Welcome to the June newsletter of The Wellbeing Equation. June brings together PTSD Awareness Month and Men’s Mental Health Month, two observances that both point toward forms of suffering other people may not immediately recognize.

This is why I find myself thinking about what happens when we go through painful, stressful, or overwhelming experiences before we have had time to understand what we have been through.

In some ways, when we begin to suffer and cannot yet explain what is going on within us, we are brought back into contact with one of the earliest conditions of being human. Before we can understand ourselves, we first need some way of feeling comforted and safe in our body. The search is not only to figure out what is happening to us. It is also to find some way of helping our body feel safe enough to stay with what is happening inside us, before we can better understand it and perhaps put words to our experience.

When we are suffering or not feeling well, our body can at times be the first part of us to know. The first sign may be that we feel less at ease with ourselves, and a bit less comfortable in our own skin.

We may feel unusually tired, have a harder time sleeping, or notice headaches or body aches when too much stress has accumulated. At other times, we might become more easily agitated than we would like. We might also become jumpy or overly cautious. It can be easy to dismiss these reactions as having a bad day or a particularly difficult week. But they often suggest that our body is still carrying too much stress, stress we may not fully understand or have had enough time to process.

We may pay too little attention to our discomfort, or try to explain the discomfort away. In my case, I can tell myself I’m too busy: Bronce, you have a lot on your plate today and a lot of people to help. Before I know it, I can move through my day without giving myself enough time and space to pay close attention to how I actually feel in my body.

When I do slow down, I sometimes find that my body is still carrying some of the stress, even when the stressful situation has passed. I may not immediately understand why I continue to feel stressed, only that my body does not feel as calm or comfortable as I would like. In these moments, I try to help my body slow down so I can feel calm and centered again. Once I feel more settled, I can often understand myself a little better and have a clearer sense of what I need to help myself.

Though stress can affect many different parts of our lives, I find one particular aspect especially important: how stress can change our relationship to ourselves. When stress continues, we may not only respond differently to the situations around us. We may also become more critical of ourselves for how we end up responding. The difficult part is that, after a while, the stress can start to feel like just another part of us.

We may feel ashamed or embarrassed by our irritability, or humbled by not being able to live our lives the way we would like. Over time, this can make it harder to feel connected to ourselves and to enjoy who we are when we are more at ease with ourselves.

And while I help people explore and contend with the stress of everyday living, I’ve also wrestled with this in my own life. I know, in a more personal way than I would like, the painful experience of losing contact with parts of myself when I have been dealing with too much stress at once.

It began, as it did for many of us, during the pandemic. I remember being in my house, inside the strange bubble so many of us found ourselves living in, away from extended family, ordinary routines, and the daily habits that helped life feel familiar. No gym. No office. No seeing my patients face to face. How was I going to help the people I cared about without the old-fashioned, face-to-face human contact that sits at the heart of so many warm, caring relationships?

So there I was, beginning telehealth of all things. More and more people just kept calling to see me, while my cat TomTom sat on the couch and I on my recumbent bike. And somewhere in the middle of this strange new life, I remember having the thought: you aren’t going to be able to see everyone. Maybe you should write a book. But you don’t know how to write a book. It’s okay you can learn. That is how it all started.

And I was right. I couldn’t see everyone. So I began getting up in the early morning hours to write and work out, while still trying to keep up with the rest of my life. The words poured out of me as more and more people called.

Soon, I had to begin turning people away, and I kept writing with even more urgency, out of a desire to help and also out of my own mounting guilt. Where I came from, you did not turn people away when they came knocking at your door, suffering in spirit and in need of a little relief and kindness to help with their healing.

In the dead of winter, after ten months of the pandemic, I was seeing patients early in the morning and into the evening without getting outside in the sun. My anxiety and stress were still mounting, so I decided to begin hiking on my lunch break. It meant extending my break by an hour, seeing fewer people, and making less income. But it also meant less stress and a way to ease my nervous system in the middle of the day.

By the time the book was finished, it had ballooned to somewhere around two hundred and forty thousand words. I eventually found an editing company in New York, and the person I spoke with told me that I had three books’ worth of material and would need to cut it down.

Then came the cost of editing a manuscript that large, and after that another unfamiliar phrase: author platform. I remember thinking, what is an author platform? Then came the book proposal. What is a book proposal? Then came the question of finding an agent. You need a book agent to write a book? And how does a person even get one of those?

Over time, the book became its own kind of second job, while I was still making my living as a full-time therapist. I kept writing in the morning, working during the day, hiking in the afternoon when I could, and in my “free time” trying to build the author platform everyone kept telling me was all important. I stopped working out in the morning so I could write more, and my anxiety and irritability kept mounting. Eventually, I went back into therapy because I didn’t like how irritable I had become.

After two years of trying to figure out the agent process, and after seventy-five query letter rejections, I finally signed with an agent. Not long after that, my father had a heart attack, later broke his hip, and I found myself helping him look for an assisted living place. Then the book proposal was finally submitted, with no guarantee of a contract.

Over time, I could feel the emotional and physical cost of all of this building. It was not that my work as a therapist or my work on the book had stopped feeling meaningful. In many ways, helping others had become even more meaningful and personal than ever.

But I was no longer experiencing myself in the ways I had worked so hard to become: calmer, more centered, more self-assured, and kinder. I had given up parts of my morning routine. I had once again become a younger version of myself, less confident and more irritable than I wanted to be.

My life had become its own kind of repetition: my book, my patients, my father, and the hikes I could still manage in between, all while trying to show up with less stress for the people who come to see me. Somewhere in all of that, I missed the part of me who could go on vacation and simply enjoy my time off. No checking emails. No feeling the need to keep up with the people engaging with me online. No feeling constantly connected to the process of getting my book published. The stress I had been dealing with for so long made it harder to enjoy myself, even when I finally had a break and time away.

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My body had been under too much stress for too long. I needed to take seriously how much that stress had worn me down, not only physically, but in my ability to stay connected to the parts of myself that I enjoy.

The harder question, then, is how we can begin finding our way back to the parts of ourselves that help us enjoy our lives again, even in the midst of what have become, for many of us, ordinary, difficult, and stressful lives.

For me, I still need a break from the stress I have been under, and another chance to go on vacation to see if I can actually enjoy myself this time. But I have also been trying to look back at the situations that helped create the problem in the first place and reverse engineer them a bit. I have moved back to exercising at six in the morning instead of writing for hours before work. I am trying to be online a little less and respond a little less quickly, my apologies. And I have gone back to spending a half hour or so reading an actual paperback or hardcover book, the old-fashioned way, for sheer pleasure.

I have become too focused on getting to an outcome, and not focused enough on putting time and energy into enjoying myself in the process. Over the weekend, I went out to celebrate my book proposal being sent to a few publishing houses. The book is not published yet, and there is still no guarantee of a contract.

I went to a new restaurant, ordered one of my favorite meals for the first time in years, and had a glass of red wine with dinner for the first time in four or five years. I also left my phone at home so I would not be distracted. When I got home, there was a message from my brother letting me know my father was back in the ICU with kidney and heart problems.

The timing was hard to miss: after waiting this long to celebrate anything related to the book, I was glad I had gone out, but it was hard to enjoy the rest of the evening, and I felt a little guilty for leaving my phone at home.

But after six years of writing, building an author platform, trying to make my way through the publishing process, and contending with the ongoing stress of my father’s health, what I failed to realize is that I had been waiting for a contract, or even the published book itself, before I celebrated the milestones I had already accomplished. But there may always be another worry around the corner, waiting for me when I get home. This made me think I need to carve out more moments where I stand a chance of enjoying myself, even with everything I have going on in my life.

Maybe, then, the important question is not how we escape the stress of modern life altogether. Maybe the question is how we learn to notice when stress has made it harder to stay connected to the parts of ourselves we enjoy, and what it takes for those parts of ourselves to return.

With this in mind, here are a few practices that may help us respond to our stress so we can come back to ourselves in ways we prefer.

1. Regulate Your Body Before You Reflect.

When we feel irritable, anxious, or overwhelmed and do not know why, we can ask whether we need to help our body slow down before we push ourselves to make sense of what is happening. When our physiology remains activated, it becomes harder to self-reflect and think clearly. This might mean moving our body, getting outside, meditating, or stepping away from the screen long enough to let our nervous system slow down a bit. The point is that we do not have to resolve everything at once. Once we are less activated, it often becomes easier to think about and better understand why we feel the way we do.

2. Bring Back One Thing That Gives Back to You.

When we are stressed and overly busy, we can give up the very things that help us feel less stressed. Maybe it is morning exercise, reading before bed for pleasure, getting outside on a lunch break, or taking time to talk with friends and loved ones. If you have had to give up something that used to give back to you in a healthy way, pick one of your favorites and put it back in a realistic way. Reintroduce it slowly and pay attention to whether you begin to feel less stressed while doing it. Sometimes taking one small step can help us feel a little more like ourselves again and give us back some sense of control.

3. Choose Enjoyment on Purpose.

When we have been contending with too much stress for too long, enjoyment can become something we keep postponing. We tell ourselves we will enjoy ourselves later, once the outcome has been reached or once we feel less stressed. But sometimes we have to put time and effort into enjoying ourselves before our nervous system has had enough time to recover. Start with something simple: something you used to enjoy, or something new you have wanted to try. Do not worry about getting it right. Try it, and then notice whether it helps you feel a little more connected to yourself in a way you actually enjoy.

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In Closing,

Perhaps the difficulty is not simply that too much stress leaves us worn down, but that we can become accustomed to continuing under stressful conditions, even when we are doing ourselves harm. What often begins with the feeling that we are merely doing what has to be done can, over time, make it harder to stay connected to the parts of ourselves we enjoy.

👇 Comment below: Where in your life have you been continuing under conditions that may have quietly cost you more than you’ve been willing to admit?

With care,

Bronce

👉 If you’d like to read more about me and my Wellbeing Equation journey, please visit my website: www.broncerice.com and my Substack About Page.

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From the moment we are born, human life seems shaped, at times almost driven, by a peculiar kind of search going on within us. So much so, in fact, that much of our lives is spent trying to understand what, exactly, we are searching for. Some of us will spend a lifetime grappling with the nature of God. Others may spend years looking back toward who they were before their suffering began. Still others may wonder why, as life goes on, we feel compelled to change something in our past that cannot be undone.

Searches like these are often placed under the larger idea that human beings are meaning-making creatures. Of course, meaning has its place. But for me, it is not where the human story begins. Before we can make meaning of something, anything, in life, we first have to find what becomes meaningful to us.

But early on, this creates a dilemma. How do we begin to figure out what deserves our attention in a world we do not yet understand? How do we know what will become important before we have had enough life experience to know ourselves clearly? This is where the search in life often becomes especially difficult: we are not born knowing what will later become meaningful to us.

Part of the problem is that, from the beginning, we are surrounded by endless possibilities that may interest us, while other people are also telling us what we should pay attention to. To complicate matters further, what helps one person find their way in life may not help another person find theirs. This is why we cannot simply follow what is meaningful to others and expect it to become the answer for us. At some point, if we are not to feel disconnected from what helps us feel more alive, the question of how to go about living our lives has to become a more inward and individual form of exploration.

Feeling Emotionally Disconnected from Ourselves

Near the start of the pandemic, John had been feeling more uneasy and restless than he cared to admit. His wife had noticed it too, and suggested he speak with someone. At first, John politely brushed off her suggestion, telling her it was probably just the added stress of the pandemic. Then one afternoon, he found himself watching an old episode of As the World Turns.

After that afternoon, he went looking for old episodes of the soap opera and eventually bought a box set on DVD. John decided to call me after his wife came home from an afternoon of shopping and found him still in his bathrobe, unshowered, after he had watched four episodes of the show. What disturbed him was not that he had spent his afternoon watching television, but that he felt angry with his wife for interrupting him while he was doing so. Until then, he had been able to treat the whole thing as an odd, harmless distraction. But in that moment, he knew something else was going on, even though he did not understand what it was.

When we began talking about it, John felt foolish saying all of this out loud. He also felt confused by why he felt compelled to keep watching the show, especially because the more he watched, the more numb he began to feel.

After some time passed, John mentioned, almost in passing, that this particular soap opera had often been on in the house when he was a boy. His mother used to watch it, and when the episode was over, she would go outside and play with him in the backyard. She had been a single mother, and John did not get a lot of time with her while he was growing up. But those afternoons stayed with him: the two of them playing frisbee, catch, and hide-and-seek, both of them happy in those moments. His mother had died a few years earlier, and John did not talk about her much.

John had a good life. He loved his children, cared about his marriage, and took pride in his work as an architect. His outer life, and the time he had put into building it, was not the problem for John. It brought him a great deal of comfort and enjoyment. But when the pandemic hit and John found himself alone with himself inside, something felt off in a way he had a hard time describing.

While John missed aspects of his childhood, his childhood had also been marked by periods of financial worry and anxieties about being left alone at a young age while his mother worked two jobs to make ends meet. What he missed was not childhood, but the feeling of being free for a while, of playing without anything being asked of him, and feeling happy with his mother while she was still alive.

Without fully knowing it, John was trying to find his way back to the sense of freedom and play he remembered from childhood. The difficulty was that the show brought him closer to this memory while also creating the opposite experience within him: he felt deadened inside. It left him longing for a sense of freedom and aliveness in his present life, though he didn’t quite understand this at the time.

For many of us, as with John, we sometimes have to look far back into our past to remember when feeling alive did not feel so difficult. The painful part often comes when we are surrounded by people we love, or doing things we usually enjoy, and still feel disconnected from ourselves in the process.

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Bringing Aliveness into Being

The irony is that many of us only begin to pay closer attention to our aliveness after we have gone without it for too long. By then, our health may have already been affected, or our suffering may have increased to the point where it becomes harder to bear. The harder question, however, is often not only what might help us feel alive again, but how we begin to participate with life in ways that help bring that aliveness back into being.

Though the landscape of aliveness has many ways to enter it, one central way is through longing, because longing is often what remains when aliveness goes missing within us for too long.

But longing has a way of complicating what we think we are searching for, because it is tied to desire and a host of other feelings at the same time. It can draw our attention toward a part of life, whether in our past or in some not-yet-experienced future, that seems, at least from a distance, to touch us more deeply than life currently does. And yet longing may point not only toward what actually happened, but toward what we wished had happened, or what we wish could still be brought into our present life. What we are searching for may appear, at first, as a wish to return to another version of ourselves or to move toward a version of life we have not yet known.

The difficulty is that we can spend long periods of our lives emotionally organized around a past self, a lost relationship, a wished-for future, or a fantasy of another life. The feeling may be real. The sadness may be real. The ache may be real. But if longing remains tied to what we can no longer experience, or to what may never come into being, it can keep us intensely alive and emotionally attached to what is absent without helping us discover what form that feeling could take in our present-day life.

And yet longing is not only a problem. If we can listen to our longing without letting it keep us solely emotionally organized around what is absent, it can begin to clarify what it is we want, or think we want. In this sense, longing often carries both hope and motivation within it, and without some connection to these, life can become even harder to bear.

This is where longing can become useful: when we stop using it only as evidence of what is missing in our lives and begin to receive it as a rare form of inward listening. If longing points us backward or forward, the work of listening eventually has to return us to who we are in this present moment, because whatever aliveness we are searching for has to become possible within our innermost experience. In this way, longing can become a doorway into a deeper form of listening, helping us hear what our spirit is asking us to bring into existence.

In John’s case, this meant understanding his longing not only as a feeling related to what was missing, but as a question about what could still be brought into his present-day life. The memory of playing with his mother with abandon and enjoyment, tied as it was to As the World Turns, did not mean the show could give him back what he was missing.

At first, he did not understand why he kept going back to the show. What was difficult for him to hear was the connection between the show and what had once followed it: his mother finishing the episode, the two of them going outside, and the feeling of play and freedom that he did not have in his current life. The harder question for John was how he could bring this aspect of life back into existence for himself now that his mother was gone. Maybe this would mean playing outside with his children and seeing whether some part of that older feeling of freedom could return, or maybe it would mean speaking with me and his wife about what he missed most about his mother.

This is where the search becomes deeply personal and individual. We may be guided by other people’s accounts of how they find their way toward their own aliveness, but we cannot simply borrow another person’s way and expect it to become ours. Other people can help us see possibilities for our own lives, but they cannot finally tell us what will bring our own spirit more fully into being.

I can say that, for me, aliveness has something to do with love and affection, and with being able to meet the world with some sense of awe, but saying this does not tell another person where their own aliveness will be found, or what their own spirit may be asking of them. Nor can I do the work of finding it and bringing it into existence for them. Each of us still has to listen for what, in our own life, brings us closer to the feeling of being inwardly alive.

And if we learn, over time, to listen with this inward ear, we may begin to sense that our aliveness is not only something we feel deep within ourselves, but something that asks us to give it expression in the wider currents of life itself.

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Living in Alignment with Our Inner Aliveness

What I mean by giving it expression is that what we discover inwardly eventually has to become something we can connect with and begin living in relation to, or it risks remaining something we understand only at a distance, without becoming part of a deeper and more meaningful experience of feeling alive. But before we can do this in any conscious, thought-through way, we often have to feel some sense of aliveness within ourselves and begin asking not only what this feeling is, but what helps produce it to begin with.

The risk, as we see with John, is that once some sense of aliveness appears and then fades, we may not stop to ask what happened to the connection. For if life unfolds through movements and phases, our experience of aliveness ebbs and flows as well. In this sense, part of what helps us sustain this inner aliveness is learning not only how to find our place within the life around us, but how to stay in contact with the life moving within us.

And yet when we lose contact with this inner aliveness, we often come into contact with one of the harder facets of being human: our own suffering. To live with aliveness is also to know what it is to lose contact with it. For many of us, when this happens, we begin searching for what has gone missing.

Some of us come to this search through spirituality, others through healing, and still others through a desire for greater wholeness. And some of us, like myself, come to understand this search through a combination of all three. But however we come to this search, and whatever language we use, part of what we are trying to understand is what helps us feel less divided from ourselves and more able to participate in our own aliveness again.

These are not answers that can simply be handed down to us by someone we believe knows more about life than we do. They have to be tested in the life we are actually living. This does not mean we have to do the work alone. Other people, with their own traditions and ideas about how to live life, may help guide us, but they also carry the risk that we use them to replace the more difficult task of listening for, and figuring out, what is true for us within ourselves.

Still, I can point you toward what has helped me, and what seems to help many others: being out in nature, connecting with a wider sense of awe, turning inward through movement or meditation, focusing on gratitude, kindness, and love, becoming part of a larger community, giving time to what we are passionate about, and learning how to live with more purpose and intention.

But none of this can be taken up abstractly, as though these ideas exist separate from how we go about living our lives. What does gratitude mean when we are angry or hurt? What does becoming a better person look like if we are driven mostly by fear, pain, or the pressure to make more money? What helps me feel alive may not be what helps you feel alive, and vice versa, and what helps you feel alive may not be what anyone around you would choose or recognize as important. This is where the search becomes much more difficult and more personal, because each of us has to find out what these ideas mean to us, and how they do or do not fit into our own lives.

And so the search often becomes more meaningful and, over time, a touch easier when we are willing to listen to the different parts of ourselves that contribute to our sense of aliveness. Part of the work is learning to listen for what we most deeply hope for and desire, while also asking whether what we are drawn to is good for us in mind, body, and spirit. This kind of listening asks us to discern whether what we are drawn toward is keeping us organized around our suffering or helping us move closer to what helps us feel alive. This is how I understand alignment: as learning how to live in closer contact with the parts of ourselves, and the parts of life, that help us feel alive and become healthier and more fully ourselves.

Part of the struggle in life is that, at times, we may already know what will help us feel better, but still find ourselves unable to move toward it in ways we know will help us. At other times, life becomes more difficult because we are not quite sure what will help us feel better, or why we feel as bad as we do. I have found it important to understand both of these human experiences in relation to our aliveness, because suffering can change how we respond to ourselves, to what helps us feel alive, and to the possibility of finding our way back again.

This became part of the work with John: helping him understand how the show was tied to his memory of playing with his mother, and how some part of that older aliveness might find a place in his present-day life. The work was not simply to get John to stop watching the show or explain it away. It meant trying to play more freely with his children and speaking with his wife about what he missed, including his mother, rather than keeping the longing sealed inside a private world he had not fully shared with others or with himself. His past did not have to be repeated exactly; it could help him discover what part of his earlier aliveness could still be experienced in his current life.

Maybe this is the deeper work beneath the search for our aliveness: learning how to listen for what is good for us, and then finding ways, over time, to live more in alignment with what we find. When what is good for us in mind, body, and spirit begins working together in a synergistic way, each part can deepen and support the others, and we may begin to experience a unique kind of aliveness. Others might describe this as a spiritual experience, a form of healing, or even a kind of communion, and in certain ways it taps into aspects of all three. This is what I have come to think of as the spirit of alignment: the unique aliveness that emerges when our mind, body, and spirit begin working together in a way that brings us closer to the sacred dimensions of life.

Author’s Note

This essay is part of my larger work on The Wellbeing Equation, where I explore how each of us comes to understand what helps us live with more aliveness, health, and inner connection over time. Here, I am trying to follow one question more deeply: how do we learn to live closer to what helps us feel alive? In this piece, I approach that question through longing, inward listening, and the spiritual dimensions of alignment.

For readers who want to go further into the question of how we come to know what is true within ourselves, my paid essay, On Inward Knowing and What Becomes Ours, explores this related theme more fully.

*If my writing has been useful to you, or to someone you love, and you’d like to support the time and care that goes into it, you can do so here.

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👉 If you’d like to read more about me and my Wellbeing Equation journey, please visit my website: www.broncerice.com and my Substack About Page.

👉 And if you like what you’ve read, please sign up for my newsletter The Wellbeing Equation HERE and spread the word by hitting the restack button ♻️ to share with your community.

👉 I also offer Paid Subscribers access to additional resources and deeper content related to your wellbeing. You can sign up HERE.

Welcome to the May newsletter of The Wellbeing Equation. As May is Mental Health Awareness Month, I find myself thinking as a therapist about the difference between feeling connected to ourselves in ways that feel healthy and alive, and gradually losing contact with that aliveness. I know this not only from my work with patients, but from my own life outside the office. There are times when I wonder what happened to the freer version of myself, the one who could laugh with abandon, feel less burdened by the time I spend online each day, and return to walking in the mountains as I remember doing years ago.

From talking with others about their lives and what they care about most, I know I am not alone in wrestling with this question. What I have come to understand is that many of us only begin asking this question after some part of life has begun to feel overly complicated and difficult to manage. As we move through our lives, our access to that freer version of ourselves tends to wax and wane. We go through periods when enjoyment feels more available to us, followed by others when we feel more stressed, get caught up in deadlines, and keep pushing on toward the next thing on our to-do lists. Sooner or later, if we have not learned how to care for what helps us feel alive, we can end up living more from the stressful demands of adult life.

Part of what makes this so difficult is that many of us already know our lives tend to go better when we take time out of our day to care for ourselves, slow down our physiology, treat ourselves and those around us with more kindness, and feel safer in our mind and in our body. But what modern life teaches us over and over again, at least in my case, is that knowing this does not make us immune to the difficulty of putting it into practice on a regular basis.

We do not have to work at the stressful parts of life in quite the same way. We know stress will continue showing up in one form or another, but what is not guaranteed are the things that give back to us and help us feel better. Those are the things we have to put time and energy into if we hope to live with less stress and difficulty. For those of us who are used to being the person other people depend on, putting these things into practice can be even more complicated.

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I know what it feels like to be counted on, to want to show up for the people I love and care about, to do my part to make the world a better place where I can, and to be responsible in ways that feel true to how I want to live. But like many of us, I have also begun asking myself a difficult question: what happens when my responsibility to others starts rubbing up against my responsibility for myself? I have always had an ambivalent relationship with responsibility, and I find myself wrestling with guilt along the way, because there is never a shortage of people who need care, love, and support.

For me, and I imagine for many of you as well, this is where guilt can become one of the more difficult parts of caring to sort through. Because when someone needs me, I was raised to answer the call. Taking care of myself may be needed, but it can also feel as though I am taking care away from someone else who needs it. And once that feeling enters the picture, it can become harder to take my own needs seriously without feeling as if I am leaving someone else behind.

Of course, I know that we experience guilt for a reason. Sometimes it lets us know we have hurt someone we love or acted in a way that does not sit right with us. But I also know guilt can appear when I begin making room for myself after a long time of not doing so, like pulling back on the amount of engagement here on this platform for personal reasons and for my own mental health. In those moments, my guilt is less about having done something wrong, and more about feeling as though I might be letting someone else down. Sometimes guilt is not only responding to the situation in front of us. It is also carrying older expectations about who we are supposed to be for other people.

More recently, I have found myself wrestling with guilt in a more personal way than I would like. A few months ago, my father broke his hip and needed care in a rehabilitation hospital. I decided to go back home, several states away, to visit him and help figure out what came next, including looking at assisted living and independent living options. Of course, this also meant sorting through the time and money logistics that come with being self-employed, since I do not get paid when I take time off. But after I returned home, my guilt about not being there more and my anger around my relationship with my father growing up felt more intense than I expected. In my own therapy, I have had to acknowledge that caring for my father is not a simple matter of showing up or not showing up. It brings me into contact with older feelings of love and frustration toward him, and with the painful question of my limits around what I will be able to give him.

This situation with my father has left me with an unsettling realization. Guilt can point me toward what I care about, but it cannot tell me how much I am able to give, or whether giving as much as I can is actually wise. For that, I have had to make room for another necessary part of caring: boundaries. Over time, and certainly in my work as a therapist, I have had to wrestle with my own boundaries as a way of being more honest with myself about when caring begins to cost me too much. In this sense, guilt has not only brought discomfort. It has also pointed me toward the hope of providing ongoing care for the people I love without forgetting my own needs or disappearing from my own life.

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From my own therapy, and from providing therapy for other therapists and medical care specialists in my community, I know what the stress of providing care looks like up close. From the outside, being one of the reliable ones in our families and communities can make it look as though we are holding everything together. But holding things together is not the same as having an endless capacity to do so. Over time, the strain of being counted on can begin to wear us down.

As that strain builds, caring can start to feel different. We can still love the people we care for and believe in the work we are doing, but our patience can wear thin and resentment can show up in ways that are hard to ignore. Requests that seem ordinary from the outside can become harder to respond to when something in us is already worn down. This does not mean we have stopped caring, but it may mean that caring itself has begun to take more of a toll on us than we would like to admit.

I think of these changes as signals that I need to reconsider how I am caring for myself or my loved ones. At that point, I have to ask myself whether I am still able to give in the same way, or whether I have pushed myself past my limits. If we do not ask ourselves this question from time to time, we may keep giving in ways that have begun to cost us more than we realize.

Changing the care we offer does not mean we care any less. It may mean the care itself has to change if we are going to keep offering it in a way that is healthier for everyone involved. This is where boundaries enter the picture and become necessary, not to make our guilt disappear, but to help us better see whether continuing to care in the same way is actually helping.

That question also leads us toward another one: whether the way we are caring for others is leaving enough room to support our own everyday needs.

The paradox is that many of us are not confused about what helps us cope with life. We know our lives tend to go better when we sleep enough, move our bodies, eat in ways that support us, spend less time pulled into our screens, and stay connected to the people and places that bring some level of enjoyment to our lives. And yet, somehow, we can “forget” how to put these things in place and keep them there long enough to feel less burdened by stress. Or maybe that is merely how we explain it to ourselves, since once life becomes too full, these are often the first things we let go of, even though their absence can affect the quality of almost everything else in our daily lives.

It can feel as though we are falling behind and need to focus on doing more with less time, until one or more of the basics gets dropped from our daily routine. But dropping the basics does not usually make the harder parts of life disappear. It usually leaves us with fewer resources for responding to them. The irony is that the habits that help us feel better and make life more manageable are often the ones we remove first. Over time, daily life can begin to feel harder than it needs to feel.

This is why I think of the basics as the cornerstone of our health and wellness. They affect our mood, our energy, and how well we are able to function across many areas of our lives.

Part of the problem is that these basic supports are often taken more seriously only after something has gone wrong. We return to the basics when the stress of life has already taken a toll, rather than recognizing that these are often the very supports that help us live better in the first place. In this sense, we can end up treating them the way they have often been treated in parts of modern mental health care: as secondary considerations, or as side notes that receive attention only after our mental health has already been called into question.

With this in mind, here are a few practices that may help the reliable one care for others without losing sight of their own needs.

1. Ask what you can reasonably give.
Before you say yes to the next request, ask yourself what you actually have available to give, if anything. There are times when we need to take care of ourselves before we can take on more. Caring does not mean we automatically answer before we know whether our time, energy, and patience can support what is being asked of us. And if you do not know yet, it is often better to say you need some time to think it over: “Let me sleep on it. I’d like to think it over so I can realistically tell what, if anything, I can commit to right now.”

2. Offer help without taking ownership of the whole problem.
There is a difference between supporting someone and becoming responsible for the entire situation. Before you offer your help, be clear about what you are willing to commit to and what is off the table. And if you are not sure, err on the side of offering less, not more. I would rather have someone be disappointed with me in the moment than later feel annoyed with myself for taking on more than is mine, or more than I can reasonably handle.

3. Use the basics to see how you are doing.
Pay attention to the difference between the days when the basics are in place and the days when they are not. Often, when I am sleeping well, moving my body, and eating in ways that support me, my body and mind tend to respond well. But if I still feel stressed, off, or unlike myself on the days when they are in place, that usually tells me something else may need my attention. Maybe I have taken on too much at once. Maybe I need a medical checkup to see whether something physical is contributing to how I feel. Or maybe I have not been putting the basics in place consistently enough for them to support me in the way they can.

4. Choose one thing that gives back to you and repeat it.
Try to figure out one thing in your day that gives back to you and rarely, if ever, lets you down. Maybe that is a walk around the block on your lunch break, going to the gym after work, taking a quick catnap on the sun porch, or, in my case, hiking for an hour in the woods and saying hi to my woodland friends along the way. For most of us, there is already too much stress in the world around us, and in our technological age, our attention is often pulled away from what actually helps us feel better. This means many of us have to put extra time and attention into the daily habits that give something back to us and help daily life feel less stressful.

🗓 Friday, May 22 | 2:00 PM ET | Substack LIVE: Author Spotlight with Caroline Wilke of Sacred Business Flow

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Caroline is an energy management expert and Master Bioenergetics Practitioner. Through Sacred Business Flow, she helps people bridge the gap between knowing and doing by working with both practical strategy and the deeper patterns that can shape visibility, follow-through, and growth.

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In Closing,

Perhaps the difficulty is not simply that we give too much, but that we have been giving for so long that we have forgotten to ask what we still have left to offer. What begins as showing up for the people we love can, over time, quietly become a way of disappearing from ourselves.

👇 Comment below: Where in your life might guilt be driving your choices more than your actual capacity to give?

With care,

Bronce

Dr. Mehmet Yildiz’s How Tapping Into My Subconscious Mind Changed My Lifeis a wide-ranging and personally reflective exploration of how much of human life is shaped before we become consciously aware of it. The book brings science and lived experience together in a way that helps us think more clearly about the mind beneath awareness.

As a psychoanalyst and psychologist focused on mental health and wellbeing, I found this book especially meaningful because it takes up a subject that sits at the center of my own clinical work. Much of therapy involves helping people bring attention to parts of their inner life that have been influencing them before they can fully recognize what those influences are.

Many people come to therapy because something in their lives feels off, or because something within them does not feel right. They may not yet understand the psychological patterns shaping their lives, even when they can feel the effects of those patterns. What they often do not understand is why these patterns keep repeating, or why they can affect them so deeply.

The book gives us a grounded way to think about the subconscious without reducing it to a vague, hidden force we can never understand. Dr. Yildiz shows how the mind beneath awareness participates in ordinary life, especially in moments when our reactions or relationships do not make immediate sense to us.

Understanding the Subconscious Mind

One of the strengths of Dr. Yildiz’s approach is that he treats the subconscious as a dynamic system we can learn to observe. Rather than presenting the subconscious as a sealed-off part of the mind, he shows how it learns from experience and begins shaping our responses before we have fully thought them through. This gives the book a practical foundation: the subconscious becomes less of an abstract concept and more of a way to understand the automatic nature of our responses.

As someone trained in psychoanalytic thought, I usually think in terms of the unconscious, especially in Freud’s more dynamic sense of the word. In that tradition, the unconscious is not simply material outside awareness. It is an active part of mental life, one that can influence a person’s behavior before the person understands why they are reacting in certain ways. Dr. Yildiz uses the term subconscious more broadly, drawing from contemporary science while writing for a broader audience.

This approach also helps us see why change often requires more than conscious effort. If the subconscious learns from repeated experience, then new understanding has to be reinforced through new experience over time. The book is strongest when it shows that awareness does not instantly change us, but helps us begin participating differently in the patterns shaping our daily lives.

Emotion as a Primary Language of the Subconscious

In the chapters on emotion, Dr. Yildiz describes our emotions as one of the primary languages of the subconscious. What he means by this is that our emotions are a central way our body and mind register experience before we have a chance to understand it or explain it to ourselves. Because our emotions can arise before conscious thought, we may feel anxious or hurt before we understand why we feel this way.

For many of us, disconcerting emotions feel confusing or upsetting before we are able to understand them as meaningful information about ourselves. Dr. Yildiz’s point is that our emotions help determine what our minds give their attention to. In this sense, a feeling may be the first indication that an experience has registered as important before we know why.

The body enters this discussion as another place where emotional experience can first become known to us. A feeling may appear in our body before we can connect it to a thought we can examine. This does not mean every bodily sensation is emotional. It means our body can sometimes give us the first sign that something has affected us emotionally. Listening to our body is one way we can begin listening to the subconscious.

The book also shows how closely our emotions and memories are connected. An experience that affects us emotionally does not simply pass through us and disappear. A painful moment may have passed, but its emotional meaning can continue to affect how we respond to similar situations later. This is one reason an emotional experience can have such a lasting influence. It not only tells us what we felt then, but it can also influence how we respond when a later situation feels familiar, even if it is not the same.

His treatment of emotional regulation is valuable because it keeps the focus on working with our emotions rather than merely trying to make them disappear before we understand them. If we move too quickly to shut down how we feel, we may lose the chance to understand why we are feeling a particular emotion in the first place. The deeper point is not that we should suppress our emotions or move beyond them, but that we can develop enough of a relationship with what we feel that our emotional responses become less automatic and more available for reflection.

Prediction, Repetition, and Why Change Can Be Difficult

Dr. Yildiz’s discussion of the predictive brain adds an important psychological layer to the book. He shows that we do not encounter the present moment without some aspect of our past already present in it. Our minds draw on earlier experience to anticipate what is likely to happen to us in the future, and over time, our expectations can begin to feel less like possibilities and more like reality itself. From my perspective, this helps explain why old patterns can be so difficult to change. We may believe we are responding only to our current situation, while some older experience or expectation has already prepared us, in some strange way, for a familiar kind of hurt.

In Dr. Yildiz’s account, these predictions can be revised, but the revision has to become more than an idea we understand intellectually. Our minds need new evidence, and that evidence often comes when a familiar situation is lived through in a new way. Over time, the old expectation begins to lose some of its hold on the present. Change can feel uncomfortable because the subconscious is being asked to learn that an old expectation no longer has to determine how we respond.

The book describes this revision of old expectations through prediction error: the moment when what happens does not fit what we expected. Psychologically, that is often where change begins. If we expect criticism and instead meet understanding, the old expectation is not simply contradicted as an idea; it is challenged by experience. The mind has to take in that the present is not repeating what the past had prepared us to expect.

Here is where prediction and repetition begin to meet. And what repeats is not only a behavior; often, it is the expectation that the past will be confirmed in the present. This helps explain why change can feel difficult even when we deeply want it. We may be trying to live differently while part of our mind is still preparing for an old, familiar outcome that has not yet happened. In this sense, repetition is not only something we do; it is something we come to expect. This is where inner conflict begins, or what psychoanalysis might understand as the mind in conflict: part of us wants a different life, while another part is still prepared for the old outcome.

Healing, Relationships, and the Work of Repair

Dr. Yildiz’s book becomes especially useful when he turns from understanding the subconscious to working with it. He offers practical ways of attending more carefully to our emotional lives, but he does not present these practices as shortcuts around deeper change. At their best, they are ways of giving our subconscious new experiences to learn from, especially when old patterns have been organized around fear, stress, or emotional pain.

This way of understanding change made me think of a clinical example I recently wrote about in my article Inward Knowing and What Becomes Ours. In that piece, I described Daniel, whose fear of intimacy was not simply a thought he could change once he understood it better. It lived in his body and in the way closeness began to feel dangerous before he could fully explain why. As he came to understand this more deeply, he could begin to pause when closeness frightened him and ask whether he was responding to the person in front of him or to an older fear of being taken over. In this sense, his struggle highlights one of the central ideas in Dr. Yildiz’s book: old patterns often need more than understanding alone. They often need new experiences that help their mind and body learn that the present does not have to repeat the past.

As Daniel’s case conveys, old patterns often become most visible in our relationships with the people we care about. When we feel conflicted, we may react before we fully understand what has happened between us. A tone of voice may be enough to stir an old expectation. At other times, the trigger may be something more fleeting, such as a sensory detail we had long forgotten. This is where Dr. Yildiz’s focus on repair becomes useful. When we set out to repair something, it frequently asks us to notice when something older has entered the present, whether in our relationship to ourselves or with another person. With that recognition, responding with more understanding becomes more possible than the old pattern alone may have allowed.

The later chapters widen the book’s frame by bringing Jung and Frankl into the conversation. Although my own clinical orientation is more Freudian, I appreciated their inclusion because it keeps the subconscious from being understood only as a system of reaction. Jung’s work gives the book a way to think about dreams, symbols, and the forms through which inner life can become more visible before it reaches conscious awareness. And Frankl raises the question of meaning: how we remain oriented toward life when suffering threatens to strip life of any sense of purpose or direction. In this way, the book moves beyond emotional regulation and repair toward a larger concern with how our inner life can become more purposeful and more deeply understood.

I am grateful to Dr. Yildiz for writing a book that invites readers to take the subconscious seriously without making it feel inaccessible. How Tapping Into My Subconscious Mind Changed My Life will be especially meaningful for those interested in healing, relationships, and the search for meaning in our lives. The book’s greatest value is that it makes the subconscious feel more understandable and less foreign, something we can begin to work with rather than fear.

This overlaps with how I understand the work of therapy: not as an effort to overcome or sidestep the unconscious, but as a way of coming into a more thoughtful relationship with the parts of ourselves that have been influencing us outside our awareness. By the end, the subconscious is no longer presented as a hidden force operating beyond our grasp, but as part of our inner life, we can come to know in a way that helps us understand ourselves more deeply and participate in life with more fullness and enjoyment.

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Author’s Note

For readers interested in the relationship between repetition, healing, and the unconscious, this review also connects with my paid companion essay, The Sacred Act of Returning: Repetition, Healing and the Living Equation that is Our Wellbeing. Dr. Yildiz’s book approaches the subconscious through his own scientific and personal framework. My essay approaches a related question through psychoanalytic thinking and The Wellbeing Equation: how old patterns return, how the body can carry what the mind has not yet understood, and how healing often involves meeting repetition with greater awareness and compassion.

Additional Information About the Book

The book How Tapping Into My Subconscious Mind Changed My Life was published on 30 April 2026, exclusive to Amazon initially, allowing readers to benefit from the KDP subscription program. The paperback and hardcoverwere also published and ready for purchase. ISBNs: 979–8258148292, 979–8258149633.

This book is part of his upcoming bundle, The Cognitive Health and Longevity Bundle, including 5 relevant health and well-being books. The author introduced in a recent story:

You may also check out this interesting review published by Dr. Michael Broadly, who was one of the editors and early access readers of the book: Subconscious Mind: Similarities and Differences Between Dr. Joseph Murphy and Dr. Mehmet Yildiz: What Dr. Murphy and Dr. Yildiz Taught Me About the Power of the Subconscious Mind Across Six Decades

The author, Dr Mehmet Yildiz, shared multiple chapters of this book on Medium. I link some of them here to give you a quick taste of this unique book.

What Science Reveals About the Subconscious Mind and Why It Matters

Embedding Intentions into the Subconscious for Manifesting What We Truly Want

Using the Subconscious Smartly to Nurture What We Truly Need Based on Maslow’s Hierarchy

Carl Jung’s Lasting Legacy and the Living Language of the Subconscious Mind

The Noological Dimension: Using Logotherapy to Enrich the Subconscious Mind for Wellbeing

Mindful Biology: How the Body Impacts the Subconscious Mind

Neuroception: The Subconscious Mind With Embodied Intelligence

Stay Connected

👉 If you’d like to read more about me and my Wellbeing Equation journey, please visit my website: www.broncerice.com and my Substack About Page.

👉 New readers may also want to begin with my essay Your Wellbeing Equation Is as Unique as Your Fingerprint, which offers a clear introduction to what I mean by The Wellbeing Equation.

👉 And if you like what you’ve read, please sign up for my newsletter The Wellbeing Equation HERE and spread the word by hitting the restack button ♻️ to share with your community.

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One of the strangest things about being human is that life begins before we have any way of understanding it. Stranger still, before we stand a chance of understanding it, we are already feeling our way through it.

From the beginning, we are already living in ways we cannot yet fully comprehend. In this sense, we are up against a kind of not knowing that resists understanding.

And as life continues, so does our not knowing, especially in relation to what matters most to us. We do not automatically know what to trust, how to love in ways that are true to us, or how to live in ways that deepen the quality of our lives. This not knowing returns in more intimate forms as we try to trust our own experience, even while life keeps presenting other ways to live, and not all of them feel true to us.

Before we can begin shaping our lives more intentionally, much of our lives is spent trying to discover what matters most to us, what we can trust, and how we want to live. Even this takes time, because what matters to us does not always become clear all at once, and a life does not become more truly our own simply because we are living it. Part of the struggle is that long before we can reflect on our lives and begin making sense of them, life is already taking shape in us in ways we do not yet understand.

What makes this harder is that some parts of what we are living out cannot be made sense of on the surface of life alone, because from the outside we can often see what keeps recurring without knowing what lies beneath it. What keeps recurring in our lives may point to something important within us before we know how to think about it more clearly. Part of what is so strange is that life keeps returning us to what we do not yet know, and asking us to face it inwardly.

Life asks us to face it inwardly because what matters most in life does not remain only outside us. It enters into how we think, what we feel, and how we go about living our lives.

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I. What Do We Do with Our Not Knowing

Life introduces us to a kind of not knowing that we may spend much of our lives trying to understand. Take the unsettling experience of feeling repulsed by a loved one and pulling away when they offer us the intimacy we have been longing for, while barely understanding why we are responding this way. Such moments can show how a kind of not knowing may already be active within us, shaping how we think and feel before we understand the psychological dynamics that lead us to respond in confusing ways.

Over time, they may open up larger questions about who we are, what matters to us, and why we can pull away from what we most long for. And because such questions do not yield easy answers, we may find ourselves struggling not only with uncertainty, but with ourselves as well.

But if we are not careful, we can spend our lives lost not only in what life asks of us, but also in the flood of answers around us that we do not know how to make sense of. We may not know what our lives are asking of us in the first place, let alone how to answer as well as we can.

This leaves us in a difficult and, at times, haunting position. We begin in families and social worlds that are already giving us their versions of a good life, and with them, ideas about what we should want, who we should become, and how we should find our place in the world. These answers do more than surround us. They enter through what others want from us, the kinds of attention they give us, and the ways they respond when we move toward or away from what they value. By the time we are able to question them, we may already be living by answers that are not truly our own.

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When we think of our lives and what we hope for deep within us, we often imagine more joy, more passion, and more time for what helps us feel more alive in everyday life.

Yet for most of us, life is shaped not only by what we long for, but also by our responsibilities, our disappointments, and the demands of adult life. It is often here that trouble begins, when too much of our lives is spent trying to manage the pressures and frustrations of adult life. The things that help us feel more at ease within ourselves can begin to receive less and less of our time and attention. As they begin to fall away, life itself can begin to feel as though something essential is missing.

April is Stress Awareness Month, a time to look more closely at how stress affects both our mental and physical health. It is also worth paying attention to how stress can become part of ordinary life, not only in the stressful moments that overwhelm us, but in the daily pressures that can impact how we live our lives.

Part of what can make this harder to recognize is that much of the self-help genre points us toward our potential, our growth, and a more promising future, while giving far less attention to the more difficult emotions and harder conditions many of us are already living with. In doing so, it can reinforce the idea that these harder parts of life should have been gotten rid of by now, which can leave us feeling worse for still having them.

What this can keep us from seeing is that these pressures can begin spreading into other parts of our lives. For instance, we can begin eating too quickly, feel at the end of the day that we are not getting enough done, and have little or no time left for what brings us peace of mind or enjoyment within ourselves.

If life stays organized this way long enough, stress is no longer only something we feel in hard moments, but something that begins shaping daily life more broadly. We might even go so far as to stop saying we feel stressed and anxious and begin thinking of ourselves as stressed and anxious people living stressful lives, without fully understanding how life came to feel this way.

Perhaps a deeper problem begins when life becomes organized around too much stress, and we begin mistaking that way of living for what it means to be a responsible adult. Once too much stress starts passing for normal adult life, our wellbeing can begin to look like something reserved for people who are less troubled by anger, irritation, sadness, and inner conflict, rather than for those of us trying to face these parts of ourselves more directly.

We still want enough time and ability to enjoy ourselves. But once stress begins taking up too much of our lives, our wellbeing can begin to feel less like something we still have and more like something reserved for other people whose lives are easier than ours.

The point is not to become an adult who is free of difficult feelings. It is to be able to have them and work with them where we can, so that our lives are not dictated by stress and anxiety most of the time.

What can make this harder to recognize is that even when our lives are increasingly organized by stress, we can still look like competent adults. We may still be doing well enough on paper that we do not read the pressure we are under as a sign that life is asking too much of us. If anything, all of this can begin to look like proof that we are managing adulthood well.

What outward signs of functioning do not tell us is whether the life we are living still leaves room for us to enjoy our lives.

A related problem is that once stress becomes familiar, we can stop reading it as information about how we are living. What might otherwise alert us that life is asking too much can begin to seem like the ordinary cost of being a responsible adult. In this way, stress is no longer something we use to gauge how our lives are going, but more as something we absorb into the background of daily life.

Once higher levels of stress have become part of our everyday lives, we can keep telling ourselves that we are simply doing what adulthood requires. All the while, life can begin to feel more difficult and harder to enjoy without our fully understanding why.

By the time life begins to feel overwhelming, our days can already be crowded to the point where we have little time left to think about what we need in order to recover. We can move from one thing to another while putting little time and energy into what helps us feel calmer, more centered, and more alive. After a while, our lives can begin to feel like something we are merely getting through, without enjoying much of anything.

A woman in her early forties came to see me because of work stress and feeling overwhelmed by her life. She was not sure whether she was anxious and depressed or simply depressed by how her life had turned out. “I used to be so carefree in college,” she told me. “I loved the freedom to learn, and now I don’t want to learn anything new. Who has the time?”

She was raising a nine-year-old son largely on her own, trying to stay on top of her bills and the mortgage, and taking on side consulting work to help make ends meet. She said she gets her son to soccer practice, watches his games, keeps up with the housework, and that if someone looked at her life from the outside, it would probably seem as though she was doing pretty well. “But by the end of my day, I’m completely exhausted,” she said. “I pour myself a tall glass of wine, start the laundry, and stay up late watching a relationship drama I can’t seem to turn off.”

She told me that those few late-night hours were the only ones that felt like hers, because by then no one was asking anything more of her. The problem, however, was that the only way she could get time for herself was by taking it from the sleep she needed. At times, it got so bad that she felt resentful of her son for the free time he had after school. This, in turn, left her feeling guilty, because she knew she loved him and worked hard to give him a good life.

Even the little bit of time she called her own was not actually helping her feel better. What she was using to decompress after a stressful day was also feeding the very stress she needed relief from. In other words, the very thing she turned to in order to feel more like herself again was also bringing out a version of herself she did not like. It had become part of a difficult pattern she was having trouble breaking, in part because she did not yet see that staying up late and drinking were leaving her more stressed, not less.

What her situation makes clear, paradoxically, is that her stress did not stay confined to what had to get done. By the end of the day, what she was using to unwind was leaving her with more stress the following day. In this sense, what can feel like relief in the short run can end up adding to the very stress we are trying to escape.

One reason this can be hard to confront is that once our lives are already asking a great deal of us, questioning the way we are living can feel like one more demand. Ironically, this can make it seem easier to keep functioning inside a life that already feels too stressful than to ask ourselves what would need to change. And yet some version of this question has to be faced if life is to feel less stressful, and hopefully even enjoyable again.

To be clear, the issue is not stress altogether, but too much of it for too long. The deeper problem begins not when stress is part of our lives, but when so much of it begins to feel stressful that we mistake this way of living for normal adult life.

What this means, practically, is that stress relief is not always the same as recovery from stress itself. A night off with a glass of wine, an hour or three of scrolling, sleeping late on a Sunday, or even a short vacation can bring real relief without changing the conditions that keep producing stress.

If the life we return to is still asking too much of us, that relief may be real, but it is often short-lived. This is where recovery can deepen into healing. It asks us to look at what in our lives is repeatedly costing us peace of mind and begin changing some of how we are living where we can.

For others, it may mean finding healthier ways to recover from stress, or coming to see that the way we have structured our lives is no longer working for us. What supports our wellbeing is not one-size-fits-all. This is part of what I mean by our Wellbeing Equation. The point is not to build a life with no stress in it, but to find a way of living in which stress no longer sets the terms for everything else.

Our wider culture presses us in this direction as well. We are constantly surrounded by technologies and conveniences that promise instant access, while also being pushed to be more productive and get more done in less time. Food can be delivered in minutes, entertainment is always at our fingertips, and our devices are designed to keep drawing us back in. The more accustomed we become to quick and easy access, the easier it can be to neglect the slower forms of recovery that actually help us reduce our stress long term. Before long, what is easiest to turn to can begin taking the place of what actually helps us recover.

If you find yourself feeling overly stressed or anxious more regularly, it may be a good time to ask what in your life is asking too much of you and what would it look like to change some of how you are living in a way that reduces some of your stress, even if only partly?

For instance, I have noticed in my own life that I need to build stress reduction measures into each day of the week, because without them I can become overwhelmed more quickly and speak to my loved one more harshly than I intend. I am not proud of this, but it reminds me that I have to practice what I preach and put time and energy into the same things I help others work on in their own lives.

One of those measures has meant extending my lunch break Monday through Friday to go on a hike, which means working fewer paid hours each week and bringing home less money. I have had to decide that less stress during the week is worth that cost.

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Research supports the value of changes like these as well. Healthier ways of responding to stress have been shown to reduce anxiety, improve daily functioning, and support both our mental and physical health. Because stress can become such an ordinary part of life that we stop fully seeing what it is doing to us, I wanted to leave you with a few reliable resources in case you would like to read further.

A Related Essay: If this piece resonated, my essay Our Wellbeing and the Sacred Space Within Us explores a related question: how busyness, shame, and the noise of modern life can pull us away from the deeper listening that healing often requires. You can read a free excerpt here, with the full essay available to paid subscribers.

Further Reading:
CDC — Managing Stress
NIMH — I’m So Stressed Out! Fact Sheet
NIMH — Caring for Your Mental Health

If my writing has been useful to you, or to someone you love, and you’d like to support the time and care that goes into it, you can do so here.

Buy Me A Coffee

In Closing,

Perhaps the difficulty is not simply that there is too much stress in our lives, but that it has had time to shape how we are living in ways that do not support our wellbeing. What begins as something we manage in difficult moments can, over time, become part of everyday life.

👇 Comment below:

Where in your life might stress be shaping your days more than you’ve fully noticed?

With care,

Bronce

👉 If you’d like to read more about me and my Wellbeing Equation journey, please visit my website: www.broncerice.com and my Substack About Page.

👉 And if you like what you’ve read, please sign up for my newsletter The Wellbeing Equation HERE and spread the word by hitting the restack button ♻️ to share with your community.

👉 I also offer Paid Subscribers access to additional resources and deeper content related to your wellbeing. You can sign up HERE.

One of the more curious things about human nature is that we are capable of a considerable degree of self-awareness while also being remarkably skilled at looking past what we see. Over time, we repeat patterns in our lives, in our relationships, and in the ways we live with ourselves, often to such a degree that they become difficult to ignore.

The types of food we prefer or allow ourselves to have, the kinds of things that capture our interest, the people we grow close to, even the hobbies we take up over the years, can begin to reveal the patterns that organize our lives. Yet one of the paradoxes of being human is that seeing something clearly does not always mean we are able to move differently in relation to it.

Take a common example we experience so often in our close relationships. We get into the same argument with a brother or wife, perhaps, speaking harsh or unkind words out of frustration because they have once again forgotten something important we told them. We tell them again not to forget it, this time with extra emphasis at the end, as if the added force will somehow make the message stick this time.

Does our frustration come from encountering a familiar pattern we experienced with someone earlier in our lives? Maybe we never learned how to appropriately express our frustration when we get angry with someone we love in the first place. Maybe we were too submissive in our last relationship and promised ourselves no more. Maybe I feel my partner has never apologized for anything in our relationship, even minor mistakes, and so I turn the volume up on my own reaction. But whatever the reason, I notice I am speaking too harshly and want to say what I mean with more compassion and kindness, yet I am having trouble doing so.

What I have come to notice is that once a harsh response repeats itself often enough, many of us begin to recognize the pattern. After a while, we can almost predict what is going to happen before the argument even begins. The interesting thing is that even with this recognition, many of us still find ourselves emotionally pulled into the same exchange, saying things in a way we know we will later regret. The question then becomes: if we can see the pattern coming so clearly, why is it often so difficult to respond differently once we begin interacting with the people we love?

Though it may be difficult to understand on the emotional surface, what many of us do after recognizing a pattern and thinking about it is assume that this alone will allow us to respond differently moving forward. After all, once we become more aware of what we are doing, it seems logical to assume we stand a better chance of changing our behavior. And yet even with this knowledge, many of us still repeat the very response we hope to avoid. The paradox, then, is that the very awareness that helps us see a pattern clearly does not always give us the ability to respond differently in the moment.

Yet from this paradox, another one can emerge, making life even more complicated. Awareness is usually necessary if change is going to happen, yet once we catch sight of a pattern, it can begin to feel as though we now have to do something about it. And yet trying to change an ingrained pattern, especially one that has become habitual, can place us in a difficult position.

Once we recognize a pattern, it becomes hard not to feel responsible for changing it. We may tell ourselves that the next time the situation arises, we will respond with more patience, more restraint, or more care. And yet when the situation happens again, many of us discover that the reaction we hoped to avoid still happens more easily than we like.

A man came to see me not long ago about an argument that kept repeating itself in his marriage. He explained that the argument often began when his wife reminded him of something he had forgotten, and he would find himself responding in a tone more critical than he intended. He described how quickly his irritation gave way to anger. Before he knew it, he was practically yelling at his wife because he felt as though she was correcting him.

As we spoke more about what had been happening in his life at the time, another pattern began to appear. In the months leading up to these arguments, he had been sleeping poorly, skipping meals during long workdays, and had stopped exercising altogether. By the time these conversations happened in the evening, he often felt physically worn down and mentally overloaded before the conversation with his wife even began.

After he calmed down, he could easily see that his emotional response had been stronger than the situation warranted. He told me he loved his wife deeply and that when he was not angry, he could speak to her with patience and warmth. That contrast only made the arguments harder for him to understand afterward.

Over time, as we explored his anger more closely, it became clear that his reaction followed a predictable pattern. The moment he felt corrected, anger rose quickly because the reminder registered as criticism, touching the same sense of shame he had often felt growing up.

Yet he noticed something that confused him. He did not react the same way with me when he felt I corrected him. In our sessions, he could talk about feeling corrected by his wife without becoming upset. But he could not seem to bring himself to discuss this with her directly.

As we continued talking, we began to understand why his anger rose so quickly in those moments. When he felt corrected, as if he were being criticized, his chest would tighten, his breathing would shorten, and his voice would begin to rise. By the time he recognized how angry he felt, his reaction was already underway. The anger was already present before he had time to decide how he wanted to respond, and only afterward did he begin asking himself why he had reacted that way.

When our physical health is neglected, the difficulty is not limited to stronger emotional reactions. It can also affect how we think through situations and understand what others mean. Emotional and cognitive processing abilities can become less reliable, making it harder to interpret situations accurately and regulate our reactions. A simple reminder from a partner may register as criticism, and we may raise our voice before we have taken time to understand the situation.

One reason this happens is that our nervous system can react extremely quickly when a situation feels threatening, even in subtle ways. Our body may begin preparing for confrontation before we recognize what is happening. By the time we realize how angry we feel, we may have already raised our voice or spoken in ways we later regret.

As we begin to see these patterns more clearly, we may begin to notice our reactions while they are unfolding. It becomes harder to ignore how we speak to the people closest to us. We may hear the sharpness in our voice or feel the tension in our body while the conversation is still underway. Later, when we replay the exchange, we often remember not only what we said but also how we said it and recognize how harsh we sounded.

Many of us discover that recognizing a pattern does not mean we can respond differently when the situation arises again. We may see clearly afterward that we spoke too harshly or reacted more strongly than the situation required. Yet when the same situation occurs again, the reaction can rise just as quickly as before. Knowing what we wish we had done differently does not always help us respond differently while the interaction is unfolding.

In situations like this, our awareness often develops unevenly. We may see clearly that we are speaking to someone we care about in a way we do not want to. Yet the reason our anger rises so quickly when we feel corrected may still not be fully clear to us. We know we do not want to react this way, but we do not yet understand why the situation triggers such a strong reaction.

When awareness develops in this way, it can begin to work against us. We know we are reacting in ways that do not match how we want to treat the people we care about, yet the reason the reaction happens so quickly remains unclear. Because we can see the reaction but not what is driving it, it can begin to feel like a personal failure rather than something we do not yet understand.

Over time, this gap between awareness and understanding can become painful to live with. We may begin to criticize ourselves more harshly, feel ashamed of how we behave, or grow frustrated that the pattern continues even though we can see it clearly.

In some situations, resentment can even begin to form toward the other person involved. The uncomfortable feelings that arise in these moments become tied to the interaction itself, making it difficult to know whether the reaction truly belongs to the present situation or to something earlier that the situation has stirred up.

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After we had spent some additional time exploring how quickly his anger intensified when he felt corrected by his wife, he began to notice his reactions sooner. At times, he could feel the tightening in his chest while they were still talking and recognize that his irritation was beginning to increase. Yet even as he recognized what was happening, his voice had already started to rise before he could stop it. “I know exactly what’s happening,” he told me. “I can almost see the reaction forming while it’s happening. I just can’t seem to stop it.”

Many of us assume that once we can see a pattern clearly, we should be able to respond differently the next time the situation happens. If we recognize that our reaction is stronger than the situation warrants, it seems reasonable to believe we should be able to slow ourselves down or choose another response. In this way, awareness starts to function like a kind of supervision over our reactions, as though recognizing the pattern should allow us to interrupt it. Yet the experience he described suggested something different. Even when he could see the reaction beginning, he still reacted before he could change what he did.

What experiences like this often reveal is that many of us carry an assumption about how our emotional lives should work. We assume that once we understand our reaction, we should be able to guide it differently. If we can recognize the pattern or explain why it happens, we expect awareness to give us the ability to slow down and choose another response. This expectation reflects a familiar cultural belief often captured in the phrase “mind over matter,” the idea that once we understand a reaction, we should be able to think our way through the situation and act differently.

This belief feels convincing because it resembles how understanding often works in everyday situations. When we discover that something we are doing is not working, we usually approach the situation differently the next time. Because this pattern appears so often in practical parts of life, it is easy to assume our emotional reactions should respond to understanding in the same way.

What makes emotional reactions difficult to change is that they often begin before we have time to reflect on what is happening. In the man’s case, his reaction did not begin with a decision to raise his voice. It began in his body. His voice became sharper, and his chest tightened before he had time to understand why the reminder from his wife had affected him so strongly. By the time he began asking himself what was happening, the reaction was already unfolding. In moments like this, understanding the situation does not immediately change what we do.

Emotional reactions are not governed by thought alone. When a situation feels tense or threatening, our nervous system can begin preparing the body to respond before we have fully understood what is happening. Because this process unfolds so quickly, awareness often arrives after the reaction has already begun.

This is where the belief in mind over matter begins to break down. Even when we understand exactly why we feel anxious, angry, or hurt, our reaction does not automatically stop. Many of us respond by trying to think our way through it. We tell ourselves the situation is manageable or that it has an easy fix. Yet our reaction continues because our nervous system has organized our body around a threat. Sometimes the threat is unfolding in the present moment.

At other times, our nervous system reacts to memories, expectations, or emotional learning carried from earlier experiences. In moments like this, reasoning alone does not immediately alter the state our nervous system is in.

Moments like these are rarely shaped by a single factor. Earlier experiences may give a situation its emotional meaning, our nervous system may react quickly before we have time to think, and the physical condition of our body can influence how clearly we are able to process what is happening. When these elements combine, awareness alone is often not enough to change what we do in the moment.

We may begin to notice another part of this process once we pay attention to our reactions over time. Our reactions do not unfold the same way every day. In the man’s case, the arguments with his wife often happened at the end of days when he already felt physically worn down and mentally overloaded before the conversation even began. When our nervous system is in that condition, reactions can intensify quickly and become harder to slow down once they begin.

What this begins to suggest is that our emotional reactions cannot be governed by thought alone. Our ability to work with our reactions depends partly on the condition of our nervous system when a situation unfolds. When we neglect our physical health, the brain systems that regulate our emotions tend to function less effectively. In those moments, we may recognize that we are becoming more irritated, anxious, or defensive than the situation requires, yet still struggle to think through what is happening before we respond.

The belief that we should be able to think our way through our emotional reactions often leaves many of us feeling as though we are failing when we cannot do so. Yet the difficulty is not simply a matter of willpower or understanding. Part of the difficulty lies in the belief that we should be able to control our reactions simply by thinking about them. When the reaction continues despite our efforts to reason through it, many of us conclude that something is wrong with us, when the real difficulty lies in expecting thought alone to control what we feel.

In my writing on the Wellbeing Equation, I often refer to sleep, exercise, and healthy eating as the Trifecta of health and wellness. When these areas begin to erode, our nervous system becomes more reactive, and it becomes harder for us to pause and think through what is happening in the moment.

If awareness alone is not enough to change how we react, the work is not simply trying harder to control our emotions. It also involves paying attention to the conditions that shape them. The state of our nervous system, our physical health, and the patterns we carry from earlier relationships all influence how we respond in the moment. When we begin looking at our reactions this way, we often discover that change becomes possible not through force, but through understanding the psychological and physical factors driving our reactions.

🗓 February 13 | 2:00 PM EST | Substack — LIVE: The Cause and Impact of Complex PTSD

Join me and Margaret Williams, founder of The Empowered Leader, for a conversation about complex trauma and how it can shape the lives of those who live with it. Together we will explore the difference between PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and complex PTSD, how these experiences often show up in everyday life, and some of the ways people begin to work through them. We will also talk about how we can reconnect with ourselves with greater compassion and meaning during times when stress and anxiety begin to take over.

Margaret Williams brings her experience as an executive leadership coach, I/O psychologist, and retired Army civilian to her work helping leaders navigate complex systems with greater clarity, confidence, and purpose. Through her coaching and writing, she supports marginalized leaders in moving beyond survival within power structures and stepping into their own authority and influence. Her book, 5 Steps to Becoming Your Best Self, offers a thoughtful guide for those seeking personal growth, self-leadership, and a more intentional path forward.

You can purchase a copy of here book HERE.

You can find out more about Margaret and her Substack work HERE.

If you would like to explore these ideas further, you may enjoy my essay, Your Wellbeing Equation: A Living, Breathing Framework for a More Meaningful Experience of Life. An excerpt is available to all readers, with the full essay reserved for paid subscribers.

If my writing has been useful to you, or to someone you love, and you’d like to support the time and care that goes into it, you can do so here.

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In Closing,

Perhaps the difficulty is not that we lack awareness or willpower, but that emotional change rarely happens through insight alone. It unfolds slowly, as we begin to understand the deeper forces shaping how we respond.

👇 Comment below:

What have you found actually helps you change a reaction or pattern once you’ve become aware of it?

With care,

Bronce

👉 If you’d like to read more about me and my Wellbeing Equation journey, please visit my website: www.broncerice.com and my Substack About Page.

👉 And if you like what you’ve read, please sign up for my newsletter The Wellbeing Equation HERE and spread the word by hitting the restack button ♻️ to share with your community.

👉 I also offer Paid Subscribers access to additional resources and deeper content related to your wellbeing. You can sign up HERE.

I. How Life Continues

Life, at its core, is governed by a principle of taking in what is needed so that we can grow and continue to develop. This means that, in regard to what helps us grow, we must learn to adapt or redirect ourselves toward what allows us not only to survive, but to emotionally flourish. The question is not simply how to keep living, but what we need in order to feel more emotionally connected to ourselves in ways that feel meaningful as our lives unfold.

As life progresses, however, discovering what helps us feel more alive is not always straightforward. Unlike other living beings, we are not preprogrammed to know what will help our lives feel fuller and more meaningful. We have to learn this over time, often through years of trial and error, and even then what we find ourselves longing for is not always easy to make sense of.

What helps one person flourish may not help another, a theme I explore more fully in my piece on the Wellbeing Equation, where I describe how each of us must discover what uniquely supports our wellbeing.

Before we begin asking ourselves what we need or long for, we grow up in the care of others and within the world we were raised in. Yet what we are given early on does not always align with our later emotional and psychological needs. As a result, much of adult life can feel uncertain and even painful, leaving us to discern what truly sustains us emotionally, a process that is rarely simple.

It is often within this uncertainty that we begin searching for what might help us feel more secure and alive. For some of us, this search organizes itself around what feels missing, while for others it takes shape around what captures our interest and brings a sense of vitality. Few of us remain fixed in one position, and over time our lives reflect movement between these orientations.

Gradually, we may begin to notice that what we learned growing up and what we need later on in life can feel at odds with one another. We may feel this as a tension within us, even when we cannot yet name what feels off. Over time, this tension creates a gap we end up living with, and we begin to shape our lives around it in ways we may not fully recognize. We build relationships, pursue interests, and develop routines around it, often without fully realizing how these choices help us manage what still feels unresolved.

As we grow older, it often becomes clear that this gap does not entirely disappear, though aspects of it can lessen depending on how we respond to it. Some of us wrestle with persistent feelings of not being good enough, while others contend with abandonment, grief, or the sense that no matter what we attempt we fall short.

Still others carry the feeling that the love and affection they longed for was rarely shown to them, or not in ways that felt real. Beneath these different hardships lies a shared human experience: at some point we come to feel we need or want something more. When that “something more” is unclear, it can leave us with a yearning for what might help our lives feel more whole.

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II. When a Life Continues but Does Not Feel Alive

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For most of us, love in its current form differs from what love was like at the beginning of our lives, and it often shows up in ways that shape how we live with ourselves each day. And yet it is rarely separate from the emotional foundations formed early in life, before we had words for what love was or what it means to us now. What we later come to recognize as love is therefore rarely something neutral or entirely new. We often experience it through earlier-formed patterns of expectation and emotional response that shape how love is felt and understood.

What is not yet present is the capacity to organize those experiences into a psychological and emotional form that we come to recognize as love. When we are young, our earliest experiences are not yet organized through psychological concepts, but through direct involvement with others.

What happens in relation to those around us is taken in directly, in the immediacy of being with others, before it can be separated into feelings, thoughts, or what it might mean for us later. What we later come to call love is first situated within the emotional world of our early relationships. It is here that the earliest meanings of connection are established, before they can be reflected on, named, or remembered as such.

As development continues, our emotional world widens into family arrangements, roles, and the unspoken rules through which we come to belong. Love becomes associated not only with being held or responded to, but with how one comes to secure a place within important relationships.

By the time a child develops the ability to speak of love, love has already become woven into the emotional complexity of life. It is already tied to matters such as who we should be loyal to, who we should fear, who we should be responsible to, and how the loss of love first enters our emotional life. Love is no longer only something a child feels; it is already beginning to organize how they experience themselves in relation to others.

These early experiences, and ways of locating ourselves in important relationships, do not remain confined to the family. These ways of organizing experience are also shaped and taken in by the wider society around us.

Valentine’s Day, for instance, is one of the clearest cultural moments in which this organization of love is on display. It reflects how love is repeatedly framed as something that takes place between people, rather than as a way of living with oneself. Love becomes located primarily between people.

Under these conditions, love continues to develop outwardly. Others increasingly become the place where love is expected to reside. A person’s emotional life can then begin to organize around those connections in ways that place something essential to their sense of self outside of themselves.

This outward way of organizing love is part of what I explore more broadly in my work on the Wellbeing Equation, a framework focused on how the ways we live with ourselves shape our wellbeing over time.

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Within this organization, the relationship to oneself often remains undeveloped, and there is little guidance for how to think through what this means for us as we move through the world. Love then tends to take shape and play itself out as something that exists for us primarily in relation to another person.

When love is organized this way, the self often becomes experienced as something that depends on whether love is present or absent elsewhere, tied to someone or something existing outside of us. Within this way of organizing love, a person can come to experience their relationship to themselves as fragile, unstable, or dependent on aspects of life they have little ability to control or even understand.

When love remains organized primarily through outward ways of relating, the developmental movement of forming a more internal relationship with oneself may never become established. What is often missing is not simply an idea about oneself, but the gradual formation of a way of being with one’s own feelings, needs, and inner life.

Over time, this way of being with one’s own inner life can become a way of relating to oneself, shaping how a person meets and responds to themselves and their own experience. This inward relationship is not organized around where love appears elsewhere, but around the capacity to remain in contact with one’s own experience.

When this inward relationship has had difficulty consolidating, or has failed to form at all, people often find themselves turning outward to orient themselves and make sense of what they are feeling. Looking outside oneself to important people, relationships, or external situations can come to serve as a primary way of orienting ourselves and helping us to feel safer.

Over time, this outward organization can leave a person increasingly dependent on what is happening around them for a sense of where they are emotionally. In unfamiliar situations, new relationships, or moments of uncertainty or higher stress, inner peace or a sense of self can easily become lost. In these moments, people may feel suddenly unmoored from themselves, unsure of what they feel or what they need.

In this state, people often look to others not only for connection, but for relief, reassurance, and a way of restoring a sense of inner peace and coherence.

This way of organizing love takes shape within emotional environments that ask a great deal of a child, often leaving little room for or emphasis on how to build a loving relationship with ourselves. In some families, love becomes closely tied to meeting the expectations or emotional needs of others, or to securing one’s place in relation to what is important to another, in ways that come to take precedence over one’s own needs and desires.

Within these kinds of emotional environments, learning how to attend to others, anticipate what is needed, or adjust oneself in relation to important figures can become central to how love is experienced and understood, and this way of relating often extends into later emotional life as well.

Under these conditions, love can come to be experienced primarily as something that happens between people and in relation to circumstance, rather than as something that can be developed and cultivated within ourselves.

As we grow and life becomes more nuanced and complex, organizing love primarily through others often begins to create difficulties. People may find that how they experience themselves shifts in response to what is happening around them, particularly within important relationships.

When love feels tenuous or becomes uncertain, many people find they struggle to remain in contact with what is important to them, separate from another. In these moments, a person’s sense of self and what love means to them can become increasingly dependent on another person’s wishes or desires.

Over time, this way of relating can leave a person less equipped to know what they want, what they feel or need, or even what kind of love, and what kind of love relationship, is truly good for them.

Under these conditions, what has not yet taken shape, or what remains difficult to develop, is a more stable inward relationship through which we come to live with ourselves.

By an inward relationship, I don’t mean only how we think about ourselves or the attitudes we hold, though clearly these are important, but more a way of being with ourselves that takes time and dedication to develop.

It is through our eventual relationship with ourselves, shaped in relation to others, that we develop the ability not only to recognize what our needs are, but to discover whether and how we are able to meet them in a loving and caring manner.

In this sense, learning to love ourselves is not only an attitude or stance we adopt, but an aspect of maturational growth, an achievement of living, that requires time, experience, and a different way of being with ourselves than what was provided to us early on.

For many of us, questions about love, and more specifically what it means to us, often begin when the ways we have gone about important relationships start to affect other areas of our lives. What often happens is that we have a hard time making sense of how we end up feeling. We may find ourselves suffering within existing or newer relationships, experiencing a painful loss, or beginning to feel emotionally neglected or abandoned in ways that are difficult to understand or place in the context of what love meant to us growing up.

When these emotional struggles continue, we often need help making sense of why they feel so painful. Over time, our efforts to understand present pain can lead us to explore our emotional upbringings, and whether the ways love was expressed early on are shaping how we experience relationships now.

Questions related to family dynamics, emotional roles, and unspoken expectations often begin to emerge as we try to understand why love and closeness affect us the way they do.

For many of us, myself included, this kind of exploration often begins in a therapist’s office. People arrive speaking about the painful feelings they are having in a current relationship. Others come carrying the pain and suffering that has followed the loss of an important relationship. Still others arrive wanting to explore why they keep finding themselves in familiar emotional dynamics or situations they don’t understand and can’t yet make emotional sense of.

In those early sessions, much of what gets talked about often centers on what is happening in our current lives and relationships. People generally describe current events in their lives, the emotional conflicts they are experiencing, and the losses they feel.

As they speak, they begin to bring their reactions and feelings into the room. The room begins to fill not only with their personal stories, but also with their tensions, irritations, confusions, and disappointments, in addition to other moments that neither person quite expects.

Over time, I begin to focus our attention not solely on current events, but on how the person is feeling and experiencing themselves with me, as they speak.

A man in his late thirties is sitting across from me, looking tired and agitated as he speaks about a recent fight with his partner. He moves through what was said, how he said it, who left the room first, and how the conversation ended. As he talks, his breathing quickens and his fists tighten in his lap.

After a few moments, he becomes teary-eyed and says, “I don’t know why this always hits me so hard.”

I pause to let his question settle, then smile slightly.

“That’s a good question,” I say, gesturing toward his hands. “What else do they want to say right now?”

He looks down at his hands.

“They’d tell you I’m still angry,” he says, “but I know I shouldn’t say any more.”

I tell him that in this room, his thoughts and emotions are welcome, including the anger he feels he shouldn’t show.

His fists tighten again and he looks at me angrily, rage in his eyes, as tears begin to run down his cheeks.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t do this again.”

“On the one hand, your anger is here and welcome,” I say, “and on the other, you’re telling me you made a promise, to someone, not to do this again. Who did you promise?”

“When things got bad at home, when I was a kid,” he says, “I promised my father I’d be good and watch after my mother.”

He grows silent, looking down at his hands, rubbing them feverishly.

When he speaks again, he says, “I feel like I’ve been fighting with him, or myself, for a long time. I don’t really know who, or for how long.”

He exhales slowly and his hands drop from his waist.

“I’ve spent so long trying not to feel this,” he says, “I don’t think I ever noticed how much it’s been costing me.”

He pauses, then adds, “I was just a kid,” rubbing his hands more gently.

What distinguishes moments like this is not only that attention turns inward, but that it begins to do so in a more loving fashion.

In the slowing of his breath, in the way he speaks of the child he was, and in the way his hands soften, he is beginning to relate to himself more lovingly. Instead of meeting his inner life only through restraint or self-control, he is beginning to experience concern for himself.

The man feels his anger, his efforts to restrain his emotions, and the intensity of his conflictual grief. At the same time, something new is taking shape.

He begins to notice himself having these feelings, and to respond to himself with more care. There is curiosity now about what they have cost him. He allows himself to acknowledge his own hurt.

In doing so, he is not only exploring himself. He is beginning to treat himself in a more loving way.

Gradually, his awareness turns toward a promise he has been living by for most of his life, and the conflict it creates inside him.

What organizes his attention is no longer only what happens between him and his partner, or between him and his parents. It now includes how he is living with these experiences within himself, and how he is beginning to relate to himself with more care.

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What is beginning to take form here is often described as “self-love.” When people speak about “loving themselves,” it is usually framed as an attitude or a stance, something one decides to adopt or take up as a practice.

What my work shows with this man, however, is the beginning phase of a developmental shift in how he is able to take up, reflect on, and interact with his emotional experience. It is a shift that carries greater care and begins to provide new developmental support for his emotional life.

With this shift, he is no longer only living inside an inner life shaped by what was handed down or sought from others, but is beginning to contribute something new by responding to himself with greater care.

As my work with this man continues, what begins to shift is his capacity to question how he wants to respond to himself, to his frustrations and desires, and whether he wants to respond to himself differently than others have in the past.

As this capacity grows, the automatic ways he has learned to treat himself can be taken up and reflected on, allowing space for a different emotional response to his own experience.

We work on helping him respond to himself with less criticism and urgency, and with more patience, kindness, and allowance for being human and making mistakes.

In its place, a different inner experience, or emotional atmosphere, begins to take shape. He begins to experience himself less as someone who exists primarily to meet other people’s expectations, and more as someone who can question what he wants, allowing concern and care to be directed toward himself as well.

When we begin to turn inward and interact with ourselves in a more loving fashion, it does not pull us away from relationships, per se, but begins to establish a different kind of relationship with ourselves.

In this sense, what this shift highlights is that we begin to be able to belong to ourselves differently, and that our inner life is no longer something we have to organize primarily around others, particularly when doing so is not being kind to ourselves, but something we can actively take up and be responsible to.

Developmentally, this means that as our inward relationship continues to develop and grow, love and connection in our outside relationships are no longer asked to carry the full weight of our worth and sense of self.

I want to point out that developing a kinder, more loving relationship with ourselves is not simply a comforting idea, or some self-help or new age concept, but something that is increasingly supported by what we are learning about our bodies, our nervous systems, and our emotional health.

Research across psychology, neuroscience, and the field of health and wellness consistently points to the fact that the emotional environments we live inside shape our physiology and stress responses, immune functioning, and the way our nervous systems organize around safety, regulation, and our long-term health.

When the inner environment becomes more supportive and caring, the body is no longer living under the same stress conditions, and research links these kinds of emotional climates to shifts in the chemistry of our nervous systems, including the so-called “feel-good” chemicals like serotonin and dopamine.

Over time, these kinds of internal environments are associated not only with changes in mood, but with lower overall stress burden, different patterns of inflammation, greater support for emotional and physical wellbeing, and a growing sense of internal confidence.

What this points to is that how we respond to ourselves and our emotional needs each day is not only emotionally meaningful, but shapes the conditions our bodies and nervous systems are living inside.

This is one reason learning to respond to ourselves differently in ordinary moments matters, as a way of gradually shaping the inner environments we live within.

Seen this way, learning how to respond to ourselves becomes part of the work of living, a developmental task and activity in its own right that takes time, attention, and ongoing practice.

This can begin in very simple ways: noticing how we speak to ourselves when we become irritated or stressed, taking time to pause, and giving ourselves the chance to question how we would like to respond rather than reacting immediately.

Often, this also finds expression in the forms of self-care we allow ourselves, such as slowing down, spending time in nature, exercising, resting, or taking up forms of learning and growth that support our wellbeing.

In doing so, we open the possibility of responding with kindness and love when it feels appropriate, allowing care and concern for ourselves to take a more central place where they may not have been present before.

For some, this may take the form of keeping a journal focused on noticing moments of kindness toward ourselves, moments of gratitude for our own efforts, or times we choose to respond to ourselves with greater care.

For others, practicing kindness outwardly, in relation to our neighbors, strangers, or people in our daily lives, can become another way to cultivate this inner orientation and support a developing sense of self-esteem, since the emotional environments we help create around us often feed back into the ones that surround us as well.

🗓 February 13 | 2:00 PM EST | Substack — LIVE: Self-Love, Courage and Finding Our Voice

Join me and Deborah Jeanne Weitzman, founder of Set Your Voice Free, for a conversation on writing, love, and finding our own voice. We’ll explore how the kinds of love we show ourselves shape the stories we tell ourselves—and how we can reconnect with ourselves with compassion, and meaning when we feel stressed and anxious.

Deborah brings her background as a musician, novelist, and teacher, to help creatives find their voice and courage. She has written an absolutely wonderful book The Sinking of the Leonardo de Vinci. I loved every word of it and it is well worth buying in my opinion. She explores themes such as love, loss, grief and finding our way back to ourselves.

You can purchase a copy of The Sinking of the Lenardo do Vinci HERE.

You can find out more about Deborah and her Substack work HERE.

If you want to explore more about the science and practice of self-care, self-compassion, and their links to health and wellbeing, these accessible pieces are a good place to start:

1. Neff, Kristin D. — The Role of Self-Compassion in Development: A Healthier Way to Relate to Oneself. Human Development, 2009. An accessible paper showing how self-compassion relates to wellbeing and emotional maturity. (Neff, 2009)

2. Homan, Kristin J. & Sirois, Fuschia M. — Self-Compassion and Physical Health: Exploring the Roles of Perceived Stress and Health-Promoting Behaviors
   A review showing links between self-compassion, lower perceived stress, and better health behaviors.

3. Harvard Health — The Power of Self-Compassion
   A clear, evidence-based overview of how being kind to yourself benefits both mind and body. (Harvard Health)

4. University of Kentucky — What Is Self-Compassion? Why It Matters and Seven Ways to…A practical, research-informed introduction to self-compassion and ways to practice it in daily life. What Is Self‑Compassion and Why It Matters

5. Verywell Health — What Is Self-Compassion?
   A reader-friendly article explaining why self-compassion matters for mental health and wellbeing, including accessible tips. What Is Self‑Compassion? (Verywell Health)

In Closing,

To belong to ourselves in the way I’m describing is not something we arrive at suddenly or by mistake, but something that develops over time, through effort, patience, and practice, and through the ways we learn to live with ourselves.

If my writing has been useful to you, or to someone you love, and you’d like to support the time and care that goes into it, you can do so here.

Support My Work

👇 Comment below:

Where in your life are you still looking outside yourself for something that might need to be developed within?

With care,

Bronce

👉 If you’d like to read more about me and my Wellbeing Equation journey, please visit my website: www.broncerice.com and my Substack About Page.

👉 And if you like what you’ve read, please sign up for my newsletter The Wellbeing Equation HERE and spread the word by hitting the restack button ♻️ to share with your community.

👉 I also offer Paid Subscribers access to additional resources and deeper content related to your wellbeing. You can sign up HERE.

When I hear people talk about January, I often hear an unspoken expectation and tension that we should be ready for change, ready for something new to begin, and be happier for it. Given the ongoing stressors and tensions many of us have had to contend with this past year, this mismatch is often experienced as we should feel better while still carrying doubts that the pressures of everyday life will change all that much in the year ahead.

If you are new here, you can read more about the broader framework behind this work in my essay Your Wellbeing Equation Is as Unique as Your Fingerprint, which lays out how mind, body, and lived experience work together over time, and serves as a central reference point for much of what I explore in this space.

What I often notice is that many of us are so busy trying to manage the external demands of our lives that we have little time to focus on how we are relating to ourselves in the process. When this way of proceeding in life goes on for too long, the attention we pay to ourselves often suffers. How we relate to ourselves often becomes more a function of pressure or stress than one related to conscious choice and intention.

How this shows up is different for everyone, but it often becomes more noticeable as the pace of daily life accelerates. As things speed up, many of us find our focus narrowing toward work or other obligations, while the attention we pay to ourselves may begin to take a back seat. In this manner, things in our lives can get accomplished, while slowing down and taking time for ourselves often gets pushed aside.

However, if a harried pace and the stress of life continue, the effort required to keep going can increase. As a result, over time, we can feel less patient, become less tolerant of uncertainty, and feel more irritable, particularly when things do not go as we planned. Even then, most of us continue moving through our days, handling what needs to be handled and doing our best to keep up with what is on our plate. The stress and anxiety we experience may not stop us from functioning, but they can begin to affect how we experience ourselves over time.

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When life becomes busier, as demands increase and time feels constrained, the way we respond to stress begins to matter more in how we experience ourselves day to day. For many of us, myself often included, instead of slowing down or easing up, our response is to continue pushing ourselves and, at times, to ask even more of ourselves when we are already stretched too thin. What tends to happen next is interesting. Even when we know that slowing down and resting would help us feel a little better, many of us find ourselves pushing even harder. What we need most to support our wellbeing can begin to feel conditional and, at times, less important than pushing forward.

Over time, this way of responding has a tendency to shape how we move through our days. Time to slow down and take care of ourselves can begin to feel like something we allow ourselves only after everything else has been taken care of. Our internal bar moves higher just as our capacity becomes more limited. In this context, the pressure we put on ourselves often comes to feel necessary rather than excessive, even as the increasing strain becomes harder to ignore.

As this pattern continues, many of us begin to notice changes in how we experience ourselves. Our patience wears a bit thinner, and even small disruptions can feel harder to absorb. What we say to ourselves can become more insistent and more critical, more focused on what still needs to be done, and less attuned to what we may actually need. We may continue to function well on the outside while feeling more strained or unsettled inside, even as our way of being with ourselves becomes harder and, at times, less kind.

Many of us assume that if we can just think differently, push through a little longer, or get past the current stretch, things will ease on their own. Yet the strain often has less to do with insight or effort and more to do with how much we are asking of ourselves day after day. Without changing the conditions we are living inside, even good intentions can begin to feel like another demand placed on an already full life.

January often brings this tension into sharper focus, as we feel pressure to start fresh even while our bodies are still stressed and worn down from the year that just ended. When the pace of life remains high and the body is not given a chance to settle, many of us find ourselves carrying the same tension and strain into our daily living.

Even when we mean to do things differently, the day can still unfold in familiar ways. Our body can remain anxious as we keep moving, our attention gets pulled outward, and care of ourselves can slip into the background. In this way, stress is not resolved so much as it is deferred, put off to another time when there might finally be room to address it and ourselves differently.

We can say we are going to clean our house, go to the gym, be more socially active, and get more done as the year begins. We can plan carefully and tell ourselves we are starting the year off right. But when that planning turns into urgency or pressure to reorganize everything at once, it often pulls us away from the very conditions that would make any of it sustainable. Without prioritizing the body and what helps our physiology settle, even well-intentioned plans tend to falter. It becomes difficult to maintain anything that truly feels healthy, not just in appearance, but in the way we actually need to feel in order to live well.

A man in his early forties came to treatment after what he described as a period of “burnout.” He was working long hours, exercising most mornings, and keeping up with his social commitments. When I asked if anything had changed in his life recently, he paused and said, “Nothing, really. I’m still doing everything I was doing before. I just don’t feel right anymore.”

He reported waking most mornings with his jaw clenched and his chest already tight, as if something had been missed before the day had even begun. The sense of urgency he described was present before he could think about what was on his morning to-do list.

In sessions, his body carried the same tension he described in his daily life. He sat forward in his chair, shoulders raised, legs engaged, speaking rapidly as if his time were limited. When we paused to reflect on what he was saying, this seemed to unsettle him further. He spoke briefly about growing up in a family where being busy was simply how life was lived, and where slowing down had never quite felt natural or safe. As those pauses lengthened into silence, he often moved toward offering more detail or points of clarification, as though stopping might generate more stress than continuing to speak.

He spoke about trying to make changes in his life. He recommitted to exercise, tightened his routines, and filled his evenings with plans meant to offset the intensity of his workdays. Yet these efforts carried the same sense of urgency that marked the rest of his life. When a plan fell through or a routine shifted, he became more agitated rather than feeling more at ease with himself.

Becoming less driven and more settled required not only changes in pace and care of the body, but also making sense of how familiar patterns of busyness had come to shape his way of being with himself over time. Without attention to our bodies, what we call self-love often functions more like another demand than a source of care that supports our wellbeing, and our relationship to ourselves can begin to feel less loving even when our intentions are good. When the body remains tense and unable to relax, even thoughtful attempts at self-care can still feel like another set of expectations to meet, rather than a form of support that eases some of the strain of living.

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What the vignette makes visible is that care often breaks down not because people lack intention, but because the body is not given enough of a chance to slow down for care to register as such. When urgency becomes the baseline, even well-meant efforts to reduce stress can end up contributing to the problem rather than relieving it. Over time, the question shifts from how to try harder to what the body needs in order for care to be felt as loving rather than just another demand.

What we need in these circumstances is not an invitation to do more, but to do less. Learning how to slow down does not mean withdrawing from life, but interrupting the constant acceleration of moving too fast or doing too much in ways that keep the body stressed and anxious. Without some shift in pace, self-care measures have little chance of being experienced as anything other than more pressure, no matter how thoughtful the intention behind them.

For most of us, the external pace of life is not going to slow down. We still have to go to work, pay the bills, and keep up with the responsibilities and demands that show up day after day. The work, then, is not waiting for life to settle on its own, but learning how to slow ourselves down within the life we already have, and paying attention to what helps our body and mind decompress and recover so that we can actually enjoy ourselves in the process.

Slowing ourselves down is necessary, but it is not enough on its own. The body also has basic needs that shape how well we feel from day to day, and those conditions matter for how any attempt at slowing down is received internally. When the body is chronically depleted or overstimulated, even intentional pauses may not register as decompression or relief. Instead, slowing down can feel flat, restless, or ineffective, as though nothing has really shifted.

It is here that the body’s most essential forms of support begin to matter. Aspects such as the quality of our sleep, how our bodies are moving, and the nourishment we give ourselves shape how well our bodies function. In turn, they influence whether slowing down registers as decompression or not.

Taken together, these elements form what I refer to as the Trifecta of health and wellness. While they do not resolve the pressures of life, they shape how our bodies respond to them, influencing, for instance, how much stress and strain are present before we ever try to slow down. When these basics are neglected, many of us begin our days already taxed, and attempts to rest or slow down can feel ineffective. In those moments, we may offer ourselves various forms of self-care, but if sleep, movement, or nourishment are out of balance, those efforts often fail to land as care.

This is why I think of the Trifecta as creating the bodily conditions that allow care to be received as care, shaping how the body functions beneath daily life and whether slowing down gives something back to us or not. Seen this way, slowing down and attending to the Trifecta work together, shaping both the pace of our lives and whether the body is able to benefit from slowing down. From here, the question becomes how to translate these ideas into practice in ways that support our wellbeing.

How we start the new year matters, not because January offers a clean slate, but because it gives us an opportunity to integrate care into our daily lives in ways that are less burdensome and more workable. January often carries a heightened pressure to reorient ourselves toward change, and in that context, self-care can feel like yet another demand.

What follows is not about doing more, but about practices that support the mind and body so we can feel healthier and less stressed. The question, then, becomes how we incorporate sleep, movement, nourishment, and ways of reducing stress into our daily lives without turning them into one more burdensome to-do item.

The aim is to put stress-reducing supports and the Trifecta in place in ways that are introduced gradually, fitted into lives as they already exist, and allowed to be imperfect. Rather than adding them on top of already crowded days, this often means making room for them by easing pressure elsewhere, lowering expectations, and resisting the urge to optimize or do them “right.”

When sleep, movement, nourishment, and ways of reducing strain are approached with less urgency and fewer rules, they are less likely to feel burdensome and more likely to improve the quality of daily living. In turn, feeling a bit better in our bodies often makes it easier to return to these supports without force or self-pressure. This creates a feedback loop, where care gives something back, reducing strain and making it more possible to keep caring for ourselves as the year unfolds.

Practice 1: Make Room by Subtracting First

If we want the Trifecta and other stress-reducing supports to help us feel less stressed, we want to find ways to introduce them into our lives in ways that are less stressful to begin with. This often means removing something that adds pressure and replacing it with something that helps reduce strain. Rather than stacking new practices onto already crowded days, the work is often about easing pressure elsewhere so these supports feel more workable and easier to return to.

A) This can be as simple as noticing that the only time available for movement is a lunch break currently spent answering emails, and choosing to protect that time instead of squeezing one more task in.

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Practice 2: Protect One Part of the Day Where You Slow Down

Choose one part of the day where you intentionally slow the pace at which you are moving, thinking, or responding so your body has a chance to decompress. The aim is to interrupt the constant forward push that keeps stress activated and to allow tension to begin to dissipate.

What matters is that this part of the day is used in a way that allows the body to slow down and decompress, so that we feel less stress internally.

B) For example, this might mean taking a short nap or brief break between tasks instead of immediately moving on to another one, giving our bodies a few minutes to relax before continuing.

Practice 3: Support the Body When Stress Is Already Present

When stress is already present in the body, it can be helpful to spend a few minutes in places that allow us to unwind and return to a state that feels less stressful.

C) For example, this might mean going for a short walk or hike in nature, or moving to a quieter space inside your home for a few minutes before re-engaging with other aspects of the day.

Practice 4: Strengthen the Body’s Capacity Through the Trifecta

The Trifecta of Wellness works best when sleep, movement, and nourishment operate as a connected 12–24-hour cycle. Together, they support stress reduction and how the mind and body function rather than any one practice on its own.

D) For example, a day that includes some form of movement, regular meals, and enough sleep that night will often feel different in the body than a day where one or more of those supports are missing.

Practice 5: Notice What Helps and Build From There

Over time, it becomes important to notice which supports make the greatest difference for your own body and mind. Stress reduction is not one-size-fits-all, and what helps one person settle may not help another in the same way.

E) For example, noticing when you feel more settled, clearer, or better able to respond to stress can help identify which practices are worth returning to and strengthening over time, rather than feeling imposed or too rigid.

In Closing

This piece reflects an ongoing clinical and reflective inquiry into how people live with themselves under conditions of stress, pressure, and change. The practices offered here are not meant to be taken up all at once or treated as expectations to meet, but approached gradually, returned to over time, and adapted to the realities of each person’s life. What matters most is not doing them “right,” but noticing what helps you feel more settled, more supported, and more at ease in your relationship with yourself over time.

If my writing has been useful to you, or to someone you love, and you’d like to support the time and care that goes into it, you can do so here.

Support my work

👇 Comment below:

As you move into the new year, what would it look like to relate to yourself with a little more care, rather than more pressure?

With care,

Bronce

👉 If you’d like to read more about me and my Wellbeing Equation journey, please visit my website: www.broncerice.com and my Substack About Page.

👉 And if you like what you’ve read, please sign up for my newsletter The Wellbeing Equation HERE and spread the word by hitting the restack button ♻️ to share with your community.

👉 I also offer Paid Subscribers access to additional resources and deeper content related to your wellbeing. You can sign up HERE.

The Wellbeing Equation is not discovered through insight alone, but through lived experience over time. This piece takes up one of the experiential conditions that allows that process to unfold.

1. When Insight Isn’t Enough

Most of us can speak with some clarity about who we believe we are and who we are trying to become. We have some sense of our values and intentions, and of the patterns we have come to recognize in ourselves. And yet, in certain relationships or situations, especially as emotional tension rises, many of us respond from a place shaped earlier in life.

Often this becomes clear only afterward, when we realize we reacted in ways we did not intend or could not quite understand in the moment. Experience comes to be organized around an earlier way of responding, sometimes before there is any sense of choice at all. What is striking is how quickly this can happen.

This can happen even to people who have spent years doing inner work. Under strain, a reaction may already be underway before there is time to reflect, drawing on habits and patterns that formed long before adult insight or reflection were possible. In those moments, when safety feels compromised our capacity to stay with experience often diminishes making it harder for new responses to emerge.

Understanding ourselves does not always prevent these older patterns from shaping how a moment unfolds. We can know ourselves well and still find ourselves pulled into familiar ways of being when pressure rises.

As this difference becomes more noticeable, attention often shifts away from explaining why an old response appeared, toward what allows thinking to stay available under pressure. What comes into question is not insight itself, but whether the moment is organized in a way that allows something different to be lived from within it.

Across the course of a life, there are moments when understanding emerges not through new ideas, but through changes that allow experience to register differently. What we know from past experience may come into view in new ways, even as other aspects of experience become possible. Often, what is new is not the insight itself, but a deepening of experience as mind, body, and feeling come into closer contact with what is already present, and we feel more alive in ourselves.

2. A Field of Emergent Knowing

What follows are moments in which this shift in experience can be felt as it unfolds.

Several days into hiking a mountain range on the East Coast, I reached a stretch where clouds filled the valley below and pressed low against the slope above. As I continued upward, the trail passed through a place where the mountain emerged from the cloud cover, disappeared again, and then appeared farther on, rising clearly above it.

As I kept walking, my attention began to register something beyond the terrain itself. Thoughts continued to arise, but they no longer carried the same urgency. Earlier concerns were still present, but they felt less consuming. I remained engaged with what I was doing, more aware of my movement and of how it felt to continue walking.

I felt more at ease with myself, without needing to manage what was happening internally. The hike continued much as before, but I was fully there, and my aliveness stayed with me through the remainder of the day.

I call this a field of emergent knowing.

Moments like this are often familiar in hindsight, even if they were not named as such at the time. A field of emergent knowing names a kind of moment when experience shifts and feels more alive and open to what is happening. We meet the moment in a way that allows us to stay present with what is unfolding. Awareness widens, and more of what is present can be felt at the same time. What matters is not whether something new appears, but whether we remain in contact with what is already there.

Within this field, understanding becomes possible as lived experience itself. Thought, feeling, and bodily awareness stay in contact, moving together rather than splitting apart. What had previously been out of reach can now be felt and reflected on in the experience itself.

The moment does not need to make sense right away. What changes is how directly we are in contact with what is happening and how alive we feel in the moment. The openness of the moment is not sustained by effort or explanation, but by allowing experience to continue unfolding as it is.

3. When Psychological Space Becomes Available

To understand how psychological space becomes available, it helps to return to the hiking experience itself. What mattered about the hike was not a particular moment, but how psychological space became available as the hike continued.

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As the year winds down and comes to an end, it can bring a mix of relief, added stress, and a clearer sense that it might be time to take stock of where we are in our lives.

Before the holiday rush is in full swing, we can take a moment to slow down and pay attention to how we’re doing, both outwardly and inside ourselves. Many of us notice the early signs that something in us needs our attention: our patience may be tested, our body may feel tighter, or our mind might start to pull us in more directions than we can manage. When we notice these early shifts, it’s often a sign that the way we’re going about our lives may not be supporting us as well as we need, especially before the demands of the season speed up. And this is often when the question of wholeness starts to make itself felt.

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Wholeness, as I have come to understand it, is the ability to participate in the different areas of our life, along with the deeper parts of our inner life, in ways that help us feel present, connected, and supported in our wellbeing. This is a large part of what I mean when I talk about The Wellbeing Equation, the ongoing process of learning what supports us and what helps us live in ways that feel more grounded and whole. We often notice it most clearly when something in our inner experience doesn’t line up, when our pace feels off, when our emotional needs aren’t met, or when we feel disconnected from what helps us feel grounded in ourselves.

In these moments, our sense of wholeness can feel frayed, and we often feel it in how we move through our days. And when we lose track of our wholeness, we often feel it in the flow of our day, in how we talk to ourselves, how we relate to the people closest to us, and how we respond when things feel difficult.

This season is a natural time to slow down so we can pay closer attention to how the year unfolded for us, not just the version we imagined or wished for. When life isn’t pulling at us from multiple directions, it’s often easier to see what we’ve been carrying internally. If we make room for it, slowing down can help us notice if there’s a gap between how we’ve chosen to live our lives and how we might wish to live them differently as we move into the new year.

When we slow the pace of our lives down, many of us stand a better chance of assessing how it is that we’ve been living our lives. Doing so helps us take a closer look at what has been unfolding in our inner lives but has been harder to notice while we were keeping up with the pace of this past year.

Slowing down has positive physiological effects on us. Our anxiety levels can lessen when the pace of life eases, some of the strain in our body can release, and our attention is not generally pulled in as many directions with the same urgency. When this happens, it can open the door to a different kind of thinking if we know how to access it. Our mind often has more room to pay attention to how we are going about our lives and for what reason, along with the patterns we have used to get through our days.

As this happens, the choices we have made in our lives and the way we have organized our time can come into sharper focus. We can begin to see what we’ve been prioritizing, sometimes without fully realizing it. Slowing down helps this kind of recognition happen. It also supports our cognitive and emotional capacities working together in ways that help us understand ourselves better, which can strengthen our connection to meaning and even purpose.

A patient came into treatment because he felt trapped in a loop he couldn’t step out of. His job was time consuming and demanding, leaving him little time for himself or his loved ones. He had stress and anxiety at work and at home, and he moved through most of his days feeling wired and worn down at the same time. He described coming home late, over-checking his emails, and snapping at the people he cared about over things that he realized did not matter to him.

As I got to know him better, it became clear that the pace of his life was not just something happening to him. He was also participating in it by never giving himself a chance to slow down and take a break from the pace of his life. He had been running on empty, rarely stopping long enough to ask what he needed emotionally or how his way of living was affecting the people closest to him.

Our work centered on helping him interrupt this pattern so he could begin to see how much this way of living was costing him and what he actually needed so he could feel more grounded in himself and move through his life with more healthy intention.

And once we begin to see our lives more clearly in this way, the next challenge is staying honest with ourselves without slipping into self-criticism.

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As we purposely begin to slow ourselves down toward the end of the year, hoping to see ourselves and our year more clearly, another challenge may show up. Many of us can approach self-reflection by turning inward with a critical lens. We may look back and highlight what we failed to accomplish, what we tell ourselves we should have handled differently, or feel we should have done more and that what we did wasn’t enough.

This kind of reflection, though sometimes warranted, can turn into a general negative view that narrows our sense of the year to the things we believe we did wrong. When this happens, it can leave us feeling sad or discouraged, disconnected from ourselves emotionally, or wishing things were different than they are.

Reflection can also work in a different kind of way. It can be a way of listening to what life asked of us over the past year. Not as a negative assessment, but as a way of helping us understand where we felt connected to ourselves in the ways we hoped for, and where we may have drifted from ourselves in ways that were not helpful. It can show us where we learned to adapt as best we could, and where older patterns shaped how we approached our life without fully realizing it.

When we slow ourselves down enough to feel less stressed and look at our year through this lens, we stand a better chance of seeing a fuller and more honest picture of how we have been living and for what reasons.

The man I mentioned earlier had a year that felt overwhelming from the inside out. He was moving through his life at a pace he could not sustain and in a way that was not healthy for him or his family. As we began working together to ease this pace, he started to see more of the truth of what was happening, and another layer of his psychological life came into view.

He grew up in a home where his father was often away and emotionally distant, and when his father was home his mother became critical of my patient in ways that left him unsure of himself and careful around her. His father’s distance taught him that being away, both physically and emotionally, was normal, and his mother’s criticism taught him to turn inward on himself when he felt he wasn’t measuring up.

He carried this into adulthood in familiar ways, sometimes snapping at a loved one and then replaying it internally as proof he had failed as a husband and a parent. Over time he internalized both patterns. He learned to stay busy and distant and turn against himself in similar ways to how he had been treated growing up.

As he began to reflect, not from a place of blame but from a place of honesty and more care, he could see more of his year for what it truly was. He wasn’t just tired. He was living inside a pattern that had followed him from childhood into adulthood. And once he could see that and understand where it came from, he could begin to work on being less critical of himself and less reactive with the people around him. He could also see more clearly the toll it took to keep moving through the years in this way.

As we take in the emotional truth of our year, we may start to notice another part of our psychological life coming forward. Wholeness doesn’t ask us to overlook our difficulties or pretend we’ve handled everything perfectly. It asks us to see the parts of our life that need more of our attention while also recognizing the strengths we bring to the table.

Many of us are quick to notice where we fall short, likely a product of the negativity bias, the mind’s tendency to register what’s wrong before what went well. And when life is busy, we may not register what went well at all, which leaves us slow to name our strengths. Yet both belong in the internal landscape of our lives.

When we can hold the full reality of who we are, the patterns we want to work on, the difficulties we’ve faced, the moments we’ve shown up for ourselves, and the places we know we can do better, we begin to see ourselves more truthfully. And from that place, we give ourselves a more balanced ground to move from.

This kind of reflection asks us to bring honesty and care into the same conversation. It gives us room to acknowledge the parts of our life that call for change without slipping into self-blame, and to recognize the effort we made across the year instead of dismissing it.

When we approach ourselves in this way, we begin to move forward from a place of wholeness rather than a place tied only to stress, negativity, and pressure. When we are able to do this, we can carry the truth of our year forward with compassion, and this makes the year ahead likely feel a bit more kind and possible.

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As one year ends and another begins, I want to leave you with an important thought. We don’t need to reinvent ourselves, but we may want to change a few things about how we’ve been going about our lives or respond to ourselves differently where we can. We don’t need to create a new identity or persona or set goals that don’t reflect who we are or how we actually live.

A better question is simply:
What is worth carrying forward in our lives, and what no longer suits us that we’d like to work at setting down.

How we close this year and what we bring forward into the new one will matter. I hope our movement can come from the moments when we recognize what has genuinely supported our life this past year. It may relate to a slower pace that feels more humane, a boundary that helps buoy our emotional life, or a clearer sense of what our needs actually are and how to respond to them with more loving care.

It may also come from how we stayed with ourselves in harder moments, even if only briefly, and what that revealed about what we need moving forward. Most of us know a fair amount about what we need in our lives, if we can slow down long enough to notice it and listen to what our bodies are asking for.

And part of this work is learning to talk to ourselves with less criticism and with more care and compassion, the way we might say to ourselves, “Take a moment to slow down and think through what happened, Bronce,” instead of the old habit of, “You screwed up again, Bronce, you never get things right.”

And this same kind of shift showed up in the man we’ve been discussing. What he was able to carry forward in a different way came from seeing himself more honestly and staying with his emotional life in relation to what he found. When the old pattern of distance or self-criticism began to surface, he began catching himself saying, “You’re overwhelmed, and it makes sense,” instead of slipping into the familiar voice that told him he was the problem. He worked at slowing himself and the pace of his life down, pausing long enough to respond to himself and those around him in a healthier way. He didn’t overhaul his life entirely, but he did work at showing up as the man he was working at becoming. A kinder and gentler man, and this helped him open up space for the parts of his life that needed more of his attention.

🗓 DECEMBER 12th | 4:00 PM EST | Substack LIVE

The Demands of Perfection during the Holidays

Join me and Brian Kendall, MD, an emergency medicine physician, for a conversation about how the holiday season can stir up stress and anxiety. We’ll look at how our desire for a “perfect” holiday shapes the kind of experience we end up having.

Brian brings his background as a Board-Certified Emergency Medicine Physician who has practiced full-time for the past ten years. His passion isn’t getting people into the emergency room. It’s helping them stay out of it!

You can learn more about Brian and his Substack work HERE.

Do yourself a favor and sign up for his newsletter. It’s a good way to deepen gratitude and support the wholeness we all need a bit more of as the year winds down.

This Live session invites reflection, gentle inquiry, and shared conversation about the expectations we carry around perfection, and how shifting them can help us live in a more enjoyable and connected way with each other.

In Closing

Ending the year from a place of wholeness isn’t about trying to wrap everything up in a nice neat bow. It’s about giving ourselves enough time and attention to our inner life so we can better understand what has supported our wellbeing and what has made life harder than it needed to be. When we do that, we can guide our thoughts and actions toward how we want to live in the coming year.

My hope is that this season gives you a bit of room to sit with your own experience. Not to judge it, but to understand it and learn from it. And may you bring forward the parts of your life that help you feel more rooted in yourself and more able to live in ways that feel healthy and true to who you are, especially when you feel centered and at peace with yourself.

👇 Comment below:

Where did you feel most like yourself this year, and what helped you feel that sense of grounded wholeness?

With care,
Bronce

👉 If you’d like to read more about me and my Wellbeing Equation journey, please visit my website: www.broncerice.com and my Substack About Page.

👉 And if you like what you’ve read, please sign up for my newsletter The Wellbeing Equation HERE and spread the word by hitting the restack button ♻️ to share with your community.

👉 I also offer Paid Subscribers access to additional resources and deeper content related to your wellbeing. You can sign up HERE.

“Only the wounded healer can truly heal. It is by facing our wounds that we find what restores us.”
Carl Jung

I. The Ground of Healing

Across different traditions and ways of viewing life, the meaning of healing and of wholeness has reflected each culture’s understanding of what it means to live in balance with the world around us. Living in balance helps us move in rhythm with life in ways that keep us from falling back into old patterns that work against our wellbeing.

In some traditions, to be whole meant having harmony between our body and spirit. In others, it meant maintaining balance between ourselves and the communities we belong to, or between human beings and the natural world around us.

In Greek therapeia, to heal was to attend to the body, the soul, and to whatever keeps the order of life flowing in relation to all that supports it. In Chinese medicine, health was understood as the flowing movement of qi, the vital energy that links the inner world with the outer. Indigenous traditions spoke of balance within a living web of relationship to the land, to ancestors, to the people we encounter, and to the world of spirit and energy, where disconnection from any part unsettled the whole.

Over time, this wider understanding of life has narrowed, losing much of the depth and complexity it once held. In its place, we now emphasize control, improvement, and becoming efficient at managing life rather than participating in it fully.

Healing, in this context, becomes reduced to symptom management and self-improvement, stripped of its connection to the living systems that support us. When healing feels like just another task, wholeness can start to feel like a goal rather than an ongoing practice in our lives. Yet healing has always been about relationship, with ourselves, with others, and with the deeper currents in our life.

Often, we do not recognize our need for healing until something feels off or out of sync in our lives. It may be the pace of our lives, the way we are moving through our days, or a loss of connection to the parts of us that help us feel more alive and a bit more whole. Living may feel more effortful, as if we are slightly off in how we are moving through life without knowing why. It can unsettle us, even calling into question how we have been going about our lives.

What we do with this awareness can be revealing. A patient once described realizing her days had become a series of tasks with little presence behind them. She was not in danger or in crisis, but she felt restless and disconnected from the things that once helped her feel anchored. When our attention drifts from what supports our wellbeing, our sense of imbalance often deepens, and we may find ourselves moving further out of rhythm with the life we prefer to experience, and further away from the sense of ourselves we want to return to.

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II. When We Drift Out of Rhythm

All of us know this feeling in our own way. We go through periods when we feel out of sync or out of balance, even if we don’t fully know why. What often sets these moments apart is what they raise for us emotionally.

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November is National Gratitude Month, a reminder that we can turn our attention toward what’s good in our lives and invest our time and energy in ways that help us feel better. It’s a time when we can take a few extra minutes out of our day to acknowledge and appreciate the people, experiences, and things that help us bring joy, connection, and meaning to our lives. When we actively practice gratitude, good things tend to follow, such that it can strengthen our wellbeing, deepen our relationships with the people we care about, and help us see life through a more generous and hopeful lens.

And just so you know, practicing gratitude is backed by science, showing that we can literally rewire our brains to see the world in a less negative light, interrupting the mind’s default setting, which is the negativity bias. The negativity bias refers to the brain’s habit of giving more weight to negative experiences than positive ones. Gratitude can help interrupt that loop, helping us to experience life as more balanced and, in turn, feel calmer and more at peace with ourselves. We can use this time to pause and look a little closer at what’s already good in the day we’re living. That kind of awareness, when paired with time and energy, can help us better understand how to participate in experiences that both create and sustain our gratitude. This interplay between awareness, physiology, and emotion is part of The Wellbeing Equation in action—how the mind and body reinforce one another.

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As the holidays approach, we can find ourselves moving too fast, juggling competing expectations and trying to stay grateful while also feeling the stress of work, family, and the emotional fatigue that often comes with managing it all. For example, we want to feel thankful, but our schedules can become so full that our minds grow busy and overcrowded, and our energy can get pulled in too many competing directions. When this happens, even practicing gratitude can start to feel less like something we do willingly and more like another obligation on an already packed to-do list, one that can drain the peace and thankfulness we all want to feel this time of year.

Culturally, many of us have been taught that gratitude should come easily—that good people, like us, are grateful no matter what. But gratitude, when it’s genuine, asks something deeper of us than cheerful positivity with a constant smile on our face. It asks us to explore what actually helps us feel better, particularly when we’re struggling. It takes both effort and awareness, the willingness to keep exploring new ways of living and adjusting how we move through our days. When we skip that kind of honesty, gratitude can turn into a kind of self-abandonment, giving thanks outwardly while inwardly feeling empty and anything but grateful for our own emotional experience.

One patient put it this way. Each year, as soon as October turned to November, she could feel the weight of the holiday season tighten through her body. Her shoulders would stiffen, she began sleeping less soundly, and her mind started spinning through lists of tasks: coordinating travel, cooking meals, buying gifts weeks before the holidays even began, and making family plans. Everyone around her saw her as the capable, responsible one, the person who held it all together while everyone else felt stressed and anxious. And she believed it as well, until her stress heightened, eventually turning into fatigue, then resentment, and her gratitude felt anything but genuine.

In our sessions, we began tracing where this pattern of overextending herself at the expense of her own needs began. Growing up, she was the emotional anchor in a household that prized keeping the peace over being open and honest. Her mother would often say, in an overly saccharin tone, “Let’s keep things nice,” particularly when tension filled the room.

Gratitude became a kind of peacekeeping ritual, a way to keep love intact, but at the cost of swallowing her own frustration until it made her ill, and she couldn’t bear it anymore. As she grew up, she carried this pattern of gratitude with her, thanking others even when she didn’t feel it, and smoothing over potential conflict before anyone else noticed it existed. What looked like kindness on the outside was, underneath, a lifelong rehearsal in keeping love alive by disappearing into the role of the delightful little helper.

When she finally began to notice how tired she felt, how the very holiday season that was supposed to bring warmth and connection left her instead feeling drained and more connected to her exhaustion, we decided to help her experiment a bit. As she worked through the guilt that often turned inward as self-criticism, learning to meet herself with a bit more compassion became a way to help her feel more genuine gratitude. Instead of hosting the full family gathering and carrying all its accompanying responsibilities, she asked her siblings if they’d be willing to pitch in and share some of the load. She also allowed herself to buy store-made pies rather than bake from scratch, a holiday tradition she’d long been known for.

Most importantly, she began asking herself if there were things she didn’t want to take on before automatically and “cheerfully” saying yes when she didn’t mean it. At first, she felt awkwardly giddy, almost as if she were enjoying a necessary act of disobedience—and in her own way, she was. But gradually, over time, she began to open space for herself and realized she wasn’t doing anything wrong.

When she began saying no thoughtfully, she noticed that the guilt which once overtook her so easily began to lessen a bit. At first, saying no felt awkward, almost wrong, but over time she noticed something shift; she could say yes when she actually meant it, not just to hold everything together. Gratitude, she realized, wasn’t about pleasing everyone; it was more about showing up in a way that felt right for her.

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For this patient, her emotional life and her sense of connection to herself began to change when she stopped living as though she had to put her needs last to be loved. When she continued to keep the peace at her own expense, she ended up feeling numb, resentful, and cut off from anything resembling gratitude. It was only when she began honoring her limits and making choices that supported her wellbeing that she began to feel positive emotions about herself. Gratitude came not from shallow expressions of pleasing others but from finally figuring out what she needed and taking steps to attend to those needs, something she could, at last, feel genuinely thankful for.

For some of us, gratitude cannot be experienced when we’re depleted and exhausted. For others, when all hope feels lost, gratitude is the very thing we reach for to bring some comfort in the midst of life’s turmoil. Either way, gratitude points to what we try to remain connected to when we are struggling or when we want to keep what matters most to us in the forefront of our minds. It can reveal where our care and attention should go if we want to stay connected to what is good for us and help us feel more alive.

In terms of gratitude, this is where boundaries and self-care enter the picture. Boundaries can allow us the space to pause and ask ourselves what we need before we overextend ourselves. And self-care, when it’s genuinely good for us, can help us use that space to restore our strength and energy. When we’re able to do this, gratitude can change from something we try to merely feel into something that grows naturally out of how we live our lives.

The balance between appreciation, boundaries, and what is good for us is the foundational heart of the Gratitude Equation. Gratitude, in this sense, becomes a way of exploring how we care for ourselves, gaining perspective on what helps us restore our balance and sense of self, and practicing the awareness that helps us bring our wellbeing into existence.

The Gratitude Equation describes the conditions that make genuine gratitude possible. It isn’t a formula but a relationship: when awareness, healthy boundaries, and self-care interact, they cultivate the inner capacity for real appreciation—the ground that supports our wellbeing.

For some, the idea of setting boundaries can carry an old echo of rejection or selfishness. When we begin to protect our own needs, it can stir up an old conflict between caring for ourselves and the belief that love means putting others first.

Psychoanalytically, guilt can arise when the wish to care for ourselves comes into conflict with the demand to care for others at the expense of our own wellbeing. Some of us can fear that setting healthy boundaries—that saying no—will lead to love being withdrawn or replaced with disappointment. Yet boundaries are often what make genuine care possible. They can help us stay connected to ourselves and to others in ways that feel honest rather than forced. When we can experience and notice this, guilt can begin to lessen over time. We stand a chance of seeing that saying no doesn’t have to be a rejection of others, but a way of preserving the kind of relationships that can actually last.

When we start setting limits, it can take us time to adjust. We’ve often spent years putting our needs last, so learning to listen to ourselves can feel uncomfortable at first. Our body will often let us know how we’re doing. This can show up through tension, stress, or the sense that we’ve been running on empty. It can also tell us when we’re finding our footing—when we notice less fatigue, a bit more hope, or an energy that feels more our own.

Our body has its own way of letting us know when we’ve gone past the point of what feels right for us and when we’re coming back into balance in healthy ways. The work isn’t to push past those signs—like tension, fatigue, irritability, or that sense we’re running on empty—and call it gratitude, but to pay attention to what they’re telling us about our wellbeing. We can start to restore a sense of cooperation with ourselves. From this more grounded space, gratitude isn’t something we have to chase or force, causing us more exhaustion. It’s something that can begin to take shape more naturally, in relation to how we live and care for ourselves day by day.

As the work with my patient continued, she found that her holidays began to feel lighter and more enjoyable. She still cared deeply for her family, but she no longer measured her worth by how much she took on or gave at her own expense. She began to feel more grounded—more herself in a way that felt right—and, paradoxically, more appreciative. The less she pushed herself to prove her worth through doing, the more space she had to actually feel thankful for what was already there. What she noticed was that her sense of gratitude grew not from doing more, but from allowing herself to do less and to care for herself more along the way. Gratitude became less about proving her love to others and more about appreciating how much better she could feel when she put healthy boundaries in place.

What happened for my patient shows how gratitude can easily get tangled up with old patterns of trying to prove ourselves. Many of us learn early on that love or approval depends on how much we give, so we carry that belief into adulthood. When we’re worn out, we tell ourselves we should be thankful we have a job, a family, a home—when what we’d actually feel thankful for is an afternoon by ourselves to rest, a meal we don’t have to prepare, or a day when more isn’t asked of us. In this way, we use gratitude as a way to talk ourselves out of our own needs and what would make us actually feel grateful.

Our society often prizes busyness and generosity at the expense of the very self-care required to make genuine appreciation possible. The byproduct of this way of going about life is often a kind of burnout, wrapped in the language of gratitude and what we “should be grateful for.” For us to stand a chance of living differently, we have to see gratitude not as a demand to stay positive, but as a way of staying connected to the practices that support our health and wellbeing, and to the experiences that we actually feel grateful for.

Notice When Gratitude Turns Into Obligation
When you catch yourself saying yes a bit too often, especially out of guilt or duty, try to stop and pause before you respond. Ask yourself what’s behind your yes. Is it a genuine wish to give, or more an attempt to manage an expectation or your guilt? A brief moment of honesty can often reveal whether your choice comes from a sense of willingness or from pressure you’d rather avoid. The difference often becomes clear afterward, in whether you feel grounded and content, or resentful and a touch more depleted.

Let Gratitude Include the Hard Parts
Gratitude doesn’t mean ignoring what’s painful. When we try to be thankful while pushing aside our frustration or exhaustion, it can start to feel forced. Instead, we can let both exist—the parts of life that bring us joy and the parts that bring us pain.

Sometimes that looks like feeling grateful for the love still present in our lives while also feeling sad for the loss of someone we miss, or appreciating a brief moment of rest when we feel tired and worn down.

When we can hold both, gratitude becomes less about pretending and more about being real with ourselves—about noticing what’s still good even when life doesn’t feel easy.

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Recenter in the Present Moment
When the pace of life speeds up — too many things coming at me, too many items on my to-do list, I notice how quickly I can leave the moment I’m in and become anxious or irritable. Sometimes my right eye even starts to twitch as I get caught up trying to fix an imagined scenario or solve a problem that doesn’t really exist in the way I’m picturing it. Before I know it, I’m already a few steps ahead of myself, moving toward a moment that hasn’t even arrived.

When this happens, I try to slow my mind down and give myself an extra minute to breathe—not to check out, but to check in with myself and my surroundings. I look for something specific to help ground me in the moment: the sound of my own breathing, the light shining through the window after the clouds break, the voice of someone I care about from across the room. Sometimes I even sit down and remind myself out loud, hey, slow it down, Bronce—it’s okay, you’re just anxious. You’ve been through worse.

For me, gratitude can begin here, not in some far-off place I’m dreaming of, but in what’s real and still right in front of me. In a strange way, that awareness helps me stay with myself and hold things together in ways that feel real and I can be thankful for. Even when life is hard, that ability, though sometimes shaky, feels like something I can still be grateful for—an everyday reminder of how wellbeing is built in moments, not ideals.

When we can return to what’s present within us or around us, even for brief moments—especially when we’re struggling—we give ourselves the chance to interrupt that constant urgency to chase a better version of the moment we’re already in. If we can practice small ways of returning to ourselves, over time we begin to build a different kind of stability—the kind that allows gratitude to take root and become part of our daily experience. Not as an idea, but as a felt sense that life is happening now, and we’re in it, even when it’s not everything we want it to be. To be grateful for what we have—right now and actually feel it. Bronce, you’re enough for me in this very moment. Thank you. I’m grateful for your guiding presence, and for the love and compassion you’re learning to cultivate.

Reflection Questions
🧠 When I feel pressure to be grateful, what fear or expectation contributes to it?
🧠 How does my body tell me when I’ve crossed from genuine giving into over-giving?
🧠 What boundary, if I could find a way to put it in place and honor it, would help me feel more grateful in this present moment?

🗓 November 14 | 2:00 PM EST | Substack — LIVE: Writing, Healing, and the Lost Art of Gratitude
Join me and Amanda Saint, founder of The Mindful Writer, for a conversation on writing as a healing practice. We’ll explore how gratitude shapes the stories we tell about our lives—and how slowing down to write mindfully can reconnect us to presence, compassion, and meaning.

Amanda brings her background as a novelist, teacher, and creator of The Slow Writing Movement, along with new insights from her ongoing mindfulness training with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield.

You can find out more about Amanda and her Substack work HERE.

Do yourself a favor and sign up for her newsletter. It’s a great way to increase your sense of Gratitude in this very moment!

This Live session invites reflection, gentle inquiry, and shared conversation about how words can help us live with more gratitude and a deeper sense of wholeness.

In Closing
National Gratitude Month reminds us that our wellbeing is not measured by how much we give, but by how meaningfully we connect—to ourselves, to others, and to what sustains life within us. Gratitude without capacity is a candle burning at both ends. But when we pair appreciation with self-awareness, gratitude becomes a renewable resource; it helps to restore us instead of draining us. Perhaps the greatest renewable energy source we humans have at our disposal—in this very moment!

This season, may our gratitude include our limits, our needs, and our right to rest and linger a bit longer in the midst of what is truly good for us.

👇 Comment below:
What’s one small way you could honor your capacity this month while still practicing gratitude?

With love, compassion, and hopefully a fair amount of steadiness,
—Bronce

👉 If you’d like to read more about me and my Wellbeing Equation journey, please visit my website: www.broncerice.com and my Substack About Page.

👉 And if you like what you’ve read, please sign up for my newsletter The Wellbeing Equation HERE and spread the word by hitting the restack button ♻️ to share with your community.

👉 I also offer Paid Subscribers access to additional resources and deeper content related to your wellbeing. You can sign up HERE.

“Transformation begins when the old is given a new relation to the living.” — Bronce Rice

The Mystery of Transformation

To be human is to live with contradiction. From my perspective, it is to live with, in one form or another, the mind in conflict. For instance, when we long for change, the kind we know deep down is necessary for a better quality of existence, we often find ourselves resisting it. It is a strange truth about being human: even the necessary change required for us to live a healthier, less stressful existence often causes the very stress we are trying to avoid.

This is where repetition often enters our lives. In a relationship, for example, we might long to speak what the heart needs to heal but instead remain silent, frozen, and numb. Perhaps this is because silence once kept us safe, so we return to it as if on cue. When this old pattern reappears, it is as if the past pulls the present into its orbit. These recurring moments are not just habits; they are echoes of earlier survival strategies replaying until we pause and reflect, becoming more aware and giving ourselves the chance to respond differently.

Transformation often occurs in the everyday parts of our lives. It asks us to begin letting go of older ways of protecting ourselves, particularly when they no longer serve us. When we take that risk, we step toward an unfamiliar future and toward possibilities we may not have seen before.

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Here we come to the paradox at the heart of being human. The tension between what we repeat and what helps us change places us in a precarious position. We are pulled between the comfort of the familiar and the risk of the unknown, and neither side feels entirely safe. That is why we need a way of thinking that can frame the complexity of our struggles while also highlighting the possibility of working with them differently. From my way of thinking, alchemy is one such frame, because it gives us a way to understand transformation itself and what it means to become more fully human.

Alchemy, the ancient practice of seeking transformation, was first imagined as turning base metals into gold. Beneath that pursuit was a deeper belief that what is heavy, fragmented, or ordinary could, given the right conditions, be changed into something of greater value.

We can hear this today not only as an old idea but as a way of speaking to our own lives. What feels heavy or painful, what seems scattered, or even the most ordinary parts of living can, under the right conditions, become sources of healing. Transformation begins to take shape when our emotions are not just felt, but worked with.

For example, love often asks us to open our hearts even when we feel exposed or afraid of losing something important. In those moments, it does not just connect us more deeply with others. It also deepens our connection with ourselves.

Anger too has its place. When it is met with honesty and with grounded stability, it can help us face our wounds more directly and respond in new ways rather than repeating old patterns or passing our hurt along to others.

Grief has a way of moving in suddenly. A song, a scent, or a passing memory can bring it rushing back, reminding us of what we have lost and how deeply we have loved. If we can stay with grief and listen to its undercurrents, it can help us soften over time. It can teach us what matters most to us, help us sit with the sorrow of others, and, even in its heaviness, point us toward meaning and direction in life.

In this way, our emotions may weigh heavily on us, but they can also become the raw material for transformation. Worked with and reshaped, they can help us heal, deepen our connection with ourselves, and grow stronger emotionally. They can also open us to greater empathy, making it possible to listen to the pain of others in ways we might not have before. Often it is our emotions themselves that alert us when something no longer fits, pointing us toward the places where growth and repair are likely most needed.

When we are suffering, it is easy to believe the pain we are experiencing will never end. But in time, pain often shifts, hinting that new ways of living and feeling are possible, and may, under certain conditions, gently guide us toward what is good for us. When this happens, we may find ourselves drawn toward what helps us feel more whole, and in that very wholeness, life itself can feel more alive. Transformation then asks something simple yet profound, to meet life as it is, while also imagining what it might become beyond what we can see right now. This is the paradox at the heart of transformation: that we can face life as it is and still move toward what is good for us—a movement that helps us integrate more of who we are and, in doing so, become more fully human.

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Therapy as Alchemy

Therapy is one of the places where the paradoxes in our lives can be explored, where the patterns that shape us can be unpacked, and the feelings and thoughts we struggle with can be given space to be understood and worked with. I know this not only as a therapist, but as a patient myself. In my own therapy with my therapist, Mel, I’ve come to see how the same patterns I help others recognize can shape my own life, and how the process of working through them, slowly and honestly, can be both healing and life-changing.

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