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It took me 35 years to realize that sometimes the hardest thing to get used to is having nothing to worry about.

I was lying on the beach on the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania.

White sand, tall palm trees, turquoise blue water in front of me, and my beautiful girlfriend lying next to me. There was absolutely nothing to worry about in that moment.

Still, after about an hour of lying there while my girlfriend was enjoying her book, I started to feel weird.

I didn’t know what the problem was, but I was sure that something was off. My heartbeat suddenly went up and I became anxious.

My head turned from left to right as if I were searching for something, then my hands started shaking, followed by my legs.

I knew I was having a panic attack because I had experienced them before, but never in the middle of paradise.

I didn’t tell my girlfriend because I was ashamed.

Instead, I went to the bar and secretly ordered two shots of vodka, which I drank immediately, hoping they would calm me down.

And it worked.

I followed them with a glass of wine, lit a cigarette, and after around 30 minutes of suffering, I was drunk but fine again.

The irony of the whole situation was that there wasn’t any problem that would justify having a panic attack.

I was always waiting for something to go wrong

This wasn’t something that happened to me once. I experienced different versions of it many times throughout my life, which made me curious about what the actual reason could be.

So I went to my doctor and told her what had happened, but she wasn’t particularly interested in figuring out the root cause. She gave me some sedatives in case it happened again.

Then I brought the topic up in therapy.

My therapist said it was an eruption of accumulated stress I had carried with me into my vacation. That made sense when I first heard it, but there was one problem with that explanation: it didn’t only happen when I tried to enjoy my well deserved days off.

It also happened at home, sometimes on completely ordinary weekends when everything was alright. It didn’t always come in the form of a panic attack either.

Sometimes it was just this inner unease, this vague sense that something was off.

I behaved like a suspicious cop who was constantly expecting danger.

When everything seemed to be cool at work, for example, I could interpret a single facial expression from my boss as a sign that he wasn’t fully happy with my performance.

He never said a word, but I created the story myself and reacted by working harder.

Even without any negative feedback, I could convince myself that something was happening in the background and that sooner or later it would become a problem for me.

It wasn’t exactly paranoia, but sometimes it came pretty close.

I did the same thing in my relationships, even during our happiest moments.

You know that feeling of it’s too good to be true?

There must be something wrong with her. There must be something wrong with our relationship.

The pattern became increasingly obvious: I created problems for myself or made my life harder even when I could have been having the best time of my life.

Whenever I achieved a goal, for instance, I immediately defined another, harder one. Subconsciously, I found a way to skip the phase of enjoyment and peace and move straight back into struggle.

Overpreparing for situations that barely required any planning became normal to me. I even rehearsed small talk in my head before attending an event.

These were the more subtle consequences of my actual problem because not every peaceful moment ended in a panic attack.

I think the beach situation was simply the most extreme version of the same pattern. There was nothing around me to fix, anticipate, or worry about, and somehow, instead of feeling peaceful, my whole body went into alarm mode.

But why was my brain doing this?

After spending years in therapy and practicing self awareness on my own, I finally started to understand where all of this was coming from.

I grew up in a difficult environment where dealing with problems 24/7 was normal. Survival mode became a part of me.

People often don’t believe me when I tell them about my childhood, but there were very few periods when I could simply enjoy being a child. My environment was too unpredictable. Things could escalate at any minute on a completely random day.

Compared to other kids, my normal life was a life full of problems.

I was constantly waiting for the next one to show up so I could deal with it. I didn’t consciously choose to live this way. It was simply the environment I had adapted to.

On a conscious level, I actually hated it. I complained a lot about having such a hard life and wondered why problems kept showing up for me.

At some point, I genuinely believed I was cursed.

And yet this is how I lived for around 30 years: worrying about the next problem, expecting the next disaster, and preparing for battles that didn’t even exist.

Until I realized something.

I wasn’t afraid of problems.

On the contrary, I was incredibly familiar with them.

What I wasn’t familiar with was their absence.

I kept turning back onto the bumpy road

That realization changed the way I looked at my entire life because it came with an uncomfortable recognition: many of my previous difficulties had been caused by me.

Every time my life was moving in the right direction, I somehow jumped behind the wheel and turned onto the goddamn bumpy road again without even noticing it.

Because I had never learned how to enjoy life when nothing was wrong.

When there was no problem to deal with, I created one or made my life harder with thoughts, goals, challenges, tight deadlines, or conflicts.

So what could I do about a subconscious mechanism that was quietly sabotaging my peace?

Well, I had to learn how to navigate a good life, which might sound surreal to someone who never had this problem.

And of course, recognizing the pattern didn’t make it disappear. My brain still does this shit.

The difference is that today I can sometimes catch myself before I march into the next artificial war.

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Learning to leave things alone

In the past, when somebody didn’t reply to me quickly, I immediately suspected that something was wrong and took it personally.

Today, I’m aware of this pattern and try not to react the same way. If somebody doesn’t reply to my message, I assume they are busy with their own life. Until they directly tell me there is a problem, there is no problem.

The same applies to my job.

I used to search for new jobs the moment my boss wasn’t in a good mood. I interpreted his behavior as the beginning of a potential problem that could eventually cost me my job, so I started preparing for the worst before anything had even happened.

Today, if there is no recurring negative feedback, I assume everything is alright.

My boss could have slept poorly. He could have had a fight with his partner. There are countless reasons for someone’s behavior, and most of them probably have nothing to do with me.

The same applies to relationships.

If I’m in a relationship and everything is going well, I try to accept the simple fact that everything is going well. I don’t search for signs of a possible catastrophe that I need to turn into a discussion, and I’ve stopped trying to read my partner’s thoughts or the thoughts of other people in general.

That’s something people who are used to living with problems often do. We read and interpret everything as a potential threat.

Now I try not to act until my girlfriend actually says, “There is a problem. Let’s talk about it.”

And then there are goals and achievements.

Constantly setting new and harder goals was another convenient way to make my life difficult again. If I worked on several ambitious goals simultaneously, my schedule became tight, everything needed to be organized, my own needs came up short, and eventually I became frustrated.

The strange thing is that all of this felt familiar.

So now, when I achieve a goal, I try to live with the empty space for a while. I use it to rest, read, practice yoga, or simply do things without needing them to lead anywhere.

The thing I’m learning is to accept that not having any problems is a valid state of life.

Problems still feel like home

But I’m not perfect at this, and probably never will be.

When I talk to someone, let’s say at the gym, and that person tells me about a problem, I can still feel my brain waking up. It immediately switches back into its familiar firefighting mode and starts looking for solutions to the problems of people I barely know.

I remember searching for jobs for people I hardly knew because I wanted to help them.

Today, I try to just listen. I tell people they can reach out to me if they need help, wish them the best, and then return to my own life.

I try not to carry their problems home with me just so I can feel “home” again.

Still, I often catch myself thinking about solutions for other people. When I go for a walk, my brain loves having a problem to deal with, and I don’t think this part of me will ever completely disappear.

Maybe it doesn’t have to.

What matters is that I’m aware of it now. I can catch myself and ask whether there is actually a problem that needs to be solved or whether my brain is simply looking for something familiar.

Because a life without problems is actually pretty great.

Real problems will show up again. That’s inevitable.

And when they do, I can use the superpower I spent most of my life developing and deal with them.

But hopefully, the next part of my life will be about becoming just as good at living when there aren’t any.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

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Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

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I stepped on most of these myself before I even realized they existed.

You know there are many ways you can ruin your life.

You can gamble all your money away in a casino or lose yourself in drugs.

Those are the obvious ones. We all know about them.

But then there are habits that slowly push your trajectory in the wrong direction.

There is no dramatic moment. You don’t suddenly go to jail or lose everything overnight. Instead, years pass, and one day you realize that you’re nowhere near where you actually wanted to be.

I think of these habits as landmines. They’re hidden along the path of life, and sometimes you don’t realize you’ve stepped on one until the damage is already done.

And I can tell you that I’ve stepped on quite a few myself.

Fortunately, none of them caused permanent damage that I couldn’t repair. But fixing that damage took a lot of hard work and, in some cases, years.

So I want to tell you about these landmines, because maybe knowing where they are will help you avoid stepping on them yourself.

Here are the 10 things that slowly ruin your life that I wish someone had told me about earlier.

1. Staying slightly too long in everything

There are many people who don’t leave. Whether it’s a relationship with hundreds of red flags or a job that drains them every single day, they stay until it slowly consumes them from the inside. Being unhappy and disappointed becomes normal. At some point, they stop thinking that something is wrong with their situation and start believing that life just sucks.

Deep down, these people know they should leave. But they never take that step because leaving feels harder than staying.

2. Pretending all the time instead of being who you actually are

Inhaling in the morning before you leave your home and exhaling once you close the door behind you in the evening.

There are people who have been doing this their entire lives. They’re exhausted, sad, and miserable on the inside because they believe their true self won’t be accepted. So they put on that happy face every day, laugh at jokes they don’t find funny, attend events they hate, and say yes when they mean no.

Then, later in life, some of these people wake up one day and ask themselves: Who am I actually?

And that can be a terrifying question when you’ve spent decades being who everyone else wanted you to be.

3. Pleasing everyone around you except yourself

People who please everyone are often the ones who rarely please themselves. They put everyone else’s needs before their own.

Over time, they become angry and exhausted, and they don’t even realize why.

There was a time when I also tried to please everyone around me. It got to the point where I had shaking hands and panic attacks.

And all that effort didn’t even get me the acceptance I so badly wanted. Because what I was looking for wasn’t something I could get from others. I had to give it to myself first.

4. Treating your real life as something that starts later

My parents wanted to go on vacation “next year” their whole lives. But they never went on that vacation.

It can be about anything, though. Your business idea, starting that hobby, booking that flight.

Your life is already happening now, and you’re most likely somewhere in the middle of it. There is no second life waiting for you once you finally have enough time.

If you have the time, money, and health to do something, don’t keep postponing it, because you don’t know how many more chances you’ll get.

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5. Expecting from others what you never give yourself

This is a tough one. You make other people responsible for meeting certain needs that you haven’t learned to meet yourself.

For example, my ex-girlfriend expected me to entertain her and constantly come up with new things for us to do, but she rarely did that herself. On the other hand, I expected her to show me unconditional love when I had never learned to give that love to myself.

She was angry at me, and I was angry at her. But we never asked ourselves the relevant question: Do we give ourselves what we expect from each other?

That’s the trap. When you depend on someone else to give you something you can’t give yourself, your happiness becomes dependent on their behavior. And whenever they fail to deliver, you blame them for how you feel.

You can spend years changing partners, friends, or circumstances without realizing that you’re carrying the same unmet need with you wherever you go.

6. Ignoring your health and calling it “enjoying life”

Someone I know used to tell me that he was simply someone who loved to enjoy life. Exercise wasn’t his thing. Eating well wasn’t his thing. But he loved opening a bottle of red wine on a random Tuesday.

Years later, he had a stroke at 41. I don’t know whether his lifestyle had anything to do with it. But seeing someone my age suddenly end up in a hospital changed the way I thought about health.

We tend to treat our health as something we’ll deal with once there’s a problem. The trouble is that by the time the problem arrives, some things are much harder to undo.

7. Always choosing what feels easier right now

It’s easier to stay on the couch than to go to the gym. My mother didn’t go to the doctor because she wanted to avoid hearing bad news.

There is always an excuse not to show up.

But many of the things you want require choosing temporary discomfort over what feels good right now. The good thing is that it’s your choice. You can stay on the couch and feel miserable, or you can get up and do the hard thing.

And this is a habit you can train.

Over time, the hard choice starts to become the easier one.

8. Comparing yourself to everyone and feeling behind

You will always find someone doing better than you. Someone who earns more money, looks better, travels more, has a nicer apartment, or seems to have figured out life while you’re still trying.

I feel it myself when someone tells me they’re moving into a fancy new apartment. Or when I walk through the garage in my building and see all those expensive cars.

But here is the strange thing about comparison: five minutes earlier, I was perfectly happy with my own life. Nothing about my life changed when I heard their news or saw those cars. I didn’t suddenly become poorer or less successful. I simply saw what someone else had and started looking at my own life differently.

That’s what comparison can do. It can turn something that was enough a moment ago into something that suddenly feels inadequate.

And there will always be another garage.

9. Never taking responsibility for your own life

I was there.

My parents, my girlfriends, and my teachers were to blame for my misery. And yes, what they did is on them. But I’m the one responsible for what I do with it now.

I know it’s not fair, and I also hated the idea that I’m the one who needs to clean up the mess after others. But here is the ugly truth: nobody will do it for you. No one is on the way to save you.

So either you stay stuck in victimhood and blame everyone else for your situation, or you start asking yourself what you can actually do about it.

Many people spend their whole lives in that prison and only realize at the end that they had a choice all along.

10. Trying to fill every void by buying something

Technology makes this worse.

You just log into your Amazon account, and within minutes something is on its way that makes you feel a little better.

People try to buy the status they don’t have, the novelty they don’t experience, and the identity they wish they had.

But the pleasure of a new gadget fades quickly, and the emptiness comes back. No Rolex, nice car, bag, or pair of shoes can give you what you need to develop on the inside.

Don’t get me wrong. Shopping is not the problem. The problem is when you try to fill the hole inside you with the next thing you order.

There are many landmines I mentioned above, but you don’t need to start panicking now. These are small hints, crumbs that can help you be aware of them.

And once you’re aware, you can also change your behavior if necessary.

The good news is that nothing I mentioned above is irreversible. You don’t go to jail or lose everything you have because you please everyone around you. But in the long term, these things can impact your life negatively.

It also means that you have enough time to change something before your life starts going in the wrong direction.

I did it, and it means that you can do it too.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

Subscribe now

Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

If this resonates, Subscribe and join 650 readers.

There was a time when I stayed in the wrong relationship and the wrong job without even realizing it. It took me years to understand why I couldn’t see what was right in front of me.

People always told me it’s fate.

You cannot have a good relationship and a thriving career at the same time.

Either one or the other. And there was a time I actually believed it, because I experienced this phenomenon myself, in both directions.

The relationship ended after almost five years exactly when I finally started making money and getting recognition. And I also quit the job when I fell in love. Two of my ex-girlfriends broke up with me when they found a new job.

Many friends told me about the same experience and they also started to expect that outcome when they finally found a job or a partner. It almost turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy by thinking about having success in a job and love at the same time.

The myth seemed to be true.

Either that, or there must be something else we missed all the time.

I don’t believe in myths but I believe that there is almost always a reason for everything that happens in our life. We need to pay more attention.

After years of observing, thinking and reading I recognized the pattern that caused this fate-like situation.

And fortunately it’s not about a higher power playing an either-or game with us.

It’s about security.

When I finally had something, I saw everything

When I was unemployed back then, around the age of 22, I had a girlfriend.

We loved each other, moved together and tried to live our lives. But it was a tough time for me because after university I wasn’t able to find a stable job, only temporary solutions.

It sucked. But at least I had my girlfriend.

Who actually often talked to me like crap. She criticized me every single day. Same as my mother did. But I can tell you that I never once thought about breaking up with her.

When people asked me about our relationship I said we were happy, and I meant it.

She was the only person I could stick to and in my eyes she was perfect.

Then after two years of searching for jobs and trying to get into programs, I finally ended up in an international company. From the first day I sat in a room with academic people and worked for clients in Switzerland.

I got a computer, had my own desk in the office, people were nice to me and I started making real money. I also got a lot of appreciation from clients and colleagues.

I felt much better in my skin.

A few months in, I bought my first iPhone. My girlfriend criticized that too and said I was stupid for finally buying something for myself.

Time went on and I started to notice more when she judged me for something. When I wanted to watch an old movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger she said I was dumb. She criticized how I cleaned the apartment. When I wanted to tell her about my day she said she wasn’t interested at all.

Over time I had this feeling that I didn’t even want to go home anymore.

And I asked myself: what happened to her? Why did she change?

But the truth is that she didn’t change at all.

I changed.

Or more precisely, my circumstances changed.

She was the same person as when we first met. She didn’t criticize me more after I got a job. I finally had enough security in another part of my life to notice what had been there all along.

Which is interesting because it would mean I was blind in the first years of our relationship and didn’t see those problems.

I was blind, yes, but because that relationship meant survival for me. I lacked a good relationship with my parents, had no supportive network and no money either.

That level of insecurity narrowed my world. When one thing was keeping me emotionally stable, I became much more willing to tolerate everything that came with it.

It’s like asking yourself how to live a more fulfilled life. It’s a privileged question. People who work for survival every day don’t ask themselves whether their job fulfills them or makes them happy.

They work to make it to the next day.

And even if it sounds unfair, it was the same for me at the beginning of that relationship. I didn’t question those problems because losing the relationship felt too risky at that point in my life.

And none of this happened consciously. I wasn’t sitting there thinking that I needed her for stability or that I couldn’t afford to leave. I genuinely thought I was happy and that our relationship was good.

Sometimes we don’t stay because something is good. We stay because losing it feels too expensive.

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This time it was the job

When I was single in 2019 and started working for a company I shouldn’t have worked for, the same thing happened.

At that job I felt miserable every day. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t endure it, but I was under-challenged, bored, worked with people I didn’t like, on tasks I didn’t care about.

It was an e-commerce company whose purpose was to sell stuff to people, which I couldn’t identify with at all. But at that time I only looked at the bright side.

Then a few months in, I met my ex-girlfriend there. We fell for each other fast and turned quite quickly into a relationship. Once we had been together for a few months, I started complaining and searching for a new job.

That idea came out of nowhere. I suddenly had a long list of things I hated about that job that I hadn’t named before.

After one year and nine months I quit. But I’m telling you I wouldn’t have quit as quickly if I hadn’t met her. That was the same process I had experienced before, just flipped.

The first time, a job gave me enough stability to question my relationship.

This time, a relationship gave me enough stability to question my job.

What insecurity actually does to you

Looking back, I know insecurity narrowed my world.

When we are insecure, we can only afford to focus on what keeps us stable. Everything else becomes less important.

The moment a second stable pillar shows up in our life, like a new job, a new relationship, a better network, we suddenly have more room to question the things we tolerated before.

We start seeing things differently. Not necessarily because they got worse. Because we finally have enough security to look.

And the more security you have, the easier it becomes to consider alternatives.

Being single is not as scary when you suddenly have cool people around you in the office and a life outside your relationship. Quitting a job doesn’t feel as scary when you have a loving relationship waiting for you at home.

It’s not entitlement. You simply know that leaving became an option.

What to watch out for

This is the part I actually wanted to share with you, so you won’t end up surprised in that weird situation.

1. Make decisions slowly when you don’t have enough stability in your life. If your relationship is the only stable thing right now, be careful about big commitments like moving together or having a kid. People often do these steps because they want to keep their only stable pillar in their life, not because they really want it.

2. If you suddenly see problems that weren’t there before, take a step back. When you land a new job or enter a new relationship and suddenly start complaining about the other area of your life, it could be a sign. Those problems might have always been there. Take your time to think about it before you make changes out of impulse.

3. Don’t automatically assume that something suddenly became worse. Maybe your partner didn’t change. Maybe your job didn’t change. Sometimes the biggest change is that you now have enough security to admit what you don’t like. That doesn’t automatically mean you should leave. It means you finally have the space to ask yourself whether you actually want what you have.

I almost got a dog after my last breakup. I love dogs. I really want one. But I was reflecting on it and I knew I only wanted it right then because I felt miserable. That was my survival instinct, so I didn’t get the dog.

I still want one. But I want to get one because I want a dog, not because I need something to make an unstable period of my life feel stable.

Maybe you read my last piece about the rejections I got recently. I’m single and not fully happy in my job either. This would be exactly the moment where my survival instinct could push me into bad decisions. I could jump into a relationship with someone I don’t like just to feel loved a bit.

That would be wrong and fortunately I’m aware of it.

Insecurity can make us blind.

Once the pressure decreases and we have more stable pillars, like a job, a relationship, a strong network, financial security, then we start becoming more aware of the things we don’t actually like.

It’s not necessarily that those things became worse. Sometimes we simply stopped ignoring what was always there.

And sometimes we don’t stay because something is good for us, but because losing it feels too expensive.

That’s why I think the more stable pillars we build in our lives, the less desperately we need any single one of them.

And then we can finally ask ourselves a much better question before we make a commitment:

Do I actually want this, or do I just need it?

Because there is a huge difference.

The good news is that you can have the good job and the wonderful relationship at the same time. But you need to choose them because you actually want them, not because you desperately need something to hold on to.

The myth for me is busted.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

Subscribe now

Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

If this resonates, Subscribe and join 650 readers.

This was something that beat me down for a few days and made me question everything in my life.

When I clicked the play button on her voice message and heard the first three sentences, I had that feeling of explosion in my stomach. My body got warm and I had a choking feeling in my throat.

It was almost unnecessary to listen to the end, but I did anyway because I was paralyzed for a few seconds.

She didn’t want to see me again.

We have all been rejected in our lives and it’s not the first time for me either, but it doesn’t get any easier.

There was also this tiny voice in the back of my mind. The voice of the self-fulfilling prophecy about not being good enough, waking up immediately and saying: I told you.

It was almost like a moment of satisfaction because that belief I have been carrying my whole life about not being good enough might turn out to be true. And if it is true, then failing is not my fault at all. I’m just messed up and for that I can blame my parents. It’s a relief and an easy way out.

Good thing I didn’t fall into that trap and I don’t need to blame myself either.

But that voice message was the last drop in the glass of rejections I collected within a month, and it forced me to sit down. Usually I start asking loudly what all these rejections are trying to teach me, as if I were talking to a higher power, to God, or to the universe, waiting for the verdict.

But no one gave me the answer.

Two rejections from employers for trying to level up professionally and another from a girl I really liked.

I’m sure if I had received those nos with more time between them, I wouldn’t have ended up almost losing myself in victimhood. But they came one after another too quickly, and I couldn’t recover from the first one before the next arrived.

There is this saying about relationships that if you have a bad day, like fighting with your partner, you need at least five good days to make things good again. This might also apply to life in general.

The problem is not when you face problems or rejections. It simply gets overwhelming when many of them come simultaneously.

Then you don’t have a stable pillar in your life. When a date doesn’t work out but you are thriving in your job, a rejection doesn’t bother you as much. And it works the other way around as well. When you have success in dating or another area of your life but not in getting a better job or raise, at least you can turn to your partner and feel loved.

This is actually an interesting phenomenon I’m going to write about later.

In that moment, I had the rejections at work and I couldn’t call the girl anymore to talk about the work situation either, because she had also said no.

I had that tough hour, but since then I feel a little more relaxed about everything in my life.

But I didn’t become nonchalant, and I didn’t avoid my harsh feelings either.

I wanted to cry. I was lying on the couch and felt the pain. In my chest, in my stomach, and in my heart.

Maybe I tried too hard?

Should we search for lessons at all? Or just accept rejection as part of life and keep going?

I need more than that.

Maybe rejection helps us to pause and to think.

I have been contemplating it for a week now and letting my mind process those negative experiences.

One important thing came up quite quickly about not being good enough.

The fact that they didn’t choose me and the belief that I’m not good enough are two different things. Which might not be obvious to many of us. It helped me to separate my self-worth from those results.

The other thing that especially hit me is how little control I actually have over outcomes.

And I like to have control.

It helped me to survive in my childhood. It’s important to me to know everything about time, planning, and everything else. I want to calculate all possible outcomes in my mind like Magnus Carlsen, the chess grandmaster.

But life is often unpredictable. If I believe I delivered well in a job interview, it doesn’t mean at all that they thought I was great.

Or when I’m on a date, being polite, showing interest, and making her smile doesn’t mean she will like me.

That breaks the pattern that usually works well in my running training. I can calculate everything, and if I deliver, I get the results.

I thought I was well prepared for those conversations with employers and also for the date.

Still, nothing worked out.

That’s why my other learning is that the secret of success is not always great preparation.

Maybe it is taking on as many attempts as possible, having a lot of rejections and a few wins.

Or maybe it’s being more at peace and more present in the moment. Or being at the right place at the right time.

Who knows?

As I mentioned above, I feel more relaxed this week. It’s like a break. No interviews, no dates.

It’s like another encounter with acceptance that I can’t control everything in my life.

So trying too hard wasn’t the problem.

It was my expectation that good performance and following the right steps would naturally lead to guaranteed success.

This reminded me of what real life is. It can go sideways even if I did my best. But the other way is also possible. It can go well even if I didn’t do my best.

And I’m telling you this now so you won’t be surprised next time you get rejected while you feel well prepared.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

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There was a time I believed anger is something I just need to release somehow and that's the whole story. I was wrong.

I was hitting the elevator door with my fist and had this feeling of explosion in my whole body because I was so angry.

That was the time when I didn’t know that I’m someone who loves freedom.

Also an introverted guy who couldn’t stand being in the spotlight.

That was the third day of a company gathering with workshops, stupid team building games and networking. On my way out, leaving home, I couldn’t keep myself together anymore.

But I lacked any explanation for my anger. There was only a feeling of rage and the repeating line in my mind: I don’t wanna go!

It would have been great to have someone who patted my back and told me that that moment had something important to tell me.

This is what I’m trying to do for you.

Because I needed at least 5 more years until I finally figured out what my anger was about.

But don’t get me wrong. Not every anger needs deep psychological interpretation. For instance, if someone scratches your car then the reason for freaking out is obvious.

What I’m writing about here is the anger that seems exaggerated given the situation. The kind that leaves you wondering why you turned into a beast for a second.

People often email me and ask about tools that help them to uncover their true self.

I usually tell them that they need to notice when they smile effortlessly or end up in a state of flow when they forget time passing. Which are all great signs if you want to understand what excites you and where your true interests lie.

What I often forget to mention is anger. And that’s why I wanted to dedicate an article to it.

Your anger is a great compass but also the finest source of self-destruction.

If it stays unexpressed, it will eat you from the inside. If you express it by screaming, hitting the gym, or hitting the elevator door, the problem will return because you didn’t solve the cause.

Next time you might let it out directly at your partner because she didn’t take out the trash, and you get into a fight. On top of that, you might turn into that annoying passive-aggressive person nobody wants to be around.

That’s why it’s important not only to treat the symptoms of your anger by releasing it but also to understand what it is trying to teach you about yourself.

Here are three important things you can learn about yourself by understanding your anger.

Your boundaries

You get angry when someone crosses a line. The tricky part is that you might not even know that boundary exists.

For instance, if your boss gives you extra work without asking whether you have the capacity for it, you might silently accept it but spend the rest of the day irritated at everyone around you.

Your boss crossed a boundary that says: I want to be consulted about my capacity and time before I get a new task.

But since you got used to it and it was always like this, you never realized that boundary existed.

Your anger is telling you that there is something you should pay attention to.

Earlier in my life, I was also angry when my girlfriend tried to force me to discuss an issue before I could think about it first. I’m an inner thinker due to my introverted personality and I like to take some time to think about problems before I talk about them.

In those situations, I learned that I need to communicate openly that I need some time to think before having a conversation about a problem. Surprisingly, nobody had a problem with that boundary since then.

And that’s why it’s important to take a moment when you get angry and ask yourself: has someone just crossed a line? If yes, try to name it out loud to yourself, and once you have it, you can say it next time.

Once you name the boundary, you will learn something about yourself that helps uncover who you really are.

Your values

Your values are even more important if you want to get to know yourself better. Based on them you can make better decisions that will help you to live more aligned with yourself.

If you know that freedom is an important value for you, you might choose a profession where you have more room to make decisions on your own. This is the reason why I love to work fully remote because this way I can design my days. It makes me more satisfied than being forced into an office all day long.

Knowing your values helps you to filter opportunities better. If you’re looking for a job and the company offers a lot of money but no freedom, you will end up frustrated.

I also get angry when I see that someone has been treated unfairly because fairness is another one of my most important values.

Or when I go hiking and see trash in a beautiful forest.

I value nature and it pisses me off when people simply throw away empty coke bottles in the middle of the forest.

This helps me to live more consciously. I don’t have a car but ride a bicycle a lot, recycle trash, and buy clothes from sustainable manufacturers. I feel great about it.

Next time you get angry, ask yourself whether it is about a value. Don’t judge it, just notice it.

Write it down and keep it in mind the next time you need to make a decision, so you can check whether that decision is aligned with your values.

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Your wounds

Earlier in my life I often felt some kind of explosion in my chest when I talked to someone and noticed that the person wasn’t listening to me.

My mother did that regularly during my childhood.

I would tell her about school and in the middle of my story she would start talking to my father, as if I wasn’t there at all. That created a wound in me, the belief that I’m not worth listening to, and it hurts every single time someone gets distracted while I’m talking.

It was important to understand that anger in me because not everyone is like my mother. Sometimes it can really happen that someone gets distracted for a second. That should not be a reason to get upset.

But it wasn’t obvious to me when I was younger.

Only after I understood where that feeling came from and what it triggered in me could I start working on it.

Today when it happens, I don’t get angry but I empathize with the other person. This is important because that way I don’t let my past control my mood all the time.

You are probably also carrying some wounds with you. We all do. Our anger can help us identify them and find better ways to deal with them.

Next time you get angry, stop for a minute and ask yourself when you felt similarly in the past.

Use your anger as a compass

I’m always talking about how important it is that we know ourselves because it helps us to live a more fulfilling life.

But I do agree that it’s easier said than done when it comes to the actual process of getting to know ourselves.

Fortunately, we are not completely lost. There are many things we can pay attention to.

Anger is one of them. It helps us define our essentials like boundaries, values, and wounds. If you combine these with your true interests and the things that excite you, you can build a pretty satisfying life around them.

Try to think about your life like building a house. If you don’t get the foundation right, the building will collapse at some point when the storm arrives.

But if you have built a house on a solid foundation, it can resist and stay stable during hard times as well.

Your anger points in the direction where those basic pillars of yours lie.

Be curious about them. Uncover them. Use them to find your own way.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

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At some point I got so exhausted in my life that I didn't need any other change, just to become authentic for the first time.

It took me 39 years to understand what it takes to live an authentic life.

Decades ago I would have said that I have to become indifferent and able to say “fuck you” in people’s faces without a blink.

And I have always admired those people who were able to say what they had on their mind without being scared and do whatever they wanted.

People who don’t explain themselves because they are so centered and unbothered.

I thought this was something genetically hardcoded in those lucky bastards but not in people like me.

But here is the good news for you and me: I was wrong back then.

After almost half of my life while facing many hardships, I figured out what made those people fearlessly authentic.

It’s not their genetics or money.

But it’s something you can develop by working on yourself and it comes down to three essential things.

They know themselves

I mean how could you become authentic if you don’t have anything to be authentic about?

If you don’t know yourself well then you only have two options:

1. You start faking something you’re not, which is the opposite of being authentic.

2. Or you simply do what other people want you to do, so you become a servant.

None of these options will lead you in the right direction.

You must know yourself deeply. Know what you love and how you like to spend your time alone when nobody is watching.

That’s the foundation of an authentic life.

This was my biggest problem when I was younger because I spent my whole childhood pleasing my mother. She criticized me to death and gave me the feeling that everything I liked was wrong. So I learned to please her, so she was happy and I felt right about myself.

I carried this strategy over the years into my romantic relationships, friendships and workplaces as well.

All my girlfriends complained that I didn’t have anything cool in my life like other guys who played in bands, were skating or playing on sports teams. I was sitting at home wondering how I could please my girlfriend.

Wow, this still hurts me when I write it down because I literally did that and I was surprised that they didn’t find me attractive anymore.

People who are able to express themselves in an authentic way have one thing in common: they formed an opinion of their own, based on their interests, values, needs, desires, strengths, weaknesses and what matters to them.

They don’t need to be right and badass all the time, but they own their true self.

Ask me today what I love, or ask anyone who you think is living an authentic life.

I can give you the exact answers including the values I’m living by. All the unfiltered stuff and my nerdy interests regarding astrophysics and movies.

For you it can be a good entry point to ask yourself how you would spend a weekend without any plan or distractions.

They are honest with themselves

One thing is knowing, but accepting is where it can get hard.

When I was younger I had the feeling that I’m a nerd in some ways, like if it’s about movies, books, instrumental music or even astrophysics. Unfortunately these were not the things I wanted to spend my time on.

Why? Because I thought these things were lame.

I purchased a 200€ Yamaha guitar so I could tell everyone that I play guitar. The guitar was much cooler than books by Stephen Hawking.

The shiny black guitar looked much cooler on Instagram and Facebook. I was also wearing a hat so I looked like Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day.

As a result I embarrassed myself every single time when people asked me how to play a guitar, or when someone accidentally had one with them. I tried to find excuses while getting a red face and trying to explain myself.

Everyone knew that I was a fraud.

That’s exactly how someone looks who doesn’t live an authentic life.

I could have avoided these moments by accepting my real interests, because there lies the difference.

If I’m honest with myself then I can be honest with others as well. If I accept myself as I am, I don’t need everyone else’s acceptance.

There is no need to pretend.

Yesterday I had a phone call with a friend. I told her about the book I recently read, The Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. For 10 minutes I spoke about light speed, stars and the problem with the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

She just said: wow, so cool that you know these things and remember everything you’ve read about.

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They live accordingly

Authentic people live the way they are.

They don’t put on a mask when they leave their home. The time they spend pretending is reduced to a minimum. Thanks to that, these people have more energy and are well balanced.

There is no secret life they try to hide when they are with others.

Years ago when I was 30 years old, I remember going to the office and putting on a mask every single day. In the evening, when I came home, I closed the door behind me and stopped for 10 seconds to breathe in and out. That was the moment I put down my mask. I felt exhausted.

Today when I go out, I stay the same as I am at home. I focus on the things I learned about myself, accepted, and created space for in my life.

When I meet new people and they are interested, I tell them about my life. It’s still surprising how much more likable I am now than back then when I wanted to be someone else.

I also sleep better because I know that tomorrow will be another day with me and I don’t need to prepare for the next performance.

Here is one more thing to mention: being authentic doesn’t mean that you never compromise on anything. If your partner or family need you then you don’t need to say no to them just because you’re such an authentic guy now.

Caring and supporting others are also part of authentic living and sometimes we need to push that solo trip back a week.

Just don’t skip it completely.

Life is just better this way

Authenticity is knowing who you are, accepting who you are, and having the courage to live accordingly.

Nothing will make you happier than waking up every day and being yourself.

Believe me, I have tried many different ways, but in the end the answer was not who I should become, but whether I could simply live as I am.

Give it a try and let me know how it went.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

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Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

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This one is close to my heart and I hope it resonates with you.

I was sure that I was just messed up.

For almost 35 years, I did not speak the language of my body at all.

Sore neck for three weeks? I ignored it. Daily panic attacks during university? I assumed something was fundamentally broken in me. When I got my first job and had shaking hands and a racing heart at work? I carried on. I once called an ambulance because I was convinced I was dying. That was a panic attack too. And the sad thing was that not even the doctors wanted to understand what was happening inside me.

They gave me some pills to calm myself down when I would get another panic attack and that was it.

All of this because I grew up in an environment where I learned to put my own needs aside. There was no space to pay attention to what my body was telling me and I never learned how to. Later in college, my body started to send me signals I couldn’t really ignore, but still I never thought about the real reasons.

Today, I understand what those signals actually meant.

The panic attacks were the eruption of years of accumulated, suppressed stress that my body could no longer contain after I moved out of my parents’ house where I lived under constant pressure.

The shaking hands were a sign of running on completely empty for months at work, pushing through with energy drinks, cigarettes, and bad sleep, without realising it.

The alcohol I used to calm myself down was not calming anything, but it was disrupting my sleep even more and I lost myself in the downward spiral more and more.

I did not know that my body was trying to tell me: Hey dumbass! Slow down! Sleep! Eat well! Reduce stress and do sport!

Now I know. I guess better later than never.

Maybe you also need to learn to understand your body, because if you need three coffees before 11 in the morning, yawn through the afternoon, and fall asleep on the couch but struggle to sleep in bed, that is not normal.

If you have sore shoulders, recurring headaches without any known reason, or even problems with your digestion, that is not normal.

If you have been living like this for years and believe it is normal because it was always like this, that is not normal.

Many of us live with these problems and believe it is just how life is.

But what if your body has been sending signals the whole time and you simply never learned to read them?

The headache that comes back every week could be a result of constant stress, just like the shoulders or neck that can’t relax.

The poor sleep that leaves you exhausted before the day even begins, which you dismiss as just getting older because you read somewhere that older people don’t need as much sleep.

There are people who might notice these signs and take action to solve the underlying problems, but there are many others, including me, who never learned to notice them at all.

The stress you do not know you have

There is a kind of stress most people never recognize because it never produces any dramatic symptoms.

I’m not talking about the deadline kind of stress, the one you feel in your chest when your boss sets an impossible deadline for an impossible task.

That mental stress you feel immediately.

I’m talking about the low-level, constant physiological stress that sits underneath your daily life and quietly raises your heart rate, disrupts your sleep, and keeps your body in a state of mild emergency for months or years at a time.

The reason can vary.

Maybe you’re angry at your partner all the time but you don’t want to express yourself because you prefer harmony.

Your daily job is draining you silently every single day because you grew up with the belief that work sucks and it’s just how it is, and never thought about doing something about it.

But it makes you feel exhausted every single day.

This silent chronic stress also lowers your heart rate variability, which is the natural variation in time between your heartbeats. High HRV means your body is recovering well and handling stress effectively. Low HRV means the opposite.

Most people have never heard of it, and almost nobody knows their own numbers, and why should they?

If there are no alarming symptoms then why should you worry at all? This is how our medical system works today, right? No symptoms, no problems. Which is very bad in my opinion.

Recently I read the book by Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal, and he also discussed this problem thoroughly.

The ignored stress and suppressed emotions that put your body into a constant state of worry. The anger you swallowed for decades just eating you from the inside.

Usually this problem turns into bigger health issues later on when it stays uncovered, because the body has no other choice but to make you aware of the problem.

This is the moment when people get those diagnoses and start changing things in their life rapidly. And then they ask themselves that one question when they feel better immediately after quitting the job, leaving the relationship, or talking openly to the boss: why didn’t I do this earlier?

Well, because you didn’t really know that your body was sending signals to you over the years and you just thought that everyone else feels the way you feel.

Most people have no idea what it means to feel really good, just fine, or really bad because they might never have entered the upper area of those feelings, and when they feel just fine, they believe that they feel great.

All these feelings are relative.

And it’s not only about stress but also sleep and muscle tension, energy level and mood.

If you have never slept eight genuinely restful hours, you do not know what truly rested feels like.

Your exhausted is your normal. And no amount of coffee changes that.

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What I found when I started tracking

Four years ago I bought a Garmin watch to track my runs, but I was really curious about my sleep quality as well. At the time I had read enough about self-development and I knew that I could only implement changes in my life when I first understood the status quo. And in order to do that, I needed to bring technology in as a support system.

What happened over the following months changed how I understood myself.

The first morning I checked my sleep data after wearing the watch, I was surprised. I knew my sleep was not great, but I had no idea how bad it actually was.

I was waking multiple times a night. My REM sleep, the phase most important for memory, emotional processing, and creativity, was extremely short. I had been drinking many coffees before noon and felt exhausted during the day, and I had assumed this was just who I was.

I remember that I often woke up when my alarm went off at 7am and I couldn’t believe that it was already 7am because I felt like I hadn’t slept at all.

When I recall those moments, I have to smile about it because the way I lived, drinking too much alcohol, smoking, eating a lot of heavy food late at night, it was almost impossible for my body to calm down and sleep well.

So I was regularly underslept and I had normalised it for many years. And I didn’t really know about it because everyone else in the office drank 4-5-6 coffees during the day, so I figured I fit in.

I also got to know how my nervous system works. Heart rate variability shows how activated my parasympathetic nervous system is when I watch an exciting movie, spend time with a lot of people, eat heavy food, look at screens, get into deep work flow, or read a book on my balcony.

It surprised me how strongly activated my nervous system is when I spend time with people, and how calm I am when I am reading a book silently. When I watch an exciting movie in the evening, my body can’t calm down and it disrupts my sleep.

My nervous system is very sensitive due to the environment I grew up in, the constant stress and existential terror, but this is not something I can change. What I can do is understand myself better and try to support my body as well as possible.

My resting heart rate tells me how well my cardiovascular system is functioning and gives me an early signal of how the night ahead will go. The lower my heart rate in the evening, the better I tend to sleep, and there are several ways to achieve that.

My body battery, which combines recovery, sleep quality, and stress into a single number, tells me at a glance whether I have the resources for a hard training session or whether I should reduce those weights in the gym. It’s not something I take 100% seriously, but it gives me indications about how much energy I still have to spend after a hard week. Earlier in my life, even if I felt the same as I do now when I see a low body battery, I would go into the gym and do the hardest training I could. Then I had to skip almost a week because I was so exhausted. The body battery helps me balance better, because even if I don’t fully trust my own feelings, the data supports them.

I also learned which food increases the physiological stress of my body (yes, food plays a much bigger role in our lives than most people might think) and also my heart rate. After I stopped eating anything after 6pm, the data showed how my values decreased until 10pm, which supported my sleep during the night. Before that I experimented with various dinners to test which had a bigger impact on my sleep, but after a while I realized that the earlier I ate my last meal, the better it was for my sleep.

Screens do something similar. An exciting film in the evening raises my heart rate and lowers my HRV, and the impact shows up directly in my sleep quality. My nervous system is sensitive to these things.

Maybe you have a more resistant one, but that is exactly the point: you need your own data to know.

The goal is not the data

I want to be clear about something. The goal of using a wearable is not to spend your life staring at metrics. Many people resist the idea of monitoring their own body instead of living by their own feelings, which I completely agree with.

What I’m saying is that if you don’t know your body well and you have never learned to feel it, then you can use measurements to give you guidance so you can map your data to feelings and eventually identify them without wearables.

Once you know what really good feels like, you start to recognise when something is off without needing to check a chart. You notice the familiar tension in your stomach or chest that you once ignored. You understand that you are not just tired from Monday but that your body needs something specific.

After four years of tracking, combined with regular yoga (which also helps enormously to feel your body, and even more so when combined with meditation), I can now tell in the evening whether I am going to sleep well or not without looking at any data at all. When I wake up, I feel that my sleep quality was probably not the best, so I’m gonna go easy into my day. When I go to bed and I’m rolling from side to side, I know exactly the reason for that.

The best thing about looking at the insights, besides getting to know your body, is prevention.

In the last 4 years I haven’t had shaking hands at work anymore because I always took the necessary steps when I saw that my body battery was empty. I could slow down before my body had to send a stronger signal to get my attention.

It helped me to balance my social life and say no more often when my body screamed for rest.

That is something I could not do before.

If this sounds familiar

Wearables are not for everyone, I totally get that. If you already sleep well, feel your stress clearly, know what you need to recover, and can read your own body with confidence, you probably do not need one.

But if you are similar to me and don’t know your body well, or if you have normalised exhaustion, if you cannot tell whether you are stressed or just tired, if your body has been sending you signals for years that you have been quietly ignoring, then a wearable might be something you could give a try.

It might teach you, for the first time, what your body has been trying to say, and that can save you from suffering, health issues, and stress in the future.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

Subscribe now

Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

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I wrote this because I needed to read it too.

You cannot commit.

Not to a business idea, not to a partner, not even to how you want to spend your weekend.

A new option shows up. A better idea appears.

You start from scratch again.

And somewhere along the way you begin to wonder why you cannot simply stick to anything.

This is not a character flaw. It is a trap.

Four weeks for one hotel

In September I am spending a month in Bali. Two weeks working, two weeks on holiday. I started planning early because I love having everything organized before I arrive. When the groundwork is done, I can simply show up and enjoy the experience without making too many decisions on the ground.

Usually it runs smoothly.

This time I ran into a problem I recognized immediately but could not find my way out of.

I already knew I wanted three different locations on the island.

Two working weeks somewhere I could keep my habits intact.

One week near the rice fields in Ubud.

One final week somewhere beautiful for a proper holiday.

The first two came together without much difficulty.

For the working location I had precise criteria: gym, pool, yoga studio, supermarket nearby, beach access, strong wifi, excellent reviews. A bit of research around Denpasar and I found the right place in Kuta quickly.

Ubud followed the same pattern. I knew exactly what I needed, and the search reflected that clarity.

Then came the last week.

I spent four weeks searching for that final accommodation.

Four weeks. For one week of holiday.

Bali has an almost overwhelming number of beautiful, affordable options. I scrolled Booking.com, switched to Airbnb, went back to Booking. Beautiful. Beautiful. Another beautiful one. I felt stuck and increasingly frustrated with myself. I knew exactly what Barry Schwartz described in The Paradox of Choice. But understanding the name of the problem did not help me escape it.

My criteria for the final week?

Nice. Paradise. Meaningless words that guaranteed failure from the very beginning.

And every time I found something promising, I immediately went digging for negative reviews. One complaint about the breakfast and the property was eliminated. Noise from a nearby road. Rejected. I was searching for the perfect option, which meant I was effectively searching forever.

After four weeks I finally stepped back and looked at what I was actually doing.

I chose one area of the island where I could run, which already eliminated the vast majority of options. On Bali, running is genuinely difficult because of how the roads and traffic are structured, so Sanur became the obvious starting point. I committed to Booking.com only and closed Airbnb entirely. I filtered for breakfast included, gym access, a beachfront location, and a review score above 9. That left me with three properties.

I made my decision in about ten minutes.

Restriction was the only thing that could solve it. But I want to be honest here. Even after that very deliberate process, my brain continued whispering that I might have missed a better villa or a more interesting property somewhere.

I stayed with my decision, but those voices were there for at least another two days.

The optionality trap does not let go immediately. It has to be outlasted.

The people who understood this

Mark Manson had a book deadline but found himself completely unable to sit down and write with any consistency. Too many distractions, too many alternative ways to spend his time. So he rented a cabin in the woods with a friend who also had a demanding project to complete. No internet. No entertainment. Just boredom or the work in front of him. The first two days were genuinely painful. By day three, something shifted. With no other options available, his mind settled and he simply wrote. He accomplished more in that one week than he had managed in months.

Steve Jobs applied the same principle deliberately. When he returned to Apple in 1997, the company had over 350 products and was weeks away from bankruptcy. Jobs eliminated all but ten. He told his team that deciding what not to do was just as important as deciding what to do. The focus that followed produced the iMac, the iPod, and eventually the iPhone. The restriction was not a compromise. It was the strategy.

Henry David Thoreau chose restriction on his own terms. In 1845 he moved into a small cabin on Walden Pond, stripped his life to its essentials, and spent two years there deliberately. No excess, no unnecessary obligations, no noise. He wanted to experience what life actually felt like when everything inessential was removed. The result was Walden, one of the most influential works in American literature.

Buddha left his wealth, his comfort, and every material option he had ever known, and walked into the forest. He understood that if he wanted to learn something true about life, he would need to remove everything competing for his attention first.

The pattern across all of them is identical.

Remove the alternatives. Find the focus. Do the work.

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It goes much further than accommodation

Think about the gym. You could go. You could also watch something, scroll through your phone, meet someone for dinner, or do any number of things that feel easier and more immediately rewarding. With that range of alternatives available, the gym loses almost every time unless you have already made going a firm, non-negotiable decision.

The same applies to building anything meaningful on the side. An online project, a creative practice, a new skill. The sheer volume of things competing for your attention today is extraordinary. The alternatives do not even need to be related to what you are trying to do. They simply need to exist.

Dating apps are perhaps the most transparent example of this trap in action. Endless profiles, always the possibility of someone more interesting further down the list, and almost zero tolerance for anything imperfect. I once dismissed someone because she mentioned she did not enjoy going to the cinema. How irrational is that, honestly?

Recently I matched with a woman who lived ninety minutes away. My first thought was to skip her. Too far, too complicated. Then I caught myself, I was doing exactly what I had done with the hotels.

I have spoken to people who refuse to match with anyone who lives more than four miles from them. We are searching for the perfect partner in exactly the same way I searched for that hotel. Applying a zero-tolerance policy to anything that looks like a negative review.

When did we become so reluctant to make anything work?

I notice this in professional environments as well. The company I work at is constantly searching for new tools. The tool everyone is looking for is one you purchase and it immediately resolves all your problems. But nobody wants to invest the time in making the tool genuinely useful once it is purchased. Nobody reads the documentation, contacts customer support, or thinks seriously about how to adapt it to their specific situation. They simply move on to the next one.

It is the same mindset people bring to relationships, to careers, to anything that requires patience.

We want to find the thing that already works perfectly.

We have little interest in doing the work of making something good.

Why this is happening

There are two underlying reasons worth examining.

The first is instant gratification.

A decade of food delivery, streaming services, social media, and frictionless online shopping has conditioned our brains to expect immediate returns on almost everything.

Commitment rarely offers that.

It brings boredom, setbacks, doubt, and the persistent feeling that perhaps you made the wrong choice. Most people today interpret that friction as a clear signal they should keep searching.

That friction is not a warning signal.

It is simply what commitment feels like in the early stages, before it becomes part of who you are.

The second is a lack of self-knowledge.

My first two Bali accommodations came together quickly because I had a precise understanding of what I actually needed.

The third consumed four weeks because I abandoned that clarity and chased a vague, external image of what a perfect holiday should look like.

Even though I consider myself someone with good self-awareness, I stepped directly into the trap without noticing.

When you search without knowing what you actually need, no number of options will lead you anywhere useful. You will either never commit, or commit to something wrong and blame the decision rather than the search itself.

Knowing yourself is where the commitment process actually begins.

How to escape the trap

If you recognize this pattern in your own life, here are the things that genuinely help.

1. Define your criteria before you start searching, not during it. Vague intentions like “nice” or “the right person” are not criteria. Know what you actually need, based on who you actually are, before you open a single tab or swipe in any direction.

2. Limit your sources deliberately. One platform, not five. One channel of information, not all of them. The moment you start cross-referencing endlessly, you are no longer searching. You are postponing the decision.

3. Set a hard deadline and honor it. Give yourself until a specific date to decide. When that date arrives, you decide with the best option available to you. The search closes. This single rule eliminates weeks of unnecessary paralysis.

4. Accept that every real option has a negative review. No hotel, no relationship, no job is flawless. The negative reviews are not information that will save you from making a mistake. They are noise. You are not looking for perfect. You are looking for right enough.

5. Learn to distinguish friction from wrongness. The discomfort you feel after committing is almost always the discomfort of commitment itself, not evidence that you chose wrong. Give it time before you conclude anything. My brain was still whispering for two days after I booked that hotel.

The irony of too much freedom

We spend enormous energy pursuing freedom and then struggle to understand why we feel so disoriented inside it.

Freedom without self-knowledge is not really freedom. It is paralysis dressed in more attractive clothing. The people who thrive when surrounded by many options are the ones who understand themselves clearly enough to filter decisively.

They restrict their own options deliberately. Everyone else gets lost in the scroll.

I removed Instagram from my life two years ago. Almost immediately I began executing my own plans with far greater consistency. There was no comparison pulling my attention sideways, no fear of missing out, no endless alternative competing with whatever I was actually doing.

The restriction produced the focus.

Most people are not equipped to navigate total freedom. They function better within structure, clear constraints, and deliberate limitations. Not because they lack strength of character, but because the human brain was never designed to process infinite choice.

The perfect option does not exist before you choose it.

It is made, through commitment, through investment, through the decision to work something out rather than start the search again.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

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I watched a lot of videos about discipline before I figured any of this out. Most of them told me to wake up at 4am, take cold showers, and embrace suffering. None of it stuck. What actually worked was almost embarrassingly simple, and I kept waiting for someone else to say it.

Motivation is great to have.

The problem is that it is unreliable.

You never know when it shows up and you never know when it disappears. One bad night’s sleep and it is gone.

A stressful day at work and it is gone.

And then you feel guilty because there is a goal you set for yourself and the days keep passing without action. This is the cycle most people live in.

High motivation on good days, nothing on bad ones. Go hard when you feel it, crash when you do not.

The problem is that building a business, getting fit, or learning a skill all require consistent effort over a long period of time.

You cannot build anything serious based on emotions you have no control over. That is where discipline comes in.

Before you scroll past, I know what you are thinking.

Discipline sounds like David Goggins yelling at you.

It sounds like military, punishment, suffering, and giving up everything enjoyable.

And yes, it has a cost.

But it is far less brutal than most people imagine. Because once you have built real discipline, it stops feeling like effort.

It becomes part of who you are. And here is what happens when it does.

The small, invisible work you put in every day starts compounding. From the outside it looks like nothing is happening.

Then one day someone asks you for advice about your training.

Someone wants to know how you built a business on the side.

Someone says, wow, you already have so many subscribers.

That is discipline showing its results. Slow, invisible, then suddenly undeniable.

What discipline actually feels like

Here is how you know you have it: you stop negotiating with yourself.

Think about brushing your teeth.

You do it when you are tired, sick, late, or depressed.

You do it because it is simply something you do.

There is no internal conflict, no motivation required. That is exactly what real discipline feels like about the thing you have committed to.

In my case: when I have a training run scheduled and I look outside to see rain, cold, and wind, I do not think about skipping. I think, okay, it will be harder today, and I go anyway. There is no decision to make.

That is discipline from the inside.

Not suffering but certainty.

How to build it

This is my own approach, based on what actually worked for me.

Adjust your expectations before you start

Most people fail to develop discipline because they cannot accept what the process actually looks like.

It is not glamorous.

It is repetitive, slow, and takes far longer than anyone wants to admit.

When I set goals, I try not to attach a finish date to them. Running a marathon is not a temporary project.

After each race I take one week to recover and then I am back out again because it is part of my life, not a box to tick.

When I started writing on Substack I told myself I would not measure success for at least two years. Most people quit after two weeks.

If you accept from the start that this will take longer than you want and remove the expectation of quick results, you remove the main source of disappointment.

You just show up.

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Start with something you already like

It is very hard to build discipline around something completely unfamiliar. It is much easier to start with something you already enjoy a little.

For me it was running. I had always done it casually but never seriously.

Turning something familiar into a discipline practice was far easier than starting from scratch with something new.

Sport in general is a great starting point because it requires no special talent and there are countless options: cycling, swimming, martial arts, tennis, whatever feels natural.

At this stage the activity matters less than the mindset you are building. You are learning to show up regardless of how you feel. That skill transfers to everything else later.

Create a real commitment

The mechanism is simple: attach your practice to something external with a real deadline and real stakes.

When showing up stops being optional, something shifts.

You start taking yourself seriously in a different way.

For me it was signing up for my first race.

Suddenly it was not jogging anymore. It was training.

I had a date in my calendar, a plan to follow, and something to lose. I bought proper shoes, studied technique, built a schedule.

After that first race there was no going back. I signed up for another one immediately, and another after that.

Find your version.

A tournament, a writing challenge, a public commitment, a deadline you have told someone about.

The form does not matter. The point is to make it real enough that showing up stops being a choice.

Transfer it everywhere else

After two years of consistent training I noticed I had changed.

I was not just disciplined about running. I had become someone who does things regardless of how they feel.

So when I decided to write seriously on Substack I approached it the same way.

No expectations for at least two years. No checking numbers daily. Just show up, the same way I show up for training when the weather is bad and I am tired.

I have now written over 60 articles without once seriously thinking about quitting. Subscribers have left. Some notes got no engagement. I did not care. I was working with discipline, not with emotion.

From there I applied the same approach to reading every day, quitting alcohol, going to the gym, and performing well at work. I only needed one area to start, something I already liked, and from there the discipline spread naturally.

You do not need to overhaul your entire life at once.

You need one activity, one commitment, one race to sign up for.

Build discipline there first.

Then watch it transfer to everything else.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

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Two years sober and I still have more questions than answers. This is my honest version of the story.

Last week I told you the story of why alcohol and I became best friends for more than twenty years, and what led to our ultimate breakup.

But the story did not end there.

After quitting, I had to face a completely new reality I had never experienced as an adult: living without alcohol.

Thousands of people search every month for questions like how to stay social without drinking, how to maintain friendships after getting sober, or whether quitting changes your social life.

I am not surprised.

If someone had asked me to quit ten years ago, I would have laughed in their face.

Drinking was simply too much fun and I wanted to keep it in my life. But as you read last week, the negative effects slowly outweighed the positive ones and I made my choice to leave that life behind.

The First Thing I Noticed

A few years ago I did Sober January with friends a few times, mostly to prove to ourselves that we did not have a problem if we could go a whole month without drinking.

We met on a Friday night after work and ordered non-alcoholic beers, but the conversations were noticeably different. It felt more like quickly updating each other on the week and nothing more. We admitted quickly that it made no sense to buy another non-alcoholic beer just to sit there in silence, so we called it a night early, around ten.

We literally spent the whole month counting the days until we could drink again.

I tried it once with an ex-girlfriend too, but she gave up after two weeks. She said life was too boring without drinks. Tough statement, if you think about it.

But now I do not have a date I am counting down to. I simply do not drink anymore.

And it changed my social life and how people pigeonhole me.

At the beginning I tried to believe I could keep up my old lifestyle.

In my mind I had pictured myself like those people at college parties who danced around with a Coke Light in their hands, perfectly at ease.

So I hung out with friends as before, but this time I stuck to non-alcoholic drinks. With my closest friends it was not a problem to spend time together, but just like during those sober January months, the night was always much shorter.

When strangers joined us, I went quiet again. I did not feel bad around them, but I did not open up the way I used to with alcohol.

The difference this time was that I had already figured out I was introverted, and that it was completely normal for me not to get into deep conversations with people I did not know. I saw that part of myself less as a problem now, which was a genuine improvement compared to the old days when I believed something was fundamentally wrong with me.

Once the strangers left, I started talking more again with my friends.

But something was still different. The mood no longer built the way it used to after three beers and two hours of drinking.

Instead it sort of plateaued and then quietly descended. Not into anything bad, but it felt like there was an end somewhere on the horizon that had not been there before.

We still laughed sometimes, but it was contained, nothing like the free flow that used to come after a few rounds.

I also started saying no to work related events.

A room full of people wanting to network did not sound like something I wanted to be part of anymore.

Before, I would have arrived already loosened up by a drink or two, ready to jump straight into small talk, crack some jokes, and feel like I belonged.

Sober, those events felt completely different. I felt like a white mark on a dark background that had ended up there by accident. I had to be honest with myself: I genuinely do not like those events.

Because I stopped showing up and started saying no to after-work pizza and beer gatherings, people at work began to label me boring.

Nobody said it out loud, but I could see it in their eyes. They were polite, but they stopped asking me to join them.

After about a year of not drinking, I stopped receiving any invitations to company dinners or parties at all. I only found out about them by accidentally seeing them in someone else’s calendar. They had simply stopped considering me.

That hit me sometimes, because at previous workplaces I had been one of the people who organized those evenings. The one everyone counted on to make it fun.

Then there was our yearly big company event where people came from different countries for workshops and a party. We had dinner together and that part went fine, because I work with these people every day and we had enough to talk about. But when dinner ended, someone suggested going to the bars. Every single person went except me. I knew it made no sense for me to go. I would not drink and I would not enjoy it. So I said a quick, slightly awkward goodbye to everyone and disappeared into the evening.

The next morning I saw the photos from the night I had not been part of. A few years ago I would have been there. I might have felt rough the next day, but I would have been in those photos. I would have had those memories and those new connections too.

This happened not only at work but with almost everyone I used to drink with.

Everyone tried to be polite and understanding about my decision, but I immediately felt they did not see the point of hanging out anymore.

For what, exactly? To sit silently next to each other? I am not exaggerating. That is genuinely how it would have gone.

Quitting alcohol worked like a filter.

Many of the people I used to spend time with got stuck on it. Only a handful came through on the other side, friends who still wanted to see me without drinking, but in a different way.

I have to be honest here. These changes made me sad sometimes. I know this transformation is a process, and I know I was gaining things I could never have had while drinking. But losing things you used to enjoy is still a certain kind of grieving, even when the decision was right.

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What Happened to My Dating Life

I updated my dating profile to say I was sober. I quickly noticed fewer matches after that. Some women wrote to ask whether it was true that I did not drink, or whether it would bother me if they did. I always said it did not bother me, but most of them stopped replying anyway.

Maybe that was not the reason. But I think it played a part.

In my last relationship, when I mentioned I was thinking about quitting, my girlfriend became genuinely upset. She said alcohol played such an important role in her life that she could not imagine being with someone who did not drink. That surprised me, but it also showed me how deeply intertwined drinking is with the way most people connect.

Outside of dating apps, I also rarely end up in situations where meeting someone new is even possible anymore. Almost every girlfriend I ever had I met at a party, after work, during a day-drinking session, or at some kind of event where alcohol was present and lowering everyone’s guard including mine.

Those unpredictable, unplanned moments have gone quiet.

This is something Scott Galloway talks about in almost every podcast appearance, that Gen Z is drinking less and as a result meeting less, having less sex, getting into less trouble. The percentage of single and sexless men and women is rising and he sees a strong connection to the decline in drinking.

I think about that more than I expected to.

Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, also quit alcohol for a few years and recently started again.

He said that despite all the benefits, something was still missing. He did not enjoy music the way he used to. His marriage became a little flat because even on vacation with his wife they ended up going to bed at nine without doing anything wild or memorable.

I completely understand that. And when I see people I respect making that decision to go back, it sometimes makes me question my own.

But when I am completely honest with myself, I know I do not miss the alcohol.

What I miss is the novelty, the adventure, and the fun moments that alcohol used to help create. That is exactly what Manson missed too. He just admitted he had not found another way to generate those moments without it, partly because he discovered he was far more introverted than he had realized before quitting.

For now I have accepted that those things are missing, without forcing myself toward any particular solution.

That patience is also something new. The old version of me would have tried to escape this feeling immediately rather than just sitting with it.

What I Actually Gained

Quitting alcohol and doing serious work on myself has produced results. Small ones, but real ones.

I can now hold a conversation when I run into someone on the street, someone from my gym or a previous job. I feel comfortable in my own skin in a way I genuinely never did before.

Quitting made it possible to do hard things consistently, like training for marathons. Being sober helped me sleep well, perform better at work, and walk into difficult conversations without falling apart.

Those things built something in me over time.

During the years I was drinking, I was an insecure, shy person with low self-esteem on top of being introverted.

That has changed.

Today I have simply accepted that I am introverted, and when I find myself in a social situation, even with fewer of them than before, I no longer panic or feel the need to perform. I stay, I make eye contact, I ask genuine questions, I listen, and sometimes I am even funny without anything in my glass.

That is something I had genuinely never experienced before in my life.

I also notice that people seem to respect the decision. Friends tell me they admire it. Some say they want to do it too but are not ready, or are still enjoying the advantages I used to enjoy. I do not judge anyone for that. I have been there, and I honestly do not know where I will be in five years.

The Honest Closing

Most people do not actually want to drink.

They want what drinking gives them: the uninhibited conversations, the courage to talk to a stranger, the feeling of being the funniest person at the table. As I wrote last week, those things drove me for over twenty years.

Wanting to be more relaxed, open, and brave is completely human, and having those desires without alcohol does not mean something is wrong with you.

Alcohol is simply a shortcut. It lends you those qualities for an evening without requiring years of slow, uncomfortable work to build them for real. And because life is short, most people would rather borrow them tonight than earn them over years.

I am not going to say I will never drink again. I might.

But I am feeling too good right now mentally and physically to consider it, and I wonder whether starting again after forty even makes sense for me.

If I do drink again, I will write about that too.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

Subscribe now

Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

If this resonates, Subscribe and join 500 readers.

Most people don't drink because they love alcohol. They drink because they love who they become when they drink.

To understand what happens when you quit alcohol, you need to understand what it was giving you in the first place.

This is that story.

The whole journey splits into three chapters:

1. Before I touched alcohol.

2. The years I drank.

3. Life after becoming sober.

This article covers the first two.

Next week, I’ll cover the third.

I’ve also written about the health side of quitting and how to do it. If you’re interested, check them out:

Alcohol in my life before I had my first glass

I grew up in a family where alcohol was always present. Both of my grandfathers died from its consequences and my father followed the same path, misusing it as often as possible. My mother never drank, only a glass of wine at Christmas, because she had the opposite reaction to her husband’s alcoholism. She hated it. But because it was familiar, she tolerated it.

Both of my parents suffered from anxiety in their own ways. My mother lived in a constant state of worry, a kind of self-generated terror. My father fought feelings of not being good, strong, or valuable enough. He was deeply jealous, and alcohol amplified everything.

Fights, yelling, broken glasses, and worse were simply part of everyday life.

This made it impossible to have friends over because the situation was always too unpredictable.

My parents never had friends.

Growing up in that house, I learned quickly not to invite anyone either. My brother was six years older than me and always out with his friends. I stayed home, managing my mother’s misery and waiting for my drunk father to return so our daily tradition could begin.

Why am I telling you about my broken family?

Because those circumstances shaped my relationship with alcohol before I ever took a sip. Due to constant isolation, I developed social anxiety early. I turned red the moment I had to speak in front of a handful of people I already knew because I felt so insecure.

My mother’s constant criticism gave me the sense that I wasn’t allowed to make mistakes or just be myself, because that would embarrass her. She had a narcissistic personality, she needed constant attention and often withdrew her love when I didn’t do something right.

Her behavior made me feel like everything was my fault.

I became a child who worried constantly. I couldn’t measure my cortisol levels back then, but I was running on chronic anxiety. I didn’t know what I wanted because I was never encouraged to explore my own interests and nobody asked me about that either. My parents never knew what music or movies I liked, which kids I was hanging out with at school, nothing. My only job was to manage my mother’s emotional needs. When other kids’ parents asked why I was so quiet, I said I didn’t know, smiled, and shrugged my shoulders.

I had nothing to say, or at least nothing I believed was worth saying.

At school, I was one of the best students because failing would embarrass my mother. But socially, I was lost. We never had guests at home, so I never learned how to be around other people.

I declined every birthday party invitation because if I went, I’d have to invite them back, and I had no birthday party to give. I lied constantly. Made up reasons why I couldn’t come. Pretended we had vacations we never took.

I hated it, because deep down I wanted what they had. Cool parents. A normal house. To be the kid who made everyone laugh.

Instead, I carried years of unexpressed anger, unmet wishes, and the feeling that I simply wasn’t built the same way as everyone else.

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Alcohol gave me the life I always wanted

I was 14 when a friend suggested we drink together. He already had experience with alcohol once or twice but for me, it was the first time. Maybe at home I had licked some from my father’s beer once but that was all. We went to a supermarket and bought cherry liquor and mixed it with Coke.

After the third plastic cup, it kicked in.

We laughed. I tried to walk to a tree to pee and couldn’t go straight. We laughed more at ourselves and finished all four small bottles we had. That night we went to a teenage disco, running down the middle of the street on a Saturday evening. My eyes were almost closed and I was cheering loudly, stumbling from side to side.

It felt like Andy Dufresne walking out of Shawshank.

Except instead of a physical prison, I had just escaped the mental one I’d been locked in for the first 14 years of my life. I didn’t feel worried anymore. I didn’t care what other people might think about me. We were in another city anyway, and the alcohol made me feel free.

After that night, I knew I had found the solution for my anxiety and being socially awkward: alcohol.

Drinking and partying became my regular escape. I went to parties every weekend, not because I wanted to enjoy the music or because I was interested in those people. That was also part of it, but I simply needed to get out.

I danced carelessly and also started smoking as a small symbol of freedom.

Honestly, I became cooler. I talked to strangers, told jokes. They laughed and patted me on the back. My social circle grew for the first time in my life.

You can imagine what that meant to a kid who had spent years believing he wasn’t good enough.

Hangovers became familiar but I was more than ready to pay that small price for my new, enhanced life.

Sundays were for lying in bed and suffering a little. Sometimes I went out on Sunday too and drank a beer or two.

At university, I moved as far from my parents as I could. I chose the school by distance.

And it worked.

By that time, I was an experienced drinker. I quickly found new connections with people who shared my admiration for the booze and we drank almost every day, skipping seminars, heading to the bar at 1pm for table soccer and gin tonics.

Those people didn’t know my background. After a few beers, I talked like I belonged.

I organized my first birthday parties. One night I kissed one girl in one corner of the bar and another in the other corner. The first found out and poured half a liter of wine in my face.

My friends said I was so cool and I was so proud.

Looking back, I was still an insecure kid. Just also an asshole. But I didn’t care. I was catching up on everything I had missed.

Alcohol helped.

After graduating, came work.

I never drank during office hours, that much discipline I had. But I lived for the moment someone said “drinks after work?” The answer was always yes. I remember one evening when colleagues from headquarters were visiting. I arrived late. About ten people were sitting almost silently at a table. Then one of them spotted me and said: “David! Finally. It’s been so boring. When you’re here it’s always fun.”

I’ll never forget that. Someone was happy I walked in the room. I ordered a beer, lit a cigarette, and started talking.

I was proud, again.

What they didn’t know was that I had already drunk three beers at home before I left.

I always did. I sat on the balcony, had beers or a gin tonic, smoked, put on music until I felt right, and then I left.

Without that ritual, I was nervous.

Because no matter how many good experiences I collected, no matter how much positive feedback I got over the years, inside I was still the kid from elementary school who didn’t know how to be in a room with people.

I didn’t get better with people. I got better at drinking.

There were moments it was obvious.

Meeting a girlfriend’s parents sober, sitting quietly at the table while everyone wondered what was wrong with me. But the moment the first drinks came out and her father asked me outside for a cigarette, I knew what to do. I drank as fast as I could without looking like I was doing it.

Two drinks in, I started talking. Asking questions. Making them laugh.

My girlfriend looked over with that look in her eyes, proud of the funny guy she had brought home.

Every man on earth wants that look from his girl.

And finally, I got it too.

Alcohol helped again.

After 20 years of moments like these, I think it’s understandable why I kept going.

At least I have empathy for my own behavior.

And I’m sure many of you recognize something here. The deep underlying need to be liked. To feel cool at least once. The feeling of belonging. The courage that doesn’t come naturally.

The mental prison with a liquid key.

But as we all know, nothing lasts forever.

When alcohol stopped working

You know how a hangover gets worse as you get older.

If not, don’t worry, you will learn it.

Your body starts sending different signals. It started for me around 32 but I held on until 35.

By then it had become bad. If I drank heavily on a Saturday, I still felt wrecked by Wednesday. I wanted to throw up in the gym five days later. The social benefits started disappearing too. I drank and felt a little more relaxed, but that free, euphoric mode was gone.

After a few beers my body was a mess while my mind stayed sober, watching.

During drinking, my mind would wander to the next day, thinking about the consequences of the next beer we had just ordered. I knew I wanted to open my eyes on Sunday feeling fresh, not that feeling you probably also know, when your eyes open in the morning and you know immediately that you’re screwed and it will be a day about survival.

Just thinking about that made me not want the beer sitting in front of me.

Then one evening, after I had drunk a bit more again, I caught my reflection and saw my father.

That image didn’t leave me. Without the social benefits, and with my body rejecting it, I felt disgusted. I couldn’t walk straight and when the waitress came with the bill I couldn’t express myself properly. My words mixed up.

So I started reducing more and more. Sometimes I’d nurse a single beer for hours and sometimes leave it on the table unfinished. My only wish was to wake up fresh in the morning.

Slowly, I moved from drinking to belong to just enduring it to fit in.

Until one day I was done.

Two years ago, I stopped completely and I haven’t had a drink since.

Many people are scared to stop because they don’t want to lose exactly what I described above. They search online about how it feels to be completely sober. Some of them want confirmation that quitting makes life miserable so they can continue drinking, or that quitting makes life better without losing the version of themselves that only exists when they drink.

That’s the question I couldn’t answer for 20 years either.

But you’ll find an honest answer here soon.

Because that’s the story I’m telling next week.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

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This one took longer to write than usual, mostly because it meant admitting things about my younger self I'm not proud of.

I didn’t expect a hot afternoon in the south of France to teach me anything about myself, but it did.

We were in Nice, on vacation with my ex-girlfriend. We had dropped her car off for a service appointment and had to walk back to the train station afterward. It was around noon, the kind of heat where every step feels like walking into a wall. One side of the street was sunlit, the other shaded by the buildings. We were walking on the sunny side when she said we should cross to the other one. I looked at her, confused, and asked why. She looked back at me, equally confused, and said we were burning alive over here.

That was the moment I realized I hadn’t noticed I was sweating through my shirt and that my skin was starting to sting from the sun. My first thought, once I caught up with what she meant, was that crossing the street would be better for her. It took a second longer to register that it would also be better for me.

Without her, I would have walked the entire way on the sunny side without a second thought, not because I preferred it, but because paying attention to my own needs had never been something I learned to do. After that day, I kept turning the question over: in how many other situations had I been ignoring what I actually needed, without ever noticing?

At that point in my life, I had already encountered ideas like awareness and self-improvement, but I was still a beginner. That walk in Nice is one of the clearest examples I have of what self-improvement actually gave me: the simple ability to notice that I exist, and that what happens to me matters too.

What changed in how I love people

A friend of mine has a demanding life, and there are stretches where she goes quiet for weeks. Years ago, her silence used to feel like a verdict. I would tell myself the friendship was over, that she had quietly moved on, and I would wait, almost daring her to prove me wrong by reaching out first. If she didn’t, I took it personally, sometimes even resentfully, as though her busy life was something done to me.

I never once considered messaging her first. Reaching out felt like an admission that I needed her more than she needed me, and somewhere underneath that was the belief that if I wasn’t the one being chased, I wasn’t really wanted at all.

Today, when a few weeks pass without a word from her, I’m the one who reaches out. I send a message, ask how she’s doing, and I mean it without any quiet test attached to it. She always replies warmly, and I’ve come to understand that her silence was never a verdict on us. It was just her life being full. The difference isn’t that she changed. I did.

That same period cost me a different friendship entirely. I had a friend who, whenever something didn’t go the way he wanted, would shift into manipulation rather than conversation. He never once looked at his own part in anything. If I didn’t meet some expectation he’d never actually stated out loud, the fault was automatically mine. For years I absorbed that, because ending the friendship felt like proof that I was the difficult one, the one who couldn’t keep people around.

Eventually I did end it, and I felt no guilt afterward, which surprised me almost as much as the decision itself. The old version of me believed that removing someone from my life meant I had failed at being a good enough friend, and that whatever someone gave me, however unbalanced, I was obligated to accept it gratefully.

What changed wasn’t that I stopped caring about people. It was that I stopped needing something from them to feel secure in the relationship. Before, every connection ran on a quiet transaction: their attention proved my worth, their silence threatened it. Today I can let someone be unavailable without reading it as rejection, and I can let someone go without reading it as my own failure. I’m genuinely happy these people exist in my life, but I no longer need them to in order to feel okay.

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Why I take self-improvement seriously

Self-improvement gets demonized by one group and worshipped by another, and most of the public conversation happens at those two extremes. I’ve spent the last two decades watching both camps, and I think the truth lives in a quieter, less talked-about middle.

I don’t believe the people who reject self-improvement and choose instead to “just be themselves” arrived there without doing any inner work at all. Some of them did grow up in homes where they learned, early and without effort, how to be at peace with themselves. I think that group is small. In my experience, the people who say they don’t need self-improvement usually fall into one of two categories. Either they did the work quietly, without naming it as such, or they are avoiding something they’re afraid to face, and rejecting the entire idea of self-improvement is easier than admitting that.

That second pattern is familiar to me. It’s a bit like disliking people who own cars because you can’t afford one yourself, while never quite admitting that earning more money is the actual answer. The same logic shows up around self-improvement. People who avoid it often aren’t rejecting the concept. They’re rejecting what they suspect they’d find if they looked closely at themselves, and I understand that completely, because the work itself is rarely pleasant. It means sitting with your weaknesses, naming your trauma out loud, having uncomfortable conversations with yourself and occasionally with a therapist, and slowly letting go of a version of yourself you’ve known your entire life in exchange for one you’ve never met.

So is self-improvement a good thing? In my case, the answer is an easy yes, and I only need to look at where I started to explain why.

I grew up in a difficult household, where I became my mother’s primary emotional caretaker starting around age five. At that age I was already absorbing things no child should have to carry: financial stress, marital conflict, addiction. I never learned to notice my own needs, let alone voice them. I became someone who served. I grew up believing I wasn’t good enough, shaped by the fighting between my parents, by my mother telling me she’d been disappointed I wasn’t born a girl, and by her repeated threats to take her own life. I internalized all of it as my fault.

I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’m telling you because it explains where the journey started. Those early experiences built an adult who needed constant approval, who felt jealous easily because he never felt good enough, and who used alcohol and nicotine to numb what he couldn’t name. None of that was a good foundation for an adult life, and the walk in Nice is just one small, almost embarrassing example of how deep that pattern ran.

Without self-improvement, I don’t think I would have built the awareness, the boundaries, the confidence, or the physical health I have today. I quit drinking. I quit smoking. I’ve never felt more capable in my own body. I’m comfortable being alone without being lonely, and I set goals that genuinely make my life feel richer, because for the first time I actually know what I want from it.

I think most people are carrying something similar from their own upbringing, often without realizing it. And if you’re one of the rare ones who isn’t, genuinely, I’m glad for you. But in my experience, that’s the exception rather than the rule.

So if you ask me whether self-improvement is worth it, my answer is yes, but only when you’re doing it for yourself and not for an audience. Which brings me to the other side of this.

When self-improvement becomes a problem

Self-improvement starts to work against you the moment it stops being about your own peace and starts being about performance. I’ve watched people adopt rigid five a.m. routines, follow extreme diets, and journal by candlelight at three in the morning, not because any of it serves them, but because it photographs well and travels well online. That kind of self-improvement is dishonest at its core, and honesty is the one ingredient the whole process actually depends on.

I don’t run an intense early morning routine, because my own body doesn’t ask for one. I wake up around seven thirty without an alarm, and I’ve made peace with the fact that this is simply how my body operates. Forcing myself into someone else’s four a.m. ritual would mean fighting my own nature for the sake of appearances, and I’d rather build a life that fits the person I actually am.

The other failure mode is when self-improvement quietly swallows everything else in your life. A walk becomes a step count. A conversation becomes networking. A hobby becomes a project with metrics attached. People lose track of why they started in the first place, and the practice itself becomes the addiction, not so different from the substances some of us used it to replace.

This is why knowing when to stop matters as much as knowing how to start. I spent years in therapy, and at some point my sessions had turned into casual updates about my week rather than real work. I told my therapist I wanted to stop coming, and she simply said: good choice, go enjoy the results. That sentence stuck with me, because it gave me permission to treat the work as something with an actual finish line rather than a lifestyle to maintain forever.

A few honest signals tell me the work has done its job, at least for now. The problem I set out to solve is actually solved, not managed, not white-knuckled, solved. The habits I built no longer take willpower; they’ve become how I simply live. Continuing to push on that particular area stops producing any noticeable change. I start losing presence and joy in the process itself, more focused on optimizing than on living. And the sense of who I am starts to feel solid enough that I’m not constantly trying to fix or prove it.

If you don’t have some version of a finish line, self-improvement can quietly become obsessive. Taken far enough, it can erode your relationships and your ability to simply accept yourself, because there’s no longer a self left to accept, only an ongoing project.

Growth and acceptance were never opposites

I think self-improvement and self-acceptance can coexist, and honestly, I think they’re supposed to. In my own life, it felt worth spending a few real years, three or five, deep in the work: cutting distractions, facing the things I’d been carrying without noticing, and figuring out who I actually was underneath everything my parents, teachers, friends, and culture had layered onto me. That kind of focused period lets you understand your past clearly enough to choose your direction without simply inheriting someone else’s.

But that season isn’t meant to last forever. At some point the work shifts from discovery to maintenance, and the goal stops being to keep improving and starts being to actually live the life you built. Self-improvement, done honestly, isn’t a permanent identity. It’s a season you walk through so you can come out the other side and finally just be there.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

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I am writing this thinking about all the years I spent in that space between stimulus and response, frozen, not knowing I had a choice.

Once I ordered food and a soda from a delivery service and the guy who brought my food forgot the drink.

He told me he would come back the next day. I accepted but deep inside I knew I would never see him again.

The next day I sat on my balcony feeling dumb.

It was a small amount of money and I knew my parents would have simply accepted the loss and moved on.

For most people the solution is obvious.

But I sat there with a pressure in my chest that came from the weight of the unfairness, not knowing how to act.

I wanted to solve the problem but I had never learned how to take back control when something went wrong.

It took hours of internal conversation before I came up with the idea of contacting customer support.

Their response was quick.

They sent back the money and gave me a voucher for my next order.

That relief was unlike anything I had felt before.

It was as if the world had been spinning in the wrong direction and I had finally pushed it back.

I felt strong in a way I had not experienced before.

That was the first time I realized I did not have to accept everything that happened to me and that I was not as helpless as I had always believed.

This story might sound trivial.

But for me it was the end of one era and the beginning of another.

What helplessness actually is

Helplessness is the belief that you cannot influence or change a situation even if you try.

And because you believe that, you stop trying.

You stay in the job that makes you miserable because the market feels hopeless and you feel unqualified.

You give up on finding a relationship because you believe the circumstances are working against you.

The belief that you have no control leads directly to the behavior of someone who has given up.

The critical thing to understand is that this is a feeling, not a fixed character trait.

It is something most of us learned early, usually at home, from people who were also helpless and had no other way to show us.

A friend of mine told me a story about his childhood.

He had ingrown toenails that caused him pain and embarrassment for years.

His mother would look at his foot, say it was a shame, and do nothing.

She genuinely believed there was nothing she could do.

My friend was twelve years old when he walked to the doctor alone, explained his problem, and eventually got the surgery he needed.

A twelve year old solved in one afternoon what his mother could not solve across years of watching him suffer.

The helplessness was not about the situation.

It was about the belief.

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Why you have to start smaller than you think

Most people who try to escape helplessness start with something too large.

They decide they are going to change their career, fix their relationship, or transform their body all at once.

When it does not work immediately they take it as confirmation that they were right all along.

Nothing changes for people like them.

The way out is not through a dramatic leap.

It is through small repeated experiences of control that slowly rewrite the belief that you have none.

Start with your environment.

Clean your apartment.

Sort out the things you no longer need.

These feel almost too small to matter but they are not.

When you decide that your space will look the way you want it to look, and then you make that happen, you send your brain a message it has not received in a long time.

You are someone who can change things.

From there the steps get slightly bigger.

Unfollow the accounts that make you feel behind or anxious.

You have been tolerating them for months telling yourself that is just how social media feels.

It does not have to.

Removing them is a small act of control that costs nothing and pays immediately.

Then practice it in the world.

When a colleague takes credit for your work in a meeting, say something.

When a friend cancels on you for the third time, tell them it bothers you instead of pretending it is fine.

When a shop charges you incorrectly, ask them to fix it instead of walking away quietly.

When someone interrupts you mid-sentence, finish your thought.

Each of these moments is a rehearsal.

Each one adds evidence to a new belief that is slowly replacing the old one.

What changes when the belief shifts

Once you have enough evidence that you can influence your circumstances, the belief begins to change.

Not overnight.

Over months of small repeated actions.

When that shift happens, the job you have been tolerating for years stops feeling like something you have to endure and starts feeling like something you can change.

You update your CV.

You talk to people.

You send applications.

You realize that the help you were waiting for was always something only you could provide.

You start to apply the same logic to your relationships, your health, your finances.

Everywhere you have been passive, you begin to look for the thing you can actually do.

After a while this becomes part of who you are.

You stop being the person who waits for something to change and become the person who changes things.

That shift is not dramatic.

It happens quietly, one small act at a time, until one day you look around and realize you are living a completely different life.

You will have a choice.

That is when everything starts.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

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Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

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I am writing this after running an unfamiliar track in a part of the city I had never explored before.

Do you know those people who talk about flying from LA to London like it is the most natural thing in the world?

Or who sign up for an Ironman without a second thought?

Meanwhile you get nervous a week before meeting friends at a local bar or trying a new sport class for the first time.

We are all human beings living in the same world but some people operate in a completely different reality than others.

I know this because people regularly tell me I am crazy for signing up for marathons on the other side of the world as casually as buying chocolate at the corner shop.

My plans feel completely normal to me.

And I have spent a lot of time thinking about why.

Part of it is courage. Part of it is deliberate practice.

But most of it comes down to one thing: I refuse to let my world get smaller.

Your Reality Is Not Fixed

Psychology calls this moving your reference point.

Reference dependence theory says that how you perceive any situation depends entirely on what you compare it to.

If you have already navigated alone through the chaos of an Indian city, traveling to structured, quiet Denmark feels easy. But if you have not left your apartment in a year, going out with new people feels overwhelming because your reference point is the comfort zone inside your four walls.

This is how we evaluate everything before we act.

And here is the important part: those walls move in both directions. Push against them and they expand. Stop pushing and they contract. Your reality is far more malleable than you think.

When I read my first 500 page book it felt like climbing a mountain. After finishing it, every 300 page book felt like a short read I could knock out in a weekend. When I flew to New Zealand alone with limited travel experience, it felt like the edge of the world. After that, booking a flight to Australia felt straightforward. It is not that far. I had already been further.

This is not just confidence. It is your brain recalibrating what normal looks like.

But like any muscle, it needs maintenance.

Stop using it and the recalibration slowly reverses.

How Life Gets Smaller Without You Noticing

The process always starts the same way.

You stop doing something you used to do.

Not dramatically. Just quietly, gradually, with a good excuse each time.

• You stop going to the gym because you are busy.

• You stop traveling because prices are high.

• You stop reading long books because you do not have the focus anymore.

• You stop trying new things because the last time did not go well.

Each individual decision feels reasonable.

But together they add up to a life operating in an increasingly smaller space.

I wrote about this recently with my own broken bike that sat in my apartment for five months while I kept finding reasons not to fix it. That moment could have been the start of a shrinking I would not have noticed until much later.

If that resonates, you can read the full story here:

The comfort zone does not announce itself. It just quietly reduces the exposure.

It feels easier to stay on the couch.

It feels easier to drive the car instead of walking.

It feels easier to watch a television show than to start a book you are not sure about.

And because each of these choices feels natural and justified in the moment, the shrinking stays invisible until you look around one day and realize how small everything has become.

The people who end up grumpy, nervous, and unsatisfied in the second half of their lives are not that way because of age. They are that way because they stopped pushing the walls and the walls moved inward without them noticing.

You might think those people are simply the ones who went through hardship, loss, or failure, and that is why they became grumpy. That is true in a sense, but not in the way most people assume. It is not the hardship itself that shrinks their world.

It is what they decided that hardship meant.

Imagine my first solo trip had gone wrong. Something stolen, a scam, a bad experience. It would have been easy to label travel as dangerous based on that single moment and never try again. That is how one setback can quietly close a door for good. Being aware of these moments, and refusing to let one experience write the story for everything that comes after, is part of what keeps the walls from closing in.

The Four Stages Your Brain Goes Through Every Time You Push

The mechanism behind reality stretching follows four stages.

Exposure. You do something new and slightly uncomfortable. Sign up for a 5k. Write your first article. Book a solo trip somewhere that feels slightly out of reach. Speak up in a meeting when you would normally stay silent.

Adaptation. Your brain flags the activity as unfamiliar and uncomfortable. The first time you go to a new gym class you feel anxious. The second time less so. By the fifth time it is just something you do. The anxiety does not disappear overnight but it shrinks with each repetition.

Recalibration. After repeated exposure your brain updates its baseline. What once felt big and unachievable starts feeling normal. Your reference point has moved and it takes the whole landscape with it.

Identity shift. Over time you stop seeing the activity as a challenge and start seeing it as part of who you are. You are not someone trying to become a runner. You are a runner. You are not someone who wants to travel more. You are someone who travels.

Identity follows exposure, not intention.

And there is a side effect to all of this. Everything that used to feel hard but was smaller than your new limit now feels almost easy by comparison.

This is why the order matters. Most people wait until they feel ready or confident before they act. But confidence does not come before the exposure. It comes after. You do not think your way into a bigger reality.

You act your way into one.

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Why You Talk Yourself Out of It Before You Even Start

Two things keep people in a shrinking reality.

The first is overestimating discomfort.

We imagine the anxiety of the first exposure will be unbearable and use that imagined discomfort as a reason not to start. Research on exposure therapy consistently shows that we overestimate how bad the first experience will feel and underestimate how quickly adaptation follows. The discomfort is almost always smaller than the anticipation of it.

The second is social reinforcement.

Growing up I regularly heard that certain things, travel, challenges, ambition, were for other kinds of people. Not for us. That belief restricts your reality before you even try anything. You rule yourself out of experiences based on an identity that was handed to you rather than one you chose. Recognizing that story as a story rather than a fact is the first step out of it.

There is also the trap of waiting for the right moment. The right moment does not arrive. You create it by starting before you feel ready and letting the adaptation process do its work.

Where to Start When Everything Feels Too Big

You do not go from zero to one hundred. Pushing too hard too fast tears the walls rather than stretching them and you end up disappointed and back where you started.

Instead aim for ten to thirty percent beyond your current comfort level. Psychologists call this the zone of proximal development, the sweet spot between what feels easy and what feels impossible. That is where growth happens.

If you want to become a runner, start with a 5k not a marathon. If you want to be more social, join a running club or a class where interaction is possible but not forced, rather than throwing yourself into a networking event with strangers. If you want to read more, choose a book that is slightly longer than what you would normally pick up.

Repetition matters more than intensity. One big push means very little without consistency behind it. Your brain needs repeated exposure to recalibrate, not a single heroic effort followed by months of nothing.

And you do not have to focus on only one area at a time. You can be pushing your fitness limits during the week while taking your first solo weekend trip. The expansions reinforce each other. A person who does hard things in one area of their life finds it easier to do hard things in other areas too.

The goal is not to become someone who does extraordinary things. The goal is to keep moving the walls outward so that things which once felt impossible become simply part of how you live.

The Direction Is Up To You

Life does not shrink by accident.

It shrinks by non-use.

The activities you once loved, the challenges you once took on, the version of yourself that felt alive and curious, none of that has to become a memory. But keeping it requires deliberate pushing against the natural pull toward comfort and routine.

Your reality is not fixed.

It expands when you push and contracts when you stop.

That is not a motivation speech. It is simply how the mechanism works.

The direction it moves from here is entirely up to you.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

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Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

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I am writing this exactly one year after I made a deal with myself not to quit again.

This is not really about Substack.

It is about accepting a part of yourself and finally letting it live, even when it comes with no financial promise and no guarantee of anything.

Before I started writing on Substack, I had launched at least five different blogs and websites.

A travel blog because I love traveling. An online marketing site despite having no expertise in online marketing.

A personal blog about my life that I abandoned before anyone could read it.

I purchased domains from multiple providers, set up WordPress sites, created Pinterest and Instagram accounts, and cancelled almost everything before it had a chance to become anything.

The pattern always ended the same way. Frustration, disappointment, and a quiet reinforcement of the belief that I was someone who quits.

Those moments did not feel like lessons at the time. They just felt like failure.

But something was happening underneath all of it that I could not see yet.

The last time I found myself on GoDaddy about to purchase another domain, I laughed out loud.

Not because it was funny but because I finally recognized what was happening.

Here we are again, I thought. The same idea, the same impulse, the same pull toward putting something out into the world.

It had come back five times already.

Maybe six. I had lost count.

That was the moment something shifted.

I had read enough about patterns and awareness to know that life repeats the same lesson until you learn it.

And standing there on a domain registration page for the fifth or sixth time, I finally understood what the lesson was.

This interest was not going away. It had never gone away. Every time I abandoned it, it simply waited and came back.

So I made a deal with myself.

I would purchase this domain one last time.

I would set up the account.

And whatever happened, I would not cancel it.

Not because I expected it to succeed quickly but because I finally accepted that I would end up here again anyway.

Quitting no longer made sense.

I set up Substack, linked my custom domain, and started writing without a plan, a niche, or any clear direction.

I just wrote what was on my mind.

In the first few months almost nothing happened.

A handful of subscribers, one or two likes, no viral moments.

And for the first time that did not bother me because the goal was not a result.

The goal was not to abandon the thing again.

That single shift changed everything.

When you stop trying to control the outcome and focus only on showing up and doing the work, the pressure disappears.

You cannot control how people respond to what you put out.

You can only control whether you keep putting it out.

So I defined a schedule, developed a routine, and kept going even when the ideas were slow and the weeks felt quiet.

One year later I have more than 500 subscribers, over 50 articles published, and a daily content practice that I maintained even on vacation.

But the number that matters most to me is not any of those.

It is the fact that for the first time in my life I did not walk away.

I am genuinely proud of that.

Not because of what the numbers look like but because I finally let something in.

An interest that had been knocking on the door for years, that I had turned away every single time, is now part of my daily life.

It makes me feel more complete than I expected.

If you have an interest that keeps coming back, something you have started and abandoned more than once, something you tell yourself is not important enough or practical enough or realistic enough, I want to say something directly.

It is coming back for a reason.

You do not have to make it your career or your identity or your income stream.

You just have to stop making it wait.

One year in, I feel like I have barely started.

But I am still here.

And that is everything.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

Subscribe now

Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

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I am writing this the same day I finally walked into that bike store, five months later than I should have, and more relieved than I expected.

When I came out of the bike store with the collection slip in my hand, I was smiling.

In the last five months I looked at my broken bike in my apartment every single day and told myself I should go to the bike store. Somehow I never did. There was always an excuse. No time because of work, running, writing. Bad weather so I would not need it anyway. But it bothered me because I knew it was never really about the bike.

It was about my life. The bike was a symbol sitting in my apartment every day, waiting for me to be honest about what it represented.

During those five months dust started to collect on the seat and the wheel. I looked at it daily and the answer in my mind was always the same. Yes, I am going to go to the bike store. Soon.

This is how shrinking starts.

There is always a last time you do something, accompanied by the quiet assumption that you will do it again. You stop going to the gym because you need new shoes first, and then somehow you never go back. You stop seeing the friends you used to see every week because life got busy, and you keep meaning to message them, but a year and a half passes and the closeness you remember is now just a memory you have not updated.

One thing stops, then another follows, and then you look around and realize the dust is sitting everywhere. Your life has become so small it is mostly just work and television in the evening. But when someone at work asks how you spend your time, you still tell them about the gym, the travel, the friends. Because in your mind that is still who you are.

For five months I was still the guy who rides a bike. The fit one who cycles to the gym instead of taking the bus. I told people I love cycling with a small uncomfortable thought in the back of my mind that I really should go to the bike store.

The truth is I had started lying to myself.

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I practice enough awareness in my daily life to eventually notice the unspoken conflict. Something felt off and I felt uncomfortable enough that I had to look at it honestly. When I did, I knew it was about procrastination and about what happens when you let procrastination make your decisions for you.

You might think I am being dramatic about a bicycle. But this is always how it starts. You stop doing something in your thirties or forties, you blink, and suddenly you are sixty seven and have not ridden a bike in decades but still think of yourself as someone who just needs to go to the bike store.

Many people lose themselves exactly this way. A small problem becomes a blocker, the well-oiled system stops, one hobby disappears then another, and life gets smaller and smaller until everything they loved exists only as a memory of who they used to be. It really bothers me because it is completely avoidable, which is exactly why looking at that bike every day made me so uncomfortable. The weather was beautiful outside and I could have been the person I remembered.

When I came out of the bike store smiling, it was not because the bike would be fixed. It was because I had said no to the shrinking. I had noticed the drift, named it, and done something about it before it became permanent. They also need to fix the brakes which will cost more than I expected. I did not hesitate for a second because that cost felt like nothing compared to what it represented.

On Monday I get the bike back and my life will be a little richer for it.

Awareness is not about grand transformations. It is about noticing the small shifts before they become irreversible. The dust collecting, the excuses multiplying, the gap between who you are and who you keep telling yourself you will be again soon.

What in your life is broken and collecting dust right now?

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

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Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

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I wrote this after realizing how long I spent asking for permission I could only ever give myself.

Most people think they ask for other people’s opinions because they want information.

But in most cases that is not what they are looking for.

They want permission.

When I told my parents I wanted to travel the world, including countries they had only ever seen covered negatively on the news, they told me not to go.

They were genuinely concerned.

But they had never left the country themselves.

Their opinion was not based on experience.

It was based on fear, and they projected that fear directly onto my decision.

Their answer did not make me happy because I did not get the permission I was hoping for. A motivating response like “Yes, that sounds amazing, go for it” was what I was actually looking for. But my parents did not really reply to me. They replied to themselves, answering how they would decide in the same situation. That is not useful information for anyone but them.

I did the same thing once to a friend. She asked whether she should do a yoga teacher training. Without any expertise in that area, I told her the market was too saturated and she probably should not bother. She looked deflated but said I was probably right.

I went home that evening feeling terrible. The next day I found her and told her to ignore everything I had said and go for it. She did. Today she has fully booked sessions every week, spent months in India, and came home a different person.

What I had given her was not advice. It was my own insecurity dressed up as an opinion.

There is a difference between gathering expertise and outsourcing your thinking. Most people do the second one without realizing it. And it costs them more than they know.

The real cost of asking everyone

When you constantly outsource your decisions to others, three things happen that quietly undermine your life.

You lose alignment with yourself. Imagine you have realized you want a slower, calmer life and are thinking about leaving a big city. But your friends tell you that you would regret it, that cities have more opportunities, that you would be throwing something away. So you stay, because of a fear they gave you, without them ever understanding your real priorities. You live with the consequences. They do not.

Your confidence shrinks. Every time you hand a decision to someone else, you send yourself a message: I cannot trust my own judgment. Over time that message becomes louder. You start asking for opinions on smaller and smaller decisions. The muscle weakens from lack of use.

Responsibility gets diluted. When something goes wrong, you can always say you just followed someone else’s advice. That might feel like relief in the moment but it means you never fully learn. You stay dependent.

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When asking for opinions actually helps

There are situations where other people’s input is genuinely valuable. The difference is expertise versus opinion.

Ask people who have done the specific thing you are considering. If you are thinking about running your first marathon, ask a marathon runner. If you are thinking about going solo in your career, ask someone who has actually done it.

Even then, apply a filter. Someone who built a business with wealthy parents and a safety net will give you different advice than someone who did it from scratch. Their experience is real but it is not your situation. Take the information, not the conclusion.

The simple rule: ask for facts and experience, not for permission or validation.

How to make better decisions on your own

Use your long term vision as the filter

Every significant decision I face I run through the same question: does this bring me closer to the life I am building or further from it?

I know I want to keep traveling, stay active, and maintain my freedom. So when the question of buying a car comes up, the answer is straightforward. A car means less walking, more expense, less money for experiences, and a daily cost that does not serve anything I actually value. Decision made in two minutes without asking anyone.

Your vision does not have to be elaborate. It just has to be yours. Once you know what you are building, most decisions answer themselves.

Limit who you ask and why

If you do ask someone, be specific about what you need. You are not looking for their overall verdict. You are looking for one piece of information they have that you do not.

Ask one or two people maximum. More than that and you will end up more confused than when you started, trying to reconcile perspectives that were never designed to work together.

Never ask someone whose opinion comes from fear rather than experience. You can usually tell the difference quickly.

Build the decision muscle with small choices

Start where the stakes are low. Choose the restaurant without consulting anyone. Pick the film for the evening on your own. Decide on the route for your run without asking which way is better.

These decisions feel trivial but they are practice. Every time you make one and it turns out fine, you collect evidence that your judgment works. Over time that evidence becomes confidence and confidence makes the bigger decisions easier.

Accept that discomfort is part of the process

Making a decision alone will always carry some uncertainty. That discomfort does not mean you are doing it wrong. It means you are taking responsibility for your own life, which is uncomfortable by definition.

The alternative is a life where every major choice has been filtered through other people’s fears and limitations before it reaches you. That might feel safer. But it is not your life. It is a version of their lives applied to your circumstances.

The thing nobody tells you

The people whose opinions you are asking will not live with the consequences of your decision. You will.

Your parents who told you not to travel will not be the ones sitting at home wondering what those places were actually like. Your friends who told you to stay in the city will not feel the weight of a life that never matched what you actually wanted.

Only you carry the result. So the decision should start and end with you.

Ask for expertise when you need it. Listen to people who have genuinely done the thing. But stop handing your choices to people who are simply nearby and willing to have an opinion.

Your judgment is not perfect. Neither is anyone else’s. The difference is that yours is calibrated to your life, your values, and your vision.

Start trusting it.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

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Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

If this resonates, Subscribe and join 450 readers.

I am writing this on a quiet Sunday morning, thinking about all the years I spent running from things that were simply trying to get my attention.

We all know that situation.

We are sitting in a meeting with a good idea or a solution we believe in, but we stay silent.

We want to avoid the moment when we break the silence and draw attention to ourselves.

Just thinking about it makes us nervous, so we say nothing.

At home, we feel the urge to turn on a podcast the moment we walk through the door.

The silence of an empty apartment is the thing we cannot face.

Avoidance is a coping mechanism.

It protects us from discomfort and runs our life quietly in the background, often without us even noticing.

The mechanism is efficient. That is exactly what makes it a problem.

Because avoidance is more than protection.

It hides information about ourselves that we need to know.

In the meeting it is not really about the attention.

It is about the fear of being exposed as not good enough.

At home it is not really about the silence.

It is about the loneliness or sadness waiting underneath it that we are not ready to sit with yet.

The pattern is always the same. The avoidance is never really about the thing on the surface.

In my own life I often did not send job applications.

Not because I was lazy but because I wanted to avoid the interview where it might turn out I was not good enough for the role.

In my relationships I stayed silent when something bothered me or when I wanted something for myself because I was afraid that showing my real needs would risk the harmony and eventually cost me the relationship.

The hidden information underneath both was the same belief: I am not good enough, and if people see that, they will leave.

Nobody wants to face that about themselves.

But that belief, once you can name it, is actually valuable information. It is the starting point of everything that can change.

As long as you stay in avoidance mode you keep that information hidden.

You never get the chance to question it, challenge it, or collect evidence that it is wrong.

You never find out that the thing you feared was never as dangerous as the avoidance itself.

What happens when you stop avoiding

The first thing you will experience is discomfort.

There is no way around it and no shortcut.

That is something you have to get through.

But on the other side of that discomfort, your energy improves.

Avoidance is exhausting in ways you do not notice until you stop.

The internal dialogue loops, the constant low level stress, the bad sleep.

When you stop feeding the avoidance, that weight lifts.

More importantly, you start collecting real information about yourself.

What you are actually capable of.

Where you genuinely need to grow.

The picture of yourself becomes clearer and more honest, which makes every future decision easier and faster.

You also lose something.

The short term relief that avoidance gave you disappears.

But what replaces it is something more durable: the quiet confidence of someone who shows up instead of hiding.

How to quit the avoidance loop

You do not have to go from zero to one hundred.

The best approach is to shrink the avoided thing down to its smallest possible version.

If you fear silence, start with short walks without music or earbuds.

If you avoid writing because you believe you are not good enough, open the document and write one deliberately bad sentence.

The goal is not to complete the task.

It is to put one foot in the room, stay for two minutes, then leave.

Then do it again the next day.

Tell yourself before you start that it will feel uncomfortable.

That single step adjusts your expectations and almost always leads to the same realization: it was not as bad as you thought.

Remove the escape routes.

No phone on the desk when you sit down to write.

No earbuds when you walk.

And when you finally speak about something real, do not soften it with humor.

If you do not take the conversation seriously, neither will anyone else.

What I found when I stopped running

Silence was one of my biggest enemies.

I lived in constant noise so I would not have to hear what was happening inside.

When I finally started walking without distraction, I felt the discomfort immediately.

But I also found the man I had been neglecting for 35 years.

Someone who had many interests but never got the attention he needed.

I found warm memories from my childhood I could finally use as a compass.

I found things that needed work, my lack of confidence, the belief that I was not enough.

And in meetings, when I finally spoke up, I found that people appreciated what I said.

Nobody laughed.

Nobody judged the out of the box ideas.

My words mattered more than I had ever allowed myself to believe.

That is what was waiting on the other side of the avoidance.

Not the catastrophe I feared.

Just myself.

What Was Always Waiting

Avoidance feels like protection.

And for a while it is.

But it is a short term strategy with a long term cost, because everything you are hiding from yourself is also everything you need to grow.

The courage to face it does not have to be dramatic.

It starts with two minutes in the room, one honest sentence, one walk without noise.

That is the lowest price you will ever pay for the life waiting on the other side.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

Subscribe now

Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

If this resonates, Subscribe and join 450 readers.

I'm writing this from Hamburg, a week after returning from Tenerife where I hiked volcanoes, trained daily, and came home feeling better than when I left.

A note before you start reading

This article is for people who have built habits they care about and want to keep them alive while traveling. If you prefer to fully switch off on vacation, that is completely valid. But if you have ever come home from a trip feeling sluggish and frustrated with yourself, this is for you.

We all know how it starts.

You book the early flight because it is cheaper. You leave the house before your body has woken up properly and arrive at the airport with your stomach growling. So you grab a croissant and an orange juice at the gate, things you never eat at home, just to get through the morning. On the flight you order an overpriced panini and another coffee. By the time you land you are hungry again and the first place you see is a Burger King. You tell yourself it is just this once.

You arrive at the hotel and the fridge is full of minibar alcohol. There is no kitchen. The gym has two treadmills and a broken elliptical. You forgot your running shoes. And somewhere in the back of your mind you already know: the next two weeks are going to be a write-off.

You tell yourself you will make up for it when you get home.

I lived this many times. Then I got serious about changing it.

Before my four week trip to Australia in 2025 and again before Tenerife this year, I sat down and made a proper plan. Not a vague intention to eat well and exercise but a real preparation process that made keeping my habits the path of least resistance rather than the exception.

The result was that I maintained every single one of my habits for the entire trip. Running, weight training, stretching, supplements, sleep, reading, writing. The same way I do at home, just in a different environment, with the hours I would normally spend working now free to explore.

Here is exactly how I did it.

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Why most people fail before they even leave

Habits do not break on vacation because of temptation or weak willpower.

They break because of poor preparation.

When the environment is not set up to support your habits, the default becomes whatever is easiest in the moment.

No kitchen means you eat out for every meal.

No gym means you do not train for two weeks.

No running shoes means no running.

No yoga mat means no stretching.

The environment wins every time. The solution is to control the environment before you arrive.

The preparation starts way before your vacation

Step 1: Visualize your day from the moment you wake up

This is the most important step and the one I always underestimated. Before booking anything, I sit down and mentally walk through a full day of my vacation as if I am already there.

I wake up. I want to make my own breakfast. That means I need a kitchen with a stove, basic utensils, and a fridge. I need a supermarket within reasonable walking distance that carries oats, yoghurt, berries, and eggs.

After breakfast I want to write for an hour or two. That means I need a reliable internet connection and a comfortable place to sit with my laptop.

Around 11am I want to train. That means I need a gym with at least enough equipment for a proper session. Not two treadmills. Actual weights.

After training I want my protein shake and a snack. That means I need to either bring my supplements or find a nutrition shop nearby.

Lunch and dinner I cook myself. That means the kitchen and supermarket matter again.

In the evening I want to stretch or do yoga. That means I need a yoga mat and enough space to use it, indoors if the weather is bad.

At 10pm I want the lights off and to sleep well. That means I need a quiet area, a comfortable bed, blackout curtains, and working air conditioning.

Going through this exercise makes your actual needs completely visible. Most people skip it and end up improvising on arrival.

Step 2: Research the location

Once you know what you need, you can research intelligently rather than just booking whatever looks nice.

Start with the supermarket. This is non-negotiable. I check which major supermarket chains exist at my destination and find their locations on Google Maps before I choose where to stay. In Tenerife that was Mercadona. I chose Los Cristianos specifically because there was one within walking distance.

Small grocery stores are not enough. They rarely carry everything you need and the prices are significantly higher. A proper supermarket within 30 minutes on foot is the minimum.

Then find your accommodation around the supermarket, not the other way around. The kitchen is the most important feature. It needs a stove, pots, pans, a fridge, and basic utensils. Read the listing carefully and check photos. If it is unclear, message the host directly.

For the gym, photos in listings are almost useless because hotels always photograph the one corner that looks good. Instead I search through reviews specifically for comments from other people who actually use the gym. A small gym with proper weights is better than a large one with only cardio machines. If the hotel gym is not good enough, search for a nearby commercial gym. Just make sure it is close. A gym that requires a 40 minute commute will not get used after a long day.

Check the neighborhood for noise. If the hotel is in the middle of the nightlife district your sleep will suffer regardless of how well you planned everything else. Read reviews that mention noise specifically.

Finally, if you rely on supplements, search for a nutrition or fitness shop near your accommodation. I do not travel with large bags of protein powder if I can avoid it. One search on Google Maps before I leave tells me whether I can buy what I need on arrival.

Step 3: Pack with intention

This is the easiest step because most things can be bought at your destination if needed. But bringing the right things eliminates unnecessary spending and the risk of arriving unprepared.

My non-negotiables: running shoes, sport and gym clothes, chest strap for heart rate monitoring, running cap and sunglasses, stainless water bottle, a shaker for protein, one or two physical books, laptop, and my dental care kit. Everything else I can source locally.

The deeper reason this matters

You could read all of this and still ask: why bother?

Is the whole point of vacation not to escape your normal life?

That is exactly the question worth sitting with.

If your habits feel like obligations you need a break from, then yes, vacation becomes an escape from them. But if you have built habits that genuinely serve you, that make you feel strong, clear, and like yourself, then you do not want a break from them.

You want to take them with you.

In the last four years I built a life at home that I genuinely enjoy. My habits are not a burden. They are the reason I feel good every single day. When I travel I do not leave them behind because they are part of who I am, not just part of my routine.

I came home from Tenerife feeling better than when I left. Stronger, clearer, more energized. Not despite keeping my habits but because of it.

That is what good preparation makes possible.

The right habits do not need a holiday.

Build the life first.

Then take it with you wherever you go.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

Subscribe now

Welcome and thank you for being here. Running Home is a weekly newsletter about awareness, self-reliance, health, and freedom. Real stories, honest struggles, and the hard-won lessons from someone who chose to change his life completely.

If this resonates, Subscribe and join 450 readers.

I am writing this from Tenerife, a day after hiking Montana Blanca alone in strong wind with nobody around for miles. I have not stopped smiling since.

There was only one free slot in the parking place at Montana Blanca so I took it as a sign of invitation.

I got out of the car, put on my hiking boots and windbreaker.

The moment I walked away from the road the silence hit me.

There was no wind at that moment and at more than 2000 meters above sea level on the side of a volcano there was no sound of nature either.

I stopped for a second because it felt uncomfortable.

It had been a while since I experienced such silence around me.

On both sides, rocky hills rose with their desert orange color. I looked up and there were small caves in those walls.

Before me, just a dusty endless path with some spots covered with snow.

My first thought was that I was on Mars. Or in Star Wars when C-3PO and R2-D2 head toward Jabba’s palace to rescue Han Solo. I smiled thinking about how little fuzzy creatures might be watching me from above waiting for the right moment to catch me.

Having these thoughts eased the discomfort I felt in those first minutes so I continued walking.

Since I rarely wear earbuds to listen to music or podcasts, the only option was to spend time with my own thoughts. Fortunately, years of marathon training and enough time spent alone had prepared me for these situations and I didn’t panic knowing that the next few hours were going to be between me and myself.

I heard the crunch of my steps and as I gained elevation the wind woke up, cold enough to keep patches of snow frozen on the ground despite the sun burning overhead.

The wind came in waves, each one announcing itself before it hit. When it arrived fully it was a deep constant roar that filled everything around me, and my hood vibrated against my head like it was trying to tear loose.

This was the moment I started smiling more. In my mind I stepped outside myself for a second, seeing the scene from above — a guy walking his own way on a volcano, feeling great about it.

I felt proud about the decision I had made to go on another adventure without asking for permission or waiting for somebody to join me. The feeling of being alive, of freedom, of living deliberately. Exactly the things I write about, lived out in reality, with me as the author of my own life.

I remember when I was 27, green and insecure, and decided to go on my first adventure alone. Back then I had no clear idea about what mattered to me, but there was one strong thought in the back of my head:

If you don’t do it, it won’t happen.

I knew I had to go alone. I couldn’t wait for other people to join me, for the next summer, the next year, or the next decade.

But don’t get me wrong. It was never about wanting to be alone on these journeys.

It was about going on them regardless of the company.

After an hour of ascending I reached 2500 meters and the wind turned into a roaring invisible force that pushed my legs sideways with every step. But at that point turning back was not something I could consider.

I was smiling even more. Because now I wasn’t only a guy hiking alone on a volcano.

In my head I was on a mission, like Indiana Jones facing danger and risk without hesitation.

So I kept going.

There is a guy at the gym where I show up two or three times a week.

He is the same age as me, 39.

We usually exchange a few words when we see each other before focusing on our workouts.

Last time we ended up sitting next to each other after the sauna, I asked him about his vacation plans for this year.

“Do you have any plans for this summer?” I asked.

“It depends,” he said.

“Depends on what?”

“On whether I meet a girl or not.”

I looked at him for a second. “Why does your vacation plan depend on that?”

“Well, I don’t like doing all the travel stuff alone. Cooking, buying groceries, booking hotels. It’s better to share it with someone so I don’t have to do everything by myself.”

“Have you met anyone recently? Are you dating?”

“I’m trying,” he said. “The last date didn’t work out so I keep trying.”

I accepted what he said and we moved on.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterward.

He is waiting to meet someone in order to start living the life he wants. And maybe traveling is not even his biggest dream.

Maybe it is something else entirely.

But the pattern is the same.

He has decided that whatever he wants requires another person to be possible first.

That is not a travel problem.

That is a life problem.

And I kept asking myself the same two questions on the way home.

What if he never meets her?

And what if he does, but she doesn’t want to travel or do the things he loves?

After almost two hours I arrived at a crossing on the path.

One way leading to the peak of the volcano was closed due to stormy weather conditions but the other was only a 300 meter walk to the end of my hiking route.

Without hesitation I turned left and walked that short distance to the finish.

A few jumps and balancing acts over a deep snow patch and I was there.

Standing there I started laughing.

Even now, writing about it, I am smiling because it was such a strong moment of aliveness.

Up there in that windstorm, able to see far in almost every direction, with nobody around to validate the moment for me.

As you can probably guess, I didn’t need that.

I will never forget this experience.

The hike was not difficult and it was never about doing the hardest thing possible.

It was about proving to myself again that it does not matter where I came from, how good my genetics are, how handsome I am, or how rich my parents are.

If I make a plan, follow my interests, and stop waiting for permission from others or from society, I can achieve almost anything.

What I felt was pride.

Because I know how many people refuse to get off the couch and do something about their life.

They are waiting like the guy from my gym.

For a girl, a man, a Monday, next year, the lottery, a new job, the approval of friends and parents.

Meanwhile their whole life passes waiting for the right moment.

I encourage you to start living deliberately.

Life is too short to spend it waiting.

So the next time you have something on your mind that you really want to do, make a plan and do it without hesitation.

Never once have I regretted a decision I made to make myself feel alive and go after what I want.

You won’t either.

Thank you for reading.

It means a lot that you spent your time here.

If this resonated with you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to read it. A comment or a like also means more than you think, it tells me that this kind of writing is worth continuing.

And if you are not yet subscribed, you are welcome to join the journey below.

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