this week in your relationships, and with yourself

Mentioned in this episode

• The righting reflex: Miller and Rollnick’s concept from motivational interviewing, describing the urge to fix, correct, or solve before fully listening

• Miller, W.R. & Rollnick, S. (2013). Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change (3rd ed.)

• The “but” vs “and” reframe: A coaching tool drawn from acceptance-based frameworks and positive psychology coaching

Your experiment for this week

Next time someone you care about tells you about something hard, try this:

No solutions for the first five minutes.

Instead, ask three questions:

1. What does that feel like?

2. What’s the hardest part?

3. What do you think you need?

Notice the urge to fix.

That’s the righting reflex.

Advanced version: try the same three questions on yourself.

Favourite line

The space between someone sharing a problem and you offering a solution is the most important space in any relationship. Including the one you have with yourself.

Reflection question

What’s the last thing you tried to fix that actually just needed to be heard?

Noemie x

I grew up in the French Alps, where spring is NOT subtle.

One week everything is cold and frozen, the next week the whole valley is aggressively alive.

Four seasons, dramatically different, so your body learns the rhythm whether you want it to or not.

Then I lived in Singapore for nearly 20 years, with tropical 30+ degrees year-round and no real seasons to speak of.

And yet every single March/April, something in my body would go “right, it’s spring, time to get serious!”

I would usually find myself signing up for something, building a new training plan, rethinking my whole nutrition, stacking super ambitious commitments on behalf of a body that was actually doing perfectly fine without them.

And now while travelling through Central America, I’m doing it again.

I’ve signed up for a half marathon in Mexico City in June and I have absolutely no business doing that given everything else on my plate right now.

But it’s spring, so apparently my brain thinks I’m invincible.

So if you’re currently 10 days into a new plan and starting to feel it wobble, hi 👋🏻

I know exactly where this is going, because I’ve been there a million times, and so has almost every client I’ve ever worked with.

And here’s the part that always breaks my heart a little: if they can’t stay consistent, they don’t blame the plan, they blame themselves.

Every single time. Without fail.

And it’s never the ones who weren’t trying hard enough.

It’s the ones who were trying the hardest.

Motivation is not ability

One of my biggest pet peeves with the productivity bros is that they speak about discipline and motivation like a fuel you can top up, the way you’d add petrol to a car.

The logic goes: if you’re not doing the thing, you must not want it badly enough.

Want it more. Visualise the result. Read the book. Find your why.

My eyes are rolling back so far just writing this….

BJ Fogg, who runs the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford, has spent 20 years demonstrating that this is total BS.

His model is super simple:

Behaviour happens when motivation, ability, and a prompt all show up at the same time. Take any one of them away and nothing happens. And the one that looks the most stable (motivation) is actually the most volatile of the three. It spikes, it crashes, and somewhere along the way it convinces you it’ll be there tomorrow. It won’t. By mid-May it’s gone and you’re standing there wondering what happened to all that energy.

Which means if your new habit depends on motivation being there, your new habit is going to fail, predictably, at the exact moment you most need it to hold.

Design is what keeps a habit running when motivation isn’t in the room.

As a digital nomad this year, I have to be super intentional if I want to stay fit, healthy and happy, because with a hectic travel schedule, flights, different food, and constant change, motivation is rarely available when I need it.

That translates to booking hotels or Airbnbs with a half decent gym in the building so I can train.

My gym clothes live in their own dedicated packing cube so they’re always ready.

My iPad has the training videos downloaded so I don’t have to think about what I’m doing when I get there.

None of this requires motivation. It requires making the desired habits as easy as possible so I don’t need to think too much about it (or argue against myself on why I should train in the first place)

I realise I’m making this sound like I’ve figured it out. I have NOT.

Last week I got AI to generate me an 8-week half marathon training plan, looked at week 1, immediately skipped to week 4 because, of course, “I’m probably already at that level,” and then haven’t actually gone for a run at all. Classic.

If your habit plan is “try harder,” your habit plan is a motivation plan. And motivation plans have a half-life of about 10 days. TOPS.

The double whammy

When you zoom in on the type of motivation that tends to show up in spring, it’s almost always the fragile kind.

Some motivation is autonomous: you’re doing something because it genuinely matters to you or you actually enjoy it.

Some is controlled: you’re doing it because of guilt, shame, or that creeping fear of being seen in summer clothes.

And an even-worse fear underneath it, of being seen as someone who “let themselves go” during the winter (this and bounce back are phrases I would very much like to retire forever)

The “getting summer-ready” version of motivation is almost always the second kind.

It works, but only briefly, and it spoils the actual experience of doing the thing, because you’re not enjoying it, you’re just avoiding the consequences of not doing it (shoutout to every January gym membership that was really just a guilt subscription with a locker).

So you’ve built a habit on fragile fuel, running a design that assumed motivation would always be there to keep it going. By mid-May the whole thing is out of juice.

Despite what the productivity bros, wellness influencers, and supplement-code fitness accounts are telling you, it’s not about willpower or motivation.

And it’s definitely not about you, or something you’re lacking. It’s about designing habits properly. Which means it can be fixed.

And the fix to design better habits is stupidly obvious once you see it: you stop raising the motivation bar and start lowering the ability one.

Let’s take movement, because that’s the big one in spring and also the one I have the most personal experience of getting spectacularly wrong.

Most people default to ‘exercise’ which actually has a pretty specific meaning if you look it up: planned, structured, repetitive, deliberate.

And it’s also, for a huge number of people, a word with genuinely AWFUL associations: PE class, bad gym experiences, fitness instructors who mistook humiliation for motivation, bodies that refused to do what the DVD told them to (if you just went ‘yep’ reading that list, we are the same person).

Physical activity on the other hand is a much bigger category: dancing in your kitchen, walking to get bread, gardening, playing with kids on the floor, carrying groceries up 4 flights of stairs because the lift is broken.

All of it counts.

Your body doesn’t need the movement to be branded as “exercise” before it starts benefiting from it.

If your version of “getting serious” is a form of exercise you already hate, you are forcing yourself to do something you hate, powered entirely by guilt, and expecting it to last.

You’ve designed something that requires a small miracle to happen 3 times a week. And then you’ll be surprised when the miracle stops?

Lowering the barrier isn’t the same as lowering your standards. It’s just what happens when you’re honest about how humans actually work.

Pick something you’d actually do on a Tuesday at 6pm after a hard day. Something that sounds like fun, or at least doesn’t sound like a punishment.

Rooted Routines

Instead of trying to insert a brand-new habit into your existing life by sheer force of will, you attach it to something you already do automatically. You borrow the prompt, the timing, and the willpower you’d otherwise be spending on remembering to do it.

If you’ve been following this newsletter for a bit, you already know how to do this:

After I [thing I already do every day], I will [tiny new thing]

After I make my morning coffee, I drink a glass of water while it brews. The first thing I do when my head hits the pillow is think about something I’m grateful for.

Nothing heroic. Just enough that the behaviour happens without you having to give yourself a motivational speech first.

One thing to try this week

If you’re mid-wobble on something right now (and if you started something in April, you probably are), try running it through 3 questions before you abandon it or, worse, try harder.

1. Is the motivation guilt or genuine interest?
   Be honest. If the main reason you’re doing it is because you feel like you should, that’s controlled motivation, and it has about two weeks of shelf life left in it.

2. Would you do this on a Tuesday at 6pm after a terrible day?
   If the answer is no, the ability barrier is too high. Not your willpower. The design of your habit.

3. What’s the prompt?
   If the answer is “I just have to remember,” there isn’t one. Attach it to something that already happens.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot while traveling, my own routines dissolving and reforming every time we move Airbnbs.

Every single time I’ve tried to ‘get disciplined’ while travelling, I’ve failed inside 72 hours.

The things that have actually held over the past 4 months on the road have all been tiny things, things that work no matter where I am, anchored to something that’s usually already happening.

Making coffee or turning off the bedroom lamp at night turns out to be more structurally important than any amount of motivational self-talk.

Motivation is a lovely thing when it arrives.

But please, for the love of god, stop building your life around the assumption that it will.

With love,
Noemie x

PS: If this hit a nerve, start with The Bullshit Audit! It’s a free 20-minute MAKE SPACE Method™ exercise to help you map where your energy is actually going, spot your biggest drainers, and stop building habits on top of a life that’s already too full. Get it here 👉 https://unwritten.podia.com/the-bullshit-audit

20 years of corporate life trained me to do one thing brilliantly: hear a problem, solve it, move on.

With a blend of decent critical thinking + a loud mouth, I could fix things before the meeting was over. That skill built my career.

It is also, it turns out, the single most counterproductive thing I do to myself.

I found this out the hard way when I started coaching.

2 decades of being paid decent money to solve problems all day means it’s really hard to stop wearing the problem-solver hat. Someone would come to me with something they were struggling with and my brain was already 3 solutions deep before they’d finished talking.

And it’s not just coaching.

A friend calls because they’re going through something and I go straight into what worked for me, what I’d do, what I read.

If I’m being honest, I tend to love talking about myself…. and I have a whole newsletter about it, in case you hadn’t noticed.

It comes from a good place, I swear! Ok maybe with a dash of self-centeredness.

But coaching made me realise something uncomfortable: my clients don’t actually want to be told what to do. That’s the whole point. And you probably don’t either.

If being told what to do worked, we’d all be super fit, sleeping 8 hours a night, and running wildly successful businesses by now.

That urge to fix, the one where you hear a problem and immediately go for the solution, has a name. And psychologists have been studying it for over 40 years.

And it’s terrible.

The reflex with a name

William Miller and Stephen Rollnick are the psychologists behind motivational interviewing, a coaching method with more than 4 decades of research behind it (I’m a huge fan of the method and that’s what I use with my clients).

They identified something they call the righting reflex: the urge to help, to make things right, to push a solution before you’ve even finished describing the problem.

The core finding: the harder you argue for change, the more the other person defends the status quo.

You push, they resist. Not because they don’t want to change. Because that’s just how humans are wired.

Miller and Rollnick describe the alternative as dancing rather than wrestling.

A coach guides instead of directs. Stays engaged while the client does the thinking, which turns out to be slow, unglamorous, and unbelievably effective.

But we don’t just do this to other people. We do it to ourselves. All the time! A rough week becomes a new morning routine by Monday. A bad night’s sleep becomes a bedtime protocol and 3 supplement purchases by Thursday. You don’t sit with the thing, you solve the thing. And the solution doesn’t last, because it was built on top of something you never actually dissected properly.

The smallest reframe I know

There’s a reframe I learned in coaching training that I think about almost daily:

Or try this one:

The first sentence closes the door. The second one holds it open.

“But” turns exhaustion into a disqualifier, a no-go.

You can’t move forward because you’re tired. End of story.

“And” lets both things be true at the same time. You’re tired, AND you still want something different. Those two things can coexist without cancelling each other out.

You don’t have to fix how you feel before you’re allowed to move forward. “But” makes you think you do. “And” says nah, move anyway. The tiredness comes with you. It doesn’t get a veto.

Your experiment this week

This week, the experiment isn’t on you. It’s on someone else.

Next time someone you care about tells you about something hard, set yourself one rule: no solutions for the first 5 minutes. Ask questions instead. You only need 3: What does that feel like? What’s the hardest part? What do you think you need?

No advice. No “have you tried.” No “what worked for me was.” Just those 3 questions and whatever silence comes after them.

Notice what happens. In them, and in you. The urge to fix will be almost unbearable. That’s the righting reflex. Now you know what it’s called.

And if you want the advanced version: try the same 3 questions on yourself next time you’re mid-solve. What does this feel like? What’s the hardest part? What do I actually need right now? You might be surprised how different the answer is from the plan you were about to make.

The space between someone sharing a problem and you offering a solution is the most important space in any relationship. Including the one you have with yourself.

🔴 My first-ever Substack Live, this Thursday!

Thursday April 30, 12pm ET. I’m going to talk about Spring healthy habits, why your wellness routine might be the new source of burnout and do a live coaching teardown with Q&A.

Come watch someone attempt to hold her own righting reflex down in real time ;)

JOIN ME LIVE!

I’m still learning to not fix things. I’ll probably be learning for a while.

But at least now I know what I’m doing when I do it, and that turns out to matter more than I expected.

With love, from someone who wrote this entire newsletter about listening and will almost certainly interrupt my hubby 3 minutes into dinner tonight 🙃

Noemie x

‘Listen to your body’ is the most repeated and least useful phrase in wellness. In this episode, certified health coach Noemie Mooney explains interoception, the science of reading your own body signals, why type A overachievers get it wrong, and the 60-second check-in that rebuilds the skill.

What does ‘listen to your body’ actually mean?? Nobody tells you.

The skill has a name: interoception.

It’s how your body communicates through sensations, and a study in Biological Psychology found it breaks down into three things:

1. how well you detect signals

2. how good you think you are at it

3. and the gap between those two

In this episode, I’m sharing how I ignored every signal my body was sending in a hotel gym in Panama City, what a researcher at the University of Washington found after 20 years of studying this skill, and the 60-second check-in that rebuilds the connection.

In this episode:

• 00:00 Intro

• 01:59 Why this episode is late

• 03:44 The Panama City gym story

• 04:57 What interoception is

• 06:29 The confidence-accuracy gap

• 08:35 When stress scrambles your signals

• 10:02 The 60-second check-in

Your experiment for this week: Before your next workout, pause for 60 seconds. Ask: how does my body feel right now? Not what the plan says. What is my body actually telling me? You don’t skip the workout. You just notice what’s there before you start. The noticing is the practice.

“The body doesn’t shout. It’s more like a very patient colleague you keep putting on mute.”

What signal has your body been sending that you keep overriding?

Noemie x

Something shifts in April and I fall for it every single year.

Longer days, lighter clothes, race sign-ups everywhere (Hyrox season is back, I can feel it), your feed filling up with 'day 1' selfies and new training plans.

That collective post-winter hibernation 'I'm starting NOW' energy hits, and before you've properly registered it, your brain has already committed to something your body hasn't been consulted about.

My body often finds out about these plans later, and last week was a textbook case.

We were heading to Panama City and I knew days before we arrived that the hotel had a PROPER gym.

Not a “2 dumbbells and a yoga mat in a converted storage room” gym (I’ve had those too…). No, a real proper one.

I’d checked the photos. My workouts were ready. I was going to do 4 days of serious strength training instead of the bodyweight and cardio workouts I’ve been doing while on the road.

But I arrived totally flat. Bad sleep, too much travel, work piling up. My body was sending every signal short of a formal letter, and my brain was going ok honey, but get over it because there’s a squat rack!

I coach people through this for a living. I know what I’m supposed to do.

And I still walked into that gym and tried to train like I hadn’t spent days travelling and sleeping 6 hours a night.

I'm also, as I write this, eyeing a half marathon in Mexico City in June. We've got the Inca Trail a few weeks later, so this is either excellent preparation or a spectacularly bad idea and I genuinely cannot tell.

The most useless phrase in wellness

It's in every fitness programme, right?

Every physio appointment, every pilates instructor, every PT's Instagram bio, every app's loading screen. The same 4 words: listen to your body.

As if that’s a thing you can just do?

As if years of calorie trackers and macro targets and sleep scores and readiness percentages and pushing through pain because a podcast bro said “discipline equals freedom” haven’t systematically trained you to do the exact opposite.

Nobody teaches you what listening actually involves.

It’s just assumed, like breathing or knowing how to parallel park (I can do one of those. Guess which?)

What 'listening' actually means

The skill of detecting and interpreting signals from inside your own body has a proper name. It’s called interoception.

It's how your body talks to you. Not in words, obviously. In sensations. Hunger, fatigue, the tightness in your chest before you cry, that flush of heat right before you say something you'll regret at dinner. All of that is interoception, and most of us have never been taught to read it.

I always thought I was good at this. I can feel when something’s off.

Especially nowadays. Giving up drinking 3 years ago turned the volume up on signals I'd been numbing for years (turns out your body has a lot to say when you stop drowning it out).

And yet there I was in a hotel gym in Panama City, ignoring every signal my body was sending because there were dumbbells and a plan.

A paper in Biological Psychology actually measured this and found that the skill breaks down into 3 things: how well you actually detect your body’s signals, how good you think you are at it, and the gap between those two.

That gap is the whole story.

Because most of us, especially the type A ones, have very high confidence and surprisingly low accuracy.

We’re sure we know what our body is saying.

We are, measurably, not great at it.

You think you’re pushing through productive discomfort, but you’re actually pushing through a warning.

You think you’re “not that hungry,” but you’re actually overriding a signal that got buried under 5 years of MyFitnessPal.

“Listen to your body” assumes you have the accuracy. It never checks.

How we got so bad at hearing ourselves

Every plan, app, and tracker you’ve ever used has slowly replaced your internal signals with external rules.

You stopped asking am I hungry? and started checking whether you’d hit your protein target. You stopped noticing fatigue and started consulting a readiness score.

I still wear my Garmin every day. I track my workouts, I try to get my 10,000 steps.

But somewhere in the last year the obsessive checking just... stopped.

I used to live and die by the data. Now I glance at it and make my own call.

I’m not sure exactly when that shift happened, but I think it started when I realised the metrics were answering a different question from the one my body was asking.

And if you've been stressed for a long time, it gets worse.

Stress actually scrambles the signals. Most of us genuinely can’t tell the difference between being tired, being anxious, and being hungry. They all feel like the same thing. When your body's been in overdrive for that long, every signal comes through blurry.

A researcher at the University of Washington has spent 20 years developing an evidence-based protocol specifically for people who’ve lost this connection.

Her clinical trials found that people who relearn this skill don't just get better at reading their bodies. Their cravings drop. Their emotional regulation improves. They start looking after themselves more.

Not from new information. From hearing what was already there.

Every spring, same story

I see it everywhere, every year, and at this point it’s so predictable.

Someone comes out of winter and decides this is the year! They sign up for a race, buy new trainers, set the alarm for 5:30am because someone on a podcast said early risers are more successful. (Those studies are about correlation, not causation, but that’s a different newsletter.)

By mid-May they’re injured or exhausted or both, and by June they’ve quit and they’re blaming themselves. Because obviously the problem is discipline.

The problem is not discipline.

The programme asked them to ignore every signal their body was sending, and then told them to 'listen to their body.'

I don't know a more elegant summary of the entire wellness industry's problem.

Your experiment this week: The 60-second check-in.

Before your next workout, pause.

Not a meditation, not a full on ritual. Just 60 seconds of actually asking:

How does my body feel right now? Not what the plan says I should do today. Not what I promised myself on Sunday. What is my body actually telling me? Tired, sore, flat, ready, fired up? And how confident am I that I’m reading that signal accurately and not just overriding it because there’s a plan?

You don’t skip the workout. You don’t change the programme. You’re just noticing what’s actually there before you start. The noticing IS the practice.

What you’re doing is training yourself to detect the signal, check your confidence in it, and notice the gap between what you feel and what you think you feel. 60 seconds. No app required.

If your body says “I’m flat” and you go anyway, fine. At least you heard it. That’s the whole point. Most of us never even ask.

And if you’re not training right now, try it before your next meal instead. Same question, different signal: is this actual hunger, or is it habit, boredom, or the clock?

Try it for a week. Notice what shifts.

Instead of waiting for some big, clear broadcast, you get curious about the quieter stuff.

The 3pm fatigue that isn’t about caffeine. A full feeling you blow past because there’s still food on the plate. Your body arriving in a hotel gym completely flat while your brain is already planning leg day.

That’s where the information is. It always was.

Take it from someone who spent 18 years in corporate Singapore optimising everything she could get her hands on, took that same energy into wellness, strapped on a Garmin, and eventually figured out she was doing the exact thing her clients pay her to unlearn.

The body doesn’t shout. More like a very patient colleague you keep putting on mute.

It’ll wait, it always does. But it would be nice if you could hear it before something has to hurt to get your attention.

With love from Panama,
Noemie x

P.S. If the “subtract before you add” idea landed, that’s the foundation of the MAKE SPACE Method™. Live June cohort details coming soon!

P.P.S. Going live on Substack for the first time next week! It’s happening Thursday 30 April at 12pm ET and I’m beyond excited! Think Q&A + coaching + coffee chat together. I hope the wifi in Panama holds up. Details in Notes this week.

The 8-hour sleep rule is a myth, catching up on weekends doesn't work, and the technique that actually helped is counterintuitive: try to stay awake. In this episode, certified health coach Noemie Mooney shares how 3 weeks of teaching across timezones wrecked her sleep, and the evidence-based tools that rebuilt it.

Does the 8-hour sleep rule actually matter?

Not as much as you think. A 2023 study tracking tens of thousands of people found that sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration.

In this episode, I'm sharing how 3 weeks of teaching across timezones wrecked my sleep routine, and the evidence-based techniques that rebuilt it.

I'll walk you through why catching up on weekends doesn't work, why the desperate effort to fall asleep is the thing keeping you awake, and paradoxical intention: Viktor Frankl's counterintuitive technique where trying to stay awake actually helps you fall asleep.

In this episode:

• What is paradoxical intention for insomnia? The Viktor Frankl technique where trying to stay awake helps you fall asleep

• Does sleep regularity matter more than sleep duration? What a 2023 wearable data study tracking tens of thousands of people found

• Can you catch up on sleep at the weekend? Why consistency beats compensation every time

• What is sleep performance anxiety? Why monitoring yourself in bed sends alertness spikes through your nervous system

• How to rebuild a sleep routine after disruption using Rooted Routines (implementation intentions)

• The Stuff You Should Know sleep hack: why listening to a podcast at minimum volume works when trying to sleep doesn’t

Timestamps:

• [00:00] The 1am brain: “If I fall asleep right now, I’ll get five hours and forty-three minutes”

• [01:57] Welcome + teaching Singapore from Panama City

• [04:07] What happens when your sleep schedule is disrupted

• [04:28] The 8-hour lie: why regularity matters more than duration

• [05:25] The catching-up myth: why sleeping in on Sunday makes Monday worse

• [06:14] Paradoxical intention: Viktor Frankl’s counterintuitive sleep technique

• [07:25] Why it works: sleep performance anxiety and the nervous system

• [08:33] The Stuff You Should Know sleep hack

• [09:01] Your experiment: one Rooted Routine for tonight

• [10:14] The 7-Day Sleep Reset workbook

Mentioned in this episode:

• Paradoxical intention: Viktor Frankl’s clinical technique for insomnia, where the instruction is to try to stay awake rather than force sleep

• Sleep regularity study, 2023: sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (wearable data, tens of thousands of participants)

• SMART Goals episode: the Rooted Routines format for attaching new habits to existing ones [🎧 listen here]

  7-Day Sleep Reset workbook: seven days of structured sleep tools, worksheets, and evidence-based techniques. $17 USD

Your experiment for this week:

Pick one Rooted Routine. Choose something you already do every evening and attach one small sleep-friendly action to it.

After I brush my teeth, I’ll put my phone in the other room.

After I get into bed, I’ll do five slow breaths.

One anchor, hold it for a week.

“The thing keeping you awake isn’t the noise or the temperature. It’s the desperate effort to sleep.”

What’s your 1am brain’s favourite lie?

Noemie x

This week's piece comes with something new. I built The 7-Day Sleep Reset: a proper protocol based on clinical insomnia research and behaviour design, with 15 printable tools and the worksheets I use with actual coaching clients. The guide is the full 7-day programme and it’s $17. If you want the one technique that changed everything for me, plus one experiment to try tonight, keep reading.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been teaching a human-centred design course to 70 adult learners in Singapore, from Latin America.

Which means evenings, 8pm to midnight, and a lot of coffee at 10pm to keep my energy up for a room full of people 12 hours ahead of me.

I do this a few times a year and used to do it without a second thought when I lived in Singapore, but now that I’m on the other side of the world it means my whole schedule flips.

A few weeks of late nights, stacked on top of my legaltech work, stacked on top of my Unwritten work and I’ve honestly been feeling like I’ve been reassembled slightly wrong.

The funny thing is, I used to live like this all the time.

Go out, drink 2 bottles of wine until stupid o’clock, get to work on a few hours of sleep, do it again.

For years. I didn’t think about sleep because I didn’t think sleep was something you could be good or bad at. It was just the gap between going out and going to work.

These days, few things make me feel more like I’ve got my shit together than being in bed by 10:30pm, warm shower done, some ginger tea, reading a page or two of a book before I turn the light off.

Waking up fresh. Full of energy. That quiet feeling of: yep, I’m doing alright.

It sounds boring. It is boring. It’s also one of the best things I’ve ever done for my health.

So when 3 weeks of teaching across timezones blew that up, I did notice.

The 1am brain showed up. The internal monologue kicked in: You’re going to feel terrible tomorrow. You’ve undone all your progress. What is wrong with you?

Coffee at 10pm basically shuts your melatonin down, so you’re tired but wired.

And your prefrontal cortex, the bit that’s supposed to help you make sensible decisions, is barely online.

So the day after a bad night is the day you’re least equipped to make good decisions about food, exercise, or anything else.

My HRV was all over the place. And every morning my Garmin cheerfully informed me that my body battery was low and my sleep score was terrible.

I talk all the time about not being a slave to the data on your wrist, not obsessively optimising every metric. I am also still a human being who wakes up, sees a bad number, and immediately feels stressed about it.

The irony is not lost on me…

I ate like absolute shit. And that's not a willpower thing, by the way. Even one bad night triggers a rise in ghrelin (your hunger hormone). Your body thinks something has gone wrong and starts screaming for calories.

Helpful.

The 8-hour lie

While we’re here. The number that made all of this worse: eight.

Eight hours, every night, or you’re failing at the most basic human function. Cool. No pressure.

Adults need roughly 7 to 8 hours, but the number varies wildly from person to person. And here’s the bit that actually matters: a 2023 study tracked tens of thousands of people using wearable data and found that how regular your sleep is matters more than how long you sleep. Regularity was a stronger predictor of early death than total hours.

Let that land for a second.

You don’t have to nail the number. You can improve regularity, improve your wind-down, improve the conditions. Those gains count even if you’re nowhere near 8 hours on the dot.

The other myth worth killing: catching up.

Bad week, so you’ll sleep in at the weekend feels logical. I believed that for years.

But the research keeps landing in the same place: consistency beats compensation.

Sleeping in on Sunday doesn’t fix a week of bad sleep. It actually makes Monday night harder because you’ve shifted your body clock. (I know, I know. Annoying.)

What helped me more than obsessing over hours was accepting that the 3 weeks of teaching were going to disrupt things, and focusing on getting back to my routine once it was done.

Not panicking about the lost sleep. Not trying to “catch up.” Just returning to the routine that works.

The technique that actually helped

You already know the standard sleep hygiene list.

Blue light bad. Bedroom cool and dark. Caffeine. Screens, blah blah blah. I’m not going to rehash it.

The technique that actually changed my relationship with sleepless nights comes from psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s clinical work on insomnia, and it sounds ridiculous.

Try to stay awake.

I’m serious. It’s called paradoxical intention.

The harder you try to fall asleep, the more performance anxiety you create.

You’re lying there monitoring yourself: am I sleepy yet? Is this working? It’s been twenty minutes. Why isn’t this working?

Every check-in sends a little spike of alertness through your nervous system. Which is obviously not helpful if what you’re trying to do is very much not to be alert.

So you flip it!

Lie in bed with the lights off, keep your eyes open, and give up any effort to fall asleep. When your eyelids get heavy, gently tell yourself: just stay awake for another couple of minutes.

That’s it.

It works because the thing keeping you awake isn’t the noise or the temperature. It’s the desperate effort to sleep.

The moment you stop trying, your nervous system calms down and sleep shows up on its own. It’s like a cat that only sits on your lap when you stop reaching for it (and the reason I’m more of a dog person myself).

It’s been tested properly since, and it works. Especially for the performance anxiety part, which is the whole problem.

I do this all the time when I’m struggling to fall asleep, or if I wake up in the middle of the night and struggle to get back to sleep.

I put on my sleep buds, an episode of the podcast Stuff You Should Know at the minimum volume, set a sleep timer to the end of the episode, et voila!

I’m usually asleep within a few minutes.

Your experiment this week

Tonight, pick one Rooted Routine.

Choose something you already do every evening and attach one small sleep-friendly action to it.

After I brush my teeth, I’ll put my phone in the other room. Or: After I get into bed, I’ll do 5 slow breaths. Or: After I turn off the light, I’ll run through 3 things that went well today.

Same format every time: after I [thing I already do], I will [tiny new thing].

You’re designing the behaviour into your evening so it doesn’t rely on motivation at 10pm when you’ve got nothing left.

If your routine got disrupted recently (say, by 3 weeks of teaching across timezones), this is how you rebuild. One anchor at a time.

That’s it. One Rooted Routine. Hold it for a week.

And if it all falls apart and you still have a terrible night? One bad night is one bad night. Get up at your normal time. Resist the nap. Let your body reset.

I’m writing this from the other side of those 3 weeks. Back to my 10:30pm bedtime.

Back to the warm shower and the ginger tea and the quiet smugness of waking up before my alarm. It came back faster than I expected. The design held, even when I couldn’t follow it.

With love from a much more reasonable timezone,
Noemie x

P.S. What’s your 1am brain’s favourite lie? Mine is you’re behind on everything and you’re going to feel like shit tomorrow and somehow everyone else is handling it better than you.. Classic catastrophising with a side of comparison. Hit reply and tell me yours!

The world is simultaneously on fire and deeply, profoundly ridiculous, and somehow you're supposed to just keep going. In this episode, certified health coach Noemie Mooney shares what collective burnout actually looks like, why looking away doesn't help either, and the 4 research-backed things that do.

Does everything feel harder right now, or is it just you?

It’s not just you.

14 minutes of negative news is enough to trigger catastrophising about your own life.

In this episode, let’s get honest about collective exhaustion: the guilt of looking away, the gap between the scroll and the street, and the four evidence-based interventions that actually help.

I’ll walk you through what the research says about subtraction, nervous system regulation, movement, and social connection, and why none of it has to be dramatic to make a difference.

In this episode:

• How does negative news affect your mental health? The 14-minute threshold that changes how you see your own life

• Why does looking away from the news make you feel guilty? The overwhelm-disconnection gap

• Are we really as divided as the internet says? What the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found vs what the street actually feels like

• What is cyclic sighing? The Stanford-studied breathing technique that outperformed meditation

• Subtractive solutions: why your brain defaults to adding more when removing is faster and more effective (Nature, 2021)

• Does exercise really help depression? The BMJ’s 218-study analysis and what it found

• Why social connection has the same survival effect as quitting smoking

Timestamp:

• [00:00] The world is on fire (and deeply ridiculous)

• [02:07] Welcome + Lake Atitlán + why tuning out doesn’t help

• [03:31] 14 minutes of negative news & why everything feels worse

• [04:32] The scroll vs the street: are we really that divided?

• [06:42] 4 evidence-based ways to cope

• [09:53] Your experiment for this week

Mentioned in this episode:

• Johnston & Davey, British Journal of Psychology, 1997: 14 minutes of negative news triggers personal catastrophising

• Reuters Institute Digital News Report, 2024: news avoidance at record high (39% globally)

• 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer: 70% unwilling to trust someone with different values

• Adams et al., Nature, 2021: people overlook subtractive solutions, especially when overwhelmed

• Balban et al., Cell Reports Medicine, 2023: cyclic sighing outperformed meditation for mood (Stanford)

• Noetel et al., BMJ, 2024: exercise and depression meta-analysis (218 studies), walking/yoga/strength comparable to medication

• Holt-Lunstad et al., PLoS Medicine, 2010: social connection increases survival odds by 50%

Your experiment for this week:

Pick one of the 4 interventions:

• Subtract something noisy.

• Try five minutes of cyclic sighing.

• Move for twenty minutes.

• Or text someone and say “is it just me, or does everything feel a bit fucked?”

One thing. This week.

“Maybe the distrust lives in the scroll, not in the street.”

What’s the one thing you’ve stopped doing that made everything feel a bit quieter?

Noemie x

Is it just me or is everyone a little bit over... everything right now?

It’s like a constant dread in the background. A constant what the fuck is happening that doesn’t switch off.

You open your phone and there’s multiple wars, climate crisis, something unhinged someone said, and a grocery receipt that makes you want to lie down on the floor.

And then, at the same time, everything is also incredibly stupid.

Oracle just laid off 30,000 people via a 6am email signed by “Oracle Leadership.”

Not a person. A concept.

Someone raised $4 million to put an AI camera inside your toilet so it can photograph your poop and analyse your “gut intelligence.”

Oranges are up 75% at the supermarket but the wellness industry is selling a $900 mirror that uses AI to tell you how fast you’re ageing.

The world is on fire and also deeply, profoundly ridiculous.

Both at the same time. All the time.

And somehow you’re just supposed to keep going. Make dinner. Answer the email. Look after yourself. Be normal about all of it.

So I’ve been trying to figure out what actually helps.

The strange luxury of looking away

I'm writing this from Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. Three volcanoes, a lake, and absolutely no idea how to work the cable TV box.

Which is honestly a blessing because that means no news in the background, no ticker updates, no panel guests yelling at each other for 55 minutes minus ads.

I still check headlines daily, but I’ve stopped going deep.

And here’s the honest part: it’s been wonderful!

Travelling gives you this strange permission to look away. The distance is a luxury and I know it.

But I’ve also noticed something slightly uncomfortable.

Tuning it all out doesn’t actually make you feel better. It makes you feel guilty. And then weirdly more anxious, because you know it’s all still happening. You’re just choosing not to look.

So you end up in this gap. Too much and you’re overwhelmed. Too little and you’re disconnected.

There’s apparently a sweet spot somewhere in between but I have absolutely not found it.

If you have, genuinely, let me know!

Psychologist Graham Davey found it takes about 14 minutes of negative news to make you start catastrophising about your own life.

Not geopolitics, but the email you haven't sent, the decision you're putting off. And the number of people actively avoiding the news globally is now at a record high.

“Staying informed” has a cost. We just don’t talk about it much.

The scroll vs the street

I’ve been lucky enough to travel to every continent over the years, and we’ve spent the past few months moving through Latin America.

And there’s something I keep noticing that I can’t quite shake.

Are we actually as divided as it feels? Or have we just repeated that story so many times it’s started to feel like fact?

I’m not being naive. The deep divides are real. Ideology, inequality, the gap between who has enough and who doesn’t.

But everywhere I go, people are... lovely. Not in a dramatic way. Just in small, unremarkable, consistent ways.

A woman at a market in El Remate handing us extra tortillas and smiling like it’s nothing.

Our Airbnb host in Belize driving us to the hospital when my husband fractured his arm (he’s ok!).

People are generally so patient with me when I’m obviously practicing my very broken Spanish with them.

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 70% of people globally are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values.

And yet that’s not what it feels like on the ground. The towns and markets and taxi rides don’t feel like that.

Maybe the distrust lives in the scroll, not in the street.

And the thing about collective exhaustion is that it’s also, by definition, collective.

Nobody is going through this alone, even though it absolutely feels that way at 1am when you’re doomscrolling and the world feels like it’s about to end for the 10th time this month.

Subscribe now

So, how to not lose your fucking mind?

Stop adding. Start removing

When everything feels like too much, the instinct is to add. A new routine. A better system. A plan to sort your life out. (I have made approximately 400 of these plans from various hotel rooms this year.)

But here’s what’s interesting. There’s a study in Nature where researchers gave people problems to solve, and almost nobody thought to remove things, even when removing was faster and more effective. And when people were already overwhelmed, they were even worse at it.

So I’ve been asking myself a different question: what can I stop?

The news apps I downloaded “to get a different perspective.” The group chat that’s basically just people sending each other terrible headlines. Scrolling the news before bed to see what fresh hell happened while I was making dinner.

None of it was dramatic, but it made everything a little quieter.

Regulate before you try to understand anything

If your nervous system thinks you’re under threat, everything looks worse than it is. And scrolling through crisis after crisis keeps it there.

There’s a breathing technique called cyclic sighing that’s been properly studied at Stanford. 5 minutes. Double inhale through the nose, long exhale through the mouth. It outperformed meditation for mood, and the effect got stronger with each consecutive day.

I do it when everything feels a little too much.

It hasn't transformed my life, but everything feels about 15% more manageable.

Right now, 15% is genuinely all I’m after.

Move. Badly. It still counts

The BMJ’s largest ever analysis of exercise and depression, 218 studies, found that walking, yoga, and strength training reduced symptoms at levels comparable to medication.

You don’t need a plan. You need 20 minutes where you’re not sitting and scrolling.

I do HIIT classes in the living rooms of our Airbnb when we don’t have access to a gym.

I look absolutely ridiculous but I always feel better afterwards.

That’s the entire science.

Find the others

This might be the most important one, and it’s also the simplest.

Researchers at Brigham Young University found that social connection increases your odds of survival by 50%. That’s roughly the same effect as quitting smoking.

But more specifically for this feeling: there’s something about naming it out loud.

Saying is it just me or... and hearing no, it’s not just you.

So technically, this entire newsletter counts as an evidence-based intervention.

You’re welcome.

It doesn’t fix anything.

But it makes the whole thing feel a little less like something I need to solve, and a little more like something we’re all in together.

And right now, that’s enough.

With love from Guatemala,
Noemie x

P.S. If the “make things smaller” idea hit home, that’s the foundation of everything I teach in the MAKE SPACE Method™. Next cohort opens in June. More soon.

P.P.S. I’m curious. What’s the one thing YOU’VE stopped doing that made everything feel a bit quieter? Hit reply. I genuinely want to know!

A 2022 systematic review published in Health Psychology Review analysed 147 studies on goal-setting in health contexts and found zero evidence that SMART goals outperform other approaches.

In this episode, certified health coach Noemie Mooney breaks down why the world’s most popular goal framework was never tested, never validated, and may actively be getting in your way.

So why do your goals keep failing?

I’ll walk you through the science of what actually works: process goals (which outperform outcome goals in research), intrinsic motivation and self-concordance theory, implementation intentions (what I call “Rooted Routines”), and why borrowed goals — goals that look right on paper but don’t connect to your values — may be the real reason you keep quitting.

This is Part 2 of The Spring Clear-Out series.

Subscribe now

In this episode:

• Why SMART goals have zero scientific evidence (and the wild origin story behind them)

• What is a “borrowed goal” and how to tell if your goals are actually yours

• Process goals vs outcome goals: what the research says about which one works

• What are implementation intentions? How “Rooted Routines” use habit stacking to build lasting change

• The cognitive distortion link: why outcome goals are an all-or-nothing trap

• How to set goals that actually stick without worksheets, deadlines, or willpower

Chapters:

• [00:00] Do SMART goals actually work?

• [02:19] SMART goals have never worked for me either

• [03:15] The origin story: George Doran, 1981, a water company memo

• [04:46] If SMART doesn’t work, what does?

• [05:40] Borrowed goals: why you keep chasing someone else’s life

• [06:53] Shift 1: process goals vs outcome goals

• [07:53] Shift 2: Rooted Routines and why the “after” matters

• [09:28] Your experiment: write one Rooted Routine this week

Mentioned in this episode:

• George Doran: “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management’s Goals and Objectives” (Management Review, 1981)

• Health Psychology Review: systematic review of 147 studies on SMART goals in health contexts (2022)

• Self-concordance theory: why goals aligned with your values sustain effort and improve wellbeing

• Implementation intentions: the psychological research behind “if-then” planning and habit stacking

• Previous episode: The Audacity of Your Own Brain — cognitive distortions and all-or-nothing thinking (The Spring Clear-Out Part 1)

Your experiment for this week:

Pick one area where you keep starting and stopping. Forget measuring it. Forget deadlines. Ask yourself: does this actually matter to me? Then write one Rooted Routine using this format: “After I [existing habit], I will [tiny action].” Put it somewhere visible. Do it for two weeks. That’s the whole experiment.

What’s your Rooted Routine? What are you anchoring, and to what?

Noemie x

Subscribe now

The world’s most popular goal framework has zero evidence behind it.

I know. That’s a big claim. But stay with me.

SMART goals are everywhere.

Every corporate training deck you’ve ever sat through. Every January reset article. Every wellness carousel with cute fonts and a sunset background.

They feel so official, so universally agreed upon, that I assumed there must be decades of research behind them. Right?

There are not.

The whole thing traces back to a 1-page article published in 1981 by a corporate planning director at a water company in Washington state, USA.

George Doran wrote it for Management Review. It had no references. No data. No evidence of any kind.

It was designed to help managers write clearer objectives for their teams.

Not for your health. Not for your habits. Not for the complicated, messy, deeply personal business of changing how you live.

Even Doran said the acronym “doesn’t mean that every objective written will have all five criteria.”

So in 2022, a team of researchers finally did what nobody had bothered to do: they checked the evidence.

A systematic review in Health Psychology Review looked at 147 studies on goal-setting in health contexts.

Their conclusion: not a single study has demonstrated that SMART goals outperform other approaches.

A hundred and forty-seven studies. Zero proof.

A 2024 study went further and tested SMART goals against simple "do your best" goals for complex, creative tasks.

SMART didn’t win. The specificity it demands actually constrained people’s thinking and reduced their motivation.

So the most popular goal-setting tool in the world is a 1-page management memo that was never tested, never validated, and may actively get in your way for anything more complex than “Dave, ship the report by Friday”.

Isn’t that absolutely mental?

Every January I used to sit down with a fresh notebook and write goals that ticked all 5 boxes.

Specific? Check. Measurable? Check. Attainable, relevant, time-bound? Check, check, check. Gold star. Yay!

And by mid-February I’d have quietly abandoned every single one while the pretty notebook gathered dust on my desk, judging me.

If that sounds familiar: it’s not a you problem. It was always the tool.

Back in January, I wrote about the kinds of goals we set and why they fail.

This is the part I hadn’t seen yet: the playbook itself.

This is Part 2 of The Spring Clear-Out.

First we cleared the thinking errors. Now we’re clearing the way you set goals.

Why the goals that work look nothing like a worksheet

While SMART was becoming gospel, actual goal scientists were studying what makes people follow through. And what they found is more interesting than any acronym.

It comes down to one thing: the goal has to actually be yours.

Not “yours” because you wrote it down. Yours because it connects to something you genuinely care about.

When there’s a real match between what you’re pursuing and what you value, you don’t just try harder. You sustain effort over months. And when you get there, it actually feels good.

But when a goal looks right on paper and doesn’t connect to anything real inside you? Even achieving it doesn’t make you feel better. You tick the box and wonder why you still feel empty.

And here’s the part that got me: many people are actively pursuing goals they neither want nor like. And they can’t see it.

Because the goals look correct. They tick the boxes. They’re specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

They’re also someone else’s idea of a good life. I call these borrowed goals. And they’re everywhere.

It goes even deeper than values, though. When a goal feels like “something a person like me does,” difficulty gets reframed as importance. This is hard because it matters.

But when a goal feels disconnected from who you are, difficulty becomes evidence that you should quit. This is hard because it’s not for me.

Same goal on paper. Completely different experience in your body.

This is why “exercise three times a week” completely changes one person’s life and makes another person miserable. It’s not about the goal. It’s about whether the goal belongs to you.

Achieving the wrong goal can literally make your life worse. And SMART has no way of telling you which kind you’re holding.

OK. So here’s what does work.

If you take one thing from this, make it this: there are only 2 shifts that actually matter.

First: focus on what you do, not where you end up.

When researchers compared process goals (”walk for 20 minutes after lunch”) with outcome goals (”lose 5kg”), process goals won by a landslide. Like, not even close. Like comparing a proper meal to finding a crisp under a sofa cushion.

“Write for 30 minutes before breakfast” is a process goal. “Finish my book” is an outcome goal.

“Eat vegetables with dinner” is a process goal. “Fix my diet” is an outcome goal.

Process goals work because they point your attention at something you can actually do today. They build confidence with every tick.

And if you remember last week’s cognitive distortions, you’ll spot why: outcome goals are an all-or-nothing trap. Process goals aren’t.

Second: root the new behaviour to something you already do.

This is the bit that changed how I coach.

The idea is almost embarrassingly simple: “After [something I already do], I will [tiny new thing].”

By pre-deciding what you’ll do in a specific moment, you create a mental link between the situation and the response. When the moment shows up, the behaviour fires without you having to negotiate with yourself about it.

I call these Rooted Routines. New behaviours anchored to things you already do.

Not floating around in your calendar waiting for motivation to show up (spoiler: motivation is not coming, she has other plans), but wired into the structure of your existing day.

“After I pour my morning coffee, I’ll write for ten minutes.”

“After I eat lunch, I’ll walk around the block.”

“After I close my laptop for the day, I’ll do five minutes of stretching.”

Notice the shape:

After I [thing I already do], I will [tiny new thing].

The “after” is doing the heavy lifting.

It turns an existing moment into a launchpad instead of asking your brain to generate momentum from scratch at 3pm on a Wednesday when you can barely remember your own name.

The one thing to try this week

Pick the one area where you keep starting and stopping. You know the one. It’s been on every list you’ve written since January, and possibly since last January.

Now forget measuring it. Forget deadlines. Forget making it achievable and relevant and all the other boxes.

Instead, ask yourself two things. Does this actually matter to me (not to the version of me that looks impressive on paper, but to the one who’s actually living this life)?

And: what’s the smallest version of this I can root to something I already do every day?

Write one Rooted Routine. After I [existing habit], I will [tiny action]. Put it somewhere you’ll see it. Do it for two weeks.

That’s the whole experiment. Nothing more.

Spring is here. The fresh start is real. But this time, skip the worksheet.

Start with something that’s actually yours.

With love,
Noemie x

P.S. Be honest: have you ever set a SMART goal that actually worked long-term? Or did it quietly fall apart while you assumed it was your fault?

P.P.S. If you want to stress-test your goals first, I broke that down in more detail back in January. Three simple questions that catch most of the problems early.

Unwritten Potential

⚡Ex-corporate burnout turned Certified Health Coach. Helping growth-oriented humans design their wellbeing with intention. Easy, science-based tools for real, messy life. No guru BS, toxic wellness, or hustle culture. Let's build a life you love!

By Noemie Mooney

It arrives with zero evidence but total certainty, and because it sounds like you, you believe it.

This week, we’re pulling that apart. Psychiatrist David Burns identified the specific, predictable ways your brain lies to you, and once you can spot them, they start losing their grip.

This is the first episode in The Spring Clear-Out!

In this episode:

• The thought I had by the Bacalar lagoon that was so ridiculous it made me laugh

• The 4 cognitive distortions that would ruin my life if I let them

• Why “always” and “never” are red flags in your own self-talk

• Albert Ellis’s A-B-C-D-E framework (brilliant psychologist, terrible branding)

• The one shift between reacting to your thoughts and choosing what you believe

Chapters:

• [00:00] Your brain is lying to you

• [04:14] 6,000 thoughts a day and most of them are unchecked

• [05:08] The 4 cognitive distortions running your life

• [07:37] Where the lie actually lives: the A-B-C-D-E framework

• [09:06] D is for disputing: “show me the receipts”

• [10:03] Your experiment: name the glitch

Your experiment for this week:

When a thought makes you feel like shit, don’t fight it. Get curious. Ask: which distortion is this? All-or-nothing? Catastrophising? Overgeneralising? Labelling? Name it. Out loud or in your head. Because the moment you name a pattern, it stops being the truth and becomes a thing your brain does sometimes.

“You don’t need to fix your thinking. You just need to stop believing all of it.”

Which distortion do you catch yourself in most? All-or-nothing, catastrophising, overgeneralising, or labelling?

Noemie x

Unwritten Potential

⚡Ex-corporate burnout turned Certified Health Coach. Helping growth-oriented humans design their wellbeing with intention. Easy, science-based tools for real, messy life. No guru BS, toxic wellness, or hustle culture. Let's build a life you love!

By Noemie Mooney

This is the first in a short series I’m calling The Spring Clear-Out. Two weeks of clearing out the stuff that isn’t working but you’ve kept doing anyway. Starting with the voice in your head.

There’s a version of this you’ll recognise.

You’re having a perfectly fine day. Nothing is particularly wrong, nothing’s on fire.

But out of absolutely nowhere, your brain produces something like: you’re falling behind. Or this isn’t going to work anyway so what’s the point. Or everyone else has figured this out and you’re the one who hasn’t.

It arrives with zero evidence yet total certainty.

It doesn’t knock or present a case. It just shows up in your own voice, already dressed as a fact, and you believe it.

Not because it’s convincing but because it’s familiar.

It sounds like you, so you assume it is you.

So you don’t argue with it, you barely even clock it as a thought.

I had one of these last week that was so ridiculous it actually made me laugh once I caught it.

I’m 4 months into a year-long trip through Latin America, doing work I chose and living a life I spent 2 years building.

And the thing that’s surprised me most since we started travelling? The guilt.

Not about anything specific. Just a constant you should be working right now every time I’m not at my laptop.

18 years of corporate life + a deeply type A brain will do that to you.

So there I was, sitting by the beautiful Bacalar lagoon in Mexico, and my brain’s contribution? You should be further along with your business by now.

Not “this is nice” or “well done, you!”

Just: not enough.

The fucking AUDACITY!

We have roughly 6,000 thoughts a day according to a neuroscience team at Queen’s University in Canada.

The number might be debated, but the number isn’t the problem.

The problem is how many of those 6,000 are running completely unchecked.

Not the harmless ones (wait, is it Thursday already?). The ones that arrive disguised as truth and quietly rearrange your mood, your confidence, your entire afternoon.

In 1980, psychiatrist David Burns identified and catalogued these cognitive distortions: the specific and predictable ways your brain lies to you.

And once you can spot them, they start losing their grip on you.

The four glitches

I’ll give you the 4 distortions that would run (and ruin) my life if I allowed them to.

All-or-nothing thinking is the one that gets me on work days. I either had a productive morning or a completely wasted one. The workout was great or it was pointless.

No middle ground. No “decent Tuesday where some things got done.”

This is the engine behind every "I wasted the morning so the day's a write-off" spiral.

Your brain offers two categories: flawless or failure.

And because it sounds so clean, so logical, you don’t think to question it.

Catastrophising is my personal favourite (and by favourite, I mean the one that loves ruining a good night’s sleep for me).

One thing goes wrong and your brain fast-forwards to the worst possible outcome.

Your boss doesn't reply to an email and suddenly you're getting fired.

You skip two workouts and you've "let yourself go."

A friend cancels plans and they obviously hate you now.

It feels like preparation. Feels responsible, even.

It's neither. It's just worry pretending to be useful.

Overgeneralising is subtler but listen for the words. I always do this. Nothing ever works. If the sentence contains always or never, it’s probably this one.

And labelling. This one’s the fastest, which is what makes it dangerous.

Instead of “I made a mistake,” it’s I’m a mess.

Instead of “I didn’t follow through,” it’s I’m unreliable.

You take one behaviour and upgrade it to an identity. And then you act accordingly, because that’s what unreliable people do, right?

None of these are character flaws. They’re glitches. Your brain running patterns on autopilot while you assume you’re thinking clearly.

Subscribe now

Where the lie actually lives

Here’s what I find most useful about all of this, though. Not the labels. Understanding where the glitch actually sits in the sequence.

Albert Ellis, a psychologist working around the same time as Burns, mapped it out.

His framework is called A-B-C-D-E (psychologists are awesome but apparently not known for their branding..)

But it’s one of the most useful thinking tools I’ve come across.

Something happens. That’s A, the activating event. A cold email from your boss. The number on the scale. Someone on Instagram who appears to have the exact life you want.

Your brain tells a story about it. That’s B, the belief. They don’t respect me. I’m a failure. Everyone’s ahead of me. This part happens so fast you rarely even notice it as a separate step.

And C is the consequence.

You spiral, eat the thing, scrap the plans. You spend the afternoon in a mood you can’t trace back to anything specific, because you’ve already forgotten the thought that triggered it.

Most of us live entirely in A to C. Something happens, we feel terrible, and we assume the feeling is the correct response.

We never examine the belief, because it didn’t arrive as a belief. It arrived as a fact.

D is where it gets interesting. DISPUTING!

You catch the story and actually question it. Is this true? Is this definitely true? Would I say this to someone I love? Is there another explanation that doesn’t involve me being fundamentally behind on life?

Basically, “show me the receipts”

This isn’t positive thinking. I’m not suggesting you look at a nasty email and think “what a gift!”

I’m saying the space between something happening and your reaction to it is the most important space you have. And most of the time, we don’t even know it exists.

E is the new effect. What happens when you replace the distortion with something more accurate. Not cheerful or gaslighting yourself here, accurate.

Which tends to produce a response that doesn’t involve eating an entire packet of biscuits or writing off your whole week by Tuesday.

The one thing to try this week

When a thought shows up that makes you feel like shit, pause.

Don’t fight it. Don’t try to be positive. Just get curious.

Ask yourself: which one is this? All-or-nothing? Catastrophising? Overgeneralising? A label I’ve stuck on myself?

Name it. That’s the whole exercise. Literally say it in your head: that’s catastrophising. Or that’s all-or-nothing.

Because the moment you name a pattern, it stops being “the truth about my life” and becomes “a thing my brain does sometimes.”

And that shift, small as it sounds, is the difference between a life spent reacting to every thought your brain throws at you and a life where you actually get to choose what you believe about yourself.

I spent years believing my thoughts were accurate progress reports on who I was and how things were going. They weren’t.

They were a running commentary from a nervous system that can’t tell the difference between a genuine threat and a bad inbox.

It’s working exactly as designed. The design is just spectacularly outdated.

You don’t need to fix your thinking. You just need to stop believing all of it.

With love,
Noemie x

P.S. Which one do you catch yourself in most? All-or-nothing, catastrophising, overgeneralising, or labelling? Hit reply and tell me. I’m genuinely curious (and I might use the answers in a future piece, anonymously, obviously).

Further reading: David Burns, Feeling Good (1980). Albert Ellis, A Guide to Rational Living (1975).

Unwritten Potential

⚡Ex-corporate burnout turned Certified Health Coach. Helping growth-oriented humans design their wellbeing with intention. Easy, science-based tools for real, messy life. No guru BS, toxic wellness, or hustle culture. Let's build a life you love!

By Noemie Mooney

The wellness space is flooded with charismatic people saying things that sound true but aren’t.

So this week I’m doing something different: sharing three books that actually changed something in me, how I think, how I treat myself, how I treat others, written by people who are actually qualified to write them.

In this episode:

• The time I got conned by a bestselling author (and what it taught me about the wellness space)

• Book 1: Thinking, Fast and Slow by the late Daniel Kahneman, and why smart people make terrible decisions

• Book 2: What Happened to You? by Bruce Perry & Oprah Winfrey, and why your habits aren’t character flaws

• Book 3: Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown, and why you can’t process what you can’t name

• Why none of these books tell you to try harder

Chapters:

• [00:00] I got conned by a bestselling author

• [03:40] Book 1: Thinking, Fast and Slow — why smart people make terrible decisions

• [05:10] Book 2: What Happened to You? — your habits aren’t character flaws

• [06:51] Book 3: Atlas of the Heart — you can’t process what you can’t name

• [08:32] The one thing all three books have in common

Mentioned in this episode:

• The late Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow

• Dr Bruce Perry & Oprah Winfrey: What Happened to You?

• Dr Brené Brown: Atlas of the Heart (+ her TED talks)

• Full list of all 8 books: unwrittenpotential.com

The 3 books at a glance:

1. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman — Why your brain makes terrible decisions and how to design better systems instead of relying on willpower. Also increasingly relevant in the age of AI.

2. What Happened to You? by Bruce Perry & Oprah Winfrey — Why your habits are adaptations, not character flaws, and how childhood experiences shape behaviour.

3. Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown — Why you can’t process what you can’t name, and how a richer emotional vocabulary changes everything. Self-knowledge starts with having the words.

Want the full list? Head to unwrittenpotential.com for all 8 books that actually changed my life.

Tell me: what is one book that has changed your life, or changed how you see yourself, the world, or others? 💛

Noemie X

Unwritten Potential

⚡Ex-corporate burnout turned Certified Health Coach. Helping growth-oriented humans design their wellbeing with intention. Easy, science-based tools for real, messy life. No guru BS, toxic wellness, or hustle culture. Let's build a life you love!

By Noemie Mooney

I got conned by a bestselling author and I didn’t even see it coming.

She was on one of the biggest podcasts in the world (you know the one, tens of millions of downloads every month), super confident and articulate and full of bold claims about nutrition and what was slowly killing us all.

I bought her book before the episode was over.

Within the first few chapters, I knew something was off. So I did what I should have done before handing over my hard-earned cash and I looked into who she actually was.

She wasn’t qualified to make half the claims she was making. The “science” was cherry-picked, oversimplified, or flat-out wrong.

And the host never pushed back on a single thing.

I felt like such a fucking idiot. I still CRINGE!

I’m educated, I’m a health coach, I know how to read research, and I still fell for it.

If it wasn’t a Kindle copy, I would have burnt that fucking book.

Now I’m more skeptical. I check credentials and I look at the research. I check if the person is actually qualified to say this, or are they just confident and well-marketed.

Because the wellness space is flooded with charismatic people saying things that sound true but aren’t.

And the cost of bad advice isn’t just wasted money. It’s wasted time, misplaced trust, and sometimes real harm.

So here are 8 books that actually changed something in me, how I think, how I coach or how I treat myself (written by people who are actually qualified to write them).

They changed my life, and I think they could change yours too.

This is a long one. Grab a coffee or bookmark it :)

1. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

This book explains why smart people make terrible decisions about their health, their habits, and their lives.

Daniel Kahneman was a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and in the book he breaks down the two systems driving how we think:

• System 1 (fast, instinctive, emotional)

• System 2 (slow, deliberate, logical)

Most of the time, System 1 is running the show, and it’s full of biases we don’t even notice. It’s the reason you fall for marketing claims, overestimate your willpower, and keep repeating patterns that don’t serve you.

Once you understand how your brain actually works (spoiler: not as rationally as we’d like to think), you stop blaming yourself and start designing better systems.

This isn’t pop psychology repackaged by an influencer.

Kahneman spent decades researching this and won the Nobel Prize in Economics for it.

The man literally changed how we understand human decision-making. It’s not perfect (some of his findings have been debated since), but it’s still one of the most influential frameworks for understanding why we do dumb shit.

2. Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg

This is the book that made me stop relying on motivation.

BJ Fogg is a Stanford behaviour scientist who founded the Behaviour Design Lab, and his model is elegant: B=MAP (Behaviour happens when Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt converge at the same moment).

I’m a huge advocate of design thinking, in fact I got the opportunity to train at the d.school at Stanford U so I was immediately intrigued by his approach.

His whole thing is making the desired behaviour so small that you can’t fail. Floss one tooth. Do two push-ups. Open the journal.

It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it works because it removes the biggest barrier to change: the feeling that it must be hard.

This book fundamentally shaped how I design my coaching programme. And unlike a lot of habit content out there, this comes from the source.

Fogg has been researching this for over 20 years. A lot of the people who popularised habit science either studied under him or borrowed heavily from his work.

[I wrote more about tiny habits and why motivation is overrated here →]

3. The Kindness Method by Shahroo Izadi

This book was a turning point for me.

I spent years trying to force my way out of bad habits through sheer willpower, beating myself up every time I "failed."

Shahroo is a behavioural change specialist who worked in addiction services, and she reframes the whole thing: your habits aren’t moral failings, they’re coping mechanisms.

And the way to change them isn’t punishment. It’s understanding and kindness.

The book walks you through mapping your habits, understanding what they’re really giving you, and replacing them without the usual guilt spiral.

For anyone who’s ever thought “I know what to do, I just can’t make myself do it,” this is your book.

She’s not selling a fantasy or a 21-day fix. She’s sharing a method grounded in real therapeutic practice, and you can feel that on every page.

[I’ve written about The Kindness Method and self-compassion before here →]

4. How to Change by Katy Milkman

Where Tiny Habits gives you one elegant framework, How to Change gives you a whole toolbox.

Katy Milkman is a Wharton professor, co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative, and her research is published in top academic journals.

This book offers a toolkit of evidence-based strategies for making change stick: fresh starts, temptation bundling, commitment devices, and more.

It’s the most useful research-to-real-life behaviour change book I’ve read in years, but it’s written in a way that doesn’t make you want to fall asleep.

The book is organised by theme, so use it as a reference you come back to regularly. Milkman is brilliant at translating academic research into things you can actually use on a Monday morning.

5. What Happened to You? by Bruce Perry & Oprah Winfrey

This book rewired how I understand behaviour. Mine and other people’s.

Dr Bruce Perry is one of the world’s leading experts on childhood trauma and brain development, and together with Oprah, he explores how childhood experiences shape who we become.

The central question shifts from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”

So many of our “bad habits,” emotional reactions, and self-sabotaging patterns aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptations. Responses that made sense at one point, even if they don’t serve us anymore.

It gave me more compassion for myself and for every client I work with. It’s the reason I now ask “what’s driving this?” instead of “why can’t you just stop?”

I read this book while I was in therapy, and honestly, the timing couldn’t have been better. It helped me understand why some of my patterns ran so deep, and why talking about them was only ever going to be part of the work.

Some things don’t start with a decision. They start with something that happened long before you had any say in the matter.

Perry explains the neuroscience in a way that’s accessible without being dumbed down. Oprah brings the storytelling and her own deeply personal experiences, but the science is Perry’s, and it’s rock solid.

The combination of rigour and humanity is what makes this book special.

6. Not Drinking Tonight by Amanda E. White

I’m over 1000 days sober, and this is the book I wish I’d had earlier.

The line that changed everything for me: “Would your life be happier without alcohol?”

Amanda White is a licensed therapist who specialises in addiction and founded a therapy group practice, and she combines clinical expertise with her own recovery journey into something that feels like a conversation with a smart, non-judgmental friend.

Most sobriety resources are either 12-step focused or very all-or-nothing. This book meets you where you are.

Whether you’re sober-curious, cutting back, or just wondering why you always reach for wine after a hard day, it treats you like an adult who can make their own decisions.

What sets it apart from the growing pile of “quit lit” is that White isn’t an influencer who quit drinking and wrote a memoir (nothing wrong with that, but this is different).

She’s a clinician who understands the psychology behind why we drink and how to change that relationship.

[I wrote about my sobriety journey and this book in more depth here →]

7. Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown

This book gave me a language I didn’t know I was missing.

Dr Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston who has spent over two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame and empathy. In Atlas of the Heart, she maps 87 emotions and experiences, and makes a compelling case that most of us are working with a shockingly limited emotional vocabulary.

Her whole argument is that we can't process what we can't name. And honestly, that changed everything for me.

I only discovered this book at 40, and it was quite revolutionary.

I’d spent my whole adult life cycling through feelings I couldn’t articulate, defaulting to “I’m happy” or “I’m stressed” or “I’m sad” when the truth was so much more nuanced than that.

I have the coffee table edition and I still reach for it regularly when something feels off but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. Being able to say “this is disappointment, not anger” or “this is grief, not numbness” has changed how I coach and how I talk to myself.

This isn't some influencer's feelings wheel repackaged into a book. Brown has spent over two decades researching this stuff, and it shows on every single page.

8. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

OK, full disclosure. This is the odd one out on this list. Tolle isn’t a scientist. He doesn’t cite peer-reviewed studies. And I’ll be honest, I’ve read it twice, and both times I had to really work at it. It’s not the easiest read, not for me anyway.

But this book changed how I experience being alive. Not in a dramatic, overnight way, but in a quiet, fundamental shift.

It helped me notice how much of my suffering was created by my own thoughts about the past and future, rather than anything actually happening in the present moment.

For someone who spent years living in a constant state of “what’s next” and “not enough,” that was revolutionary.

I’m including it because this list is about books that genuinely changed me, not just books that tick the “evidence-based” box.

Tolle isn’t selling a programme, a supplement, or a lifestyle. He’s pointing at something that contemplative traditions have been saying for thousands of years, and that neuroscience is increasingly backing up: rumination makes us miserable, and presence is a skill you can develop. Sometimes the thing that shifts you isn’t a study.

It’s a different way of seeing.

The common thread

Looking at this list, I notice something. None of these books tell you to try harder.

None of them promise a transformation in 30 days. None of them require you to wake up at 5am, buy a supplement, or follow some guru or heavily rely on stoic quotes.

What they do, in different ways, is help you understand yourself better. How your brain works. Why you do what you do. What’s actually getting in the way. And then they give you tools, real, evidence-based (mostly) tools, to work with that understanding.

That, to me, is what good self-help looks like. Not someone shouting at you to be better. But someone helping you see clearly, so you can choose better.

With love,
Noemie x

P.S. Have you read any of these? Or do you have a book that genuinely changed how you live? Hit reply and tell me!

This is Lesson 1 of the MAKE SPACE Method™.

It’s called The Bullshit Audit, and it’s the exercise my coaching clients say changed how they see their own life.

What is the Bullshit Audit?

The Bullshit Audit is a simple but revealing exercise. You rate eight areas of your life on two separate scales: how satisfied you are, and how much energy that area is draining. Those numbers are almost never the same, and that gap is where the insight lives. You might be perfectly satisfied with your job but completely drained by it. Or deeply unhappy in a friendship that barely costs you any energy at all. Most of us have never looked at our lives through both lenses at the same time.

Grab the free worksheet at unwritten.coach/audit. It takes about 20 minutes, a pen, and a bit of honesty.

DOWNLOAD THE FREE WORKSHEET

Why start here?

Because the MAKE SPACE Method™ doesn’t start with goals, habits or motivation. It starts with seeing what’s actually going on. Before you can design a life that works, you need to stop pretending the current one does. The Bullshit Audit gives you a map of where your energy is really going, so everything that comes after it (the clearing, the designing, the sustaining) has something real to build on.

This is Module 1 of four. The full course covers UNCOVER, SUBTRACT, DESIGN, and SUSTAIN. Eight lessons, seven tools, and a system for when everything falls apart. It’s $97, designed for a weekend, and the cart is open now.

Three Key Takeaways

1️⃣ Satisfaction and energy drain are two completely different measurements. You can be satisfied and drained at the same time, and that disconnect is exactly what most people miss when they try to change their habits.

2️⃣ Before you add anything new to your life (goals, routines, systems), you need to see what’s already taking up space. The Bullshit Audit shows you where your energy is leaking so you stop building on top of a mess.

3️⃣ The MAKE SPACE Method™ starts with subtraction, not addition. This lesson is your first step, and it’s completely free. Do the exercise. The gaps will surprise you.

Resources Mentioned

• Free Bullshit Audit Worksheet: unwritten.coach/audit

• Full MAKE SPACE Method™ Course ($97): unwritten.coach/space

Get the Full MAKE SPACE Method™

Join the Movement! If you enjoyed this episode, you’re going to love my newsletter! I dive deeper into these topics and share exclusive tools, guides, and behind-the-scenes insights that I don’t share anywhere else. It’s like getting your own coach in your inbox every week. Subscribe at www.unwrittenpotential.com to join our community to get unstuck, grow and unleash your Unwritten Potential!

Unwritten Potential

⚡Ex-corporate burnout turned Certified Health Coach. Helping growth-oriented humans design their wellbeing with intention. Easy, science-based tools for real, messy life. No guru BS, toxic wellness, or hustle culture. Let's build a life you love!

By Noemie Mooney

I’m going to be honest: I’m a little emotional writing this.

I built something.

From scratch, across six countries, in between bus rides and Airbnb check-ins and more Descript exports than I care to count.

I’ve been a coach for 2 years now, and this is the very first time I’ve taken everything I’ve learned and put it somewhere people can actually use it, at their own pace, without needing me in the room.

It opens today.

Here’s why I built it.

A few years ago, I was running on red wine, caffeine, and cortisol. Smoking 20 cigarettes a day while downloading meditation apps. Making the same promises every Sunday night and breaking them by Wednesday.

Every time something didn’t work, I added something new. A new app. A new routine. A fresh-start Monday. I never once thought to ask: what if the problem isn’t that I’m not doing enough? What if I’m doing too much of the wrong stuff?

Then I burned out. Spectacularly.

And instead of rebuilding with more habits, more rules, more discipline, I started subtracting. One thing at a time. Quietly. Boringly.

The biggest thing I removed was alcohol (1,000+ days ago now). But that wasn’t the start.

The start was the moment I stopped trying to shove good habits into a life with zero room for them.

And here’s what I didn’t expect: the habits I’d been forcing for years started showing up on their own. Because there was finally room.

If you've ever made a plan on Sunday night and watched it quietly collapse by Wednesday, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

That’s what the MAKE SPACE Method™ is.

The framework I built from everything I learned. It starts where nothing else does: by clearing space before you try to fill it.

See what’s inside the MAKE SPACE Method™ →

$97. Designed for a weekend. Yours for life.

Cart closes Sunday 15 March at midnight EST.

With love, Noemie x

P.S. Questions? Hit reply. I read everything.

Get the MAKE SPACE Method™ →

In this episode, I’m breaking down additive bias, why the wellness industry keeps selling you “more,” and what actually happened when I stopped adding and started clearing.

In this episode:

• Why your first instinct is always to add (and why that’s the problem)

• Additive bias: the research that explains why we default to “more”

• Why you have 10 wellness apps and still feel like shit

• The real reason there’s no room for healthy habits in your life

• What happened when I stopped adding and started clearing instead

• The connection between the last three weeks: guilt, unrealistic plans, and no space

• A teaser for the MAKE SPACE Method™

Your experiment for this week: Pick one thing you’ve been trying to add that keeps not sticking. Don’t try harder. Instead, ask: what’s one thing I could remove that would make this easier? Not “what should I add to support it.” What should go?

“It’s not that you’re not trying hard enough. You’re trying too much. Of the wrong things.”

If this one resonated, share it with someone who’s been stuck on the hamster wheel of adding more. They don’t need another app. They need permission to subtract.

Tell me: what’s one thing you keep trying to add that you suspect you actually need to make space for instead?

Have the best weekend! 💛

Noemie X

I want you to think about the last time something in your life wasn’t working.

Maybe you weren’t sleeping well. Or you’d stopped exercising. Or your stress was through the roof and your eating had gone to shit. Or you were drinking too much.

What was the first thing you did?

I’ll guess: you tried to add something.

An app. A new routine. A supplement. A 30-day challenge. A habit tracker. A course. A podcast. A cleanse. A book.

Because that’s what we all do, right? Every single time.

Something’s not working, so we add. More structure. More tools. More effort. More systems. More discipline.

Nobody’s first instinct is to remove something.

Nobody looks at their busy life and thinks, “You know what would help? Less.”

There’s actually a name for this: additive bias.

Researchers at the University of Virginia found that when people solve problems, they default to adding rather than subtracting, even when removing something would be simpler, cheaper, and more effective (reference).

We’re literally wired to add. Which explains why you have 10 wellness apps on your phone and still feel like shit. Why your morning routine has 8 steps but you can’t get through step 3. Why you’ve bought the supplements, the journal, the running shoes, the meditation app, the meal prep containers, and yet here you are, googling “how to build better habits” at 11pm on a Tuesday.

It’s not that you’re not trying hard enough. You’re trying too much. Of the wrong things.

Meanwhile, your real life:

You wake up already behind. You check your phone before your feet hit the floor and immediately absorb 20 things that have nothing to do with you. Your morning is a blur of reacting. Your calendar is back-to-back. You eat something beige at your desk and call it lunch. By 3pm your brain is soup. By 7pm you’re too tired to do anything but too wired to rest.

So you pick your poison. The scroll. The wine. The takeaway you said you wouldn’t order again. Whatever gets you through to bedtime.

Somewhere in there you were supposed to go for a run, cook something nutritious, read that book that’s been on your nightstand for ages.

With what time? With what energy? With what space?

There isn’t any. That’s the actual problem.

Subscribe now

And the entire wellness industry is making it worse. Every app, every guru, every influencer with a morning routine and a ring light is selling you the same thing: more. You keep buying, they keep selling, nothing changes, and somehow that’s your fault for not wanting it badly enough.

(Cool. Love that for us.)

I know this because I did it for years.

I was trying to shove healthy habits into a life that had absolutely no room for them. My calendar was packed. My head was worse. I was running on caffeine, cortisol, and way too much wine, smoking 20 a day and wondering why I couldn’t “just” meditate for 10 minutes.

Every time something didn’t work, I’d add something new. New plan. New app. Fresh start Monday.

And I never once thought to ask: what if the problem isn’t that I’m not doing enough? What if I’m doing too much of the wrong stuff?

So I stopped adding. And I started clearing.

Not in a dramatic “burn it all down” way. In a boring, quiet, one-thing-at-a-time way.

I stopped the 6am alarm before I tried to “build a morning routine.”

I stopped doom-scrolling before bed before I tried to “improve my sleep hygiene.”

I stopped trying to add healthy food on top of a lifestyle that was making me sick, and started removing the stuff that was making me sick in the first place.

And the thing I genuinely did not expect?

The habits I’d been trying to force for years started happening on their own. Not because I found more willpower. Because there was finally room.

And honestly? The room was the thing. Not the habits. The room.

When my head wasn’t full of noise, I could hear what I actually wanted. When I stopped performing “wellness” and just... cleared space, everything got lighter.

I didn’t become a different person. I just gave myself some room to show up.

You already know what that would feel like, don’t you?

So before you add one more thing, can I suggest something different?

Instead of asking “what should I do?”, ask “where’s the space for it?”

And if there isn’t any, make some.

You don’t need a habit tracker. You need space on your list. Remove the 3 habits that aren’t serving you anyway.

You don’t need a gym accountability partner. You need space in your morning. Stop going to a gym you hate that’s 40 minutes away and walk around your block instead.

You don’t need a “digital detox challenge.” You need space in your evenings. Delete 3 apps and charge your phone in another room.

I know. It sounds too simple. But simple is the whole point.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the voice in your head that tears you apart every time a habit breaks. Last week I wrote about Sunday You and Wednesday You, and how your plans were designed by someone who doesn’t have to live your actual week. This week: what you’re actually planning.

You can’t build from guilt (week one).

You can’t build for a person who doesn’t exist (week two).

And you can’t build on top of a life that has no room (this week).

Your experiment this week

Pick one thing you’ve been trying to add that keeps not sticking.

Don’t try harder. Instead, ask: what’s one thing I could remove that would make this easier?

Not “what should I add to support it.” What should go?

One last thing

Writing these last few weeks, I kept coming back to the same realisation. The guilt, the unrealistic plans, the constant adding. They’re not three separate problems. They’re the same problem, from three different angles.

And that realisation is the foundation of something I’ve been quietly building.

A framework for people who are done adding more to a life that has no room for it. For people who are ready to make space for what actually matters, instead of piling on more of what doesn’t.

It’s called the MAKE SPACE Method™, and I’ll tell you everything about it next Tuesday.

For now, just know this: it’s a weekend reset, not a 6-week programme. It’s built for real life. And it starts with the one thing nobody in the wellness industry will tell you to do: making space first.

More very soon.

Much love,
Noemie x

P.S: If this hit home, reply and tell me: what’s one thing you keep trying to add that you suspect you actually need to make space for instead? I read every single reply.

P.P.S: Want to be first to know when the MAKE SPACE Method™ goes live? If you’re already subscribed, reply with “I’m in” and I’ll make sure you’re first in line next Tuesday. If you’re new here, hit subscribe so you don’t miss it.