You Can't Win at Being Calm. Trust Me, I Tried.
Trying harder is why it's not working, 'clear your mind' is the worst meditation instruction ever given, and the 2-minute practice that actually helped me involves doing absolutely nothing
I’ve downloaded, deleted, and redownloaded the meditation app Headspace so many times, it should come with a loyalty card.
I’ve also done 200-hour yoga teacher training. I am literally certified to teach people how to be more present.
And I still catch myself treating mindfulness like a performance metric.
I can’t help it, I turn everything into striving.
Meditation, nutrition, sleep, exercise, even rest.
Part of it is just how I’m wired, the Type A brain that wants to optimise everything.
There’s also something else underneath: I spent years being a complete trainwreck.
And now that I’ve rebuilt myself into someone who has her shit mostly together, there’s a quiet fear that the smallest leeway means sliding back. That if I’m not monitoring, tracking, improving, the old version of me will somehow creep back in.
She won’t. I’m a completely different person, but the fear doesn’t care about logic. So I grip. I optimise. I turn being well into a full-time job and then wonder why I’m exhausted by it.
“Fun is serious business”, former Singapore minister George Yeo said in 1991.
That energy, that’s me with wellness.
I wrote about mindfulness last year in Mindfulness Without the Bullshit, and the gist was: it doesn’t need to be complicated. Just be here, on purpose. I still believe that.
But I skipped over the reason most of us can’t actually do it, and it’s not because we don’t have time. It’s because we approach it the same way we approach everything else: as a project to win at:
Download the app > set the schedule > track the minutes > feel good on day 3 > miss day 4 > feel guilty > decide you’re just “bad at meditation” > quit > redownload 6 months later > start the cycle again.
So why does this keep happening?
The one that makes Type A people squirm
Jon Kabat-Zinn, the researcher who essentially brought mindfulness into Western clinical practice in the 1970s, identified 7 pillars of mindfulness: non-judging, patience, beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go.
I could write about any of them, but there’s one I keep coming back to.
Non-striving.
Kabat-Zinn describes it as the absence of striving toward an outcome. Being with yourself, moment by moment, without needing the moment to produce anything.
The idea is this: stop trying to get somewhere with it. Just be where you are and pay attention to what’s actually happening.
For someone who’s built their entire identity around striving toward outcomes, that’s not just a wellness concept. It’s a full existential crisis in two words.
Non-striving doesn’t mean giving up or becoming someone who lets everything slide. It means the thing you’re doing right now doesn’t need to serve a future outcome to be worthwhile. You’re allowed to just be in it.
"But isn't your whole thing about growth?"
Well, here’s where it gets complicated.
Because I built this whole newsletter on the idea that you’re a work in progress. I called it Unwritten because I genuinely believe we’re always becoming.
The MAKE SPACE Method™ is a framework for change.
My entire thing is: you can do this differently.
So how do I square that with “stop striving”?
I think about this a lot. And honestly, I don’t think it’s a contradiction you solve. It’s a tension you hold.
You can want to grow and still give yourself permission to be where you are right now. Aspiring to something better doesn’t mean treating who you are today as a problem to fix.
Are you moving forward because you’re curious about what’s next? Or because you’re terrified of going back?
Because that second one is the grip. And the grip is exhausting.
The white bear problem
In 1987, psychologist Daniel Wegner ran a study that’s become a now-classic study in psychology.
He told participants: whatever you do, don’t think of a white bear.
Then he asked them to ring a bell every time the thought of a white bear came up.
The result? Well obviously the people who were told not to think about it thought about it significantly more than the control group.
Wegner called this the ironic process of control: the harder you try to suppress or control a mental state, the more likely you are to produce exactly that state.
This is your brain on striving.
This is also why “try to clear your mind” is the worst meditation instruction ever given.
You sit down, try to think of nothing. Your brain immediately produces every thought it’s ever had.
You decide you’re terrible at this, open your eyes, and check your phone. The whole thing lasted ninety seconds.
Wegner’s research explains exactly why: the act of trying to control the thought is what creates the thought.
If this sounds familiar, it should.
Paradoxical intention, the sleep technique from last week’s piece, works on the same principle.
You stopped trying to sleep, and sleep came.
Non-striving is the same insight applied more broadly: stop forcing the outcome and the thing you’re reaching for gets closer, not further away.
So what does non-striving actually look like?
Non-striving sounds dangerously close to “just relax” or “stop caring so much.”
Which is useless advice and not what I mean.
You can still try hard. What changes is where you’re pointing that effort.
Going for a run because it feels good to move your body versus going for a run because you need to hit your step count. Same action, completely different relationship to it.
Or cooking a meal you actually want to eat, rather than cooking because it’s on your habit tracker and you’ll feel guilty if you order takeaway.
Your Fantasy Self has a perfect morning routine with 20 minutes of meditation, journalled gratitude, and a green smoothie.
Your Actual Self has a meeting at 8:30 and hasn’t had coffee yet.
Non-striving says: the two minutes you spend actually tasting that coffee, noticing the warmth, being in your kitchen before the day swallows you, counts.
That IS the practice. The full routine was never the point.
The one-week anti-practice
I almost didn’t want to give you a “thing to do” this week because the irony of assigning homework on non-striving isn’t lost on me.
But I know you, and “just be more present” as advice is about as useful as “just relax” when you can’t sleep.
So here’s what I want you to try:
Once a day, for one week, do nothing. On purpose.
Pick an existing moment in your day and use my Rooted Routine format: after I [thing I already do], I will sit and do nothing for two minutes.
After I pour my morning coffee. After I park the car at work. After I close my laptop at the end of the day. Whatever anchor makes sense for your life.
Two minutes. No phone, no podcast, no breathing exercise, no app. Just you, sitting with whatever’s there. If your brain starts planning dinner, fine. If it starts worrying about work, also fine. You’re not trying to quiet it. That’s the whole practice: the absence of trying.
And when your brain says this is pointless, I should be doing something productive, which it will, usually within thirty seconds, just notice that thought and let it pass.
That’s non-striving in action. The thought that this moment needs to produce something useful is exactly the thought you’re practising not following.
Two minutes. No outcomes, no tracking, no way to fail at it.
I’m still working on this. Probably always will be.
Non-striving doesn’t come naturally to someone who spent 20 years in corporate treating every day like a performance review, and it definitely doesn’t come naturally to someone who’s quietly terrified that one lazy Tuesday means my whole life unravels.
But I’m learning that the grip is the thing making me tired. Not the wellness. The monitoring of the wellness.
The moments I manage to let go of it, the ones where I’m just here without needing the moment to be useful, are the ones I actually remember. The still ones. Always the still ones.
With love,
Noemie x
P.S. If you missed it, Mindfulness Without the Bullshit covers the basics of how to actually start: https://www.unwrittenpotential.com/p/mindfulness-without-the-bullshit
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, certified yoga instructor, and creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™. She writes Unwritten Potential, a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing, and health behaviour change for people who are done with hustle culture and wellness BS.