The French do September better.
We have turned the end of summer into an epic national event:
La Rentrée.
I loooove La Rentrée, which roughly translates to “the return” or “the re-entry”.
Every September, the nation collectively returns to life. It’s a major cultural and societal reset.
Kids go back to school.
Grown ups go back to work.
The arts come back from holiday too, with the publishing world dumping 500 novels on us in the space of 6 weeks.
Basically, we all get back to real life.
But with enthusiasm and energy rather than the post-summer blues.
The Rentrée energy is brilliant and September in general is a great opportunity to refocus on our goals.
But when we decide to “get back at it” after the summer, we nearly ALWAYS default to “let’s add more!”. More routines, more rules, more targets, more optimisation.
More, more, more.
And September is primetime for this. Apparently the improved autumn version of you gets up at 5am, drinks matcha, knows her sleep score for the past 6 weeks and possibly tapes her mouth shut at night.
I was thinking more cute notebook and “right, let’s sort ourselves out”, but OK.
But what if this September, we spent the energy differently?
Because September does feel different.
But also Spring. And New Year. And big birthdays. And Mondays.
Dai, Milkman and Riis figured out that those temporal landmarks help create a so-called “psychological boundary” between an old time period and a new time period.
Basically, these time milestones gift you a separation between an old version of you, and a new version of you.
And that separation can help increase so-called aspirational behaviour.
That’s awesome. We want to use that energy!
Though it is worth noting that these temporal milestones are great at getting us to start, and sure, getting going is half the battle won in some cases.
But they don’t really help us figure out whether whatever action we choose is wise, sustainable or actually useful in the long run.
They don’t tell us whether what we’re starting deserves the effort.
So to me the more interesting question is this: what are you going to spend that September energy on?
Because chances are you’re already doing so so much.
According to a Lululemon survey of 16,000 adults in 15 markets, 89% of respondents said they were taking more action to improve their wellbeing than they had been a year earlier, while almost half were experiencing “wellbeing burnout” and 61% felt overwhelming societal expectations to appear well.
And those wellbeing scores have not moved in 4 years.
There’s a specific (and exhausting) kind of mental labour that comes with wellbeing these days.
It’s about tracking, planning, checking, maintaining, evaluating, consuming, and sadly, a lot of second-guessing.
To me there’s something utterly absurd about stressing about your sleep score from a fitness tracker before you even check in with yourself to check how you feel.
There’s something ridiculous about the stress we put on ourselves to “do” self-care.
And clearly I’m not alone because there’s been a huge backlash against over-optimising everything, against the constant, competitive self-surveillance that seems to come with trying to look after ourselves.
The Global Wellness Summit, an actual wellness industry body, named the “over-optimization backlash” one of its trends for 2026. The wellness industry has apparently had enough of the wellness industry. Incredible.
Last week I wrote about dragging my Singapore routine around Latin America and what happened when it finally fell apart.
Here’s the part I left out.
Even when I wasn’t doing the routine, I was still mentally managing it. New city, new little calculation: when am I training, what time are we eating, what moved where, what am I supposed to be doing today?
Very efficient. Beautiful little internal operations department. Absolutely nobody had hired that little terror.
And when I finally stopped trying, I got something much better than a perfectly maintained routine: I got to just “be”.
To have a day without constantly asking myself whether I was doing health right.
Maybe yours isn’t a travel routine. Maybe it’s the app, the target, the eating rule, the recovery score, the account you keep checking because surely there is one more useful thing you haven’t learned yet.
None of these things need to be terrible to be costing you something.
Most wellbeing advice has one thing in common: it tells you to add.
Add a new programme, some habits and routines, a new protocol, systems.
We’re massively biased towards addition, I wrote about this here and here.
But chances are you already have a lot going on with a full life and work and family and trying to get to the gym and read books and have a great social life and generally be a decent human.
You can’t shove good habits in a life that has zero room for them.
Plus, adding feels so productive, you’re taking action. While removing doesn’t feel productive. It feels like you’re quitting, you’re lowering the bar of expectations, or worse, doing nothing at all.
But I don’t particularly want to become exceptionally efficient at wellness. I would quite like all this looking-after-myself stuff to leave me with MORE life, not less of it. More energy for people, work, movement, music, dinner, travel, fun. You know, the actual point.
So before we use all this lovely September energy to build something new, I want us to look at what is already there.
Less is not automatically better, but anything taking up space in your life and in your wellbeing deserves to earn its place.
So my question to you is this: what is taking up wellbeing bandwidth without earning it?
Here we are again, my friend! New season, fresh clean page ahead of us.
I’m not opting out of la rentrée (I love it way too much) but I’m definitely opting out of treating September as a shopping list for a new me. The current me is imperfectly existing, thank you very much.
September can keep the new me. I quite like this one. She just needs less admin.
With love,
Noemie x
P.S. And that is the idea behind this month’s series: the Wellbeing by Design Rentrée.
For the next 5 Tuesdays, at the end of each article I will share some tools, exercises and small experiments designed to make your wellbeing work a little better in actual real life.
Remember that experiments are not a judgement of our characters, we’re simply collecting data: we try something, see what works, keep what helps, tweak what doesn’t, and hopefully learn something useful about ourselves along the way.
This week, we’re starting with subtraction.
Right. Let’s goooo!
🧪 Your Wellbeing by Design experiment: The Wellbeing Cost Test
We’re not clearing out your entire wellbeing routine this week.
But we are looking for one thing that might be costing you more than it’s giving you.
Give yourself 5 minutes and open a blank note:
1. What’s currently on your wellbeing payroll?
Write down up to 5 things you currently do, check, follow or think about in the name of being healthy.
It could be a routine, a rule, an app, a metric, a supplement ritual, a daily target, a podcast, an account you follow. Anything that regularly asks for your attention.
2. Score the benefit
For each one, give it a Useful Benefit score from 0–10.
Ask yourself:
How much does this genuinely help me feel better, function better or live better?
You’re not asking “Is this theoretically healthy?” here, but “does it actually help me?”
3. Score the cost
Now give it a Mental Load score from 0–10.
How much planning, remembering, checking, guilt, negotiation or second-guessing comes with it? Be honest here.
4. Look for the bad deal
Which one has the worst ‘exchange rate’?
High mental load + Meh benefit = That’s likely your candidate.
Not because you’ve proved it’s bad, we’re not holding a wellness tribunal.
But we are running an experiment.
5. Pick your test
Light: leave it alone for 24 hours.
Medium: pause it for 7 days.
Deeper: remove it for the rest of September and see whether you actually miss the benefit.
Then ask yourself:
How confident am I, from 0–10, that I can genuinely try this?
Anything below 7? Make the experiment smaller/easier.
6. Expect yourself to wobble
You will. We all do when trying something new.
So ask yourself, what is most likely to make you automatically restart it?
Decide now what you’ll do when that happens (not if, when).
And if you restart it anyway? Fine.
That’s data too, my friend.
Sunday review
Come back to this at the end of the week and ask:
What did I lose?
What did I gain?
Did the benefit I was worried about losing actually disappear?
What became easier when this wasn’t taking up space?
There is no perfect score this week.
The win is leaving with better information than you started with.
Comment or DM me if you have any questions or if you find this exercise useful! I ALWAYS love to hear from you!
Next Tuesday
We’ll take one thing that is worth keeping and ask a different question:
Was your plan designed for the life you actually have?
New here? You’re reading Week 1 of the Wellbeing by Design Rentrée, a 5-week series of small experiments for making healthy living work better in real life.
Each week stands completely on its own, so you haven’t missed anything and there’s nothing to catch up on.
Subscribe free and I’ll send the next experiment straight to you next Tuesday.
Key Sources
Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman and Jason Riis, ‘The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior’ (2014) 60(10) Management Science 2563 <https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901>.
Global Wellness Summit, ‘The Over-Optimization Backlash’ (16 March 2026) <https://www.globalwellnesssummit.com/blog/the-over-optimization-backlash/>.
lululemon athletica, ‘lululemon’s Global Wellbeing Report Shows the Pressure to Keep Up with Wellbeing is Making People Feel Unwell’ (press release, 23 September 2024) <https://corporate.lululemon.com/newsroom/press-releases/2024/09-23-2024-120019912>.
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, certified yoga instructor, and creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™. Trained in design thinking at the Stanford d.school, she writes Unwritten Potential, a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing, and health behaviour change for smart, health-curious people who want to feel their best without making it a full-time job.