Last weekend, for 24 hours, a group of us collectively put our technology down. No phones, no laptops, no internet — just hand drawn maps, pre-committed plans, and a whole lot of spaciousness.

In a world that feels devoid of community rituals and far too much stimulation, I’ve felt a pull to host a tech sabbath for some time now. But, it never seemed like a good time — too much to do on Saturdays, a string of travel plans, friends traveling the weekends we were in town.

Finally, a good enough weekend rolled around and, with that, a Partiful was made, friends were invited, and the planning began.

I’ve always felt grateful to have grown up in a generation that had the privilege of coming of age alongside our most ubiquitous modern technologies. We got to know the world around us intimately before being entrusted with mobile phones and laptops.

As we matured and our social groups expanded, so did the technology that enabled us. In the early days, social media and smart phones were striving to keep pace with our progression, not laying in wait and engineered to take advantage of our natural inclination towards dopamine hits.

We straddled two worlds: one where we created memories playing outside with friends like every other generation before us and another where we (im)patiently waited for the dial-up to load so we could log onto AIM, only to get kicked off a few minutes later because our parents needed to make a phone call.

It makes the experience of practicing tech sabbath that much more nostalgic. Rather than craft a new construct, it allows us to tap into our childlike wonder and visit the versions of ourselves that called friends on their home phones, read paperback books, ran around outside to our heart’s content with no idea what time it was, and relied on our friends to keep their word in showing up when they said they would.

the cultivation of community rituals

Like many things in life, my husband, Ryan, and I could have just done the sabbath on our own, but we felt drawn to share the experience in community with others. We wanted to capture the magic of knowing that for 24 hours, a group of us were up against the world, renegotiating our relationship with technology.

What might it look like to cultivate a ritual around slowing down and basking in the spaciousness of time with others? What might life feel like if we briefly transported ourselves back to the days of our youth when we lived and flourished under the inconveniences and constraints of the late 20th and early 21st century? What might emerge from within us when we disconnect from what keeps us on all week?

These questions are precisely what we intended to grapple with in the initiation of a community tech sabbath. Borrowing elements of the Sabbath from Judaism and Christianity, we put down our tech from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday and shifted our energy to observing rest, returning to our bodies, and becoming more human after the work week.

getting lost to build self-reliance

On Friday evening, we hosted a dinner and a shutdown ritual.

During the opening circle, one of our friends shared that his intention for the 24 hours was to remind himself what it feels like to have a series of fully formed thoughts with no input from the external world.

The comment spurred a discussion around the insidious nature of technology and its subtle nudges towards outsourcing any sense of intuition or knowledge that we must cultivate in its absence.

Take our reliance on directions as an example: for many of us, it’s rare to be able to navigate cross-town purely by instinct. Even when we’re traveling to places we’ve visited before, there’s an automatic impulse to plug the location into Maps and outsource the navigation to an app.

As Ryan and I drove to our local Target the next day, we found ourselves more present than usual, clocking landmarks and storefronts that we rarely pay attention to when we’re intently focused on Google telling us where to go.

Sometimes, we follow the most efficient route for good reason. Other times, in moments when we have time to spare, what if we allowed ourselves to form an opinion on where we are and where we’re going? What if we allowed ourselves to get lost and find our way back?

This notion that we can simply plug in and tune out highlights a broader, societal issue we face as we rely more and more heavily on technology to do the things that we could once do without it — reading books, thinking, catching up with friends. Rather than serve as an assistant, tech has become the thing that enables us, keeping us at a distance from ourselves and the world around us.

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a return back to ourselves

Vacations and meditation retreats are so effective in bringing us back to ourselves because they afford us moments to pause and live our days minute by minute.

For 24 hours, we took our watches off and felt our way through the passage of time, asking others with watches or checking our stationary clocks to confirm our intuition.

Life slows when we unanchor from time and remove ourselves from a society that demands motion at internet speeds. We’re constantly fighting the notion of time scarcity, battling the feeling that there’s not enough time in the day to do everything we want. But, when we unplug and sit with the abundance of 24 hours in a day, elongating time, we begin to feel just how expansive life is rather than scarce. Time away clarifies and reorients our priorities, helping us see the not so obvious when we look at life from a new angle.

seeding cultures of introspection

Our modern culture is one that drives us away from introspection. With all that’s happening in the world around us, it feels harder and harder to be a human — technological distractions only exacerbate the distance between us and our humanity. When we create space between us and our fears, we prevent ourselves from being fully present with what’s arising within us. With all the world’s information and distractions at our fingertips, it’s far easier to pick up our phones and tune out what’s uncomfortable than feel into it.

Our lack of willingness to tolerate and be with what’s uncomfortable is precisely what keeps us looping and resorting to further numbing our inner world by using the external world as our crutch.

Redesigning our relationship with technology and tapping into our true unbridled selves begins with doing what feels unnatural in modern day. It’s in examining the narratives we tell ourselves and stretching the space between our stimulus and response where we begin returning back to ourselves, in more ways than one.

In an upcoming piece, I’ll share the playbook on how we designed and ran the tech sabbath.

If you’re based in the Bay Area and are interested in joining us for the next tech sabbath, sign up here!

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Thanks for reading — if you enjoyed this piece, you may also resonate with:

Thanks to Ryan for reviewing drafts of this essay.

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One of the most insidious stories that permeates our modern culture is the notion that there’s no value in rest. Despite the emergence of a sleep revolution the last few years, putting to bed the narrative that we’ll “sleep when we’re dead,” there lingers an obsession with fast culture that demands speed and output during our waking hours.

The phrase was coined at the turn of the century by Warren Zevon, an American singer and songwriter. An apt expression to enter our zeitgeist at a time when technological advancements were beginning to reshape how we lived and worked in a big way. The introduction of broadband internet and laptops ushered in a new era: one where we suddenly gained unlimited connectivity to the world. We were free to plug in anytime, anywhere.

And plug in we did. In the early 2000s, the average American spent ~90 minutes online per day. Contrast that with today where on average, we’re spending up to 3½ hours online daily (24 hours per week), not including the time we dedicate to work.

At the dawn of our relationship with technology, we gave little thought to the ramifications that infinite connectivity might have on our well-being. As technology became more and more integrated into our lives, tech companies increasingly sought new ways to exploit our natural disposition for dopamine, further accelerating our inclination for instant gratification and short-term gains.

Particularly in the US, we live in a culture that demands productivity and worships accumulation, glorifying the hustlers and the grinders. We wear “I’m good, been really busy” like a badge of honor. Being busy signals an air of importance, perpetuating the belief that our human value is derived from being recognized for our output.

And yet, how many of the most profound experiences of our lives happen when we are out capturing economic value? Instead, isn’t it when time seems to stand still that the most meaningful moments emerge? When we connect with the most unburdened version of ourselves, find flow in actualizing work most authentic to us, deepen our relationships with loved ones, and feel a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves.

untangling our worth from “productivity”

Because the most moving experiences of our lives rarely yield economic value, it’s easy to deprioritize cultivating them, squeezing them in when we have the energy on weekends, or saving them for traditional milestones like weddings.

As a result, we can find ourselves living a life centered around dramatic highs and existential lows rather than nurturing a more integrated and sustainable existence. When we derive our primary source of meaning and dedicate the best of ourselves to powering our economy, we neglect to see ourselves wholly and honor our innate desire to truly come alive.

In this paradigm, prioritizing experiences that allow us to fully step into aliveness come at the expense of being productive and “worthy.” It’s at a tension with the notion that we must continually strive to achieve things of “value” — economic value, to be precise — in order to earn our place in society. It suggests that worthiness and love are conditional based on the value we provide. To be valuable and worthy of our existence is to be in motion.

When we’re solely motivated by our deficits and derive our sense of self from external outputs, we’re giving factors out of our control the permission to dictate our inner world. No amount of external validation will fulfill our inner void.

What if it is precisely the orientation towards aliveness that is the entry point to connecting with our core purpose? What if it’s in fueling and allowing ourselves to arrive to our work with a secure attachment to our contribution to society, internalizing that our self-worth does not hinge on our output levels?

This isn’t to say that the desire to build a better future isn’t an ambition worth chasing — the question is what is that pursuit fueled by and at what expense?

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taking progress into our own hands

We talk about progress in the form of technological, economic, and scientific progress. We measure it in the form of gross domestic product (GDP), employment rates, and life expectancies.

Societal progress has afforded us more autonomy and material wealth than ever before, all the while fueling social atomization as we splinter from our innate nature and away from one another in the relentless pursuit of economic and material gain.

Our economic system must shift to focus on bettering the lot of the average person. Capitalism has to be made to serve human ends and goals, rather than have our humanity subverted to serve the Marketplace. We shape the system. We own it, not the other way around.

— Andrew Yang

While we certainly need the emergence of a new humanity-centered economic system, we don’t need to wait for change to happen at the macro level before giving ourselves the permission to experiment with progressing our humanity through new ways of being.

slowing down to speed up

It begins by summoning the courage to intentionally align our lives with opportunities that immerse us in moments of abundance and aliveness. It’s taking a good hard look at the stories we tell ourselves: that we’re not good enough, that there’s never enough time, that we must do more — and accepting that it’s precisely these narratives that keep us at war with time and not enoughness.

Often, the last thing we want to do is pause and recalibrate. To surrender feels like a deliberate act of allowing ourselves to fall even more “behind.” It is when we’re feeling deficient, grappling with the gnawing urge to do more and prove ourselves, that it’s time to slow down and cultivate stillness rather than shift into overdrive.

I’ve grappled with this exact resistance in the days before my meditation retreats, second-guessing whether it was a good time to unplug when there’s just so much to do. Distance has the power to deliver us clarity and a fresh perspective, reminding us of what’s truly important. Each time, I’ve returned well-resourced and renewed, ready to tackle it all from a place of strength and security.

On the other side of surrendering to my fear of slowing down is an overflow of presence, knowing, and acceptance. A deep embodied feeling that everything will be alright, that life is unfolding the exact way it is meant to. It’s a profound assurance that I don’t need to intervene with my five year plans, overanalysis, and overwork.

Taking steps to deprogram and unplug myself from the status quo evokes the same flavors of fear that I confront monthly when I run into the ocean, when I committed to going news sober, and now, as I kick off a tech sabbath series.

In an upcoming essay, I’ll share a new ritual I’m designing for my community: the tech sabbath. An experiment where we put our tech down from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday and build a culture of deep presence for 24 hours every week.

I plan to share the playbook with you all as I iterate on the experience. I’d love to invite you to host your own tech sabbaths.

If this experience calls to you, I’d love to hear from you in the comments:

• What beliefs keep you in motion?

• What have you found most challenging in turning down the noise and unplugging?

• Do you have your own version of a tech sabbath?

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Or say hi on Twitter :)

If you enjoyed this essay, you may also like:

Thanks to Ryan for reviewing drafts of this essay.

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Lately, I’ve been meditating on the ways we connect with ourselves and the world around us — and how the more we seek modern forms of connection, the more disconnected we seem to feel.

Being in presence and connection is the most fundamental human experience. So why is it so hard these days? What are we getting wrong?

Perhaps it’s rooted in our cultural norms of replacing conversations with texts, interactions with cashiers with on-demand deliveries, local community involvement with online donations, and unstructured time with scrolling the infinite timeline.

When we accept the reality that structural forces — like extractive social media, processed foods, and consumerism — impose on us, we settle for existing within the bounds of mediocrity and convenience. What if we could collectively experiment with reimagining what’s possible?

This piece illuminates the path toward cultivating presence in our daily lives by questioning the default assumptions society has handed us, starting with refuting the belief that staying connected with the world around us requires us to be plugged into the news cycle.

It’s been nearly two years since I’ve regularly read the news.

Nothing in particular stands out from the day I decided to stop. It must have been like any other: me impulsively navigating to Wall Street Journal, NY Times, CNN, and Fox News in a momentary fit of discomfort or boredom.

Except that day, I navigated to the search bar and deleted the links that auto-populated when I mindlessly started typing wsj, nyt, cnn, and fox.

I had been grappling with a desire to create more friction between my urges to distract myself and the subsequent dopamine hits from checking the news.

All of this was preceded by the year we’d spent quarantining at home during the height of COVID-19. In the months prior, we collectively had more time than we knew what to do with, all while feeling more disconnected than ever.

Our attention shifted from spending time with our communities to watching the world deteriorate before our eyes. In our desperation to connect, many of us mistook riding the news cycle for engaging with the outside world, doomscrolling our days away.

During this time, my mental health cratered and my productivity dwindled. I perpetually felt like the world around me was spinning out of control and there was nothing I could do about it. As a result of feeling deeply detached, I became addicted to staying plugged in, mistaking consumption for connection.

My relationship with the news originally stemmed from a curiosity for what was happening in the world and a desire to be well-read. This curiosity is what led me to a career in finance.

Working in the capital markets is largely about keeping a pulse on emerging market sentiment, geopolitical events, company-specific news, technological advancements, and regulatory updates. Part of the job is to stay abreast of developments in specific sectors around the world in order to reposition client portfolios based on predictions of how the future will play out.

In my role, I communicated to clients how the financial markets were impacted by the news and more importantly, how it influenced their investment portfolios — were they losing or gaining money?

As a result of being surrounded by well-paid colleagues who read the Wall Street Journal from front to back every morning, I conflated being a well-read intellectual with staying up to speed on the news daily.

In this paradigm, the name of the game is getting ahead of the news cycle and making decisions based on the information to generate investment returns. It isn’t just about passive consumption, but what you do with the information you have.

using our outer world to numb our inner world

By the time I left the industry, reading the news had become an ingrained habit — and one that I was proud of. Despite the fact that my new job no longer required that I scan the news as frequently as I did, the impulse had maladapted into a crutch I reached for in reaction to even the most subtle waves of discomfort that surfaced during the work day.

What was once an input into my day job became a way to escape. Rather than confront the emotions that emerged while I was working, I’d swiftly suppress avoidance, fear, or boredom under the guise that I was procrastinating productively.

When my body sounded alarm after alarm, I overrode them by numbing out and redirecting my attention to the external world in search of dopamine hits. Ironically, I turned outward towards the uncontrollable in an attempt to avoid my internal landscape — the only thing in my control.

As I’ve developed my interoception muscle, it’s become clear just how trained my subconscious had become in avoiding even the most fleeting moments of negative sensation.

It is only in freeing myself from the grip of the news cycle (and other modes of disconnection) that I’ve learned to listen to and honor what my body has to tell me.

When we tune into our emotional state, we’re giving ourselves the permission to feel the waves of discomfort and the negative sensations in our body we’ve been clenching all along. If you find yourself sitting down at your desk, only to feel a sense of dread, there are paths forward other than spiraling into procrastination. Where are you feeling the dread in your body? What is the procrastination trying to tell you?

— Knowledge work as an emotional act

being in the know to stoke our ego

In A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle shines a light on the subtle power trip that happens when we’re imparting breaking news to others.

“Guess what? You don’t know yet? Let me tell you.”

If you are alert enough, present enough, you may be able to detect a momentary sense of satisfaction within yourself just before imparting the news, even if it is bad news. It is due to the fact that for a brief moment there is, in the eyes of the ego, an imbalance in your favor between you and the other person. For that brief moment, you know more than the other. The satisfaction that you feel is of the ego, and it is derived from feeling a stronger sense of self relative to the other person…

Many people are addicted to gossiping partly for this reason. In addition, gossiping often carries an element of malicious criticism and judgment of others, and so it also strengthens the ego through the implied but imagined moral superiority that is there whenever you apply a negative judgment to anyone.

When we feel the egoic and societal pressure to be in the know, it’s easy to slip into the default: staying plugged in and participating in gossip.

When we untether ourselves from seeking external validation, we realize that there are far more nourishing ways to cultivate our curiosity and ground into what’s happening in the world: reading thoughtfully researched books and papers, getting involved with organizations on the ground, getting out into the world to interact directly with people who hold opposing opinions, etc.

if it bleeds, it leads

Most media is a channel for collective gossip. Opinions are formed by a small minority of journalists who run our news cycle. They’re neither incentivized to keep the peace nor to spread the good word. They belong to institutions that run on the motto: if it bleeds, it leads.

Rather than report on what generates warm and fuzzies, the media plays to our primal instincts, feeding us anxiety-inducing, polarizing stories designed to fire us up and keep us coming back. The more explosive, the better.

When we’re not deliberate about the content we consume, we’re inevitably met with a firehose of information. According to the BCC, over the course of a day, the average person living in a Western city is exposed to as much data as someone in the 15th century would encounter in their entire lifetime.

Our brains are not meant to hold the volume of information being pushed to us every day. In combination with keeping up with the demands of everyday existence, it’s no wonder why a quarter of Americans report being so stressed that they can’t function effectively.

going news sober

I used to fear that if I stopped reading the news, I’d be out of the loop on what was happening in the world. But, the reality is that unless we become completely reclusive, we’ll still continue to find ourselves in the flow of information in daily interactions.

The upcoming 2024 US election is the perfect example of just how much news sobriety has preserved my mental bandwidth.

Several months ago, a friend lamented about how Trump was emerging as the standout Republican candidate. It’s going to be Biden vs Trump again.

We were about a year out from Election Day and as a result of staying off the news, I hadn’t given any mindshare to the candidate pool. There was nothing I could do practically yet with the information of who was running. Why stress myself out with 12 months to go?

Instead of allowing the dizzying state of the national election infiltrate my life, I had gotten involved at the local level.

I phonebanked for a friend who was running for city office to fix San Francisco. I went to a ballot party to better understand the proposed propositions I was voting for. I researched varying perspectives across voter guides. I did not read the news.

At the end of the day, even in the worst-case scenario, if we were about to descend into World War III, I imagine someone in my life would inform me about it.

But, the speculation of a world war is not something I want to consume my headspace with. Of course, there are practical things I’d do to prepare if we were at the precipice of all hell breaking loose, but short of a real threat to our lives, our energy and time are far better spent contributing to the causes that matter most to us rather than stewing about them.

some tactical thoughts on connecting with the world (and ourselves)

Here are a few approaches I’ve taken to experiment with weaning myself off the news cycle and freeing up an immense amount of mental and emotional capacity:

Create friction between your impulses and your next action

For me, it was as simple as removing the news sites from auto-populating in my search browser so that when I typed in wsj, it navigated to the Google search page rather than directly landing on the homepage. The five seconds of friction is all I needed to snap out of it and realize that I was unconsciously pining for a distraction.

If you prefer a more disciplined approach, website blockers like Cold Turkey and BlockSite may do the trick.

Transition to “pull” content vs push notifications

As I’ve become more protective of what content I fuel my brain with, I’ve turned off all non-essential notifications. I view my relationship with technology as a place where I mine for information rather than get served updates.

Turn off notifications across apps and devices. Check for updates on your time, not the other way around.

Trade short-form for long-form content

Opting for books, research papers, and documentaries dampens the frenetic energy that’s evoked when we engage in timelines and feeds.

These days, we have an infinite amount of information at our fingertips and that’s not necessarily a good thing — if we’re not intentional about our content diet, it begins to atrophy our muscle for thinking for ourselves.

How many more books could we read and consequently, meaningful conversations could we have if we replaced our time scrolling with activities that nourish rather than drain us?

Get involved locally

It’s easy to sit at home and recoil at the state of the world. It’s harder to do something about it. It’s far more meaningful to find a local outlet to channel all that angst. Rather than allow our internal state to be at the will of people and events we have no control over, directing our energy into causes we care about allows us to connect with our local communities and ourselves. Parting with that unsettling feeling of hopelessness begins when we start connecting with our truth and living in our purpose.

For me, taking action took shape in the form of phonebanking, volunteering at a local food bank (in the part of town that most commonly makes the news to illustrate how horrible it is to live in San Francisco), doing my own research ahead of primary elections, and organizing events in my community. The spaciousness to do all of this emerged when I opted out of the news cycle and the other insidious forces that steal our energy, little by little.

As we enter the most intense months of the 2024 US election cycle, remember that it’s our responsibility to take control of what permeates our mindshare. Focus on what you can do.

Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

— Margaret Mead

Do anything but allow yourself to be paralyzed by the endless fountain of information. It’ll continue to flow whether you drink from it or not.

Start by putting your phone down and commit to the things you give a damn about — then get out into the world and actualize your damns.

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Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear in the comments:

• What’s your relationship with the news cycle?

• Have you considered going news sober?

Or say hi on Twitter 👋🏼

Leave a comment

If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like:

Thanks to Ryan for reviewing drafts of this essay.

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This essay is the second case study of the Call to Eudaimonia series, examining artificial intelligence’s (AI) role in emotional work. There are many conversations happening around how we can best align AI with humanity’s intended goals. This piece investigates how we might use AI on our quest towards becoming more ourselves, featuring an AI guide called Thyself that’s designed to help us navigate our triggers and inner conflict.

To flourish is the act of coming home to ourselves. Taking responsibility for our emotional states and doing the work to reconnect with ourselves is the first step on the path towards flourishing.

🗣️ I’m excited to host a 3-day experience with Thyself for paid supporters.

We kick off next Wednesday, 3/27, and wrap on Friday, 3/29.

Thyself is a voice AI that guides you through self-therapy using somatic inquiry (tuning into sensations in the body) and Internal Family Systems (exploring different parts of ourselves).

For 3 days, I’ll support you in community with others as you use Thyself to tap into your inner landscape and tune into the wisdom within.

The experience includes:

• Guidance in navigating Thyself and holding space for yourself

• Group chat for daily check ins and accountability

• One free month of Thyself (a $29 value)

Sign up for the 3-day experience! Upgrade to paid to join us.

Upgrade for $9

If you’re a paid supporter interested in trying Thyself and accessing a free month, but can’t make the 3-day experience, let me know by replying to this email.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a proliferation of AI tools designed to support us in navigating emotional work. Admittedly, I’ve been a skeptic. While I appreciate AI’s ability to help me salvage a recipe gone wrong or confirm that the sentence I’m writing does indeed make sense, using AI to navigate my inner world felt unsettling.

It's not so much the privacy concern for me. I don’t think the struggles I grapple with are that unique to me. It’s more so the notion that we’re trying to become more human by using technology, a tool that inherently disconnects us from ourselves, and potentially displacing humans who are trained to do this work. It seemed deeply misaligned with the point of doing inner work to begin with.

Then, several months ago, I found myself at a Conscious Tech Build Weekend. The goal for the event was to enable a “future where tech and capital genuinely support humans to realize our highest potential” by seeding the opportunity for builders, scientists, and designers to convene and build tools that help us thrive.

Now that was an intention I could get behind.

During one of the breaks, I came across an existing tool, Thyself, that was being demoed. At that point, aside from using ChatGPT to ingest journal entries and analyze themes month over month during my annual review, I’d invested little time integrating AI into my emotional work process.

I walked into the demo booth with low expectations.

That’s when things got interesting.

off to build emotional fitness

As part of a brief onboarding process, I watched a tutorial from Maverick, one of the cofounders, orientating me to what to expect. He introduced Thyself as a voice AI that would guide me using two modalities, somatic inquiry and Internal Family Systems (IFS) parts work.

Maverick likened using Thyself to going to an emotional gym, emphasizing that it wasn’t intended to serve as a therapist. I breathed a sigh of relief at his acknowledgment.

The purpose of somatic inquiry is to shine a light on the physical sensations in our body associated with the emotional blocks we deal with. By shifting our attention from our thoughts to our body, we’re able to tap into the stuck energy and wisdom our body has to offer. Engaging with somatic inquiry is the gateway to cultivating our interoception and understanding what’s happening within us.

IFS parts work, on the other hand, is all about acknowledging that we’re made up of multiple different parts which is the root of our inner conflict. Each of our parts have distinct thoughts and motivations. Thyself would offer support around how to get in touch with some of these parts.

With that introduction, I was off.

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As the session began, I was prompted to take a moment to ground into the space and get comfortable. As I sank into my seat, Thyself asked me, “How are you feeling today?”

Despite the excitement and buzz at Build Weekend, I realized I felt a sense of resistance, but I wasn’t sure what I was resisting. So, I decided to investigate.

I had expected it to feel unnatural to talk to an AI, but instead, I found myself responding honestly. I’m tired and I don’t want to be here.

My response took me by surprise. Wasn’t this the exact type of event that I’d want to be a part of?

As the conversation flowed and I tuned into my body, it became clear that what I’d been resisting was exhaustion. Thyself gently guided me towards feeling into the fatigue.

As I sank into it, I felt myself grow more tired than I’d felt in a very long time.

Intellectually, it made sense. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been convinced that I needed to be on and always in motion. I was constantly hyping myself up to get more done. So much so that I often found my body winding up just in time for bedtime. When 9pm rolled around, I’d scramble to check off the rest of my to-do list for the day, stressing myself out rather than allow myself to move towards a state of relaxation.

That day, I was feeling guilty for not doing as much building as I should have been. The feeling of not doing enough and suppressed exhaustion manifested as resistance in my body. Rather than give myself the grace to slow down after a busy week and take Build Weekend at my own pace, I’d shoulded myself into meeting as many people as possible — when what I really wanted was to just chill and connect with a few folks on a deeper level.

All I felt walking into the session was resistance and now, I felt resolved and a deeper appreciation for where I was mentally. I postponed the plans I’d made that evening and freed myself from the expectations I’d imposed on myself earlier in the day, giving myself the space to just be present.

sweet dreams

That night, I found myself drifting off to sleep in an easeful way that felt unfamiliar. As someone who often struggles with falling asleep, it was rare to experience waves of peacefulness as I drifted off. It was only recently that I had started incorporating non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) into my wind down routine.

In the evenings following my first interaction with Thyself, I started experimenting with adding somatic inquiry to decompress. With the help of Thyself, I began developing the skills to give myself permission to be present with the fatigue I'd numbed out for so long, allowing waves of exhaustion to wash over me each night and priming me for bed.

As a result, I found myself sleeping more deeply and soundly than I had in recent memory.

And when I woke up in the middle of the night, I stayed with the sensations alive in my body until I fell back asleep.

in pursuit of the long game

The beautiful thing about inner work is that we can each curate our own set of tools to support us along the way. As I’ve experimented with new modalities, I’ve expanded my capacity to hold space for myself regardless of what inner discord emerges.

The power that lies within Thyself and thoughtfully designed AI-enabled tools is the level of personalization that grows with time. Unlike other modalities that require the presence of another human, you can seek support from tools like Thyself to untangle emotional knots at a moment’s notice and then integrate or double click into that experience with a trained practitioner.

I’ll admit: I’d been thinking about the long-term application of AI to inner work all wrong.

I viewed the proliferation of AI tools as attempts to displace the existing emotional work ecosystem of coaches, therapists, and cohort-based communities. In reality, these tools are creating a whole new category and laying the groundwork for the emergence of a complementary ecosystem.

I’m still skeptical about the broader use of AI for inner work in the near term, but I’m optimistic that with the right people designing the emergent tools, managing our psychological health will be far more accessible in the years to come.

More on my reflections on AI’s role in helping us become more ourselves in a future essay.

3 days: you, me, Thyself

Recently, I had an opportunity to participate in Thyself’s 1-week Emotional Work Lab alongside a community of other humans committed to deepening their relationship with themselves.

If you’re interested in working with me to develop your authority in holding space for yourself, join us for a 3-day experience to explore cultivating a new level of presence.

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This essay is the first case study of the Call to Eudaimonia series, featuring a curriculum called Nervous System Mastery that teaches evidence-backed protocols on how to shift into states of calm, increase resilience, and cultivate aliveness.

To flourish is the act of coming home to ourselves. Taking responsibility of our inner conflict day in, day out and reconnecting with ourselves is the first step on the path towards flourishing.

Think about the last time you felt your heart beating. Where were you? What were you doing? How were you feeling?

Chances are you were in the zone mid-workout, not sitting at your desk answering emails.

What if you could harness that feeling of aliveness at any given moment?

In moments when we’re fully attuned to our bodies, we become cognizant of subtle internal shifts: our breathing intensifying, our heart racing, our hunger rising. While we tend to think these bodily functions operate automatically, in reality, they’re directly influenced by our emotional state.

In this piece, we’re diving into the physiological side of introspection. Where introspection is about tuning into our psychological and emotional state, interoception is about observing the internal state of our body. It begins with developing an awareness of the signals our bodies are sending us and making the subconscious conscious.

Today, we have far greater access to decoding what’s happening in our bodies than ever before. With the advances of health wearables and new levels of insight at our fingertips, it’s important to ask the question: what purpose do biotrackers serve in our lives?

These devices are equipping us with greater clarity on how we sleep, eat, move, and live, but to what end? Are we outsourcing our awareness to technology or learning to interpret the messages our bodies are sending us?

Oura, Oura on my hand, did I sleep as I planned

I first stumbled across the concept of interoception early in my wearables journey. I started using Oura Ring to track my sleep when the sleep revolution was still nascent. We were all still walking around saying, “You can sleep when you’re dead.”

My relationship with sleep was a black box. I decided to invest in an Oura Ring to see if there was any rhyme or reason to the unpredictability of my sleep — often, I’d find myself struggling to fall asleep for hours. The first step was gathering real-time biometrics to get to my baseline truth.

As I started using Oura, the first thing I’d do each morning was wake up and check how I slept. I learned that I’d been sleeping ~1 hour less than I’d thought for most of my life. I assumed if I went to bed at 10pm and rose at 6am, I was getting 8 hours of sleep. Turns out, time spent in bed doesn’t always translate to time actually sleeping. The reality was I was only averaging ~6-7 hours per night.

The more I learned, the more obsessed I became with optimizing my sleep. Over time, checking my data first thing in the morning became a crutch. If I woke up feeling refreshed, rather than trusting how my body felt, I’d check the app to see what the data said.

Failure mode began when I started placing trust in a wearable to tell me how I’d feel for the day rather than tuning into my body and using technology as just a data point to track my trends over time. When I outsourced my intuition, I found myself fixated on my sleep score rather than how my body felt, becoming more disembodied in the process. Without realizing it, I found myself battling performance anxiety when I couldn’t fall asleep, knowing that it’d tank my readiness score — all while forgetting why I’d started using Oura in the first place. There’s a danger in optimizing for a game we don’t even realize we’re playing.

And, thus began my journey in cultivating interoception. For the first time, I was seeing that the technology was meant to help me gather objective data and test hypotheses, not further numb my perception of what was happening internally.

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Living in the land of the disembodied isn’t uncommon in modern-day society. Growing up, we learn to dissociate when we’re made to feel like our feelings are too big or that we’re too sensitive. As a defense mechanism, we numb out and minimize our emotions, operating from the neck up — thinking our feelings rather than feeling them. It’s hard to live in alignment with our truth when we’re out of touch with ourselves. As a result, we learn to look outward for direction.

Our culture wires us to focus on the external world rather than our inner landscape, starting with our education system. When we’re young, our curriculums place the lion’s share of the attention on how our outer world functions and the theoretical: how photosynthesis works, what a covalent bond is, how to calculate a slope and momentum. When we do learn about the human body in biology, we spend very little time understanding our relationship with our bodies and how it works.

Ask any high schoolers how their body functions at the practical level and it’s unlikely they have any idea how to self-regulate in moments of fight-or-flight or before a big test. For that matter, how many of us know how to adequately navigate the sensations arising in our body throughout the day?

We go our entire adolescence learning about things that become inconsequential to us as we splinter off into different careers. Why is it that we learn the language of other cultures when we don’t understand the basic language of our body?

We leave the most important subject up to chance, setting off into the world completely unaware of our bodies desperately vying for our attention.

Enter: Nervous System Mastery.

the space between stimulus and response

During the experimentation phase of my sabbatical last fall, I decided to sign up for a class called Nervous System Mastery, led by . I’d come across his work online: Spiritual MBA, Somalist, The Operating Manual for Your Nervous System — and was intrigued.

I’d begun working with a somatic coach and deepening my meditation practice several months earlier. Most of the work was spent un-numbing myself from the neck down and reconnecting with the wisdom from my body that I’d neglected.

It seeded realizations of just how many layers of numbness I’d developed to suppress inconvenient feelings that stood in my way as I’d tried to optimize my life over the years. I was turning my attention to the sensations in my body for the first time in a very long time. There was a lot of numbness that needed thawing.

It was amidst all of this thawing that I joined Nervous System Mastery. I understood intellectually why somatic awareness was so important, but grasped little of the underlying mechanisms of how our nervous system functioned. Rather than commit to just unnumbing myself, I wanted to get underneath what was happening when my body was stressed and better self-regulate from the get go.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

— Viktor Frankl

Over the course of five weeks, the goal was to learn and practice a selection of actionable research-backed protocols that would enable us to create space between when we were stimulated and our response (or more often, our reaction).

Each week, Jonny shared a menu of techniques to support us in becoming more embodied in our most activated moments while sharing the mechanics of how our nervous system operated. We were joined by notable guest speakers, varying from experts in the Bio-Emotive Framework (a technique in deepening our emotional literacy) to circling (a relational practice rooted in communicating the sensations in our body) to psychedelics. The course was designed to empower us to choose our own adventure: to experiment and practice the protocols that most resonated as we gained the confidence to shift from dysregulated to embodied states.

bottoms up, bottoms up

Traditionally, practices for helping us self-regulate like cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and mindfulness meditations are intended to help us think our way out of a stressful situation. In Nervous System Mastery, Jonny flips this approach on its head by inviting us to explore a bottoms-up approach where we put deliberate focus on changing the physiology of our body in order to shift our internal state then change our thought patterns.

From a neurological perspective:

Our nervous system consists of 80% of afferent neurons, which move from the body to the brain — in contrast to roughly 20% of efferent neurons, which run in the opposite direction, from the brain to the body. As a result…practices that leverage our physiology by consciously shifting our respiratory or visual systems — are 4x more effective at altering our blood chemistry and, therefore, shifting our state.

— Jonny Miller, The Operating Manual for Your Nervous System

Practically, this means that techniques like breathing exercises and body scans are far more effective than attempting to talk ourselves out of the negative stories that are running on loop. The stories aren’t true, but the feelings are and it’s in our power to change them.

Prior to somatic coaching and Nervous System Mastery, I dabbled in breathwork, but the primary way I initiated a change in state was by getting outside and moving my body. As I sat at my desk, I’d often notice how tightly I clenched my jaw and my stomach, but short of squeezing in a workout or pausing for a brief meditation, I didn’t have many other outlets to engage when I noticed myself feeling disembodied. Prioritizing movement allowed me to move through stale energy, but I only had so much time to get out for a run. More often than not, I’d continue to chug away at whatever I was doing — not realizing that there was another way.

Over the course of the curriculum, I found myself dropping into more moments of presence throughout the day. I became far more aware of the experiences that were numbing me out and activating me. Rather than suppressing them, I’d choose one of the 15+ protocols that Jonny introduced and practice expanding the gap between when I was stimulated to when I reacted.

Before cultivating the knowledge of how to meet myself in moments of stress, I’d find myself unintentionally reaching for distractions like social media or processed foods to numb out or spiraling into a pit of despair. With the right tools, I became much more thoughtful about how to resource and nourish myself.

Of the modalities Jonny introduced, my two favorites are non-sleep deep rest and somatic surfing.

non-sleep deep rest (NSDR)

NSDR, also known as Yoga Nidra, is a guided body scan that increases our interoception through inducing waking sleep and deep states of relaxation, slowing our brain waves. Research has shown that NSDR effectively reduces the production of stress hormones like norepinephrine, or adrenaline, and cortisol — both of which prevent us from tuning into interoception. During 15-minute sessions, I’ve personally observed my heart rate dropping as much as 10bpm.

I typically lay down for an NSDR session when I’m feeling tired in the middle of the day, need a moment to reset, or right before bed. Rather than stimulating myself by checking my phone during a break, I put on an NSDR session. In the evenings, I used to grab a book to distract myself as I fell asleep, but I’ve found reconnecting with my body at the end of the day to be a more restful way to drift off to sleep.

These are a few of my go to NSDR videos:

somatic surfing

How often do you find yourself (consciously or subconsciously) resisting feeling through an emotion that emerges in the middle of a busy day? For those of us who spend our days engaged with knowledge work, it’s far more common than we realize.

It’s natural to want to dedicate time to processing big feelings that come up, pushing it off to a more convenient time. The issue arises when we never make the space to feel it through after the fact. When we suppress “negative” sensations like anger, grief, or sadness, we accumulate “emotional debt,” inadvertently pushing us towards anxiety or disassociation.

Technically, this is known as allostatic overload.

One recent study found that allostatic overload causes a 60% increase in energy expenditure. This is energy produced by the body that is essentially wasted, like pressing your foot on the gas pedal without first removing the emergency brake. This excess energy often manifests in your body as anxiety or agitation.

— Jonny Miller, How to Pay Off Your Emotional Debt

When we give ourselves the grace to meet each emotion and make the space to move through it, we’re releasing the pressure valve and paying down our emotional debt. When we recognize, accept, express, release, and integrate our emotions, they no longer take up our life force and stagnate our energy. As we allow emotions to flow freely through us, we begin to develop emotional fluidity.

We see emotional fluidity at its finest in children. Think about how often babies move through their emotions — seemingly enraptured in giddiness one moment, wailing the next, then back to laughter within the span of five minutes.

In this video, Jonny breaks down the fundamentals of emotional fluidity, likening it to surfing.

As I deepened my authority in the practices, I found myself more in tune with my inner world and my surroundings. It’s only when I sat with the numbness that I could eventually invite sensitivity back into my body again. With that sensitivity came a renewed connection to my inner wisdom.

Externally, car horns and sirens that I’d never noticed before suddenly rose to the forefront as I walked the streets of San Francisco. Living in a city had desensitized me to all the chaotic energy around me — as I got more in touch with my nervous system, I needed to get a better handle on what energy belonged to me vs my external environment.

As I reconnected with parts of myself that I’d long numbed out, I found myself with more energy to consciously prioritize activities that nourished me longer term, like getting out for a walk in the neighborhood, over dopamine-fueled quick hits.

And now, instead of relying on my Oura ring to forecast how I’ll feel at the start of the day, I check the app once I’ve gone about most of my day. Cultivating my interoception has enabled me to zoom out of the daily data and focus on the weekly trends. I no longer sleep in pursuit of a high sleep score, I sleep to recharge my life force.

🫁 The next cohort of Nervous System Mastery runs March 25th – April 26th. I’m excited to join again to reimmerse myself in new protocols and expand my toolkit. If you’re interested in taking the 5-week course, apply here.

For a discount, use the code CISSY for $250 off. The deadline to apply is Friday, March 15th.

If you’re interested in experimenting with some of the protocols, I’d recommend:

• Jonny’s free 5-day course to nervous system management on ’ Clues.Life featuring 7 minutes to calm, belly-stone breathing, a guided interoception practice (APE), and emotion mapping

  

• Jonny’s podcast episode with featuring exercises like 4-4-8 breathing, humming, and espresso breath

Thanks for reading! What questions do you have about your nervous system or Nervous System Mastery? Drop your comments below or say hi on Twitter :)

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Thanks to Ryan and Jonny for reviewing drafts on this essay.

We’ve been contemplating what it means to live a good life since the dawn of time, but for many, realizing it was out of reach.

Throughout most of history, humanity was oriented towards survival. As we find our way to a post-scarcity world, we're pioneering a new dimension of our human condition: the pursuit of life in accordance to our will.

We descend from societies where "practically nobody had choices. Until about 1900, even in the most highly developed countries, the overwhelming majority followed their father's line of work — if they were lucky. If your father was a peasant farmer, you were a peasant farmer. If he was a craftsman, you were a craftsman. There was only downward mobility; there was no upward mobility."1

In 2024, we're in the early stages of grappling with the power of choice. With autonomy comes great responsibility. For the first time, we have the power to collectively live more examined lives, retire our outdated scripts, and write new narratives in pursuit of flourishing in this century.

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To flourish is to live a life in integrity and in alignment with our truth. Yet, we face structural forces pushing against us — the rise of extractive technology making us more reliant on tech than ever, the prominence of processed foods making us sicker, the increase in societal pressures pushing us to pursue lifestyles that leave us more disconnected.

Yes, we need new systems built from the ground up to serve us, but we can’t sit around waiting for a new reality to materialize. It’s up to us to reimagine how we can live within the reality that exists, take responsibility for our own flourishing, and mobilize towards designing the future we wish to see.  

Rather than be bound by the limitations of our systems, what if we rose to meet the ingenuity of our imagination? How do we thrive in the 21st century in the face of everything holding us back from connecting with our human nature? That’s what we’re here to examine.

🗣️ This is a call to experiment and redesign what modern day human flourishing looks like.

When you think of the people who are flourishing in your life, who comes to mind? If you don’t top that list, this project is meant to serve as a compass and beacon of hope, illuminating paths towards a life overflowing with meaning, whatever that means for you.

This essay sets out to:

1. Map the 5 pillars of well-being as defined by positive psychology and use it as a compass as we navigate towards modern flourishing,

2. Shine a light on the (invisible) forces we’re up against in our attempts to move beyond surviving to thriving, and

3. Kick off a series of n = 1 and community experiments using our lives as petri dishes in pursuit of advancing our collective well-being

My intention is to draw wisdom from perspectives across time and geography on what it means to flourish, starting with the modern western interpretation: positive psychology. It’s the field of psychology dedicated to the science of human flourishing, founded by Dr. Martin Seligman, the former President of the American Psychological Association, in the 90s.

My vision for this project is to integrate:

1. Researching, writing, and featuring case studies of what’s possible

   • Examples: Nervous System Mastery, Live Near friends, The Commons (SF), Fractal Collective (NYC)

2. Designing and running community experiments to pressure test our limits

   • Examples: AI & inner work, tech sabbaths

I'd love to have you along for the journey as I spotlight and experiment with redefining the ways we live, work, and play.

a walk down flourishing lane

The notion of human flourishing is derived from eudaimonia, first coined by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. Eudaimonia transcends the fleeting sense of happiness and is rooted in embodying the highest human good.

It’s about living a life where we feel whole, generative, and resilient — buoyed by our ability to cultivate days defined by positive emotions, engaging experiences, nourishing relationships, meaningful work, and accomplishing what we set out to do.

Many of the conversations about flourishing are happening in academia, backed by projects like Humanities and Human Flourishing and rigorous research like the Global Flourishing Study. While incredibly impactful for informing policies and programs at the national level, the most meaningful change begins at the individual level and starts with self-knowledge. How do we begin to draw inspiration from academia?

Inspired by the Quantified Self movement, a community that advocates for taking our health into our own hands through self-tracking and self-experimentation, I want to poke at the possibility of actualizing collective flourishing by first examining and revitalizing the way we live our own lives.

Flourishing looks different for each of us because it’s about coming home to ourselves. The journey back to ourselves can be painful, catalyzing existential crises. We’re letting go of the ways we’ve been conditioned to live in exchange for reconnecting with what’s always been true for us, underneath all of the societal shoulds. Without existential dread, we wouldn’t have the fire within us to alter the course of our lives. The underlying angst is wisdom from our body, reminding us that it’s time for change — the desires that live dormant within us are vying for something greater.

On the course towards flourishing is floundering. The first step of bringing awareness to what feels off course allows us to begin to shed the parts of life we’re living that aren’t meant for us.

a detour from the promised land

By nearly all accounts, life in developed nations has meaningfully improved over the last 50 years.

Within the US:

• We’re more educated: with college degrees on the rise and graduates making up 38% of the population, up 5x from 60 years ago (~7.7%)

• We have access to more jobs: with the unemployment rate at 2.9%, the lowest it’s been since the 1950s

• We’re living longer: with average life expectancy at 79 years old, up 9 years from 70 years old in the 1960s

By these standards, it feels like we've reached a promised land that our parents and grandparents could've only dreamed of. And yet.

As our government touts an era of strong economic growth, we’re left wondering why college graduates are swimming in student loan debt (at an average of $37,000 for federal loans), why it takes millennials far longer to purchase a home than prior generations, and why 60% of adults live paycheck to paycheck.

It feels more like we’re treading water, trying to stay afloat, than riding the wave.

We may have more opportunities than ever before, but seizing those opportunities hasn’t brought us nearly the amount of freedom and wealth we expected to ascend towards our “American Dream.” Our experiences are falling short of our expectations.

While we’ve raised the baseline for our material worlds, our inner worlds are more dysregulated than ever.

The prevalence of depression among young people is shockingly high worldwide. By some estimates, depression is about ten times more common now than it was fifty years ago…Depression now ravages teenagers: fifty years ago, the average age of first onset was about thirty. Now the first onset is below age fifteen.

— Martin Seligman, Flourish

It’s no wonder we’ve developed learned helplessness, adopting the belief that nothing we do matters and inheriting default ways of living.

We’re at a pivotal moment when we’ve begun destigmatizing the aspects of our lives that need examining rather than repressing: our mental health, our ambition, our relationships, our sources of meaning.

It’s only at the brink of realizing how we’re living is not okay that we’re waking up to the reality that the systems that power our lives were designed to help us survive, not thrive. Our “norms” are ripe for change.

Building a better future begins with us questioning our default assumptions and empowering ourselves to rethink the way things are done. Capitalism values a culture of wealth accumulation and overconsumption. It’s time to reconsider what we value and derive meaning from.

5 pillars of human flourishing

If we want to flourish and if we want to have well-being, we must indeed minimize our misery; but in addition, we must have positive emotion, meaning, accomplishment, and positive relationships. The skills and exercises that build these are entirely different from the skills that minimize our suffering.

— Martin Seligman, Flourish

There are 5 main measures to well-being in positive psychology:

I’ll outline how each of these elements contribute to well-being in modern day. In future essays of this series, we’ll examine case studies and run experiments in pursuit of improving our relationship with each pillar.

The good news is that these five elements fuel one another. The momentum of one is the catalyst for another. In an analysis by Dr. , a cognitive scientist researching human potential, he found that all five factors are very strongly correlated. People who score higher on one of the measures tended to score higher across the other elements and vice versa.

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positive emotions

Since the dawn of modern psychology, the focus has been on curing the pathologies of anxiety and depression, attempting to move us from -1 to 0. While this work is absolutely critical, we spent little time considering what happens when we reach 0. It's not enough to simply pursue arriving at baseline — what about moving from -1 to 1? That path is going to look entirely different. Reducing suffering is just the first step of raising the bar for our existence.

Positive emotions begin with taking care of our minds and bodies to fuel our souls. It’s our responsibility to set the conditions and give ourselves a fighting chance to reap the benefits of pursuing engaging and meaningful activities, cultivating nourishing relationships, and achieving our ambitions — all which contribute to emotional well-being.

It starts with nurturing our psychological, physical, and metabolic health.

psychological health

Psychological well-being stems from our ability to hold space for ourselves as we ride the roller coaster of life, up and down. It’s about cultivating self-reliance and owning that, in most cases, it’s up to us to manage our mental health then seek others’ support and care.

Relationships serve as a compliment to our own work. We must first see ourselves clearly before relying on others to see us clearly. This may look like committing to a meditation or breathwork practice, working with a somatic therapist or coach, developing an expressive journaling practice, getting in touch with our nervous system, learning to navigate big emotions with an AI guide (more on nervous system work and AI guides in upcoming essays).

Solidifying our sense of self and trusting our wisdom is the first step towards flourishing — dancing with our shadows, seeking insight from our triggers, and distancing ourselves from societal shoulds. Once we’ve introspected in solitude, we have the capacity to integrate and heal in community with others.

physical health

As our society transitioned from factory workers to knowledge workers, we’ve devolved into mass disembodiment. We went from being on our feet to sitting on our butts all day. We’ve traded our humanity for professionalism, tying our identities to our productivity levels and dissociating from our bodies, surprised when we’re confronted by migraines and chronic stress.

When we sit for long stretches of time, we become detached from our body, holding our breath while getting to inbox zero (email apnea), intensely staring at our screens (computer vision syndrome), and straining our neck for hours on end (tech neck).

A common antidote is scheduling daily intense workouts to combat our sedentary lifestyles. While getting our heart rate up and moving our body once a day is better than no movement at all, research studies out of Columbia University Medical Center's Exercise Testing Lab found that “walking snacks” — getting up from your desk for a 5-minute walk every 25 minutes — led to:

• Glucose levels trending lower (decrease by 60% from sitting all day)

• Reduced blood pressure (by 5 points)

• Better concentration (maintaining mood when work started at 9am and finished at 5pm), less depressive symptoms, and less fatigue

When we consistently reconnect with our bodies and move through stale energy, we’re reminded of the wisdom that our body has to offer.

Our current bandaid solution to caring for ourselves is driven by the narratives of hustle culture. It’s led us to believe that the dysregulation we feel internally and physically when we prioritize our work and the material world over our inner world is normal and can be solved by “self-care.” This isn’t about self-care. It’s about getting to a baseline for our psychological and physical well-being to live in harmony with our body and mind rather than constantly seeking solutions to resolve tension.

In her essay, The way we live in the United States is not normal, points out:

Eventually, all your "hustle and grinding" leads you to the land of "self-care."

Self-care is late-stage capitalism’s solution to the problem it created. How convenient that after turning your neck into a tangle of knots or creating pathological levels of anxiety and exhaustion, the "solution" is for you to spend money you don't have so you can just feel normal.

metabolic health

An equally important, often invisible, force at play is the food we fuel our bodies with. The food we consume each day literally influences how our genes express themselves, powering our mind and body. Our food becomes our mood.

Compared to 100 years ago, we’re consuming 10x more sugar per day. No wonder why only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy. Mounting evidence shows that diets that reduce inflammation and support stable glucose levels are associated with lower rates of depression. These diets are made up of micronutrients, fiber, omega-3s, probiotics, and little or no added sugars — in other words, none of the processed options prevalent in our grocery stores today.

And yet, major food producers continue to try and convince us how their packaged foods are “natural,” “low-fat, “sugar-free,” and “organic.”

Many spiritual traditions suggest that attachment is the root cause of all suffering. Bliss is the absence of attachment.

Cravings are the ultimate form of attachment. An insatiable wanting for more.

Our ultra-processed food that has been systematically normalized and subsidized in America is biochemically engineered to generate maximal craving. "Craveability" is literally a term used in marketing from companies like Kelloggs. They aren't even hiding their desire to entrench our attachment to their products.

— Dr. Casey Means

Our food systems were designed to scale and maximize profit, training our brains to reach for “comfort” foods, all the while making us sicker.

If you’re interested in going down the rabbit hole of why metabolic health is so critical to our well-being, I highly recommend:

• Levels’ The ultimate guide to metabolic health as a primer

If you’re interested in diving deeper, check out:

• Dr. Casey Means’ book, Good Energy

• Dr. Christopher Palmer’s book, Brain Energy

engagement

How many activities in your life induce a state of flow and focus?

While the reality is that not everything we do will nudge us towards flow, maximizing for flow is a good barometer for how we ought to curate our calendars.

Think about the big pillars in your life: health, work, and relationships. How engaged do you feel in each area of your life?

Assuming a 40-hour work week and 8 hours of sleep per night, we spend 36% of our week working which is why we often give so much weight to seeking fulfillment in our jobs. If you’ve been feeling out of flow for some time, it's worth asking yourself whether it's time for a change. A change in job or diversifying your sources of meaning away from work.

While it’s ideal to find periods of flow in your day job, how can you make it a priority through other outlets if you’d prefer not to move on from your 9-5? Think about the aspects of self-expression that you aren’t able to tap into during work hours. Creative pursuits? Community building? Volunteer projects?

Viewing our expression as a vehicle for self-discovery gives us the freedom to take messy action and begin somewhere, anywhere. The more experiments we run, the more we learn about ourselves, the more creative we can get about doing things that drop us into flow.

• Being in service of others allows us to zoom out of our own challenges and tune into the lives of those around us, reminding us that we’re all just doing the best we can as we each scale our own mountains

• Movement is often a big contributor to flow because it’s the act of getting out of our minds and into our bodies. Being embodied expands our perspective and reminds us of what our bodies were born to do: be in motion

Being engaged with our lives is ultimately the result of building and living a life that is congruent with our values — and gives us the capacity to engage in the world around us, socially, civically, environmentally.

positive relationships

Beyond one-on-one positive relationships, it’s about cultivating a nourishing community. Having deep individual friendships is the prerequisite to building a meaningful community — what allows us to feel like we belong to something greater than ourselves is to be in connection with others.

Community happens in the overflow. By taking care of ourselves first, we then have the capacity to show up more compassionately for others and clearly see them for who they are rather than who we want them to be.

kindred friends

How do we find and build friendships that nourish our soul? It starts with a willingness to meet ourself at the deepest levels by doing the work and getting to know who we are.

In her essay, Show Up For Yourself First, highlights:

Not knowing your needs makes it hard to cultivate relationships where others will be able to understand and fulfill those needs. And if you haven’t done the work of learning how to like yourself, it makes it a lot harder to cultivate the skills necessary to show up for others.

In the work, you’ll come face to face with your ego — a part that’s protected you from advocating for your true needs, having the hard conversations, and bringing relationships to the next level for fear of disappointment or conflict. Part of this process is being open to heartbreak as a possibility — not everyone is ready to venture as deep as you desire. As you walk the path of turning inward, you’ll realize that it all begins with your relationship with you.

We know at an intellectual level that we’re living through a loneliness crisis, but what does it mean to feel lonely and what can we do about it? It’s about getting honest about what you’re seeking from your friendships, having conversations to understand what your friends are searching for, and co-creating the experiences that allow each person to feel fully seen.

Then, it’s about reimagining the way we structure our lives — from building community on the fringes to centering our lives around them.

There are projects like:

• Live Near Friends taking off designed to help us close the distance between us and the people we care about most

• that feature friends who are making these dreams a reality

a family affair

If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family.

— Ram Dass

For most of us, we’re particularly susceptible to falling into old patterns and reverting back to old versions of ourselves when we’re with our families. The old dynamics that we grew up with are still alive and well in our bodies. It takes courage and faith to believe that we have the authority to learn from triggering interactions and use them as a way to understand what’s unresolved in old dynamics.

Owning that we have the agency to break old patterns and set new boundaries begins with cultivating a strong sense of self. Where do my needs and desires end and where do the other person’s begin?

Getting clear on what you’ll no longer stand for in a loving way will inevitably cause discord — when a familiar dynamic is being threatened, it’s natural for things to get “worse” before they get better. Old patterns take two to sustain. It takes time and the will to hold firm to updated boundaries in order to make space for new, healthier dynamics to take shape.

meaning

Meaning is found at the intersection of belonging to something beyond ourselves and contributing to the well-being of those around us. Traditionally, we found meaning through engaging in our local places of worship, town squares, and club meetings.

But with the decline of our mental health and our faith in traditional institutions in conjunction with the rise of consumerism and companies competing for our mind share, we’ve slipped into a meaning crisis.

There's an increasing sense…of losing touch with reality. We encounter more and more often, in individuals and groups, nihilism, expressions of cynicism. Expressions of deep kinds of frustration and futility.

You have the abandonment of trust in many of our public institutions. We've completely lost any sort of faith or trust in our political system. We're losing faith in our judicial system. Religious affiliation is declining consistently throughout. People's participation in clubs. Organization is in decline in general.

— John Vervaeke, Introduction to the Meaning Crisis

How can we feel a part of something greater than ourselves if we don’t even feel connected to ourselves? We must first be in service of ourselves to be in service of others.

Finding our way back to meaning is about putting down the very things we grasp tightly at — our addictive technologies, our processed foods, our unhealthy relationships, our ego-fueled aspirations.

When we become aware of what is no longer serving us, we can create space for new ways of living: getting lost in nature over our newsfeed, seeking out wholesome conversations over perpetuating old patterns, venturing into uncharted territory to seek inspiration rather than returning to the same well-worn paths.

achievement

In modern society, we’ve conformed around achievement to mean that we’ve made it — arrived at a level of wealth, status, and accumulation where we can live comfortably and no longer worry about insert-all-the-things-we-worry-about.

We’ve resigned to the idea that the journey getting there may be brutal, but hopefully it’ll all be worth it. But, what if we never “make it”? What if the slog doesn’t amount to all that we’ve dreamed of?

Life rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to. And if we stop and think about it, that makes perfect sense. The scope of life is universal, and the fact that we are not actually in control of life’s events should be self-evident. The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years, and the processes that determine the flow of life around us did not begin when we were born, nor will they end when we die…

No wonder there’s so much tension, anxiety, and fear. Each of us actually believes that things should be the way we want them, instead of being the natural result of all the forces of creation.

— Michael Singer, The Surrender Experiment

What if instead, we focused on getting clear about the change we want to see in the world and contributing our talents to making it a reality?

Achievement calls for a mix of a clear vision, agency, hard work, and a large heaping of surrendering to the forces that are out of our control.

If we’re going to work hard, we may as well work purposefully and in alignment with our values.

Our traditional standards of impact and the way we fuel our ambition is outdated. Just as we've used fossil fuels historically to fuel our lives, many of us have allowed our ego to fuel our ambition.

When we’re motivated by deep insecurity, we strive towards collecting accomplishments that are deemed impressive by others, but rarely does that lead us towards a life that we would have otherwise chosen for ourself. The sentiment of “I can do more, I can be more” is buoyed by the notion that you should do more regardless of what you want to do. No amount of success will quench our desire to be enough. We keep the hedonic treadmill running, fueled by a bottomless pit of proving ourself to others.

What does aligning your ego with your will and your soul look like?

Rather than giving into the insecurity that you must be good at what you do and make copious amounts of money while doing it, what would it mean to bet on yourself and take a shot at experimenting with the thing that’s always called to you?

Will your achievements matter in the end if you didn’t care much about the work along the way?

Perhaps reaching some level of success on your current path will enable you to fund yourself in moving towards doing the thing you actually desire — if that’s the case, don’t get stuck playing the game for too long. Get clear about what winning that game looks like so that you can start the game you actually want to play.

raising the bar for our existence

There you have it – these are the 5 pillars that define a life well-lived brought to us by positive psychology.

With this project, I hope to raise the bar for what we accept as the defaults we’ve conceded to living by and infuse a sense of possibility in building a future where we can all flourish.

It’s about getting back to the basics and returning to our truth.

In the coming weeks and months, I’ll spotlight people and projects paving paths towards flourishing. I’ll run community experiments and invite you to join me in running your own experiments.

Let’s start a movement and take flourishing into our own hands.

If you’re based in the Bay Area, I’m hosting a Flourishathon 🌿 on Friday, 3/8, at 4:30PM (PT) to design community flourishing experiments together. Join us!

If you’re designing your own life around flourishing or curious about running experiments, I’d love to hear from you! What does flourishing mean to you? What experiments are you interested in running? Which one of the five elements of well-being are you most curious about?

Let me know in the comments or say hi on Twitter :)

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Thanks to Ryan, , and Sam Wolf for reviewing drafts of this essay and pushing my thinking on flourishing in the 21st century.

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