As women rise in their careers and receive higher visibility (in any career), suddenly the most urgent question she is asked is not how she built what she built, but can she display an apology for being a career-woman-mother. This happens in interviews, at dinner parties, in relationships. It is the same demand: center your children, acknowledge the sacrifice, make your ambition legitimate through the lens of motherhood — otherwise, you are not a good woman.

The recent discourse around Emma Grede, a British business woman, author, co-founder of Good American and SKIMS, and by now in every third scroll on your feed is a great example of this. Grede has been building for years, doing the tedious, unglamorous work of actually running companies. She is currently doing a lot of press, and her wave of visibility has arrived with a backlash. The critique is not about her business decisions, but about the fact that she speaks about ambition without making motherhood the center of her businesses. She has four children. She mentions them but she doesn’t organize her personal identity narrative around them.

And people, especially women, are mad about it.

Scrolling on Tiktok this morning, I was very surprised to see all the criticism she was getting. Why do we still expect women to make their ambition acceptable by shaping it in maternal devotion? And what does it cost us, all of us, when we enforce that expectation on each other?

Scrolling away in bed, instead of starting the day, I couldn’t help but wonder: is a woman’s ambition only trustworthy if she seems conflicted about it?

The singular story

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at a women’s leadership panel for young women who were graduating or were in the early career years. The panel began with the question: what are you most proud of in your career?

The most senior, and by all accounts, the one with the most pedigree kicked off the answer: “I am most proud of being able to pick up my daughter from the bus stop everyday”. My heart sank just a little. Not because her experience or value of motherhood wasn’t important, but because she had distilled her entire, illustrious career to one part of her life (albeit, a large one). I wondered what the young women in the audience would hear; would they hear “organize your ambition around bus schedules”, would they hear “none of your titles matter as much as mom”, would they hear “think about your biological imperative first”? I wasn’t sure but I left the panel holding a vague sense of disappointment.

Motherhood has always functioned as the organizing principle of a woman’s life, not just practically, but morally. For centuries, across cultures, the “good woman” was defined almost entirely through her relationship to children: as nurturer, as the person whose needs were always secondary to those of her family.

Adrienne Rich makes the incredibly important distinction in Of Woman Born between motherhood as experience: intimate, embodied, particular; and motherhood as institution: a set of rules and expectations designed to manage and constrain women’s lives. The experience could be profound; the institution was often a trap. So many years later, while we’ve sent humans the farthest away from Earth successfully, we are still living inside that same tension Rich spoke of in 1976.

Here is what I think we are actually resisting when we criticize a woman for not centering motherhood: the idea that there is more than one legitimate way to be a woman with children, and without. What if there was the mother who worked from home, and shaped her career around her primary identity of motherhood? And, what if there was the mother whose primary identity was her career, and her life was built to fit around that — children included. And what if both of those women were good?

There is the mother who works from home and shapes her professional life around school pickups and sick days, whose children are her first priority. She is real, and she is good. There is also the mother who is up early, running companies, limiting her “on-duty mom” weekend hours, not because she doesn’t love her children but because she knows herself, knows her work, and has made peace with both. She is also real, and she is also good.

Joe Rogan has children. He has never, to my knowledge, been asked to justify his ambition through them. He is the most listened-to podcaster on the planet, and his fatherhood is biographical detail, not the emotional framework through which his entire career must be understood. This courtesy extends to nearly every ambitious man in history, and no woman ever.

We have made enormous collective progress in insisting that women deserve careers, ambitions, and identities beyond the domestic arena. But we haven’t fully extended that generosity to mothers who actually live that way. The mothers who work without apology, without the softening themselves with “but my children always come first”.

“Everybody says, ‘How do you do it all? How do you wake up at 5 and run the companies?’ And, I’m like, let’s give a list of all the things that I don’t do, because you know what’s helpful? That’s what’s helpful to women.” — Emma Gerde.

Women, including women who work full-time, continue to carry a disproportionate share of unpaid domestic and emotional labor. The idea of the woman is to always be accumulating: more tasks, more schedules, more responsibilities. That is what makes her good. I love that Gerde pointed out that perhaps we should audit what we say yes to and remove the things that truly do not matter. Because so much of what women, especially mothers, do is a fabrication of an idealized version of womanhood rooted in archaic patriarchal ideas.

What happens when you lose your identity?

There is real psychological weight to what happens when motherhood becomes a woman’s sole identity.

Psychologists use the term role engulfment to describe what occurs when one social role (parent, caregiver, partner) absorbs all the others, until a person can no longer access a sense of self that exists outside of it. It is different from loving a role deeply. It is what happens when the role becomes the only answer to the question: who are you?

The concept of matrescence, which is the developmental process of becoming a mother, first identified by anthropologist Dana Raphael and brought into wider discourse by reproductive psychiatrist Dr. Alexandra Sacks, describes the psychological shift that accompanies new motherhood. Like adolescence, it is a period of genuine identity reorganization. The risk occurs when matrescence collides with patriarchy, and is this reorganization becomes total: the self that existed before is not integrated but wholly replaced by an external entity.

Reflection point:

• Where in your life are you enforcing an expectation on another woman that no one should be enforcing on you?

• Is there a version of another woman’s choices that you’ve been feeling is a critique of your own?

Psychological research shows that when identity becomes entirely externally dependent on others’ perceptions of you and the relentless labor of being needed, it leads to anxiety, resentment, and a diminished sense of personal agency. Women who locate their sense of self almost entirely in their external roles are more vulnerable when those roles inevitably shift: when children grow up and need them less, when the structures that hold their identity in place are suddenly gone. It creates an identity crisis for which many women are completely unprepared, mainly because no one told them to invest in themselves while caring for everyone else.

None of this is an argument against loving your children or finding genuine meaning in the daily role of caring for them. It is an argument for keeping some of yourself for yourself.

Is this just Girlboss 2.0?

Individual success is not collective freedom — bell hooks

The Girlboss era sold women a specific story: that equality was individual, aspirational, and available to anyone willing to work hard enough. It was feminism repackaged as personal achievement, which meant it had very little to say about the structural conditions that made achievement easier for some women than others. Some of the criticism Grede is receiving is based on truth. So, is Grede offering something new, or is she the same thing but packaged differently?

I think the honest answer is: she is both.

• The classic Girlboss mystified her success, as if it was a natural result of vision and grit alone. Grede is doing something different: she talks about her support systems and the staff she employs. She is teaching other women about the infrastructure that individual ambition requires.

• She does not extend that structural thinking outward. She does not ask what it means that the kind of life she describes requires significant economic capital, and what we owe the women for whom “outsourcing” is not possible.

But I think that is okay. Because Grede is not talking to all women, and definitely not to all mothers. She is not talking to the soft-life woman and she is not talking to the soft-ambition woman. She is talking to the woman who wants to build beyond the identity of daughter, mother, partner — and that woman exists. She is one of many voices that are sharing infrastructural ideas about finances, ambition, and personal growth for women. Choose your fighter, based on the life you want.

We need more conversations that show that women, in any group, are not a monolith with the same needs, ideas, and identities. The Girlboss era failed, and the answer to that failure is not to demand that ambitious women center their suffering, their children, or their guilt. It is to build a broader, more honest conversation about what it actually takes (structurally, financially, relationally) for any woman to build anything at all. Collapsing women into two archetypes — the one devoted to motherhood, the other devoted to careerhood — is suffocating all our potentials.

As a childfree woman, I have been on the receiving end of a particular kind of misogyny (not just from men, but from other women who are mothers as well). The comments follow a predictable format:

• How do you live such an empty life?

• You’ll regret it.

• But, you’ll never feel such a powerful love.

The implication is that a woman without children is waiting to begin, is filling time rather than inhabiting it. I’ve thought a lot about where that comes from. When someone makes a choice that is significantly different from your own, especially a choice as foundational as whether and how to mother, two uncomfortable things happen simultaneously:

1. Their existence reminds you that your own path was a choice, not a requirement — that there was always another road. This is destabilizing in proportion to how much of your identity rests on having taken the road you did.

2. It compels a hierarchy. If her way is good, is mine better? Is mine enough? This is not a conscious thought. It is a feeling: a comparison that surfaces as criticism, as the sudden need to establish that your version of womanhood is the correct one.

This dynamic does not only play out between mothers and childfree women. It also happens between mothers who work and those who don’t, between those who acknowledge the weight of motherhood publicly and those who hide from it. The hierarchy, in every form, is the tool of patriarchal control — and keeps us all smaller than we need to be.

Reflection point:

• What is the primary way you answer the question who are you? Is that answer one you chose, or one that arrived by default?

• If you are a mother, can you name three things that are true about you that have nothing to do with your children?

This is not a judgement on how anyone should live, or a suggestion that ambition is superior to presence, or that building a company matters more than building a home. This is a calling in: to make room. It is a request to respect the mother who built a company, and the mother who built a home, and the woman who built neither alongside children, and the woman who built a life beyond motherhood, as equally intelligible and worthy of our solidarity.

There is a woman who is building something, a business, a body of work, a version of herself that has always existed alongside and beyond her role as mother, partner, and daughter. She is not asking permission and she is not asking you to do it her way. She is only asking not to be made the town’s fool for the attempt.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance. Live well + be well xx,

Israa

My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it here: www.israanasir.com/toxic-productivity

Reading Recommendations:

• Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich. The foundational text on the difference between motherhood as experience and motherhood as institution.

• A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk. A startlingly honest memoir about early motherhood and the self that gets lost in it.

• Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. On raising children without the weight of gendered expectation and on the identities women are allowed to have alongside their roles as mothers.

• The Matrescence Project, Dr. Alexandra Sacks’ ongoing work on the psychology of becoming a mother, and why we don’t talk honestly enough about what it does to a sense of self.

• Women Without Kids, Ruby Warrington. A rigorous, unsentimental examination of what it means to move through the world as a woman who isn’t a mother by choice, by circumstance, or by something in between. Warrington dismantles the assumption that childlessness is either a tragedy or a feminist trophy, and asks the more honest question: what does a woman’s life mean when she is allowed to mean it on her own terms?

Cover image: https://ca.pinterest.com/pin/1477812374963255/

In my line of work, as a therapist, I am often meeting people at times in their lives where things do not make sense. Where the story they’d been telling themselves about fairness, effort, being a good person, crashes against a reality. The question I encounter, again and again, is some version is: why me? why now? I did everything right. But, I am a good person…

The Karmic idea of “if you are good, then good will happen” is a life motto I live by myself, and yet, I know in psychology this is known as ‘magical thinking’. In clinical literature, magical thinking refers to the conviction that our thoughts, intentions, or behaviors have a direct causal relationship with unrelated events in the world. It appears as a feature of anxiety disorders, of OCD (where it's known as thought-action fusion: the belief that thinking something makes it more likely to happen), and of psychotic spectrum conditions.

But the clinical framing misses something crucial: magical thinking also describes a nearly universal human experience. Almost everyone, if asked honestly, would admit to some version of it. We don't say the thing out loud in case we jinx it; we believe that suffering should be proportional to wrongdoing; that kindness should be met with kindness; that the universe is at least loosely in the business of fairness.

Psychology has a label for almost every human experience. That doesn’t necessarily make any of it pathological.

The belief in cosmic reciprocity — that the universe keeps score — appears in virtually every spiritual tradition humans have ever constructed. In Islam, the concept of tawakkul (trust in God) is deliberately paired with personal responsibility: the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said, “Tie your camel, then put your trust in God.” In Judaism, the idea of midah keneged midah — measure for measure — suggests that the moral shape of our actions reverberates outward through the world. In the Confucian tradition, the Golden Rule is formulated in the negative: do not do to others what you do not wish done to yourself. In Buddhism, karma is not punishment but consequence:the understanding that intentional action shapes the conditions of future experience. The Stoics went further still, arguing that virtue is its own reward: the good life is lived well regardless of what comes next.

What these frameworks share is something deeper than theology. They offer structure to a cosmos that has none. They give us a language for the gap between what we deserve and what we receive.

We are, at a neurological level, pattern-seeking creatures. The psychologist Michael Shermer calls this patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful connections in noise. Predictability does something specific for us emotionally. Research on what psychologists call intolerance of uncertainty (Michel Dugas and colleagues) shows that ambiguity is often more distressing than a known bad outcome. We would rather have a certain answer, even an unwelcome one, than remain suspended in not knowing. Our nervous system is built to prefer resolution.

We are also creatures of rhythm. We evolved to wake with the rising sun, to slow when temperatures drop, to eat by the season. The body itself is an argument for predictability. Ritual, routine, and ceremony, across every culture we know of, function partly as an anxiety-management system.

But, I’m not sure that searching for and maintaining certainty is the way to a meaningful life. If we spend all of our lives railing against the only prevailing truth of the universe — that nothing is certain — then we are at the risk of spending our lives in fear. I find a more helpful, liberating, and somewhat happier perspective to be to embrace the absurdities of life.

Existential writers looked directly at the universe's indifference and refused to flinch. Albert Camus believed that the central question of philosophy is whether life is worth living, given that it offers us no coherent meaning. The absurd, for Camus, is not meaninglessness itself, it is the collision between our need for meaning and the universe’s complete indifference to that need. We are the ones who require explanation - the universe simply continues.

At the end of Camus’ The Stranger (1942), the protagonist Meursault sits in a prison cell the night before his execution, having refused every offer of consolation (religious, philosophical, narrative). He will not pretend that his death means something it doesn’t, or that the life he lived was building toward anything in particular. What he finds instead, in those final hours, is what Camus describes as an opening to the “gentle indifference of the world.” A recognition that the world’s indifference is not a verdict on him. The universe did not arrange itself against him. It simply did not arrange itself. And once he stops requiring it to, he is just, briefly, free.

What I find useful about Meursault — not as a model for living, but as a thought — is that he stops negotiating with reality. He stops asking the world to confirm what he deserves. And in that stopping, he finds something more stable than the certainty he was never going to get.

Nietzsche’s version of this is amor fati: love of fate. This is not a passive acceptance or resignation; instead, it is an an active embrace of everything that has happened, including what you did not choose and would not have chosen. His thought experiment of the eternal recurrence asks: if you had to live your life again, in exactly the same way, would it be livable? The point is not a metaphysical claim about time. It is an invitation to live in a way you could stand fully behind.

What both thinkers are reaching toward is a more honest relationship with contingency. Not the false pretense that things happen for a reason, but the capacity to live fully within a world where they often don’t. I find this, when I can actually access it, more inhabitable than the alternative — which is to spend the better part of a life in argument with what already is.

[Reflection Point]: What do you believe, at some level, that the universe owes you? Where did that belief come from?

The Pale Blue Dot

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us." - Carl Sagan

The psychologist Frank White, who spent years interviewing people who had been to space, identified a phenomenon in returning astronauts: the Overview Effect —the cognitive and emotional shift that occurs when a human being sees Earth from outside it for the first time.

What astronauts consistently describe is not wonder in the most ordinary sense. It is something more disorienting than that. The borders between countries that we have organized wars and identities and entire historical narratives around are simply not there. The atmosphere that sustains every living thing on this planet is, from that vantage point, visibly thin and fragile. Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon during Apollo 14, described the experience as a sudden, embodied understanding of the interconnectedness of everything; what he called "an instant global consciousness."

And yet what the astronauts bring back is not despair. It is almost the opposite: a clarified sense of what matters. Carl Sagan, reflecting on the famous photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1 from roughly six billion kilometres away — the "Pale Blue Dot" image — wrote that the picture underscores our responsibility to one another, and to the only home we have ever known. Not because the universe demands it of us, but precisely because it doesn't. Because no one else is coming. Because everything that has ever mattered to any human being who has ever lived happened here, on that barely visible point of light.

[Reflection Point]: Is there a loss in your life that has no name, something you’ve been grieving without calling it grief?

As I was thinking about the randomness of life, I couldn’t help but see the similarity between The Overview Effect and the acceptance of the ambiguous, random grief of being alive. What strikes me about the Overview Effect (arguably, one of the most existential moments a human being can experience) is that it does not resolve the randomness. It doesn't answer the question of why things happen, or offer any cosmic guarantee of fairness. The universe seen from space is, if anything, more indifferent than the one we imagine from the ground.

Most of us will not go to space. But the reorientation the Overview Effect describes — the sudden irrelevance of certain anxieties, the sharpened attention to what is actually in front of you, the sense of shared fragility with every other person alive — is available in smaller doses, if we pay attention. The randomness doesn’t go away. But from a different enough vantage point, it starts to look less like a problem to be solved and more like the condition under which we are all, improbably, here together.

Ambiguous grief: the losses with no names

Which brings us back to earth — to our lives. Specifically, to the losses we carry here that we have never quite learned to name.

The family therapist Pauline Boss introduced the concept of ambiguous loss in the late 1970s. She was writing about families of soldiers missing in action; people who were physically absent but emotionally ever-present. And about those caring for loved ones with dementia, who remain present in body but are increasingly absent in self. In both cases, she observed that grief had no clear closure. No funeral, no marked ending, and without those rituals, grief becomes tangled, vast, formless. We don’t know what to do with a loss that doesn’t have a name.

The concept has since expanded to include something I witness constantly in my work: the grief of changes that don’t announce themselves as losses. The things we mourn without calling it mourning. We know how to grieve a person. We know far less about how to grieve a version of a life.

So here is, in no order, the ambiguous grief of being alive:

• Knowing that there was one day when you, your siblings, and parents all lived under the same roof and you can never really bring that back again.

• Friend groups growing apart in your 30s as each person picks their own path and pace in life. You love them but you don’t see them as much anymore.

• Your favorite restaurant, where you might have celebrated milestones, shutting down.

• Being a child of immigrants. There is a chasm between the world your parents carried inside them and the one they landed in, and the further gap within yourself between both of those and whoever you are becoming. There is a vague sense of loss for your parents, for everything they left behind or lost.

• Long-distance anything - friends, siblings, parents.

• Past versions of yourself. The choices you made that caused you pain, but you didn't know better. The young person you once were, doing their best with what they had. We sometimes carry a complicated, unacknowledged tenderness for them.

• The city you moved away from. And subsequently, who you were in that city.

• The body you used to have, and weren't grateful enough for at the time.

[Reflection Point]: Is there a past version of yourself you haven’t yet offered much kindness?

None of these appear in a grief checklist. There is no socially sanctioned period of mourning, no DSM-diagnosis, no rituals. And yet they accumulate in the background of a life, pressing on things we can’t really name.

What do we speak into the gap left behind by grief? There is a phrase in Islam — Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un, from the second chapter of the Quran — that translates as: To God we belong, and to Him we shall return. It is spoken at moments of loss. Not only death, but any loss: of health, of stability, of something loved. Beneath its theological frame, it is an acknowledgment that impermanence is not an aberration in the design of human life, but instead it is the design. We are temporary custodians of everything we hold: our relationships, our roles, our bodies, our particular version of the world as we have known it. The phrase does not ask you to feel fine about loss. It asks you to locate loss within something larger than the loss itself: to find, if not meaning, then at least context.

What We Can Actually Hold

If the universe is not a reward system, then what remains? Where does will and choice then stand - if we can truly not influence anything, since it is so random?

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born into slavery and spent his life thinking seriously about freedom, drew a clear distinction between what is eph’ hēmin — up to us — and what is not. Our judgments, our desires, our choices: these belong to us. The outcomes, the responses of others, the randomness of events: these do not. The practice of a good life, in this view, is learning to direct energy toward what is genuinely ours to hold, and to meet the rest with something other than a futile resistance.

Viktor Frankl, writing from inside Auschwitz, in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), describes what he called the last human freedom: the freedom to choose one’s response to any given circumstance. Not to control the circumstance but to meet it with intention. In this intention is our will, agency, and power.

How to accept randomness?

• Radical acceptance: a core concept in Dialectical Behavior Therapy developed by Marsha Linehan, is not the same as approval or giving up. It is the recognition that resisting reality as it is by wishing it were different, raging against it, refusing to acknowledge it only amplifies suffering without changing the underlying fact. Acceptance is a starting point: you can accept something and still work to change it.

• Meditation: the capacity to observe one's own response to events without fusing with it. What contemplative traditions had long understood, Kabat-Zinn helped translate into a clinical framework — that the space between stimulus and response can be cultivated. That we are not simply the sum of our reactions.

  • A specific meditation I am doing lately is lucid affirmation - you see things as they are (random, impermanent, cosmically indifferent) and choose to be here anyway; not in the hopes that it will work out, but because presence itself is the point.

• The practice of identifying spheres of influence (what falls within my genuine reach, and what does not) offers a practical geography for where to place attention. Anxiety tends to live in the zone of concern that lies outside the circle of genuine control. When we bring attention back to what is actually ours: our choices, our quality of presence, our posture toward events, something becomes possible that wasn’t before.

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The Ethics of Ambiguity

The existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir opened The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) with a provocation: that the first thing human beings do, upon confronting the ambiguity of their existence, is try to escape it. We reach for religious, ideological, psychological systems that promise to resolve the tension between our freedom and our limitations, between what we want the world to be and what it actually is. The flight from ambiguity, she argued, is deeply human. But it is also where a great deal of unnecessary suffering is generated.

What de Beauvoir proposed instead was not the absence of meaning but its reframing. Meaning, for her, is not discovered — as though it were already embedded in the structure of things, waiting to be found — but created, through genuine choice and through genuine relation to others. It is constructed in the presence of uncertainty, not after uncertainty has been resolved. A life does not become meaningful once things make sense. It becomes meaningful in the act of living it with honesty and intention, with what she called a willingness to remain open to the irreducible complexity of being here.

This is harder than it sounds. This mindset asks us to stop waiting for the world to issue a verdict on our lives; to stop, as she put it, fleeing from freedom into the false comfort of certainty. But it also offers something the comfort of certainty never quite delivers: the possibility of being genuinely, rather than conditionally, alive.

The absurdities of life are not a design flaw. The randomness is not something to be corrected, or explained away, or held at arm’s length through enough goodness or ritual or careful living.

What I am working toward, imperfectly and inconsistently, from inside my own life and from what I witness in the lives of the people I sit with is that the more useful question is not why did this happen? but who do I want to be in the face of it?

The universe is not keeping score. However, this is not only a hard truth. If you let it be, it is also a kind of freedom.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance. Live well + be well xx,

Israa

Cover art: New York Movie, 1939 by Edward Hopper

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We’re told that longing - wanting something and making an effort towards it - makes us look needy, unserious, embarassing.

Wanting someone and letting it show.
Wanting friendship enough to text first.
Wanting a creative life enough to make something bad before it becomes good.

So we mask desire with irony and distance. Yet the very things we want - love, friendship, creative aliveness - require visible wanting. And we are all caught in the paradox together: we crave deep connections while punishing the behavior that builds it.

The aesthetics of chill

The ideal right now is to appear unbothered - hard to read, low-investment, slightly unavailable, interested, but not too interested. People are rewarded for ‘being mysterious’, and seeming like nothing really touches them; as if the less you need, the more evolved you are; as if the most admirable person in the room is the one who could leave first and care the least, the most chill. We are using detachment as a way to cope out of being seen as yearning.

As a retired-chill-girl, I can tell you that detachment (appearing unbothered) might protect you from rejection, disappointment, and embarrassment; and so you remain unaffected, unharmed, in a cocoon of your own making - and you remain alone.

Because detachment prevents connection: It prevents reciprocity, because people can’t meet needs you never name.It prevents intimacy, because warmth needs visible wanting. It prevents learning, feedback, and momentum, because you never try. It prevents community, friendship depth, and being helped.

What does this look like in real life?

• Romance: “I don’t care either way” protects your pride. It prevents clarity and mutual pursuit.

• Friendship: Waiting to be invited protects you from feeling “too much.” It prevents the dinner that would have happened if you asked.

• Work and creativity: Keeping drafts private protects you from critique. It prevents iteration and opportunities.

• Community: Not initiating a meetup protects you from awkwardness. It prevents a third space from forming.

Reflection exercise: How can I let myself be seen without abandoning my boundaries?

Fear stack: seen, judged, trying

I think what sits beneath this whole “yearning is cringe” discourse is not one fear, but a layered one.

Fear of being seen

Research on fear of negative evaluation, one of the core mechanisms in social anxiety, shows that many people become vigilant in anticipation of judgment, not only in response to it. The mind starts scanning for risk before anything has even happened. We monitor ourselves, rehearse, pre-edit, and imagine the audience before we make the move. Which is why something as small as texting first, asking someone out, or sharing a draft can feel much bigger than it is.

Fear of being judged

Attachment research helps explain why some people confuse desire with danger. When closeness has historically come with criticism, inconsistency, emotional withholding, or shame, the mind learns that wanting is costly. More recent research on attachment, rejection sensitivity, and fear of intimacy suggests that insecure attachment can make people more likely to expect rejection and, in turn, protect themselves from closeness before closeness even has a chance to form. That is part of why ambiguity can feel safer than clarity because a vague connection preserves possibility while a clear conversation risks a clear no.

Fear of trying

The fear of trying may be the most under-discussed layer of all. In psychology, concepts like experiential avoidance and self-handicapping describe what happens when we organize our behavior around avoiding uncomfortable internal states, especially shame, failure, and exposure. We delay, downplay, detach, and opt out, not necessarily because we do not care, but because caring raises the stakes. If I never fully try, the outcome says less about me. If I keep the work private, I never have to metabolize critique. If I act casual, I can pretend I was never invested. These are not random habits, they are protective behaviours, and in the short term they work. They reduce discomfort, preserve pride, and create distance from the possibility of humiliation. But over time, they also narrow your life. They keep you from the very experiences that would expand your tolerance for visibility, reciprocity, and creative risk.

[Reflection exercises] Pick one place you’re “protecting.” Name the fear in one sentence. Then take a 1-step visible action that respects your boundary and invites connection: send the text, make the ask, share the draft, plan the coffee. Write down what you feared, what happened, and what you learned.

Yearning in real life

Romance and masculinity

There was a period, especially in the late 1990s and 2000s, when mainstream culture briefly made more room for ornamental, emotionally expressive, even slightly softened versions of straight masculinity - the metrosexual man. What has changed since then is a much harder script, reinforced by an online ecosystem that packages masculinity as a project of domination, optimization, and status maintenance. There has been an entire cultural current teaching men to relate to themselves as brands, bodies, systems, and projects to optimize: more discipline, control, status, data. On the flip side, this demands less dependence, less tenderness, and vulnerability gets framed as weakness unless it can be converted into a “strategy”.

Researchers studying masculinity norms have found that ideals like self-reliance, invulnerability, and emotional suppression can limit men’s capacity for connection. In that framework, manhood is not treated as a stable identity but as a social status that must be repeatedly proved and can be easily threatened. If masculinity feels contingent, then tenderness is not just an emotion, it is a reputational risk. But what is so threatening about yearning in today’s masculinity, especially, is that it interrupts the script of dominance. It asks for receptivity and emotional exposure. So detachment becomes a kind of social insurance policy. Vagueness, unreliability, ironic distance, even self-deprecation can function as micro-armors because they preserve masculine credibility in a culture that sees open desire as weakness.

You can see this in the way male group culture often still polices tenderness through ridicule. The recent backlash around the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team was not just about one “locker-room moment”, but it was more about what that moment revealed. It showed how easily masculine bonding can still cohere around minimizing women, even when those women achieved the exact same victory. That is the larger pattern: if femininity is positioned as lower status, then anything associated with women, including emotional openness, romantic expressiveness, and visible devotion, becomes easier to diminish, mock, and avoid.

Which is also why yearning in media remains so charged. The longing man in a period drama, the Bridgerton gaze, the man who looks wrecked by love instead of above it, still has such a hold on women because yearning signals something emotionally rare in today’s world: presence, attunement, noticing, consideration, devotion, the willingness to be altered by love. So when people sneer at yearning, what they are often really sneering at is human relational basics that have become strangely scarce: steadiness, pursuit, emotional fluency, warmth, clarity, care.

In a culture where so many men are taught to relate to themselves as machines to optimize, yearning can look almost subversive. Yearning refuses the fantasy of total self-containment and reminds us that love is not only about choosing someone, it is about being changed by someone.

Not just in romance, but in friendships

‘Yearning is cringe’ is also ruining out friendships. So many of us want closeness but have become strangely allergic to looking like we want it. We are comfortable lamenting the loss of community in the abstract, by sharing articles on Instagram stories, but far less comfortable taking visible action that building community actually requires: the follow-up text, the clear invitation, the second ask, the honest “I’d love to spend more time together.”

Social psychologists have found that people consistently underestimate how much others like them after conversations, a bias known as the liking gap. In other words, we often walk away from an interaction assuming we were less enjoyed than we actually were. That matters because it means adult friendship is often constrained not only by actual rejection, but by anticipated rejection. This is because we are overexposed to self-consciousness. Friendship asks for something that feels emotionally expensive: initiative without guarantees. To be the eager friend is to risk misreading the room, to risk seeming overly available, to risk caring a little more than the other person does.

And so a lot of people end up waiting for unmistakable proof of reciprocity before they allow themselves to move toward someone, which is another way of saying we want the safety of connection without the vulnerability of building it. However, friendship, like any living thing, grows through bids: small acts of initiative that say, I want to know you better, I want to see you again, I want to make room for you in my life.

[Reflection Exercise]: When was the last time you made an explicit bid for friendship? What were you afraid of, and what actually happened?

• Think of one new-ish friend and make an explicit effort to connect with them this week.

• This of an old friend / friend group and explicitly offer to organize a gathering. You can use tips to gather and host without stressing yourself out!

How it shows up at work and creativity

Related research on avoidance motivation makes a similar point: when our attention is organized around avoiding failure rather than moving toward possibility, creativity narrows. In professional settings, we tend to call this high standards and strategic timing. In creative settings, we call it incubation, perfectionism, “being private”, waiting until it is ready. But often what is happening underneath is much simpler: being seen as trying is visible, and visibility invites judgment. There is a reason psychologists use the term evaluation apprehension to describe what happens when the fear of being assessed by others inhibits idea generation. Research on collaborative creativity has found that when people become preoccupied with how their ideas will be received, they produce fewer ideas and fewer categories of ideas.

This is why I keep thinking about that Austin Butler line, or at least the version of it that has circulated so widely online, that embarrassment is an underexplored emotion and that we should go out there and make fools of ourselves. To make anything, and especially to make anything with feeling, requires a tolerance for a certain amount of cringe. Eagerness opens doors in a career, in art, in collaboration, in community. Aloofness keeps corridors empty.

Let yourself want

Maybe that is the real cost of always playing it cool: you get to protect yourself, but you also lose access to the very things that make a life feel alive. Eagerness is how communities form, how friendships deepen, how love becomes visible, and how art begins. If coolness keeps you safe, yearning is what makes you real. So come as you are, want what you want, tell people you love them, and let yourself be perceived. Connection is borne of desire, of longing - that is what propels us towards each other, and the things we love.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance. Live well + be well xx,

Israa

My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it here: www.israanasir.com/toxic-productivity

Cover art: Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss Sculpture by Antonio Canova

The word healing is having the same cultural moment that ‘self-care’ did a few years ago - overexposed, over-marketed, ill-defined, and misunderstood. It began, I presume, in 2021 when “how to heal” was the world’s most searched phrase.

Healing, as a therapeutic or self-discovery concept, itself is not a bad thing - it the process of emotional development after a significant event (from a bad breakup all the way to a bad childhood, and everything in between). The issue is our bastardized, unrealistic expectations for what healing is supposed to do that is a problem.

True healing is meant to bring us back into integrity and connection. But the way we’re using the concept is sometimes doing the opposite: excusing harm, skipping accountability, and isolating us further. However, the true version of healing is hard to find in the endless scrolls of content pushing us towards hyper-individualism and defensiveness. As the discussion on ‘what is means to be in community’ rages on, I couldn’t help but wonder: when did “healing” become something we announce, instead of something we practice?

The 25 Reset

I’ve protected my peace so much, I’ve accidentally made myself boring.

I’ve protected my peace so much, I’ve accidentally made myself boring…

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9 months ago · 2600 likes · 108 comments · Niamh Duffy

The overcorrection era

“Healing will make you lonely” is a very popular sentiment right now - and it’s false. Healing is not suppose to make you lonely, community is not the price you pay for emotional development. We live in an individualistic culture that loves the solo hero arc. But many wounds are relational, and so should the healing be - in relation to others.

Overcorrection on healing, also known as hyper-individuated healing, leads to loneliness. Some people might pull away when you start changing some habits. But: healing that only happens alone is often incomplete. We learn regulation in relationship. We practice boundaries in relationship. We practice repair in relationship.

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Do a quick Relational Healing Audit. Pick one relationship you want to keep, and ask yourself three questions:

1. Am I setting a boundary, or building a wall?

2. Am I taking space with a return plan, or disappearing and calling it “self-care”?

3. Have I asked for what I need directly, or have I been hoping they’ll read my distance as a message or will read my mind?

Then choose one “stay” move that’s small but honest:

• a clarifying text - I’ve been overwhelmed, not angry. Can we talk this weekend?,

• a repair attempt - I realize I shut down earlier. I’m sorry. Here’s what was happening for me,

• or a concrete request - Can you check in with me once this week? I’m trying to practice letting people support me

If healing is real, it will make you more self-aware and connected.

Zara Zaman

We've optimised ourselves into loneliness

tldr: we continue to pour endless resources into optimising everything. speed, efficiency, scale. but not the one thing we can’t live without: connection. this is a manifesto for JoyTech, a look at those building in the space and a call for more crazy smart, ambitious and resilient people to spend their careers working on the question of joy…

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4 months ago · 44 likes · 17 comments · Zara Zaman

Using it as an excuse for shitty behavior

Healing should make our relationships more honest, not more brittle. And yet the loudest version of healing online sometimes sounds like permission to become untouchable - to call avoidance “alignment”, and coldness as “boundaries.”

There are too many influencers telling you that “It’s okay to flake on your friend’s birthday if…” or “Don’t text your friends for a week- see who doesn’t reach out”. It’s advice that pretends it’s about self-respect, but often it’s just hyper-individualism and disconnection.

Yes, you are allowed to take space and yes, you are allowed to have limits. But healing does not mean you stop being accountable for your impact. If your “healing” consistently leaves other people confused, punished, or walking on eggshells, something is off.

• “I need space” (healing) vs “I refuse repair.” (lacking accountability): Refusing repair is when space becomes endless. with no check-in, no timeline, no return plan.

• “I’m dysregulated” (healing) vs “I’m not responsible.” (lacking accountability): Dysregulation explains what’s happening in your body, not what happens to other people because of it. “I snapped because I was overwhelmed” is a starting point, not a conclusion.

• “This is a boundary” (healing) vs “This is punishment.” (lacking accountability): A boundary is about what you will do to protect your well-being. It’s clear, consistent, and not designed to control. Punishment is meant to teach someone a lesson through withdrawal, silence, or coldness.

Filling the accountability gap

Filling the accountability gap is where healing stops being a concept and starts becoming practice.

A lot of people are getting very good at understanding themselves. They can name their attachment style, identify their triggers, recite their trauma timeline, and explain exactly why they shut down, lash out, or disappear. And insight is important. It can be life-changing. But insight is not the same thing as integrity.

Understanding yourself explains behavior, it doesn’t excuse any harm you cause.

That’s the accountability gap: the space between “here’s why I did it” and “here’s what I’m going to do about it.” It’s the difference between self-awareness and self-responsibility.

Two things can be true: you didn’t choose what happened to you, and you are responsible for how you respond now. You can be triggered and still be responsible for what you say when you’re triggered. You can be flooded and still be responsible for returning with repair.

Reflect on a recent encounter / conflict you’ve had and try this framework: Insight → Ownership → Repair

• Insight: What’s happening in me?
  “I’m shutting down because conflict makes me feel unsafe.”

• Ownership: What did I do, specifically?
  “I stopped responding for two days and left you anxious.”

• Repair: What will I do next time, and what do you need now?
  “Next time I’ll ask for a pause with a clear return time. Right now, I’m sorry. I understand how that landed. Can we talk tonight?”

Healing is not the same thing as ‘self-improvement’

Healing is not constant introspection, perfect behavior, or becoming unbothered. Healing is building capacity: for discomfort, for repair, for accountability, for intimacy. Self-improvement is obsessed with outcomes. It turns your inner world into a project plan: fix this, optimize that, remove the “bad” parts, become someone who never spirals again.

True healing includes all the unsexy things we wish we could skip: grief, messiness, relapse, tenderness, and time. Which means the “progress” usually looks quieter than you want it to. Healing is less about feeling good, more about being able to face what’s true.

And maybe that’s why so many people are tired of “healing” right now. Not because healing is bad, but because the version of healing we see most often is overdressed avoidance masquerading as self-awareness. The version that protects the self, but forgets the impact.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance. Live well + be well xx,

Israa

My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it here: https://www.israanasir.com/toxic-productivity

Another trend, similarly about nostalgia, was the ‘Jon Hamm at a club’ with millennials talking about how they’ve all achieved the American Dream (RIP?) and yet would give anything to have one night in 2014-2016 at a club. Again, it was a time and you really had to be there.

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It’s nice to look back on our lives - and on society - in this way. However, I’ve read hundreds of comments under various different “2016-core” posts that say some version of “this was the last time we were happy”.

As I scrolled through 2016-nostalgia-core content, I couldn’t help but wonder - were we really just young and innocent back then, or are we all really just sad right now?

Why is nostalgia a trend?

In a fast-moving, unstable world, people are reaching backward to find emotional safety and identity anchors. When the present feels too fast, too bleak, too expensive, too online, we turn towards familiarity to soothe us. Familiarity lets us borrow a past self who still believed the future was going to be normal.

And there is data behind this. When threat is in the air, nostalgia shows up in behavior. For example, right as the COVID pandemic began, there was an immediate jump in “nostalgic social media use”. Spotify noticed it in real time during early COVID: from April 1–7, 2020, they saw a 54% increase in listeners making nostalgic-themed playlists, alongside an uptick in listening to older decades. Google Trends data shows that searches for “nostalgia,” “90s TV,” “childhood memories,” and even “old cartoons” spiked during the pandemic and have remained elevated since.

This is what we do when we are overwhelmed. We create a pocket of predictability. We replay something we already know the ending to. We put on a song that can carry us back to a version of ourselves who had fewer words for dread. In other words, when the future feels scary, the past starts to feel safer.

It’s not just Gen Z rewatching Arthur clips on TikTok. Millennials are rediscovering early-2000s playlists, Boomers are swapping comfort food recipes from the 80s, and Gen X is romanticizing pre-digital parenting life. From Stranger Things to Y2K fashion to remakes of nearly every 90s show, pop culture has been reworking the past for over a decade. It’s seems like everyone is romanticizing flip phones, Y2K chaos, early-2000s tech, even “simpler” internet eras that were not actually simple, just less surveilled, less curated, less monetized, less exhausting. As society undergoes rapid transformation, we anchor ourselves emotionally to eras that remind us who we once were - or who we hoped to become.

What is nostalgia from a psychological perspective?

Nostalgia is a bittersweet longing for the past, often idealized and selective. That last part is important - nostalgia is about a selected past. We don’t actually want to go back to one night in 2016, we want what that time period gave us, what is signified.

Research shows that nostalgia can be an existential tool - it can increase a sense of meaning in life, and that this effect is closely tied to feelings of social connectedness. In other words, nostalgia helps us feel like our life makes sense as a continuous story, not just a series of disconnected plot twists. Psychologically, nostalgic thoughts can activate the brain’s reward system and help regulate emotions during distress, by reaching for comforting memories. Researchers call this “restorative nostalgia”: a psychological state that allows us to return to a time that felt safer, more communal, or more certain.

In this way, nostalgia can be both a great comforter and a great teacher. Looking back selectively at happy, successful and easier times gives you the opportunity to: (1) reflect on your strengths, interests, and values; (2) examine where in your life you can bring that energy back. Nostalgia can be action-oriented and future-facing, if you are able to process the grief that comes with nostalgia.

Ammi Service was one of my earliest lessons in what it means to build something that matters, even when it did not “make it” in the traditional sense. Ten years later, I can look back on Ammi with something other than disappointment. Nostalgia has a strange generosity if you let it. It helps you see the parts of yourself that were created in the attempt: the self-reliance of figuring things out without a roadmap, the tenacity of taking an idea from a pitch to early prototypes, the resilience of staying in the work even when the conditions were imperfect.

This is how nostalgia can be immensely powerful - it fosters emotional resilience by recalling times of support, success, or comfort; it can increase optimism and motivation by reminding you of past strengths and successes; and most importantly, it serves as a bridge to values and goals - reminding us what mattered to us deeply then, and maybe still does now.

However, unbridled nostalgia can keep you stuck in the past. Repetitive longing for the past can lead to depressive rumination or “golden age” thinking - if you’ve read The Great Gatsby, you know that this does not end well. Too much nostalgia can idealize the past to distort reality and make the present feel insufficient or dull by comparison. It can prevent growth if you cling to identities, environments, or ideals you have evolved out of. This leads to feeling uninspired and pessimistic. Most detrimentally, it can reinforce escapism and unprocessed grief - an avenue to avoid present challenges instead of facing them.

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But - all is not lost. There are habits and mindset shifts that can help you keep your nostalgia healthy and happy. The turn to nostalgia is because the present seems uncertain and frankly, terrible - we have the individual power to shape our futures. The future you want later is built today, in this present.

Reflect on what you are nostalgic about and commit to one action that moves you towards that:

• Spontaneous hangs of the 90s-2000s: don’t overbook your calendar. If every minute of your week is accounted for, you won’t have any spontaneous adventures. Pare down what you commit to (or commit your children to), and let there be free space in your calendar to be able to pick up the phone and call a friend at random.

• Carefree vibes at a party: don’t over-engineer the theme of your party when you host, and don’t try to recreate Pinterest boards. Just host a low-stakes gathering that is more focused on connection, and less on photo-ops. In fact, I recently went to a birthday dinner where the host explicitly requested we don’t take any pictures! It was so nice and helped keep the vibe real.

• Community vibes: bring back the “third place” energy. Become a regular somewhere - go to the same coffee shop weekly, take a weekly walk with a neighbor, have a standing Sunday park meet-up. If you want community, you have to make it easy to bump into people.

• Affordable ease: rebuild “cheap joy” on purpose. Host a potluck instead of a prix-fixe dinner. Do the pregame at home. Pick one night a month that’s intentionally low-cost. Go to the museum on the free day. Make a $12 pasta night feel like an event. Wear the same outfits. Don’t make hanging out such a production.

• A sense of calm: stop multi-tasking every minute of your life (Netflix while eating, scrolling while using the bathroom, podcasts while walking, etc). We are really over-stimulated right now - try low frame-rate media. Watch something slower, older, less optimized for dopamine like a 90s sitcom, a PBS clip, a nature documentary with long pauses. (Low frame-rate media is basically a nervous system cue: nothing urgent is about to happen.)

What does the future hold?

I came of age in the peak of millennial club culture, before algorithmic feeds and endless scrolls. Facebook photo albums were the currency of connection - we’d upload 60 blurry pictures from one night out, tag everyone, and relive it the next morning, still buzzing from Red Bull and bass. Music festivals felt like rituals, instead of cosplay shows for influencers. We were convinced we were part of something bigger than ourselves. I think that is the feeling we are all trying to capture in an increasingly divided, lonely, unaffordable, and angry world.

This is happening right now because we are disoriented at a social level. The last five years have been marked by compounding global uncertainty: a pandemic, economic instability, climate anxiety, political polarization, and now egregiously rapid AI advancement.

A lot of us are carrying am ambiguous grief. The grief of routines that disappeared during the pandemic and never fully returned. The grief of friendships that are disappearing, not from one big rupture, but from distance, burnout, and a life that has became harder to coordinate. Life is more expensive, but it’s not only money. It’s the psychological cost of everything. Every plan requires logistics. The digital spaces that promised more connection now are overstimulating and rootless. Social media collapses time: you scroll from war footage to childhood TV clips to influencer content in seconds. As our future feels increasingly unclear, we seek refuge in a past that feels certain.

@well.guideEmotional whiplash overwhelms our nervous system, which is designed to process one emotion at a time. Instead of fully registering or regulating what we’re feeling, we’re pulled into the next post, creating a kind of emotional fragmentation. Over time, this can leave us feeling overstimulated, anxious, numb, or fatigued without understanding why. Psychologically, this kind of consumption also taxes our cognitive resources. Each post demands micro-decisions (Do I like this? Do I care? Should I share?), which quietly drain our mental energy and attention. At the same time, the unpredictability of what comes next hijacks our dopamine system, hooking us into compulsive scrolling while offering little real satisfaction. The result? A tired, dysregulated brain that’s constantly reacting but rarely reflecting - disconnected from self-awareness and emotionally burned out. #nervoussystemregulation #dysregulation #dysregulatednervoussystem

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The answer is not to throw your phone away into the ocean, and delete your digital footprint (although, that too is a trend right now). The answer is to balance nostalgia with hopefulness for the future. Examine your nostalgia and asking yourself - does this memory move me toward my life, or away from it? If it moves you toward your life, nostalgia can be a resource. It reminds you what you value, what you want more of, what kind of connection you miss. If it moves you away from your life, it is usually a sign of something needing your attention in the present.

Maybe 2016 is not the point. Maybe what we are calling nostalgia is really a craving for a life that felt more livable.

When I think about those blurry Facebook albums and the bass-heavy nights, I do not miss the exact details. I miss the sensation of being embedded, present, the ease of belonging without having to plan it like a project. I miss how often we were together in ways that did not require a reason. That is the thing about nostalgia. It shows you what you valued before the world got so noisy, what you want to protect - it is not about what you need to recreate.

The question worth asking is not “How do we get this feeling back?” Instead, it is, “What are we trying to return to inside ourselves, and how do we build it forward?”

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance.

Live well + be well xx,

Israa

If you’re looking to give back, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) provides urgent mental health and medical care to people affected by conflict, disasters, and displacement worldwide

The more you chase motivation and “feeling ready,” the less likely you are to change. The less you rely on motivation, and instead build systems and small habits, the more ready you become.

When I was in my third year of undergrad, I took a course called ‘Environmental Psychology’, which focused on the intersection of environmental issues, human behaviour and social justice. I had the fortune of listening to a lectures by Thomas Homer Dixon (amazing!) and Jordan Peterson (before his descent into conservative and “traditionalist” hubris). We learned how to ferment our own Kombucha and designed marketing campaigns for toilet paper made of recycled materials. But - the most important thing I learned in that class was ‘Systems Theory’. Systems Theory taught me that life is a collection of interconnected and interdependent systems, and each component of the system influences the broader whole - it’s essentially taking a holistic view.

And I want to share how you can use Systems Theory to create better, longer-lasting goals and improve your overall wellbeing. 

A goal, or resolution, without a system is just an idea. A system means creating a process for yourself so you can live the kind of life that makes you happy and proud. If you want to learn more about how to use a system to help move you towards your goals - I created a resource, that you can use to learn how to make a system that works for you. This 27 page digital workbook is not about conforming to external expectations; it’s about embracing yourself and crafting a journey that resonates with your true desires. This will not change your life, but it will help you organize yourself in a different way.

📘 Workbook Highlights:

1. Feel vs. Should: Move beyond societal expectations and tune into your inner compass. Explore the powerful connection between your emotions and aspirations, allowing your feelings to guide your journey. Learn how to use your feelings to guide you towards goals that are aligned with you.

2. Six Essential Steps: This step-by-step guide walks you through the process of creating a system for success. From understanding core motivations to tracking progress, each step is carefully crafted to lead you toward intentional growth.

   The Well Guide is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

3. Engaging Exercises: Immerse yourself in hands-on exercises tailored to reinforce each step. These activities bring theory into practice, making the journey enjoyable and effective

4. Journal Prompts: Capture your thoughts and emotions with our curated journal prompts. This tool encourages introspection and provides a space for continuous self-reflection.

Motivation vs. Habit: Who is the winner?

One big mistake you might make when trying to make changes in your life is prioritizing motivation.

Motivation is not inherently sustainable. Motivation is what lights the spark. But your habits create long-lasting changes. If you only rely on motivation and don’t focus on building systems that will support healthy, sustainable habits - your motivational will dry up. Building habits are the systems you put in place in your daily life to help you get the results you want; especially, when you don’t feel like it.

Systems help enable habits - they are the small structures in your daily life that make the right choice easier to start and easier to repeat, especially on the days you don’t feel like it.

How to build habits instead of waiting for motivation

• Make it smaller than your ambition. Pick the “minimum effective version” of the habit (2–5 minutes, one page, one rep). The goal is consistency, not intensity.

• Attach it to a cue you already have. Habits stick when they’re repeated in a stable context (same time, same place, same trigger). Example: “After I make coffee, I open my notes app and write 3 lines.”

• Use an if-then plan. Put your healthy habits in the “If X happens, then I will do Y” format. Example: “If it’s 9pm and I’m scrolling, then I plug my phone in and read 2 pages.”

• Design friction on purpose. Environment changes matter. I call this the “river and rock” method: increase the ease (like rivers flow) to make a habit happen - leave the book on the pillow, keep the walking shoes by the door; and increase the obstacles (rocks that block) to the habit you don’t want - log out, move apps off your home screen

• Plan for low-motivation days in advance. Write your “when I don’t feel like it” version now: “If I’m exhausted, then I do the 2-minute version.” Consistency beats mood.

• Practice emotional regulation regularly. When we are flooded with emotions, it becomes harder to choose the harder but better option. Poor emotional regulation is what triggers us to cope with unhealthy habits. Practice deep breathing, grounding, and calming rituals when you are feeling good, so you can practice.

  

If you’re looking to be more productive in a healthy way in 2026

People often use productivity to chase belonging, or to avoid painful emotions like shame, guilt, and rejection. what choices will you make?

• Being productive isn’t necessarily about how you manage your time. It’s about how you manage your emotions.

• Research shows that compared to people sleeping 7–8 hours, those sleeping 5–6 report significantly more productivity loss. So, prioritize sleep if you really want to be productive.

• Research also shows that you will also be more creative when you step away and return to a problem later, especially when the break is low-effort and gives you a positive boost (e.g. do something from your dopamine menu).

• Research suggests when you have unresolved emotions like shame or guilt, you get pulled away from real goals and into chronic busywork - which leads to unhappiness and life dissatisfaction.

If any of these feel like you - or someone you know - my book, Toxic Productivity can be very helpful in decoupling emotions like shame, perfectionism, guilt and fear of not being good enough from true, healthy productivity.

Go Deeper: The Over-functioning Index

If you tend to be the person who “just handles it,” this is for you.

Over-functioning is when your nervous system equates control with safety, so you take on more than your share. You anticipate needs. You fix problems before anyone asks. You keep the wheels turning, even when you are exhausted. From the outside it looks like competence. On the inside it often feels like resentment, pressure, and a quiet fear that things will fall apart if you do not stay on top of everything.

The Overfunctioning Index is a short quiz I made to help you name your patterns without shame. You will get a score, supportive guidance and some next-step FREE resources you can download! It’s not a diagnosis. It’s a mirror.
Overfunctioning is often a productivity strategy, but it’s really an emotional regulation strategy. It can protect you from discomfort in the short term, while quietly pulling you toward burnout in the long term.

When I think back to that Environmental Psychology course, what Systems Theory gave me was this: change is rarely a single decision. It’s a set of small inputs that shape the whole.

Readiness is a decision, not a mood. You choose it the same way you choose to brush your teeth when you are tired. You do it because you are building trust with yourself, not because you feel inspired. This is why habits matter more than motivation. Habits translate values into behavior. They take a goal out of your head and put it into your Tuesday.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance.

Live well + be well xx,

Israa

If you’re looking to give back, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) provides urgent mental health and medical care to people affected by conflict, disasters, and displacement worldwide.

I’ve been thinking a lot of what passes for honesty or critical thinking lately; it is really just the posture of opposition. Being the one who disagrees has become an identity, a personal brand. We are encouraged to have a take, preferably one that cuts against the grain, because it signals that we are sharp, original, not like everyone else. Algorithms and short attention spans don’t reward the slow work of nuance.

The Performance Of Being “Different”

There is a difference between saying, “I can understand why people feel differently” and “every position deserves equal airtime.” We tell ourselves we are being “balanced” if we can argue any side. So someone might take on a conservative or far-right position “just to show both perspectives,” even when that position harms marginalized people or denies basic facts. The goal shifts from “what is true and ethical” to “how do I prove I am fair and open minded.” It feels intellectually sophisticated to say, “I can see it from both sides.”

Not all “sides” are symmetrical. Some are grounded in data and lived experience. Others are grounded in dehumanization, conspiracy, or nostalgia for a world where fewer people had rights. If one side is rooted in dehumanization or misinformation, treating it like just another angle is not neutral. Instead, it flattens important moral and factual differences into a singular aesthetic of “I am open minded.”

Real critical thinking asks us to do two demanding things at the same time: evaluate whether a claim is true, and ask what it does in the world if more people believe it. That requires effort and discomfort. It is easier to outsource that process to a rule like “every argument deserves a hearing” or “the truth is always somewhere in the middle.” In media studies this often shows up as “bothsidesism,” where, for example, overwhelming evidence on climate change is presented as one opinion among two, simply because there is a vocal opposing minority. The appearance of balance replaces the work of proportion, context, and moral judgment.

What Is Critical Thinking

Critical thinking means slowing down: you pause before you repost or react; you ask better questions than “do I like this or not?”; you check where the information comes from, who benefits from you believing it, and whose voice is missing. Mostly, you allow for the possibility that more than one thing can be true at once. For example, “This advice does not fit my life at all, and it might still be exactly what someone else needs.”

Critical thinking is less about proving you are right and more about updating your view as you learn. If your opinion never changes, that is not a sign that you are consistent. It is often a sign that you are not letting new information in. Critical thinking is the journey of exploring “how do I understand this more honestly?”

• Critical thinking is: slow, curious, evidence-based, self-aware, and willing to change. You actively seek out perspectives different from your own, especially from people most affected. You let your level of certainty match the strength of the evidence.You’re willing to revise your view when new information or better arguments show up.

• Contrarian thinking is: reactive, identity-driven, selective with evidence, and more focused on being different than on being accurate and responsible. Cherry-picking, “just asking questions,” or relying on edge cases to feel clever rather than genuinely weighing the strongest evidence on each side.

The Emotional Work of Thinking

We talk about thinking as if it is only happening in the brain, but a lot of it lives in the nervous system. The moment you encounter an idea that challenges you, your body reacts first. Maybe you feel a spike of defensiveness, a flush of shame, or the tightness of “I do not want this to be true.” Cognitive biases are not abstract flaws. They are the mind’s way of protecting us from those uncomfortable sensations. Confirmation bias, for example, is often a way to avoid the anxiety of uncertainty. If you only look for evidence that you are right, you never have to feel the wobble of “maybe I need to change.”

Defensiveness is another emotional shortcut that dresses up as logic. Instead of sitting with “this critique might have a point,” your system rushes to build a case: here is why the other person is overreacting, uninformed, or too sensitive. On the surface it looks like argument, underneath it is self-protection. The discomfort of not having a quick answer, or of feeling implicated, is so intense that we would rather argue about tone, wording, or edge cases than engage with the substance of what is being said.

Critical thinking asks you to do something much harder emotionally. It asks you to tolerate feeling ordinary, to admit that other people know things you do not, to allow your identity to be less rigid. It asks you to stay present with the discomfort of “I do not know yet” rather than grabbing onto the first confident opinion that feels familiar. When you can recognize, “Right now I am chasing control or specialness, not truth,” you create a tiny bit of space. In that space, actual thinking becomes possible.

You ask not just “Is this true?” but also “What does this belief do in the world? Who does it help or harm if more people adopt it?”

Contrarianism and Psychology

We celebrate people who “go against the grain,” but reacting in the opposite direction isn’t the same as thinking deeply. A few emotional dynamics that often underlie “I just like to argue”:

• Psychological reactivity: When people feel their freedom is being threatened, they get a surge of motivation to push back. Classic reactance scales literally include items like “I enjoy playing devil’s advocate whenever I can” and “Nothing turns me on as much as a good argument,” which tells you how closely the “devil’s advocate” identity is tied to this oppositional reflex.

• Need for uniqueness: People who score high on this trait want to feel different from others and are especially sensitive to anything that makes them feel ordinary. They’re more likely to defend their opinions publicly and to act in ways that break social conventions.If everyone goes left, they’ll go right, not necessarily because right is wiser, but because it feels more me.

• Argumentativeness as a personality style: Communication research talks about argumentativeness as a predisposition to enjoy taking positions and engaging in verbal conflict. It can be constructive – think: good lawyers, activists, researchers – but when it isn’t paired with empathy, it slides into chronic combative communication.

However, recent research has proposed a Contrarianism Scale and found that contrarianism behaves like a relatively stable personality trait that’s distinct from other things we might confuse it with, like reactivity, need for uniqueness, or simple autonomy. There is more to be studied here, and this is just the beginning of understanding this trait.

Reflection questions:

• Before I disagree, do I fully understand what I’m reacting to?

• Is my opinion evolving, or have I fused my identity with being ‘the one who sees it differently’?

Recreational Debate Families

Some families use argument the way other families use board games. Disagreement is a sport, a love language, a primary way of engaging. Family communication research gives us a frame for this. Studies describe families along two axes: conversation orientation (how much open talk and exploration of ideas is encouraged) and conformity orientation (how much children are expected to match the family’s beliefs and values). These two dimensions create different “family climates” - from highly discussion-oriented homes to more “because I said so” homes.

In high-conversation families, kids learn to speak up, defend a position, and tolerate disagreement. That can be incredibly protective for critical thinking if emotional safety is also present. But when a family is high on debate and low on emotional attunement, arguing becomes the main currency of connection. You get what some clinicians describe anecdotally as recreational debate families:

• Feelings are quickly translated into positions

• The “winner” is the one with the sharpest rebuttal, not the most accurate or empathetic perspective

• Kids learn that being slow, unsure, or ambivalent makes you ‘weak’ or open to attack

Research on family communication patterns shows that these climates do shape later behavior: conversation-heavy homes predict more willingness to talk about sensitive topics, while high conformity without safety predicts more anxiety and avoidance. Argument-focused families can produce adults who are excellent at spotting flaws in an argument, but less comfortable at saying “I don’t know yet” or “this is what I feel, not a thesis I have to defend.”

How to balance contrarianism and critical thinking?

Instead of swinging between “believe everything” and “trust nothing,” there is a middle ground I think of as soft skepticism. You assume there is something worth understanding, but you don’t make quick judgements. Soft skepticism sounds like: “Let me understand this fully before I decide how I feel.” You look for context, complexity, and impact. You ask yourself:

• What is this person actually saying, in plain language, without the performance around it?

• What evidence are they offering, and what evidence are they ignoring?

• Who is most affected if more people believe this, and what happens to them?

This approach builds more grounded opinions and more generous conversations, online and offline.

You can try small practices like:

• Asking yourself:

  • Before I disagree, do I fully understand what I am reacting to?

  • Is my opinion evolving, or have I fused my identity with being the one who sees it differently?

• Waiting 24 hours before sharing a hot take, then revisiting it and noticing what has shifted

The goal is not to become less opinionated. It is to become more spacious, intentional, slower, and honest in how you arrive at what you believe.

How do I know if it is something I truly believe or I am being contrarian

A useful question here is, what part of me is speaking right now: is it the grounded part that is trying to understand, or the part that is afraid of being ordinary, wrong, or out of control

A few checkpoints:

• Source of energy: Does this opinion feel settled and steady, or buzzy and performative. If you imagine holding this view privately, with no one to impress or correct, does it still feel true?

• Relationship to evidence: Did you arrive at this view after seeking out information and perspectives, or did you backfill reasons after deciding you wanted to take the opposite side? Can you name one or two strong points on the “other side” without mocking them?

• Psychological flexibility: If someone you respect showed you compelling evidence that challenged this view, would you feel mostly curious and a little unsettled, or would you feel mostly humiliated and defensive?

None of these on their own are definitive. Together, they help you notice when you are practicing critical thinking and when you are simply rehearsing a familiar oppositional role.

If you are looking for a thoughtful holiday gift for the person in your life who is always hard on themselves, Toxic Productivity is a gentle invitation to step off the hamster wheel and rethink what a “good” life actually is. Buy it at: www.israanasir.com/toxic-productivity

How to approach a contrarian in your life

Most of us have a friend, colleague, or family member who seems to live in devil’s advocate mode. They jump to the exception, the loophole, the “actually,” often before anyone has fully finished a sentence. It can be exhausting. Here are a few ways to engage without getting pulled into endless intellectual sparring:

1. Shift from debate to curiosity: Instead of arguing point by point, ask, “What makes this feel so important to you” or “When did you start feeling this way about these kinds of topics”. You are inviting them out of the role of commentator and into a more personal, reflective space.

2. Name impact without attacking intent: You can say, “I know you like to look at things from all angles. Sometimes when you immediately take the opposite side, it makes me feel dismissed rather than understood.” You are giving feedback on the effect of their pattern while still honoring the value they see in it.

3. Set gentle boundaries: It is also okay to opt out. “I am not in a place to debate this right now, but I hear that you feel strongly about it,” or “I want to share this as a story, not a topic for a debate today.” You are protecting your own nervous system without diagnosing or shaming theirs.

Contrarianism is real, measurable, and sometimes necessary for progress. Many important shifts in history began with someone willing to say, “I do not agree.” The problem is not disagreement itself. The problem is when opposition becomes automatic, an unexamined habit that we mistake for insight. Without self-awareness and emotional regulation, contrarianism is just another pattern we inherited from our upbringing, our fears, and our need to feel special. It keeps us reacting to the crowd instead of actually choosing what we believe.

So I keep coming back to that reel in my feed. Imagine a world, online and off, where fewer of us are performing difference and more of us are practicing depth. Where “unpopular opinion” is not a hook but a responsibility, something you have earned through real thinking, context, and care. The invitation is not to be less opinionated. It is to be more spacious and honest in how you arrive at your opinions, and more willing to revise them as you learn. That is the important unglamorous work of critical thinking.

In a culture surviving on divisive politics, “truth-tellers”, and hot takes - it might be the most radical stance of all.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance.

Live well + be well xx,

Israa

If you’re looking to give back, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) provides urgent mental health and medical care to people affected by conflict, disasters, and displacement worldwide.

There is a crisis in men’s emotional health that optimization cannot solve on its own. Many men are lonely, over-indexed on self-reliance, and under-resourced when it comes to language for feelings or practices for community, friendship, and romance.

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Research show that men’s close friendships have reduced over time, and that the stigma around help-seeking remains high. This leaves many men susceptible to ‘leaders’ that offer certainty, status, and an ideal for masculinity. Into that gap steps a certain wellness/podcaster/biohacking aesthetic that promises mastery: sleep scores, macros, cold plunges. Alt-gurus (and the Andrew-Tate-adjacent pipeline) exploit real pain points in men’s lives. They identify real frustrations (confusion about dating, purpose, and power) and then redirect them away from connection and toward contempt or control.

There are various voices in this Manosphere - what I call ‘Men With Microphones™’ (Joe Rogan, Scott Galloway, Jordan Peterson, etc) encompassing different vibes. Peterson is obsessed with genetics, Huberman is obsessed with “Testosterone-Hacking”, Rogan is obsessed with online culture, and Galloway is obsessed with intellectualization. Galloway is the most intriguing to me because he says many things - he talks of ‘the better man’, the importance of a role model and positive father figures, the myriad reasons men are ‘farther behind than women’. All good things, on the surface. However, anytime I read his work on this or hear him speak about boys and men, I hear an implication: the situation we are in is a result of women changing the rules.

This week’s New Yorker article (below) explains Galloway’s intellectual MO really well, as well as the double-bind and hypocrisy both men and women are trapped in - each lonely, disconnected, and resentful on their own. The immense scrutiny of male loneliness makes it seem like women are not lonely, or that they do not suffer from the perils of current society - unaffordable housing, low wages, divorces, mental health issues (including suicide). However, according to Pew Research, men and women experience roughly equal amount of loneliness. The point is not who “wins” loneliness, but that disconnection is widespread.

I often hear different Men With Microphones™ say different versions of ‘when women are lonely they turn to each other, they create; while male loneliness leads to aggression’. Biological ‘wiring’ is often cited as the reason, bringing back every current social issue to the ‘men are hunters, women are gatherers’ theory. Even though we now know that women were just as involved in hunting as gathering. Or, they say that women have a ‘maternal instinct’ which makes them natural nurturers compared to men, even though the maternal instinct has been widely challenged in contemporary research (references: 1, 2, 3).

I can’t help but wonder - is the issue that women don’t feel rage against a broken system, or is the issue that rage is a socially acceptable (and sometimes, encouraged) response from men?

Is rage, antipathy, disconnection somehow inherent to men biologically?

Research is looking into the relationship between loneliness and aggression, finding that “even if we ascribe loneliness and misogyny to individual persons, they cannot be understood independently of the socio-political structures in which they are embedded”. This indicates that aggression and disconnection is not inherent to men, the way it is often presented; but that men are socialized to express themselves in this way.

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The conversation about male loneliness is often framed in a way that strips men of agency, as if they have no choice but to be the way they are given the state of the world. This framing leads to defeat and withdrawal. Voices like Galloway’s often describe the “Male Loneliness Epidemic” in the passive voice, which can imply these things are happening to men (because women changed the rules). A clearer perspective is that these things are happening within patriarchy, a system of norms and institutions that men often support and benefit from (and sometimes, disregard the negative impact it has on them); and one that many women also play into.

It is easier to blame shifting dating norms and educational gaps, than it is to name the older operating system we are reacting to. Naming the system, instead of faulting one group, restores agency. This type of accountability returns power to the people who feel they have none.

@well.guide#stitch with @Banter and Bliss Podcast please read the caption before commenting. I am not saying that this is a biological fact. I am not saying that this is something people actively choose. I am saying that the cultural system around masculinity has taught men that connection is not as important as competition. And so, you are seeing this play out in the dating field, and families, and romantic, relationships, and friendships. Straight Men turned to their female, romantic partner for community and struggle to create meaningful, rich bond with other men. I generally think one of the ways we can get out of this male loneliness issue is to encourage young boys to read fiction. And also young men to read fiction. And also middle age and older man to read fiction. I’m not saying that reading fiction is gonna solve the issue, but it will help men understand the skill of empathy. Because if you look at nonfiction, it is a hyper radically individualistic journey. When you are reading non-fiction it is about the loan hero, who needs to fix something, whether it’s himself or the protagonist of the memoir. And so the focus is solely on yourself. Reading fiction forces you to think about other people’s experience and walk in their shoes. And that is the beginning of empathy and curiosity. These two things are the cornerstone of connection. And before someone says something, this is not a causation, reading fiction will not make you a good person. But there is a reading gap between men and women, and that’s indicative of the feeling gap between men and women. This is within the straight context by the way. I explored this more and my substack so check it out, the link is in the bio. #malelonelinesscrisis #maleloneliness #toxicmasculinity #alphamale

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The Crisis Of Romance

Romance struggles when self-improvement feels more important than mutuality. The crisis of romance is less about men being “bad” at feelings and more about a culture that has trained them to focus on solo-quests (improving themselves to be providers and protectors), while neglecting the shared life and their interior world.

The British Vogue article “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?” sits at this same cultural point. The headline hints at misandry - but the article itself is not about hating men. It is about a visible fatigue with heteronormative relationships that don’t feel mutual: women are calling out a weariness with performative “couplehood”, the rules for which were set in a different era; the optics of partnership as status; and relationships that aren’t reciprocally emotionally literate. The article captures a significant mood shift: women are skeptical toward partners who are not able to meet them for relational care.

The data suggests why there might be a gap between emotional literacy between men and women - women consistently use mental-health care more than men. In 2023, 28.5% of women vs 17.1% of men reported any treatment in the past year (therapy, medication, telehealth). While the use of mental health services rose for ages 18-44 in both groups during 2019–2021 - women’s usage went from 23.8% to 28.6% and men’s from 13.1% to 17.8% - the gap persists, even though there was a growth in men using mental health services. (References: 1, 2)

This gap is also reflected in reading patterns: men tend to read more memoir and personal leadership books which enhances their Self-mastery; women read those genres as well as personal growth books, which enhances their relationships. You can read more on this in the essay below, including the research on this.

What Is A Woman’s Role?

So, where does this leave women? Women are not the cause of this crisis, and, importantly, they are not the cure. But women are part of the cultural milieu that shapes it.

In many heterosexual couples, women still plan the dinners, send the birthday texts, and keep their social connections from evaporating. Increasingly, women are doing a second, more invisible job: “mankeeping,” or maintaining the man’s friendships so he does not drift into isolation. When one partner manages all connections, resentment grows. Many women I’ve spoken to have shared some version of: “I do not want to be the project manager of our relationship.”

The patriarchy has flattened men into roles that are useful to the system and costly to the Self. Many women have absorbed those same stories (like in this video below).

This script of the man/woman binary is reflected in the current language of “feminine/masculine energy.” On TikTok and Instagram, creators with millions of followers frame relationships as transactions, as an exchange: a woman offers ‘Softness’, a man offers ‘Protect and Provide’. This framework offers clarity in a confusing marketplace of romance. In times of economic issues and social changes, defined roles give us a (false) sense of certainty, safety, and belonging. However, this extremely popular mindset simply reimposes an old hierarchy that narrows intimate connections to complementary tasks.

Patriarchal ideals of masculinity and femininity are not only about who cooks or who pays. They influence who gets to have needs, who is allowed fear, who must be brave on demand. Men who internalize the ‘provider’ script often outsource vulnerability to private moments, substance use, silence, or rage. Women who internalize the ‘nurturer’ script over-function, then become resentful and bitter. When providing/duty becomes the male path to love, and emotional labor becomes the female path to love, both partners lose the full range of being known by each other.

Recently, a friend sent me an interview where an older man talked about how he knew he would divorce his wife. He said, he knew she “couldn’t hold his heart” when he was vulnerable in front of her. Unfortunately, she had internalized and was perpetuating the patriarchal script that ‘real men should not be vulnerable’.

Women are not responsible for healing men, they are responsible for healing themselves from the poison of the patriarchy. What we need to do is captured so beautifully by :

“We should pay attention to bell hooks when she said that the great flaw of feminism is its unwillingness to look at male pain—preferring to see men as adversaries rather than potential co-workers in dismantling patriarchy.” - Celeste Davis, ‘I am a feminist and I am concerned about the male loneliness epidemic’.

“Rather than bringing us great wisdom about the nature of men and love, radical feminist focus on male power reinforced the notion that somehow males were powerful and had it all. Feminist writing did not tell us about the deep inner misery of men.”

“The truth we do not tell is that men are longing for love. This is the longing feminist thinkers must dare to examine, explore and talk about.”

“The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, ‘Please do not tell us what you feel.’”

“Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure.” - bell hooks, The Will to Change

A healthier path doesn’t ask men to abandon structure or certainty. It asks them to add proactive connection as a metric of health: Did I check on a friend? Did I share a feeling instead of outsourcing it to a ‘life hack’? Did I apologize and stay present? Did I ask the right questions? Was I gentle? Was I proactive about my curiosity instead of reactive?

Social connection is not a soft add-on to society. It is a core element for our health and for a life worth living - for men and for women.

*Note: this essay is an opinion piece about the heteronormative system and does not reflect the nuances of other genders, orientations, sexualities, and romantic partnerships.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance.

Live well + be well xx,

Israa

If you’re looking to give back, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) provides urgent mental health and medical care to people affected by conflict, disasters, and displacement worldwide.

Cover photo: Sven Brasch, City Vals, 1910

Before the industrial era, our days followed the rhythms of the body and the sun - not the clock. Most people organized the day by tasks and natural cues: sunrise and dusk, tides, seasons, chores that “demanded” attention (milking, collecting eggs or fruits, harvest before storms). Historians call this a task-oriented sense of time: what you did stretched or shrank with the work itself, and your social life intermingled with it, instead of being blocked into identical hours by a clock.

Then, because of the rise of the Protestant work ethic in Europe and North America, idleness became sinful, a sign of moral weakness. So work was no longer something you did at a specific time for a specific purpose; instead it became proof of virtue and salvation, and rest became something to be ashamed of - indulgent, even dangerous. This morality-based mindset around the work-rest dyad impacts us till today.

Today, the attention economy has made sure that even rest is monetized. We rest to “recover productivity,” not to exist. We call it “self-care” but often mean “maintenance for future labor.”

The psychology of hating rest

Most of us don’t rest, we negotiate for it.

We unconsciously engage in moral licensing, what I call “the spreadsheet mind.” We keep score: if I complete three productive tasks, I’ve earned a Netflix episode; if I skip a workout, I must compensate with extra emails. But there is no finish line; the target keeps moving. Productivity, when tied to self-worth, becomes a treadmill - endless motion without feeling good enough. This internal accounting system treats rest like a transaction, not a regular part of life.

On a physiological level, our nervous system adapts to the speed with which we live our lives. Chronic busyness floods the body with cortisol and adrenaline, wiring us to expect constant stimulation. When we finally pause, the drop in arousal feels wrong - like anxiety, boredom, or restlessness. That’s why sitting still, resting, and not doing anything, can feel unsafe: our body interprets calm as threat.

The complicated relationship between rest, time, and culture

Interestingly, the concept of time is internalized differently in different cultures, and by proxy, the concept of rest is also internalized differently. Polychronic cultures are cultures where time is fluid, relational, and multiple things can coexist at once. In many parts of the Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, time has traditionally followed people and events, not clocks. Work unfolds in conversation, in response to weather, or the arrival of others.

Growing up in Saudi Arabia, there was no concept of guests coming at a certain time - instead, guests arrived in relation to the prayer time (noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, or late evening). In Pakistan, work schedules (and even school) are based on the heat of the high-noon sun. This is true in other places, like Spain and Italy, where there is the siesta in the afternoon - to rest and sometimes, because it’s too hot to be outside. In these places, resting is not a moral failure, instead a part of daily routine.

In Japanese culture, there’s the concept of ma, the pause or emptiness that gives meaning to what surrounds it. I find that so beautiful, that rest actually gives meaning to work. In Islamic traditions, barakah (divine blessing) is often described as time that expands when aligned with purpose, not speed. And in many African cultures, the Bantu concept of ubuntu, time is inseparable from community; rest and gathering are ways of sustaining life together.

Rest has also been distributed unequally. Throughout history, whose rest was respected and whose was criminalized has always been political. Enslaved and colonized peoples were denied the right to rest, their labor extracted under violence. Women’s domestic work, especially care and emotional labor, is still invisible - endless, unpaid, and unacknowledged. Immigrants were taught that rest was a luxury for those who belonged, not for those proving they deserved to. Many of us still carry this inheritance: the need to over-acheive just to feel acceptable and valued.

These difference reveals that our guilt about rest is not universal - it’s cultural. The Western, industrial mindset treats rest as a deviation from progress, while many collectivist cultures view rest, ceremony, and slowness as essential to balance and harmony. What matters is being with rather than being on time.

How to have healthy rest

Healthy rest is not simply the absence of work; it’s the presence of recovery. It’s made up of two parts: creating space for doing nothing and engaging in behaviors that actively nourish you. You have to first take away - the courage to stop filling every blank moment. The second is to explore your intention - choosing what genuinely restores instead of distracts.

True rest is proactive, not reactive.

Saundra Dalton-Smith’s 7 types of rests:

• Physical: not only sleep. Also microbreaks, posture, breath, walking that is not a step count.

  • Try: 5 body-weight squats every hour to shift circulation.

• Mental: intervals of unfocused thought to let working memory clear; single-tasking as hygiene.

  • Try: One task, 25 minutes, full-screen window.

• Sensory: intentional reduction of inputs; quiet light; closing tabs both digital and emotional.

  • Try: Dim lights after 9 pm.

• Creative: exposure to beauty, novelty, nature; permission to make without monetizing.

  • Try: One page of “useless” doodling. No posting.

• Emotional: time with people who do not require performance; honest “no” without explanation.

  • Try: Tell one person the truth of your capacity today.

• Social: relationships that give energy rather than extract it; boundaries as care.

  • Try: Choose the friend who grounds you.

• Spiritual: connection to something larger; ritual, awe, values alignment.

  • Try: Five minutes of awe. Sky. Tree. Music. Prayer.

Unlearning the transaction of rest

• Ritual: Replace “Did I earn it” with “What do I need.”

• Language swap: From “I deserve a break” to “I am a body that requires recovery.”

• Boundary cue: Choose one low-stakes “no” this week without justification.

Nervous system retraining

• Two-minute decompressions: 120 seconds of eyes-softened gazing out a window after meetings.

• Slow starts: 10-minute morning of no-input. Tea. Breath. No phone.

• Body check: Tight jaw, lifted shoulders, shallow breath are “I am on.” Drop shoulders, drop your tongue from the roof of your mouth, take 2 deep breaths and exhale slowly.

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Rest is not a loophole in productivity; it’s the soil from which meaning, creativity, and self-trust grow. It asks us to remember that we are not machines measured by output, but living systems that require rhythm, repair, and reprieve. If rest feels strange, let it. Discomfort is part of the rewiring. Keep sitting, keep noticing, keep breathing into the parts of you that panic when things slow down.

If this essay resonated, you’ll find a deeper exploration of these ideas in my book, Toxic Productivity: Reclaim Your Time and Emotional Energy in a World That Always Demands More. There’s an entire chapter on shame - how it disguises itself as drive - and another on how to integrate healthy rest into your habits without guilt or fear of falling behind.

If you’ve ever felt that rest is something you have to earn, this book will help you understand why and how to unlearn it.
👉 Order Toxic Productivity to begin the work of resting without permission.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance.

Live well + be well xx,

Israa

If you’re looking to give back, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) provides urgent mental health and medical care to people affected by conflict, disasters, and displacement worldwide.

In psychology, this is known as a ‘harm reduction’ approach to changing habits - telling people to stop doing something (even when it is harming them) doesn’t always work; instead, telling people to add something better to their life has a spill-over effect in creating space for more, healthier habits.

So, let’s do that.

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Bed-rot: the practice or an instance of spending many hours in bed during the day, often with snacks or an electronic device, as a voluntary retreat from activity or stress.

It was in the summer of 2022 when I first heard the term - during a webinar I was facilitating on mental wellness; in the zoom chat someone said “I can spend up to 8 hours on TikTok in a day - bedrotting”. Since then, I’ve heard it being used as weekend plans, things people do on vacation, a coping strategy for depression and anxiety, and - something people feel guilty about.

Why are we all rotting ourselves?

If it makes us feel guilty, and bad about ourselves, why do we do it?

• We bed-rot as a way to disconnect from ourselves; it is a form of disassociation. While a certain level of disassociation is healthy, perhaps even necessary, in today’s world - bed-rotting for an entire weekend can be harmful to your mental health (see below).

• We bed-rot because of dopamine loops - we think dopamine is the happiness chemical, but it is actually the seeking chemical - it is released when we pursue something and then receive the reward. The act of doomscrolling or binge-watching traps us in a cycle of short-dopamine loops. And since dopamine is a seeking-chemical, you feel pulled to repeat the behaviour and not necessarily be pleased by it.It also impacts attention span, memory, and focus negatively.

• We bed-rot as a way to alleviate boredom (which as both my friend and creative scientist, , and social scientist Arthur C. Brooks say - is necessary for emotional wellbeing).

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What is the harm of bed-rotting?

• Most people experience strong negative emotions like guilt, remorse, or regret afterwards. When bed-rotting is used to avoid feelings, your brain tags it as procrastination, which often triggers guilt or regret afterward. That emotional hangover lowers motivation and makes re-engagement harder next time. Essentially, “I’m wasting the day” → shame → more avoidance.

• Our brain feels overstimulated, so it’s not actually a restful activity. Long scroll sessions deliver novelty and micro-rewards that keep your nervous system “on.” High sensory input plus blue light disrupts recovery, so you feel wired and foggy rather than restored.

Only 40% of bed rotters feel good about their energy levels, compared to 66% of those who don’t do it. - The Rise of Bed Rotting

• It’s a way of engaging in parasocial relationships: you witness the lives of people you don’t talk to anymore. Watching people you no longer speak to or influencers creates an illusion of closeness without reciprocity. It reactivates old dynamics, fuels rumination, and rarely meets real attachment needs.

• Increases loneliness and comparison. Curated feeds shift your reference point and inflate perceived gaps in your life. The more you compare, the more isolated you feel, which then reinforces staying in bed and scrolling again.

*there may be medical / health reasons someone may bed-rot, and that can be helpful if done in small, intentional ways.

Bed-rotting reduces our ability to show up for ourselves and others

Research shows that “the average American spends 364 hours a year bed rotting, equivalent to 15 full days”, with that number increasing to 21 days for Gen Z.

Interestingly, bed-rotting makes being in relationships harder. There is no friction in bed-rotting, there is no challenge - it is a wholly passive activity. When disconnection becomes the default way of dealing with discomfort, then how do we stay with discomfort with a lover, friend, parent, or stranger?

We are shorter, more irritable, less forgiving, quick to judge and shame, and have less compassion towards each other. I’m not saying that bed-rotting is the root of all the perils facing our divided society - but I am saying that it is impacting us at a relational level.

And, I’m saying that it is the piece of the puzzle that we have control over. Yes, we can’t control governments and policy, we can’t control the billionaires, we can’t control climate change and the housing crisis.

But we can control our habits, we can control how much emotional resilience we have in our reserve to meet inconvenience, we can control where we spend our energy, and we can control how we make ourselves feel better in this hellstorm of current society.

So, here are a few ways you can take back control of your time, energy, and emotions.

How to transform rotting into ripening:

Rest is not rotting—it’s part of that ripening. It’s the quiet rain and sunlight that allow everything else to bloom. -

There is a significant difference between resting and bed-rotting: intention. Resting in bed is a decision - you name what you need, you set a gentle container, and you lower the stimulation so your nervous system can settle. Maybe you close your eyes, breathe, sip water, let the room be quiet, and give yourself a clear end point.

These are some things I do to reduce my temptation to bed-rot:

• Opposite action - do something you don’t want to do

  • This is an emotional regulation skill from DBT (a type of therapy). Avoidance gives short relief but keeps the loop alive. Doing the small version of what you avoid retrains the brain to expect safety with action. Pick a 2-minute action that moves you toward the day. Sit up, feet on the floor, open curtains, sip water. Set a timer. When it ends, decide your next step, not before.

• Bring newness into your life - challenge yourself

  • Novelty triggers curiosity and small dopamine rises that come from learning, not scrolling. It also interrupts habit ruts. Do one new micro-thing per day. New route to coffee, a different playlist, five pages of a new book, a two-ingredient recipe you have never made.

• Keep an updated ‘things I like’ list - visual reminders

  • If you don’t know what else to do, then you will turn to the thing that is most familiar. And usually, when I’m bored / anxious / whatever, I can’t really think of what I like to do. So, keeping a list of books I’ve been reading (or articles), playlists, meditations, activities I can do helps me convince myself to do something else besides bed-rotting. Sometimes, all we need is a reminder.

• Put that phone down at certain times - have boundaries

  • The bed-phone (or bed-Netflix) pairing is a powerful cue. Breaking the pairing weakens the urge; put your phone out of arms’ reach. Add more things to your bed-side that will discourage you from picking up the phone. Or, give yourself a strict timeline for scrolling in bed (10-15 mins). You can even use timer-locks that are in the app or phone settings to set these time-limits.

My friend and yoga/meditation teacher wrote in one of her recent essays about healthy habits - “light before likes”, which is a great reminder for opening your windows before opening your phone.

A few guidelines to make these habits stick

• Pair each habit with a cue you already do, like brushing teeth or making coffee.

• Set “Good Enough Points”. Decide what “done” means before you start, for example two minutes of light, one window stretch, one item from the 2-minute list.

• If you slip, reset kindly. “That was one episode, not my identity.” Then do the tiniest next action. We are not looking for streaks, we are looking for habits!

I hope these swaps will help you ripen instead of rot in bed this weekend!

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance.

Live well + be well xx,

Israa

[Ps. My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it here: www.israanasir.com ].

If you’re looking to give back, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) provides urgent mental health and medical care to people affected by conflict, disasters, and displacement worldwide.

Once, aspiration was measured in upward mobility: bigger houses, shinier cars, corner offices. Now, a new kind of yearning has taken root. Instead of striving upward, many of us are longing downward - toward pastures and provincial havens where schedules don’t exist and time bends, where life feels less like a ladder and more like a meadow. Reports show that Gen Z is declining middle management positions, women are ‘conscious unbossing’ at work, and people are questioning their ambitions.

There’s a nostalgic element to this desire. Remember the gentle pacing of childhood TV shows - Arthur, The Berenstain Bears, Sesame Street, and even Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood? These programs unfolded slowly, often in “real time,” with long pauses, meandering conversations, and low frame rates. Compare that to the hyper-cut, ultra-stimulating editing of today’s children’s programming or social media content. We crave slowness not only because it feels soothing, but because on some level, our nervous systems remember being calmer inside those rhythms.

Longing for slowness often comes packaged as nostalgia: an ache for a past that never fully existed. We imagine simpler, gentler times - even though those eras had their own stresses and exclusions. What we’re really craving isn’t a return to the 1990s or the “idyllic countryside”; it’s the emotional state we felt then: less fragmented, less pulled apart by competing demands.

As a self-professed lover of the Slow Living Movement, I’m ashamed to say that my desire for speed was on full display in July when I was on holiday in the South of France.

At the spice counter of the Thursday Marché Provençal (the weekly fruit and vegetable market), Tony, a young 17 year old told me his dream was to move to New York City one day. He had cousins in the Bronx and he marveled at their life. Through a series of broken phrases and gestures, he told me that he wanted to shed the slowness of the South of France - he did not wish to wake up to languid lazy afternoons. I deduced he wanted to shed the ennui that clung to him thickly, like the humid high-noon heat. The sunlit Cote D’Azur was too slow, too quiet, too …little. He dreamt of buildings so tall they blocked out the sun; of being packed in a subway car like human-sardines; of vitality, vigor, and speed.

I claim to desperately want the opposite (just look at my other essays!). I want to run off to Italy and live in a provincial town. I desire to sit under the expansive sky and witness a moonrise without a construction crane blocking the view, of eating real sardines in a farm-village somewhere on bruschetta instead of being packed like one in a humid, suffocating subway cart; of stillness, grounding, ease.

What I know is that I desire a slow life, but can I embody one?

Reflection point: Where in your life are you attached to the aesthetic of slowness without living its value?

Desire vs. Embodiment

There’s a difference between craving the aesthetic of slowness and embodying its value. I can post images of lavender fields, lemon trees, and stone piazzas, but when I’m asked to live the inefficiency, my reflex is irritation.

Take the gas station in France. None of them allowed pay-at-the-pump. You had to walk inside, wait in line, exchange words with the cashier, maybe make small talk with others in line, and then pump your gas. I repeatedly caught myself tapping my foot in impatience. “It’s so inefficient,” I muttered to my sister. But wasn’t that the point?

In North America, we have traded presence for efficiency. The places we romanticize as “slow life,” the places that fill Pinterest boards with that aesthetic, are romantic precisely because they are inefficient. They are built around small talk, chit-chat, and waiting in lines. They are built on pharmacies closing at 7:30pm and coffee shops not opening until 9am on Saturday mornings.

Within the North American mindset, the desire for efficiency is fueled by what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill (Brickman & Campbell, 1971): we adapt quickly to improvements, then crave the next hit of novelty or speed. Even when we long for stillness, our nervous systems are conditioned for acceleration. Layer onto that the scarcity mindset that capitalism breeds: time is money, and if we’re not maximizing, we’re wasting.

Inefficiency, and much of what we romanticize about the ‘slow life’, begins to feel threatening because it exposes us to what modern life teaches us to avoid: discomfort, silence, waiting. We crave stillness, yet when it arrives, we don’t know how to stay inside it.

And yet, research on attention restoration theory (Kaplan, 1995) shows that “inefficient” environments - those that encourage fascination, reflection, and soft focus - are the ones that restore us. In other words, our impatience fights against what we actually need.

Natural settings, unhurried routines, and spaces without constant stimulation allow our directed attention (the part of the brain that focuses, filters, and works hard) to rest. In their place, we enter what psychologists call “soft fascination”, moments of wonder that don’t demand effort, but still gently engage us: watching leaves ripple in the wind, hearing waves roll in, noticing the changing light of dusk.

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This is why a slow walk in the park feels more refreshing than twenty minutes of scrolling, even though both fill time. One empties us; the other replenishes. Yet most of us resist these inefficient spaces because they feel unproductive. Our impatience, our need to “get on with it,” fights against what we actually need most: mental rest and emotional spaciousness.

Journal prompts:

• Where in your daily life does inefficiency show up, and what would happen if you treated it as restoration instead of inconvenience?

• When did you last allow inefficiency to become intimacy like chatting with a stranger in line or waiting without distraction?

• What do you romanticize abroad that you resist at home?

Practice: This week, choose one small inefficiency and lean into it: wait without your phone, let the bread rise, take the longer walk. Notice what comes up; is it irritation, relief, or maybe a glimmer of presence?

How to do less so your life becomes slower?

You can't teach someone to swim when they are drowning,

We have become habituated to speed, deadlines, multitasking. This is why stopping feels harder than starting - our bodies interpret slowness as “something is wrong.”

One habit that can help with this is mindfulness and meditation.

Mindfulness research (Kabat-Zinn, 1990s onward) demonstrates that intentional slowness (pausing to notice breath, sound, sensation) rewires our stress response.

Technique: Try the “5-4-3-2-1” grounding practice. Pause and notice 5 things you can see, 4 things you can feel, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. This simple practice interrupts urgency and brings your body back into the present moment.

Another practice is somatic body work.

Research on somatic experiencing (Levine, 1997) and polyvagal theory (Porges, 2011) shows that the nervous system stores speed and stress in the body. If it’s never discharged, we stay stuck in a cycle of tension and vigilance. Somatic practices teach us how to “complete the stress cycle” and allow the body to return to equilibrium.

Technique: Try a simple body shake. Stand up and shake out your hands, arms, legs, shoulders for 30 seconds. Let sound or movement come through if it feels natural. This physical release signals to the nervous system that it is safe to slow down.

Challenge yourself this week:

• Choose an inefficiency on purpose. Pick one task you usually rush (like making coffee or folding laundry) and stretch it out. Notice your resistance. Stay with it.

• Practice “single-tasking.” For one hour, do only one thing - cook without scrolling, walk without texting, read without checking your phone. Track how your body responds.

• Create a ritual of pause. Before opening your laptop or leaving the house, place a hand on your chest and take three slow breaths. Remind your body: slowness is safe.

• Savor instead of document. Next time you encounter beauty - a flower, a sunset, a meal, resist the urge to capture it. Let the memory live only in your body.

What Are You Really Longing For?

Slowness is not about doing fewer tasks. It’s about experiencing less emotional fragmentation. Emotional fragmentation happens when our attention and energy are splintered in too many directions at once:

• Overstimulation from constant pings, alerts, and feeds.

• Digital mental load of juggling emails, texts, DMs, Slack channels, and Google Cals.

• Social comparison amplified by the highlight reels of others’ lives.

• Ambition overload: the belief that every hobby must be monetized, every talent optimized, every season of life leveraged.

When our attention is fragmented, even small tasks feel exhausting. Slowness, then, is less about having an empty schedule and more about having an integrated one - a life where our energy moves in one direction at a time, where presence is possible.

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5 Ways to Bring To Embody The Slow Life

1. Reintroduce Low-Frame-Rate Rituals: Watch something intentionally slow: old sitcoms, nature documentaries, even “slow TV” (yes, there are 7-hour Norwegian train rides on YouTube). Let your nervous system re-attune to gentler rhythms.

2. Single-Task Something Mundane: Choose one daily activity (like washing dishes or making coffee) and do it without multitasking or digital distraction. Notice how different the task feels when you give it your full attention.

3. Create a Nostalgia Anchor: Bring back a small, comforting ritual from childhood: re-read a favorite book, listen to an old soundtrack, eat a snack you loved as a kid. Sometimes our bodies need to remember safety before they can practice slowness.

4. Design for Spaciousness, Not Efficiency: Leave margin in your schedule. Arrive early on purpose. Block out “do nothing” time as though it were sacred. These inefficiencies create the space where integration can happen.

5. Practice Emotional Integration: At the end of each day, take five minutes to write down three things you actually experienced (a sound, a conversation, a moment of laughter).

[The Slow Life can be a part of The Trad Wife movement but they are not the same. You can have a Slow Life and not be a Trad Wife. The Slow Life is not about churning butter and living in subservience to a male figure.] I’ll share an essay on The Myth of the Trad Wife soon, for now you can read this NYT article called: Tradwife Content Isn’t Really for Women. It’s for Men Who Want Submissive Wives.

Where do you resist slowness?

• When do you feel impatient in daily life? Waiting in line? Cooking a meal? Walking without headphones?

• What emotions surface when you slow down: boredom, anxiety, guilt? What might those feelings be protecting you from?

• Which moments of your day could be reframed as opportunities for presence rather than problems to be optimized?

We often say we want a slower life, but what we really want is a life that feels whole, integrated, less scattered across a hundred competing demands. I want my life to look like Call Me By Your Name: idyllic countryside, sunlit afternoons, peaches on the table. But what I need is for it to feel like that - expansive, embodied, unhurried - even in a city, even in ordinary time.

So perhaps the question isn’t “How do I build a slow life?” but “How do I belong to the life I already have?”

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance.

Live well + be well xx,

Israa

“After I quit my job, I didn’t really want to go out or be at parties or events", she told me when I asked where she’d been these past few months. I silently waited for her to continue with some version of “because I didn’t have a job and I don’t feel good enough” script that I have heard so many times before (and had felt myself).

“But, I’m just so happy - this is the first time I feel completely content” she said, surprising me.

“Oh! that’s amazing but… why would you not be out and about then?”, I asked.

“Because people kept asking how I could be content after leaving a glamorous tech job, especially without working or ‘doing something.’ It made me feel weird, like I had to defend being okay.”

Isn’t that so weird? We, as a society, judge people who are just happy without striving for anymore than they already have.

Complacent. Lazy. Uninspired. Unambitious.

We are suspicious of those who are just happy. It’s no wonder everyone feels some form of burnout - there is no escaping the race. Even in our imaginations we compete with our past by benchmarking our current moments against it (very Gatsby-esque, although no one learned has the lesson); and we compete with an aspirational future, one that we collect pin by pin on Pinterest.

That conversation with my friend made me pause and wonder how I felt about being content- or, rather, had I ever felt content in my life? If, being alive for three and a half decades on this wondrous planet did not elicit a sense of contentedness even once, was that a life well-lived?

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What is the difference between being content and giving up?

We have to first align on what it means to be content - it is the feeling of satisfaction, presence, and gratitude all rolled into one emotional experience. In contrast, giving up has an element of resentment or incompleteness; negligence has regret; and being unambitious is unused potential or lacking direction (more on this one below).

So, why then does the content person unnerve the discontented hustler?

It is because we have all absorbed the idea that in order to be ‘successful’ you must be unhappy to some degree. I’ve worked with people who believe that if there is no emotional pain (shame), then they will lose motivation. The old adage is “no pain, no gain”, but we believe it to be “if pain, then only there is gain”. The notion that we can just be satisfied implies that we are not gaining anything. But, if you look back at moments in your life where you felt content, I’m willing to bet you gained a lot - perhaps not in dollars or likes on Instagram - but in emotional connection and resilience.

When we give up something, like I mentioned, there is resentment - because of a loss, something has been taken away, or an obstacle has become insurmountable. When we give up, we do it because we have lost agency - it wasn’t our choice to give up. For my friend, she quit her job because of a work situation (not her choice) so she very well could have gone the route of giving up - but her agency was in choosing not to dive into another job, and instead focus on being present in her life and being intentional about her next step. That choice shifted her from a place of giving up to contentedness.

Our choices define the quality of our life and too many of us believe we have no choices, when all we have to do is look for one.

In order to feel good about their choices, people need to discredit the choices of others. In psychology, this can be explained as a form of Self Enhancement Bias: overestimating their own choices and abilities as better than others, thereby discrediting others. Research shows that this behavior is most common among people who feel insecure or unsure about their own choices.

In society, insecurity is seen as a moral failing - and yes, it can lead people to do harmful things to themselves and others - but it is not an immoral state of being. It is a very intense way of coping with a lack of internal emotional safety and an attempt at self-preservation.

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Chasing thrills to what end?

You never experience the first high ever again - is often said about using drugs for the the first time. The idea is that nothing beats the thrill of the first high and then people continue to chase that feeling (sometimes, to their own detriment).

Sometimes, we can bring this mindset to our lives - to our achievements, social group, as well as romantic partnerships. Always reaching for the next big achievement, the next intense romance, the next exhilarating social moment, hoping it will finally feel like enough.

For many, especially those who grew up in chaotic or emotionally volatile households, emotional intensity feels familiar. The rush of highs and lows becomes the baseline. So when life offers something quieter like stability, calm, predictability, contentment - it can feel dull or even like something is wrong. The nervous system doesn’t recognize peace as safety. It reads it as boredom.

Others, raised in high-achieving environments might find it emotionally unsafe to not be pursuing a goal. For these people, their identity and value is wrapped up in the outcomes they can achieve and so the absence of an outcome can feel terrifying. This is known as Toxic Productivity - an unhealthy obsession with productivity, often at the expense of your health and wellness.

If you spend your whole life chasing the end of the rainbow - a mirage - there’s an inevitable sense of disappointment when you finally arrive. Enjoying the mediocre and ordinary moments, instead of chasing the end, is necessary for contentedness and happiness.

I want to share a few ways that you can bring a sense of contentedness into you life, even when it feels impossible:

• Embodying gratitude: When your mind is spinning with everything that’s missing or going wrong, anchor into one ordinary thing that is working. Start small: name one thing you’re grateful for and one thing you’re grateful to. (e.g., "I’m grateful for my morning coffee. I’m grateful to my friend for checking in.") The specificity invites presence and presence makes room for peace. This doesn’t make the problem or feeling go away, it broadens your horizon to include the good and the bad.

• Radical Acceptance: Radical acceptance is based in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which shows that acknowledging reality as it is, without judgment, can significantly reduce emotional suffering. You don’t have to like something to accept it. Acceptance is not agreement; it’s a skillful way to conserve emotional energy and respond more wisely. Try this: name one thing you’re struggling to change, and say to yourself, “This is what’s happening right now. I may not agree with it, but I’m not going to abandon myself in the fight against it.” Let acceptance be an act of self-loyalty, not defeat.

• Values-aligned living: When you live in alignment with your core values (even when circumstances are difficult) it enhances well-being and reduces psychological distress. Ask yourself: “What value do I want to embody in this moment?” Not in your five-year plan, but right now. Whether it’s curiosity, kindness, or stability, choosing to live in alignment restores a sense of inner coherence and direction.

• Psychological flexibility: This is the ability to hold your thoughts and feelings lightly and still act according to your values. One way to build it? Next time you feel a strong emotion or urge, pause and ask: “Is this taking me toward or away from the life I want?” That micro-moment of choice interrupts autopilot and opens the door to a life that’s led by intention, not reactivity.

You can read this essay below, My year of mediocre hobbies, for some fresh insights on how to invite mediocre moments in life as a way to be more present and content. Trust me, it is good for your nervous system.

The courage of choosing contentment.

Contentment is often misunderstood as settling, or giving up, or aiming low.

We treat movement as inherently meaningful. Progress. Productivity. ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ ‘Keep grinding.’ ‘What’s next?’ These aren’t just phrases. They’re value judgments. But what if stillness isn’t regression? What if it’s integration?

It takes courage to step off the treadmill, to say “enough” in a culture that thrives on scarcity and perpetual striving. It’s vulnerable to choose presence when everything around you says “push.” It takes courage to be content.

Ask yourself: What does progress look like if no one is watching?
Define success in a sentence that has nothing to do with income, accolades, or how quickly you get somewhere.

Your desire should come from a place of presence rather than panic.Are you moving toward a life that feels like yours?

A few days after that coffee date, I passed the same café on another slow August afternoon. The weather was just as golden, just as still. I remembered our conversation, how radical it felt to hear someone say, “I’m just… happy.”

I stood at the corner of Christopher St and Waverly Pl in the West Village, watching people rush by with their iced lattes and laptops, AirPods in, brows furrowed, quick steps. And I realized: no one can spot a content person in a crowd. There’s no glow, no hustle, no badge. It’s invisible.

Maybe that’s what makes contentment so threatening: it can’t be measured, or performed. You just have to live it. Intentionally. Even when no one else understands.

And maybe, that’s the whole point.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance.

Live well + be well xx,'

Israa

[My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it on my website: www.israanasir.com]

Cover image: Jack Vettriano, After Midnight.

As a therapist who works in digital health (I work at Anise Health - one of the first and only VC-backed, digital therapy and coaching platforms by and for Asian Americans) I know that the discourse about using AI in mental health services is not a matter of ‘if’, or even ‘when’, but a matter of ‘how’.

“Why shouldn’t I use Chat GPT instead of a therapist?” ask techno-enthusiasts. The reasons are many (which I will get into later on), but the biggest is: using AI to make your feelings sound coherent may create the illusion of emotional maturity without doing the inner work. It's the difference between having insight and outsourcing insight. And when the illusion sets into becoming a false reality, you may start to mistakenly think you’re growing or healing because you have the words to describe it - but do you know how to embody the insights?

The emotional (and cognitive) labor of working through a disparate series of thoughts, identifying feelings, making connections, and extracting a theme from it all is known as emotional translation. That emotional translation is an integral part of the healing journey. When you struggle to put a feeling into words, you’re actually creating a deeper connection between body, brain, and language. That struggle is generative. It forces introspection, patience, and a confrontation with ambiguity, which are exactly the things AI reduces. If AI smooths that out for you, you skip the part where you get to know yourself.

“It is just more efficient, it saves time!”, say the optimizers. To that I saw - why are we at such a place in life that we cannot even give ourselves the respect of time to introspect and wonder about ourselves? So far, the human brain is known to the only one that imagines a future for itself - we have the incredible capacity to dream and imagine, inspire, build and create - and we are so obsessed with efficiency that we want to leap-frog over all of those processes and get to the outcome: the insight for personal growth. What a horribly boring way to live, in my opinion.

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“But - therapy is not affordable!”, say the realists. Yes, that is a frustrating part of the mental health system. AI can be thought of a good tool to help you prepare for therapy, but it is not the solution to the systemic problem of lack of accessible care. Chat GPT can be a useful tool for in-between therapy work, for journaling, for help in finding a therapist. Chat GPT and other AI-based mental health tools can be powerful therapy adjacent tools, like supportive coaches. I encourage you to look at academic institutions that always have free/low-cost therapy services from PhD or MA candidates who are interning (and are supervised by fully licensed mental health professionals).

I asked ChatGPT what it thought on HBR’s report that said the top use case for AI in 2025 was for therapy/companionship. Heres’s how the conversation went:

Turning to a machine for intimacy and connection sounds like the plot of the movie ‘Her’ - but here we are, with married men marrying to their AI girlfriends and people falling in love with the AI companions. But, is it really intimacy if it is one sided? Is intimacy not a two-way street riddled with awkwardness, friction, discomfort as well as having your emotional needs met and feeling understood? What happens to intimacy if the friction, discomfort and awkwardness are gone, and you’re left only in your own echo chamber?

AI won’t challenge you, a therapist will - and nobody wants to be challenged anymore.

Why should a therapist challenge you?

Inevitably, AI will enter the therapy realm, hopefully as an enhancement and not a replacement. As it stands right now, the technology and the scripts are not prepared to give you a nuanced perspective on what you write. That means it does not challenge you.

Even Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI has called the product ‘sycophanty’ (i.e. a suck up) - so no, no it won’t offer you a challenge, nudge you in a different direction unless you ask it, or hold you accountable. What it will do is offer confirmation bias, unrelenting validation, and ultimately will erode your ability to translate your thoughts and emotions into a coherent communication.

I was recently sent this reel which talks about how people are performing in therapy using therapy speak and bringing notes made by Chat GPT. And because of the pop-culture obsession with avoiding discomfort, therapists are not challenging clients because they don’t want to seem judgy, so they ‘mirror your pain’ instead of holding you accountable.

The issue with this thinking is that people assume what they see on social media as therapy speak is actually how therapists talk in sessions. People assume the way therapists’ play out ‘role play scenarios’ on TikTok is what is happening in the session. People also assume that therapists’ want the approval of their clients. As a therapist of ten years, a content creator of five years, and being in therapy myself for five years - let me tell you this: none of those things are true.

Therapist’s are not looking for your validation (sorry!), we want you to feel safe. We know when to challenge and when to validate. And most importantly, we want you (yes, you!) to be co-creators of the therapeutic space. You can ask for more of a challenge from your therapist, you can say that you don’t want the challenge. We are not the driver’s, we are in the passenger seat of your healing journey.

The assertion that people are allergic to discomfort is true to some degree. My one and only viral Substack essay is about this: A good life is inconvenient. I agree that people are less open to taking accountability now and often hide behind therapy-speak sourced from ChatGPT. Words like “boundaries,” “trauma,” and “toxic” get tossed around for power, not tools for growth. It’s easier to diagnose someone else’s behavior than to examine your own.

Emotional bypassing is not emotional growth.

“People were against the car when it was replacing the horse-drawn carriage too!” Um, okay… the goal of the car and the horse was the same: transport. The goal of using Chat GPT as an emotional processor and using your own brain as an emotional processor is not the same. The former’s goal is to be presented immediately with a complete insight about yourself; the latter is to synthesize insight about yourself, yourself.

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I am not against Chat GPT or AI-based services, by the way. I just don’t think it is a good usecase for being used as a therapist (not because I am one myself). But like I mentioned in the beginning, it leap-frogs an integral part of emotional growth. Using Chat GPT or AI to be your therapist leads to emotional bypassing.

Emotional bypassing is the act of using insight, the ‘right’ language, or concepts to avoid actually feeling or processing difficult emotions. Emotional bypassing prevents us from:

• Fully metabolizing emotions like grief, rage, shame, or fear.

• Building resilience through emotional discomfort.

• Forming deeper, more authentic relationships (with ourselves and others).

• Developing long-term emotional maturity.

So while reflection, journaling, and AI tools can support growth, they can also become a way to intellectualize or perform healing , without actually doing the inner work. The inner work involves: thinking about your own thoughts/feelings, communicating them using your own words, expressing them to others, and changing habits.

Here are a few ways you can use AI or Chat GPT for mental wellness (do not use any AI-based services for mental health care on your own if you have a mental illness or actively symptomatic):

• Let AI reflect your thoughts back to you (help you clarify, organize, or explore) but resist the urge to let it decide for you or speak for you.

• Use it as a supplement, not a replacement, for therapy, friendship, or community. If AI becomes your only place to feel seen or understood, it’s a sign to widen your support net.

• After an AI reflection, text a trusted friend, therapist, or peer support group to continue the conversation.

• Use AI to build awareness, not avoid it. If you notice you're turning to AI to escape discomfort, pause and ask: What feeling am I trying to bypass right now?

All to say, AI is here to stay and trying to ignore it or wish it away is futile. The best we can do is approach it with curiosity, caution, and clear boundaries. Like any powerful tool, it can support you, or erode it, depending on how and why you engage with it.

If this resonated, you can download a free resource for emotional growth, and subscribe below for more thoughtful tools and reflections to support your inner life.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance.

Live well + be well xx,'

Israa

[My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it on my website: www.israanasir.com]

Cover image

The life cycle of an emotion involves a series of stages through which emotions arise, are experienced, processed, and eventually released. While the process can vary from person to person and across different emotional experiences, a general framework might include the following stages:

1. Trigger: Something happens in your environment, thoughts, or body that triggers an emotional response. This could be an external event, a memory, or an internal thought process.

   Journal prompt: What situations, people, or internal thoughts consistently trigger strong emotional reactions in you? Try listing three recent examples.
   

2. Emotional response: The triggered emotion is felt and experienced subjectively. Emotions can manifest as feelings, physiological changes, and cognitive responses.

   Reflection: Notice where you feel this emotion in your body. Does sadness sit in your chest? Does anger tighten your jaw? Naming the emotion and locating it physically can begin to soften its grip.
   

3. Awareness: You become aware of the emotion you are experiencing. This involves acknowledging and identifying the specific emotion(s) at play.

   Journal prompt: “Right now, I feel ____ because ____.” Try completing this sentence without judgment. Let clarity emerge through naming.
   

4. Processing: Reflect on the circumstances leading to the emotion. Consider the meaning and significance of the trigger and the thoughts associated with the emotion.

   Activity: Trace the emotional thread. Ask yourself: “Have I felt this before? What past experience might be amplifying this response?” Mapping past to present can loosen the emotional knot.
   

5. Expression (communication and behavior): Express the emotion in a healthy and adaptive way. This may involve verbal communication, non-verbal expressions, or other forms of constructive outward expression.
   Activity: Choose one mode of expression that feels safe today: writing, movement, conversation, art. Let the emotion move through you in a way that aligns with your energy.

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6. Acknowledgment and acceptance:Validate your own emotional experience by acknowledging that your feelings are legitimate and understandable given the context.
   Journal prompt: “It makes sense that I feel ____, because ____.” This exercise helps you witness your own humanity without self-criticism.
   

7. Reflection and understanding: Reflect on the deeper meaning of the emotion. Consider how it relates to your values, beliefs, and past experiences. This stage contributes to emotional intelligence and self-awareness.
   Reflection: What does this emotion reveal about what matters to me? What value or boundary may have been challenged?
   

8. Integration (incorporation into self-concept): Integrate the lessons and insights gained from the emotional experience into your overall self-concept. Consider how this emotional experience contributes to personal growth and learning.
   Journal prompt: “What is this emotion trying to teach me about who I am becoming?” Let this be less about solutions and more about self-compassionate witnessing.

   

9. Behavioral adjustments: Make any necessary adjustments or changes in response to the emotional experience. This may involve adapting your behavior, setting boundaries, or making decisions that align with your emotional well-being.
   Activity: Choose one small boundary, request, or habit that supports your emotional clarity going forward. Write it down and revisit it at the end of the week.
   

10. Release and letting go: With understanding, validation, and adaptive expression, the emotional energy is gradually released. This may involve a sense of closure, relief, or a return to emotional equilibrium
    Reflection: Let go without needing to “feel done.” Ask: “Can I soften around this today, even a little?”

It's important to note that this framework is not always linear or neatly sequential. Emotions can be complex and dynamic, and you may move back and forth between stages. Additionally, some emotions may take longer to process and release than others, so be patient with your emotional healing.

If this resonated, you can download a free workbook to take the next step, and subscribe below for more thoughtful tools and reflections to support your inner life.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance.

Live well + be well xx,'

Israa

[My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it on my website: www.israanasir.com]

That feeling, that endlessness of a summer afternoon, is hard to come by now. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time I experienced it. Time no longer stretches itself in our lives; instead it shrinks, hastening its speed. Our days blur into years. Conversations are interrupted. Notifications pile up. Even joy is fast: fast fashion, fast media, fast friendships. And somewhere along the way of growing up, we become disconnected from our internal clock.

Anyone I meet, in some way, tells me that they want to “make the most of” their time. Even I say it. But what I think all of us really mean is: we want it to slow down. We want more of the richness, the depth, the saturation, the presence.

We don’t want more time.
We want time to feel different.

When time collapses: why everything feels so fast.

Psychologically, our perception of time is not objective; it’s shaped by attention, memory, and emotional salience (how noticeable or important something feels). Time perception shifts when we do something new because novelty slows time; when we do something that inspires us, because awe slows time; when we do something with presence, because deep attention slows time. This is why childhood summers felt endless: the world was new and we were still paying attention.

But modern life and adulting conditions us into what psychologist Marc Wittmann calls “temporal disintegration” in his book ‘Felt time: the psychology of how we perceive time”’. It is when time feels fragmented and slippery. You might recognize it in phrases like:

• Where did the day go?

• This week disappeared.

• I blinked and it was over.

This isn’t just a poetic loss, it’s a neuro-cognitive shift. When our attention is constantly divided by screens, notifications, and tasks, our hippocampus (the brain’s memory processor) doesn’t code the information meaningfully. The more distracted we are, the fewer long-term memories we make. And without those anchors, our sense of time becomes unstable.

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Reflection point:

Think about a recent week where time felt like it disappeared.

• What were you doing?

• How much of that week was spent in divided attention?

• Were there any moments of slowness you can remember or did the week pass in fragments?

The myth of false urgency.

Hyperconnected living has created an illusion that everything is immediate. Every notification feels like a call to action. Every headline feels like an emergency. We scroll through stories faster than we can process them, as our nervous systems absorb the ambient noise of a perpetual state of fight or flight.

Part of the problem is how we’ve come to measure time through productivity metrics: how much we can do, how fast, and how visibly. We value the social media post more than the moment we are in. We expect replies in seconds. Friendships become threads of texts with no time to deepen. Parenting becomes a logistical operation. Children are over-scheduled and families live parallel lives under one roof. Even rest has become performative.

The result? We live lives that run smoothly but lack emotional coherence. Beneath the surface of this urgency lies something else: not just stress, but grief.

Hidden behind our obsession with speed is something deeper: anticipatory grief - the emotional state of bracing for a loss that hasn’t happened yet. It is an unconscious response to living in a world that feels precarious, fast-changing, and uncertain. We hurry not just because we’re busy, but because we fear what we might lose if we slow down. It’s not just anxiety. It’s mourning in advance.

The more we fear losing time, the more we try to control it, and therefore, the less we’re able to stay in it.

Activity: Set a recurring 5-minute “stillness anchor” in your day.

1. Choose one small moment (washing your face, stirring coffee, walking to the subway).

2. Commit to doing it without rushing, multitasking, or background noise.

3. Let it be unproductive, uneventful, even boring. That’s where presence live

Fast culture is shrinking our souls.

From fast fashion to binge culture to algorithms, we are living in what sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls an era of social acceleration - where even pleasure has to be fast, optimized, and consumable.

This has led to a collective decline in our capacity for anticipation, deductive reasoning, empathy, and reflection. We don’t look forward to things anymore; we pre-order, binge, and move on. We don’t process joy or sorrow; we scroll through it. We consume instead of dwell. We don’t use contextual cues to see how something pertains to us, we want everything to be catered to our exact needs and identities.

Think about it: A friend sends a life update in a 15-second story. You reply with a heart emoji. It’s efficient, but is it connection?

This lifestyle has spiritual and communal consequences:

• In friendship, we default to reaction instead of connection.

• In art, we demand content over craft.

• In community, we replace sustained presence with “checking in.”

Reflection point

When was the last time you waited for something with joyful anticipation?
What’s something you could plan slowly, look forward to, and let unfold?

We can’t slow time alone. We live in relationship to the pace of the people around us. Even if you personally adopt slower rhythms, if everyone else around you is moving at a frantic pace, your nervous system will eventually match theirs. This is known in psychology as emotional contagion: our internal states synchronize with those we are around. Which means if we want to live more slowly, intentionally, and presently, we have to build environments and communities where slowness is seen, practiced, and protected.

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When we glorify productivity and quick turnarounds, we teach others that worth is earned through speed. When we respond immediately to every message but never make time for long conversations, we normalize shallow attention. But when we model presence, when we linger in conversation, when we show up without needing an excuse, that models something else entirely: relational time.

That means rethinking how we show up in community:

• Slow communication (voice notes, letters, long dinners)

• Repetition and ritual (monthly potlucks, weekend walks)

• Emotional labor as investment, not inconvenience

• Practicing the awkwardness of mutual care without needing it to be efficient

Time as a sensory experience.

The paradox is that time slows down when we do less, but only if we do it differently. Not just empty space, but presence.

To reclaim that, we need to re-engage our senses. Instead of scrolling, we can make. Instead of consuming, we can create. Draw. Bake. Walk without a podcast. Write something no one will see. Play a board game. Fix something with your hands. These acts of creativity and ritual bring time back into the body.

The experience of time isn’t just mental, it’s also physiological. Our nervous system determines whether we experience time as safe or threatening, slow or fast. When we’re in fight-or-flight mode, everything feels rushed. But when we feel safe (i.e. when we’re grounded, nourished, and unhurried) our perception of time expands.

Practices like diaphragmatic breathing, stretching, or simply lying down without stimulation aren't just relaxing, they can help recalibrate your internal tempo. Time softens when your body does.

Activity: Try a 3-2-1 grounding practice

• Name 3 things you can see.

• Name 2 things you can touch.

• Name 1 thing you can hear.

This redirection helps your body step out of urgency and into presence.

Small Ways to Stretch Time

• Name the urgency: Before reacting, ask: Is this urgent, or does it just feel urgent?

• Interrupt the scroll: Replace one daily media input with something tactile: kneading dough, watering plants, playing with clay.

• Observe seasonal markers: Light a candle at dusk. Keep track of the moon. Let the natural world slow your internal pace.

• Sensory reclamation walk: Go for a 20-minute walk without your phone. Choose to notice five distinct things: a color, a sound, a shadow, a texture, a movement. Reflect on how it shifted your sense of time.

• Plan a “slow gathering”: Host something intentionally analog: a handwritten-letter night, a no-phones dinner, a journaling circle. Make slowness a shared ritual.

• Uncurated creativity practice: Choose a medium (paint, collage, embroidery, clay, writing). Set a timer for 30 minutes. No purpose, no posting. Just process.

If July afternoons once felt like freedom, ask: What made them feel that way?

Often, the answer is: no agenda. Unstructured time. Sensory play. Mutual presence. A sense of enoughness.

Activity

1. Choose one day a week to live “off the clock.” No time-blocking. No optimizing. Just one afternoon of following your natural rhythms: rest, hunger, joy, movement, conversation.

2. Note how long that afternoon feels.

3. Notice what emerges when you stop trying to extract value from time and just live in it

Creative Health with Daydreamers

Why We Crave Simpler Times

Hi there! I'm Katina, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Daydreamers. Every week, we explore the science of Creative Health: how to wake up your creative brain, feel more alive, and ultimately, build a life that’s full of depth, beauty, and meaning…

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a year ago · 5 likes · Daydreamers

The world isn’t going to slow down. But you can.

Rebuild your relationship to time by shifting your attention from urgency to awareness. Move away from efficiency and control, and toward intention and presence. Choose not to rush through your one precious life.

Recently, Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day”, particularly the line, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” had a resurgence on TikTok. It’s not surprising that young people are gravitating toward this language, this longing. We are a generation overwhelmed by climate crisis, geopolitical instability, digital overstimulation, economic precarity, and a relentless stream of self-optimization. In that context, slowing down isn’t just romantic: it’s a psychological need.

But I also want to name this plainly: the ability to slow down is, in many ways, a privilege.

Time inequality is real.
Not everyone has access to slowness.

If you’re a single parent, a gig worker, a first-generation immigrant, or someone navigating systemic barriers to safety or stability, slowness can feel like a luxury you don’t have. Your days might be governed by survival, not mindfulness. In these cases, the invitation to “be more present” can sound tone-deaf or dismissive of structural realities.

How can you help?

Paid Leave For All

Doctors Without Borders

That’s why slowing down cannot be a purely individual pursuit, it must be cultural and collective. We need to reimagine slowness not just as a personal wellness practice, but as a social value. That means:

• Supporting labor protections and living wages, so people don’t need to work multiple jobs to survive.

• Advocating for childcare, paid leave, and policies that create margin in people’s lives.

• Creating communities where emotional labor, care work, and rest are shared.

When slowness is treated as something only accessible to the resourced, we reinforce the very systems that make so many feel rushed, exhausted, and unseen. This is exactly why the Trad Wife trend gained popularity. The aesthetic offers a sanitized illusion of peace that many crave but without interrogating who has historically had access to time, care, and domestic ease.

But when we protect slowness as a right for everyone, not just a privilege, we open the door for more people to experience life at the pace where meaning can emerge.

So yes, choose not to rush through your one precious life. And also, hold space for others who don’t have that same choice yet. If you have time, share it. If you have margin, extend it. That, too, is a way to slow down time, by letting your presence ripple outward.

Reflection point

• Where in your life are you trying to “get through” something that might deserve to be felt instead?

• What would your life look like if you honored boredom, wonder, and unproductivity?

• Who do you need to invite into your slow moments and who do you need to release?

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance. Live well + be well xx,

Israa

Maybe the director didn’t mean to convey this, and maybe I’m reading (pun!) into it a bit too much but this has happened to me before as well. Men have read books I love while trying to court me, and abandoned those pursuits later. There are also memes about men who cosplay being readers (tote-bag-carrying, reading A Woman Destroyed in public) to be perceived a certain way by women. I have male friends who keep interesting fiction books on their shelves, but don’t read them (to play into the old, classy adage: don’t sleep with someone who doesn’t own books). I’ve heard male friends say ‘I don’t read fiction’, and I also know a handful of men who have never actually read an entire book in their entire lives.

This is not meant to shame men but to examine the underlying framework that is operating behind the scenes, which is impacting men negatively. I recognize that reading is not for everyone and I don’t want to make it seem like reading is a morally superior endeavor - I want to just talk about something that is silently fraying the fabric of our society (among many other things): men are not okay.

There’s a crisis unfolding in the emotional lives of men, especially young men. We see it in the epidemic of male loneliness, in declining life satisfaction, the rise of the ‘manosphere’ (online misogyny forums and content), and in the fact that men account for nearly 80% of all suicides in the U.S. The root causes are interconnected and complex: economic shifts, gender role confusion, cultural isolation. These are big problems and we feel too small to do anything about them. Yes, we can’t change the system overnight - but we can make small shifts that bring us closer to the world we want for our future. That’s why I want to suggest a more intimate starting point: men need to read more fiction.

Many men don’t read - specifically, they don’t read fiction and I think that is partially the reason for the predicament we find ourselves in. When men do read, they tend to gravitate more toward nonfiction: memoir, personal development, and business books. These genres often center the individual against adversity, the lone hero mastering hardship through discipline, grit, or reinvention. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, over time, this narrative focus reinforces a narrow masculine ideal: one that values control over vulnerability, success over self-reflection, and solitude over connection.

Fiction offers a different model of strength; one that men, I believe, desperately need.

Unlike nonfiction’s emphasis on conclusions, takeaways, or frameworks, fiction asks readers to stay in uncertainty; to feel deeply, not just analyze; to sit with ambiguity, contradiction, longing, tenderness, shame. It asks you to drop into the inner world of someone else and care about what happens to them not because it will benefit you, but because it reveals something about being human. In other words: fiction cultivates empathy.

A 2013 study published in Science found that reading literary fiction significantly improves ‘Theory of Mind’: the ability to understand others’ emotions and perspectives. That’s not a soft skill - that’s a relational skill, an intimacy skill, a communication skill, a fatherhood skill, a leadership skill, a lover’s skill, a mental health skill. It is the crucial cornerstone of emotional maturity.

Yet, men aren’t reading fiction. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, women are 50% more likely than men to read any form of literature. A Pew Research report found men consistently under-index in fiction readership and are more likely to report reading as a task for learning or growth, instead of for pleasure. In a UK YouGov survey, nine of the ten most-read books by men were nonfiction. The lone exception was George Orwell’s 1984.

Still, if I am to be completely honest, fiction isn’t the only path to empathy. Emotional maturity and intelligence can be developed through therapy, close relationships, art, or even certain kinds of nonfiction. Many men find emotional depth in memoirs, journalism, oral histories, and even films or games. There are nonfiction writers like Matthew Desmond, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rebecca Solnit, whose work evokes profound empathy. There are also men who, despite never having read a novel (like a few of my friends I mentioned earlier), are generous, attentive, funny, caring, and emotionally available.

The point is not to present a binary; I don’t intend to romanticize fiction as a panacea for all the world’s problems, or pathologize nonfiction as emotionally shallow. Instead, I want to invite a reflection on what types of stories men are being offered, and what those stories teach them about themselves. Most personal development books promise transformation through effort of Self. Fiction offers transformation through identification of and with the Other.

Of course, the male emotional crisis is not just a literacy issue. It's a cultural one. Boys are often discouraged from emotional expression early in life. Emotional complexity is feminized. By adolescence, many boys have already disengaged from reading, especially books that center vulnerability or relationships. Fiction starts to feel like a threat to their social identity. That disinterest hardens in adulthood, leaving many men emotionally disconnected from themselves and relationally insufficient.

And when men do suffer - when they feel empty, lost, or unfulfilled - they’re often offered more productivity hacks, more self-optimization, more “man up” language. Just go to any ‘personal development’ or ‘growth’ section of a bookstore. Rarely are men handed a story that says: Here’s someone who feels what you feel. Sit with it. You're not alone. I find this so dehumanizing. Our cultural narrative has robbed men of their humanity, leaving them with only anger and power as accessible “emotions”. How more men are not offended by this surprises me.

How can we expand the emotional vocabulary available to men? How can we make room for different masculine narratives, not just those of achievement, but instead, of ambivalence; to replace the narratives of power with narratives of care? What if we gave men stories that didn’t teach them how to win, but how to feel?

Reading fiction won’t solve masculinity’s crisis on its own. But it is a cultural gateway to richer interior lives, to embodying empathy, to being more present. If more men engaged with literature that centered love, loss, ambiguity, empathy, or tenderness, perhaps we’d see a different masculine ideal emerge. And while not every man needs to read Middlemarch or Ocean Vuong, maybe more men need to read stories that end in understanding, not triumph.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance. Live well + be well xx,

Israa

[Ps. My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it here: https://www.israanasir.com/toxic-productivity ].

Living under the immense pressure of being significant and exceptional for almost twenty four months left me feeling disconnected from myself. I felt locked in a hazey cage of ‘I shoulds”, lost in the stories of other people’s writing careers, comparing myself to peers who were moving ahead in their careers. The weight to be exceptional all the time eventually became too heavy to carry. I longed to just be mediocre. So, I did what any reasonable American-living person does.

I went to Europe.

“Maybe I can just be average, just be okay”; the thought came to me in Paris, actually, where I had run off to, to pretend to be a beleaguered writer (in reality, I ate crème brûlée and cheese for six days, for I am no Hemingway). I was at Café de Flore, across the iconic Deux Maggot, for breakfast. Both cafes are historical and significant in their own right, however over time (and thanks to Instagram), have now become absolute hubs for tourists (including me, but of course “I was different”). As I watched tourists order the well-known whipped cream coffee and wondered what this place must have been like in 1885 – I thought about how it was no longer exceptional, yet it still mattered.

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Maybe there’s power in choosing mediocrity, in some things, on purpose. Our work fills up all the time we give it - that’s Parkinson’s Law - which says, “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” But what if we didn’t give everything all our time? What if we stopped trying to make every part of our life exceptional and instead got very clear on what actually deserves our energy?

It wasn’t the most elegant epiphany, but it stuck - like a 90s pop song in a grocery store. I played the thought over and over in my head: what did it mean to be intentionally mediocre? What would it take, giving a task or activity less effort that you would, than you could?

At that time, I was writing Chapter 11 of my book, about rest and rejuvenation; and I was exploring the practice of hobbies. I was reading about why we used to have hobbies and no longer do, what the value of a hobby is, and how they improve our mental health.

Then, I started thinking about myself – what were my hobbies? I was horrified to find out that I don’t do anything just for the sake of doing it. That’s what a hobby is – it’s not meant to have an outcome, the value is in the process. It is not about the done, it is about the doing. If it leads to a positive outcome, then that’s great; but a hobby is about being present and detached from outcomes.

I don’t know if there’s a real definition of what a hobby is, but I do know what it’s not. It’s not strategic. It’s not monetized. It’s not tracked on a spreadsheet or done for the sake of content. A hobby is something gloriously inefficient. It’s the thing you do badly and still return to. The thing you don’t have to justify. A hobby is what you do when no one’s watching and you’re not trying to be impressive. It’s how you reconnect with the part of yourself that exists beyond achievement.

In 2023, I decided to try a few things I was unqualified for. I danced terribly in a studio that smelled like rubber mats and nostalgia. I joined a pottery class and made what can only be described as an ashtray for a giant. I cooked without a recipe and once without any garlic (my ancestors were likely crying). I took photos on a disposable camera, most of them out of focus. I colored with crayons. I took up needle point. I joined an improv class for 8 weeks. I didn’t post about most of it. I didn’t measure progress. And most of all - I didn’t try to improve.

And that was the point. I let these things stay beautifully, defiantly average. Not because I had given up, but because I was saving my excellence for where it mattered. Writing my book, being a therapist, showing up for the people I love—those still deserved my full effort. But everything else? It was finally safe to let some things be simply… okay.

And in that okay-ness, I found freedom. The freedom to try. To be bad. To not care. To do something just because I wanted to. And somehow, that made life feel more meaningful, not less.

How to make time for a hobby (even when you feel like you don’t have any)

We often say “I don’t have time” when what we mean is: “That doesn’t feel urgent, so I can’t justify it.” But rest, pleasure, and play don’t need to be urgent to be essential.

Here are some gentle but practical ways to carve out space for something just for you:

1. Start small (really small)

Set a 20-minute window once a week. That’s it. No pressure to finish anything, just to begin. Block it on your calendar as “creative time” or “play.” Don’t call it a hobby yet. Let it be curiosity.

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2. Pair it with something you already do

Look for places to stack joy onto routine.
Example: Listen to music while folding laundry and try identifying instruments. Doodle while on a Zoom call. Add one new spice to a recipe you already know.

3. Create a “hobby drawer” or “play shelf”

Make your hobby easy to start. If it takes 15 minutes to set up, you won’t do it.
Keep your paints, yarn, camera, or puzzle out in the open. Visibility invites action.

4. Choose one thing and go “shallow” on purpose

You don’t have to go deep into a new identity (“I’m a gardener now!”). Just pick one thing you’re vaguely curious about and give yourself permission to do it… badly.
Try: sketching, baking one recipe, learning a TikTok dance, rearranging your books by color, writing letters.

5. Reframe: it’s not wasted time, it’s reclaimed self

Instead of asking, “Do I have time for this?” ask,
“What am I making space for by doing this?”

Research consistently shows that engaging in leisure activities, especially creative ones, improves mood, reduces anxiety, and boosts a sense of life satisfaction.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who coined flow state) found that people are happiest when they’re immersed in an activity that challenges them just enough to lose track of time. That’s what a hobby gives you: a portal out of self-judgment and into presence.

A 2016 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology found that people who engaged in creative hobbies felt more relaxed and energized the next day. Another study showed that people who pursued hobbies had lower cortisol levels, meaning lower stress.

You don’t need to be “good” at something for it to be good for you.

A “Hobby Starter Pack” mini list

If you need somewhere to start…

• Watercoloring with no goal (paint blobs, not landscapes)

• Reading a book from a genre you never touch

• Growing one herb on your windowsill

• Freewriting for 10 minutes about anything

• Making a playlist based on a feeling

• Rearranging your bookshelf like it’s an art piece

• Trying out Duolingo for a language you’ll never use

A hobby doesn’t ask for your five-year plan. You don’t have to already be good at it or even particularly like it at first. It can be weird. It can be private. It can be a half-finished crochet project or a playlist of flute solos. Unlike passion, a hobby doesn’t have to grow into something. It just has to grow you.

Chronicling my year of hobbies in retrospect was great, it helped me think about my year as themes. Reflect on what I learned, where the resistance was, how I released it and how I created comfort for myself in uncomfortable situations. It helped me expand my view of myself .

I got to meet versions of myself I hadn’t made time for in years. It reminded me that expansion isn’t always loud - it’s often quiet, playful, and unpolished.

We don't need to be exceptional at everything we do. Sometimes we just need to do the thing that makes us feel a little more human. So if you’ve been waiting for permission: this is it. Try the thing. Let it be mediocre. Let it be yours.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance. Live well + be well xx,

Israa

[Ps. My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it here: https://www.israanasir.com/toxic-productivity ].

“You want to create meaning in the world”, she told me, matter-of-factly biting into the crispy baked potato we had ordered. I waited for her to continue. “You want to do meaningful things for others, to give something, you know?”.

I looked at her and thought about how many times I’ve felt directionless unless I was doing something meaningful, offering something of value, holding something together. Was that generosity, curiosity, or performance? Maybe a little bit of it all? Maybe meaning is what we create when we’re trying to make sense of our own restlessness.

It’s incredible how a simple, honest conversation with friends can spark a deeper introspection about something you’ve been avoiding from yourself. So, I set out to explore where our deep need for meaning comes from, and perhaps more importantly, what we do with it.

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Why the brain wants to make meaning?

Our brain seeks meaning, and makes it when it can’t find any, because that helps with pattern recognition. And the human brain is wired to find patterns. This is so because if something has meaning, then the brain knows why it happened and can either avoid it in the future (if it’s negative) or replicate it (if it’s positive). Meaning making gives us a sense of certainty in a world that doesn’t have meaning. In fact, Yuval Noah Harari has an interesting thought on this:

As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual.

To some, this may feel bleak - but the inherent meaninglessness of life is a very liberating idea for me. When there is no pre-determined or pre-scribed meaning to things, we are left to our own devices: our imaginations and desires to create it.

Meaning-making, then, is not an end result of life; instead it is essence of being - being present, being intentional, being alive.

We are all story-tellers.

Being human, story-telling, and meaning-making.

The world does not come with inherent narrative arcs or moral lessons; it is full of randomness, unpredictability, and ambiguity. Yet as humans, we are wired to seek patterns, explanations, and coherence. This is where storytelling becomes essential. Stories help us stitch together disconnected events into a narrative that feels logical and emotionally satisfying. In doing so, storytelling transforms chaos into coherence and turns experience into understanding. It helps us organize the messiness of life into something that feels manageable and meaningful.

Psychologist Dan McAdams describes this process as forming a “narrative identity”: the internalized and evolving story of the self that integrates our past, present, and future into a coherent whole. According to his research, we don’t just experience our lives; we interpret them, crafting a storyline that helps explain who we are and why we are the way we are. This narrative gives us a sense of stability over time, especially as we encounter change, trauma, or uncertainty.

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Story-telling (which needs meaning-making) also connects us to others. It literally connects us through something known as “neural coupling”. Researchers at Princeton found that when a person tells a story and someone listens, their brain patterns become synchronized: a sign of shared attention and understanding. Isn’t that wild?

Whether it's through religion, family roles, career ambition, or social causes, the stories we tell ourselves help us endure suffering, justify sacrifices, and imagine a future worth striving for. We live in a universe that offers no intrinsic meaning, so our stories are the meaning, and the more consciously we construct them, the more purposeful and intentional our lives become.

In my own therapeutic journey, one of the most powerful exercises I did is called the ‘deathbed journal’. I am not saying you need to do this, in fact — it’s best done with a therapist but I’ll tell you about it here so you can see the connection between meaning, purpose, and our lives.

You imagine yourself at the very end of your life: old, reflective, even at peace, perhaps dying. Like you really picture it (this part of the exercise is a visualization). Then you imagine your present-day self sitting beside older-you. You then have a conversation with your older, dying self. You ask questions like: What mattered most to me? What do I regret? What brought me joy? What do you wish I’d done differently? What must I not forget?

And then, you listen. You let that older version of you speak.

It’s intense, and often emotional. But it reveals something essential: beneath the striving and distractions, we all know what really matters. For me, it was a confrontation with my own avoidance: of creativity, of vulnerability, of service, of choosing a path that felt true rather than impressive. That imaginary conversation didn’t give me all the answers, but it sharpened my sense of what I didn’t want to waste time on anymore.

And it planted the seed that meaning isn’t something you wait to find, it’s something you create by how you choose to live, today.

[Reflection Point]

Complete the sentence:

• “If I only had one year left, I would…”

• “The legacy I want to leave is…”

• “I will feel proud of my life if I…”

• “I want to be remembered as someone who…”

Meaning-making is not just youth’s privilege.

We’ve culturally relegated meaning-making to the realm of the young. As if it only belongs to gap years, college essays, and hormonal angst. In your twenties and early thirties, meaning-making feels like a quest: Who am I? What do I want? What kind of life do I want to build?

So, when people in midlife or later ask, What’s next?, What do I care about now?, or What if the old story doesn’t fit anymore?, they’re met with silence or shame. As if asking those questions later in life means you failed earlier. But I think the opposite is true: to keep searching, to stay curious about meaning at every stage of life, is a kind of freedom. The meaning of life and purpose isn’t in the answer. The meaning of life and purpose is in the asking.

The truth is, however, that many people enter midlife feeling betrayed by the answers they were sold. You got the job, the partner, the apartment, and yet a quiet discontent lingers. This is what I call the “the season of marginal dissatisfaction”: a recurring sense that something’s off, even when everything looks fine. Because the truth is, we were told that meaning is something you find early, then live out. We believe the stories we’ve been told that this is the end and there is nothing left to be done.

Midlife is often thought of as arrival; when we should “have it figured out.” But the pressure to solidify meaning early can actually backfire. When meaning is treated as a fixed goal instead of a living process, people in their thirties, forties, and fifties often feel trapped by the very stories they once found comforting.

That’s why I’m really excited to see that media is exploring the nuances of meaning-making and finding purpose later in life through shows like Four Seasons, Grace and Frankie, and books like All Fours, The Midnight Library, and The Perfume Collector.

Some of my favourite films about this:

The Worst Person in the World : A modern bildungsroman about ambiguity, relationships, and the messy middle.

Everything Everywhere All At Once: An existential action comedy about infinite lives, intergenerational trauma, and meaning in the mundane.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou: This is perhaps the quintessential absurdist exploration of grief, legacy, and purposelessness.

Becoming comfortable with meaninglessness.

What if none of this means anything?

Existentialists didn’t look away from that question, they stared directly at it. Thinkers like Camus, Kierkegaard, and Sartre didn’t pretend meaning was inherent. Instead, they argued that life has no universal meaning and that doesn’t make it empty. It makes it ours.

The discomfort you feel around meaninglessness isn’t failure. It’s friction. It means you’re awake to the reality that control is an illusion, certainty is rare, and no one can tell you how your life should unfold. Once you stop outsourcing meaning to systems, titles, or milestones, you get to ask: What matters to me, truly?

Being comfortable with meaninglessness doesn’t mean becoming apathetic. It means building a deeper tolerance for life’s lack of guarantees, embracing both certain and uncertain moments, rooting in presence, and showing up with curiosity, love, and integrity.

[Reflection Point]

The “What If It Doesn’t Mean Anything?” journal prompt
Write down the question: What if this doesn’t mean anything? in the context of your current struggle (a job, a breakup, a health issue, etc.).
Then write for 10 minutes without editing, correcting, or stopping yourself. Explore:

• What would change if this situation didn’t have a larger purpose?

• What freedom would that give you?

• Can meaning still come from how you respond to it?

Absurd Affirmation (inspired by Camus)
Choose one ordinary thing to do with absurd devotion. Water your plants like it’s a spiritual ritual. Make your bed with operatic flair. Pour your morning coffee like you’re painting the Mona Lisa. It’s a quiet rebellion against the idea that only “important” things matter.

“What Still Matters?” meditation
Sit in silence and ask yourself: If nothing had to matter, what still would?
This helps you strip away the performative, inherited, or external meanings and get closer to your personal values.

Carl Jung believed that the search for meaning was central to human life, a necessity of the soul. He called this the process of individuation: the unfolding of your true self over time. Meaning, in Jung’s view, doesn’t come from conforming to societal roles, but from aligning with your deeper inner life.

And I wholeheartedly agree with him. My friend from the story at the beginning is right: I do want to create meaning in a world that is largely meaningless. I believe that we don’t find meaning, and then after that, live our lives. Meaning making is the work of being alive. And if we’re lucky, we get to keep making meaning. Not just once, but again and again, as we evolve, reflect, and become more fully ourselves.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance. Live well + be well xx,

Israa

[Ps. My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it here: https://www.israanasir.com/toxic-productivity ].

The annoying thing is, sometimes you want to stop thinking about it. You want to let it go. You want to not care. But, your mind keeps holding on to it the way Rose held on to the Heart of the Ocean (oop! Titanic reference). But like her, you also have to let it go at some point.

Important dates this month:

• 🔒 Paid newsletter #1: Conflict Avoidance or Self-Protection? It will unpack the real fears behind your urge to keep the peace at all costs. 5/12

• 🔒 Paid newsletter #2: Setting Boundaries with Parents and In-Laws. It will unpack practical, compassionate guidance for navigating guilt, culture, and closeness. 5/19

• 💬 Monthly In Sessions Zoom meet up (for paid members only): We’ll take the themes from this month like conflict avoidance and family boundaries, and explore how they show up in your real life. You’ll learn how to notice when you’re self-abandoning to keep the peace, and practice language for setting boundaries with care. 3/27 at 3pm ET.

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What’s really happening when you can’t let it go

Psychologists define rumination as a repetitive, passive focus on the causes and consequences of what’s bothering you (an awkward interaction with someone, a bad date, or an argument with someone), rather than solutions. In other words, it’s when your mind loops the same thought over and over without resolution.

And this is why you minds clings so tightly to certain conversations or conflicts. Our nervous system is wired for pattern recognition and survival. When something feels unresolved, like a threat to our sense of safety, identity, or belonging, our brain keeps it in the queue. It's not overreacting. It’s scanning for danger, trying to protect us, and asking: What did I miss? What can I learn? How can I avoid this next time?

The problem is, when there’s no outlet for expression or closure, that loop can become emotionally exhausting. Rumination, then, is less about what happened and more about what didn't or what could still happen.

This is also where the concept of emotional hangovers comes in. Emotional hangovers are the lingering effects of an intense emotional experience, even after the event has passed. A study published in Nature Neuroscience found that emotionally charged moments can leave lasting physiological and cognitive traces, affecting memory and mood for hours or even days afterward (Tambini et al., 2017). This is especially true when something felt unfinished, when we didn’t speak up, or when our nervous system didn't feel safe enough to fully process the moment. The tension doesn’t disappear. It just waits.

@well.guideWhat sets successful people apart isn’t that they never feel overwhelmed, anxious, or frustrated—it’s that they acknowledge those emotions instead of avoiding or becoming consumed by them. They don’t pretend the hard feelings aren’t there, nor do they let them take the wheel. They pause, feel, reflect—and then pivot to action. The people who get stuck are usually in one of two camps: those who are so identified with their difficult emotions that they freeze, and those who bypass their emotions entirely, rushing to “just fix it” without understanding what’s really going on underneath. Both paths lead to burnout, poor decisions, or cycles that repeat. True progress comes from emotional awareness and action. Feel first. Then move forward. #wellguide #sundayreset #emotionalregulationskills #emotionalintelligence

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When rumination helps vs when it hurts

Not all rumination is bad. Sometimes replaying a conversation can help you gain clarity. It gives you a chance to reflect on what mattered to you, what felt off, and what you might want to do differently next time. In this way, rumination can serve a purpose. It becomes a form of emotional processing or problem-solving.

But it becomes unhelpful when it turns into repetitive, passive thinking that keeps you stuck in the same loop without new insight. It often sounds like:

• “Why did I say that?”

• “What’s wrong with me?”

• “I should’ve handled it better.”

These thoughts don’t bring resolution. They just reinforce shame or regret.

Rumination is helpful when it leads to insight or action. It’s harmful when it leads to self-blame or paralysis. The goal isn’t to shut down your thoughts, it’s to redirect them toward something useful, something that helps you understand yourself instead of punishing yourself.

Unresolved tension = Unspoken needs

When a conversation lingers in your mind, it’s rarely just about the words that were said. More often, it’s about the need that went unmet, the boundary that was crossed, the fear you may have about loss and other people’s emotions, or the part of you that felt invisible, dismissed, or rejected. Unresolved tension is usually a signal from your emotional system that something important didn’t get acknowledged.

Psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, in his work on Nonviolent Communication, emphasized that most conflict stems from unmet universal human needs, such as respect, autonomy, or emotional safety. When we ruminate, we’re often trying to make sense of that gap: to retroactively meet a need through mental rehearsal or fantasy resolution. But unless we recognize what that need was, we stay stuck in the loop.

This isn't about being “too sensitive.” It’s about your body interpreting dismissal or disconnection as a threat to your sense of self or relational safety. So instead of asking, “Why can’t I let this go?” try asking, “What part of me didn’t feel seen?”

Your nervous system is not concerned with logic. It’s concerned with safety. When a conversation ends in tension, ambiguity, or emotional disconnection, your body stays on alert. Even if the moment has passed, your system doesn't always register that the threat is over, especially if something felt unfinished or emotionally risky.

When tension remains unresolved, your body keeps scanning the memory, trying to complete the cycle. This is why emotional hangover lingers. Your system is holding onto the interaction as “unfinished business,” hoping to either protect you better next time or find a way to feel safe again. In the absence of closure, the nervous system stays activated.

Breaking the loop: From rumination to resolution

Rumination feels urgent because your brain is trying to resolve something that still feels incomplete. But the truth is, most emotional loops don’t need to be solved. They need to be seen.

Moving from spiraling to self-awareness isn’t about finding the perfect comeback or rewriting the past. It’s about slowing down enough to notice what that mental loop is protecting, avoiding, or yearning for.

Use these questions as entry points:

• What did I wish I had said? This helps you name the truth that was stuck in your throat. It’s not about whether it would have changed the outcome. It’s about reclaiming your voice, even if it’s only to yourself.

• What emotion am I avoiding by replaying this? Sometimes we spiral intellectually so we don’t have to feel emotionally. Rumination can be a distraction from grief, anger, shame, or disappointment.

• Is this about this moment, or is it about a familiar pattern? Many of our strong emotional reactions are less about what happened and more about what it reminds us of. A wound from the past that hasn’t been healed, a role we’re tired of playing, or a part of us that keeps being dismissed.

Reframing the moment doesn’t mean rewriting the event. It means allowing the conversation to become a mirror, not a trap. You don’t need to go back and fix it. You need to listen to what it surfaced.

[Exercise] The two-column clarity exercise

This is a simple but powerful way to decode your emotional replay.

1. On the left side, write out everything you're mentally replaying: phrases, body language, thoughts you can’t let go of.

2. On the right side, answer these questions for each item:

   • What did this make me feel?

   • What need or value of mine felt ignored or violated?

   • What would I have needed in that moment to feel seen or supported?

At the bottom of the page, write one sentence that sums up the core message your mind is trying to deliver. For example: “I wanted to feel respected.” Or “I was afraid of being misunderstood again.”

This process turns vague emotional noise into insight. It helps you move from judgment ("Why can’t I let this go?") to compassion ("Of course this still hurts—it touched something deeper").

If you're still thinking about that conversation, it's because something about it felt unresolved. Your brain isn't trying to torture you—it’s trying to process what didn’t get acknowledged in the moment. That might be an unmet need, a crossed boundary, or a part of you that felt dismissed.

The goal isn’t to go back and fix it. The goal is to understand what your reaction is pointing to. When you stop asking how to let it go and start asking what it’s trying to show you, you move out of the loop and into clarity. That’s how you start to feel more in control—not by forgetting the moment, but by learning from it.

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That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance. Live well + be well xx,

Israa

[Ps. My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it here: https://www.israanasir.com/toxic-productivity ].

I often think about what I needed to hear when I was younger or what I might need to remember when I’m older. These are the kinds of shifts I return to again and again. Some I’ve learned the hard way. Some I’m still working on. But all of them have helped me move through confusion, over-functioning, self-doubt, and burnout with a little more clarity.

Maybe one will meet you where you are. Maybe another will sit with you until you’re ready to hear it.

1. You’re allowed to change, even when it disappoints people.

Growth often means becoming someone others didn’t expect you to be. And that’s okay. Let people misunderstand you if staying misunderstood means being more honest with yourself. Staying in a version of yourself that keeps others comfortable is not a life—it’s a performance.

Reflect: Who do I fear disappointing if I grow in the direction I truly want?

Act: Make one small decision this week that aligns with your evolving self—not your past roles.

2. Being empathetic doesn’t mean absorbing everyone’s pain.

Empathy without boundaries becomes self-abandonment. You can care deeply and protect your capacity. You can hold space for someone else without erasing yourself in the process. Empathy that depletes you isn’t sustainable—it’s extraction.

Reflect: When was the last time I felt emotionally drained after supporting someone? Did I ignore any signals from my own body or needs in that moment?

Act: Before saying yes to holding space for someone, pause and ask yourself: “Do I have the capacity right now?” If not, offer a loving boundary: “I care about you deeply, and I want to be present for this—can we talk when I have more space to give you my full attention?”

3. You are not a self-improvement project.

You are not a problem to be fixed. Healing and growth don’t need to be productive. They can be slow, nonlinear, even invisible. You don’t need to earn your own acceptance through constant work. Sometimes rest is the work.

Reflect: What part of me still believes I have to earn rest, joy, or self-worth by achieving something first?

Act: Do one thing today not because it improves you, but because it nourishes you: rest, play, pleasure, or stillness. Let it be enough.

4. Let your life be shaped by your values, not by someone else’s urgency.

Urgency is often a projection of someone else’s anxiety. Don’t let it become your compass. When you’re constantly responding to what’s loudest or most immediate, you lose sight of what’s meaningful. Come back to your own rhythm.

Reflect: Whose urgency have I been prioritizing lately—and what has it pulled me away from?

Act: List your top 3 values. Then look at your calendar. Does your time reflect them? Choose one small adjustment this week that realigns your schedule with what matters most.

5. Sometimes clarity comes after the leap, not before.

There are decisions you can’t think your way into. You have to move, trust, feel your way forward. Some knowing only arrives once you’re in motion. Waiting for certainty can be a form of avoidance. Sometimes action is the clarity.

Reflect: What decision or change have I been postponing because I’m waiting to feel 100% ready?

Act: Take one small, brave step toward it—even if it’s imperfect. Make a call, schedule the thing, send the email. Momentum creates clarity.

6. Confusion doesn’t mean something’s wrong.

We’re so quick to pathologize confusion. But often, it’s just a sign that something is shifting under the surface. You’re outgrowing something. You’re reorienting. You’re making space for a new way of being. Confusion is the in-between—and that’s where real change begins.
Reflect: Where in my life am I feeling confused right now—and what might that confusion be trying to show me?

Act: Instead of rushing to solve it, name the feeling and give it space. Try journaling: “What am I outgrowing? What new possibility might be taking shape?”

7. There are no wrong decisions—only different versions of who you become.

Every path teaches you something. Every choice shapes you in some way. You don’t have to be certain it’s “right” to move forward. What matters is who you’re becoming through the process.

Reflect: What “mistake” am I still holding onto—and what did it teach me about who I am or what I want?

Act: Write a letter to your past self, thanking them for a decision that felt uncertain but shaped who you are today.

8. Starting over doesn’t mean you’ve failed.

It means you’re paying attention. It means you’re being honest. You’re allowed to change your mind, pivot your path, or rebuild from scratch—even if it’s uncomfortable. It’s not too late. It never was.

Reflect: What’s something I’ve been afraid to walk away from because I didn’t want it to “look like” failure?

Act: Give yourself permission to release it. Say out loud or write: “I am allowed to begin again. I don’t need permission to choose a better fit.”

9. You don’t find community—you build it.

There’s no magical place where the perfect people just show up. You build belonging by showing up, reaching out, asking better questions, and making space for connection—moment by moment. Be the one who goes first.

Reflect: Where in my life have I been waiting to be invited, rather than doing the inviting?

Act: Reach out to one person today. Ask a deeper question. Initiate a conversation or gathering. Be the one who goes first.

10. If your value is only recognized when you’re agreeable, productive, or self-sacrificing—it’s not real recognition.

That’s performance, not presence. You shouldn’t have to shrink, smooth your edges, or silence your needs to feel worthy. Your value is not conditional. The spaces that truly see you won’t require you to disappear.

Reflect: When have I hidden my needs or truth just to feel accepted or praised?

Act: Practice showing up with one truth or boundary this week—even if it’s small. Let it be a reminder that you are enough as you are.

These are some of the truths I’m holding close lately—some I’ve lived, some I’m still learning.

What would you add to this list?
Hit reply and tell me what mindset shift has helped you show up with more clarity, courage, or compassion lately. I’d love to hear.

That’s all for now! May your tables, health, and happiness be always in abundance.

Live well + be well xx,'

Israa

[Ps. My book, Toxic Productivity, is available everywhere books are sold. You can learn more about it here: https://www.israanasir.com/toxic-productivity ].

This mental Health Awareness Month, donate to (if you can) or volunteer with:

1. MSF (Doctors Without Borders): Provides urgent mental health and medical care to people affected by conflict, disasters, and displacement worldwide.

2. JED Foundation: Protects emotional health and prevents suicide among teens and young adults through education, policy, and community-building.

3. Active Minds: Empowers students to speak openly about mental health, creating supportive school communities and preventing stigma on campuses.