Things we never say

Topics include: Psychology of comfort, modern convenience, discomfort tolerance, novelty and attention, boredom and creativity, smartphone use and digital overstimulation, the Fogg Behavior Model, solitude versus loneliness, the psychology of silence, noise and stress, nature and attention restoration, soft fascination, wilderness experiences and creativity, physical adaptation, heat exposure and BDNF, learning and neuroplasticity, habit formation, intentional discomfort, practical ways to reduce digital stimulation

Follow the podcast on Instagram: @unpack.with.mehak

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For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version:

How much discomfort do you really experience in a normal day?

Not anything serious, just the small stuff. Waiting for something, being bored, being alone, being too hot or too cold, walking somewhere without listening to anything, or not knowing what to do next.

A lot of these things have become very easy to avoid. If you’re hungry, food can come to you. If you’re bored, there’s your phone. If you’re waiting, there’s your phone again. If you don’t know something, you can find the answer immediately.

For me, whenever I’m watching a show and I see an actor I recognise but can’t place, I’ll struggle for maybe 30 seconds before pulling out my phone to check who they are. If you’re walking somewhere, you can listen to something. If you’re alone, you can call someone.

We have made everyday life incredibly convenient, and I’ve been thinking about what that does to us when almost every small discomfort has an escape route.

Hi, welcome to Things We Never Say. I’m your host, Mehak Chhabra, and this is a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat, and the things we all feel but rarely say out loud.

Today, we’re talking about comfort.

I was reading Michael Easter’s The Comfort Crisis, and the book took me through a lot of different subjects that initially seemed unrelated: boredom, phones, cities, loneliness, silence, sleep, nature, physical effort and learning. The more I read, the more they started to fit together. They all say something about what happens when we remove effort, uncertainty and discomfort from everyday life. Some of the numbers in the book made that much harder to dismiss as just an idea.

Let’s start with novelty.

When you do something for the first time, you have to pay attention. You don’t know the route, you don’t know the people, and you don’t know what is going to happen. You have to learn. Then you repeat the experience, it gets easier, and eventually you can do it without thinking very much about it.

Think about your commute to work if you’re someone who drives. The first time you took that route, you probably checked Google Maps, looked around carefully and paid attention to every turn before reaching your destination. If you’ve been driving the same way for a while, you can probably do it almost automatically, without giving it much conscious attention.

That is useful because your brain cannot spend the same amount of energy on everything you do. But the more familiar your life becomes, the less attention some of it receives.

William James wrote about this in The Principles of Psychology in 1890. He observed that time seems to pass more quickly as we grow older because our later years contain fewer new experiences compared with childhood. When you’re a child, almost everything requires learning. Then routine takes over. You know the route to work, you know what you’re going to order, and you know how your day usually goes. The days start blending.

This isn’t an argument for making your life exciting at every moment. It tells us something about attention. New experiences demand it. Familiar experiences don’t need as much of it.

That connects directly to boredom.

Easter cites a figure of 11 hours and 6 minutes of digital media use a day. That’s across different forms of media, not 11 hours of phone use, but it gives you an idea of how much stimulation can occupy a day.

Think about the tiny gaps in your day. Waiting for an appointment, standing in a queue, sitting in a car, waiting for someone to reply or eating alone. We fill these gaps almost automatically.

Boredom researchers describe boredom as a motivational state. It tells you that what you’re doing isn’t giving you enough return and pushes you towards another activity. Psychologist Sandi Mann studied what happened when people were deliberately given boring tasks before being tested on creative thinking. Some of the bored participants performed better on divergent-thinking tasks.

John Danckert, one of the researchers Easter discusses, makes an important distinction: boredom itself isn’t creative. It creates an urge to do something. What you do with that urge determines what happens next.

And now we have a very easy answer. You feel bored, you reach for your phone, and the feeling disappears. You never find out what would have happened if you had stayed with it. You might have created something, followed a thought or found another way to occupy yourself.

The phone makes this particularly easy because the behaviour requires almost no effort. A notification appears, you pick it up, you scroll. You get information, entertainment, a message or something new, and the behaviour gets repeated.

That is the basic logic behind the Fogg Behaviour Model. Behaviour becomes more likely when motivation, ability and a prompt come together. Your phone provides the prompt, using it requires very little effort, and a reward arrives almost immediately. Boredom doesn’t stand much of a chance.

This matters because boredom isn’t the only uncomfortable state we’re avoiding. Being alone is another one.

Loneliness and solitude are very different experiences. You can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely, and you can spend an afternoon alone and feel completely fine.

Psychologist Matthew Bowker writes about the capacity to be alone: being able to spend time with yourself without immediately needing another person or another activity to fill the space.

One University of Virginia experiment made this particularly clear. Participants were asked to sit alone with their thoughts for between six and fifteen minutes, without a phone, a book or anything else to occupy them. They were also given the option of administering a mild electric shock to themselves while someone stayed with them.

Twenty-five per cent of the women and 67 per cent of the men chose to shock themselves at least once.

The point isn’t that people don’t like solitude. The experiment showed how difficult unstructured thought can be for some people. We have become very good at making sure there is always something else available. Rather than sit alone with our thoughts, we can choose to introduce another sensation, even an unpleasant one, to interrupt the experience.

This brings us to silence.

Easter writes about experiencing very quiet environments in the Arctic and how noticeable the absence of ordinary human noise became. Daniel Lieberman has written about how humans have changed the sensory environment around themselves. We experience fewer temperature changes, our feet are protected by shoes, and we don’t need to smell food to determine whether it’s safe in the way our ancestors often did.

But one sensory experience has gone in the opposite direction: hearing.

The book cites research from the University of Michigan estimating that more than 100 million Americans live with noise levels above around 70 decibels, roughly comparable to the sound of a working dishwasher. Noise is not just something we hear. Research has connected chronic environmental noise with stress, sleep disruption, cardiovascular problems and difficulties with attention.

There is also an interesting experiment involving office workers. One group worked in a quieter environment, while another worked in an open-plan office that was around 50 per cent louder. The people in the louder environment did not necessarily report feeling significantly more stressed. Their bodies, however, showed a different response. They displayed signs of stress, completed less work and were less motivated.

You can become accustomed to noise without becoming unaffected by it.

There is an interesting place called the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories. It was designed to absorb reflected sound so thoroughly that it became one of the quietest environments ever measured.

People who enter such spaces can initially find the silence uncomfortable. Without the usual background noise, they start noticing their breathing, their heartbeat and other sounds produced by their own bodies. These are sounds that are always present but normally covered by everything around us.

You’re never really hearing nothing. You’re hearing things you don’t normally hear.

Easter also recounts an anecdote about a veteran who had experienced persistent sounds associated with aircraft taking off. After spending time in the chamber, the veteran reportedly experienced relief from that sound. It is an individual account rather than proof that silence can resolve persistent auditory symptoms, but it illustrates how powerful the experience of silence can feel.

Nature does something similar, except it removes several forms of stimulation at once. The traffic, the notifications, the artificial light, the usual schedule and the constant access to entertainment all fall away. In their place, you get walking, weather, darkness, physical effort, uncertainty and natural sound.

Psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan describe one part of this experience as soft fascination. Nature holds your attention without demanding it in the same way a screen does. You can watch water, trees, clouds or birds. Your attention is engaged, but you don’t have to keep making decisions about what comes next.

Our attention is often occupied by tasks that require deliberate effort. We look at screens, work, make decisions and respond to information. Soft fascination offers another way of engaging with the world. Instead of directing every moment of attention towards a task, we can allow it to move naturally between things around us.

There is research suggesting that spending time in nature can reduce stress and help restore directed attention. Easter discusses research suggesting that around 20 minutes in nature, three times a week, can be enough to reduce cortisol, the stress hormone. He also discusses research pointing to around five hours a month in more natural environments.

Then there are longer wilderness experiences.

David Strayer and colleagues studied what happened when people spent several days in the wilderness without their usual technology. After several days, participants performed around 50 per cent better on a creativity test than they had before the trip.

That’s a substantial change. The book also describes research into brainwave activity during wilderness trips, with participants showing more alpha and theta activity after several days. Those particular findings need to be interpreted carefully, but the broader pattern is interesting.

The first day of a trip can be full of thoughts about everything you’ve left behind: your phone, your work, your messages and everything you might be missing. Then the environment becomes familiar. You’re walking, carrying things and spending hours outside. You don’t have hundreds of little decisions coming through a screen. Your attention finally has somewhere else to go.

The physical part matters too.

Easter describes research from the University of Oregon in which participants exercised in a room heated to 100 degrees Fahrenheit for ten days. Compared with people doing the same exercise in air conditioning, the heat-exposed group showed additional physiological adaptations, including changes involving the heart’s left ventricle.

The book also discusses heat-shock proteins and BDNF, a protein involved in the growth and survival of neurons. These are examples of the ways the body responds to its environment and to physical demands. They aren’t a reason to assume that exercising in extreme heat is automatically better or safer.

Learning works in a similar way. At first, something is difficult. You have to concentrate, you make mistakes, and you don’t know what you’re doing. Then you practise. Your brain adapts, and the task becomes easier.

You have to spend some time being bad at something before you become good at it.

This is where comfort becomes more complicated.

We have made daily life easier in ways that are genuinely useful. We don’t need to reject any of that. The issue is what happens when there is no room left for experiences that require effort.

If you never get bored, you don’t find out what you do with boredom. If you never sit alone, you don’t develop much experience being alone. If there is always noise, silence can feel uncomfortable. If everything is familiar, fewer things demand your attention and your days can seem to pass very quickly.

If you never do anything physically demanding, you have fewer opportunities to find out what your body can adapt to. If you never let yourself be bad at something, learning becomes harder because the beginning is always uncomfortable.

These are different ways of experiencing very little friction in life.

I tried to reduce the idea to something I could actually use. I’m not in a place where I can go on a three-day wilderness trip or remove my phone entirely from my life. I’m trying smaller interruptions to my usual patterns.

I’m taking walks without my headphones. When I’m standing in a queue, I’m trying to keep my phone in my pocket. I’m also trying to eat without watching something. This is a big one for me because I really enjoy watching something while I eat, but I’m trying not to do that every time.

I’m also trying to do things I’m bad at, allowing myself to be bored and paying attention to what happens before I automatically fill the space.

That is the part I find most useful. I’m not trying to force myself to suffer. I’m interested in learning to tolerate discomfort and noticing how quickly I reach for something the moment life feels uncomfortable. That reaction can tell me a lot about my habits.

Comfort has made a lot of things easier, and that’s worth appreciating. But the body still needs movement, the brain still benefits from novelty, and attention needs periods when it isn’t directed towards a task. Sleep still needs darkness. People still need connection in real life, and we still need some experience of being alone with ourselves.

Those needs didn’t disappear because we became better at controlling our environment. We simply have more ways of avoiding them.

I don’t want to spend my life deliberately making things difficult. I want to notice when I’m making something easier simply because I cannot tolerate the feeling of it being difficult. Those are two very different things.

Sometimes I’ll take the comfortable option. I’ll order food, watch something or stay inside. Other times, I’ll leave my headphones at home, go outside, walk for an hour and let the day be a little less controlled.

Being uncomfortable isn’t the goal. I want to know that I can still be there when it shows up.

There are parts of life that only become noticeable when nothing is filling the gap. A thought, a place, a person, your own attention. Sometimes you need a little less coming at you to notice what’s already there.

I hope you find this episode useful. I’m Mehak, and this is Things We Never Say. Before I tune out until next time, be kind to yourself and to others. Bye-bye.

If you’ve been stuck in this loop of knowing what to do but not doing it, that’s exactly why I created Unpack with Mehak, and here’s how I can help.

If you are ready to ‘Rebuild your Self-Worth,’ I would suggest going ahead with the monthly container that is focused exactly on this.

Rebuild Your Self-Worth — $499/month (Monthly Container)For when rejection, comparison, relationships, or other people’s behaviour have started to shape how you see yourself, and you want to change that.

Over the month, we’ll work on things like learning to handle rejection without letting it take over your day, responding to shame when it shows up, and breaking the patterns that make you abandon yourself to be chosen by someone else.

You get:

* 4 × one-hour 1:1 sessions

* Personalised ongoing support between sessions

* A month of focused work on your patterns, rather than generic advice

Pattern Breakdown Session — $149A one-hour 1:1 session to work through a specific pattern, relationship, decision, or situation together.

Email Deep Dive — $79For when you want me to go deeper into a specific situation. I’ll analyse what’s happening beneath the surface and send you a detailed written analysis, with three follow-up exchanges to explore what comes up.

Loop Breaker — $39Tell me about a specific pattern you’re stuck in, and I’ll analyse it using the Loop Breaker framework and send you a written analysis. One response, no follow-up.

Loop Mapper — $9A self-guided framework to help you map the pattern you keep finding yourself in and understand what’s keeping the loop going.

Topics include: curiosity as more than wanting answers, why familiarity can make us stop paying attention, the difference between rest and simply consuming time, unsatisfied curiosity and the experiences we miss by deciding too early, how curiosity can change our experience of ordinary or disliked activities, noticing novelty in familiar people and in ourselves, what neuroscience tells us about uncertainty and information gaps, boredom as a signal for engagement, the three-novel-things practice, how attention changes experience, curiosity and play, the peak-end rule and how memory shapes what we approach next, breaking the loop between experience, memory, expectation, and attention, why the brain relies on familiar patterns, changing the variables in your routines, practicing curiosity in everyday moments, and how curiosity can create a cycle of exploration, discovery, interest, and deeper engagement with your life.

Follow the podcast on Instagram: @unpack.with.mehak

Subscribe on YouTube: @unpackwithmehak

For business: [email protected]

For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version (on Substack):

There are so many things I have decided I don’t like without actually giving them a chance. A book I decided would be boring because of the subject. A conversation I didn’t want to have because I already knew where it was going. A place I assumed I wouldn’t enjoy. A hobby that looked completely pointless from the outside. And sometimes I don’t even remember making the decision. It just becomes part of who I think I am. I’m not the kind of person who likes that. I’m not interested in that. That’s not for me.

And then, every once in a while, something slips through. You try the thing you had already rejected, and something happens that is almost annoying. You realise you had no idea what you were talking about.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

If you enjoy what I do and want to support it, you can buy me a coffee here.

Hi, welcome to Things We Never Say. I’m your host, Mehak Chhabra, and this is a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat, and the things we all feel but rarely say out loud. Today we’re talking about curiosity. Not curiosity as in wanting to know the answer to a trivia question. I’m talking about something much more fundamental. The part of you that notices something and thinks, I don’t know enough about this yet. The part that can stay with uncertainty for a little longer. The part that allows you to discover something about another person, a situation, a place, a task, or even yourself that you couldn’t have predicted beforehand.

And I think we underestimate how much of our lives are built around the opposite of that. We get very good at knowing. We know what we like. We know what we don’t like. We know who we’re compatible with. We know what kind of work we’re good at. We know what kind of person we are. We know what will be boring. We know what will be uncomfortable. We know what won’t work.

And there is a practical reason the brain likes doing this. Familiarity saves effort. You don’t need to consciously reconsider every little thing you do every day. Your brain can recognise patterns, predict what comes next, and move through familiar situations without spending enormous amounts of energy on them. That’s useful. But there is a point where efficiency starts becoming a limitation. Because if you’ve already decided what something is, you don’t have to pay attention to it anymore. And if you don’t pay attention, you don’t discover anything.

Think about a normal day. You wake up. You check your phone. You go to work. You do the things you’ve done before. You come home. You watch something. You eat. You scroll. You sleep. And somewhere inside all of that, you might genuinely believe you’re resting. But sometimes you aren’t. Sometimes you’re simply not doing anything particularly demanding. Those are not necessarily the same thing.

Todd Kashdan writes about this distinction in Curious?, particularly the difference between activities that actually replenish us and activities that simply consume time. You can spend an hour watching television and finish feeling exactly the same as when you started. Not refreshed. Not excited. Not peaceful. Just slightly dull.

And that made me think about how often we confuse the absence of effort with restoration. Something doesn’t have to be difficult to be restorative. But if something is supposed to replenish you, there should usually be some change in your internal state. Maybe you feel energised. Maybe you feel peaceful. Maybe you feel interested. Maybe you feel connected. The important thing is that something comes back to you.

Because we need energy to explore. And curiosity can also help us figure out what actually gives us energy. That relationship can work in both directions. You try something because you’re curious. You discover that it makes you feel alive. You want to do it again. You become more skilled. You become more interested. And suddenly something that wasn’t part of your life becomes part of it.

But there is another category of things that never even make it into the experiment. Things we are curious about, but don’t try. Kashdan calls this unsatisfied residual curiosity. You notice something. You want to know more. You think about trying it. And then you don’t. Maybe you think it’s impractical. Maybe you think you’ll be bad at it. Maybe someone you trust told you it was pointless. Maybe it doesn’t fit the version of yourself you’ve already constructed. And so you never find out.

That is one of the costs of losing curiosity. You don’t only miss information. You can miss entire experiences that might have changed your life.

There’s a story in Kashdan’s book about a veteran at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who initially rejected his therapist’s suggestion that he try yoga. He thought yoga wasn’t for someone like him. He tried it anyway. And eventually something he had dismissed became part of his recovery. The point isn’t that yoga is secretly the answer to everything. It isn’t. The point is that his first judgment was made before his first experience. And that happens constantly.

We do it with people. We do it with jobs. We do it with cities. We do it with books. We do it with food. We do it with hobbies. We do it with versions of ourselves we haven’t met yet.

And sometimes the thing we need isn’t something completely new. Sometimes it’s the ability to notice something new inside something familiar. Think about someone you’ve known for years. You already have a version of them in your head. You know what they’re like. You know their habits. You know what they would say. You know what they would never do. But people change. Their interests change. Their fears change. Their values change. Their relationship to the world changes. And if we keep relating to someone through an old version of them, we can become less curious about the actual person sitting in front of us.

The same thing happens to ourselves. You can become so familiar with your own story that you stop investigating it. I’m just an anxious person. I’m not creative. I hate exercise. I’m bad at meeting people. I don’t like public speaking. I’m not someone who takes risks. Maybe those statements were true at one point. But curiosity doesn’t ask you to immediately replace them with positive statements. It asks you to leave a little room around them.

There might be something you don’t know yet. That doesn’t mean you’re unintelligent. It doesn’t mean you’re lost. It means the story isn’t finished.

And neuroscience gives us an interesting reason to take that seriously. Curiosity is often described as emerging when there is a gap between what we know and what we want to know. That gap can create tension that motivates us to seek information. So uncertainty isn’t necessarily something the brain simply wants to eliminate. Sometimes uncertainty is exactly what gets us moving.

And curiosity isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it feels like irritation. Sometimes it’s the feeling of not being able to stop thinking about something. Sometimes it’s boredom pushing you toward something more interesting. Boredom can push us away from an environment that isn’t engaging, while curiosity can pull us toward information that feels worth exploring. Which means boredom isn’t always asking for entertainment. Sometimes it’s asking for engagement.

And this is where curiosity becomes much more useful than simply telling yourself to “be curious.” Because you can actually practice it.

There was an experiment described in Kashdan’s work where people were asked to do something they already disliked. But they were given one additional instruction. While doing it, they had to look for three novel things about the experience. That’s it. Three things they hadn’t noticed before.

One participant was an 18-year-old bodybuilder who had dismissed crocheting as something completely uninteresting. He spent 90 minutes doing it. And he discovered that it was physically more demanding than he expected, that it could be meditative, and that the stitches could be used to make something he actually wanted. More importantly, participants who had been encouraged to look for novelty were more likely to return to the activity later.

The activity didn’t necessarily change. Their attention changed. And once attention changed, experience changed.

That is a very different idea from forcing yourself to like something. You aren’t telling yourself, This is amazing. You’re saying, I don’t know everything about this yet.

Try that with something you dislike. Pick something genuinely unappealing. A genre of music you normally avoid. A book you have judged by its cover. A task at work that makes your eyes glaze over. A household chore. A conversation you tend to rush through. And while you’re doing it, look for three things you have never noticed before.

Not three reasons why it’s good. Three things you didn’t know.

That distinction matters. Because the goal isn’t to convince yourself that everything is wonderful. The goal is to stop deciding what something is before you’ve actually experienced it.

And once you start paying attention that way, even something as boring as laundry can become an experiment. One of Kashdan’s therapy clients was depressed and had been avoiding her laundry. The pile had become a physical reminder of everything she felt she wasn’t accomplishing. She was asked to do one load. But she had another instruction. Look for novelty.

She noticed the texture of her clothes. She noticed her hands getting dry. She started thinking about where different pieces of clothing came from. She began wondering why she had bought certain things and what her clothes said about how she saw herself.

The laundry didn’t magically become fun. But it stopped being one giant category called something I hate doing. There were details inside it. And details give curiosity somewhere to go.

This is also why play can be so powerful. There’s a story in the book about Fred, a janitor at Grand Central Station. His work was repetitive. Mopping floors. Emptying bins. Cleaning bathrooms. Doing the same kind of work every day and watching people undo it almost immediately.

He already had one strength outside work. He loved creating games. So he started treating his work like one. He timed himself. He kept track of his best times. If something made the task harder, he gave himself a handicap. Eventually his coworkers started doing it too. They competed. They joked. They had something to talk about.

The job hadn’t changed. But the way they were attending to the job had. And suddenly there was something to discover.

That is curiosity at its most ordinary. It doesn’t always look like travelling to a new country or reading a difficult book or changing careers. Sometimes it looks like asking yourself how to make a repetitive task a little more interesting. Sometimes it looks like noticing that you’re bored and refusing to automatically reach for your phone. Sometimes it looks like asking a better question when someone gives you an answer you’ve heard before. Sometimes it looks like paying attention to your own reaction instead of immediately trusting it.

Because our first reaction is not always the whole story.

And there is another reason our first reaction can be misleading. Our memory is not a perfect recording. We remember experiences through expectations, emotional intensity and what happened toward the end.

Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier demonstrated this in research on painful medical procedures, including colonoscopies. People’s later evaluations were influenced not simply by how much pain they experienced overall, but by the intensity of the worst moments and how the experience ended.

This became associated with what is commonly called the peak-end rule.

And you can use that idea outside a hospital. If you go to the gym every day and finish every workout feeling exhausted and miserable, your brain starts building a story around the gym. Gym equals suffering.

So what happens if you change the end? Maybe you finish with something you genuinely enjoy. A hot shower. Your favourite song. Ten minutes sitting outside. A conversation with someone you like.

You’re not pretending the workout wasn’t hard. You’re giving the experience another piece of information.

Because what we remember influences what we approach next. And what we approach next determines what we get the opportunity to learn. That creates a loop. Experience shapes memory. Memory shapes expectation. Expectation shapes attention. Attention shapes experience. And curiosity can interrupt that loop.

Instead of entering an experience already knowing what it will be, you enter looking for something you haven’t noticed yet. That tiny shift can change the amount of life available to you.

And it doesn’t have to stop with activities. It applies to people. The person you think you already understand. The friend who has always been “the responsible one.” The parent whose personality you stopped updating ten years ago. The partner whose reactions you can predict. The colleague you decided you don’t like.

Curiosity creates space for another version of the story. It doesn’t mean becoming naive. It doesn’t mean ignoring red flags. It doesn’t mean suspending every judgment forever. It means allowing observation to happen before judgment becomes permanent.

There is always another piece of information.

And that is particularly important because the brain is very good at conserving effort. Once something becomes familiar, we don’t have to consciously inspect every detail of it. That efficiency is useful. You don’t need to relearn how to brush your teeth every morning. You don’t need to reconsider the route to work every day.

But the same efficiency can become a trap when it gets applied to things that actually need updating.

Your relationship. Your career. Your beliefs. Your identity. Your understanding of yourself.

This is where Kashdan uses the idea of changing the variables in a workout. The popular concept of “muscle confusion” describes varying training stimuli rather than repeating exactly the same routine indefinitely. The broader principle is useful here. Your mind also benefits from encountering something it hasn’t already categorised completely.

So change the variables. Take a different route. Talk to someone you normally don’t talk to. Read something outside your usual interests. Ask a different question. Do the same task in a different order. Try something you have already decided isn’t for you. Look at a familiar person and remember that you don’t actually know everything about them.

And sometimes, just notice. When you wake up, notice something you usually miss. When you’re talking to someone, listen without immediately preparing your response. When you’re walking, notice your body. Notice the sounds. Notice the smells. Notice what you automatically ignore.

You don’t need to spend an hour meditating on this. Start with five minutes.

Five minutes where your only assumption is: There is something here I haven’t noticed yet.

Because curiosity isn’t just about finding more things to consume. It changes the way you inhabit the things that are already around you.

And this is where I think the conversation gets much deeper. We often imagine that a fulfilling life requires discovering the perfect passion. The perfect career. The perfect hobby. The perfect relationship. The thing that finally makes everything click.

But maybe part of the work happens before that. Maybe we have to become interested enough to explore. Then exploration gives us information. Information gives us experience. Experience gives us competence. Competence gives us confidence. And confidence makes it easier to explore again.

That can become its own cycle.

Curiosity. Exploration. Discovery. Interest. More exploration.

And the opposite can happen too. Judgment. Avoidance. No experience. No new information. More certainty that we were right all along.

That is how a universe gets smaller without us noticing. Not because someone locked the doors. Because we stopped opening them.

So I want to leave you with a very small experiment this week. Don’t try to become a completely different person. Pick one thing you have already decided you don’t like. One. And give it one honest attempt.

While you’re doing it, find three things you didn’t know about it. Not three reasons to convince yourself that you love it. Three things you genuinely didn’t notice before. Then write them down. And pay attention to what happens afterward.

Maybe you still hate the thing. That’s useful information too. Curiosity doesn’t require a positive conclusion. Sometimes exploration confirms your original judgment. But now it’s your judgment. It’s based on experience rather than assumption.

And sometimes you discover something you weren’t expecting. A new interest. A different side of someone. A skill you didn’t know you had. A way of doing something that makes it less exhausting. A part of yourself that had been sitting outside the version of you that you thought you knew.

The world doesn’t necessarily become bigger because there are more things in it. Sometimes it becomes bigger because you are paying attention again.

And maybe that’s one of the things we never say about curiosity. We think curiosity is about wanting to know more about the world. But sometimes curiosity is what allows the world to surprise us again. And maybe, after enough time, that includes ourselves.

If something in this episode made you notice one of your own patterns, send it to someone who might recognise themselves in it too. And if you want to go deeper into the emotional patterns we repeat, you can find the rest of Things We Never Say wherever you listen to podcasts, and the written versions on Substack.

I’m Mehak Chhabra. I’ll see you next time.

If you’ve been stuck in this loop of knowing what to do but not doing it, that’s exactly why I created Unpack with Mehak, and here’s how I can help.

If you are ready to ‘Rebuild your Self-Worth,’ I would suggest going ahead with the monthly container that is focused exactly on this.

Rebuild Your Self-Worth — $499/month (Monthly Container)For when rejection, comparison, relationships, or other people’s behaviour have started to shape how you see yourself, and you want to change that.

Over the month, we’ll work on things like learning to handle rejection without letting it take over your day, responding to shame when it shows up, and breaking the patterns that make you abandon yourself to be chosen by someone else.

You get:

* 4 × one-hour 1:1 sessions

* Personalised ongoing support between sessions

* A month of focused work on your patterns, rather than generic advice

Pattern Breakdown Session — $149A one-hour 1:1 session to work through a specific pattern, relationship, decision, or situation together.

Email Deep Dive — $79For when you want me to go deeper into a specific situation. I’ll analyse what’s happening beneath the surface and send you a detailed written analysis, with three follow-up exchanges to explore what comes up.

Loop Breaker — $39Tell me about a specific pattern you’re stuck in, and I’ll analyse it using the Loop Breaker framework and send you a written analysis. One response, no follow-up.

Loop Mapper — $9A self-guided framework to help you map the pattern you keep finding yourself in and understand what’s keeping the loop going.

Topics include: what anxiety actually is (fear plus uncertainty, and why it rarely shows up alone, usually alongside depression), anxiety as a habit loop (trigger, behavior, reward, and reward really meaning result, something that may have paid off years ago but often doesn't anymore), why willpower fails (the prefrontal cortex going offline under stress, and the myth that anxiety fuels performance), mapping your own loops as the first step toward change, paying attention to what a behavior is actually giving you right now instead of relying on old assumptions, finding a genuinely better substitute through curiosity, the RAIN practice, and self-kindness, and finally the shift from asking why you're anxious to asking what's happening in your body right now.

If you’ve been stuck in this loop of knowing what to do but not doing it, that’s exactly why I created Unpack with Mehak, and here’s how I can help.

If you are ready to ‘Rebuild your Self-Worth,’ I would suggest going ahead with the monthly container that is focused exactly on this.

Rebuild Your Self-Worth — $499/month (Monthly Container)For when rejection, comparison, relationships, or other people’s behaviour have started to shape how you see yourself, and you want to change that.

Over the month, we’ll work on things like learning to handle rejection without letting it take over your day, responding to shame when it shows up, and breaking the patterns that make you abandon yourself to be chosen by someone else.

You get:

* 4 × one-hour 1:1 sessions

* Personalised ongoing support between sessions

* A month of focused work on your patterns, rather than generic advice

Pattern Breakdown Session — $149A one-hour 1:1 session to work through a specific pattern, relationship, decision, or situation together.

Email Deep Dive — $79For when you want me to go deeper into a specific situation. I’ll analyse what’s happening beneath the surface and send you a detailed written analysis, with three follow-up exchanges to explore what comes up.

Loop Breaker — $39Tell me about a specific pattern you’re stuck in, and I’ll analyse it using the Loop Breaker framework and send you a written analysis. One response, no follow-up.

Loop Mapper — $9A self-guided framework to help you map the pattern you keep finding yourself in and understand what’s keeping the loop going.

Follow the podcast on Instagram: @unpack.with.mehak

For business: [email protected]

For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version:

You know that feeling of waking up already anxious, before anything has actually happened? No alarm, no bad news, no reason you can point to. Your eyes open and your chest is already tight, like your body got the memo before your brain did.

Or the other version. You’re lying in bed at night, exhausted, and your mind starts running through everything that could go wrong tomorrow. The meeting. The email you haven’t replied to. The thing your friend said last week that you’re still turning over. None of it is happening right now. But your body doesn’t seem to know that. It reacts like the threat has already arrived.

Most of us have a version of this. And most of us have spent years trying to think our way out of it. Reasoning with it. Telling ourselves to just relax, to stop worrying, to calm down, as if that has ever worked on anyone, even once.

Today I want to talk about why it doesn’t work. And about something that changed the way I think about anxiety completely: the idea that anxiety isn’t only a feeling. It’s a habit.

Hi, this is Things We Never Say. I’m your host, Mehak Chhabra, and this is a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat, and the things we all feel but rarely say out loud. Today we’re talking about anxiety, habits, and the loop that connects the two.

Before I go further, I want to be upfront about where a lot of this is coming from. Most of what I’m about to walk you through is built on the work of Dr. Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, in his book Unwinding Anxiety. I’ve been sitting with his research for a while now, and it’s reshaped how I understand my own anxious patterns, so I wanted to bring it here in a form that actually makes sense to live with, not just read once and forget.

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Part One: Anxiety Is Not a Loner

Let’s start with a fact that surprised me. Anxiety rarely shows up alone. Research on generalized anxiety disorder has found that the large majority of people who have it also carry another diagnosis alongside it, most commonly depression. Anxiety brings company.

And it doesn’t come out of nowhere either. It’s born from something specific: fear meeting uncertainty.

Fear on its own is useful. It’s an old, fast, adaptive system. If a car swerves toward you, you jump back onto the sidewalk before you’ve even had a conscious thought about it. That reaction happens in milliseconds, in the oldest part of your brain, the part that isn’t interested in thinking, only in keeping you alive long enough to think later.

Anxiety is different. It lives in the newer part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, the part just behind your forehead that handles planning and prediction. Its whole job is to take what’s happened before and use it to guess what’s coming next. That works beautifully when it has enough information. The problem starts when it doesn’t. An uncertain future, a blank weekend, an ambiguous text message, an unclear diagnosis. Give your prefrontal cortex a gap like that and it will fill it, usually with the worst version of events it can construct. That’s not planning. That just looks like planning. Underneath, it’s your brain trying to manage an information shortage by manufacturing worst cases.

Fear plus uncertainty equals anxiety. That single equation explains more about your 2 a.m. spiraling than most of the advice you’ve ever been given about it.

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Part Two: Anxiety Behaves Exactly Like a Habit

Here’s the part that actually changes things. Every habit, whether it’s biting your nails or reaching for your phone or spiraling into worry, runs on the same three-step loop. A trigger. A behavior. A reward.

You feel a stressful thought, that’s the trigger. You worry about it, that’s the behavior. And somewhere, even though it feels awful, your brain is registering a reward. Maybe it’s the temporary sense of doing something instead of sitting in uncertainty. Maybe it’s a few seconds of relief when you check your phone for the fortieth time. Whatever it is, your brain wouldn’t keep doing it if some part of it wasn’t getting paid.

One thing worth slowing down on here. When I say reward, I don’t mean it has to feel good to you right now. Reward is really just a brain term for result, whatever outcome originally taught your brain that this behavior was worth repeating. That teaching often happened years ago, when the behavior actually did something for you. Biting your nails might have soothed you as a kid. Checking on someone constantly might have kept you safe in a relationship that really was unpredictable once. The reward was real, at the time. What’s rarely true is that it’s still real now. Most of the time, the original payoff is long gone, and what’s left is just the loop, running on old instructions, with little or no actual reward waiting at the end of it anymore.

This is the same mechanism behind every habit your brain has ever built, useful or not. It’s how you learned to look both ways before crossing a street. And it’s how you learned that when you feel a knot of dread, checking your email or replaying a conversation or reaching for something to eat gives you a few seconds of relief. Brewer describes patients who built entire identities around this loop without realizing it. One man, in his sixties, drank six to eight glasses a night. When they mapped it out, the pattern was simple. Anxiety about unfinished work in the late afternoon, drink to numb it, temporary relief, and then guilt the next morning that fed the same cycle again. Another patient’s trigger was anxiety in the morning at the sight of an unfinished to-do list. His behavior was procrastination. The reward was avoidance, a few hours of not having to feel behind.

None of this is a character flaw. It’s reward-based learning doing exactly what it evolved to do, just aimed at the wrong target.

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Part Three: Why Willpower Keeps Failing You

If you’ve ever told yourself you’ll simply stop worrying, stop checking your phone, stop spiraling, and then watched yourself do it anyway within the hour, I want you to hear this clearly. That’s not a personal failure. That’s how the system is built.

Willpower and reasoning both live in the prefrontal cortex, the same newer brain region that goes offline the moment you’re actually stressed. So the exact moment you need willpower most is the exact moment your brain has taken it away from you and handed control back to the older, faster, more primitive part that just wants relief, now, by any means available. That’s why gritting your teeth works for about a day and then collapses. You’re trying to use the one tool that isn’t available in the situation you’re trying to use it in.

There’s also a subtler trap worth naming. A lot of people, myself included at different points, have secretly believed their anxiety is what makes them successful. That without it, they’d stop pushing themselves. But the research doesn’t support that story. Most studies on stress and performance actually show a straight negative relationship: more stress, worse performance, not the inverted curve people like to imagine where a little anxiety sharpens you. If there’s a voice in your head insisting your anxiety is doing you a favor, it might be worth asking honestly whether that’s true, or whether it’s just familiar.

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Part Four: The First Step Is Just Seeing It

So if you can’t think your way out and you can’t will your way out, what’s left? Awareness. Not the vague, therapy-poster version of awareness. Something much more specific.

The first move is mapping your own loops. Trigger, behavior, reward, written down plainly. What sets this off. What you do in response. What you actually get from doing it, even if what you get is small and short-lived and followed by regret.

A word of caution here, because this trips people up constantly. Once you can see your loops clearly, there’s a strong pull to immediately try to fix them using the same willpower-based tools that never worked before. Resist that. Seeing the pattern is not the same as having changed it, and trying to force the change before you’ve actually done the next step usually just adds a second layer of frustration on top of the first problem.

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Part Five: Ask What You’re Actually Getting

This is where it gets interesting, and where most self-help advice stops short. It’s not enough to know a habit is unhelpful in some abstract, intellectual way. You already know worrying doesn’t solve anything. That knowledge alone has never once stopped anyone from worrying.

What actually moves the needle is paying close attention, in the moment, to what a behavior is really giving you. Not what you assume it gives you from memory, but what it feels like right now, in your body. Ask yourself plainly: what am I getting from this? Then notice, honestly, whether checking your phone for the fifth time in ten minutes actually feels good, or whether it just feels like scratching an itch that immediately starts itching again.

Brewer describes a woman who, while paying this kind of close attention to a cigarette instead of running on autopilot, realized it tasted like chemicals and smelled like stale cheese. She hadn’t stopped believing smoking was bad for her, she’d always known that. What changed was that she finally felt it. That’s the difference between knowing something and your brain actually updating its own internal value for it. Facts don’t rewire a habit loop. Direct, present-moment experience does.

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Part Six: Find Something Genuinely Better

Once a habit’s reward value starts dropping, your brain doesn’t just sit still. It goes looking for something else to fill the space, and if you don’t offer it something better, it will reach for whatever’s nearby, which is often just a different unhelpful habit wearing a new outfit.

The thing that actually works as a substitute isn’t another distraction. It’s curiosity. Research on this is surprisingly consistent: states like anxiety, stress, and craving physically feel contracted, closed, small. Curiosity feels the opposite, open, spacious, even a little pleasant, in a way that’s measurable in the same brain regions that light up during craving. Curiosity isn’t just a nicer mood. It’s a genuinely more rewarding state, which means your brain will actually choose it once it’s had a real taste of it, the same way it once chose worry.

There are a few ways to practice this. One is simply asking, when a wave of anxiety hits, what does this actually feel like right now, and getting curious about the answer instead of trying to make it stop. Where in your body is it. Is it tight, buzzing, hot, restless. Does it change at all once you actually pay attention to it instead of fighting it.

Another is a practice called RAIN. Recognize what’s arising. Allow it to be there instead of pushing it away. Investigate the sensations in your body with real curiosity. Note what’s happening, in short, simple words, as it shifts and eventually settles.

And there’s a version rooted in kindness rather than curiosity. Bringing to mind someone who loves you unconditionally, a friend, a parent, even a pet, and noticing what warmth actually feels like in your body compared to the tightness of anxiety. Then turning that same warmth toward yourself, without needing to earn it first. Brewer’s research found that practicing this kind of self-directed kindness measurably calms the same brain network responsible for self-judgment and rumination. Kindness isn’t just a nicer story you tell yourself. It does something.

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Part Seven: Stop Asking Why, Start Asking What

There’s one more shift worth naming, because it’s the one that trips up almost everyone, including people who’ve done all the work above.

We assume that if we can just figure out why we’re anxious, the anxiety will finally make sense and then finally leave. Brewer worked with a patient, Amy, who spent most of her sessions trying to excavate the root cause of her anxiety, convinced that once she found it, she’d be free. Instead, the searching itself became its own loop. Trigger: anxiety. Behavior: dig for the reason. Result: more anxiety, because now she was anxious about not having found the reason yet.

The question that actually helps isn’t why. It’s what. Not why am I like this, but what is happening in my body right now, what thought just came up, what does this sensation actually feel like. Why keeps you circling backward into a past you can’t change. What keeps you here, in the only place any of this can actually shift.

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None of this makes anxiety disappear. That was never really the promise, even though it’s the one we keep hoping for. What it does is smaller than that, and more useful. It gives you a way to meet the feeling without adding a second layer of story on top of it. You stop asking your anxious brain to explain itself, and you start asking it what it needs right now, this specific version of the feeling, in this specific moment.

Your habits, anxious or otherwise, aren’t evidence of something broken in you. They’re evidence of a brain that has spent your whole life trying to keep you safe with the only tools it had at the time. It just hasn’t gotten the update yet. That update doesn’t come from understanding this once. It comes from noticing it, again and again, small moment by small moment, until the noticing itself becomes the new habit.

Thank you for spending your time with me today. Until next time, be kind to yourself, and be kind to others.

Topics include: What is happiness?, pleasure vs. happiness, hedonic adaptation, affective forecasting, is happiness a choice?, biology and happiness, depression, anxiety and mental health, the neuroscience of happiness, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins, reward and motivation, relationships and social connection, belonging and social rejection, laughter and happiness, autonomy and locus of control, competence and motivation, intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, ideal self vs. ought self, goals, meaning and purpose, environment and nature, novelty and the brain, gratitude and positive experiences, happiness optimization, agency without self-blame, building a meaningful life

The promised description link to explore Rebuild Your Self-Worth.

And to become a part of Beyond Willpower (a 90-minute masterclass exploring why we get stuck, how our behavioural loops keep repeating, and how to make small, consistent action easier, even when motivation isn’t there), register here

Follow the podcast on Instagram: @unpack.with.mehak

For business: [email protected]

For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version:

You know that thing where you really, really want something, and you become convinced that once you have it, you’ll finally feel happy?

Maybe it’s a new job. A relationship. Moving to a different city. More money. Losing the weight you’ve been trying to lose. Getting your dream apartment. Finally having enough time. Finally figuring out what you’re supposed to be doing with your life.

And you don’t just want the thing. You can almost feel the version of yourself that comes with it. You’ll be less anxious. You’ll feel more confident. You’ll wake up excited. You’ll stop comparing yourself to other people. You’ll finally feel like your life is going somewhere.

And then you get the thing. And for a while, you do feel different. Sometimes dramatically different. But then, slowly, your brain gets used to it. The new apartment becomes the apartment you live in. The new job becomes your job. The relationship becomes your relationship. The number on the scale becomes normal. The money becomes something you’re used to having.

And suddenly you’re looking around thinking, why don’t I feel as happy as I thought I would?

Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question. If getting the things we want doesn’t guarantee that we’ll stay happy, and if happiness can disappear even when nothing is particularly wrong, then what exactly are we supposed to do with it? Is happiness something we can actually choose? Or are we putting another impossible responsibility on ourselves when we tell people to just be happier?

Because there are parts of happiness we have some influence over — things we can do that genuinely affect our well-being. But there are also things happening in the brain and body that we don’t simply decide away. Depression exists. Anxiety exists. Biology matters. Circumstances matter. So when someone says “happiness is a choice,” I think we need to be much more precise about what we mean. Because if happiness is entirely a choice, then not being happy starts to feel like a personal failure. And I don’t think that’s what the science actually tells us.

That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Hi, this is Things We Never Say. I’m your host, Mehak Chhabra, and this is a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat, and the things we all feel but rarely say out loud. Today we’re talking about happiness: what actually influences it, and how much of it is really within our control.

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What We’re Actually Talking About

Before we go further, I think we need to separate happiness from pleasure, because we use the word “happiness” to describe a lot of different things. Getting a message from someone you like can make you happy. Eating your favourite food can make you happy. Getting a promotion, falling in love; these can make you happy. But those are moments of pleasure, excitement, relief, pride, connection. Happiness, in the broader sense we’re talking about today, is something bigger.

Sonja Lyubomirsky defines happiness as an experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that your life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile. I like that definition because it leaves room for a life that isn’t constantly pleasant. You can be happy and still have a terrible day. You can be deeply satisfied with your life and still be anxious about something. You can love your life and still cry. You can have a meaningful life and still go through grief, disappointment, anger, boredom, frustration. Happiness isn’t the absence of every uncomfortable emotion.

And this matters because I think we’ve built a version of happiness that’s almost impossible to maintain. You’re supposed to be positive, enjoy your work, love your body, have good relationships, wake up grateful; productive but not stressed, ambitious but not burnt out, present but also successful. And when you inevitably feel bad, you start wondering what you’re doing wrong. But feeling bad is part of having a nervous system. The question isn’t whether you can eliminate every negative emotion. The question is what kind of life you’re building, and what happens inside you when difficult emotions show up.

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Why Happiness Fades

So if happiness isn’t a constant pleasant state, why does even the good stuff stop feeling as good as it did at first? This is where the brain gets interesting.

There isn’t one part of your brain responsible for happiness. There’s no happiness button, no single chemical that gets released and suddenly you’re happy. You’ll often hear dopamine described as “the happiness chemical,” but it’s much more complicated than that; it’s heavily involved in reward prediction, motivation, learning and wanting. Your brain is constantly making predictions about what’s going to happen. You see a notification from someone you want to hear from; you expect a message, you anticipate the reward, and your reward system is involved before you even get the thing. That’s one reason anticipation can sometimes feel better than the experience. You check the delivery status on something you’ve wanted for weeks; you imagine opening the package; you think about how good it will feel. Then it arrives, and it does feel good. But the intensity doesn’t last forever. That doesn’t mean something is wrong with you; the brain is designed to notice change. Novelty matters. Unexpected rewards matter. Once something becomes familiar, the response changes.

And dopamine isn’t alone in getting oversimplified this way. Endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin: these are all involved in processes that can feel rewarding, pleasurable, calming, social, or emotionally meaningful. But none of them is simply “the happiness chemical.” Endorphins are involved in pain modulation and stress responses. Oxytocin is involved in social bonding. Serotonin has functions throughout the body and brain. It would be an enormous oversimplification to say low serotonin causes depression or more serotonin creates happiness. We tend to take incredibly complicated systems and turn them into simple explanations: low dopamine, you’re unhappy; get more serotonin; hack your brain. But the brain isn’t a machine with four buttons labelled happiness, motivation, love and calm. It’s a network. Happiness emerges from a combination of things happening across the brain, the body, our thoughts, our behaviour, our relationships and our environment.

This is also where hedonic adaptation comes in. We adapt to changes in our circumstances; something good happens, our happiness goes up, and over time we adjust. The thing that initially felt extraordinary becomes part of normal life. This happens with positive experiences as well as negative ones, though not every event follows the same pattern and not everyone adapts to everything the same way. There are things people adapt to surprisingly well, and things that can have long-lasting effects: disability, chronic pain, serious illness, bereavement, major trauma aren’t things you can put in a neat “you’ll get used to it” category. But there’s a general tendency for the emotional impact of many positive changes to soften over time.

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Why We Keep Getting the Prediction Wrong

There’s another problem layered on top of adaptation: we aren’t actually very good at predicting what will make us happy in the first place. Daniel Gilbert has written extensively about what he calls affective forecasting: the way we imagine the emotional impact of future events, and tend to get those predictions wrong. Not because we’re stupid, but because we’re trying to imagine an emotional future using the information we have right now, and we forget how much the future version of us will adapt. We also tend to focus on the thing we’re thinking about and underestimate everything else that will still be happening in our lives. You think, “If I get this job, I’ll be happy”, but you don’t imagine the commute, the difficult colleague, the boring Tuesday three months later. You imagine the event. You don’t imagine the entire life around the event.

I think that’s one reason our brains can keep selling us the same promise: once this happens, you’ll feel different. And sometimes you will; a new job really can improve your life, leaving a bad relationship really can make you happier, more money genuinely can remove stress, treatment for an illness really can change someone’s entire experience of living. So I’m not saying circumstances don’t matter. They absolutely do. I’m saying the relationship between circumstances and happiness is more complicated than we think.

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What’s Actually in Your Control

So between a brain that adapts to everything and a brain that’s bad at predicting what it wants, what’s actually left for us to work with?

Sonja Lyubomirsky has a useful framework here. You may have heard the idea that happiness is influenced by a combination of genetics or temperament, circumstances, and intentional activity, sometimes presented as an exact 50%, 10%, 40% formula. I wouldn’t treat those numbers as a universal equation for every human being; that specific split has been debated. The more useful point is the layers themselves. There are things about you that you didn’t choose. There are circumstances you have more or less control over. And there are things you do repeatedly: your habits, your relationships, how you spend your time, how you respond to your thoughts, whether you move your body, whether you make time for people you care about, whether you pursue goals that actually matter to you, whether you spend your life comparing yourself to other people, whether you pay attention to what’s going well.

These things aren’t everything. But they aren’t nothing either. Saying “you have no control over your happiness” can make you feel helpless. Saying “you can completely choose your happiness” can make you feel guilty. There’s something in between: you don’t always choose the emotional state your brain gives you, but you have some influence over what you do next. So let’s take those three layers one at a time.

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Layer One: What You Didn’t Choose

We need to talk about biology here, because I don’t want this episode to accidentally become another version of “just think positive.” If someone has clinical depression, telling them to be grateful isn’t treatment. If someone has severe anxiety, telling them to choose happiness isn’t treatment. If someone is dealing with trauma, chronic illness, grief, or another mental health condition, their experience cannot be reduced to whether they’re making the right choices every day. Mental health conditions involve biology, psychology, environment, history, relationships and circumstances.

Even the genetics research is more complicated than the way it gets presented online. There’s been a lot of research into whether certain genetic variations make people more vulnerable to depression under stress: the 5-HTTLPR gene is one well-known example. But the evidence around that particular gene-environment interaction has been genuinely inconsistent across studies, with different meta-analyses reaching different conclusions. So I wouldn’t take from it that you have a “depression gene” or a “happiness gene.” A better way to think about it is that biology can influence vulnerability and resilience, and those biological factors interact with the environments we live in. Two people can go through something similar and have very different responses. That doesn’t mean one person tried harder; their brains, bodies, histories, support systems and circumstances aren’t identical. This is one reason I really dislike the way happiness sometimes gets framed as a moral achievement, as if happy people are doing life correctly and unhappy people aren’t. That’s not how human psychology works.

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Layer Two: The Circumstances You Can Shape

Some circumstances really are outside your control. But some are more workable than we tend to give them credit for, starting with something surprisingly simple: your physical environment. Where you live. How much natural light you get. Whether you have somewhere that feels safe. Whether you have access to nature. There’s research on attention restoration showing that natural environments can help restore the kind of directed attention that gets depleted by sustained mental effort. It makes sense in everyday life; you spend eight hours staring at a screen, your attention constantly pulled between messages, emails, notifications, decisions, deadlines. Then you go outside, walk somewhere with trees, and your attention can move around without needing to solve anything. That kind of environment can be restorative. Again, it’s not a happiness button; going for a walk won’t fix your life, but the environments we spend our days in affect how our brains and bodies experience those days.

The other underrated circumstance is novelty. The brain likes things that are new and surprising, not necessarily because novelty is inherently good, but because unexpected information matters to it. This is part of why travel can feel so energising: a new city, different food, different streets, different routines. You’re paying attention again, noticing things you stopped noticing at home. You don’t need a completely different life every six months to get some of that. Take a different route. Try something you’ve never done. Have dinner somewhere new. Talk to someone outside your usual circle. Do something badly just because you’re curious. Sometimes your brain just needs something it hasn’t seen before.

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Layer Three: What You Do Repeatedly

This is the biggest layer, and it’s where relationships come in first, because there’s a reason they come up again and again when researchers study well-being. We are social creatures. Social connection isn’t just something nice to have once everything else is taken care of; it’s deeply connected to how we experience our lives. There’s strong evidence that social relationships are associated with better health and longevity, and that social rejection can be processed in ways that overlap with systems involved in physical pain. Which makes sense when you think about what actually hurts the most: being excluded, feeling unwanted, losing someone, being rejected by someone you love, realising a friendship has changed. These things can feel physically painful. And the opposite is just as real: being with someone who makes you feel understood, laughing until your stomach hurts, talking to a friend for three hours without checking the time, being around family and not having to perform, having someone remember something you told them six months ago. These aren’t minor things. They’re part of the architecture of a good life.

Laughter deserves a specific mention here, because we underestimate it. It’s deeply social: we laugh around other people far more than we laugh alone. It can communicate affiliation, agreement, affection and emotional regulation, and there’s research suggesting shared laughter contributes to bonding and relationship quality. I don’t want to turn that into another happiness hack: “go laugh for ten minutes every morning.” The point is simply that happiness isn’t just something happening inside your individual head. Some of it is created between people.

The next piece is agency; the feeling that your actions matter, that you have some influence over your life. Psychologist Julian Rotter described this through the idea of locus of control: someone with a stronger internal locus of control tends to feel their actions influence what happens; someone with a more external locus of control tends to feel life is primarily controlled by other people, luck, or forces outside themselves. Neither is completely accurate; you don’t control everything, but feeling that nothing you do matters can be psychologically exhausting. This is why autonomy matters so much. Two people can have almost identical jobs, same salary, same hours, same responsibilities, but one has some control over how they do the work, can make decisions, feels trusted, while the other is constantly monitored, every decision needing approval, every small mistake scrutinised. Same job title, very different psychological experience. Competence works the same way: feeling capable, getting better at something, seeing yourself make progress. These things contribute to well-being because they give us a sense that we’re participating in our own lives rather than just reacting to them.

Which brings us to goals, because goals can be good for happiness, but the goal itself usually isn’t the source of it. It’s what the goal gives you: direction, progress, something to work toward, a reason to get up and do something. There’s a distinction I find really useful here, between your ideal self and your ought self. Your ideal self is the person you genuinely want to become. Your ought self is the person you think you should become. Those can look very different. Maybe you genuinely want to write, but you think you should become someone who makes more money. Maybe you want a slower life, but you think you should be more ambitious. Maybe you want more time with your family, but you think you should be working harder. That mismatch is exhausting, because you can be working extremely hard, achieving things, and still asking yourself why you don’t feel satisfied. Sometimes the problem isn’t a lack of discipline. Sometimes you’re moving very efficiently in a direction you don’t actually want to go.

Which is really a question about where your motivation is coming from: extrinsic or intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation comes from outside: money, status, praise, approval, recognition. Intrinsic motivation comes from the activity itself, or from something personally meaningful about it. External rewards aren’t bad; money matters, security matters, recognition can feel good, but when everything you do is tied to an external reward, it can become hard to know whether you actually enjoy your life or whether you’re constantly waiting for someone to tell you that you’re doing well. I think a lot of modern unhappiness comes from that confusion. We’ve become very good at asking how successful something is, how impressive, how much money it makes, how it compares to what other people are doing, and we sometimes forget to ask the much simpler question: do I actually like my life?

That question is really about attention, which is where two small, well-studied practices come in. The first is gratitude, done in a specific way: at the end of the day, write down three things that went well. They don’t have to be impressive: someone made you laugh, you had a good conversation, you finished something you’d been avoiding. The point isn’t to convince yourself everything is good. It’s to train your attention to notice that your brain is also receiving information about what’s working. Gratitude isn’t pretending your problems don’t exist; it’s making sure your problems aren’t the only thing your attention is allowed to see.

The second is paying attention to adaptation while it’s happening, instead of after the fact. When something good happens, don’t rush past it; actually notice it. If you move into a new home, notice what you like about it instead of spending the first week on what needs fixing. If you’re in a new relationship, notice what you enjoy about being with this person now, instead of only asking whether they’re your forever person. If you get a new job, let yourself register that something you worked for actually happened, instead of immediately moving the goalpost to the next promotion. There’s research suggesting that appreciation and variety can help slow the erosion of positive experiences through adaptation. Sometimes we don’t need more good things. We need to actually experience the good things we already have.

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Where This Can Go Wrong

All of that said; we can also become obsessed with optimising happiness, and that becomes its own problem. You start monitoring yourself. Am I happy enough? Did I meditate today? Did I exercise, journal, practice gratitude, get enough sunlight, spend enough time with friends, sleep eight hours, savour my coffee, have enough meaningful experiences? And suddenly you’re lying in bed evaluating your happiness like it’s a quarterly performance review. That isn’t happiness. That’s another form of pressure. You don’t need to turn your life into a happiness project.

Which is really the same trap in a new outfit: if happiness becomes the goal of every decision, you can end up making some strange choices. You leave a relationship because you’re unhappy. You change careers because you’re unhappy. You move cities, start another diet, buy something, all because you’re unhappy. And sometimes those decisions are exactly what you need. But sometimes you’re trying to solve an emotional problem with an external change, and the change works for a while, until your brain catches up, and you’re back where you started. So instead of asking “will this make me happy,” it can help to ask something more specific: does this make my life more meaningful? Does this move me toward the person I actually want to become? Does this give me more connection, more autonomy, more of a sense that I’m capable? Does this give me something I genuinely care about? Those questions can take you somewhere different, because happiness may not be something you can chase directly. It might be something that becomes more likely when the rest of your life is organised around things that actually matter to you.

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So, Is Happiness a Choice?

I don’t think it is. Not completely. You can’t choose your nervous system. You can’t choose your genetics. You can’t choose every circumstance you were born into. You can’t choose whether someone leaves you, whether you develop depression, or every emotion that enters your body.

But there are parts of your life you can influence. You can choose who you spend time with. What you pay attention to. Whether you move your body. Whether you pursue goals that actually matter to you, or keep living according to someone else’s definition of a successful life. Whether you ask for help. Whether you keep doing the things that make your life smaller. And sometimes you can choose what you do next even when you don’t feel particularly happy. I think that’s a much more useful definition of agency, not “I can make myself happy whenever I want,” but “I may not control how I feel right now, but I can still participate in what happens next.”

There’s something freeing in that, because it takes happiness out of the category of personal achievement. You don’t have to prove that you’re happy. You don’t have to be happy every day. You don’t have to turn every difficult emotion into a lesson, or be grateful for everything that happened to you, or pretend a difficult life is easy just because you’ve learned to look at it positively. You can want a better life without hating the life you have. You can be grateful and still want change. You can be ambitious and still rest. You can be sad and still have a good life. You can have a bad week and still be a happy person.

Maybe that’s one of the things we don’t say enough about happiness. It’s not a feeling you have to hold onto. It’s a relationship you have with your life. And the goal isn’t to make every moment feel good; it’s to build a life that contains enough connection, meaning, agency, pleasure, growth and moments of genuine enjoyment that happiness has somewhere to exist.

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Before we go, I want to tell you about something I’m doing this month: Beyond Willpower + Loop Mapper. It’s a 90-minute live masterclass on the psychology of consistency, procrastination, self-judgment, neuroplasticity, and taking action when motivation isn’t there, and I wanted to mention it here because it actually connects to everything we just talked about. A lot of us keep waiting to feel motivated before we act, and then we judge ourselves when we don’t. This masterclass is about understanding what’s actually happening underneath that pattern, and working with it instead of just telling yourself to try harder. You’ll also get the complete Loop Mapper system, designed to help you identify and work with the loops that keep you stuck.

It’s live on Google Meet, Sunday, September 27, 2026, at 8:30 PM IST / 11 AM ET / 4 PM UK time, 90 minutes, replay included.

Early-bird price is $25 — that’s the $35 masterclass plus the Loop Mapper ($9 value) — until September 8 at 12 AM IST, after which the masterclass is $35 on its own.

If you’ve been wanting to understand why knowing what to do doesn’t always translate into actually doing it, I’ll leave the details for you. And if you can’t make it live, you’ll still get the replay.

And that’s it for today’s episode. If something in this episode made you think about your own life differently, send it to someone you think might need to hear it. And if you liked the episode, you can subscribe to Things We Never Say wherever you listen to podcasts.

I’ll see you next week.

Topics include: self-worth, shame, vulnerability, authenticity, psychology, connection, courage, compassion, love, belonging, Brené Brown, development, feeling stuck, not enough, self-awareness, personal growth,rejection, lack, loss, insecurity and more.

The promised description link to explore Rebuild Your Self-Worth: https://unpackwithmehak.com/

Follow the podcast on Instagram: @unpack.with.mehak

For business: [email protected]

For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version:

You know that thing that happens when someone looks at you funny, and suddenly you go into a complete spiral inside your head?

Was it the pimple on my face? Was it something I said in that meeting? Do they just not like me? Do they think I’m rude? Did I say something weird? Should I have said it differently?

And suddenly, one person’s facial expression has somehow become a referendum on your entire personality.

You start thinking about how you can make that person like you. Should I change the way I dress? Should I change my hair? Should I talk a little more softly? Should I be less opinionated? Should I be more agreeable? You could do a million things to make yourself more palatable to other people.

And sometimes, some of that self-reflection is actually useful. If you’re angry all the time, if you’re uncooperative, if people genuinely don’t enjoy being around you, maybe there’s something there worth looking at.

But what I’m interested in is what happens when that isn’t what’s happening. When someone reacts badly to you once, and instead of thinking “maybe they’re having a bad day” or “maybe we just don’t get along,” you immediately think, “what’s wrong with me?” And then you start evaluating your entire worth based on someone else’s reaction.

That is when this stops being about the other person. It becomes about shame. And eventually, it becomes about self-worth.

Because shame and self-worth are deeply connected. When we repeatedly experience ourselves as flawed, rejected, or inadequate, shame eats away at our sense of worth. And when our sense of worth is already fragile, we’re much more vulnerable to experiencing ordinary moments of rejection or criticism as evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with us. It’s a loop.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Hi, this is Things We Never Say. I’m your host, Mehak Chhabra, and this is a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat, and the things we all feel but rarely say out loud. Today we’re talking about shame, vulnerability, and ultimately, self-worth.

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Part One: What Shame Actually Is

Before I get into this, I want to say something, because I’ve been reading a lot of Brené Brown recently. A significant amount of what I’m going to talk about today comes from her research and her books, particularly *The Gifts of Imperfection*, along with the broader research she draws on around shame, vulnerability, worthiness, belonging and wholehearted living. So I want to give credit where it’s due. Some of the language and frameworks here are directly inspired by her work, not things I came up with myself. I’m also going to connect those ideas to some of the other psychology I’ve been studying, and to my own understanding of how shame shows up in our lives.

So let’s start with the simplest question: what actually is shame?

Shame is the intensely painful feeling of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. And I think the easiest way to understand it is through one distinction:

Shame says, “I am bad.” Guilt says, “I did something bad.”

That difference is enormous. If I did something wrong, I can fix my behaviour. I can apologise. I can learn. I can do something differently next time. But if I believe I *am* wrong, there’s nothing to fix. Because the problem is me. That’s why shame is so corrosive. It attacks the part of us that believes we can change.

And shame doesn’t always look the same. There are broadly three ways we experience it.

The first is “characterological shame”: shame about who you are. “I’m a bad person.” “I’m not intelligent.” “I’m boring.” “I’m difficult.” “I’m unlovable.”

The second is behavioural shame, shame about something you did. You failed. You lied. You made a mistake. You didn’t perform well. You lost.

And behavioural shame has a way of sliding into characterological shame. You don’t just think “I failed this exam,” you start thinking “I’m stupid.” You don’t just think “that relationship didn’t work,” you think “I’m incapable of having a healthy relationship.” You don’t just think “I made a mistake at work,” you think “I’m not good enough to be here.”

The third is bodily shame, shame attached to your physical body and appearance. Your weight. Your skin. Your hair. Your face. Your clothes. This one is particularly loud right now, because we live in a culture that gives us an almost endless number of opportunities to compare our bodies to other people’s.

All three eventually feed the same belief: there is something about me that makes me less worthy.

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Part Two: Where Shame Lives, and What It Makes Us Do

And shame isn’t just intellectual. You actually feel it. Your face gets hot. Your heart starts racing. Your mouth gets dry. You might sweat. Your body feels tense. Time can almost feel like it’s slowing down. You might get tunnel vision.

One of the most useful things you can do is learn your own physical signs of shame. Because if you can recognise, “oh, my face is getting hot, my heart is racing, I’m suddenly feeling this urge to disappear,” you have a chance to interrupt the pattern instead of automatically reacting.

And what happens next matters, because when shame corners us, we develop ways of protecting ourselves.

Some people move away: they withdraw, hide, stop talking, keep secrets, disappear.

Some people move toward: they people-please, appease, become extremely accommodating, try to make everyone happy so nobody has a reason to reject them.

And some people move against: they get aggressive, try to gain power, attack before they can be attacked, use shame against someone else because they’re trying to protect themselves from feeling it.

So ask yourself: who do you become when you’re backed into the shame corner? Do you disappear? Do you become the coolest person in the room? Do you become extremely agreeable? Angry? Perfectionistic? Do you start fixing everything, scrolling, sleeping, staying busy? Sometimes what looks like personality is actually protection.

Here’s the thing worth holding onto, though: shame is universal. Everyone experiences it. And the less we talk about it, the more power it has. Shame needs secrecy, silence and judgment. It convinces you that your experience makes you uniquely defective: “nobody else feels like this, nobody else would understand, if people knew this about me they wouldn’t like me.” But feeling shame doesn’t mean you’re uniquely defective. It means you’re human.

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Part Three: How Shame Builds an Identity

This is also why I’ve been thinking back to my previous episode on resilience while making this one.

I’ve failed at a lot of things. Friendships. Parts of my career. School. Relationships. Hobbies. There are probably very few areas of my life where I haven’t experienced some version of failure. But I have never really identified myself as a failure. And I think a huge part of that has to do with how I explain failure to myself.

If I fail a test, I can say, “I didn’t prepare properly for this test”, that’s an explanation of an event. Or I can say, “I’m just not intelligent enough”, that’s an explanation of my identity. If a relationship ends, I can say “that relationship didn’t work,” or I can say “nobody will ever love me.” If someone doesn’t like me, I can say “maybe we’re just not compatible,” or “there’s something wrong with me.”

That second explanation, every time, is where shame starts building an identity. And eventually you create an entire self-image through your own internal narration: I’m not smart enough, not beautiful enough, not interesting enough, not successful enough, not lovable enough. Not enough.

Which brings us to what that actually sounds like, day to day.

You can wake up in the morning and, before your feet even touch the floor, you’ve already started counting everything you don’t have enough of. I didn’t get enough sleep. I don’t have enough time. I don’t look good enough. I didn’t work enough yesterday. I don’t exercise enough, don’t make enough money, I’m not thin enough, not smart enough, not productive enough. By the time you go to bed, you’re running through everything you didn’t accomplish. So you sleep with a feeling of lack, and wake up with another one. Eventually, what began as a busy life becomes an entire identity built around inadequacy.

This is where perfectionism comes in: not as an accident, but as a strategy. Perfectionism is not simply wanting to do well. It’s not healthy ambition. It is the belief that if I live perfectly, look perfectly and act perfectly, maybe I can avoid blame, judgment and shame. It’s a protection strategy: if I get everything right, nobody can criticise me. Except there is no such thing as getting everything right. So perfectionism creates an impossible bargain; I will finally feel worthy once I become impossible to criticise, and that day never comes.

Which takes us back to the beginning. Why do we care so much about whether someone likes us? Because belonging is a fundamental human need. But somewhere along the way, we confuse belonging with fitting in. Fitting in says: let me assess the room and become whoever I need to be to be accepted. Belonging says: I can enter this room as myself. Those are completely different experiences. If my goal is being liked, and you don’t like me, I’m in trouble. But if my goal is authenticity, and you don’t like me, I’m okay. That doesn’t mean I don’t care, or never reflect, or never change. It means your reaction to me doesn’t get to determine my worth.

There’s a line from Vincent van Gogh that captures this better than I can:

‘If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning.’

Think about what we do to ourselves instead. I’ll be worthy when I lose weight. When I get the job. When I make more money. When I’m successful. When someone chooses me. When I become the person I think I’m supposed to be. But wheat doesn’t become worthy when somebody finally recognises it as wheat. It’s wheat while it’s growing. And so are you.

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Part Four: The Way Through Is Vulnerability

So if that’s the whole architecture of shame: how it hides in the body, how it becomes identity, how it turns into perfectionism and performance; how do you actually get out of it?

You don’t get from shame to worthiness by thinking positive thoughts. You have to move through vulnerability. And vulnerability is terrifying, because it means allowing yourself to be seen without knowing what the other person will do with what they see.

That’s why vulnerability isn’t telling everyone everything. It’s not oversharing, or removing every boundary. It’s choosing people who have earned the right to hear your story. When you feel shame, one of the most powerful things you can do is reach out to someone who is deeply rooted, someone who can bend with you, someone who can hold both your strengths and your struggles. Shame grows in secrecy. Vulnerability gives it somewhere to go.

There’s an interesting piece of research Kelly McGonigal discusses in her work on stress: when we’re under stress, our bodies don’t just produce a stress response and leave us alone, oxytocin is also released. It’s often called the “cuddle hormone,” but one of its important functions is to motivate us toward social connection and support. So your stress response isn’t necessarily saying “deal with this by yourself.” It can also be saying “find someone.” Connection is regulating because your body is designed to seek it.

We’ve somehow built a culture where needing support is treated as weakness. One of the biggest barriers to connection is this obsession with self-sufficiency, the idea that there are two categories of people, the ones who help and the ones who need help. But we’re actually both. And if you can never receive help, you also limit your ability to give it, because somewhere underneath “receiving help makes me weak” is the belief that people who need help are lesser, and eventually you apply that judgment to yourself. Needing people doesn’t make you deficient. It makes you human. We need to know we matter to somebody, that there are people who will answer when we call. And when we remove ourselves from those relationships because we’re afraid of being needy, we don’t become stronger. We just become lonelier.

This is what Brené Brown calls wholehearted living, and it rests on three things: **courage, compassion and connection**.

Courage means allowing ourselves to be imperfect. Setting boundaries. Saying no. Letting ourselves be vulnerable. Letting go of what other people think.

Compassion means learning to move gently toward the things that scare us instead of attacking ourselves for being scared, and compassion doesn’t mean letting people hurt you. Boundaries are part of compassion. Accountability is more useful than blame. You can say “I did something wrong” without saying “I am wrong.”

And connection is what happens when people feel seen, heard and valued, when they can give and receive without judgment, and derive strength from one another.

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Part Five: What We Do Instead of Feeling It

Vulnerability is the way through, but it’s also exactly what makes us want to avoid the whole thing. So we numb.

Numbing doesn’t have to look dramatic. It can be alcohol, drugs, food, scrolling, television, work, staying busy, planning everything, constant worrying, perfectionism itself. Even sleep. At one point in my own life, I wouldn’t call it an addiction, but I realised I was using sleep to avoid feelings I didn’t want to experience.

And the problem is you can’t selectively numb. You can’t say “I’m going to numb shame but keep joy.” It doesn’t work that way. When we numb the painful emotions, we numb the positive ones too. And then you get a cycle: I don’t experience much joy, so I have less joy to draw from when something difficult happens. The difficult thing feels even more painful. So I numb. Which means even less joy. And the cycle continues.

The opposite of that cycle isn’t forced positivity. It’s something more specific, which is hope.

Hope isn’t “everything will magically work out.” Hope is having a realistic goal, knowing where you want to go, being able to figure out how to get there; including finding alternate routes when the first one doesn’t work, and believing you can do it. So hope has three parts: I know where I want to go, I know how I can get there, I believe I can do it.

That’s very different from entitlement. Entitlement says, “I deserve this because I want it.” Agency says, “I believe I can work toward this.” And when people develop a very low tolerance for disappointment while simultaneously feeling enormous pressure to perform, you can end up with fear, entitlement, hopelessness and self-doubt all showing up at once. Nobody is immune to that.

That pressure to perform gets a lot louder the moment you open your phone.

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Part Six: Comparison, and What We Do to Get Back to Ourselves

Trying to avoid media messages completely is basically like trying to swim without touching water. So instead, we have to become more conscious consumers. Ask yourself: is this real? Is this someone’s life or someone’s marketing? Does this reflect healthy living, or is it turning my body, my relationships, my career and my family into things to be measured against? And maybe the most important question: who benefits from me seeing this and feeling worse about myself? Because very often, somebody does.

The comparison mandate underneath all of it is basically: fit in and stand out. Be just like everyone else, but better. More attractive, more successful, more interesting, more productive, more desirable, more everything. It’s an impossible game.

One of the things shame, perfectionism and that comparison mandate take away from us is creativity, because creativity requires making something that might not be good, and perfectionism hates that. We say “I’m not creative.” But maybe there aren’t creative people and non-creative people. Maybe there are just people who use their creativity and people who don’t. Write, cook, paint, draw, dance, take photographs, build something, decorate your room, make music. You don’t need it to become a career. You don’t need anyone’s approval. Making something simply because you wanted to make it is a powerful way of reminding yourself that your existence doesn’t always have to produce something measurable.

The same is true of play. We’ve tied our self-worth so closely to productivity that doing something pointless can make us anxious; why am I wasting time, why am I watching this, why am I doing nothing. But play isn’t a waste of time. We need experiences that aren’t designed around achievement, where we’re not performing, not proving, not producing. Because if your entire identity depends on what you accomplish, the moment you stop accomplishing things, you have no idea who you are.

And sometimes the hardest thing we can do is sit still. Stillness isn’t necessarily doing nothing; it’s creating a clearing, enough emotional space to actually hear yourself think. This matters most when we’re making big decisions. Sometimes we rush into decisions because uncertainty itself is unbearable: I just need to decide, I can’t think about this anymore, I’m just going to do it. But sometimes that urgency isn’t intuition. It’s our inability to tolerate uncertainty. If you’re afraid to sit down, gather the information and actually think something through, ask yourself: am I ready to decide, or am I just desperate to stop feeling uncertain? Intuition isn’t one magical voice in your head. It’s your ability to hold space for uncertainty while drawing on instinct, experience, reason and knowledge. And sometimes the most self-respecting thing you can do is wait.

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Part Seven: What Self-Worth Actually Looks Like

I think this is where all of it comes together.

Self-worth doesn’t mean thinking you’re amazing all the time. It doesn’t mean believing you’re better than everyone, or never questioning yourself, or never improving. It means your mistakes don’t erase your humanity. You can hold yourself accountable without humiliating yourself. You can want to change without believing you’re defective. You can be rejected without deciding you’re unlovable. You can fail without becoming a failure. You can be imperfect without becoming unworthy. And maybe most importantly, you don’t have to earn your right to belong.

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Rebuild Your Self-Worth

This is why I created Rebuild Your Self-Worth. Because I don’t actually believe an Instagram post or a podcast episode can fix your self-worth, and I don’t want to sell it to you like that. A month isn’t going to magically cure every insecurity you’ve ever had; self-worth is a lifelong process. But a month can change the way you understand yourself. It can help you identify where these patterns come from, understand the stories you tell yourself, recognise your shame responses, understand what you’re protecting yourself from, and, most importantly, give you frameworks you can keep applying long after the month is over.

Rebuild Your Self-Worth is a one-month, one-on-one container with me: four individual sessions where we work specifically on your patterns instead of giving you generic advice, plus ongoing support through email or chat throughout the month, so when something comes up and you’re struggling to apply what we’ve discussed, you don’t have to figure it out alone. And the month doesn’t have to be the end, if you want to keep working together, we simply continue from wherever you’ve reached instead of starting over. Because that’s how I think this work actually happens. Not “I fixed my self-worth in 30 days,” but “I understand myself differently now, and I know what to do when the old patterns come back.”

I’ve been interested in psychology for about a decade; studying it independently for that entire period, and formally for the past two years. I’ve written hundreds of essays around psychology, behaviour, relationships and human experience, and those essays have reached readers across 189 countries. But more than anything, I’ve spent years fascinated by the same question: why do we do the things we know aren’t good for us? Why do we know we should set a boundary and still people-please? Why do we know someone doesn’t treat us well and still crave their approval? Why do we know we’re not failures and still feel like failures? Why do we know we’re worthy and still behave like we have to earn our worth? The more I study psychology, the more I realise that knowing something intellectually and being able to live it emotionally are two very different things. That’s the gap I want to work on with people. If this is something you want to work on, you can explore more here.

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You are enough

Because ultimately, I think so many of these conversations lead back to one thing: worthiness.

We want love. We want belonging. We want connection. We want to be accepted, to feel safe, to feel like we matter. And when we don’t believe we’re worthy of those things, we start trying to earn them. We perform. We perfect. We please. We prove. We become palatable. We hide. We numb. We compare. We achieve. We try to become somebody who deserves the life we want.

But what if the work isn’t becoming more deserving? What if the work is learning to believe that you already deserve love and belonging while you’re still becoming? That’s what wholehearted living asks of us. Not perfection. Not certainty. Not a life without shame. Just the courage to say: this is my story, this is where I struggle, this is where I’ve failed, this is what I’m still learning. And I am still worthy.

Maybe that’s what vulnerability really gives us; not a guarantee that everyone will love us, or that nobody will reject us, or that we’ll never fail again. It gives us the ability to be seen without immediately abandoning ourselves. Because the real danger of shame isn’t simply that somebody else might reject you. It’s that you might reject yourself first: decide you’re too much, too difficult, too unsuccessful, too unattractive, too emotional, too needy, too imperfect, too different, and spend your whole life trying to become someone you think other people will finally approve of.

But you don’t have to become perfect to become worthy. You don’t have to stop failing, or stop needing people, or have your entire life figured out. You don’t have to be liked by everyone. You don’t even have to like every part of yourself today. You just have to stop making your worth conditional on becoming someone else. Because wheat is wheat while it’s growing. And maybe we are, too.

So the next time someone looks at you funny and your brain starts telling you that something is fundamentally wrong with you, pause. Notice what’s happening in your body. Ask yourself what story you’re telling: did you do something wrong, or have you decided you are wrong? Ask who you’ve become in the shame corner. And then ask: what would it look like to stay on my own side?

Because maybe self-worth isn’t the absence of shame. Maybe self-worth is what allows you to move through shame without losing yourself.

Thank you for spending your time with me today. Until next time, be kind to yourself, and be kind to others.

Topics covered

* Drug addiction & relationships

* The habits we struggle to break

* Learning to let go and move forward

* What it really takes to rebuild yourself

In this episode of Things We Never Say Circles, Calypso Moon and Rocco Roviaro join me for a real conversation about addiction, relationships, and the things we sometimes find ourselves unable to move on from.

Things We Never Say Circles is about real people sharing real experiences and real advice about the things happening in their lives, without experts. Just honest conversations.

Want to join the next Circle? Reply to this email and tell me you’d like to be part of one.

And if you’re ready to start rebuilding your self-worth, you can begin here: Rebuild Your Self-Worth.

Topics include: attachment theory, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, secure attachment, emotionally unavailable partners, relationship anxiety, dating psychology, healthy relationships, communication in relationships, emotional needs, relationship advice, psychology of love, relationship patterns, attachment styles, intimacy, dating tips, self-awareness, personal growth

The promised description link: https://unpackwithmehak.com/

Follow the podcast on Instagram: @unpack.with.mehak

For business: [email protected]

For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version:

Have you ever noticed that you keep ending up with the same person? Different name, different face, but somehow it’s the same relationship every time: someone who doesn’t really consider your needs. And eventually, either you break up, or they do, and you’re left feeling hopeless about the whole thing. Back to square one. Actually, back to square minus one, if I’m being honest.

So why does that happen? Why do we keep being attracted to people who were never going to meet our needs in the first place? Why do we think being low-maintenance is the answer to all of this? Why do we assume we’re the ones pushing people away, instead of considering that maybe they just couldn’t have met our needs no matter how we communicated them? Why is being the cool girl still such a trend, hiding what we need so the relationship can supposedly work? Why do we put so much pressure on ourselves to make sure our partner is comfortable with whatever pace we’re moving at?

That’s what we’re getting into today.

Hi, I’m Mehak Chhabra, your host, and this is Things We Never Say, a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat, and the things we all feel but rarely say out loud.

I’ve been reading about attachment theory and relationships lately, because I wanted to understand something a lot of us experience: knowing exactly what kind of relationship doesn’t work for us, and then somehow finding ourselves in another version of the same thing. Different person, different circumstances, same emotional experience.

And the more I read, the more interested I got in something we don’t talk about enough when it comes to dating. Neediness has basically become synonymous with being undesirable. We’re told to be independent, don’t text too much, don’t care too much, don’t make yourself too available, give them space, don’t ask for reassurance, don’t expect too much, don’t make them feel like your life revolves around them.

And honestly, there’s some decent advice buried in there. You shouldn’t make another person responsible for your entire emotional life. You shouldn’t abandon your friendships, your work, your identity, just because you’re in a relationship. But somewhere along the way, we took a reasonable idea and pushed it way too far. We started acting like having needs is the problem itself.

Wanting closeness isn’t automatically unhealthy. Wanting reassurance isn’t automatically unhealthy. Neither is wanting consistency, or wanting to know where you actually stand with someone, or wanting your partner to consider you when they’re making decisions. The question was never whether you have needs. It’s what those needs actually are, how you communicate them, and whether the person you’re with is even capable of meeting them. And I think that distinction changes the entire way we approach dating.

What attachment theory actually tells us

Attachment theory started with John Bowlby’s work on our need to form close emotional bonds. The idea is that attachment isn’t some childish thing we’re supposed to grow out of; close relationships actually shape how we experience safety, exploration, and emotional regulation throughout our whole lives. Mary Ainsworth’s work, including the Strange Situation experiment, showed how a caregiver’s availability can affect how willing a child is to go out and explore the world around them.

And I think that secure base idea is especially interesting once you apply it to adult relationships. A secure base doesn’t mean someone does everything for you. It just means you know someone’s there. And that knowledge alone can make it so much easier to go out into the world. Think about the difference between travelling somewhere completely unfamiliar knowing you have someone you can call if things go wrong, versus feeling like you’ve got absolutely nobody to turn to. The destination is exactly the same. You’re the same person. But having that support changes how safe you feel actually exploring.

And that’s where I think we’ve misunderstood independence. We’ve started treating dependence and independence like opposites, but healthy relationships don’t really work that way. Sometimes knowing you can depend on someone is exactly what gives you the freedom to be independent.

There’s some genuinely interesting research on this. In one well-known fMRI study, sixteen married women were exposed to the threat of an electric shock while holding either their husband’s hand, a stranger’s hand, or nobody’s hand at all. The researchers found reduced neural responses to the threat when the women were holding their husbands’ hands, and that effect was even stronger among women who reported higher marital quality.

Now, I don’t think the takeaway here is that your partner needs to hold your hand every single time you’re stressed. What’s actually interesting is what the study represents. A supportive relationship can change how we experience threat. Being connected to someone doesn’t automatically make you weaker, sometimes it just gives your nervous system a little more room to deal with the world.

Which brings me back to neediness. Because maybe the goal was never to become someone who doesn’t need anyone. Maybe it’s to become someone who understands what they need and knows how to actually communicate it, without making another person responsible for everything they feel.

So why do some of us keep choosing people who can’t give us what we need? This is where attachment theory gets interesting. People with more insecure attachment patterns can experience intimacy and threat pretty differently. Someone leaning more anxious might become especially sensitive to signs of rejection or abandonment, while someone leaning more avoidant might feel uncomfortable with too much closeness, almost like intimacy itself feels like a threat to their independence.

I don’t want to turn this into one of those internet videos where we diagnose everyone we’ve ever dated as anxious or avoidant, though. People are more complicated than four boxes, and attachment patterns can genuinely shift across relationships and over time. What I find more useful is looking at the cycle itself.

Picture someone who wants a lot of closeness with someone who tends to pull away the moment intimacy increases. One person moves closer, the other moves away. The first person gets more anxious, so they try harder, which makes the second person feel more pressure, so they create even more distance. And now the first person is even more activated than before. Suddenly both people are behaving in exactly the way that confirms the other’s deepest fear. The person seeking closeness is thinking, see, people leave when I need them. And the person seeking distance is thinking, see, people always want more from me than I can give. And now they’ve built a relationship that confirms both of their existing beliefs.

There’s research on couples that’s found associations between anxious-avoidant pairings and heightened stress responses during conflict, though real relationships are obviously far messier than just matching two attachment labels together. And this is where something really strange can happen. You can start confusing activation with chemistry.

You meet someone inconsistent. They text constantly for three days and then disappear. They tell you they really like you, and then suddenly go distant. Affectionate one week, emotionally unavailable the next. You don’t know where you stand, so you think about them constantly. You check your phone. You replay conversations. You analyse their tone. You wonder if they still like you.

And then they finally give you the reassurance you’ve been waiting for, and suddenly you feel incredible. The anxiety disappears. You feel chosen again. And because that relief is so intense, you might interpret it as passion. You might think, this person drives me crazy because I really love them. But an activated attachment system isn’t necessarily the same thing as romantic chemistry. Sometimes what feels like an incredible connection is really just uncertainty followed by relief. And that distinction matters, because if you’ve spent enough time in relationships where you have to earn closeness, a relationship where someone is simply consistent can feel strangely quiet. You don’t have to decode them. You don’t have to chase reassurance. You don’t have to wonder if they’re pulling away. And you might mistake that calm for a lack of chemistry.

This is also where the whole low-maintenance thing gets interesting. I think a lot of us have learned to perform being low-maintenance. We don’t say we want to see someone because we don’t want to seem clingy. We don’t ask where the relationship is going because we don’t want to seem intense. We don’t ask for reassurance because we don’t want to seem insecure. We don’t say something hurt us because we don’t want to be difficult. We give them space even when what we actually want is closeness. And eventually we get so good at hiding our needs that we stop knowing what our needs even are.

You become completely focused on one question: what will make this person stay? And you stop asking the more important one: is this relationship actually working for me? That’s where I think the cool girl idea becomes genuinely damaging, because you’re so busy trying to make the other person comfortable that you forget to check whether you’re comfortable. Whether they’re okay with the pace. Whether they’re okay with how much you’re seeing each other. Whether they’re okay with commitment, with you wanting more, with your feelings. And meanwhile you’re barely asking yourself what you actually want.

There’s a real difference between giving someone space because you respect their need for independence, and giving someone space because you’re terrified that asking for what you need will make them leave. Those can look identical from the outside. Internally, they’re completely different things. If your partner says, I need some time alone after a hard day, and you understand that’s not a rejection of you, that’s one thing. If they disappear for three days and you convince yourself that asking for communication would make you needy, that’s something else entirely. Healthy independence leaves room for communication. It doesn’t require one person to constantly shrink.

And I think this applies to people who genuinely need a lot of independence too. If you need time alone, that’s okay. If you need more space between seeing your partner, that’s okay. If you need time to process conflict before actually talking about it, that’s okay too. You don’t have to become someone who wants constant closeness just because your partner does. But you do have to communicate it. You can say, I need some time alone after conflict, but I’m not leaving this relationship, I just need a bit of time to process. That one sentence can completely change the experience for the other person, because now they’re not left trying to interpret your silence. You get your space, they get clarity, and both people’s needs actually have room in the relationship. That’s what a healthy relationship should be doing, not making one person’s needs disappear just so the other person can be comfortable.

And if you’re someone who tends to be more anxious, there’s an equally important responsibility on your end. You have to learn your actual needs. Not the needs you think make you look easygoing. Not the needs you think are socially acceptable. Not the needs you think will stop someone from leaving. Your actual needs. Maybe it’s consistency. Maybe it’s regular communication. Maybe it’s affection, or commitment, or someone willing to talk through conflict instead of avoiding it. Maybe you want a relationship where you see each other four times a week. Maybe you want way less than that. None of that automatically makes you needy; it’s just information about the kind of relationship that actually works for you. And if you don’t know what you need, it becomes almost impossible to figure out whether someone else is capable of meeting it.

This is why I think the title of this episode is a little provocative, but I mean it. Being needy can actually be a dating superpower. Not because you should expect your partner to fulfil every emotional need you have. Not because you should demand constant reassurance. Not because your partner should become your therapist, your best friend, your entire social life, and your only source of happiness. That’s not what I’m saying.

What I’m saying is that your needs give you information. If you need consistency and someone is consistently inconsistent, that tells you something. If you need communication and someone refuses to communicate, that tells you something. If you want commitment and someone keeps telling you they don’t want that, that tells you something. If you want affection and someone tells you they’re just not an affectionate person, that tells you something too. The answer isn’t always, how do I become less needy so they’ll stay. Sometimes the better question is, is this actually someone who can give me the relationship I want. And that changes dating completely, because now you’re not trying to convince someone to choose you. You’re trying to figure out whether the two of you actually fit.

And this is where having a life outside your relationship really matters. Your friends matter. Your work matters. Your hobbies matter. Your goals matter. The things that make you feel like yourself, matter. Not because you should pretend you don’t need your partner, but because one person shouldn’t have to carry your entire emotional world. When you have other sources of connection and meaning, someone’s delayed text doesn’t have to become a referendum on your worth. Their bad mood doesn’t automatically become your problem. Their uncertainty doesn’t have to take over your whole day. And you actually have more room to observe the relationship for what it is. Do they show up? Do they communicate? Do their actions match their words? Can they handle a difficult conversation? Do they make space for your needs? Do you feel safe being honest with them? Do you feel like yourself around them? Those questions tell you so much more about compatibility than whether you managed to wait three hours before replying to a text.

And I think there’s one more thing worth saying. Sometimes the person who makes you feel the most anxious really isn’t the person you’re most compatible with. They might be the person who’s activating something you’ve experienced before. And sometimes the person who feels safe doesn’t create that same immediate intensity. That doesn’t mean you should force yourself to date someone you’re not attracted to. It means that when you feel an incredibly intense connection with someone, it’s worth actually paying attention to what that intensity feels like. Is it excitement? Is it uncertainty? Is it attraction? Is it anticipation? Are you genuinely connecting with this person, or are you waiting for them to finally choose you? Because those two things can feel almost identical from the inside.

So I don’t think the goal of dating is to become less needy. I think the goal is to become more honest about your needs. Know them, communicate them, and then actually pay attention to what the other person does with that information. If you’re more secure, communicating your needs helps your partner understand you. If you’re more anxious, it can help you move away from trying to get reassurance indirectly, toward actually asking for what you want. And if you’re more avoidant, it can help you ask for independence without leaving the other person wondering whether you’ve abandoned them. Your attachment pattern doesn’t have to become your destiny, but if you don’t understand your own patterns, you’ll probably keep choosing relationships that confirm exactly what you already believe.

And that’s how you end up looking back at three completely different relationships and realising, I was dating the same person three times. Different face. Different name. Same emotional pattern. Same uncertainty. Same feeling of trying to get someone to give you something they were never really willing or able to give you. And then you walk away thinking, maybe I’m the problem, maybe I’m too much, maybe I ask for too much, maybe I should just become less needy.

But maybe you weren’t too much. Maybe you were just asking the wrong person for the right things. And that distinction can completely change the way you date, because your needs aren’t only things someone else has to fulfil. They’re also information you get to use, to decide who actually belongs in your life.

So if I had to take everything I’ve been reading about attachment and relationships and boil it down to one thing I want you to remember, it’s this. Your needs are information. Don’t hide them so well that you end up choosing someone who only works for the version of you that doesn’t need anything.

And if you’re listening to this thinking about a relationship where you’ve been trying to make yourself smaller, or you’ve noticed that you keep choosing the same kind of person over and over, that’s exactly the kind of pattern I work with through Unpack with Mehak. It’s a conversation where we slow things down, understand what keeps repeating, and figure out what you actually want to do differently. If that sounds useful, you’ll find the link in the description.

Thank you for spending this time with me. This was Things We Never Say, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Topics include: resilience, psychology, stress mindset, fear of failure, optimism and pessimism, Martin Seligman, Kelly McGonigal, Michael Easter, career change, consistency, personal growth, handling setbacks, life transitions, self-improvement, mindset.

The promised description link: https://unpackwithmehak.com/

For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version:

You know what’s so amazing about human beings? Our ability to make plans. We make plans for everything. Maybe not the kind that goes into a planner or a to-do list, but they’re there. We imagine a future all the time. You imagine the career we will have, the city we will live in, the person we will end up with, even the small things.

You book a holiday, and you already imagine what the weather will be like, what you will wear, the photos you will take, how relaxed you will finally feel. Before even a thing has happened, your mind has already lived through it. It happens for the bad moments too.

You go through life thinking, uh, what if I have this conversation, and you already have a plan. I’ll say this, they will say that, and I will say this, then they will say that. And I just want to ask, does it go that way every time? At least for me, it doesn’t. Life usually does what life does. It rains, the flight gets cancelled. The other person says something so off script that I’m like, what are you even saying? And the bigger things: the relationship ends, you don’t get the job. Or even something a little different can happen.

Everything goes according to plan, and you realise that the plan doesn’t make you happy anymore. That’s something that nobody really prepares us for. Because when our plans fall apart, we don’t all respond the same way. Some adapt, some make a plan immediately. They look forward for another way. To get out of it. They still keep believing that things will work out. Other people tend to get stuck. They think, why does this always happen to me?

Maybe I’m just unlucky. Maybe this is how my life is always going to be. Same disappointment, completely different responses. So what is it that separates the 2 people? Why do some people keep going while others slowly stop believing that anything they do will make a difference? That’s the question I want to explore today?

Hi, I am Mehak Chhabra, your host, and this is Things We Never Say, a podcast about the conversations we avoid, the emotional patterns we repeat and the things we all feel, but rarely say out loud. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading psychology research trying to understand one thing. Not why some people are successful, but why some people keep going after life doesn’t go according to plan. While others give up on the version of life they once imagined.

I don’t think resilience is luck. I don’t think it’s something you are simply born with. I think it’s a lot more interesting than that. So where does this all actually begin? Stress? I think it begins with stress. Because whenever life does not go according to plan, stress is usually the 1st thing we experience. It could be our career, and you could be 28, and you would be earning a certain amount. And you are planned for something else. You thought that you would be earning much more than that. Or maybe you are close to the number that you had imagined. But everything around you seems to be doing even better, and suddenly your life starts to feel behind.

Maybe it could be the relationship where you thought that you would marry this person and live forever with and it ends. Or you get the job, you get the promotion, you get the relationship that you wanted to have, you reach the goal that you’ve been working towards, and then you realise, I thought getting here would make me happier than this. I think a lot of us have experienced some version of that. Either the plan changes. Or the plan works, and we change. In either of the scenarios, the 1st thing that a body does is it responds with stress.

Now I was listening to a psychologist, uh, who is Kelly McGonigal a few days ago. And she said something about stress that completely changed my view. She said that maybe stress itself is not the biggest problem. Maybe it is what we believe that the stress means. Simple right? We have grown up hearing that stress is terrible for us, that it damages our physical health, that we should avoid it whenever possible. But then researchers came and did something really interesting.

They asked a lot of people 2 questions. 1st one was simple. How much stress have you experienced over the last year? The 2nd question was a little more interesting. Do you believe that stress is harmful to your health? You’re probably nodding your head to this one. And uh, a lot of people did say that they did believe that. And they followed these people for years. And what they found really surprised me. The people who had experienced a lot of stress and believed that it was harming their health had a significantly higher risk of dying during this study period.

But the people who experienced just as much stress and didn’t believe stress itself was damaging them did not show the same increase in risk. I actually had to replay this part because I did not really believe that this was how it worked. I mean, stress affects us physically; it should affect all of us, right? Whatever our beliefs might be. So, um, the stress is not harmless.

But this research does suggest that the story we tell ourselves about stress changes the way our body responds to it. Researchers, we may even have tested this in the lab. Before putting people through really stressful situations like public speaking, in front of judges and with lights on their faces and the camera up close and the judges with like extremely disapproving looks and some difficult math, and after this public speaking debacle, they would send them to do a math test, and even then the examiner would completely discourage them throughout all of this.

And, I mean, if you are anything like me, you are going to feel stressed, right? But before putting these people through these situations, they told one group something very simple. When your heart starts racing, when your palms get sweaty, when your breathing changes and you feel like you are stressed, your body is not failing you. It is preparing you. It’s giving you the energy you need to deal with what’s about to happen. And the other group did not get to hear anything.

So both groups felt stressed. Their hearts did beat fast. There was one remarkable difference. The people who saw stress as their body helping them did not show the same constriction in their blood vessels that’s typically associated with the harmful stress response. The stress was still there, but the relationship had changed, which, I think, is miraculous- like, it’s so wild how the human body works.

The way we explain things to ourselves can change how they impact our lives. That is insane. And it directly leads us to Martin selling men. Now I wanted to think about something for a 2nd. When something goes wrong in life. What’s the 1st sentence your mind creates? The very 1st one, not the one that you have after you’ve calmed down, but when something does not go according to plan, and you are just getting to know about it.

Because Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, spent years, I’m studying something called explanatory style, which is really just a fancy way of asking one question. How do you explain the events in your life to yourself? Because this explanation matters much more than we think. Imagine you have been looking forward to a holiday for months. Imagine the beach, the sunshine, the food. The same holiday from the introduction.

You have pictured yourself relaxing, the outfits and everything. And then you get there, and it rains for 4 days straight. One person looks outside and says: This always happens to me; I cannot even catch a break all day. And there is one more person that looks outside and says, well, you know, that’s disappointing. Let’s see what we can do instead.

Same weather, completely different explanation. Seligman found that people who tend to recover more quickly from setbacks don’t necessarily have easier lives. They just explain those setbacks differently. When something bad happens, they don’t assume it’s permanent. They don’t immediately jump to this is my life now, or this has always been my life. They see it as temporary. As one event. Not an entire story.

And it doesn’t stop there. The same thing happens when good things happen. Imagine the same holiday: you are on it, and the forecast probably said that it’s going to be rainy, and you go there and you reach and you see that the weather is sunny and it’s amazing and it’s beautiful and you are so excited about it. And you end up thinking, I am so lucky. I’ve always, always been so lucky in my life that I get to experience such great things. Or there is someone else who can explain the experience by saying this is just the weather.

This is the, this is climate change, and this was just a lucky break that I caught. So when you, uh, explain the same event again, there are different explanations for the same event. And over years, these explanations can become something much more than sentences. They become expectations. They shape whether you keep trying or stop believing your efforts matter. This was something I kept thinking about when I was deciding whether to leave my job. Every day there was a new what if: what if this does not work? What if this is not good? What if I spent 2 years building this and then I realised I don’t even enjoy it anymore.

The questions never really went away, but there was one answer that stayed the same. I will figure it out. And that sentence did not come from confidence. It came from evidence because when I started writing, I did not have a business; uh, I never imagined that I would have a podcast. I just wanted to write for 5 months; almost nothing happened. For the 6th month, when the 6th month started, I got around 5000 subscribers in one month alone.

And then in the next month, I was at 25,000 subscribers. At the end of month 5, if you had looked at the numbers, which were approximately around 200, you would have told me to stop. There were days when I asked myself to stop. I was genuinely exhausted during the time, and every evening I would come home and write anyway. There wasn’t a single piece of evidence that suggested this was going to become my career- none.

But there was one thing that kept changing. Me. Every week I became a slightly better writer. Every week, I understood my readers a little more. Every week I learned something new about storytelling, headlines, psychology, marketing, or simply how to show up consistently. And I still am, every day, learning something new. From the outside, it looked like nothing was happening; from the inside, however, everything was.

And there might be some people who looked at my 6th month or 7th month and thought, wow, that happened so quickly, but it did not. It took 6 months. The 6th month only existed because of the 5 that came before it. Those 5 months were not empty. They were just invisible. We forget that sometimes. We judge our progress by visible results.

Life often rewards invisible efforts first. If I had stopped at month 5 because there wasn’t enough evidence that it was going to work, there never would have been a month 6. I would have gone back to the life I had planned when I was 15, a perfectly reasonable life, a stable life. But not a life that felt like mine. That’s something that the fear of failure really steals from us. It doesn’t just stop us from succeeding. It stops us before we have stayed long enough to find out what’s possible. Talking about fear, I came across another idea that

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. I was reading The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, and he talks about research on the evolutionary origins of fear. When you think about the lives our ancestors lived, fear made a lot of sense; there were predators, venomous snakes, hostile drives, etc.

So over thousands of years, our brains became very good at noticing anything that looked like danger.

That’s why, even today, we’re naturally alert to things like heights, strangers, sudden movements, or something rustling in the bushes.

Our brains evolved to keep us alive.

The interesting part is that while our world has changed dramatically, our brains haven’t changed nearly as quickly.

Today, most of us aren’t running away from predators.

We’re running away from embarrassment.

From rejection.

From criticism.

From failing publicly.

From someone thinking we weren’t good enough.

And our bodies often react as though those two things carry the same weight.

I know that because I feel it too.

Even recording this podcast, there’s a part of me wondering,

“What if people don’t like it?”

“What if I get something wrong?”

“What if this isn’t good enough?”

Those thoughts still show up.

The difference is that I’ve slowly realised something.

Just because my brain labels something as dangerous doesn’t mean it actually is.

Michael Easter writes about someone called Elliot who said something I loved.

He said that most of us are living inside a much smaller circle than our actual potential.

Imagine your potential is this huge circle.

Most of us spend our lives somewhere near the middle of it.

Not because that’s all we’re capable of.

But because we rarely go close to the edge.

We don’t apply for the job.

We don’t start the business.

We don’t speak up.

We don’t ask someone out.

We don’t publish the thing we’ve been working on.

Not because we know we’ll fail.

But because we’re trying so hard to avoid finding out.

And if we never get close to the edge of what we’re capable of…

we never actually discover who we could have become.

I think that’s one of the saddest possibilities.

Not failing.

Never giving yourself the chance to find out what you were capable of in the first place.

So if resilience can actually be built, the obvious question is…

How?

One of the most interesting ideas I came across was something called a Misogi, which Michael Easter writes about in The Comfort Crisis.

The idea is surprisingly simple.

Once every year, do one thing that feels almost impossibly difficult.

There are only two rules.

The first is that it has to be really hard.

The second is that you can’t die.

That’s it.

Now, how do you know if something is hard enough?

Easter gives an example.

Let’s say your Misogi is running twenty-five miles.

If you’re already training by running twenty miles at a time and logging thirty or forty miles every week, that’s probably not your Misogi anymore. You’re almost certain to finish.

But if the furthest you’ve ever run is ten miles, you think maybe you could push yourself to fifteen, and you’re honestly not sure if twenty is even possible…

then twenty-five miles probably is.

The goal isn’t certainty.

The goal is choosing something where, even if you do everything right, you only have about a fifty percent chance of succeeding.

When I first read that, I thought,

“Why would anyone intentionally put themselves in a situation where they might fail?”

But then I realised that’s exactly the point.

The point isn’t to finish the twenty-five miles.

The point is to become the kind of person who’s willing to find out what they’re capable of.

Because even if you don’t finish…

maybe you run twenty.

That’s still twice as far as you’ve ever gone before.

Your brain now has evidence that your limits weren’t where you thought they were.

And I think that’s something we forget.

Resilience isn’t built by succeeding over and over again.

It’s built by repeatedly discovering that you can survive things you once believed were beyond you.

Michael Easter shares another analogy that I really liked.

Imagine someone who has spent years swimming.

Then one day they decide to go for a run.

Even though they’ve never trained specifically for running, they’re often capable of running much farther than someone who has never exercised at all.

Why?

Because swimming built their cardiovascular capacity.

The strength transfers.

Resilience works in a similar way.

When you deliberately choose difficult things, you’re not just getting better at that one thing.

You’re teaching your brain something much bigger.

You’re teaching it,

“I’ve done difficult things before.”

“I’ve been uncomfortable before.”

“I’ve thought I couldn’t do something… and then I surprised myself.”

So when life inevitably throws something difficult at you—a career change, a breakup, losing someone you love, starting over—your brain isn’t facing difficulty for the very first time.

It already has evidence.

Evidence that you’ve survived uncertainty before.

Evidence that you can adapt.

Evidence that discomfort isn’t the end of the story.

And what’s fascinating is that the research seems to support this.

One study followed around twenty-five hundred people from across the United States and found something that sounds almost counterintuitive.

The people who had experienced some adversity in life actually reported better psychological well-being than people who had been completely sheltered from hardship.

They were more satisfied with their lives.

They had fewer psychological and physical symptoms.

They used fewer healthcare services.

They were less likely to describe themselves as disabled.

Notice the word some.

Not overwhelming trauma.

Not constant suffering.

The researchers weren’t saying that endless hardship is good for us.

They were saying that never being challenged isn’t good for us either.

There’s a middle ground.

A place where we experience enough discomfort to discover that we’re stronger than we thought.

And maybe that’s what resilience really is.

Not avoiding difficult experiences.

But collecting enough evidence that difficult experiences don’t have the final say.

Looking back, I think I eventually found my own Misogi.

It wasn’t resigning from architecture.

That was one decision.

The real challenge was everything that came before

It was waking up every day and continuing to build something that gave me almost no evidence it was going to work.

For months, nothing happened.

And every single day I had to answer the same question.

“Am I going to keep going?”

Looking back now, I realise something.

Resilience isn’t built on the day everything works out.

It’s built on the ordinary days when nothing seems to be working…

and you decide to continue anyway.

I think that’s what all of this research has been trying to say.

Resilience isn’t about never failing.

It’s not about pretending setbacks don’t hurt.

It’s not about positive thinking.

It’s about refusing to let one moment become your identity.

There’s a huge difference between saying,

“I failed.”

and

“I’m a failure.”

One describes an event.

The other describes a person.

One can change.

The other traps you.

And that’s what Martin Seligman spent years studying.

The people who kept going weren’t the people with easier lives.

They weren’t the people who never experienced disappointment.

They were the people who refused to explain one difficult chapter as the entire story of who they were.

So if you’re listening to this today and it feels like your life hasn’t gone according to plan…

I’d like you to do something.

Look back over your life.

Not to look for proof that everything has always worked out.

Because it hasn’t.

Look for proof that you’ve handled things you once believed you couldn’t.

Think about the exam you thought you’d never pass.

The heartbreak you thought you’d never recover from.

The city you thought you’d never adjust to.

The conversation you thought you’d never have.

The version of yourself you thought you’d never become.

You’ve already survived more uncertainty than your mind gives you credit for.

And maybe that’s the evidence you need.

Not evidence that life will always work out.

None of us can promise that.

But evidence that whatever happens next…

you’ll probably find a way through it, just like you have before.

Before we end this episode, I would like you to try something with me.

So after reading all of this research, I don’t think resilient people are fearless. I don’t think they’re luckier. And I don’t think they have easier lives. I think they do four things differently. They explain setbacks differently. They don’t see stress as proof that something is wrong. They deliberately do difficult things. And over time, they collect evidence that they can survive uncertainty.

So here’s something I’d love for you to try.

Think about the last thing that you would call a failure.

For just a few minutes, don’t think about it emotionally.

Think about it analytically.

Almost like you’re a researcher looking at someone else’s life.

Ask yourself,

What actually happened?

Just the facts.

No opinions.

No labels.

What was I trying to do?

What part of it worked?

What part of it didn’t?

If you had to put a percentage on it, how much of it was actually successful and how much of it didn’t go the way you wanted?

Now comes the important part.

Imagine this wasn’t your story.

Imagine it happened to someone you care about.

How would you explain what happened?

Would it be the same way that you explain it to yourself?

And then I’d ask you one final question.

What’s one thing you would do differently the next time?

So see what you can learn from it and try to understand that failure isn’t what your life is, it is a part of your life.

If you’ve been listening to this episode and realised that you’re carrying a story about yourself that’s become heavier than the event that created it, that’s exactly the kind of work I do in Unpack with Mehak.Sometimes what keeps us stuck isn’t the event itself.

It’s the explanation we’ve quietly repeated ever since.

That’s the work we do together

If that feels like the kind of conversation you need right now, you’ll find all the details through the link in the description.

Thank you so much for spending this time with me.

And remember…

Maybe resilience isn’t believing that life will go according to plan.

Maybe it’s trusting yourself enough that when it doesn’t…

you’ll build another one.

I’ll see you in the next episode of Things We Never Say.

Topics include: self-awareness, nervous system regulation, attachment theory, psychology, emotional healing, behaviour change, trauma, anxiety, people-pleasing, and personal growth.

The promised description link: https://unpackwithmehak.com/

Also, if you already know that the way you see yourself is affecting the way you’re living, and you’re actually ready to work on it, you can book Rebuild Your Self-Worth here

For those of you who prefer to read, below is the article version:

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I know exactly what I need to do. I know how I want to react. I know where these patterns are coming from. So why do I keep repeating them?”

You tell yourself that this time you’ll respond differently. This time you’ll speak up in the meeting. This time you won’t pull away from someone who genuinely cares about you. This time you won’t overthink that text message. This time you’ll stop people-pleasing.

And then the moment arrives. You freeze. Or you stay silent. Or you react exactly the way you’ve reacted a hundred times before. Afterwards you’re sitting there thinking, “I understood this. I worked on this. I know why I do this. So why am I still here?”

If you’ve ever had those thoughts, keep reading.

Today I want to talk about one of the biggest misconceptions I think we have about personal growth. We assume that understanding ourselves should automatically change us. That once we know why we behave the way we do, the behaviour should disappear. But that’s not what happens. You can understand yourself completely and still find yourself repeating the exact same patterns.

So today I want to talk about why that happens, what self-awareness actually is, why insight alone isn’t enough, and what real change actually looks like.

Before we understand why awareness isn’t enough, I think we first have to ask another question.

Are we even as self-aware as we think we are?

Most of us would probably say yes. I definitely would’ve. If someone had asked me a few years ago whether I knew myself well, I would’ve said absolutely. I know my patterns. I know my strengths. I know my flaws. I know why I react the way I do.

Then I came across a piece of research that completely changed how I thought about self-awareness. Around 90% of people believe they’re self-aware. Do you know how many researchers estimate actually are? Around 10 to 15%.

When I first read that, I genuinely thought, How is that even possible? How can almost everyone think they’re self-aware if so few people actually are? The answer surprised me. Because we’ve confused thinking about ourselves with knowing ourselves.

Tasha Eurich talks about this beautifully in one of her TED Talks. She explains that introspection and self-awareness aren’t the same thing.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Reflection is valuable. Thinking about your experiences matters. Journaling can help. Therapy can help. Trying to understand yourself is important. But reflection isn’t automatically accurate. Sometimes it simply becomes rumination.

And one of the biggest reasons for that is the kind of questions we ask ourselves. Think about how often we ask why.

* Why do I keep falling for emotionally unavailable people?

* Why didn’t I get promoted?

* Why can’t I speak in public?

* Why did I react like that?

* Why can’t I just change?

It feels productive. It feels like we’re uncovering some deep truth about ourselves. But a lot of the time, we’re not uncovering anything. We’re inventing explanations.

Now you might be thinking, “No. The answers I give myself are true.”

I used to think that too. But let me tell you about one of my favourite psychology experiments.

Researchers showed participants two photographs and asked them to choose the person they found more attractive. They made their choice. A little while later, the researchers came back and handed them the photograph they supposedly chose. Except it wasn’t the photograph they had chosen. It was the other one.

Then they asked them, “Tell us why you chose this person.”

Only around 20 to 26 percent of participants noticed that they had been given the wrong photograph. Everyone else confidently explained why they had chosen it.

Someone who originally preferred one photograph because the woman wasn’t wearing earrings would suddenly say, “I actually liked this one because she’s wearing earrings.”

They weren’t lying. Their brains were simply trying to make sense of what they believed had happened.

Our brains don’t like gaps in the story. When we don’t know why we did something, they often create an explanation that feels true. Not because we’re dishonest, but because our brains want coherence. They’d rather have a convincing story than no story at all.

I’ll give you another example.

A friend of mine went dancing one night. The next morning she woke up with pain all over her body. She remembered the night perfectly. Or at least she thought she did. She assumed she was sore because she’d spent hours dancing.

A day later she spoke to the people she’d gone out with. They told her, “You fell twice.” She had completely forgotten.

Her brain had filled in a perfectly reasonable explanation.

That’s what our minds do. They hate uncertainty. They’d often rather create a convincing story than admit, “I don’t actually know.”

So if constantly asking why can sometimes lead us further away from ourselves, what should we ask instead? Ask what.

* Instead of asking, “Why do I get anxious?” ask, “What about this situation makes me anxious?”

* Instead of asking, “Why can’t I speak up?” ask, “What happens inside me just before I stop myself?”

* Instead of asking, “Why do I keep choosing emotionally unavailable people?” ask, “What makes someone feel emotionally safe or unsafe to me?”

Those questions keep us grounded in what we’re actually experiencing instead of the stories we’re creating about ourselves. And once we start asking better questions, we become genuinely more self-aware. But here’s the interesting part.

Let’s imagine you’ve done all of that. You’ve reflected. You’ve understood your patterns. You’ve probably spent years trying to figure yourself out. And even then, there are moments where you’re standing in the exact situation you prepared yourself for, and you still do the thing you promised yourself you wouldn’t.

You tell yourself you’ll speak up in the meeting. You rehearse the sentence in your head.

“Just say it. Just say it. Just say it.”

The discussion moves on. Someone else says exactly what you wanted to say. Everyone nods. And you’re left wondering, “I knew what I wanted to say. So why couldn’t I just say it?”

Or maybe it’s a relationship. You know you have a tendency to pull away when someone gets too close. You’ve understood where it comes from. You’ve journaled about it. Maybe you’ve talked about it in therapy. You’ve promised yourself you’ll stay this time.

Then someone starts getting emotionally close, and before you even realize what’s happening, you’ve already started distancing yourself. It’s one of the strangest experiences.

Your mind understood everything. Your body just didn’t get the memo.

So why does that happen?

To answer that, I want to go back to something that happens long before any of us can remember. Long before we could explain our feelings. Long before we could think rationally. Because the emotional part of our brain starts learning about the world much earlier than the thinking part.

As babies, we don’t understand the world through language. We understand it through experience. Through someone’s tone of voice. Through facial expressions. Through touch. Through rhythm. Through whether someone comes when we cry. Through whether our emotional needs are met consistently.

Our nervous system is constantly asking one question: “Am I safe?”

Every one of those experiences becomes information. Not information that we consciously remember, but information that our nervous system remembers.

By the time we’re old enough to explain our emotions, our nervous system has already spent years learning what safety feels like. It’s already learning things like: Is the world predictable? Can I trust other people? Is it okay to ask for help? Is it safe to express my emotions? Or do I need to hide them? And that’s where attachment comes in.

When psychologists talk about secure attachment, they’re not talking about parents being perfect. They’re talking about a child repeatedly having the experience that their emotions are met. That when they’re distressed, someone helps regulate them. That when they’re overwhelmed, someone stays with them.

Over time, something remarkable happens. That regulation slowly becomes internal. The child doesn’t need someone else to calm them every single time anymore. Their nervous system learns how to do it itself. They develop the ability to tolerate difficult emotions, recover after stressful situations, and feel safe even when life isn’t perfect.

But what happens when that process is interrupted?

Maybe there was inconsistency. Maybe there was emotional unavailability. Maybe there was neglect. Maybe there was trauma. Maybe the people around the child were dealing with things they couldn’t cope with themselves.

Children don’t get to choose the environment they grow up in. The only thing they can do is adapt to it.

* If home feels unpredictable, becoming hypervigilant makes sense.

* If expressing emotions leads to rejection, learning to hide them makes sense.

* If love feels inconsistent, staying emotionally distant might become the safest option.

These aren’t flaws. They’re adaptations. In fact, they were probably incredibly intelligent adaptations at the time because they helped you survive.

I also want to be careful here because this doesn’t mean your childhood permanently determines your future. It means your earliest experiences become your first draft of how relationships, safety, and emotions work. And first drafts can be edited.

The problem is that our nervous system doesn’t automatically realize when the environment has changed. So years later, you might be in a healthy relationship. You might be surrounded by safe people. You might consciously know that opening up is okay. But your nervous system learned something different a long time ago.

And that’s why anxiety, emotional numbness, chronic self-criticism, fear of closeness, or feeling constantly on edge often aren’t signs that you’re weak or irrational. They’re signs that your nervous system is still using strategies that once helped you survive.

That’s why simply understanding the pattern doesn’t always make it disappear. Because the pattern wasn’t originally learned through logic. It was learned through repeated emotional experience.

And what is learned through repeated experience is rarely undone by a single insight. That’s the gap so many of us find ourselves living in.

We understand our patterns. We understand where they came from. And yet, when life happens, we still repeat them. So what actually happens inside the brain in those moments? Why does it feel like your body takes over before your mind has a chance to respond?

The answer has to do with the fact that your brain doesn’t have just one job.

Part of your brain helps you think. It helps you reflect, plan, solve problems, imagine the future, and decide the kind of person you want to become. This is where insight lives. This is where self-awareness lives. This is the part of you that’s listening to this podcast thinking,

“That makes sense.”

But there’s another part of your brain. A much older part. A part that isn’t trying to understand your life. It’s trying to keep you alive. It learns through repetition. Through experience. Through emotion. And unlike your thinking brain, it doesn’t stop to ask,

“What’s the healthiest thing to do here?” Instead it asks,

“Have I been in a situation like this before?”

“What helped me survive last time?”

And then it repeats that response. Because your brain loves predictability. One of the brain’s primary jobs is to make predictions about what’s going to happen next. It uses your past experiences to prepare you for the future. If you’ve had the same experience enough times, your brain starts expecting it. Those expectations become predictions, and those predictions shape how your body responds before you’ve even had time to think. Predictability takes less energy. It’s fast. It’s familiar.

Imagine you’ve spent years believing that speaking up would lead to embarrassment. Maybe nobody actually told you that. Maybe you just slowly learned it.

Now you’re sitting in a meeting. You know the answer. You know your idea is valuable. You even tell yourself,

“Just say it.”

“Come on… just say it.”

But while your thinking brain is trying to convince you, your nervous system has already made its decision. It says,

“We’ve been here before.”

“Speaking up doesn’t feel safe.”

“Let’s stay quiet.”

And by the time the meeting ends, someone else has already said exactly what you wanted to say. You walk away frustrated. Not because you didn’t know what to do. But because your body responded before your thoughts had a chance to catch up. The same thing happens in relationships. Maybe someone starts getting emotionally close. Your conscious mind says,

“This is different.”

“This person is safe.”

But your nervous system remembers something much older. It remembers that vulnerability once led to pain. So it reaches for the strategy it has practiced the most. It pulls away.

Not because it wants to sabotage your relationship. Because it thinks it’s protecting you. And I think that’s one of the hardest things to accept. It can feel like your body is betraying you. But it isn’t.

Your nervous system isn’t trying to ruin your life. It’s trying to protect you using a strategy it learned years ago. The problem is that what once protected you may now be keeping you stuck. This is also why understanding ourselves can sometimes become so frustrating. We assume that because we’ve had the insight, the behaviour should disappear. But insight and behaviour don’t live in the same place.

Insight can happen in a single conversation. A single therapy session. A single book. A single podcast. Capacity develops much more slowly. It develops through repeated experience. Through practice.Through showing your nervous system, over and over again, that something different is also safe.

And there’s something else that’s really important to understand. Your nervous system prioritizes short-term regulation over long-term psychological goals.

Think about what happens when you avoid a difficult conversation. Does it solve the problem? Probably not. But it does reduce your anxiety, at least for tonight. Think about reassurance seeking. Every time you ask someone, “Are you sure everything’s okay?” you feel better for a little while. Or perfectionism. You spend hours trying to make something perfect because uncertainty feels unbearable.

In every one of those situations, your nervous system isn’t choosing what will make your life better next year. It’s choosing what helps you feel safer in the next ten minutes. And those are two very different goals. That’s why avoiding vulnerability feels easier than risking rejection. That’s why staying silent feels easier than speaking up. That’s why people-pleasing feels easier than disappointing someone.

Your nervous system chooses immediate relief. Not because it’s weak. Not because you’re lazy.

Not because you don’t want to change. Because immediate relief has worked before. Now, for some people, this gap between knowing and doing can feel even bigger. If you’re living with chronic stress, if you’ve experienced trauma, if you have ADHD, or if you’re struggling with anxiety or depression, putting insight into action can become even harder.

Wanting to change and having the mental capacity to change aren’t always the same thing. That doesn’t mean change is impossible. It means we have to stop measuring ourselves by insight alone. Because insight was never meant to do the whole job.

So now you know something that I think a lot of us were never taught.

You know that understanding yourself and changing yourself aren’t the same skill. You know that your nervous system is trying to protect you. You know that these patterns didn’t appear overnight, and they’re probably not going to disappear overnight either.

So the obvious question becomes: What do I actually do?

The first thing I want you to understand is that your nervous system learned these patterns through repetition. Which means it also unlearns them through repetition. Not through one moment of insight. Not through reading one book. Not through listening to one podcast.

Through repeated experiences that slowly teach your brain,

“Maybe this situation isn’t as dangerous as I thought it was.”

Let’s go back to the example of speaking in a group. You’re sitting there. Your heart is racing. You’re rehearsing the sentence over and over in your head.

“Just speak.”

“Just speak.”

“Just speak.”

What usually happens is that we wait until the fear disappears before we say something. But that’s almost never how it works. The fear doesn’t disappear first. The action comes first.

So maybe instead of waiting until you’re completely comfortable, you say one sentence. Just one. You don’t try to sound brilliant. You don’t try to impress anyone. You don’t replay it in your head afterwards. You simply contribute once. That’s it. The goal isn’t to become confident overnight. The goal is to give your nervous system one new experience.

One experience where you spoke, and nothing terrible happened. Then you do it again.And again. One new experience usually doesn’t change a belief. If you’ve spent ten years learning that speaking up isn’t safe, your nervous system probably isn’t going to erase that after one successful meeting. It’s looking for consistency. It changes its expectations the same way it formed them in the first place: through repetition. Eventually your brain starts updating its prediction. It slowly realizes,

“Maybe speaking isn’t as dangerous as I believed.”

That’s one of the brain’s primary jobs. It’s constantly trying to predict what’s about to happen next. Every repeated experience shapes those predictions. When your experiences change consistently enough, your predictions begin to change too.

That’s how change happens. Not because your mind finally found the perfect explanation. But because your body had enough experiences to believe something new.

Another thing that helps is practicing self-awareness in real time.

Not afterwards. Not three hours later while replaying the conversation. In the moment. The next time you notice yourself freezing, pause. Instead of asking,

“Why am I like this?” Ask,

“What about this moment feels unsafe?”

That one question changes everything. Because it shifts your attention away from judging yourself and toward understanding what your nervous system is trying to protect you from. Then remind yourself of something important. This isn’t who I am. This is what my nervous system has practiced. There’s a difference. One is your identity. The other is a learned response. And learned responses can change.

Another thing that can really help is deciding what you’re going to do before you’re in the situation. Your brain likes familiar responses, so don’t wait until you’re anxious to figure out how you’ll respond. Decide beforehand. Maybe you know you’re going into a meeting. You can tell yourself,

“If someone asks for my opinion, I’m going to share one thought.”

Maybe you’re going into a difficult conversation. You can decide,

“If I feel the urge to shut down, I’m going to stay for five more minutes before walking away.”

You’re giving your brain another path to take. A response it can become familiar with. Because eventually, that new response starts becoming the familiar one. And that’s really what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to eliminate fear. We’re trying to teach our nervous system that fear doesn’t always mean danger. I think that’s one of the biggest misunderstandings we have. We assume that if something feels uncomfortable, it must be wrong.

But discomfort and danger aren’t the same thing.

* Speaking honestly is uncomfortable.

* Setting boundaries is uncomfortable.

* Being vulnerable is uncomfortable.

* Asking for help is uncomfortable.

* Trying something new is uncomfortable.

That discomfort doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making the wrong choice. Sometimes it simply means you’re doing something your nervous system hasn’t practiced yet. And every single time you choose the new response, you’re teaching your brain something. You’re saying,

“This situation didn’t destroy me.”

“I can survive this too.”

That’s how your nervous system changes. Not through one big breakthrough. But through hundreds of ordinary moments where you respond a little differently than you did before. So if you’ve been asking yourself,

“I understand myself enough. Why am I still here?”

Maybe the answer isn’t that you haven’t understood enough. Maybe your understanding arrived much faster than your nervous system could change. Insight can happen in a single afternoon. Capacity is built in hundreds of moments afterwards. Insight tells you where the pattern came from.

Practice teaches your nervous system that it doesn’t need the pattern anymore. That’s why awareness matters. It really does. It’s where change begins. It was just never meant to do the whole job. And if you’ve listened to this episode and found yourself thinking,

“This is exactly what’s happening to me,”

I want you to know that understanding the pattern is often just the beginning. Changing it is a different kind of work. It’s difficult to do alone because we’re often too close to our own patterns to see them clearly. We can understand them intellectually and still struggle to respond differently when we’re actually in the moment.

That’s why I created Unpack with Mehak.

These aren’t sessions where I tell you what to do or give you a list of techniques. They’re conversations where we slow things down together, understand the patterns you’re living with, identify what your nervous system has learned to protect you from, and work toward building new ways of responding that actually feel possible. You probably don’t need another explanation. You need somewhere to practise responding differently while someone helps you notice the patterns you can’t see on your own. That’s the work we do together.

If that sounds like something you’re looking for, you can find all the details through the link in the description. I’d genuinely love to work with you.

Thank you so much for reading another episode of Things We Never Say.

If this episode resonated with you, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with someone who keeps wondering why they know exactly what to do but still find themselves repeating the same patterns. Maybe you were never stuck because you didn’t understand yourself enough. Maybe you were waiting for understanding to do a job that only experience could do.

Thank you for spending this time with me.

I’ll see you in the next episode.

If you already know that the way you see yourself is affecting the way you’re living, and you’re actually ready to work on it, you can book Rebuild Your Self-Worth here

We’ll work on things like being able to experience rejection without letting it decide what the rest of your day looks like, responding to shame without immediately turning it into self-criticism, understanding why comparison has so much power over you, and noticing the patterns where you start abandoning your own needs to be accepted, chosen, or approved of.

The container is $499 for the month and includes four one-hour sessions (you start by booking the first one) with me, as well as personalised support between sessions. The idea is not that one month magically fixes your relationship with yourself. It doesn’t. Self-worth is something you build and maintain over time. What a month can do is give you a proper starting point, personalised guidance, and the practices you need to continue doing the work after we’re done.

Why is making decisions so hard? In this first episode of Things We Never Say, Mehak Chhabra explores the psychology of indecision, perfectionism, overthinking, and the fear of making the wrong choice. Through personal stories, psychological research, and practical frameworks, she explains why certainty is impossible, how the paradox of choice keeps us stuck, and why confidence comes after making a decision, not before.

If you’ve been struggling with career decisions, relationships, life transitions, or constantly asking “What if I make the wrong choice?”, this episode offers a different way to think about uncertainty. You’ll also learn a simple three-step framework to move from anxiety to action without waiting for certainty.

Topics covered: indecision, overthinking, decision making, perfectionism, fear of failure, psychology, self-doubt, life choices, uncertainty, confidence, personal growth, mental health, emotional clarity.

Thank you for tuning in!