The last time I was in a relationship, there was a nagging voice at the back of my head.

“Leave him!”

“He is no good for you.”

“You are not meant to be with him.”

I had no problem ignoring that voice then.

Why would I when he was the best person I ever dated so far? Surely, it was just my self-sabotaging tendencies coming to play.

As time went on it was clear he did not want to get to know me but was in love with a constructed version of me. He was also leaning heavily into marriage when I told him I wanted to finish studying and save up.

The voice just kept getting louder over time and I was not very happy in the relationship.

If the relationship was a seesaw, it always felt more tilted to my side. I wanted him to push harder on his side of the seesaw and keep the momentum in the relationship going. It gets real tiring to keep yelling at the other person to push back after a while.

Besides a low level of investment, there wasn’t really anything else wrong with us. It was pleasant and smooth-sailing apart from a few minor clashes in personality.

One day I decided to give in to the voice and end things with him.

Sure, it was depressing, heart-wrenching and every other messy emotion. But as the years passed on, life got better.

I fully focused on college, internships, jobs. My sense of self-worth went up and every area of my life improved.

I knew if I had stayed with him, I would not have discovered my love for business, writing and various hobbies that I reconnected with since childhood.

I know this because a few years later, I bumped into him outside on a random Sunday.

We exchanged cordial small talk and discovered he was getting married the following month.

He had also become religious, was marrying someone within the church, and planned to have children soon after.

Personally, I am not religious and would not have agreed to have kids so soon.

It became clear as day why I should have listened to that voice sooner. Our life paths were already becoming unaligned at the time and would have continued to be unaligned if we had stayed together.

If I had not listened to that little voice in my head, we would have been together and might have gotten married as that was ‘the natural next step’.

My intuition had saved me years of my life and propelled me to new heights, and this was only related to one relationship.

Now imagine if you made a decision in your life that could positively change the whole trajectory of your life.

It could be related to your:

• Diet

• Exercise

• Job

• Career

• Relationships

• Friendships

• Financial decisions

• Hobbies

Could you really change your life by listening to that little voice in your head, even if it goes against all logic?

What even is intuition?

Dr Gary Klein was an American psychologist that studied how firefighters and military commanders made fast, high-stakes decisions in real-world settings.

He found that intuition was a pattern recognition process, not a mystical sixth sense.

When you encounter a familiar situation, that recognition makes you notice relevant cues, expectations for how things will unfold and typical courses of action.

This happens instantly, without the need to compare any options - a pattern-matching so fast it feels like a feeling.

This is traced back to when Socrates spoke of his daimonion, an inner voice that gave him warnings before wrong decisions, always without explanation, which he attributed to a nameless divine source.

Critically, the voice never told him what to do. It only warned him away from mistakes and would fall silent when he heeded its warnings.

Whether you believe in God or the devil or science (or all of them), that little voice in your head functions as a signal before there is reasoning to justify it.

How valid is intuition?

It depends on the situation.

Judging based on intuition requires assessing how predictable the environment is and whether you’ve had a real chance to learn its patterns. Your confidence may be subjective and is not a reliable sign of accuracy.

For example, if you’ve been in a relationship for a while, you know the other person’s likes, dislikes and beliefs which leads to your intuition being more informed than someone who might be on their first date.

In Klein's original study, experienced commanders didn't compare options at all when making decisions in 80% of instances.

They simply recognised and acted.

Intuition is valid when earned through repetition, not just an innate gift.

In Polynesian wayfinding, navigators crossed thousands of miles of open ocean with no compass, sextant, or instruments, reading direction and position from stars, ocean swells, currents, clouds, and wildlife.

It looks like pure intuition, until you learn master navigators underwent years of intensive training, memorising exact star paths and wave-interference patterns.

When modern sailors tried to replicate it without that training, they couldn't.

When Polynesian students did the training, they successfully navigated to Tahiti in 1976 using only traditional methods, proving the skill was real, transmissible, and testable.

Does listening to it really make your life better?

Contrary to conventional wisdom, thorough conscious deliberation is not always the best route.

Complex choices were rated more favourably when made without focused, attentive thought, while simple choices still benefited from conscious reasoning.

It is better to

1. think consciously about simple matters

2. let complex ones settle unconsciously.

Xenophon, a key student under Socrates, said daimonion is unusually direct on this exact question.

That's a 2,400-year-old report saying that ignoring your inner voice can cost people outcomes they could have avoided.

Does intuition defy logic?

No.

It's a different, embodied form of intelligence: memory, spatial orientation, and intuition operating together, compressed by years of training into something that looks instantaneous from the outside.

The science backs this same reframe.

Intuition and logic are not opponents fighting to be right.

They are two different processing modes. Unconscious thought handles large volumes of information well-suited to complex decisions, while conscious thought performs better on simple, rule-based problems.

Intuition is not the absence of logic.

Intuition is logic that's already been run through thousands of repetitions until the calculation collapsed into a feeling.

What looks instant is the fastest replay of the slowest kind of learning.

Listening to your intuition

You might have a hunch about something in your life right now you think you should act on.

Of course, we live in a world where there may be financial or social obligations that don’t allow us to make decisions willy nilly. Injecting some logic to your intuition might be helpful.

Not every gut feeling is 100% right or should be followed.

However, if I could talk to my 21-year old self now, I would fully support her decision in ending things with my partner.

The thing is it did take over a year of being with him to subconsciously learn his patterns and learn that they were not a good fit for future me.

It took some time before I ever heard the voice clearly, let alone trust it and make a decision.

The next time a hunch shows up in your life about a relationship, job, situation:

Ask yourself “Is this a pattern that is repeating itself?”

If the answer is yes, you might want to listen to your gut.

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If ‘no’ has always been a complete sentence, why does saying it out loud feel so violently incomplete?

The first time I chanced upon the phrase was from a middle-aged woman on TikTok. The video was along the lines of ‘Things I’d tell myself in my 20s’ and I ate it up as an impressionable young 20-something. I was still learning what boundaries were as growing up in a strict immigrant household, I did not know what that looked like. I grew up to develop some people-pleasing tendencies where saying ‘no’ would have saved me from countless situations.

It is reposted as a ground-breaking discovery (guilty) when it is straight-forward and one of the shortest sentences to exist.

What is confusing is the fact that we are now reminded to do this as fully-grown adults.

Adults say it to children often yet when adults feel permitted to say it, they follow it up with an apology.

What I found is that the problem has almost nothing to do with you personally. It is not your attachment style, childhood experiences or that you’re conflict-averse.

It goes back much further to before the self-help industry invented the language of boundaries.

It goes back to a specific structural change in how human societies organise themselves.

The Banker and the Family Circus: A History of Refusal

In 1958, a newspaper columnist in Cincinnati quoted a sign on an anonymous bank official’s desk. The sign read: “In this office, the word NO is a complete sentence.”

It started with a mid-century banker being dry about loan applications.

It circulated quietly for decades after that. It showed up in a syndicated newspaper column in 1961, and in a 1987 Family Circus comic strip with a mother pointing at a child with the caption: “It’s time you learned: ‘NO’ is a complete sentence.”

In 1995, Megan LeBoutillier turned it into a full self-help book, No Is a Complete Sentence: Learning to Tell the Truth about What You Want and Need, built almost entirely around the idea that refusal does not require justification.

Eventually it landed on your For You Page, where it now lives alongside journals and accounts that post daily affirmations about protecting your energy.

Why does it feel, to a significant number of people, saying no requires courage and a little paragraph attached to it?

What Anthropologists Found: Leveling Mechanisms

For most of human existence, human societies were organised in small bands of roughly 20 to 150 people. Hunter-gatherers moving and living together, completely depending on each other.

And these societies had a problem that needed solving.

In any group of humans, some individuals will naturally try to accumulate more than their share. More food, status or influence. Left unchecked, this tendency produces hierarchy, and hierarchy produces exactly the kind of power imbalance where some people can demand and others cannot refuse.

Hunter-gatherer societies solved this problem. with what anthropologists now call leveling mechanisms.

Leveling mechanisms are the informal, collective practices a community uses to keep any single person from accumulating too much power, status, or influence. It is enforced equality. And they were remarkably consistent across hunter-gatherer cultures that had no contact with each other, on different continents, across thousands of years.

Ridicule

If someone started acting like they were more important than everyone else. boasting about a hunt, demanding more than their share, or refusing to cooperate, the group mocked them publicly and collectively.

The mockery continued until the person backed down and returned to the expected level of humility. Anthropologists studying the !Kung San of southern Africa documented this extensively. A hunter who came back with a large kill and bragged about it would be teased mercilessly.

The expected response was to downplay the kill, to say it was nothing, to defer.

Pride was considered a social transgression.

Shunning

If ridicule didn’t work, the group could simply exclude the offending person from social interaction.

In a small band where survival depended on cooperation, this was a serious consequence. Social warmth was withdrawn until the behaviour changed.

Demand sharing

Many hunter-gatherer societies had a norm where anyone could ask anyone else for food or resources, and refusal was socially unacceptable.

This sounds like the opposite of boundaries, and in one sense it is.

But it functioned as a leveling mechanism because it prevented accumulation. You couldn’t hoard if anyone could ask and you had to give.

The demands went in every direction, which meant no single person could sit on resources while others went without.

Collective enforcement

Crucially, these actions were never the responsibility of a single individual.

If someone was demanding too much of one person, the group responded collectively. The burden of saying no was distributed across the whole community rather than sitting entirely on the person being asked.

This last point is the one that matters most.

In a society with functioning leveling mechanisms, you did not need to be brave enough to say no alone as you were not alone. The structure around you enforced the norm so that any individual refusal was backed by the weight of the whole group.

The person asking too much knew they were being refused by the the entire group.

The burden sat with the person asking.

How Farming Changed Our Ability to Say No

About 12,000 years ago, humans started farming.

It sounds mundane but its consequences are still rippling through your nervous system today.

Farming meant staying in one place, meaning accumulating resources: storing grain, owning land, building structures.

Accumulation meant that for the first time in human history, some people reliably had more than others. Wealth could be passed down from parent to child

Leveling mechanisms don’t work well in that environment. You can’t mock the king or shame the landlord into giving back the land. The old informal tools of social enforcement collapse when power differences become large and permanent enough.

With hierarchy came a new reality: your survival depended on staying in the good graces of someone above you.

For thousands of years, in countless cultures across the world, compliance was socially easier and safer. The people-pleasing reflex was a rational adaptation to a world where the wrong refusal could cost you everything.

That lesson got passed down. Through the body’s learned response to the feeling of being asked for something by someone who has power over you. Through generations of people whose survival literally depended on managing other people’s moods and never letting a refusal land badly.

Your body knows this feeling even when you don’t.

That specific tension when someone asks you to do something you don’t want to do.

The way your mind immediately starts constructing justifications and apologies before you’ve even decided whether to say no.

The sense that a plain refusal is somehow rude, too much or a small act of aggression against the person asking.

Centuries of completely reasonable fear are encoded in the body, still running in a situation where the original danger no longer exists.

Absence of leveling mechanisms

In workplaces, the people least able to say no are almost always the ones with the least institutional power.

The intern who says yes to everything.

The junior employee who stays late every time.

The contractor who never pushes back.

The corporate hierarchy makes refusal more costly for them. There is no leveling mechanism protecting them. When a manager asks too much, nobody in the organization collectively pushes back on the manager. The burden falls entirely on the individual, who is also the person with the least power to bear it.

Senior management says no constantly and nobody calls it a boundary issue. It is seen as leadership.

In families, the person who can never say no is usually the one who learned earliest that the group would not back them up. The child whose refusal was met with anger rather than respect learns quickly that refusal is dangerous. The adult from that family carries the same lesson into their friendships and relationships, still waiting for the collective enforcement that never came and never will, because they have not yet found people who provide it.

In friendships, the dynamic where one person gives and one person takes is what happens when leveling mechanisms disappear. One person keeps making demands and the other keeps accommodating. Nobody in the surrounding social circle names what is happening or applies collective pressure to correct it.

In romantic relationships, the person who cannot say no often stays long past the point where they should leave. With no community around you saying: this is too much to be asked of you. We see it. We’ll back you up, the cost of conflict or letting someone down, feels unbearable when you are facing it entirely alone with no leveling mechanism.

On social media, “no is a complete sentence” found a home. Leveling mechanisms are essentially gone and the approval-seeking they were supposed to counteract has been turbocharged.

You are not managing one village’s opinion of you, a group of 150 people you know personally and who know you. You are managing a potential audience of thousands, millions, many of them strangers, all with the ability to withhold or grant approval with a single tap.

The ancient fear of social exclusion, which was once a reasonable response, is now being activated by strangers on the internet who will never actually affect your immediate survival in any meaningful way.

The feeling of danger outlived the danger by thousands of years.

Three Things That Actually Help

The bad news is that you cannot unilaterally recreate what hunter-gatherer communities had. I wish we could summon a village.

The good news is that you can build something that functions like them.

1. Find people who function as your leveling mechanism

This is the structural fix, and most people skip it entirely because modern self-help is almost exclusively focused on the individual.

Some of it has value. But none of it addresses the actual problem, which is that you are being asked to do something alone that your ancestors never had to do alone. Saying no was a collective act. The village enforced the norm so that no individual had to carry the full weight of it.

What you are looking for is people who will enforce this on your behalf when you cannot.

Friends who will say to the person demanding too much of you: that’s not okay. Partners who notice when you are being asked for more than is reasonable and name it. Communities where the shared understanding is that asking too much of someone is a transgression.

Most social circles do not function this way. Most friendships are built on a kind of polite mutual non-interference.

We do not comment on each other’s relationships, we do not name dynamics we observe, we do not apply collective pressure when someone in our group is being treated unreasonably. We have mistaken privacy for respect, and silence for support.

The first step is noticing whether you have anyone in your life who functions as a leveling mechanism for you.

2. Run small experiments before you need to run big ones

Run small, low-stakes experiments, in saying no.

Say no to something minor. A social obligation you don’t have the energy for, or a request from someone you trust, where the relationship is secure enough to handle a refusal.

Most of the time nothing catastrophic happens and the person is cool with it. The relationship survives. And your body updates itself so that saying no becomes easier the next time.

When you do this again and again, the fear loosens its grip and you discern which situations you can say no to. What are the reactions from people you say no to? What situations do you feel confident saying yes or no to?

You start building an iron-clad level of self-trust.

You have to collect the data yourself with one small refusal at a time.

3. Notice what you’re actually protecting when you say yes

Most automatic yeses look like generosity in the moment. It reflects kindness or being a good person but they function as protection.

You are saying yes to manage the other person’s potential disappointment before they even feel it. You are absorbing a cost which is your time, energy or resentment. It easier to avoid the discomfort of their reaction to saying no.

You are paying in advance to avoid a conflict that has not happened yet and might not be as bad as you fear.

Write it down if you need to and make it concrete.

Then ask the follow-up: and if that happens, then what?

Walk it out. They’re angry, and then what? They think you’re selfish, and then what? They tell other people, and then what?

Most of the time, if you follow the fear all the way to its actual conclusion, you find that in the worst case scenario of saying no, nothing bad will happen.

However, the cost you have been paying to avoid it, in exhaustion and resentment, is certainly higher than the cost of the thing you were afraid of.

The Paradox

Saying no does not account for the very real ways in which refusal is more costly for some people than for others. Gender, power, race, economic position do play a role. It treats a complex structural problem like a vocabulary problem, as though the only thing standing between you and healthy limits was being informed that the word existed.

But.

It is also, in a strange and accidental way, trying to be a leveling mechanism.

Think about what is actually happening when millions of people repost the same phrase.

They are collectively asserting a norm, applying social pressure to the idea that compliance is not the default owed to everyone who makes a demand.

Refusal does not require justification.

In a digital and impersonal way, they are doing what the !Kung San did with ridicule and what every hunter-gatherer community did with collective enforcement.

They are trying to rebuild the village.

A reposted phrase cannot do what a real community of people who know you can do. It cannot back you up in a specific conversation or name what is being asked of you and say it is too much.

But this collective permission is a start.

Finding the people who will actually back you up, and enforce the norm with you and for you, will be your leveling mechanism in a world that stopped providing them automatically.

I was having dinner with my friend the other day where we were trying to guess each other’s screen time for fun. I tried guessing her screen time first.

“2 hours?”

“No…”

“4 hours?”

“No…”

“Okay, 8 hours?”

My friend sheepishly showed me her screen. It showed 8 hours 12 minutes average that week.

I showed her mine, which was at 5 hours 34 minutes. I brushed it off, saying I was busy that week, which was why it was lower than usual.

Though I have gotten a little better at cutting down this number with a few techniques, the truth is I used to be diabolically addicted to my phone. I clocked in similar average screen times as my friend, if not worse, with my personal record being 12 hours+ at the peak of my depressive episodes. Back then, the number was far from a quirky stat to compare over dinner, but rather a source of shame.

The Stigma We Don’t Question

There is a type of stigma attached to having a higher-than-average screen time. It is not so much the screen time you have, rather the indication of your daily habits.

Doomscrolling into the late, quiet hours of the night, even when you feel your eyes grow heavy. Watching a stranger yap about a niche topic you love because you don’t have anyone in your life to talk about it with. Listening to a productivity podcast while doing your laundry because laundry is boring and the silence is deafening.

If you have a “low” screen time, it gives off the impression of a self-controlled and/or busy person, who has a life to attend to. Time is precious, you have goals to achieve, and self-control over your impulses. There is no habit of going to your phone as a form of escapism.

There is no need to doomscroll because you have methods to emotionally regulate yourself to combat boredom, anxiety, and loneliness.

There is no need to watch a stranger yap online because you already have friends to speak about your niche interests to.

There is no need to listen to a podcast because you know you are a productive person and don’t need a podcast to know that (and if you are extra lucky, you have someone who does your laundry for you).

This stigma didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s downstream of a culture that has spent the last decade treating attention as the last scarce resource, and self-discipline as the last virtue money can’t buy.

“Digital minimalism,” dumbphones, screen time leaderboards all quietly imply the same thing: that the number on your settings app is a referendum on your character.

We’ve turned a battery-usage-style metric into a morality score. This metric can’t even tell the difference between three hours of doomscrolling and three hours of video-calling your partner. It was never built to judge you in the first place.

Focus Is a Signal, Not the End Goal

I took a look at my friend’s screen time and looked at the most-used apps section.

Her top 3 most used apps were YouTube, WhatsApp, and Libby.

I asked her what type of videos she was watching on YouTube, and she mentioned it was mostly social commentary videos on the state of the software engineering industry and Claude skills she was learning (valid). WhatsApp was used mainly to video call her boyfriend, and Libby was used to read psychology books.

When looking at the bars on the screen, they were relatively balanced each hour, indicating that she was sticking to doing one thing at a time instead of switching between apps.

Her screen time may seem high at first glance, but looking at hers gave me a fresh perspective. In the past, I had been quick to feel guilty over my phone usage and the time slipping through my fingers (literally).

The thing is, a screen time means so much more. It is an indication of what we find important, what we want to grow in, and the people that we cherish in our lives.

I realised I was chasing the wrong thing altogether.

A “low” screen time is an arbitrary vanity metric. People chase focus as a skill with apps, productivity hacks, and “deep work” culture when it is simply a signal as to what you find important in your life right now.

If your phone helps you move the needle toward the larger goals in your life, why the f*ck does it matter what the screen time is?

You could be playing subliminal music on it 8 hours a day if it helps you get into the zone.

You could be watching YouTube to learn to code for 8 hours a day if it helps you ship an app in the next few months.

The issue is fragmented attention, where constant content consumption does not move the needle toward your goals. Instead, it leaves you where you started.

Two people can post the same number and be living completely different lives. One circling the drain, one mid-flow. The number is identical but the meaning behind the number is not. That’s the part the stigma flattens out.

“Even in the most difficult situations, when you focus on what is right in the present moment, it makes you happier, today.” — Dr. Spencer Johnson, The Present

My friend’s interests lie in coding, social commentary, and psychology. When she learns something online, time distorts and she is fully absorbed, reflecting her strong alignment and passion for it. When she talks to her boyfriend for an hour straight, she is also aligned with him and does not feel time passing by.

The Flow State

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was the psychologist who named the psychological concept of “flow,” after interviewing hundreds of rock climbers, musicians, athletes, surgeons, and artists. He was fascinated by people who got so lost in their work they ignored their own bodily needs.

What struck him wasn’t just that these people focused well. It was that the focus cost them nothing. They weren’t gritting their teeth through it; they came out the other side energised rather than depleted, the way most of us feel after a long stretch of forced concentration. He went on to describe people who seek out this state often as having an “autotelic personality”, people who do things for the sake of doing them, not for the medal, the promotion, or the praise that comes after.

The doing is the reward.

If you have had a moment where you ignored hunger, thirst, or sleep, it sounds uncannily similar to when you have spent hours late into the night on your phone. So many of us have already experienced this state.

The prerequisite to entering a flow state is to become absorbed by a challenging task such that it lifts your mood and time fades away.

The conditions to enter are a balance between:

• Challenge

• Skill

• Clear goals

• Immediate feedback

• Distorted sense of time

• Loss of self-consciousness

Most importantly, it means doing the activity because it is rewarding, not for the outcome.

It’s worth noticing that a phone can technically supply all six conditions, a game has clear goals and instant feedback, a comment section gives you a challenge to win, a feed gives you the loss of self-consciousness.

That’s precisely why phones are so good at imitating flow without ever delivering its aftermath. Real flow leaves you feeling satiated.

The imitation leaves you empty and reaching for the phone again ten minutes later. The tell isn’t how absorbed you felt going in, it’s how you feel when you put the phone down.

What you focus on without trying reveals what you actually value.

With the abundance of content that we consume, it is easy to find out where our focus goes.

“Self-Help” Assumes There’s a Problem Even When There Isn’t

Most modern advice treats focus as something you build through discipline. You need to lock your phone in a jar, make the largest cup of coffee, and work through sheer force. However, the flow state is something you get immersed in effortlessly, by tasks that match your skill level and naturally draw your attention.

It is located within you and cannot be built. If it is something you need to grit your teeth to get through, then it would be near impossible to derive any enjoyment from it.

This is where most productivity advice quietly misdiagnoses the problem. It assumes the issue is a willpower deficit, so the fix is always more friction: lock boxes, app blockers, accountability partners.

But friction doesn’t create alignment, it just makes misalignment harder to act on.

You can build the most elaborate system in the world to keep yourself off your phone, and you’ll still feel restless the second the system isn’t watching, because the system did not ask what you were actually trying to feel in the first place.

You Already Know How to Focus

Go to your screen time and look at the top 3 most-used apps.

Go to those apps and look at all the content you have liked, commented on, or shared in the past week.

Those are the topics that you care about, that speak to you, or that entertain you.

Ignore the actual screen time number that you see.

If you spent 3 hours doomscrolling on X, good.

What caught your attention? What made you so absorbed that you spent 3 hours on it?

What if you produced or created something related to that topic?

You see, the world tends to pathologise our absorption instead of reading it as information on what you were built for.

What would it look like if, instead of consuming, you started producing what you are interested in?

When you first start creating, it is the hardest thing. Since you are figuring out a new skill, it will look like this.

There is no flow state in the beginning.

You will want to stop after the first month because most people do. If you stick to it long enough and find the joy in it each moment, you will enter a flow state. It happens when you least expect it, that’s the best part. You can only get better at your craft with time and consistent attention. It is simply a matter of sticking with it.

The world we live in now promises 100 distractions when we are focused. It is the distractions that we need to overcome when they do inevitably show up.

Imagine how much you can change your life by honouring your interests and creating something instead of demonising it.

When you start creating and losing track of time, your screen time will decrease, because you have now become busy living your life.

Am I advocating to delete the culprit apps off your phone and never use them again?

Of course not.

Use it as information to learn about yourself.

Take action.

Your life will change.

Every writer has experienced this. The moment you first posted your writing online, you had a hundred thoughts running through your head.

‘What if this doesn’t resonate with people?’

‘What if nobody reads this?’

‘What if I go viral and everyone in my life found what I wrote?’

The moment you hit publish you have opened the front door of your mind into the never-ending ocean that is the internet.

There are bots and humans, lurking and swimming, ready to respond to you. You don’t know if it will be good or bad or if nobody will care.

The thing about our lives now is that 90% of the fear we experience is manufactured whether it be by people, societal structures or circumstances.

It makes sense to feel fear:

• When you are living in a jungle, with a sunset imminent and no shelter built.

• When a viper is a few feet away from you and a slight movement would mean a bite resulting in certain death.

• When there is a famine, and you have no idea where your next meal is going to come from.

All these situations lead to slow or quick death. The body has no choice but to make you feel emotion on a physiological level to force you into action.

It was valid to feel intense fear or worry in those situations because it was the very thing that kept you alive. Not to mention, after the threat had passed you swiftly went back to your baseline neutral state.

When short-term fear or worry extends long-term it is called anxiety. A state where worries are perpetual, amplified, and sometimes, for no reason.

Treatment for anxiety is fundamentally broken

An estimated 350 million people worldwide live with anxiety. This figure is expected to increase to 515 million by 2040.

We live in the most advanced time with numerous medications, treatments, therapies and holistic practices.

In future, the quality of medicine and therapy will only progress. Yet, anxiety rates are expected to increase.Surely, if the treatments of today worked, anxiety rates would inevitably decrease.

As someone who had been through their own bouts of anxiety years ago, I found a practice by the ancient Chinese called wu wei, or non-action.

At first, it sounds like doing nothing but it goes much deeper than that.

When you think of how water flows, it does not plan a route, fight against obstacles or set quarterly goals.

It moves in the direction that it wants to, it seeps into every crack and can wear down surfaces over time.

Nothing in nature is softer than water yet more powerful.

Non-action simply means to go with the flow.

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Where you are vs. Where you think you should be

The root of anxiety is the firm attachment to how things have to turn out in life.

Anxiety around getting an excellent job, finding an excellent partner and having an excellent-looking bank account is what causes this perpetual worry.

The gap between where you are and where you think you should be is what leads to negative thoughts, emotions and actions.

An anxious person is in constant argument with reality on how things should be faster, safer, different or more certain.

Wu wei dismantles this argument completely.

Non-action means to be sensitive to your intuition.

To know when to act and when to wait.

To know when to speak and when silence carries more power.

To know that no matter how hard things may seem now, circumstances will inevitably change.

Doing more does not mean better results. Surrendering the need to be in constant control gives the soul more peace to rest in.

You may think,

I hear you. You have a life to live with obligations and bills to pay.

Do not surrender your goals or become an audience member to your life. In fact, stay in the main character role.

Releasing control and focusing on the present

What helps is releasing the attachment to the outcome.

Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang says he has ‘no expectations’ when it comes to how things turn out. Instead he said this.

Water will keep flowing even when there are things in its way.

Water never sees them as obstacles, only as opportunities to change states.

It will flow through cracks, evaporate from the ocean into the air, gets turned into clouds, rains down during a thunderstorm, gets absorbed into the soil, gets consumed by you, ends up in the toilet.

It has changed form a million times and never once felt worried about where it will end up or what will happen to it.

That is wu wei.

Taking non-action

Become sensitive to what is happening now to respond appropriately to that.

If our ancestors encountered a snake while hunting, their first priority was to ensure safety by avoiding the snake and getting to a safe place.

After that, they did not dwell and worry endlessly on whether the snake would come and bite them in their sleep.

Instead, they took action.

• Indigenous cultures passed down information on snake habitats, seasonal behaviours and warning signs.

• They slept in elevated shelters

• They used sticks or torches to fend off snakes.

Non-action never means to do nothing. Your instincts will tell you what is right for your situation. Listen to your gut. Ask people you trust and admire on what they would do.

The gap between where you are and where you think you should be is an illusion that exists to keep you in a perpetual state of worry.

Closing the gap does not mean doing more things even when you are dying on the inside. It’s about flowing like water in the direction that feels most natural to you.

An action done from a place of readiness is more powerful than an action done from force.

In my pursuit of reducing my screen time / breaking my phone addiction, I’ve tried countless methods.

90% of the articles I read seemed to give a mishmash of the same methods without any clear protocol of how to implement them.

‘Turn on grayscale’, ‘set app limits’ or ‘do a dopamine detox for 48 hours’.

These methods are the equivalent of telling an alcoholic to ‘drink non-alcoholic beverages’, ‘stick to only 1 drink and sip on it slowly’ or ‘do dry January’.

You are treating the symptoms but not the root cause. Generic advice assumed you are on your phone out of boredom but ignores why you picked it up in the first place.

Not to mention deleting TikTok, Insta, YouTube for a few days or weeks does little to change your behaviour in the long-run, and are only temporary fixes.

I do not believe in temporary fixes because I was stuck in endless loops for years, deleting and installing apps over and over again and then feeling guilty when I got sucked in again.

The problem is not you. There is not enough concrete methods that legitimately give the truth on how effective these methods are.

That is why I will break it down for you from the scientific perspective.

The studies do not mirror real life so I will give action items on what can practically be done on your part to change your habits in the long-term.

The goal is not shiny perfection of maintaining for example, less than 2 hours of screen time per day.

It is about the slow decrease in usage over time, meaning:

1. Decreased cravings when picking them up

2. Spending less time doomscrolling each time you pick it up

3. Not feeling guilty when you do spend too much time on it

4. Filling up the space you’d have used to scroll with other fun stuff

These are the 10 most effective methods to reduce your screen time, from least to most effective.

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10. Identify and replace the core trigger

Score: 6.5/10

56% of smartphone dependency is driven by FOMO and 58% by stress-coping behaviour.

Going cold-turkey and using app limits consistently fail over the long term without replacing the behaviour that phone use satisfies.

Research on habit loops shows that substituting the routine (e.g. replacing a stress-scroll with a 5-minute walk) shows a long-term reduction in phone usage because the underlying need to reduce anxiety is met.

The analog tools approach (e.g. replacing digital calendars with physical planners) improves retention and creativity while removing the screen entirely.

This is ranked low because quantifying the reduction is difficult and varies greatly on what triggers someone and what they replace it with.

9. Workplace micro-break programs

Score: 6.5/10

Workplace micro-breaks using structured scheduled phone-free blocks cut average daily screen time by 22 minutes.

It’s a modest but meaningful reduction, especially since Americans report spending ~3 hrs of their 5+ hr daily usage during work hours.

The mechanism is habit replacement: designated off-phone blocks train intentional use rather than reactive checking.

The limitation is that this only covers work-hours behaviour, so the evening scroll remains unaffected without pairing it with other strategies related to notifications or usage at night.

Effectiveness varies heavily depending on job type. Remote workers and those with work apps on personal devices see less benefit without firm boundaries.

8. Turn off non-essential notifications

Score: 7.0/10

A 2024 randomised control trial with 205 participants found a 1-week notification-disabling intervention had no statistically significant effect on checking frequency or screen time on its own.

However, neuroscience evidence is clear that notifications causes a fragmented attention span.

Each ping forces a switch in mental context that takes minutes to recover from.

Notifications are the trigger for every other habit; turning them off doesn't reduce desire.

It simply removes the external cue that initiates the scroll session.

Another study from Penn State found that silencing phones can increase frequency so people pick up their phone more to see what they missed.

Fully turning off badges and sounds is more effective than silencing alone.

7. Scheduled digital detoxes (24-48 hrs)

Score: 7.0/10

48-hour digital detoxes improved attention span and working memory by ~23% in cognitive-boost studies.

A 2024 review found significant drops in depressive symptoms after just 2 weeks of limited screen use.

The benefits are real but episodic; detoxes are most useful as periodic resets that break habitual patterns rather than as a standalone daily strategy.

Improvement in sleep quality is noticed within 2–3 days of removing the phone from the bedroom.

A maintenance system after the detox ensures behaviour change lasts over time.

6. Add physical friction (lock box/ buried apps)

Score: 7.5/10

A 2024 study of 1,039 users over 13 weeks found that short friction delays (e.g. pausing for 1 second before opening an app) effectively reduced both app-open attempts and impulsive usage over time.

The effect grew stronger with continued use. The American Academy of Pediatrics notes that placing apps out of immediate reach reduces unconscious pickups.

Moving the most used apps to a buried folder led to 30% fewer daily openings.

However, the ‘shock factor’ of friction can wear off after 1-2 weeks.

Refreshing the approach with a new app, new friction step rekindles the effect.

5. Phone-free zones (bedroom & dining)

Score: 8.0/10

A 2025 study of 1,153 students found phone use 2+ hours before bed linked to prolonged sleep latency, frequent disturbances, and daytime dysfunction.

A 2023 study found 14-day limited social media (30 min/day cap) improved sleep by 23%.

Since 65% of people currently keep their phone in or near the bed, a phone-free bedroom directly eliminates the late-night scroll session.

Typically 30–60 min of usage that disappears simply by charging elsewhere.

4. Temporarily block mobile internet

Score: 8.0/10

A 2025 trial with 467 adults found blocking all mobile internet for 2 weeks improved mental health in 70%, wellbeing in 73%, and attention in 59% of participants.

Cognitive performance improved as much as reversing 10 years of age-related decline (woof).

Participants also slept 18 min more per night and exercised more.

The mental health effect size exceeded what is typically seen with antidepressant medications in clinical trials.

3. Stack multiple interventions

Score: 8.5/10

A randomised trial stacking 10 different methods (this includes grayscale + notifications off + app timers + friction + phone-free zones) outperformed every single-strategy control group on both screen time and depressive symptoms.

The compounding effect means each method amplifies the others.

Grayscale makes you less likely to open apps, timers cap what you do open, and friction slows the reflex to check.

2. Screen time tracker & app timers

Score: 9.0/10

A study found users cut 2.5 hrs/day within one month of using tracking apps, the largest raw time reduction of any single method.

A 2025 study found friction-based timers were 16% more effective than being completely locked out of the app.

62% of users kept friction interventions on all day vs only 36% kept the hard lockout option.

1. Grayscale mode

Score: 9.5/10

A 2020 study of 161 students found grayscale cut daily use by ~40 min, dropping from 255 min to 217 min/day.

A 2024 trial confirmed a 20 min/day reduction (7% decrease) in phone usage.

It also reduced overuse perception and stress with this effect being strengthened over time.

Across various studies, a 15–30% drop is expected when combined with other limits.

Verdict
Method 3: Use a combination of methods

There is no one way to reduce screen time.

You do not need to be extreme and cut off your internet access or do a digital detox for 48 hours.

Turns out, those are not the most effective methods at all.

They have become a hype to make you think that using your phone less has to be complete torture when it does not have to be.

All of them work to different extents. The most effective stack for me is to 1. switch on grayscale + 2. use screen-time tracking app + 3. have phone-free zones.

These are the easiest and most cost-effective ways that you can start doing today.

In total you would be saving approx ~60-90 min with only the above methods.

In 1 year, you would have easily saved 15 - 22 days just by implementing the above 3 methods.

There are 6 months left in the year.

Do you want to reclaim back 8 - 11 full days before the year ends?

Here is your chance.

Today I decided to ask my AI chatbot a question I really did not want the answer to, but did anyway.

By “mindless activities”, I mean scrolling on social media, mobile gaming, and digital consumption without any goal in mind.

*these figures are based on the average user.

Breakdown of Mindless Screen Time

Ages 0–11:
Effectively 0 hours/day
(unless you were an iPad kid or got your phone a few years earlier)

Ages 12–14:
4–5 hours of daily screen time
1.5 hours/day mindless

Cumulative wasted time:
~1,640 hours (68 full days)

Ages 15–18:
7–8 hours of total media screen time
3 hours/day mindless

Cumulative wasted time:
~4,380 hours (182 full days)

Ages 19–25:
8–9 hours of total media screen time
3.5 hours/day mindless

Cumulative wasted time:
~8,940 hours (372 full days)

That is a total of 3.9 waking years time spent on a phone.

2.5 waking years spent mindlessly.

65% of all time spent on our phones is mindless.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I feel bloody horrified.

I want to think I am better than the average 25-year-old, but I might be deluding myself.

It feels safe to assume this:

I have spent more than 3 years of my life on my phone in the past 15 years.

I have spent more than 3 years of my life on my phone in the past 15 years.

I have spent more than 3 years of my life on my phone in the past 15 years.

That is humbling. Skin-crawling. Guilt-tripping.

My intention, however, is not to make you feel any of those things.

I am simply a regular girl giving a PSA when nobody in your real life is.

When I was younger, my dad gave me one simple rule:

Charge your phone outside your room before bed.

I did not know it at the time, but that advice alone might have saved me days, weeks, or even months of nightly YouTube rabbit holes.

But after becoming an adult, especially after the pandemic, nobody has really been checking in, keeping me accountable for my ungodly phone usage, or telling me to use that extra scroll time to pursue hobbies I love, better my skillset, or grow my friendships.

If the grass is greener where you water it, then I am afraid we have collectively stopped watering our plants where it truly matters.

No wonder we are lonelier than ever, unhealthier than ever, and more unkind than ever.

We have stopped tending to our garden where it really matters.

Our families, friendships, partners, careers, hobbies, health, finances, minds, and spirituality are slowly being abandoned.

Meanwhile, the time spent on our phones is not going down.

It has only been increasing.

It is unlikely your consumption habits will change unless you decide to change.

I ask myself:

Will our screen times plateau?

Will it ever actually go down?

The people who engineered these apps are not going to wake up one day and say:

“This is as addictive as we can make it, guys. Let’s just back off and make the algorithm less addictive.”

This is an urgent issue.

You can either read this article and go about your life exactly as you always have.

If nothing changes, this is what happens.

Think about this.

With 8 years, you could have done an infinite number of things.

But instead, you were on your phone.

I write this as someone who is sick of seeing people glued to their screens whenever I go outside.

We have become phone zombies, soulless slaves to consumption, outsourcing our independent thoughts and awareness to everyone else.

And I want to change this.

If I can help people gain back even one extra hour a day from this unacknowledged addiction, it would mean the world to me.

When I started this publication, I wanted to discuss how our ancestors lived, their practices, rituals, and lifestyles, and how we might reconnect with our roots to live a grand old life.

What I realised, however, is that it is fundamentally difficult to live as our ancestors did.

The world has changed to an almost unrecognisable degree.

The shift in societal structures and values makes it incredibly hard to implement these ideas into our daily lives.

There is one thing that has worsened our approach to relationships, health, finances, self and our general perception towards our lives.

It is the damn phone.

Whether we like it or not, we are the guinea pig generation.

We are the first humans in history to test what happens when you hand a hyper-optimized dopamine machine to a developing brain.

Right now, the data says the machines are winning instead of us.

But realising you’re in a trap is the first step to escaping it.

I’m tired of losing years of my conscious life to a screen.

I’m tired of the realisation that I have already been robbed years of my youth and my attention span has been commoditised.

I have already given away 3 years without realising, I will not give it another 8 years.

My time is precious, and so is yours.

I am building a structured process to help you completely reclaim your focus, rewire your brain, and take back the years of your life your phone will rob from you.

All without having to move to a cabin in the woods, delete your apps or pay for an app blocker.

I’ll be testing the frameworks live and sharing the raw insights right here.

If you want to get the early chapters, track the experiment, and be the first to get access to the complete system when it drops, make sure you’re on the free subscriber list.

Don’t let the algorithm win another year. Join the journey.

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If you are new to the platform or have been posting into the void for a while, welcome!

I wanted to delay posting this because I am not an expert on Substack growth and only recently hit this number.

But I was once in your position and would have appreciated this advice way sooner so I did not want to delay it.

When I first discovered this platform

1. I was baffled that a platform existed primarily for deep thinkers and readers

2. There are monetisation features built into the app

I had left a job in finance I thought would be great fit for me but soon realised selling insurance is not my true calling in life.

As time went on, I felt more and more distant from who I was.

I decided to reconnect with my inner child through writing and posted to my heart’s content.

However, being new to the platform only for a couple of weeks, I did not gain any subscribers.

I thought I was not meant to be a writer because nobody was interacting with my work.

Though I was discouraged, I decided to adopt a different mindset instead.

My goal was to simply keep writing even if no one was watching.

If not for others, at least it would make young me proud.

That was a big enough reason to keep going.

That complete detachment is probably what helped me stay consistent while having fun writing.

I told myself I would not write about Substack growth because the beauty of this platform lies in the genuine sensitivity, openness and diversity of the people and their work.

I love that.

But the thing is there might be a reason you’re posting it on here instead of writing your thoughts on one of those cute journals with a padlock and a little key.

Whatever brought you here — monetising writing, building a following, or sharing about a topic you had struggles with — this is for you.

Maybe you’ve seen creators post ‘How I earned (5-6 figures) in 3 months on Substack’ or ‘How I went from zero to 100k followers’.

Sure, these posts give the juicy tips on how to get there but are a bit too out of reach for some when just starting out.

Before you run a marathon, try running a half-marathon first.

If that’s too hard, run a 10k. If that’s too hard run a 5k. You get the gist.

If you want to go from zero to 50+ subscribers, keep reading.

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1. Notes is your best friend.

This is the scroll-section similar to TikTok’s FYP or Insta’s home page. This is where content with high-engagement meets fresh eyes.

Post on here 1-5 times a day depending on how consistent you can be.

The key is not a certain number of daily notes but how consistent you can be in posting x number of notes.

So find a number that works for you and stick to that, don’t stress on posting more.

2. Connect with your audience pleasee

Showing up consistently is only half of it.

This might be where I went wrong at first.

This is social media.

The algorithm rewards engagement with your posts in the following order.

Notes values shares, then comments, then likes.

People tend to chase the likes but those are just vanity metrics.

Write content that is share-able and comment-able.

‘Dear Substack’ posts are great for engagement (through comments and restacks)

Look at a few creators from your niche and see what they write.

Re-write it in a way that suits your voice.

Observations and hot takes might be great for engagement (through likes).

They convey what you are about, but are more for your current audience to connect with. Not so much to reach new people.

Not every single note will perform well, even notes that connect with the audience.

Do not be discouraged.

Instead, use this as data for your future notes on what works and does not.

3. Find your niche and don’t stress about it

Once you’re showing up and engaging, here’s what makes people actually stay.

You might have noticed this is the 3rd point and not the first.

Many people tell you to find your niche before doing anything else.

Personally, I got stressed trying to define this which made me want to stop writing. I’m someone who does not like to be boxed in.

The thing is many huge creators believe in choosing 2-3 main pillars for your writing, that may or may not be related to each other.

My niche: I break down our ancestors’ lifestyles — how they eat, work, rest, love and find meaning — and to bring back even a fraction of it into modern life.

For you it might look like:

• AI + Design

• Exercise + Psychology

• Sports + Branding

• Art + Business Strategy

• Finance + Oil and Gas

The list is endless.

Formulate your personal taco spice mix.

What is special about your spice mix?

Why is it important?

Why should I cook with it and not somebody else’s spice mix?

If you have a very clear niche, make sure all these 3 are included in your bio.

1. Who you write for (imagine them as a person sitting in front of you)

2. What you write about (get really specific → finance → early retirement → early retirement for female entrepreneurs in their 20s)

3. Short CTA (what you want them to do on your page)

If you are not clear about your niche, that is okay.

Follow the format above loosely and as you write more, you will get a gist of where your strengths lie, what you like to write about and what clicks for your audience.

I would give you more tips but this is sufficient to gain your first 50 subscribers.

The reason I write is to simplify life and cut through the noise.

I don’t want to overload people with information when there is already an abundance of information.

You don’t need 10,000 followers to matter on here. You need 50 people who would love to hear from you.

From there, you build trust with your audience and more importantly with yourself, to keep writing.

When you prove to yourself that’s possible, it is much easier to keep going.

I write about simplifying life using psychology, philosophy and ancient wisdom that nobody else is digging up anymore.

If you've tried the routines and read the books and still feel like something's missing, subscribe below. That's exactly who I write for.

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On some days even after sleeping for 9 hours, I wake up with my mind still foggy, carrying the weight of yesterday.

After doomscrolling for the better part of the past 5 years, I am learning to live life offline.

Every time I step outside, all I see are eyeballs glued to phones.

Though I felt ‘unproductive’ at first, staring outside the window on trains or buses, I realised I am not being anymore ‘productive’ through my screen.

With the exception of writing or reading full-length books, of course.

By using the method below, I can safely say I have gained back:

• 2 hours each day that would have gone to God knows what on my phone

• Waking up feeling more rested for the same amount of time slept

• Feeling slightly more optimistic towards my life

• Better self-control

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

The modern world has gotten the definition of rest so wrong

The Romans conceptualised time as having two modes:

• negotium (business, civic duty, active work)

• otium (deliberate withdrawal from public duties to engage in restorative and enriching activities such as philosophical contemplation, literary composition, and self-cultivation, rather than idleness).

Otium did not mean no work. It meant putting aside political or career gains to focus on the progress of the soul.

This looked like time devoted to writing, philosophy, reading, meditation, contemplation, research, friendship, health practices, time spent in nature, exercise or solitude.

Seneca stressed that by doing the otium part well, it was much easier to be truly rested and return back to work.

Ironically, negotium meant ‘not leisure’, meaning when you are working, you are switching off your state of rest.

In order to truly be productive, you must first be restored.

What we’ve been doing is keeping the negotium (work) and shunning the otium (rest).

When we do rest, it is often through shallow distraction (scrolling or streaming).

Neither of these are otium.

True rest is achieved actively (e.g. writing, nature, friends), when it has nothing to do with your output.

They understood that true R&R came from being doing activities that nourished their soul and mind.

The important takeaway is that rest is our natural state of being, akin to a full bank account.

Working is withdrawing from the bank account. Resting is depositing in your bank account.

The ideal state is to strike a balance between work and rest, depositing and withdrawing, according to Seneca.

No wonder sleep alone does not feel like true rest these days.

When so much of your waking hours involve withdrawing from your bank account deep into the negative, you are indebted to future you.

The lack of active rest compounds and eventually leads to burnout.

Of course, if work is demanding, it is not your fault.

But it can be an opportunity to rest more actively instead of passively.

Do not want use this as an optimisation tool.

Simply incorporate it into your life and go about your day.

When you do feel more worked than rested, maybe it is time to look at what can be done differently when you are not working.

It looks different for everyone. Someone who is introverted like me loves a solo coffee+library date. Someone who is extroverted might want to head to an event to spend time with like-minded folks.

Formulate your special recipe to feel more rested and inspired when you are not working.

Remember, the Romans only had leisure and ‘not leisure’. Use work as the method to fund your leisure, because that is really what adds to your invisible bank account.

Imagine someone who has never set foot in a gym leaning over your shoulder while you do squats, telling you your form is wrong.

Or someone who has never touched a pan hovering over you in the kitchen, whispering which spices to add while you cook.

You would find it irritating at best and harmful at worst. You would probably smile politely and ignore them. Or tell them to f*ck off, depending on who you are.

Yet, when it comes to the actual decisions of our lives — who to date, what work to pursue, what business to start or where to move — we hand that power over freely. We consult articles written by strangers on Google or our trusty Chatbot before really thinking it through ourselves. The podcast host who has never met you sways your actions when they don’t even know your name. When did it become normal to consult everyone else before we make a decision, instead of quietly sitting with ourselves for five minutes?

The answer the search bar spits out layers on top of your confusion, dressed up as guidance.

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Self-trust is at an all-time low.

We have built an entire ecosystem around the idea that the answer is always somewhere out there, in someone else, behind a paywall, on a shelf, in a five-step framework.

We have mistaken access to information for access to wisdom.

We have mistaken other people’s certainty for our own.

The harder truth is that for most of the decisions that actually matter in your life, nobody else has the answer for.

Even though a dear family member or friend may be wise or well-meaning, but they are not you.

They did not live in your body, grow up in your family, carry your specific, irreducible history. They did not think the thoughts or feel the feelings you do when you imagine choosing one path over another. Making one major life decision over another. Choosing to drink tea that day instead of coffee because your bowels are irritable that morning.

The best they can do is answer you based on their own experience. The worst they can do is lead you down the wrong path.

As for the Internet, the best it can do is point you to the right path in a second. The worst it can do is overload you with information, suck away your time and leave you more confused than before.

Massive difference between the upside and downside yet it does not hold enough weight.

The Quakers quietly figured this out in the 1600s.

The Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, built their entire theology on one radical premise: every person already has access to inner guidance. There is no priest required. No intermediary or external authority who knows better than you do about your own life.

When a Quaker faced a significant problem they did not go to their community for answers. They went for something more useful.

They called it the Clearness Committee.

A small group of trusted people would gather around the person seeking clarity for several hours. They had read a short written description of the situation beforehand. They came prepared, present, but with one unusual instruction.

They were not allowed to give advice.

No “if I were you…” or “what you should do is…” Or reassuring anecdotes from their own lives.

The only thing permitted was honest, open, probing questions.

Questions like:

What feels most alive when you imagine this path?

What are you most afraid of finding out?

Or more interestingly,

What colours do you associate with Option A and Option B?

This helps the person answering understand something on a different level they could not have articulated before.

The entire practice was built on a belief so quietly radical it still feels startling to consider now.

The person already has the answer.

The community’s only job is to ask questions honest enough that the person can finally hear themselves think.

The best therapist I ever had never told me what to do.

I know this from the inside.

The therapist who was most helpful for me was also the one who gave me the least. She almost never told me what to do.

The only time she did, I asked her directly for advice and she reluctantly gave me her opinion and told me I would have been capable of figuring it out myself. The reason I was impatient for answers was because I was judgemental towards myself for not knowing the answer.

She knew the difference between

When I needed an outside perspective vs.

When I was trying to outsource the discomfort of not yet knowing.

The opposite is also true. Unsolicited advice, even well-meaning advice from people who love you, often produces a very specific feeling.

It feels like a wall going up because something in you registers that the other person has stopped listening and started solving your problem for you. It makes you feel as if you don’t know enough, or can be given the space to figure it out for yourself.

The Clearness Committee understood this and built the protection against it into the architecture of the whole thing.

What this means for you, without a committee

Parker J. Palmer, the educator who brought the Clearness Committee to secular audiences in his book A Hidden Wholeness, described the posture this way:

You probably do not have a Clearness Committee. The type that would sit with you for three hours asking nothing but honest questions without giving you their opinion.

But the practice points to something you can still do, right now.

The next time you are in confusion — about a decision, a relationship, a direction — before you open a new Chrome tab or ask anyone anything, try asking yourself this one question:

What do you most want someone else to ask you right now?

Imagine you held yourself in the palm of your two hands, with the gentleness you wish someone held you.

Majority of the time, all I needed was to be asked the right question. And a lot of the time, I already knew what it was deep down. I just needed to stop reaching outward long enough to let myself ask it.

You will be wrong sometimes and the answer that surfaces will be incomplete. That is okay. You may need external sources for validation eventually, it is not that you cannot go to people for their advice.

It is a suggestion to build a relationship to your inner voice.

Hear yourself first. Then, if you still need it, go outward.

What you will likely find is that the need to ask someone else diminishes because you start trusting who you are.

The Quakers built an entire practice around the assumption that you already know. They just created the conditions for you to hear it.

You can start creating those conditions yourself, in sixty seconds, before you key it into a search bar.

With greater self-trust, you build your confidence, your voice and capabilities in navigating life.

You stop needing external validation in order to make small or big life decisions.

You might be surprised what you can find within when you stop giving your power away to everyone else.

I was inspired by the Tujia women’s ‘bride-crying’ tradition where the bride cries with her female family members and friends about 2-4 weeks before her wedding. Also, it reminded me a little of that one group crying scene from Midsommar (you know the one I’m talking about).

I am not a bride but I thought it would be interesting to try out anyway, given I am having a quarter-life crisis while robots are taking over. Fun-employed activity #1284.

Thirty days. Five minutes a day to start, same time each evening, no agenda except to show up.

Week one was mostly just staring into space, running through my to-do list in my head. It wasn’t exactly the ancestral catharsis I had in mind.

Week two, it got uncomfortable and the floodgates opened, slowly at first, then all at once. I cried about past bad decisions, breakups, how I wasn’t good enough, might have disappointed my parents and a couple of days for no reason.

Until my period started two days later and that made sense. But the more surprising thing was what happened outside the five minutes.

I started crying at random points during the day, without warning, at nothing in particular. It was as if scheduling the crying had given grief a door it hadn’t had before, and now it was using it freely.

And I let myself. Being in that awkward mid-20s phase where everything you thought you would’ve achieved has not quite happened yet, there is a lot of emotional backlog.

I also noticed something strange in week two: I dreaded it. Not because it was painful, but because I kept running up against how deep the stigma goes.

When was the last time you cried in front of someone? Doing it alone is one thing. The idea of being witnessed felt like a different thing entirely.

By week three, something had shifted. I found myself looking forward to it. Though I’ll admit, scheduling time to cry sat somewhere between a wellness practice and a low-grade productivity routine.

There is something faintly dystopian about optimising your grief the same way you optimise your skincare routine or your morning meditation. And yet. It felt like mine. The one part of the day that was genuine, simple and felt like an emotional orgasm.

The part of the challenge I could not do was invite a dear woman from my life. I thought about it and then probably cried about that too at how much I wanted it.

I wondered if there anyone in my life I could invite to do this challenge, and right now, no. It made me think about the female friendships I wanted to cultivate more in my life. I do feel that if women came together and did this more often, it would be cathartic, intimate and really bittersweet.

The Tujia built the community into the ritual as a given. We have to rebuild it from scratch, which turns out to be its own kind of grief.

By week four, I had run out of tears and just say down and meditated. It felt like all that needed to be processed had been done so (at least to my knowledge). My tear ducts were dehydrated.

The Tujia believed you cannot fully arrive at a new life if you have not properly left the old one.

They had a song for the mother, sisters, grandmother, ancestors, and even one for the matchmaker the bride resented. At the end of the 30 days, her emotions were processed and she could move forward.

By week four, I had nothing left to cry about. The experience is different for anyone and the key is to tailor it to you. I do not feel it resolved every single problem in life but it has made me feel more free at other moments of the day when I am not crying and that really says something. There is a version of you on the other side of thirty days of this that is less emotionally constipated and more honest.

What transition are you in right now that you haven’t given yourself permission to grieve?

There’s a pattern you’ve probably noticed in yourself, even if you’ve never named it.

You watch a video. Something complex — a political take, a philosophical argument, a piece of news that is thought-provoking. Before you’ve even finished watching, before the idea has had a single second to settle, your thumb is already moving.

You’re scrolling the comments. You’re seeing what everyone else thinks. You’re outsourcing the processing before the processing has even begun.

Or maybe you’re the one commenting. Fast and decisive, equating the speed of your response to your experience with the topic.

The real question is, when was the last time you let an idea just sit in you, unshared, unvalidated, uncommented on, long enough to actually become yours?

Because around 500 BCE, a mathematician in ancient Greece decided that the compulsive need to respond was the single biggest obstacle to genuine learning.

He made his students shut up for five years.

The Man Who Knew You’d Never Learn With Your Mouth Open

Pythagoras (yes, that Pythagoras, the triangle guy) ran what was essentially a philosophical commune in southern Italy around 530 BC. It wasn’t a school in any sense we’d recognise today but closer to a mystery cult, complete with initiation rites, dietary rules, and a strict internal hierarchy.

When new initiates joined, they entered a probationary tier called the Akousmatikoi, which translates roughly to the “listeners.”

For a period of up to five years, the “listeners” were permitted to attend lectures, absorb teachings, sit in the presence of ideas, listening to these lectures behind a curtain.

However, they could not speak, question, or argue with the teachings. Even clarifying questions were not allowed.

They simply had to listen.

Only after this period could they demonstrate that they could receive knowledge without immediately needing to wrestle it into submission with their own opinions. Only then, were they elevated to the Mathematikoi, the active ‘learners’ who could engage, question, and debate with the teachings.

The hierarchy had nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the discipline of not reacting.

Think about what this looks like now. You hear something you disagree with and you say nothing. You hear something brilliant that you want to build on and you say nothing. You sit with the discomfort of an important idea you came up with and have the itch to share for five years, yet you say nothing.

Somewhere in that silence, the thought develops, slowly, fully and completely without contamination from the outside world.

The thing is nobody is doing this anymore.

Silence Is the Thing We’ve Industrialised Out of Existence

We live in an age where your visibility is your currency. Post more, engage more, build in public.

Share your process, your wins, your failures, your morning routine and then only the algorithm will reward you. You are rewarded by the frequency of your visibility.

Somewhere in the last decade, we collectively decided that the person speaking loudest was the one worth listening to.

This makes sense because sharing good ideas has value. A community is built through exchange as nobody learns in a vacuum.

But there’s something darker underneath the “build in public” gospel that we don’t talk about honestly enough. Most of what gets said online are not developed thoughts but quick reactions.

The intellectual equivalent of a knee-jerk, the first thing that forms in your mind when you encounter a stimulus, fired outward before it’s had the chance to become anything more complex.

The moment you externalise a thought through a comment or a post, you stop processing it and move on to the next thing to externalise.

The work of sitting with your thoughts is messy, uncomfortable and takes too much time, time that can be used to be more visible, do something more productive or consume the next interesting thing.

You are not to blame as it is something we are all navigating.

The Pythagoreans understood something we’ve structurally forgotten: expression is not the same as understanding. In fact, premature expression is often the enemy of understanding.

The Comment Section Is Making You Intellectually Dependent

How often do you form your own opinion before you seek out someone else’s?

You read an article and you scroll to the comments to see the reaction before you’ve decided if you agree or disagree with the comment, rather than taking in the words of the person who posted the article and formed your own comment which could be shared.

You watch a film and immediately look up what critics said. Maybe you decided to watch it based on what the critics say so that you know whether it is worth your time.

You hear a new argument and, rather than sitting with the discomfort of not-yet-knowing-what-you-think, you reach for the news, Reddit, or whichever forum which is full of people already talking about it.

Rather than a weakness, it is the completely rational response to an environment designed to make you behave this way. Social media platforms are not neutral spaces for intellectual exchange. They are engagement machines geared towards reaction, not reflection.

When stage one of forming an opinion is chronically outsourced, your ability to think without an audience decreases over time. Your inner monologue starts to sound like a comment section where everything gets evaluated on how it would land with people instead of who you are.

The Akousmatikoi didn’t have this problem as they had no idea what their peers thought. There was the idea, the silence around it, and whatever happened in that space is what blossomed over five years.

The Paradox: Saying Less Is the Actually Radical Move

Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone who has bought into the visibility gospel.

There’s a certain type of thinker whose words carry unusual weight. They say less and when they do speak, you naturally lean in. You’ve learned that they don’t speak until they have something worth saying.

This is the direct result of having cultivated the habit of marinating those ideas before releasing them.

The loudest person in the room is almost never the most interesting one. When the modern incentive structure has convinced us that loudness = relevance, it is easy to believe that. However, the right formula is loudness = visibility.

Pythagoras built an entire pedagogical system on the premise that the person who learns to shut up, genuinely, patiently, for an uncomfortably long time, develops a quality of thought that the reactive commentator simply never will.

Silence creates the conditions where an idea can fully metabolise.

You can’t think deeply and perform thinking simultaneously. You have to choose between the two.

What Five Years Becomes in a Modern Life

Obviously, nobody is suggesting you take a vow of silence until 2030. That’s not the point, and you’re not a 6th century BCE Greek initiate.

But there’s a version of this that’s available to you right now, and it’s more confronting than it sounds.

Just this: you are not allowed to leave a comment, reply to a tweet, respond to a take, or post a reaction to anything you’ve consumed. You can read. You can watch. You can listen. But your response stays inside you.

You can reflect, journal about it, let those thoughts marinate, agree with them, disagree with them, label them as truth, label them as nonsense, do whatever you’d like about them, as long as you keep it to yourself.

At the end of 30 days, if you want to, go back and comment on those posts you wanted to comment on when you saw them.

If it sounds trivially easy, try it. What you’ll discover, within the first 48 hours, is how much of your mental activity is oriented around the external loop.

Around formulating the response, the imagined reaction to your reaction. Without that loop, this feels uncomfortable at first.

Some of these posts you wanted to comment on, you will forget about, some of them might keep floating around in your consciousness as they just have nowhere to go.

So they go deeper.

You’ll start noticing what you actually think once the performance of thinking has been removed.

You’ll find yourself disagreeing with people you usually agree with.

You’ll find yourself more interested in ideas you’d normally dismiss quickly.

You’ll notice the moment you want to reach for someone else’s take because you haven’t formed your own yet. For the first time, instead of reaching, you will wait.

This is what the Akousmatikoi were being trained in. Silence is the prerequisite for genuine intellectual ownership. You cannot truly hold a belief until you’ve held it alone first.

The Thing Worth Sitting With

The Pythagorean silence does not serve as a punishment or asceticism for its own sake. This is how real knowledge forms — slowly, privately, and in the absence of the crowd.

We’ve built a world that is structurally hostile to that process where every platform, notification, comment section is engineered to short-circuit it.

The goal is often to monetise the noise before the thought has had the chance to become anything.

The wild thing is that we’ve largely accepted this as the natural order when it is a choice we’re making by default. Similar to most defaults, the alternative only becomes visible once you deliberately interrupt it.

So here’s the question the Akousmatikoi had to sit with for five years, and the one worth leaving you with now:

If the answer doesn’t come quickly, that might be exactly the point.