Written by April Michelle Ratchford, Occupational Therapist & Podcast Host April Michelle Ratchford, Occupational Therapist, Registered and Licensed, is an autistic occupational therapist and the voice behind Adulting with Autism. She supports neurodivergent adults across the world with relatable storytelling, lived wisdom, and empowering strategies for real-life challenges. Happy fall from Kentucky, otherwise known as the seven realms of hell because apparently nobody told the weather that summer is supposed to be over. Our time together with these articles is winding down, and honestly, that makes me a little sad. I hope you have found something useful in all the things I have thrown at you: college, finances, housing, and surviving adulthood without setting everything on fire. Today, we are talking about something that sounds simple but can make or break your entire day when you are autistic: routine. Sometimes you do not need more discipline. You need more routine. My son was warned – did he listen? Absolutely not My son took one class over the summer. It was completely online. Do you know what else he had? Absolutely no routine. None. He did not have to get dressed and go anywhere. He did not have to interact with anybody. He did not have to walk across campus or transition from one classroom to another. He could pretty much structure, or not structure, his day however he wanted. I kept telling him, “You need to start scheduling some things during your day because when fall comes, you are going to have a meltdown.” His response? “Uh-huh. Okay.” Parents, you know that “okay.” That is the “I heard sounds come out of your mouth, but I have no intention of implementing any of this information” okay. Fast-forward to fall. Now he has four classes. Three are in person. One is online and does not even start until October. His classes can start at 8 a.m., and some days he is not finished until 2 p.m. We were not even three weeks into the semester before we had multiple meltdowns. Because here is the thing: he did not suddenly become lazy. His nervous system went from almost no externally imposed structure to all the structure: waking up, getting dressed, getting to class, dealing with people and noise, transitioning between buildings, paying attention, remembering assignments, eating somewhere in there, and somehow still functioning afterward. When an autistic person struggles with that transition, people often reach for discipline: try harder, manage your time better, be more responsible. Sometimes what that person actually needs is scaffolding while their brain adjusts to the new routine. Four neurodivergent people walk onto a cruise ship Let me tell you about our family vacation. There were four of us: my son and me, who are autistic, and my sister and nephew, who are AuDHD. That is right. Four neurodivergent people boarded a cruise ship together. What could possibly go wrong? Interestingly, we all handled routine differently. My nephew is very routine-oriented. He figured out when he wanted to go to camp, what activities he wanted to do, and when he needed to be where. This child basically created his own cruise itinerary. My son? Schedule? Never heard of her. He did whatever. That matters because neurodivergent people are not interchangeable. One autistic or AuDHD person may desperately need a written schedule. Another might hate one. Someone else may need structure but struggle to create that structure independently. Needing routine and being able to build a routine are two completely different skills. Then I ignored my own advice Before the cruise, I actually did something intelligent. I knew I would need time to transition back into regular life, so I purposely scheduled two days off after vacation. Look at me being an occupational therapist and using occupational therapy principles on myself. Beautiful. Then I fucked it up. I work PRN. If I do not work, I do not get paid. I had just missed an entire week of income, so my brain immediately went, “We must play catch-up.” I picked up more hours at a second building that is nowhere near my regular building. I still had podcast interviews. Then my boss’s significant other had a stroke, which understandably affected staffing, and suddenly we were down another occupational therapist. My routine was gone. I had shit here, shit there, and shit everywhere. My podcast room looked like a hurricane had come through and then circled back around because it forgot something. Thank God I have marketing help with posting because that might have been the thing that finally sent me over the edge. My vacation was July 29 through August 4. It took me about a month afterward to feel like I had returned to anything resembling my normal routine. A month. I know better. Apparently, having nearly three decades of healthcare experience does not prevent you from looking directly at your own professional advice and saying, “That is adorable. I am not doing that.” Routine reduces decisions Routine is useful because it does more than tell you what time to do something. It reduces the number of decisions your brain has to make. If I always shower at a certain point in my morning, I do not have to spend mental energy deciding when I am going to shower. If Tuesday evening is laundry, I do not have to continually think about when I am going to do laundry. If I have a designated time to answer emails, work on my podcast, or handle paperwork, those tasks have somewhere to live. That means fewer decisions, fewer transitions, and fewer things floating around in my head yelling, “Do not forget me!” When your executive functioning is already being used for work, school, masking, sensory regulation, communication, and simply existing around other humans, removing a few decisions can be a beautiful thing. Predictability can also make transitions easier. Knowing what comes next gives your brain a chance to prepare instead of constantly switching gears without warning. Then a crisis shows up and kicks over the furniture Here is where routine becomes both a gift and a pain in the ass. When something disrupts mine, especially a crisis, I switch gears. Whatever the crisis is becomes the thing. Everything else? I leave it to burn in the fires of hell. The problem is that when the crisis ends, all those other things are still sitting there waiting for me. Now I am not simply returning to my routine. I am returning to my routine plus the backlog created while I was dealing with the crisis. That is when overwhelm can start multiplying. Sometimes people look at an autistic adult struggling afterward and wonder why they have not “gotten over it.” The original disruption may be finished. That does not mean the person’s routine has recovered. Transitions deserve recovery time, too. Going from vacation to work, summer to school, one job schedule to another, or even a quiet weekend into a packed Monday can take more adjustment than it appears to from the outside. Sometimes even tiny routines are hard to get back I have been trying to get my facial care routine back for a couple of years. Years. I used to be rigid about that routine: morning products, night products, everything had its place. Then life went sideways, my routine disappeared, and I still have not completely gotten it back. Does my skin look great? For now. Could it look better? Absolutely. This is a perfect example of something I want younger autistic adults to understand: knowing how to do something does not mean you will always be able to do it consistently. Losing a habit does not mean you failed. Sometimes you need to build the scaffolding again. Start small, I mean stupidly small If you wake up every morning with absolutely no idea what you are doing that day, do not start by creating a seventeen-hour, color-coded productivity schedule. You will piss yourself off by Wednesday. Start small. If you need to schedule your shower, schedule your damn shower. Put brushing your teeth on the calendar. Schedule dinner if you forget to eat. Schedule study time. Schedule grocery shopping. Schedule when you are going to answer emails. Yes, schedule your gaming time. Rest and recreation belong in a routine, too. You can also build routines around events instead of exact times. Maybe you take your medication after brushing your teeth. Maybe you check tomorrow’s schedule after dinner. Maybe you put your keys in the same place every time you walk through the door. Alarms, calendars, visual schedules, checklists, timers, and reminders are not cheating. They are tools. We do not give people bonus adulthood points for remembering everything using nothing but the squishy computer inside their skull. Routine should support you, not control you I am not saying autistic adults need every minute of every day scheduled. That is not a routine. That is prison with a Google Calendar. Your routine should make your life easier, not become another demand you are terrified to violate. You also need some flexibility built into it because life is going to life. Classes get canceled. Bosses call. Cars break. People get sick. Appointments run late. Sometimes you are exhausted, and the laundry can wait until tomorrow without society collapsing. It can help to have a “minimum routine” for bad days: the few things that truly need to happen even when the full schedule falls apart. Eat something. Take your medication. Handle basic hygiene. Check tomorrow’s obligations. Everything else can be rebuilt when you have more capacity. The goal is not perfection. The goal is having enough predictable structure that when something does go sideways, you have something familiar to return to. Don’t be me I spent my 20s flying by the seat of my pants. Then my 30s. Apparently, I continued portions of this experiment well into my 40s before I finally got the clue. I am sometimes amazed my kid survived and made it into his 20s. But here we are. So do not be me. Whether you are living independently, living with your parents, starting college, attending vocational school, working your first job, or trying to manage an entire adult household, give your day some structure. Our attraction to patterns and routines can be one of our gifts. It can also be our curse because one unexpected thing can knock everything completely off course, and sometimes getting back on course takes far longer than anybody, including us, expects. Build your routines. Start small. Change them when they stop working. Give yourself transition time when your schedule changes. When life knocks everything sideways, do not assume you suddenly need more discipline. You might just need to rebuild your routine. Happy scheduling I hope this helped, guys. If you have questions, or you want to tell me about the ridiculous thing you have to put on your calendar so your brain actually remembers to do it, I would love to hear from you. You can contact me through my website at Adulting With Autism. May your routine survive longer than mine did after vacation. Until next time, happy scheduling. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from April Michelle Ratchford April Michelle Ratchford, Occupational Therapist & Podcast Host April Michelle Ratchford, Occupational Therapist, Registered and Licensed, is an autistic occupational therapist, writer, and global advocate for neurodivergent adults. As the creator and host of Adulting with Autism, an internationally ranked podcast with over two million downloads, she blends clinical expertise with real-life lived experience. April specializes in supporting autistic young adults as they transition into independence, higher education, and adult identity. She is known for her clear, empowering approach that makes complex neurodivergent challenges accessible and manageable. April is currently advancing her studies in neuroscience through King’s College London to further elevate her work in autistic well-being and adult development.

Written by Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain, LCSW, Psychotherapist & Ancestral Healer Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, somatic therapist, and founder of Healthemindset. He specializes in nervous system healing, ancestral wisdom, and trauma recovery for empaths, Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs), Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), and LGBTQ+ communities. For years, I kept two languages separate: the clinical language of nervous system regulation and trauma, and the language of anime, comics, and games that had shaped me since childhood. It took one client’s offhand comment about Demon Slayer to show me they were never meant to be separate at all. I want to tell you something I kept quiet for longer than I should have. For years, I sat with clients in a clinical setting and talked about nervous system regulation, attachment wounds, somatic awareness, and the architecture of trauma. I was good at it. But there was a whole other language I spoke fluently that I was leaving outside the therapy room: the language of anime, comics, and gaming. The characters I had grown up with. The stories that had held me when nothing else could. The fictional worlds I had turned to as a child when the real one felt like too much, too loud, too unpredictable, too unkind to someone as sensitive as I was. I had learned, somewhere along the way, that these things were not serious. That they did not belong in a clinical space. It took a client to teach me otherwise. We were about six sessions in and making slow, careful progress. Then one day they mentioned, almost offhand, that they had been thinking about a scene from Demon Slayer. Tanjiro, kneeling in the snow, grieving his family, choosing to get up anyway. They could not explain why it kept coming back to them. But something in their body responded when they talked about it: a loosening, a recognition, a particular quality of emotion that our more direct clinical conversations had not quite reached. I leaned in instead of redirecting. That session became one of the most clinically significant of our entire work together. That is when I stopped leaving those worlds outside the therapy room. The power of narrative distance There is a concept in narrative therapy called externalizing, the practice of separating the person from the problem, giving it a shape outside the self so it can be examined without the full weight of shame and self-judgment collapsing in. Anime, comics, and gaming do this naturally and powerfully. When a client is talking about Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender – his rage, his need to prove himself, the way his father's voice lives inside him long after he has escaped his father's presence – they are often talking about themselves. But the distance the character provides makes it bearable to say things they could not say directly. The defenses soften. The shame quiets. The emotion becomes accessible because it belongs, for a moment, to someone else. Neuroscience supports what storytellers have always known: narrative activates the brain differently than direct emotional disclosure. When we're immersed in a character's experience, research on narrative empathy suggests our own mirror neuron systems engage much as they would if we were living the experience ourselves. For trauma survivors especially, narrative provides a natural window of tolerance. This is a core reason why body-based and somatic approaches to trauma healing often use story, metaphor, and image as entry points into difficult material. This is also why so many clinicians are now integrating talk therapy with somatic approaches rather than relying on one modality alone. Inside the session I work with a client, a young adult who identifies as a highly sensitive person and carries complex trauma from early childhood, who has spent their whole life feeling like they were born into the wrong world. They love Black Clover, specifically Asta, the one character in a world of magic users born without any magic at all, who refuses to accept that the world's definition of power applies to him. In one session, I asked them: What do you think Asta's body feels like in the moments before a fight? When the world has told him again that he does not belong, that he has nothing, that he should give up, what does his nervous system do? They described it vividly: the tension that does not tip into shutdown, the breath that stays open even when everything around him is trying to close it, the specific quality of determination that lives in the chest rather than the mind. Then I asked: Where in your own body do you recognize that? The room went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when something real is happening. We spent the rest of that session tracking, somatically, carefully, the places in their own body where that quality lived. Not as metaphor. As lived sensation. As a resource they had been carrying all along without knowing how to access it. That is somatic therapy. That is Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP). It got there through anime. For a closer look at what this kind of embodied processing can look like in practice, I’d point you to this piece on somatic experiencing in trauma resolution. Characters as clinical mirrors I have noticed consistent patterns in the characters my clients are most drawn to, and those patterns are clinically informative in ways that no intake assessment fully captures. Clients who were parentified early often identify with characters who carry impossible burdens with unwavering loyalty, like Tanjiro in Demon Slayer. Clients processing rage that was never allowed expression are often drawn to characters whose anger is enormous, legitimate, and eventually integrated rather than suppressed, like Naruto. Clients navigating questions of identity and belonging, queer clients, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) clients, and clients who feel they exist between worlds frequently identify with characters who do not fit neatly into any single category of their universe. The ones who are powerful in ways their world does not yet have language for. When I ask a client which character they feel most like right now, I am asking them to tell me something about their current nervous system state in a way that bypasses the cognitive filters that so often stand between a person and the truth of their experience. Gaming as nervous system training Gaming is often treated as avoidance. But gaming is also, for many of the clients I work with, one of the primary ways they have learned to tolerate frustration, regulate activation, and experience genuine states of flow – the full-body absorption in a meaningful challenge that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified as one of the most reliably positive human experiences available. Understanding the relationship between emotions, regulation, and engagement helps illuminate why gaming serves as genuine nervous system training for many people, not just entertainment. For clients with trauma histories, the sense of agency that gaming provides – the felt experience of being the one who makes decisions, takes action, and sees consequences can be profoundly regulating in ways that directly counter the helplessness that trauma installs. The game gives us the raw material. The clinical work helps them integrate it. When AI becomes another bridge into feeling Not every client's fluency is in a fictional world. Some of my clients are the opposite of immersed, they're analytical, always in their heads, thinking their way around a feeling a dozen times before they ever get near it. For clients like this, I've started using Artificial Intelligence (AI) between sessions to help tailor worksheets and reflection prompts to what they're actually carrying that week, and to help them get racing thoughts out of their heads and onto the page first, in their own words, before we work together to refine them. It's the same underlying principle as externalizing a feeling into a character. Getting something chaotic and internal into an external, organized form makes it possible to finally feel what's underneath it. Decades of research on expressive writing shows that turning disorganized thought into coherent narrative meaningfully reduces anxiety, and I've seen that same shift happen for clients using AI this way: less overall stress, more capacity to actually do the emotional work in session, and, more than once, meaningfully better sleep. I want to be direct about the boundary here. AI is not my co-therapist, and it never touches the therapeutic relationship itself. The American Psychological Association's ethical guidance on AI in clinical practice is clear that these tools exist to support clinical judgment, not substitute for it, and that's exactly how I hold it. The attunement, the felt sense of being met, the co-regulation that happens in the room – none of that comes from a tool. It comes from presence. What AI gives some of my clients is a way to arrive at that presence less encumbered, so the real, human work has room to happen once we're face to face. Your story awaits If you came to this article and recognized yourself, if you grew up in fictional worlds that held you in ways the real world sometimes did not, if you have characters you love with an intensity that has sometimes felt embarrassing, I want to say this directly: that love is not escapism. It is intelligence. You found, in those stories, a mirror for parts of yourself that the world around you did not always reflect back. Bring it into your healing. Let it be a resource rather than something you leave outside the therapy room. Your favorite character has been trying to reach you for a long time. Maybe it is time to listen. Bring your whole self to healing The characters, stories, and worlds that have held you, and the tools that help you finally get out of your own head, belong in your healing too. At Healthemindset, sessions are built to meet you exactly where you are, including the parts of you that speak fluent anime. To explore working together, visit here. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain, LCSW, Psychotherapist & Ancestral Healer Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain, Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), is a somatic therapist, AEDP-trained clinician, and founder of Healthemindset. Drawing on polyvagal theory, Curanderismo, and his Choctaw and Chickasaw ancestral healing traditions, Christopher offers a deeply integrative approach to trauma recovery and nervous system regulation. He specializes in supporting empaths, highly sensitive people, and members of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities navigating the intersection of identity, culture, and healing. His work bridges clinical rigor with cultural reclamation, creating space for clients to reconnect with their bodies, their lineages, and their wholeness. Christopher is based in Los Angeles, California, and works with clients remotely all over California.

Written by Prudence Hatchett, Leadership Resilience Strategist Prudence Hatchett is an award-winning entrepreneur, international speaker, bestselling author, and Leadership Resilience Strategist helping leaders transform burnout into sustainable influence and high performance. We talk a lot about what leaders need to know. We talk about communication, emotional intelligence, decision-making, confidence, strategy, and influence. But we do not talk enough about what happens inside the leader when it is time to use those skills. Knowing what to do and accessing what you know under stress are two different things. This is where the nervous system enters the leadership conversation. Your nervous system constantly receives information, interprets what is happening around you, and helps your body decide how to respond. Is this situation safe? Is it threatening? Do I need to move toward it, move away from it, fight against it, or shut down? It can make those determinations before you have consciously decided what you want to do. A difficult conversation, unexpected criticism, organizational change, a missed target, conflict with a colleague, or even an email can activate a response that influences what happens next. You may think you are simply “responding to the situation,” when your nervous system may already be influencing how you perceive the situation. This is why I believe the nervous system is one of the most overlooked leadership tools we have. The goal is not to eliminate stress. The goal is to get better at recognizing what is happening internally, so stress doesn't automatically become the leader of your response. Here are 4 ways your nervous system is already showing up in your leadership and how to make the most of it: 1. Your nervous system influences how you interpret pressure Two leaders can experience the exact same situation and interpret it completely differently. One sees a challenge. The other sees a threat. The difference is not always skill, experience, or confidence. Sometimes, it is what is happening internally. When your nervous system perceives a threat, your body prepares to protect you. Your heart rate may increase. Your breathing may change. Your muscles may be tense. Your thinking may become more rigid. You may become defensive, impatient, overly controlling, avoidant, or unusually quiet. Now imagine trying to lead from that mental state without realizing you are in it. This is where self-awareness becomes more than a leadership buzzword. It becomes a form of internal intelligence. Make the most of it: Before responding immediately when stressed, notice what is happening inside you. Ask yourself: What am I experiencing right now, and what does this situation require of me? That small separation between reaction and response can help you feel more in control and aligned with what you really want to accomplish. 2. Your nervous system affects your access to the leadership skills you already have I often say the problem isn't that leaders lack the skill, but that stress interferes with their access to the skill they already possess. You can know how to communicate effectively and still communicate poorly when emotionally activated. You can understand conflict resolution and still become defensive during conflict. You can be highly strategic and still make a short-sighted decision when overwhelmed. This is one reason traditional leadership development can sometimes stop at the surface. We teach the skill without always addressing the human behavior that affects how you implement it. When the skill does not work as expected, the leader may assume, I need more training. Maybe that is true, but sometimes you do not need another skill. You need better access to yourself. Make the most of it: Learn your personal stress signals. What changes first when you become overwhelmed? Your breathing? Tone? Patience? Ability to concentrate? Or your need to control? Those signals are information. The earlier you recognize them, the more opportunity you have to regulate before your stress begins making decisions for you. 3. Your nervous system influences the energy you bring into the room Leaders set the energy in the room, often before they say a word. People notice facial expressions, body language, tone, pace, tension, and emotional shifts. A leader who enters a meeting visibly frustrated may unintentionally change how freely people communicate. A leader who becomes defensive when challenged may unknowingly teach the team to stop challenging ideas. A leader who stays grounded during uncertainty can create enough stability for others to think clearly. This does not mean leaders should pretend everything is fine. In fact, pretending can create its own form of disconnection. Regulation is not suppression. Regulation means being able to experience an emotion without automatically handing that emotion control of your behavior. That distinction is important. Make the most of it: Before entering an important conversation, meeting, or presentation, check your internal state. Ask: What am I carrying into this room, and is it what I want other people to experience from me? Sometimes leadership preparation needs to happen internally before it happens strategically. 4. Your nervous system can become an early warning system One of the greatest benefits of understanding your nervous system is recognizing patterns before they become problems. Burnout rarely introduces itself by saying, Hello, I am burnout. It may begin with irritability, difficulty concentrating, emotional exhaustion, or trouble disconnecting from work. You may feel the need to be constantly “on,” becoming less patient with people you normally tolerate well. You may lose curiosity and become increasingly reactive. Your body often provides information long before you decide to listen. This is where resilience becomes proactive instead of reactive. Too often, resilience is discussed as something we need after something has already gone wrong. But strategic resilience also means recognizing when your internal system is telling you that something needs attention. Make the most of it: Stop treating every internal warning sign as something to push through. Become curious about patterns. What repeatedly activates you? What drains you? What situations make it harder for you to access the version of yourself you want to bring to leadership? Awareness gives you an opportunity to intervene earlier. Your nervous system is not the enemy The nervous system is designed to protect you. The problem comes when a protective response begins driving situations that require thoughtful leadership rather than immediate survival. This is why understanding human behavior belongs in leadership development. Leadership is not just about the strategies you know. It is also about the internal state from which you execute those strategies. So, what can you do in the moment when you recognize that stress, frustration, anxiety, or another emotional response is beginning to interfere with how you want to lead? Here is an introduction to a strategy I call the 90-second Triple R: Recognize, Regulate, Re-enter: Recognize: Take about 30 seconds to notice what is happening inside you. What are you feeling? What is your body doing? What automatic response is beginning to show up? You cannot regulate what you have not recognized. Regulate: Take the next 30 seconds to regulate the automatic emotional response. Slow your breathing. Create some internal space between what you are feeling and what you are about to do. The goal is not to make the emotion disappear. The goal is to keep the emotion from automatically determining your next move. Re-enter: Use the final 30 seconds to intentionally re-enter the situation by asking yourself one important question: What does this situation really require of me? Not, what do I feel like doing right now? Not, how do I prove my point? But what does this situation require from me as the leader? That question can change the direction of a conversation, a decision, a meeting, and sometimes an entire relationship. The 90-second Triple R is not about becoming emotionless. It is about creating enough internal space to regain access to the leadership skills you already possess. Because sometimes the leader does not need another leadership skill. Sometimes the leader needs a way to access the skills that stress has temporarily interrupted. That is where the nervous system becomes more than something happening in the background. It becomes a leadership tool, and when you learn to use it intentionally, resilience is no longer just about bouncing back after something difficult happens. It becomes part of how you lead while the difficulty is happening. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Prudence Hatchett Prudence Hatchett, Leadership Resilience Strategist Prudence Hatchett is an award-winning entrepreneur, international speaker, executive coach, Leadership Resilience Strategist, and bestselling author. With over 20 years of experience in mental health, education, and leadership development, she helps leaders eliminate burnout, strengthen resilience, and elevate their influence. As the founder of PH Counseling, LLC® and Learn with Prudence®, Prudence combines neuroscience, psychology, and leadership strategy to deliver transformative, actionable insights. Her engaging presentations empower audiences to lead with clarity, confidence, and purpose while creating psychologically safe, high-performing cultures that thrive in today's demanding environment.

Written by Gabrielle Lewis-Lungo, Licensed Dietitian Nutritionist Gabrielle Lewis-Lungo is a Licensed Dietitian Nutritionist, Certified Nutrition Specialist, and Personal Trainer with over 10 years of experience in fitness and nutrition. Through her unique background, she combines nutrition and movement to help individuals build a deeper understanding of how their bodies, behaviors, and lifestyles work together. Many people hear that weight loss is simple, just eat fewer calories than you burn, and the scale will go down. But if it’s really that easy, why do so many people follow this advice and still have trouble losing weight or keeping it off? The problem isn’t that energy balance is incorrect. It’s that our bodies aren’t simple equations. As we lose weight, our bodies adjust, our hunger can change, and what once felt easy may get harder to stick with. If we treat weight loss as just a math problem, we ignore the real systems that make it challenging to keep going. This oversimplification is longstanding. Nutrition science has often been reduced to new rules and programs, yet the core message persists, “You are the problem; this is the solution.” While names and guidelines evolve, the promise of an easy fix remains. This pattern began with the 1863 “Banting Diet,” which eliminated bread, potatoes, beer, and milk, and continues with trends like the “Paleo Diet.”[1] Diets have ranged from strict plans such as Atkins, South Beach, Cabbage Soup, and the Master Cleanse to more flexible approaches like the Mediterranean and Blue Zone diets. With a wealth of information, research, and opinions available, numerous external factors influence our perceptions of the “right way to eat” or “the right way to lose weight.” There is no single method to “optimize” health and weight, and focusing on this concept can distract from taking practical steps to break the cycle. This ongoing cycle can make it challenging to commit to one strategy long enough to assess its effectiveness. When a strategy becomes unsustainable or does not deliver expected results, individuals often blame themselves, “What did I do wrong?” Over time, this self-blame can shape one’s relationship with food and body. I often hear, “But I am doing everything right.” If you recognize your own experience in this, you are not alone. So many people struggle with these challenges, not because they are lacking in effort or willpower, but because the process is genuinely complex. Be gentle with yourself as you navigate these ups and downs, showing yourself kindness makes it easier to find a sustainable approach. The question, then, is not simply whether the science is correct, but whether the strategy accounts for the person using it. Weight loss occurs within a living, adaptable body, not in a vacuum. Hunger, energy expenditure, habits, environment, and physiology all influence how a person responds to a calorie deficit. The science may be universal, but the experience of applying it is not. The myth of the math Before rethinking how we discuss weight loss, it is important to clarify that losing weight is neither inherently good nor bad. Sometimes it is medically necessary, other times, it is a personal goal related to confidence or comfort. My role is not to judge these reasons, but to ensure you have accurate information to support your goals. Calories are a component of weight loss. However, reducing the process to “calories in versus calories out” creates the false impression that both variables are fixed and entirely within our control. They aren't. Energy intake and expenditure are constantly in flux. The body responds to changes in food intake, activity, body weight, hormones, appetite, and energy availability. These adjustments affect how much you eat, how much energy you expend, and how sustainable your approach remains over time.[1][2] Your body is constantly communicating information about its energy status. Hormones and neural signals help the brain monitor factors such as nutrient availability and stored energy, influencing hunger, fullness, food intake, and energy expenditure.[3] Some of the key players include leptin, ghrelin, and insulin. Leptin signals how much energy the body has stored, ghrelin stimulates hunger, and insulin helps regulate blood glucose and signals that nutrients are available after eating. These systems do not function independently. They interact continuously to regulate energy balance, so the numbers used to describe intake and expenditure are not static. This helps explain why two people can follow what appears to be the same calorie prescription and experience very different outcomes. Their energy needs, appetite, activity, body composition, dietary history, and bodily reactions may differ. Even within the same person, these variables can change over time.[1][2] For example, someone may be told their body burns about 2,000 calories daily and that consuming 1,500 calories will create a predictable deficit. While the math appears straightforward, the body is not a calculator, it is a dynamic system that responds to changes in energy availability. Mathematical calculations describe energy balance, but they do not capture all the factors that influence how that balance is achieved or maintained. Your body is designed to adapt, not fail When energy intake decreases, the body does not maintain the same level of function, it adapts dynamically. One key mechanism is adaptive thermogenesis, in which energy expenditure declines more than expected given weight loss and reduced body size alone.[2][3] This adaptation, along with the lower energy needs of a smaller body, can contribute to weight-loss plateaus even when intake remains consistent. Appetite regulation also changes. As energy availability decreases, hunger may intensify, food may seem more appealing, and previously satisfying portions may no longer suffice.[3] Simultaneously, everyday movement can decline. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), which includes spontaneous activities like walking, pacing, and fidgeting, may also decrease as the body adapts to lower energy availability.[2] These changes do not indicate that your body is “fighting” you or that something is wrong. They are normal physiological responses to changes in energy availability. Your body adapts to its environment by adjusting hunger, energy expenditure, and movement to maintain stability. If you encounter a plateau, it is simply a cue to evaluate the full picture rather than assume you have failed. Look at your week as a whole, including sleep, stress, and baseline movement like daily walking, rather than fixating on a single day or metric. Often, making small, manageable tweaks, such as prioritizing high-satiety foods like protein and fiber or protecting daily activity without overtraining, allows your body to respond without triggering excessive resistance. Your body is constantly regulating energy If the body responds to changes in energy availability by adjusting hunger, movement, and energy expenditure, what drives those changes? Energy homeostasis depends on continuous communication among the brain, gastrointestinal tract, adipose tissue, and endocrine system. Together, these systems monitor the body's energy status and coordinate hunger, food intake, energy expenditure, and metabolic rate.[4] The brain acts as the central command center. It integrates signals regarding nutrient availability, stored fuel, and recent food intake, coordinating downstream responses that influence appetite, spontaneous movement, thermogenesis, and glucose metabolism. The gastrointestinal tract signals the arrival and composition of meals. In response to feeding, it releases gut peptides such as GLP-1 and peptide YY (PYY), which stimulate satiety and communicate nutrient availability to the brain. Adipose tissue communicates long-term energy status. Fat cells produce leptin, which signals the size of stored energy reserves to the central nervous system rather than functioning purely as an acute “fullness” switch. Neural and immune pathways, including signaling influenced by the gut microbiome, further mediate two-way communication between the gut and the brain.[4][5] These systems operate as an integrated network rather than as isolated pathways. A shift in one directly influences the others, allowing the body to continuously adjust to changes in fuel availability. Decreasing calorie intake is not simply a mathematical change, it alters the physiological environment that governs hunger, fullness, and metabolic output. Why change feels hard Understanding the physiology is one thing, experiencing it in daily life is another. Any shift in eating habits naturally alters how your body feels and functions. Reducing portions may increase hunger, increasing fiber can affect digestion, and aggressive deficits may compromise energy, focus, and exercise performance.[3] These responses do not indicate something is wrong, your body is simply adapting to a new baseline. Appetite is not governed by a single switch. It demonstrates a dynamic association between internal biology and external cues, which is why hunger is determined by far more than just calorie math.[3] There is also a strong behavioral layer. Eating habits form over years of repeated timing, portioning, and food choices. Disrupting those patterns moves you away from what is automatic, and new behaviors require intentional effort before they become second nature.[6] Initial motivation can mask these challenges. As novelty fades, you must manage daily logistics, navigating hunger, adapting to social events, adjusting meal routines, and consistently choosing new options over familiar ones. Practical strategies for sustainable habit change Building sustainable routines is most effective when you start small and increase gradually: Start with single, low-friction habits: If a complete overhaul feels overwhelming, choose one simple anchor. For example, drink a glass of water before meals, add a serving of vegetables to lunch, take a 5-minute walk after dinner, or pause to breathe before reaching for a snack. Stabilize meal timing: Set reminders to eat at regular intervals to prevent the extreme hunger that can trigger overeating later in the day. Reduce decision fatigue: Plan basic meal structures in advance and use a grocery list to minimize impulsive choices when hungry. Stack new habits onto existing ones: Pair new routines with established behaviors, such as preparing lunch while making breakfast or packing snacks while cleaning up after dinner. Do not interpret every discomfort as resistance to change, but also avoid ignoring persistent biofeedback or assuming that increased restriction is always the solution. In this context, biofeedback refers to the signals your body gives you about its current state, such as persistent hunger, low mood, irritability, low energy, sleep disturbances, or difficulty recovering from workouts. Hunger, fatigue, and recovery stalls are examples of these indicators, helping you understand how your current approach is functioning. A protocol that causes ongoing exhaustion, disrupts training, or makes eating unpleasant may create a deficit, but it is not sustainable. The goal is not to make change effortless, but to develop an approach that both your physiology and lifestyle can adapt to over the long term. The strategy has to fit the person If the experience of changing your eating habits and losing weight varies from person to person, then the strategy cannot be one-size-fits-all. The underlying principles of weight regulation may be universal, but how those principles play out can look very different from one person to another. What influences hunger, eating patterns, activity, and progress for one person may not have the same effect on someone else. Consider two individuals with identical weight-loss goals: One may thrive on three structured, higher-volume meals that keep hunger low, while another feels better with smaller, more frequent meals. One may naturally undereat during the day only to struggle with intense evening hunger, while another handles time-restricted feeding with ease. Someone who strength trains regularly requires distinct nutritional priorities compared to someone with a sedentary routine. Work schedules, sleep quality, digestive tolerance, medications, and dieting history all influence what is realistic and sustainable. Personalized nutrition goes beyond food preferences, it integrates evidence-based strategies with practical limitations to reduce unnecessary obstacles. The role of individual biology Research is beginning to show that biological differences may influence how people respond to the same dietary approach. In a yearlong trial of 609 adults following either a healthy low-fat or healthy low-carbohydrate diet, researchers identified baseline metabolic and microbiome markers associated with different short- and long-term weight-loss outcomes.[7] These findings suggest that individual biology may help explain why the same approach does not produce the same results for everyone. At the same time, biology does not provide a simple formula for finding the “perfect” diet. In a separate randomized clinical trial, a personalized diet designed to minimize post-meal blood sugar spikes did not produce significantly greater weight loss than a standard low-fat diet.[8] A single biomarker cannot determine exactly how someone should eat. The key point is that biology matters, but it is only one aspect. Individuals may respond differently to the same strategy, so effective nutrition approaches must consider the person rather than rely on a single formula. Unique individual needs don't change the fundamentals of nutrition. Adequate protein, fiber, plant diversity, consistent hydration, minimizing ultra-processed foods, and regular movement remain the pillars of health. The real challenge is rarely knowing what to do, it's figuring out how to apply those guidelines to a busy, constantly shifting life. How to make your strategy more efficient A calorie target on paper can’t capture what actually happens in a living body. It doesn’t account for shifting appetite, changing energy demands, daily stress, or routine disruptions. This is where standard advice falls short. A valid principle gets reduced to an oversimplified slogan, "Eat less, move more". When progress inevitably stalls, people blame their willpower rather than question the strategy. The body is not a static calculator, and progress is rarely linear. Stalls and setbacks aren't failures, they are predictable checkpoints that tell you how to pivot. What to do when a strategy stops working Before drastically reducing calories or increasing cardio, evaluate your approach methodically: Assess true weekly consistency: Review your entire week, not just the easiest days. A consistent weekday deficit can be offset by untracked snacks, larger weekend portions, or dining out. Evaluate real-world biofeedback: Are you frequently preoccupied with food, experiencing extreme fatigue, or struggling during workouts? If your protocol demands constant willpower against basic physiological needs, it is unsustainable. Strategic changes, such as adjusting meal timing, increasing protein and fiber to promote satiety, or adding more high-volume foods, can help maintain a deficit without causing unnecessary discomfort. Audit lifestyle and recovery factors: Sleep quality, baseline movement, stress, meal distribution, and digestive comfort all directly affect how manageable a daily calorie deficit feels. Reconsider the rate of loss: Faster is rarely better. Aggressive deficits can increase hunger, compromise training performance, raise the risk of lean mass loss, and cause greater reductions in energy expenditure.[9] A moderate pace that maintains energy, training performance, and daily function is typically more sustainable. Ensure the strategy fits your life: The best plan is not the one with the most severe restriction, but the one that achieves steady progress with minimal friction. Ditching overly aggressive restrictions makes fat loss far more tolerable and sets you up for long-term maintenance. When your habits fit your routine from the start, preserving your progress becomes a natural, seamless next step. Nutrition disclaimer The information shared in this article is intended for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for individual medical or nutrition advice. Every individual’s health history, medical conditions, medications, and nutritional needs are unique. If you have particular health concerns or want individualized guidance, consult your medical provider or a qualified nutrition professional. Ready to take the next step? Are you ready to move beyond one-size-fits-all weight-loss advice and build a strategy that works with your body, not against it? Through individualized nutrition counseling, I help clients recognize their unique needs, develop practical strategies, and build sustainable behaviors that support their goals with improved confidence and less frustration. Request a complimentary insurance benefits check to determine if your nutrition visits are covered by your plan. Follow me on Instagram or visit my website for additional information. Follow me on Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Gabrielle Lewis-Lungo Gabrielle Lewis-Lungo, Licensed Dietitian Nutritionist Gabrielle is a nutrition professional whose work explores the connection between physiology, psychology, and eating behaviors to uncover the deeper patterns that influence health and wellness. Gabrielle’s approach is rooted in the belief that sustainable health begins with understanding the body rather than fighting against it. By integrating nutritional science with a deeper understanding of human behavior, she recognizes that lasting change requires more than information alone. Her work explores the physiological, behavioral, and lifestyle factors that influence health, helping individuals develop a more personalized and sustainable approach to wellness. References: [1] Gillam M. 2018. [Your original source on the history of the Banting Diet.] [2] Müller MJ, Enderle J, Bosy-Westphal A. Changes in energy expenditure with weight gain and weight loss in humans. Current Obesity Reports. 2016;5(4):413-423. doi:10.1007/s13679-016-0237-4. [3] Casanova N, Beaulieu K, Finlayson G, Hopkins M. Metabolic adaptations during negative energy balance and their potential impact on appetite and food intake. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society. 2019;78(3):279-289. doi:10.1017/S0029665118002811. [4] Iqbal A, Rehman A. Obesity Brain Gut Adipocyte Interaction. In: StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing; updated 2023. [5] Asadi A, Shadab Mehr N, Mohamadi MH, et al. Obesity and gut-microbiota-brain axis: A narrative review. Journal of Clinical Laboratory Analysis. 2022;36(5):e24420. doi:10.1002/jcla.24420. [6] Gardner B, et al. 2014. [Your original habit formation source.] [7] Li X, Perelman D, Leong A, et al. Distinct factors associated with short-term and long-term weight loss induced by low-fat or low-carbohydrate diet intervention. Cell Reports Medicine. 2023;4(1):100870. doi:10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100870. [8] Popp CJ, Hu L, Kharmats AY, et al. Effect of a personalized diet to reduce postprandial glycemic response vs a low-fat diet on weight loss in adults with abnormal glucose metabolism and obesity: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Network Open. 2022;5(9):e2233760. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.33760. [9] Murphy CH, Koehler K. 2022. [Your original source regarding rate of weight loss and lean mass retention.]

Written by Johnna Key, Spiritual Guide & Teacher Johnna Key is known for her calming and serene voice when guiding meditations. She is the author of the newly published book Making Space to Breathe and the YouTube channel Journeys with Johnna. Intrusive thoughts and rumination are hitting us hard right now, leaving each of us who overthinks with the daunting feeling of being trapped in our minds. I’ve had several questions from those I work with about “how to stop the loop” and find peace and clarity in the mind. Here’s what I’ve learned. As someone who has struggled and still does with intrusive thoughts, I understand that feeling of being trapped in the mind, not able to be free from a series of thought patterns, needing a way to escape the noise. Without the proper tools, discipline, or awareness, those intrusive thoughts can quickly become an overthinking mind or irrational behaviour. The modern world has set us up with so many distractions that, while they feel good in the moment, they unfortunately perpetuate the pattern of ruminating on intrusive thoughts. An intrusive thought is an unwanted or involuntary thought that enters the mind without warning or prompt. A ruminating thought is the action you take after the intrusive thought, getting into a loop of replaying it to “solve the problem.” Let’s say an intrusive thought comes into the mind. Often, these are unkind thoughts, something that could stem from childhood, an internal story that’s been in the back of your mind. It can also cause a reaction or action that is outside of one’s normal behaviour. Do you acknowledge it, or do you notice what the thought is bringing up? Do you distract from it or numb out? Sometimes we might do both, depending on the day or scenario. It’s important to notice your pattern, in any direction. That intrusive thought can become a ruminating thought, or it can reveal its message and lesson and then go away. The latter sounds easier, yet it's the one we resist most on a subconscious level, turning the intrusive thought from teacher to tormentor. Here’s a method I've used for years that has worked well for me and my clients. Begin by letting your mindset shift into curiosity rather than critique. Much easier to write than to put into practice. However, part of the re-wiring process is being open to not controlling the outcome. As your awareness slips into curiosity mode, you can view yourself a bit more easily. It can be hard to look into the mirror, so it’s okay to take this step slowly. Acknowledge the intrusive thought. If you're used to cutting it off or distracting yourself, this might take time too. Acknowledging a thought from the space of the observer allows you to see what the thought is, the simple message, not the one wrapped in trauma or fear. You can acknowledge the thought in various ways, stating it clearly out loud or writing it down. I encourage writing it down because that initiates the process of “letting it go.” By writing the intrusive thought down, you’ve essentially heard the message, taken time to acknowledge it, and let it go, for now. Leave the thought there on the page, set it aside, and walk away. Go do something different and immediately shift the energy. Don’t distract, just shift. For example, go for a walk or another type of movement you enjoy, perhaps do something small on your to-do list. Shift the energy in the mind and body. While doing this task, your mind will naturally want to refocus on the acknowledgment, and you can begin to say, “I see you” or “I hear you.” Our subconscious is sometimes desperate to be heard, so acknowledgment is a huge step toward avoiding rumination. Work to keep your mind focused on this new productive task while confirming that you're present with yourself, not fully distracted. You can return to where you wrote the thought down and read it aloud again. This time, acknowledge and process the emotions that arise. When you’re ready, take time to process the emotions that arise from this intrusive thought. This is a deeper layer to alleviating the rumination. Acknowledging the thought was step one. Step two would be to acknowledge the emotions. Slow down and take time to process the emotions attached to the intrusive thoughts. Notice whether the emotions are driving you to distract or numb, or whether you can sit with them. Cry it out. Get angry. Feel the grief. Feel the feels. Whatever is arising has a message to help you let go of the rumination pattern, let go of the intrusive thought, and, in time, release it from your body. Ways to process the thoughts Ask questions: You’re already in curiosity mode. Ask yourself questions. When did you first notice the thought? What was happening in your life then? Etc. Journal: Write it out. This is a physical act of letting the thought go. You don’t need direction or critique. Just write what’s in your heart. Set a time and days of the week, like it’s a personal date, and make the time to get to know your own inner thoughts. Therapies/coaching/mentorships/healed friends: Working with others one-on-one or in groups always helps support a healing journey. Use your discernment, ask questions, don’t let yourself get pressured into working with anyone, and follow your gut on who is right for you right now. If you’re confiding in friends or family, discern who can receive certain parts of this process. Not all friends, or even those who care for you, can hold deep emotions. Many are not prepared. If so, allow yourself to be vulnerable with those who can hold you. They will truly let you feel seen and loved. If those people don’t exist for you right now, go find them. They’re looking for you too. Resist the fear telling you to stay alone. You need support. Somatic movements: Yoga, QiGong, ThaiChi, to name a few, are great ways to intentionally move the body and connect with specific energy channels that process stored, stagnant emotions. Stagnant energy in the body will cause ruminating thoughts. Remember, emotions are energy in motion, so moving your body helps those stored, dense emotions move through to the other side. Stop It. The best way to stop ruminating thoughts is to simply stop it. Don’t let it continue to build momentum. Visualize your ruminating thought as something tangible that has energy, something that needs more energy to grow. i.e., a snowball, a baseball, a mudslide, a tsunami, a moving vehicle, etc. For example's sake, I’m going with a snowball. I know that if a snowball is created, it needs energy to be molded and shaped to grow. So, if one takes a handful of snowflakes, i.e., intrusive thoughts or emotions, and molds them together, they will need energy to grow into something bigger, into a snowball big enough to be thrown at someone else. You can take an intrusive thought that’s landed like a snowflake in your mind and observe it, noticing the tiny details that create it. You can see it for the beauty of the message it holds. Then you can choose to let it melt without giving it more energy to grow and let it go, or hold your hand out for more flakes, more thoughts, and mold them into a snowball you can hurl down the hill, building momentum and more energy as it grows. As more momentum builds, so too does the anxiety, fear, depression, overthinking, panic, etc. Nothing uplifting comes from this path. On a personal level, having chosen the latter approach for many years, I can say that it exhausts the mind and body to continue to let my intrusive thoughts torment me and freeze me in place with the energy I give them. Choosing to observe the snowflake that had a message and let it go has served my mind, body, and spirit much better. This takes practice and intention. It takes a self-boundary that you can easily set. Watch the thought come in, process it, then stop it from looping back around. Seeing the loop as a notification Each time this intrusive thought comes in, it’s an opportunity to get to know yourself a little further. Each time you slow down to get to know yourself, you give yourself a love that goes deep to the soul. Taking time to process intrusive thoughts to break the pattern of rumination will bring your mind peace and calm over time. That feeling of being trapped in your mind will ease out, and in its place, you can take comfort in yourself. Stay mindful of those intrusive thoughts. If they’re repeating and you’re struggling to shift the energy or let it go, then there could be an underlying cause. The mind could be experiencing a chemical or hormonal imbalance. There could be disease lurking beneath the surface. Parasites often cause rumination. An unhealthy lifestyle or environment–any one of these will deter your intention of letting those ruminating thoughts go. So give yourself time to check whether something deeper is happening. Most of the time there is, and with that knowledge, you can heal yourself and change the pattern. Yoga Nidra helps to stop the pattern of rumination or overthinking. Our minds are very, very powerful. We take the power they hold for granted because it often hides behind intrusive thoughts or fear. Let your mind get healthier and stronger through this practice, designed to retrain it into mindfulness and focus. One of the most profound things you can do for yourself is build a strong, healthy relationship with yourself. When we process these emotions from the torment of these thoughts, it leaves a space in the mind & body that needs to be refilled. What you refill it with matters immensely. If you do work on yourself to process out emotions from a trauma yet leave a void where those emotions once sat, they will come back in another form of trauma. Replacing those thought patterns with new ones is imperative to moving forward and not looping back. It strengthens the mind-body connection to yourself. When you refill yourself with encouragement, love, grace, motivation, acceptance, or gratitude, these things will change your life. Taking the time for a yoga Nidra to plant the seed of worthiness and gratitude will only benefit you in the long run. Not taking the time will keep you trapped in your mind. Follow me on Facebook and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Johnna Key Johnna Key, Spiritual Guide & Teacher Johnna Key is a certified Yoga and Meditation guide & Spiritual Teacher, leading others to calibrate their nervous system and ease overwhelm within the mind. Derived from her experience in the Western medicine system as a child and divorce from a narcissistic relationship as an adult, Johnna has learned and implemented tools to heal the mind, body, & spirit from traumatic experiences to exit karmic loops and generational patterns. Her passion is teaching others to find self-acceptance for their experiences and the emotions or perspectives that can surface. She's passionate about helping others calm a busy mind, ease tension in the body, and learn to meditate to find joy and self-worth in the journey we call life.

New York, September 14, 2026 – What actually happens to a person on the way to becoming excellent? That question is at the center of Excellence Becoming – A Gold Standards Original, a new podcast hosted by K. Joia Houheneka and launching today. Available exclusively on Apple Podcasts throughout September, the show explores excellence not as a polished achievement or fixed destination, but as a lifelong process of becoming through challenge, reflection, responsibility, and change. Rather than focusing primarily on conventional success stories, Excellence Becoming looks beneath achievement to examine the experiences that form the person capable of it: failures, difficult decisions, unexpected setbacks, abandoned plans, periods of uncertainty, and moments when an old way of working or an old version of oneself can no longer meet the demands of what comes next. “Too often, we tell stories of excellence backward,” said Houheneka. “Once we know someone succeeded, every mistake can look like just a clever step along an inevitable path. But that isn’t what becoming feels like while you’re living it. I wanted to create conversations about the messy middle–when you don’t yet know how the story ends, and the challenge itself is asking you to become capable of something you weren’t capable of before.” A launch collection about catalytic adversity Excellence Becoming debuts with a special opening collection of 15 short conversations with entrepreneurs, authors, and other leaders, each centered on one deceptively simple question: "What is a failure, mistake, challenge, or struggle that, however difficult in the moment, ultimately made you capable of greater excellence?" The resulting conversations explore what Houheneka describes as catalytic adversity: adverse conditions that become catalysts for meaningful change. The concept does not assume that suffering or failure automatically produces growth. Instead, it asks what can happen when people engage seriously with difficulty by reflecting on what reality has revealed, reconsidering old assumptions, developing new capacities, and/or choosing differently as a result. Across the launch collection, guests share stories of professional reinvention, burnout, entrepreneurial setbacks, identity shifts, changing relationships with fear, and moments when qualities that once contributed to success had to evolve for another chapter to become possible. Together, the conversations present a more human picture of excellence: not perfection, but formation. The work forms the person The deeper proposition behind Excellence Becoming is that the pursuit of worthwhile work changes not only what a person produces, but the person doing the producing. A sufficiently worthy challenge eventually exceeds existing capacities. It might demand greater judgment, courage, patience, responsibility, self-knowledge, or imagination. In attempting to rise to those demands, people have the opportunity to become more capable. Significantly, those greater capacities, in turn, can make greater contribution possible. Ideally, what starts to form is a virtuous spiral. “The work forms the worker,” Houheneka said. “When we commit ourselves to doing difficult things that make some portion of the world better, we have the opportunity to make ourselves better in the process. Then, because we have become more capable, we can contribute at a higher level. Then go on to become more ourselves.” That philosophy will continue beyond the introductory collection. Excellence Becoming will feature long-form conversations with accomplished entrepreneurs and creators examining how excellence has been formed across the course of their lives, and not merely what they have achieved, but the experiences and transformations that made those achievements possible. Houheneka will also release a short Monday Morning Question each week: an activating reflection built around a question she is considering in her own pursuit of excellence, inviting listeners to carry the inquiry into their own work and lives. An Apple Podcasts exclusive for September For its inaugural month, Excellence Becoming will be available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. The September exclusivity is an intentional part of the launch strategy, giving listeners one destination at which to discover the complete opening collection, follow the show, and return for new episodes. The full launch collection is available beginning today, September 14. Listen to and follow Excellence Becoming on Apple Podcasts: Excellence Becoming — A Gold Standards Original

Written by Michael Galileo, Author, Inventor & Founder of Galileo Real Time Michael Galileo is an author, inventor, and founder of Galileo Real Time, a platform that explores science, consciousness, and human choice. His work bridges physics and philosophy through groundbreaking innovations like his book, Where Time Comes From, and the handcrafted Real Time Earth Clock. “Life is just one thing after another. That's the good news.” I have always liked that idea. Because life really is one thing after another. One moment becomes the next. One decision leads to another. One circumstance creates another circumstance. Nothing remains exactly as it was. We tend to overlook this because our minds are very good at turning movement into objects. We see a person, a house, a tree, a relationship, a problem, a sunset. Once we've named something, we tend to think of it as a thing. But what if none of these things are actually finished? What if everything we experience is part of an ongoing process of becoming? The world isn't standing still Consider a sunrise. We say, “The Sun is rising.” But the Sun isn't actually rising around us. We are moving. Earth is rotating, and as it turns, our position changes relative to the Sun. What we experience as sunrise results from that changing relationship. The distinction may seem insignificant. I don't think it is. It reveals something about the way we perceive reality. We often mistake a changing process for a static event. That can happen everywhere in our lives. A relationship isn't simply a relationship. It's becoming something. A business isn't simply a business. It's becoming something. A problem isn't simply a problem. It's becoming something. Perhaps the most useful question we can ask ourselves isn't: “What is happening?” but: “What is this becoming?” The pattern of becoming Look at nature and mathematics, and you begin to see patterns everywhere. The Fibonacci sequence begins: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34... Each number emerges from what came before it. As the sequence progresses, the relationship between successive numbers approaches the familiar Golden Ratio, approximately 1.618. The Golden Ratio has fascinated mathematicians, artists, architects, and philosophers for centuries because it appears in mathematical relationships and in many forms of natural growth. Whether we find it in a shell, a spiral, a work of art, or a mathematical sequence, there is something beautiful about the underlying idea: What comes next is connected to what came before. That is the pattern I see in life itself. What we call time We normally think of time as something that passes. But perhaps a more useful way to think about it is as a way of navigating change. We measure time by observing regular processes. Earth rotates. A pendulum swings. A quartz crystal vibrates. An atomic transition occurs. Our clocks don't create those processes. They give us a way to measure and navigate them. The Earth itself is an extraordinary clock. As it travels around the Sun, it covers roughly 584 million miles during one orbit. That's approximately 1.6 million miles every day, or about 18.5 miles every second. Every second, Earth carries us roughly another 18.5 miles along its journey. We don't feel it. But we're moving nonetheless. So is everything around us. The circumstances of our lives are changing continuously. New possibilities appear. Choices are made. Consequences follow. The next moment emerges from the moment before it. Possibility plus choice: The formula for reality This is where my own thinking takes a turn. I describe it this way: "Reality = Possibility + Choice." I'm not presenting that as a scientific equation. It's a way of looking at life. Possibility represents what could become. Choice helps determine what does become. Of course, we don't have unlimited choice. We inherit circumstances. We encounter other people's choices. Nature imposes boundaries. The past has consequences. But within those circumstances, we continually participate in what happens next. Sometimes the choice is obvious. Sometimes it is simply choosing how we respond, and sometimes not choosing is itself a choice. History is, in many ways, a record of choices and their consequences. Our individual lives are no different. We are in the river Imagine yourself in a canoe on a river. You didn't create the river. You don't control its current. You can't stop the water. But you can pay attention. You can look ahead. You can see the rocks. You can notice the waterfall. You can paddle toward an opening. You can choose where to go. That, to me, is a useful metaphor for life. We don't control everything that happens. But we have far more influence over our direction than we sometimes realize. The secret isn't necessarily to fight the river. It's to learn how to read it. Look ahead. Recognize what is approaching. Understand the possibilities. Then choose. What is this becoming? That question has become increasingly important to me. When something difficult happens, I can ask: What is this becoming? When an opportunity appears: What is this becoming? When a relationship changes: What is this becoming? When I make a decision: What is this becoming? The question shifts our attention from the present snapshot to the unfolding process. That shift can change how we respond. Instead of reacting only to what something is, we begin considering what it might become. Possibility enters the picture, and with possibility comes choice. The power is in the movement Perhaps this is the most important thing I've learned from thinking about time and reality: "Nothing is standing still." The Earth is moving. The river is moving. Our bodies are changing. Our relationships are changing. Our circumstances are changing, and every moment becomes part of the circumstances from which the next moment emerges. We don't have to control the entire river. We simply need to become better navigators. Pay attention. Look ahead. Recognize the possibilities. Choose consciously. Then keep moving. Because life really is just one thing after another. That's the good news. Follow me on Facebook and visit my website for more info! Read more from Michael Galileo Michael Galileo, Author, Inventor & Founder of Galileo Real Time Michael Galileo is an author, inventor, and founder of the Galileo Real Time framework, a body of work that blends science, philosophy, and human consciousness. His groundbreaking book, Where Time Comes From, helps readers understand time not as something measured, but as something created through awareness and choice. Galileo also created the Real Time Earth Clock, a functional art piece designed around the Earth’s true motion through space. Through his writing, speaking, and designs, he inspires people to navigate reality with greater clarity, presence, and meaning. His mission is simple: to help humans understand their power to shape the world they experience.

Written by René Caruso, Metabolic Health Specialist, Peptide Consultant René Caruso is a Metabolic Health and Longevity Strategist, author, and founder of REPO FIT Inc., with over 30 years of experience helping individuals and clinical teams achieve sustainable wellness. Drawing from both professional expertise and her personal journey, she empowers clients to restore metabolic function, optimize energy, and build lasting health free from shame or quick fixes. For years, my honest answer to anyone who asked about ultra-processed food was: everything in moderation. A cereal bar here, a diet soda there, a supermarket loaf when life is busy, a little wouldn't hurt anyone. I no longer believe that. The more I've read of the research behind ultra-processed food, and the more I've sat with the work of physician and researcher Dr. Chris van Tulleken, the more convinced I've become that we are looking at a public health threat on the same scale as tobacco. This isn't a piece about cutting out treats. It's about understanding what has actually happened to our food supply, why it is making us sick, and why I think the comparison to smoking is no longer a stretch. What is ultra-processed food, really? Ultra-processed food, or UPF, is not just food that has been processed. Humans have processed food for as long as we've had knives, fire, and salt, and that kind of processing–cooking, fermenting, grinding, curing–is part of what makes us human. UPF is different: industrially formulated products built from fractionated crops such as corn, soy, wheat, and rice, stripped down into starches, oils, and protein isolates, then reassembled with additives into something that looks, tastes, and is marketed like food. The concept was developed in Brazil by the epidemiologist Carlos Monteiro and his team, whose Nova food classification system is now used by researchers at institutions including the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Harvard, and Oxford. Van Tulleken offers a simple rule of thumb drawn from that work: if a product is wrapped in plastic and contains at least one ingredient you would not find in a typical home kitchen, it is almost certainly ultra-processed. Why I used to say a little was fine, and what changed my mind My old position was rooted in a fair idea: obsessing over any single food is its own kind of unhealthy relationship with eating, and moralizing about what people put in their mouths rarely helps anyone. I still believe that. What I no longer believe is that ultra-processed food is simply a more extreme version of ordinary treats, best handled in moderation like a slice of cake at a birthday party. What shifted my thinking was learning how deliberately these products are engineered, and how much of the disease burden connected to them has nothing to do with the willpower of the people eating them. Van Tulleken, an infectious disease doctor and academic at University College London (UCL), has spent the past several years building the public case that diet-related disease is what he calls commerciogenic: substantially driven by commercial and financial incentives, not personal failure. Once I understood the scale of that engineering, moderation started to feel like the wrong frame entirely. The science: Your body can't always tell the difference The most striking evidence I've come across is a randomized controlled trial led by Kevin Hall, a senior investigator at the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH). Twenty adults were housed for a month and fed, in random order, two weeks of an ultra-processed diet and two weeks of a minimally processed diet. Crucially, both diets were matched for calories, sugar, salt, fat, and fiber, and participants rated them as equally enjoyable. Despite that matching, people ate roughly 500 more calories a day on the ultra-processed diet and gained close to a kilogram in two weeks, while the unprocessed diet produced weight loss over the same period. Van Tulleken also points to a classic experiment from Bristol in which people ate apples in different physical forms: whole, chopped, pureed, pureed with the fiber removed, and pureed with the fiber added back. Whole apples produced the most fullness and the gentlest blood sugar response. Even adding the fiber back into the puree didn't recreate the effect of eating an intact apple. The structure of food, not just its nutrient content, appears to change how our bodies respond. His shorthand for the mechanism is that ultra-processed food tells the body lies: sweetness without the sugar the tongue expects, a fatty mouthfeel without meaningful fat, a savory hit from flavor compounds without the protein that savory taste is supposed to signal. When taste and nutrition stop matching up, the argument goes, our normal appetite regulation struggles to do its job. Beyond the scale: The wider disease picture Weight gain is the smallest part of the story. Van Tulleken, drawing on a review of the evidence conducted with his UCL colleague Sam Dicken, points to associations between UPF intake and cardiovascular disease, several cancers, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, fatty liver disease, inflammatory bowel disease, anxiety, depression, dementia and earlier death. He is careful with his language here, and so am I: this is strongly associated evidence from observational research, not proof that any single ingredient causes any single disease. But the breadth of that list is exactly why I now think moderation is the wrong lens. We don't tell people a little tobacco smoke is fine because the data is merely associational. Why exercise and willpower were never the whole answer One of the more humbling pieces of research in this space comes from the anthropologist Herman Pontzer, who measured energy expenditure among the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer community in Tanzania who walk, dig, and hunt for hours every day. Despite that activity, their total daily energy expenditure was statistically indistinguishable from that of sedentary adults in the United States and Europe. Pontzer explains that the body operates on something closer to a fixed energy budget, reallocating energy rather than simply burning more when activity increases. Van Tulleken uses this, along with a well-known reanalysis of the marshmallow test that found much of its predictive power disappeared once researchers accounted for a child's socioeconomic background, to make a point I found genuinely persuasive: exercise is medicine, and self-discipline is real, but neither one explains why obesity rates rose in lockstep across every demographic group starting in the 1970s. Something in the environment changed. For him, and now for me, that something is what ended up on supermarket shelves. The tobacco comparison This is the part of the argument that moved me from a little is fine to genuinely alarmed. Van Tulleken draws a direct parallel between the food industry today and the tobacco industry of several decades ago: a small number of highly financialized companies, answerable to pension funds and institutional investors who expect continual growth, producing a product engineered for repeat consumption, while funding much of the research and many of the nutrition organizations that the public relies on for guidance. He has documented executives at major food companies who tried to shift their portfolios away from UPF and were subsequently replaced, and research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tracing how beverage industry funding shaped decades of public messaging around exercise and energy balance. None of this required a single evil actor. It required an industry structurally committed to growth, selling a product shown to override normal appetite regulation. That is close enough to the tobacco playbook that I no longer think the comparison is hyperbole. To be fair to the counterargument, and to van Tulleken's own caveats, he does not call for banning ultra-processed food, and he is wary of broad taxation, precisely because lower-income households currently depend on it the most. Poverty, he argues, is one of the deepest causes of diet-related disease, and policies that punish people for eating what is cheapest and most available would make the problem worse, not better. My own stance has hardened around the product and the system that manufactures it, not around the people who eat it. What I'm doing differently I'm not interested in perfection, and neither is van Tulleken. Even his own children eat some UPF, because food is social and he doesn't want them isolated from their friends over it. What I have changed is my default. I read ingredient lists before I buy. I treat bread, cereal, and snack bars from health-branded companies with the same scrutiny as obvious junk food, because some of the most deceptively marketed products on the shelf are UPF in a wholesome package. I cook more of what I can from ingredients I recognize, and I've stopped thinking of that as a lifestyle upgrade and started thinking of it as basic self-preservation. I've also stopped framing this as an individual failing when it doesn't work out. If real food costs more time, money, and kitchen equipment than the products competing with it on the shelf, then access to real food is a structural issue as much as a personal one, especially for people without the time or resources to cook from scratch every night. Seven ways to start eating more real food None of this requires a personality overhaul overnight. Here's where I'd start. Read the ingredient list before the nutrition label: Calories, fat and sugar counts can look reassuring on a product that is still built almost entirely from fractionated starches, oils and additives. Van Tulleken's rule of thumb still works: if it's wrapped in plastic and contains something you wouldn't keep in your own kitchen, treat it as ultra-processed, regardless of what the front of the pack claims. Be most suspicious of the health halo: Products marketed as natural, organic, or protein-packed are often just as ultra-processed as the snack aisle staples they're positioned against. A strawberry cereal bar with five percent actual strawberry, or an artisan-looking loaf held together with industrial emulsifiers, deserves the same scrutiny as anything else on the shelf. Cook one more meal a week from ingredients you recognize: You don't need to overhaul every meal. Pick one meal you currently buy ready-made and swap it for something built from whole ingredients. Small, repeatable changes are what actually stick, and they give you a direct comparison of how each version makes you feel. Batch cook to make real food genuinely convenient: Part of what makes UPF so hard to compete with is convenience. Cook larger quantities of grains, beans, or a simple sauce once and portion it out, so real food is as quick to grab on a busy evening as anything from a box. Keep a short list of easy, real food staples on hand: Eggs, oats, tinned beans, frozen vegetables, rice, and a few proteins you like cooking with go a long way. Having reliable staples in the house removes the decision fatigue that so often ends in a delivery order or a packet meal. Push for better food where you don't control the menu: Van Tulleken's strongest policy recommendation is to improve the food served in schools, hospitals, and workplaces, because that's where many people have the least choice. If you sit on a school board, manage a workplace cafeteria, or simply have a voice in one of these settings, raising the standard of what's served there matters more than any individual's grocery list. Leave room for food to still be social and joyful: Even van Tulleken's own children eat ultra-processed food sometimes, because food is how families and friends connect, and rigid prohibition can do its own kind of harm. The goal isn't a perfect diet. It's shifting your default so that, most of the time, real food is the easy choice rather than the exception. Start rethinking what's on your plate I'm not asking you to swear off every packaged product tomorrow. I'm asking you to read the label the way you'd read a cigarette pack: with a clear eye on what the product is actually built from, and why. Start with one meal a day built from food you'd recognize in a kitchen. Notice how you feel. Then decide for yourself whether a little ultra-processed food really is fine, or whether, like me, you start to see it differently. If you're ready to take a closer look at how the food you eat is shaping your health, and want support building habits that actually stick, book a coaching call today. Let's work through what real, sustainable change looks like for you. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from René Caruso René Caruso, Metabolic Health Specialist, Peptide Consultant René Caruso is a Metabolic Health and Longevity Strategist, speaker, author, and peptide-certified consultant with over 30 years of experience in nutrition, metabolic health, and behavior change. After overcoming decades of disordered eating and rebuilding her own relationship with food, René has dedicated her work to helping others restore energy, improve body composition, and find peace with food. She works with individuals, clinics, and wellness providers to translate complex health strategies into practical, sustainable programs that work in real life. Her mission is to help people cut through the noise, understand their body, and create health that finally feels doable. Further readings: Royal Institution: Chris van Tulleken on the invention of ultra-processed food NIH: Eating highly processed foods linked to weight gain Nova food classification, Wikipedia Pontzer et al., Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity, PLOS ONE

Written by: Dr. Sydney Ceruto, Executive Contributor Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise. “It was a million-dollar idea!” How many times have you heard that expression when describing a major success? Maybe it was an entrepreneur that took a company from zero to the moon, an executive that spearheaded a successful new product, or even the creation of a hit book or piece of music. The problem with that phrase is that it only touches on one small part of the equation – the idea. The reality is that million-dollar ideas are a dime-a-dozen. Average people come up with them all the time, and, unfortunately, the vast majority get discarded just as quickly as they were imagined. The problem is that coming up with a great idea is the easy part. The hard part is execution – actually turning a great idea into something real. Without the right personal tools to drive execution, even the most brilliant idea is all but guaranteed to go to waste. Some of those tools include things like self-discipline, drive, unshakeable self-confidence, control over fear, the ability to accept failure, and a positive outlook on life as a whole. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people don’t necessarily understand those tools of success or don’t have them close at hand in their mental and emotional toolbox. Instead, they’re armed with the complete opposite: doubts, negative thought patterns, bad habits, preconceived notions, and limiting beliefs – all of which conspire to ensure that the achievement of their goals and ideas never happen, or at the very least, never to their full potential. That’s what I aim to change, and in a way you might find surprising. As a coach with a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, I understand how to teach people to discard the attitudes and beliefs that hold them back by actually changing their brains. In place of those old bad habits, I teach them to embrace, develop, and grow the tools they need to succeed to their full potential. It’s a big shift, and the key to making that extreme and all-important change is an amazing concept called neuroplasticity. What is neuroplasticity? Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change and adapt. And I’m not talking about psychological changes, I’m talking about physiological changes – the literal rewiring of pathways and repurposing of neurons, sometimes in response to trauma, but also in response to learning. When the average person hears the word neuroplasticity, it’s generally in reference to some incredible example, like Captain Trevor Greene, the soldier whose brain rewired itself to allow him to walk again after having an axe driven into his head in Afghanistan1. Those kinds of stories clearly demonstrate just how powerful force neuroplasticity is, but they often fail to explain that neuroplasticity is actually an ability that every one of our brains constantly exercises throughout our lives. From infancy, our brains are constantly rewiring themselves in response to our everyday experiences, thoughts, and feelings — albeit in much smaller ways than in Capt. Greene’s case. That constant adaptation is thanks to the mind-brain connection, the link between the physical tissue of our brains and our ethereal and difficult-to-define conscious and unconscious minds. Because of the mind-brain connection, the brain responds physically to what the mind attends to. Essentially, our thoughts and feelings determine the physical changes in our brain. They direct our neuroplasticity, normally unconsciously, without us even realizing it’s happening. That can result in positive change — like learning to walk again after a traumatic injury, breaking an addiction, or forming better habits — or it can result in negative change — like developing all of those nasty self-defeating qualities mentioned earlier that stop people from turning their dreams and ideas into reality. The key to tipping the scales towards the positive is understanding how neuroplasticity works, and, more specifically, what it responds to. From there, the directed effort can be taken to consciously make positive physiological changes in your own brain. If there’s something more amazing than that I’m not sure what it is — and it’s that amazing potential that makes neuroplasticity such a game-changer for coaching. Neuroplasticity in executive and life coaching In my 19-years in the business, I’ve seen how effective great coaching can be. I’ve also seen plenty of fly-by-night programs that were completely ineffective. It can be difficult for clients to know ahead of time exactly what they’re getting into, and sometimes that can result in a lack of commitment — a surefire way to undermine results. The beauty of neuroplasticity is that it offers a pathway that coaches can employ to help clients make real, lasting positive changes and that clients can put their full trust in, knowing its effectiveness is grounded in hard science. That combination makes it, in my opinion, one of the most powerful tools a coach can employ. In my own practice, I call this science-based neuroplastic coaching technique neuro-rewiring. Neuro-rewiring is all about the idea that, with the right guidance, anyone can rewire themselves to live happier, more productive, more resilient lives. It’s a powerful concept so allow me to go into some detail about how it works. The first step is to identify faulty thought-patterns. At this point, it’s all about figuring out which of the tools of success and happiness a client is missing. Maybe they lack motivation. Maybe they lack self-confidence. Maybe they’re afraid of success. The list goes on and on. It could be any number of things, but most often it’s a combination. Once a client’s problematic thought-patterns have been identified, it’s time to get to work on changing them. I teach my clients how to manipulate and positively change their emotional associations through a variety of methods, including decisive self-talk, directed focusing techniques, and more. These techniques are based on my education and training in cognitive neuroscience and neurocounseling and have been refined constantly over my decades as both a neuroscientist and a coach. From there, it’s all about repetition. As a coach, my job shifts to working with the client to continuously reinforce and strengthen their new thought processes, associations, and behaviors. With that repetition, the brain can begin to rewire itself so that those new positives become the subconscious norm — the baseline state — rather than something that needs to be consciously engaged. The most obvious benefit of this system is that it ushers real positive change, but there are numerous other upsides to this approach to coaching as well. One is that, unlike seeing a traditional therapist, my coaching clients don’t need to spend the bulk of their initial sessions digging through the past trying to find the roots of their problems. With neuro-rewiring, we can get to work on enacting positive behavioral change right away. The successes achieved through this system have been overwhelming, and they’ll only continue to grow as more and more becomes known about the brain and its incredible abilities. That paints an exciting picture of the future of how the science behind our most important organ impacts our ability to live our best lives on a day-to-day basis. What the future holds for neuroscience in coaching The human mind is a complex and difficult to understand the concept, but the physical brain holds an equal amount of mystery and intrigue. Every year, neuroscience unlocks more and more of its secrets Neuroplasticity is one area that we’ve been learning incredible new things about over the past ten to twenty years, and we now understand what an effective — and controllable — force it is in helping people rewire their brains and their lives to be happier and healthier. As a result, I have to believe that neuroscientific concepts like neuroplasticity and the techniques that stimulate it will only become more and more influential in all areas of coaching — from business to life skills, to sports. It’s simply too powerful a tool to ignore, with far too much solid science backing it up. That’s going to represent a major shift in coaching, as the field has traditionally been focused almost entirely on psychology, with almost zero attention paid to the physiology of what drives happiness and success. But we now understand that, because of the brain-mind connection, psychology and brain physiology are inextricably linked, and you can’t enact a change in one without also changing the other. As a cognitive neuroscientist, I’m fascinated by every new step in our understanding of the way the physical brain impacts the ethereal mind. But as a coach, I’m filled with excitement at what those steps mean for the people I coach on a daily basis, and how our newfound understanding can be used to improve their lives and help them build the tools necessary to turn their dreams into reality. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Dr. Sydney Ceruto, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Dr. Sydney Ceruto has completed her doctoral education in the field of Cognitive & Behavioral Neuroscience & is a leading specialist in using your brains natural ability to change, neuroplasticity, to ensure you reach your desired goals. Her specialty is in helping clients recognize their faulty thinking patterns, change undesirable behaviors, developmental & emotional resiliency, & gain mental clarity. When Dr. Ceruto was a teenager, she tragically lost both parents. As an only child, the loss of family completely broke her. She became profoundly depressed & began suffering from chronic anxiety. Sydney felt lost, & any form of happiness, confidence, or clarity, seemed a long way off. Soon after, she pursued her education at Yale, earning master's degrees in Clinical Psychology and Business Psychology, and went on to obtain her PhD in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience at NYU. Studying the mind-brain connection was indeed the paradigm for her healing & growth. Dr. Sydney Ceruto created MindLAB Neuroscience over two decades ago. She pioneered an integrative approach based on hard science that has genuinely changed the way people make positive &, more importantly, permanent changes in all areas of their lives. Her program is highly venerated & has debunked all the myths regarding the efficacy of “traditional therapy” & the sad misnomer that you need to be on a counselor’s couch for years or even decades. Several publications have Dr. Sydney Ceruto on staff as a senior writer. She is a proud member of the Forbes Executive Council, Positive Performance Alliance, Wharton Executive Education Program, Executive Writer for Alternatives Watch and Brainz Magazine. She has an avid intellect, a keen understanding of human nature, & an uncanny ability to connect deeply with clients. Dr. Ceruto is hands-on, accessible, highly intuitive, compassionate & is told … pretty funny! One of her passions is traveling which she has done extensively. Dr. Ceruto is an avid sports enthusiast and watches everything from football to Formula 1 racing. She plays golf whenever she can and enjoys exploring other cultures. Dr. Ceruto has one son who graduated from Princeton University and is studying to become a corporate attorney. She also has an affinity for animals and is an adoring mom to her 1.5 pound Micro Cuban Chihuahua, Lolita.

Written by John Silva, Life Coach John Silva is the founder of Operator, a philosophy and coaching practice that helps high achievers return to their path through Presence, Energy, and Self-Love. As a Fire Lieutenant and transformational coach, he writes about awareness, identity, leadership, and living in alignment with who we truly are. There is a question few successful people ask until they’ve achieved everything they once believed would make them happy, "What if success was never the thing I was actually searching for?" From an early age, we’re taught to pursue achievement. Work hard. Earn the promotion. Build the business. Buy the home. Reach the next milestone. We learn to measure our lives by what can be seen, counted, and celebrated. There is nothing wrong with ambition. Achievement has built civilizations, advanced medicine, inspired innovation, and transformed lives. The desire to create something meaningful is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. The problem begins when we expect success to give us something it was never designed to provide: fulfillment. Why success can still leave you feeling unfulfilled I’ve met people who seem to have everything. Successful careers. Financial security. Beautiful families. The respect of their peers. Yet behind closed doors, many quietly admit to feeling exhausted, disconnected, or strangely empty. Not because they’ve failed. Because somewhere along the journey, they became so focused on building a successful life that they stopped experiencing it. Success transformed their circumstances. It never transformed their relationship with themselves. That distinction changes everything. Success is external, fulfillment is internal One can be recognized by the world. The other can only be experienced by you. We often confuse success and fulfillment because they sometimes arrive together. But they are not the same. Success answers the question, "What have I accomplished?" Fulfillment asks a different question entirely, "Who am I becoming?" When identity becomes attached to achievement, life quietly becomes transactional. Every accomplishment offers a brief sense of arrival before the horizon moves once again. Another promotion. Another business goal. Another milestone. Another version of, “I’ll finally feel complete when…” The finish line keeps moving. Not because we’re broken, but because fulfillment was never waiting there. The three foundations of a fulfilled life Perhaps fulfillment has been available all along. Perhaps it appears the moment our outer life begins reflecting our inner truth. I believe that reflection begins with three qualities: Presence. Energy. Self-love. Presence allows us to experience life instead of constantly preparing for the next chapter. Energy gives us the capacity to create instead of merely survive. Self-love reminds us that our worth has never depended on our productivity, our title, or another person’s approval. Without these qualities, success can feel surprisingly fragile. With them, success becomes something entirely different. It becomes an expression of alignment instead of a substitute for it. Redefining what success really means The most fulfilled people I’ve encountered are not necessarily the wealthiest, the most accomplished, or the most admired. They are the people whose lives reflect who they truly are. Their work has meaning because it grows from authenticity. Their relationships deepen because they are fully present. Their ambition serves their values instead of replacing them. I don’t believe the answer is to abandon success. I believe the answer is to redefine it. Build the business. Pursue excellence. Lead with courage. Create extraordinary things. But don’t lose yourself while building the life you’ve always wanted. Because one day you’ll wake up inside the very future you’ve been working toward. When that day arrives, your résumé won’t answer the question that matters most. Only your life will. Does it feel like home? Ready to return to your path? To learn more about the 90-Day Operator Reset or work directly with me as your coach, reach out here. Follow me on Facebook and Instagram for more info! Read more from John Silva John Silva, Life Coach John Silva is the founder of Operator, a philosophy and coaching practice that helps high achievers return to their path through Presence, Energy, and Self-Love. A Fire Lieutenant with years of experience leading under pressure, John believes our greatest breakthroughs begin by remembering who we truly are beneath the noise of modern life. His work bridges timeless wisdom with practical tools that cultivate clarity, resilience, and authentic performance. Through his writing and coaching, he challenges conventional ideas of success by showing that fulfillment is not something we chase-it is something we uncover. John is passionate about helping others reconnect with their innate potential, and his mission is simple: Return to your Path.

Written by Motise Miles, Holistic Coach and HIPAA Compliance Analyst Motise Miles is a mental wellness advocate, holistic coach, and doula who guides people through healing with intuitive wisdom, spiritual alignment, and HIPAA-informed care. She blends nurturing gardening principles, witty insight, and grounded confidence while encouraging others to water the mind and bloom with intention. What if deeper connection didn’t require us to disappear inside it? This article explores how people-pleasing can quietly turn connection into performance, especially for introverts who value depth but may feel drained by constant accommodation. It distinguishes healthy kindness from self-abandonment, explains why boundaries can feel uncomfortable at first, and encourages us to build relationships where love, honesty, rest, and mutual respect can coexist. Rather than becoming less caring, the piece invites us to retire the role of being endlessly available and cultivate connections that keep us rooted in ourselves. Have we ever examined our social capacity and felt a sudden wave of exhaustion before we even left the house? Or found ourselves craving deep, authentic connection while simultaneously wanting to disappear the moment the room gets too loud? As someone healing through social anxiety while learning to honor introversion, I understand that tension. We are not alone, so let’s take a slower look at what connection asks of us and what it should never require us to abandon. For introverts, navigating the social landscape can sometimes feel like trying to grow delicate flowers in a windstorm. There is nothing wrong with wanting meaningful relationships, thoughtful conversation, or a room where we can hear ourselves think, but sometimes the exhaustion isn’t coming from connection itself. It comes from everything we’ve learned we must do to maintain it. We learn to be agreeable, available, and easy to love, don’t make things awkward, don’t disappoint anyone, say yes, and keep the peace. Somewhere along the way, being a “good person” can quietly become synonymous with being a convenient person. Perhaps the problem isn’t a lack of connection but conditioned performance to connect. Let’s call people-pleasing what it is “People-pleasing” is common language rather than a formal mental health diagnosis, which matters because not every generous, accommodating, or conflict-avoidant person belongs in that box. There is a difference between choosing kindness and abandoning ourselves to avoid someone’s disappointment. People-pleasing can involve a strong desire for approval, difficulty saying no, excessive accommodation, or changing our behavior to prevent conflict or rejection. In more stressful relational situations, appeasement may also become a way of trying to create safety. These responses can make sense when we understand them as learned strategies rather than character flaws. If keeping everyone comfortable has historically helped someone avoid conflict, preserve belonging, or feel accepted, accommodation can become the familiar route. That doesn’t mean every “yes” is fawning, every conflict-avoidant person is traumatized, or kindness is something we need to outgrow. What matters is what is happening within us when we say yes, are we responding from genuine willingness, or are we already calculating how uncomfortable someone else might become if we say no? Introversion isn’t antisocial, it’s rhythmically selective People experience connections differently. For some, social interaction can feel energizing, for others, even meaningful time with people can eventually call for quiet and space to recharge. That’s where introversion comes in. It’s a personality dimension shaped in part by preferences around stimulation and social engagement, not a disorder, deficiency, or measure of how much someone cares about others. An introvert can be deeply social, affectionate, and connected while still needing solitude to return to themselves. Sometimes, connection feels best when there is room to step away from it, too. That doesn’t mean introversion is the same as shyness or social anxiety, either. They can overlap, but they aren’t interchangeable, we can be introverted and socially confident, extroverted and socially anxious, or perfectly happy at a crowded concert while still needing three business days to recover from brunch. The more useful question isn’t whether we need connection, but what kind of connection works for us. That distinction matters because intentional solitude and social withdrawal are not the same thing. One can be a healthy choice that creates space to reconnect with ourselves, the other may signal that we’re overwhelmed, disconnected, or no longer feeling safe enough to engage. Your mind is callin’ the shots Human beings have a fundamental need to belong, and our brains are remarkably tuned to social information. The prefrontal cortex plays an important role in social decision-making, emotional regulation, and interpreting situations in social settings. The amygdala also helps process emotionally significant social cues, including those connected to threat, uncertainty, and rejection. Research summarized by Weir for the American Psychological Association describes how social rejection can shape emotional responses and increase people’s sensitivity to social cues as they try to reconnect or regain acceptance. Social evaluation can also be associated with physiological stress responses, including activity involving the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and cortisol. That doesn’t mean cortisol is sitting in our brain whispering our next move. Instead, our bodies can respond to socially meaningful situations as stressors, particularly when belonging or rejection feels uncertain. Over time, repeated patterns can become familiar. If saying yes consistently produces immediate relief from conflict or someone’s disappointment, that relief can reinforce the behavior, even when the long-term result is resentment, exhaustion, or feeling disconnected from ourselves. This is one reason people-pleasing can be difficult to simply “stop.” We’re not necessarily changing a sentence, we may be changing a relational pattern that has felt protective, polite, loving, or necessary. Sometimes the work isn’t simply learning to say no, it is learning to recognize what deserves a yes in the first place. When keeping the peace means losing yourself There is nothing fundamentally unhealthy about choosing balance. Relationships require flexibility, compromise, consideration, and the occasional decision to let something small go. The trouble starts when maintaining harmony consistently requires someone to betray their own limits. Think about how quickly the mind can start negotiating on someone else’s behalf. Someone asks for something we don’t have the capacity to give, and instead of checking in with ourselves, we begin imagining their disappointment. We picture the awkward conversation. We hear the possible accusation, “I thought you cared.” Before we’ve even answered, we’re already building a defense. So, we say yes, then spend the next several hours or several days trying to recover. That isn’t necessarily generosity, sometimes it is self-abandonment. Healthy relationships can survive disappointment. They can survive disagreement. They can survive a person’s “no.” The ability to experience another person’s disappointment without immediately abandoning ourselves is part of relational maturity. Discernment helps us notice the clear contrast between a compromise that strengthens a relationship and a compromise that slowly erodes us. Introverted dilemma: Connection comes with depth This becomes particularly interesting for people who crave depth. We may not want ten surface-level conversations. We may want one conversation that lasts three hours because someone mentioned a subject or experience that activated our brain. We may want friendships where silence isn’t awkward, relationships where curiosity is mutual, and communities where we don’t have to constantly perform a version of ourselves that makes everyone else comfortable. Yet the desire for depth can sometimes make us overinvest when we finally find it. A connection that feels rare can make almost everything surrounding it feel valuable. We meet someone who understands our humor, challenges our thinking, shares our interests, or seems unusually emotionally attuned, and suddenly the connection feels precious because meaningful connection can feel scarce, we may become willing to tolerate more than we normally would just to keep it. This is where discernment becomes less about judging a person and more about observing the relationship. When a connection feels rare, exciting, or deeply familiar, it helps to pause and examine the atmosphere we are stepping into, "Is this relationship reciprocal? How do I feel after interacting with them? Do I feel enlightened or depleted? Am I allowed space to respectfully disagree? Is curiosity mutual?" Those questions don’t make connections transactional. They make them conscious. A person can fascinate us and still not be good for our nervous system, a relationship can feel heartfelt and still require boundaries. That becomes especially true when the pull is intellectual, because mental chemistry can create a powerful sense of closeness before the relationship has had time to prove whether it is steady, mutual, and safe. When your mind makes the first move For some people, attraction begins in the mind. The term sapiosexuality is commonly used to describe a pattern in which intelligence is particularly important or powerful in attraction. A 2018 study by Gignac, Darbyshire, and Ooi examined the concept empirically, including the development of a measure of sapiosexuality. Their findings suggest that attraction to intelligence is real for some people, while also showing that attraction is shaped by more than intelligence alone. That distinction matters here because chemistry isn’t compatibility, intellectual stimulation isn’t emotional security, and attraction certainly isn’t reciprocity. Shared spirituality, humor, or curiosity can make a connection feel meaningful, but they do not automatically guarantee shared values, communication skills, or relational capacity. Intellectual attraction also does not have to live only in romance. Sometimes intimacy looks like a conversation where both people feel mentally alive, a friendship where curiosity feels mutual, a creative partnership where ideas have room to breathe, or a quiet kind of closeness where being understood feels just as meaningful as being desired. Whether the bond is romantic or platonic, depth becomes healthiest when it leaves room for both closeness and self-respect. That is why boundaries become essential, not as walls against connection, but as the structure that allows connection to stay honest. Boundaries aren’t instructions for controlling other people. They communicate what we are available for, what we are not available for, what we need, and what we will do when a limit is crossed. In everyday relationships, healthy boundaries help clarify where our responsibility ends, and another person’s begins, in clinical settings, they also protect care, capacity, and sustainability. Put simply, boundaries are both practical life skills and protective relationship structures, helping preserve well-being without requiring emotional distance. Those boundaries might sound like, “I can’t commit to that right now,” “I’m not available to talk about this tonight, but I’m open to revisiting it tomorrow,” “I’m not comfortable with that,” or simply, “No, thank you.” At times, the hardest part isn’t finding the words but resisting the urge to explain them. Context can be useful when it creates understanding, but overexplaining can become another form of seeking permission. The goal isn’t to convince someone that our boundary is reasonable enough for them to approve, the goal is to communicate it clearly enough for us to honor it. Your nervous system ditched the overload One of the strangest things about setting healthier boundaries is that they can feel wrong before they feel normal. We may say no and immediately feel guilty. We may stop overexplaining and wonder whether we sounded rude, or choose not to answer a message immediately and feel like we’ve committed a social crime. That discomfort isn’t necessarily evidence that we’ve done something wrong, sometimes it is simply the unfamiliar feeling of entering new relational territory. When we’ve spent years measuring our goodness by how comfortable we can make other people, discomfort is almost inevitable when we begin allowing ourselves to have thresholds of peace. Patience matters. We don’t have to become boundary experts overnight, we can start with the small things. Notice when we automatically say yes. Give ourselves permission to pause before answering. Try saying, “Let me think about that and get back to you,” instead of making an immediate commitment. That pause can become a powerful little piece of real estate between someone else’s request and our response, giving us a chance to ask ourselves what we sincerely want. A circle, not a tightrope Retiring people-pleasing doesn’t mean becoming cold, selfish, or indifferent. It means allowing kindness to become more intentional. We can still be generous, show up, help people, compromise, and care deeply about how our choices affect others without disappearing to prove that we care. Some people may not like our boundaries, especially if they benefited from us not having many. Others may accuse us of changing, and in some ways, they may be right, but changing isn’t the same thing as becoming less loving, sometimes it means becoming more honest about what love can sustain. A healthier circle doesn’t necessarily contain fewer people. It contains fewer relationships where authenticity has to be negotiated. Retire the role, keep the love Maybe people-pleasing isn’t a personality trait we need to shame ourselves for having. Maybe it is an old role that once helped us navigate belonging, conflict, uncertainty, or approval, but now deserves to be retired. We can appreciate what that role taught us without allowing it to manage our relationships forever. We can learn that being considerate doesn’t require constant availability, disagreement doesn’t automatically equal rejection, someone’s disappointment isn’t always an emergency, solitude isn’t failure, intimacy doesn’t require unlimited access, and being deeply known doesn’t mean being completely consumed. Perhaps the deepest shift is realizing that discernment is not suspicion. It is the practice of becoming more self-aware, more present, and more honest about what our relationships are asking of us. Instead of measuring connection by how much access we can offer, we can begin noticing whether a relationship leaves us steadier, clearer, and more able to express who we are. Healthy roots don’t prevent growth, they make growth possible. The next time we look at our social circles and feel that familiar pull between connection and retreat, maybe the question isn’t, “How much of myself can I give?” Maybe it is, “What kind of connection helps me stay rooted while still reaching toward others?” That is the circle we should strive to develop. Follow me on Instagram for more info! Read more from Motise Miles Motise Miles, Holistic Coach and HIPAA Compliance Analyst Motise Miles is a mental wellness advocate, holistic coach, and doula who walks with the human race through healing, reminding individuals that balance, clarity, and Spiritual Alignment are birthrights. Rooted in nurturing gardening principles, she teaches others the power of grounding themselves like a flower while cultivating resilience. As a co-author of Mastering Mental Health Vol. 1, she shares insight on embracing sacred rarity through affirmations and reflective questions that support emotional processing and inner renewal. Known for her witty voice and grounded confidence, Motise encourages others to water the mind and bloom with intention. References: Weir, K. (2020, January 14). The pain of social rejection. Monitor on Psychology, 43(4). Gignac, G. E., Darbyshire, J., & Ooi, M. (2018). Some people are attracted sexually to intelligence: A psychometric evaluation of sapiosexuality. Intelligence, 66, 98–111. Mayo Clinic Health System. (2023, December 27). Map it out: Setting boundaries for your well-being. Stringer, H. (2025, July 1). The benefits of better boundaries in clinical practice. American Psychological Association.

Written by Nelia Camara Pereira, Founder, Carnelian Heart™ Nelia Camara Pereira is the founder of Carnelian Heart™ and creator of the Soul-First™ philosophy. Drawing from her own journey through loss, reinvention, and personal transformation, she writes about identity, conscious leadership, authentic living, and what it means to remain human in an increasingly AI-driven world. You can become fluent in the language of healing and still find yourself living from the same survival identity. You might know your attachment style, recognize your triggers, meditate, journal, go to therapy, or explore spiritual practices. All of that can help, but there is a harder question beneath all of it, has the identity doing the healing actually changed? Sometimes we do not leave the old pattern behind. We simply become more sophisticated inside it. We learn better language. Better tools. Better practices. We understand ourselves intellectually. We may even construct an entirely new version of ourselves around growth, spirituality or healing. Yet underneath it, the same survival identity can still be making the decisions. That is where recognition and transformation begin to separate. Recognition is not change Most people who do inner work reach a point where they know their patterns. They can name their attachment style. They can describe their inner child. They can talk fluently about their shadow, their triggers, their conditioning. Over the years, people accumulate therapy language, spiritual language, journalling, affirmations, courses, modalities, boundaries, and routines, even a whole new identity built around being “the healed one.” All of it can be valuable, but understanding a pattern is not the same as no longer living from it. Knowing why you do something does not automatically mean you have stopped needing to do it. When the identity beneath the behavior has never really been questioned, healing itself can become something the survival self learns to perform. When I was trying to heal through the same identity After my mother died in November 2017, I went on what I called a mission to seek. That journey would eventually become my 2019 memoir, Seeker of Light. I explored new modalities, spiritual ideas, and ways of understanding what I was carrying. I sat in circles, read the books, did the courses, and learned the frameworks, but I can see now that I approached much of it the same way I had approached everything else in my life, I tried to achieve my way through healing. Reiki. Tick. Shamanism. Tick. Sound meditation. Tick. Healing room setup. Tick. Ancient Egyptian mythology. Tick. Meditation. Tick. I was treating healing like a project to complete. That was the contradiction I could not yet see. I was asking the identity built around achievement, control, performance and survival to somehow lead me beyond itself. I kept adding new ways of thinking and new ways of understanding myself, but underneath all that learning, the same internal architecture was still running the show. Nothing fundamentally changed until I began to recognise that some of what I had always assumed was simply my personality was actually adaptation. Not who I was. What I had learned to become in order to get through. Why the pattern holds This is the part almost no one talks about. The adapted identity is not unintelligent. It is remarkably intelligent. It formed for a reason. It learned what brought safety, approval, belonging or control, and it repeated those behaviors because they worked. This means it can also absorb the language of healing without surrendering its position as leader. It can learn the vocabulary of boundaries while still being terrified of rejection. It can talk about surrender while secretly trying to control every outcome. It can understand people-pleasing while continuing to shape-shift for approval. It can meditate every morning and still override itself for the rest of the day. It can become highly self-aware and remain deeply self-abandoning. Peer-reviewed research on spiritual bypass describes it as a defensive psychological posture that can privilege spiritual beliefs or experiences over psychological needs, creating a way to avoid difficult emotions or experiences. That avoidance can offer real, if temporary, relief, which is exactly why it is so easy to mistake for change. Insight matters, but insight is the beginning of change, not evidence that change has occurred. The adaptation does not disappear because you can finally name it. Transformation begins when you can recognise it in real time and respond from somewhere else. The Soul-First™ reframe This distinction sits at the heart of Soul-First™. Transformation is not about piling more information onto an old identity. It is about recognizing the identity that was built to survive, understanding what it was protecting, and learning to choose from what is true now rather than what was necessary then. That does not mean every aligned choice will feel easy. Sometimes we do need discipline. Sometimes we need to take the walk when we do not feel like walking, show up to the practice before it feels natural, or repeat a new behavior long enough for it to become familiar. Momentum matters, but there is a difference between building capacity and forcing ourselves through a life that is not aligned. I did not always know that difference. After my mother died, I kept pushing myself because pushing was what I knew. I thought that if I worked hard enough at healing, eventually I would arrive somewhere on the other side and it would all become joyful. So I would go all in. I would decide I was going to the gym and go seven days in a row. Then I would not go for weeks. I would take on too much, expect too much of myself, become depleted, stop, judge myself for stopping, and then begin again with another enormous burst of effort. One step forward. Ten steps back. At the time, I thought I lacked discipline. What I eventually began to understand was that I was not failing at healing. I was repeating an old way of surviving inside it. I had learned to perform, achieve and push my way forward. Before my mother died, that way of operating had carried me a long way. Achievement, performance and pushing through had helped me function, succeed and keep moving. I did not recognise them as adaptations because, from the outside, they worked. After she died, they began to cost me. Grief could not be performed through. It could not be completed like a project or mastered through effort, but I did not yet understand that, so I kept applying the same strategy to healing that I had applied to everything else, do more. Push harder. Get it right. The survival identity had changed environments, but it had not changed strategy. What had once helped me survive was now depleting me because I could not yet see the pattern clearly, I was trying to heal through the very identity that was exhausting me. That is an important distinction. Discipline can support us. Consistency can build trust with ourselves. Small actions repeated over time can create genuine change, but discipline without discernment can become another form of self-abandonment. There comes a point when we have to ask, "Am I resisting something because it is unfamiliar and requires practice?" Or am I forcing myself to continue something that is no longer true for me? There is a difference between discomfort that comes with growth and depletion that comes from repeatedly overriding ourselves. Soul-First™ asks us to learn that difference. The task is not to make the survival strategy more impressive. It is not to become better at pushing. It is to understand what the pushing has been protecting, what it has been trying to prove and whether it still needs to lead. Then discipline can stop being punishment and become devotion. Choice can stop being force and become alignment. Slowly, we begin to recognise when effort is building the life we actually want and when it is simply keeping an old identity in charge. The process that changed for me In my own life, that shift has come to follow what I now call the Soul-First Spiral™: Awareness. Compassion. Truth. Choice. Integration. Awareness is noticing the pattern as it happens, not just being able to describe it afterwards. Compassion is understanding why it formed instead of attacking yourself for having it. Truth is seeing clearly what is actually happening beneath the story you have told yourself. Choice is the moment you realize you do not have to respond automatically anymore. Integration is what happens when that choice becomes how you actually live, not just how you talk. This is where healing begins to move from intellectual understanding into lived identity. You are no longer simply able to explain the pattern. You are becoming someone who can meet the same moment and choose differently. When healing stops being another performance The point of this work is not to abandon everything that has helped you. Therapy can help. Meditation can help. Spiritual practice can help. Discipline can help. Ritual, reflection, education and self-awareness can all become powerful parts of our lives. The question is not whether you use them. The question is, "Who inside you is using them? Are they helping you come closer to yourself? Or has the part of you that learned to achieve, please, control, perform, or prove simply found a new arena in which to do it?" That question changed healing for me because real transformation did not require me to become a more impressive version of myself. It required me to recognise what had been leading. To understand why it formed. To honor what it once protected. Eventually, to stop asking an old survival identity to make decisions about a life it was never designed to lead. That is the difference between performing healing and living it. The work becomes quieter. More honest. Less about how healed you look and more about how truthfully you live. Less about knowing yourself conceptually and more about being able to remain with yourself when the old pattern wants to take over. Perhaps that is what real transformation asks of us, not to become better at surviving, but to recognise when survival no longer needs to be in charge. Stay close to this work If this article named something you have been sensing but could not quite articulate, The Soul-First™ Return goes deeper into the patterns beneath the performance. It will help you understand why the identity that once protected you can continue shaping your life long after you need it, and how the Soul-First Spiral™ can become a practice of returning to what is true. Download The Soul-First™ Return, a free guide to recognizing survival identity and beginning the return to yourself. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Nelia Camara Pereira Nelia Camara Pereira, Founder, Carnelian Heart™ Nelia Camara Pereira is the founder of Carnelian Heart™ and creator of the Soul-First™ philosophy. Following the death of her mother in 2017, she began a profound journey of self-discovery that would inspire her writing, teaching, and life's work. Today, she writes and speaks on identity, personal transformation, conscious leadership, and authentic living. She is the author of Seeker of Light, Soul-First™, and The Unlearning™, and is passionate about helping people reconnect with who they are beneath the roles, expectations, and survival patterns that shape their lives. Her mission is simple, to help others remember who they were before the world told them who to be.