Phone Down, Eyes Up: How to Really See the People We Love

“The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Judy was three the first time I missed it. She had spent a solid ten minutes stacking every couch cushion on our living room floor in Vancouver, building what she clearly considered an Olympic-grade landing pad. She climbed up on the couch, stretched her arms out wide, and gave me that look. You know the one. The look kids give you right before they do something that makes your heart jump into your throat.

“Baba, watch!” she yelled.

My phone was in my hand. It was always in my hand. I was reading a Slack message or an email or maybe nothing at all, just the reflex of pulling down to refresh. I have no memory of what it was. Zero. Whatever it was dissolved completely about four minutes after I read it, because that’s what 90% of notifications actually are: things that feel urgent and then vanish.

“One sec, habibti,” I told her. My thumb kept scrolling.

She jumped. I heard cushions scatter across the hardwood floor. When I looked up, she was already gone, walking toward her room with a stuffed elephant dragging behind her by one ear.

I went right back to my phone.

That moment didn’t register as anything at the time. Kids jump off furniture, parents check their phones, nobody files it under “things I’ll regret.” But that was the beginning of a pattern I wouldn’t recognize for years, because the pattern was made of absence, and absences are nearly impossible to see while they’re forming.

Over the next two years, the requests kept coming. “Baba, look at this.” “Baba, come see.” “Baba, watch me.” Each one a little quieter than the last. Each one met by a version of me that was technically in the room but had his mind parked somewhere inside a 6.1-inch screen.

I ran engineering teams for a living. My entire professional identity was built around responsiveness, around keeping fourteen threads going simultaneously, around never letting a message sit unread for more than a few minutes. I was genuinely proud of how fast I could context switch. I thought it was a superpower. I carried that mentality through our front door every evening and never once questioned whether it belonged there.

What I didn’t know, what took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out, was that Judy had been keeping score.

There was this Saturday. She was about five. She’d set herself up at the kitchen table with markers and a big sheet of paper, and she was drawing while narrating the entire scene to me in that wild way kids narrate things. The purple dog lived on a rainbow, and his best friend was a cloud named Martin, and they were both invited to a birthday party on the moon, but the purple dog was nervous because he’d never been to space.

I was saying “wow” and “oh cool” and “then what happened” at what I thought were convincing intervals. My phone was under the table. I was reading a thread about a deployment that had gone sideways.

She stopped talking.

I didn’t register the silence immediately. Fifteen seconds went by, maybe twenty, before I noticed and looked up. She was watching me. Her face was completely neutral. Not upset, not hurt in any obvious way. Just watching me the way you watch someone when you’ve confirmed something you already suspected.

That’s the face I think about. That neutral, knowing face. Five years old and she had already done the math.

Children are paying attention even when, and especially when, you think they aren’t. They don’t need you to announce that your phone is more interesting than they are. They pick it up from the half-second pause before you respond. From the direction your eyes keep drifting. From the way you say “tell me more” while your thumb is still moving.

Sarah, my wife, was the one who made me see it.

Months later, Judy in bed, both of us sitting at the kitchen counter with our laptops open. Sarah said, “She doesn’t ask you to watch anymore.”

Four seconds of silence.

“Have you noticed that?”

I had not.

I sat with that for a while after she said it. I tried to trace it back. When was the last time Judy had grabbed my shirt and said, “Baba, watch”? I could not find the moment. It hadn’t ended. It had evaporated. The way a sound fades out and at some point it’s just gone and you can’t say exactly when it crossed the line from barely there to not there at all.

What I understood, sitting at that counter with my laptop still open and glowing in front of me, was that Judy hadn’t stopped wanting me to watch. She had stopped thinking I would.

That is a different thing entirely, and it is the worst thing I have ever felt.

I did not sleep well that night. I stared at the ceiling and ran through a kind of inventory that I did not enjoy. How many times per day did I pick up my phone? I started counting the next morning and lost track before lunch. I reached for it while the toothbrush was still in my mouth. While the kettle was heating. While walking from the car to the front door, a distance of maybe forty feet, because apparently forty feet of not looking at a screen was too many.

At red lights. During meals. In bed next to Sarah while she told me about her day. That one hit especially hard when I actually forced myself to see it.

I wasn’t hooked on any particular app. It was the checking itself. The constant pull toward somewhere else, someone else’s conversation, someone else’s emergency, someone else’s opinion about something I would forget within the hour.

My phone had turned into a door I walked through a hundred times a day, and every single time I walked through it, I left the person in front of me standing in an empty room.

What changed was not willpower. What changed first was that I let myself feel how much I had already lost.

I thought about all those mornings with Judy eating Cheerios at the counter and telling me about a dream she had and me staring at my phone. All those evenings on the couch where I was physically next to my daughter and mentally sorting through my email. Years of that. Actual years. You cannot retrieve those mornings. They happened once, and I was elsewhere for most of them, and that is permanent.

That’s the part about distraction that nobody warns you about clearly enough. It doesn’t just consume your time. It takes moments that existed once and will never exist again, and you don’t even realize they’ve been taken until much later, when the only thing left is the knowledge that they happened and you weren’t there for them.

Sarah and I had a series of long conversations about what we actually wanted our home to feel like. Not about screen time. We had tried screen time rules before. We’d downloaded tracking apps, set daily limits, made agreements that fell apart within a week because the structure was always about restriction, and restriction gets exhausting. This time we talked about what we were making room for. That was a different question and it led to different answers.

We started with small moves. Phones went into the kitchen drawer during dinner. Then during the hour before bedtime. Then for the first hour on Saturday mornings. We didn’t tell Judy we were cutting back on screens. We told her we were trying to be more here.

She noticed within days. Obviously.

Two weeks in, maybe three, she walked into the living room carrying a book. I was on the couch, no phone, just sitting there, which I realize makes me sound like some kind of relic from 2004, but that’s what it felt like, genuinely disorienting to just sit. She climbed up next to me,  dropped the book in my lap, and started reading out loud.

She didn’t ask if I was paying attention. She could see that I was.

That was the start. Not of a program or a system, but of something more like a set of family habits that we built together. We started taking morning walks and leaving our phones at home. At dinner we’d go around the table: “What was the best part of your day?” We put a list up on the fridge, one column for each of us, with whatever habits we were each working on. Judy held us to ours as much as we held her to hers.

And somewhere in there the question I was asking myself shifted. It went from “How do I spend less time on my phone?” to “What do I want to be present for?” Those questions sound similar, but they are not. The first one is about avoiding something. The second one is about choosing something. The second one actually worked.

Judy is twelve now. She is sharp and funny, and she has started learning to code, which makes me proud and also slightly terrified about what she’ll be able to do in five years. She doesn’t say “Baba, watch” the way she used to.

But she does something I like better.

She sits down next to me and shows me whatever she’s working on. A drawing. A program that won’t run because of a missing bracket. A video she thinks is the funniest thing ever created. And when she looks over to see my reaction, I’m looking back at her.

Not every time. I want to be honest about that. I have not transformed into some perfectly present person. My hand still goes to my pocket. I still feel the pull when I’m bored or stressed or standing in a line with nothing to do.

But I notice it now. I notice it and I choose. Sometimes I choose wrong. But the noticing is the thing. That’s what changed.

If you recognize any of this, if you are reading this with a tight feeling in your chest, I want to say one thing to you. You are not too late. I know it feels that way. I know the guilt is heavy because I carried it for years and it is heavy.

But the people we love give us more chances than we probably deserve. Kids especially. They will let you back in if you show up.

You do not have to rearrange your entire life before bed tonight. You just have to put your phone down the next time someone you love is talking to you, and look at them. Really look. Let whatever is buzzing in your pocket stay unread for sixty seconds.

Sixty seconds. Start there.

The moments you’re scared you already missed? New ones are forming right now. They’re in the next room, in the next conversation, in the next time someone you love glances over at you hoping you’ll already be looking back.

Be looking back.

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About Sabry Ali

Sabry Ali is a dad and husband in Vancouver, Canada. After years in engineering leadership at Life360, Reddit, Microsoft, and Amazon, nearly missing his daughter's childhood inspired him and his wife, Sarah, to co-found Habi (https://habi.app), a habit tracker and screen time app for families. He writes about presence, digital habits, and building meaningful routines at habi.app/insights (https://habi.app/insights/).

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What My Body Taught Me: 13 Surgeries, One Coma, Countless Powerful Lessons

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” ~Khalil Gibran

I was born with spina bifida. When I was ten years old, doctors told me I might not walk again after a surgery that would change my life.

I don’t remember every word they said, but I remember the feeling, the air shifting in the room, the adults speaking carefully, the quiet that followed.

Paralysis was a possibility.

By that point, my body already knew hospital ceilings well. I had been through multiple surgeries before I fully understood what surgery meant. By adulthood, that number would grow to thirteen.

I was born with VACTERL syndrome. I had a surgery to remove a kidney and another to correct my bladder. I also underwent open heart surgery and multiple surgeries on my bowels, including receiving a colostomy bag and having it repaired.

But at ten years old, I only knew one thing: my body felt uncertain.

Four days later, I stood up. I was in the hospital. Alone in a cold room. I couldn’t feel anything but pain. I pressed the pain button and sat up. I manually swung my legs to the side of the bed and pushed off the bed with my arms.

Not because I felt strong. Not because I wasn’t afraid. But because something inside me refused to accept that prediction as final.

My legs trembled. My balance wavered. But I stood. I didn’t feel anything, and the next thing I knew, I hit the floor. This happened three days in a row.

On the third day, the nurse walked in on me as I stood, and she said, “I’m calling physical therapy. You are going to walk again.” As she picked me up off the floor, I stared at a wheelchair that was no longer a dark place.

And that was the beginning of my relationship with resilience.

Basketball became more than a sport. It became my conversation with my body. Every dribble felt like proof. Every sprint felt like defiance. The court didn’t care about medical charts; it only responded to effort.

Through repetition and discipline, I built strength where fear had lived. I went on to play in high school and later in college, not because my body was untouched by struggle, but because it adapted.

Then life tested me again.

As a young adult, after twelve surgeries, scar tissue led to another. Due to complications and losing six pints of blood, I fell into a coma.

When I woke up, walking was no longer automatic. Muscles that once responded quickly felt distant. I had to relearn balance and rebuild my strength.

Again.

There’s something humbling about teaching your body how to move twice in one lifetime.

It strips away ego and teaches patience.

I had moments of frustration. Moments of anger. Moments when I wished I’d had an easier path. I compared myself to people whose medical history didn’t follow them into every room.

But something shifted in me during recovery.

I gave up. I was tired. I was over the hospital rooms and medications. A friend encouraged me to eat healthier, and I discovered herbalism, along with holistic modalities, yoga, rebounding, and chiropractic care.

I stopped asking, “Why is my body like this?” And I started asking, “What is my body teaching me?”

It taught me that strength is not loud. It’s consistent.

It’s showing up to physical therapy when progress is slow.

It’s repeating small movements until they feel natural again.

It’s trusting your body even when it feels unfamiliar.

It taught me that healing is rarely dramatic. It’s repetitive. It’s quiet. It’s a thousand small decisions to keep trying.

Thirteen surgeries could have become my identity.

Instead, they became my training.

I learned that the body is not fragile simply because it has scars. Scars are evidence of repair. They are proof that something was damaged and healed.

My body has been opened, stitched, sedated, and measured more times than I can count. It has been judged and doubted.

And yet, it continues to move.

I no longer resent its limitations. I respect its endurance.

It has survived stillness.

It has survived unconsciousness.

It has survived uncertainty.

And it keeps choosing life.

I used to believe resilience meant pushing through pain at all costs. Now I understand it means listening. It means working with your body instead of fighting against it.

My body has taught me discipline. It has taught me faith. It has taught me that rebuilding is possible, even when you have to start over.

Twice.

If you are in a season where your body feels like a burden instead of a blessing, I hope you give it patience. I hope you look at your scars, physical or invisible, and see evidence of survival, not weakness.

Sometimes the miracle is not avoiding hardship.

Sometimes the miracle is adapting.

And sometimes, the quietest strength is simply standing again.

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About Jewel Jones

Jewel Jones is an herbalist, educator, and founder of Alkaline Academy, dedicated to helping others heal through plant-based nutrition and holistic practices. Drawing from personal experience overcoming serious health challenges, she teaches individuals how to reconnect with their bodies and reclaim their wellness naturally. Her work blends traditional herbal wisdom, spiritual insight, and practical lifestyle changes to empower communities, especially those underserved, to take their health into their own hands.

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What’s Really Happening When Your Thoughts Spiral at Night

“The anxiety is not the enemy. It is the messenger. The mistake is killing the messenger instead of reading the letter.” ~Unknown

It’s 3 a.m. I’m lying in the dark, planning my own funeral.

Not because anything is wrong. My family is safe. There is no emergency. But my brain has decided, with complete confidence, that the headache I had this afternoon is something fatal. I am already thinking about who will come. Who will cry. Who will move on faster than I’d like.

An hour earlier, the same brain decided my career was ending. I have a presentation tomorrow—and in my mind, I was already standing there, forgetting every word, watching my boss slowly shake his head. Before that, a friend hadn’t replied to a message I sent at noon. By 2 a.m., the friendship was over. She hated me. Everyone hated me. I had done something unforgivable that I couldn’t even remember doing.

This is what night does. It takes small things and turns them into certainties. It takes a headache and makes it a tumor. It takes silence and makes it rejection. It manufactures catastrophe from almost nothing, with extraordinary creativity and zero mercy.

For years, I thought something was wrong with me.

I was wrong about that.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about 3 a.m. anxiety: your brain is not malfunctioning. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And once I understood that—really understood it—everything changed.

Think about where we come from. For most of human history, darkness was genuinely dangerous. Predators moved at night. Enemies came in the dark. The people who relaxed after sunset, who trusted the quiet, who let their guard down—they didn’t survive long enough to become our ancestors. The ones who made it were the ones who stayed alert. Who scanned for threats. Who imagined the worst and prepared for it.

Those people had children. Those children had children. Eventually, one of them was me, lying in a safe room in a city, with locks on the doors and no predators within a thousand miles—and a brain still running the same ancient software, searching for danger because danger is its entire purpose.

The lions are gone. The brain doesn’t know that.

So it finds new lions. An unanswered message. A headache. A presentation. It takes whatever is available and turns it into a threat worth staying awake for. Not because it wants to torture you. Because it loves you, in the only way it knows how—which is to protect you from every possible thing that could go wrong.

This was the first thing I had to learn: the anxiety at 3 a.m. is not an attack. It is, in its broken, ancient, unhelpful way, an act of care.

The second thing I had to learn was harder.

A real disaster and an imaginary one feel completely identical at 3 a.m.

Heart racing. Hands cold. Stomach tight. All of it—every physical symptom—caused by thoughts. Just thoughts. Pictures inside the mind that exist nowhere else. And yet the body responds as if the threat is standing in the room.

If you vividly imagine biting into a lemon right now, your mouth produces saliva. The body cannot distinguish between what is real and what is intensely imagined. This is not a flaw. It is the feature—the brain preparing the body for what the mind believes is coming.

And so, at 3 a.m., I was spending real adrenaline, real cortisol, real physiological resources on events that would never happen. By morning, I was exhausted before the day began. Not from what had occurred, but from what I had imagined.

The things I feared almost never arrived. And the real difficulties—the ones that did come, the ones that actually changed my life—almost never came from the direction I was watching. I prepared for the wrong disasters. The real ones arrived quietly, from places I had never thought to guard.

I tried many things to make it stop. Breathing exercises. Counting. Meditation apps with calm voices telling me to relax. Sometimes they worked. Mostly they didn’t. Because I was approaching the anxiety as an enemy to defeat, and you cannot defeat something by fighting harder against it. The resistance itself becomes exhausting.

What finally helped was something much simpler, and much stranger. I stopped trying to stop it.

Not in defeat. Not in resignation. But in recognition. The thoughts would come—they always came—and instead of arguing with them, instead of trying to replace them with better thoughts, I started just watching them. Letting them run. Treating them the way you might treat a very worried friend who is convinced something terrible is about to happen: with patience, without agreement.

The thought would say: this headache is something fatal.

And instead of fighting it, I would think, “Yes, I hear you. That’s a frightening thought. Let’s see if it’s still true in the morning.”

The thought would say, “Your friend hates you.”

And I would think, “That’s possible. We’ll find out. Right now, there is nothing to do about it.”

This created something I can only describe as a small gap—a sliver of space between me and the story my brain was telling. I was no longer inside the disaster movie. I was watching it from somewhere just slightly outside. The disasters still played. But they lost some of their authority over me.

There is one more thing. A small truth that I try to remember in the dark. Right now, this exact moment, nothing is wrong.

Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not the abstract futures my brain is so convinced are ruined. Right now. This moment. There is a dark room. A quiet house. A body that is warm and safe. And that is, actually, all that is real.

The future is imagination. The past is memory. Only now is real. And now—almost always, if you look at it directly and honestly—is fine.

This doesn’t empty the mind. Nothing empties the mind. But it creates that gap again. Enough room to breathe. Enough distance to wait.

Because morning always comes. This is the one thing you can trust completely about 3 a.m. It always, without exception, ends.

The tumor becomes a headache. The ruined friendship becomes a friend who was busy. The career collapse becomes just another Wednesday. And you look back at what felt so certain in the dark, and you understand—not with shame, but with something closer to compassion—that your brain was trying. Working hard. Doing its ancient job in a world that no longer needs it done that way.

It doesn’t know the lions are gone.

It just knows it loves you.

The next time you are awake at 3 a.m., convinced of some disaster that feels absolutely real and absolutely certain, try not to fight it. Try, just for a moment, to watch it instead. Notice what the brain is doing. Notice that you are still here, in a body that is safe, in a room that is quiet.

Thank the worried part of you, even briefly, for trying so hard.

Then wait for morning.

It is already on its way.

And you—anxious, exhausted, wide awake at 3 a.m.—you are not broken.

You are just human. Doing the most human thing there is.

Waiting for the light.

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About Selim Hayder

Selim Hayder writes essays on memory, grief, identity, and the unspoken parts of being human — anxiety, silence, time, loss, and what it means to exist in the gap between who we are and who we show the world. No advice. No answers. Just honest writing that explores what it feels like to be alive. Read more at haydervoice.com.

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5 Quotes for Hard Times (and a Free Ebook)

Sometimes everything feels like too much, and it’s hard to use all the valuable lessons you’ve learned when life requires you to use them all at once. It’s also easy to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of what you’re facing and alone with all your struggles.

I’ve felt this way on and off for the past year and a half, as I’ve been dealing with significant stressors in nearly every area of my life. Since I know many of you are in a similar place, I’m offering my Guide to Overcoming Hard Times for free, along with 18 other digital gifts, to both new and existing email subscribers.

Whatever you’re going through right now, I hope these quotes from the eBook resonate with you, and that the free resources offer some comfort, perspective, and relief. You can sign up and access everything here.

Get all 19 free gifts by joining the Tiny Buddha list here.

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About Lori Deschene

Lori Deschene is the founder of Tiny Buddha. She started the site after struggling with depression, bulimia, c-PTSD, and toxic shame so she could recycle her former pain into something useful and inspire others to do the same. You can find her books, including Tiny Buddha’s Gratitude Journal and Tiny Buddha’s Worry Journal, here and learn more about her eCourse, Recreate Your Life Story, if you’re ready to transform your life and become the person you want to be.

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The Pressure to Dream Big and the Beauty of Wanting Less

“What if I accept that all I really want is a small, slow, simple life? A beautiful, quiet, gentle life. I think it is enough.” ~Krista O’Reilly-Davi-Digui

Why do we feel such pressure to dream big? I think it starts in childhood when parents, teachers, and other adults start asking the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

One of the many problems with this question is its premise. In the classroom, at church, at youth camp, and at home, you are not alone, and you’re able to hear, understand, and internalize how others might answer this question. If you pay close attention, you’ll notice changes in responses from one age group to the next.

For young children, the answer is very simple and correlates with their immediate environment. A little girl may answer that she wants to be a mother when she grows up. A little boy may answer that he wants to be a police officer. A pre-teen girl might say she wants to be a teacher, while a pre-teen boy might say he wants to be a detective. A teenage girl might want to be a singer when she grows up, or a teenage boy might want to be a football player.

By the time most of these children reach young adulthood, the answers will not be as varied and light-hearted as they used to be. The answers will start to have a certain pattern. The most common answers will be doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, pilots, engineers, etc.

There are certainly many reasons for this, but the one I want to highlight is financial freedom and all that comes with it.

At some point in our lives, we become aware of the power that money wields, and our dreams, aspirations, desires, and lifestyles begin to shape around it.

Where I come from, it’s not uncommon for teachers to advise students not to become teachers but to try to become doctors or pilots because those professions usually make more money. Everything else is less urgent.

There is a strange story that we tell ourselves that states that, as long as there is money, everything else will fall into place. If you’re already well into your adulthood, you’ve probably made the unpleasant discovery of how untrue this story is. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve changed your goals.

Whether you become a doctor, a teacher, a creative, a small business owner, or something else, our dreams and aspirations usually take on very similar shapes.

Our dreams are no longer just about having a comfortable roof to call home but about having an enviable location, income-generating properties, and vacation homes as well.

Our desire is no longer just to own a car for convenience but to own two or more cars, preferably expensive and good-looking ones.

Our goal is no longer just to be healthy, to have a perfectly functioning body in terms of strength, balance, flexibility, and proportions; it now has to be defined, toned, provocative, and basically a work of art to see, admire, and discuss.

Even a simple walk is no longer just a walk. You need to count your steps, calculate calories burned, and share your results.

Financial freedom is no longer about meeting everyday needs or putting a bit aside for a rainy season or emergency, but it is now a full-time job on top of your full-time job and side hustle.

With the advent of happiness gurus, vision boards, affirmations, and feel-good culture, our dreams and desires are becoming unbearable. There is now a formula to dreaming and desiring and an expected, standard result to match.

I always find it curious how almost all vision boards across the globe tend to look the same. It is even more curious when you account for the fact that we are all raised in different homes and different cultural and religious backgrounds, we physically look different, and our educational background is varied. Yet our desires, dreams, visions, and aspirations seem to have morphed into one.

Most common on the vision board are all the material possessions. The unique home, the expensive car, and the enviable vacation destinations. And despite our different genes, bone density, height, etc., the body goals are very similar if not identical.

We are all reciting the same morning and evening affirmations of prosperity and abundance.

You will be hard pressed to find a vision board that is filled with desires related to patience, kindness, apologizing, picking up trash, checking on your neighbor, calling family members more, feeding stray animals, finding contentment in your finances as opposed to making more money, being thankful that the bus stops next to your dwelling and that in that season you have no desire for a car, or making peace with the changes that come with an aging body, a pregnant body, a sick body, a body that has carried and birthed other humans, a differently abled body, etc.

There could be vision boards like this, but it’s not the norm.

We are all free to dream, desire, and visualize the kind of lifestyle we want; we all know this. What needs to be said is that you can also desire little and dream simply, and that your dreams and desires are still worthy.

You are not lazy. You do not possess little or no faith at all because your dream life, the one you visualize and create in your mind, those deep desires and longings, looks something like this:

Walking or cycling to all the places you need to get to, buying secondhand clothes, living in a simple home, eating what you grow and keep, creating your own entertainment with what you have and having a good time while at it, working and earning less, napping in the afternoon, reading on the balcony guilt-free, spending your evenings or weekends just chatting with people, be they family, neighbors, friends, or just strangers, and showing up in your life make-up free, or without having to spend many hours and dollars on your appearance.

If you have never desired to wear expensive perfume and you are happy with a basic body spray or nothing at all, your desire is of value.

If you have crooked teeth but don’t have an overwhelming desire to get braces, you are not settling for less; you, my friend, have been touched by contentment.

Maybe you prefer to take walks, practice yin yoga or mat Pilates, or dance to your favorite music as opposed to doing HIIT and sweating at the gym. Yes, you have wide hips, a good dose of cellulite, stretch marks, perhaps a tiny stomach pooch, and the workouts you enjoy will not sculpt that body, but maybe you couldn’t care less.

No, you are not lazy for not wanting to put yourself through military-like training on a daily basis for a lifetime just to be an art form for others to enjoy. If you are at peace and see the value in the kind of body movements you enjoy, that is all there is to it.

If you don’t plan expensive vacations but instead choose to take small breaks in your everyday life—be it going to the seaside on the weekends, going to the beach in the afternoons, or just going for a hike once a week or treating yourself to lunch at a nice restaurant—these are all ways to relax and experience new things. You are not settling for a mediocre life just because you are doing life differently or cheaply.

Being financially poor by today’s standards should not equate, nor does it, to being mentally poor, physically poor, emotionally poor, friendship poor, relationship poor, happiness poor, or joy poor.

You are not less of a person because you do not drive a fancy car (or any car), you live in a small apartment instead of a house you own, you do not own any luxury brands or items, you do not vacation in Greece, and you attended a small vocational college (or none at all).

Define what’s important and meaningful to you, and do not cast it in stone. Always allow yourself, your definitions, your ethos, your values, your dreams, your desires, your visions, your affirmations, your emotions, your body, and your belief systems to change, to evolve with time and the changing seasons of life.

Life doesn’t always have to expand, ascend, and increase. It also descends, decreases, and compresses. This is okay. All stages of life are worthwhile and hold value, and you are allowed to enjoy them, be in them, and be at peace while at it.

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About Muthoni Amran

Muthoni Amran lives in the coastal area of Kenya. She is a freelance Mandarin Chinese tutor who enjoys reading, taking walks, long conversations, and the art of just being.

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The Seven Strengths: A Rare Free Training

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how easy it is to feel overwhelmed—by the news, by life, by everything we’re carrying day to day. I know I’ve been feeling this lately.

And when things feel like a lot, the question becomes: How do we stay grounded in the middle of it all?

If you’ve been wondering this too, I have a feeling you’ll appreciate The Seven Strengths—a free, live 7-day global online course taking place May 13–19.

It’s all about building the qualities of mind and heart that help you access your calm center no matter what’s gong on around you.

Reserve your free spot here

Each day includes a short teaching and a guided practice exploring one core strength that helps you:

• find calm amid chaos
• shift out of reactivity and stress
• reconnect with compassion, courage, and clarity
• build a steady inner foundation for life

It also features teachers I deeply admire and respect, including Rick Hanson, Sharon Salzberg, and Kristin Neff.

When you register, you’ll receive instant access to a special gift pack, including:

 The Seven Strengths Meditation Pack
An e-copy of the bestselling book Deep Resilience
A 12-month Foundations subscription to the Mindful.org app

(These gifts are valued at $97 and are yours to keep for life.)

The Seven Strengths course is normally valued at $110, but for this live experience, it’s being offered free as a gesture of support during these challenging times.

If you’re interested in finding a deeper sense of calm and steadiness in the chaos of daily life, you can sign up for this special event and claim your free gifts here.

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About Lori Deschene

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If You Feel Lonely Around People, Here’s Why

“The loneliness of the connected age is not about being alone. It’s about being unseen in a crowd.” ~Unknown

For a long time I thought I was broken.

Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet, persistent way—the kind you learn to manage so well that most people can’t tell, and eventually you almost can’t tell either.

I had a full life by any external measure. Work I cared about. People around me. Invitations to things. And yet there was this gap I couldn’t close—a feeling I can only describe as being on the wrong side of glass. Present in rooms but not quite in them. Watching conversations happen at a frequency I could hear but not tune into.

I spent years trying to fix myself. I said yes more. I pushed through the discomfort of social situations that drained me. I got better at small talk, which mostly meant I got better at pretending small talk wasn’t quietly hollowing me out.

Nothing touched the actual problem. Because the actual problem wasn’t me.

The moment I started asking different questions

It started with a late night on Reddit—the kind of spiral that usually ends with you feeling worse but this time didn’t.

I’d searched something vague, something like “Why do I feel lonely even around people?” and found myself reading for two hours. Post after post after post from people describing exactly what I’d felt but never named. The specific exhaustion of performing sociability. The hunger for conversations that went somewhere real. The strange guilt of wanting connection so badly while simultaneously finding most social situations depleting.

These weren’t isolated people. They weren’t broken people. They were people who needed a different kind of room.

That realization, so simple, so obvious in retrospect, quietly rearranged something in me. I hadn’t been failing at connection. I’d been looking for it in places built for someone else.

What the research kept pointing to

I became a little obsessed after that. I started reading everything I could find on how people actually form close bonds, not the surface-level advice but the research underneath it.

What I found kept contradicting the conventional wisdom. Proximity and shared interests, the things we’re told to optimize for, matter far less than we assume. What actually creates genuine closeness is something harder to manufacture: shared vulnerability, a similar life stage, the sense that someone else is navigating the same uncertainty you are.

Not “We both like the same music.” More like “we’re both trying to figure out what a meaningful life looks like from here, and we’re both a little lost, and we’re both tired of pretending otherwise.”

For introverts, people who find depth energizing and volume draining, this gap between how connection is supposed to work and how it actually works is especially acute. We need slower, lower-stakes environments to open up. We do better when trust is established before vulnerability is required. We’re not bad at connecting. We’re consistently placed in contexts optimized for the opposite of how we connect.

The Quiet Shift

Understanding this didn’t fix everything overnight. But it changed what I was looking for.

I stopped trying to get better at the contexts that didn’t work for me and started looking for different ones. Smaller gatherings. One-on-one conversations. Online spaces built around specific life experiences rather than general socializing. Places where showing up as you actually are is the point, not the risk.

I also started going first. This was the harder part. Introverts tend to wait for proof that a space is safe before being honest in it, which means we often stay on the surface in exactly the places where depth might be available, because we haven’t tested it yet.

Going first meant being honest a little earlier than felt comfortable. Not performing vulnerability, just offering a real answer when someone asked a real question. It felt exposed every time. It almost always landed.

What I Wish I’d Known Earlier

The loneliness I felt for so long wasn’t a character flaw. It was a context problem.

I wasn’t too much. I wasn’t too selective. I wasn’t fundamentally unsuited to close friendship, though I’d quietly started to believe I might be.

I was just in the wrong rooms. And the right rooms exist; they’re just not always the ones we’re pointed toward.

If you’ve felt that glass wall feeling, that particular ache of being surrounded but not reached, I want you to know that it’s one of the most common things I’ve encountered since I started paying attention. You are not alone in feeling alone in this specific way. And the solution probably isn’t becoming someone who finds loud bars energizing.

It’s finding your room. It exists. Keep looking.

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About Fiona Yu

Fiona is the founder of Introvrs (introvrs.com), an app in private beta built for introverts looking for genuine friendship without the performance pressure of mainstream social apps. She writes about connection, introversion, and the gap between how we're told to socialize and how we actually thrive.

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When Self-Awareness Turns into Overthinking and How to Stop

“Be gentle with yourself. You’re doing the best you can.” ~Unknown  

For years, I believed self-awareness was the answer to everything.

If I could just understand myself better—my triggers, my patterns, my childhood wounds—I would finally feel calm. Stable. Healed.

So I read the books. I journaled every night. I replayed conversations in my head, analyzing what I said, what I meant, and what I should have said instead. I studied my reactions like they were puzzles waiting to be solved.

At first, it felt empowering.

I was becoming “conscious.” Reflective. Emotionally intelligent.

But slowly, something shifted. Instead of feeling freer, I felt tighter. Instead of finding clarity, I felt constant mental noise.

Instead of healing, I found myself overthinking everything.

When Growth Turns into Self-Surveillance

It happened subtly.

After a conversation with a friend, I would lie awake replaying it.

Why did I phrase it that way? Did I sound defensive? Did I overshare? Was that insecurity showing?

I told myself this was growth. I was being responsible. Self-aware people reflect, right?

But the truth was harder to admit: I wasn’t reflecting. I was scrutinizing.

There’s a difference between noticing your patterns and putting yourself under a microscope. I didn’t see it at the time, but I had turned self-awareness into self-surveillance. And living under constant internal surveillance is exhausting.

The Moment I Realized Something Was Off

One evening, after mentally dissecting a completely ordinary interaction for nearly an hour, I felt a wave of frustration.

Not at the other person. At myself.

I remember thinking, “If this is what growth feels like, why do I feel worse?” That question stopped me.

Because self-awareness was supposed to make me feel more at home in myself—not less.

That’s when I started to understand something important: I hadn’t been growing. I had been trying to control.

Overthinking had become my way of trying to prevent rejection, embarrassment, or mistakes. If I could analyze everything deeply enough, maybe I could avoid pain next time.

But no amount of mental rehearsal creates emotional safety.

It only creates more anxiety.

What I Learned About Overthinking and Self-Awareness

Looking back, I can see that my self-awareness wasn’t the problem.

It was the energy behind it.

Curiosity had quietly turned into fear. Reflection had turned into correction. Growth had turned into pressure. And pressure is not healing.

If you’ve experienced this too—if your desire to grow has somehow made you more anxious—you’re not broken.

You might just need to approach self-awareness differently.

Here are some lessons that slowly helped me shift from overthinking to something gentler.

1. Noticing is enough.

I used to believe that every realization required immediate improvement.

If I noticed I was people-pleasing, I had to fix it.

If I noticed insecurity, I had to correct it.

If I noticed discomfort, I had to solve it.

But sometimes, noticing is enough.

There’s a quiet power in simply saying, “Oh, I see that.” Without judgment. Without urgency.

When I stopped demanding instant transformation from every insight, something softened. Awareness became lighter. Less aggressive.

Growth doesn’t always require action. Sometimes it just requires acknowledgment.

2. Ask “What do I need?” instead of “What’s wrong with me?”

Overthinking often starts with a harsh question:

Why am I like this?

That question carries accusation. When I began replacing it with:

What do I need right now?

Everything shifted.

After replaying a conversation, instead of analyzing it for flaws, I started asking: Am I tired? Am I anxious? Do I need reassurance? Do I just need rest?

Often, the answer wasn’t more thinking. It was comfort.

Overthinking is sometimes a sign of unmet emotional needs, not personal failure.

3. Regulate before you reflect.

I used to reflect while emotionally activated. Heart racing. Chest tight. Mind buzzing.

That’s the worst time to evaluate yourself.

Now, if I notice I’m spiraling into analysis, I pause. I take a slow walk. I breathe deeper than usual. I put my hand over my chest and focus on lengthening my exhale.

When my body feels calmer, my thoughts become clearer—and kinder.

Reflection works best from safety.

If you feel tense, anxious, or unsettled, your first step isn’t insight. It’s the regulation.

4. Imperfection doesn’t require immediate repair.

This one was hard for me.

I used to believe every awkward moment needed fixing. Every misstep needed correction. Every uncomfortable feeling needed resolution.

But part of being human is being imperfect in public sometimes.

Not every moment needs optimization. Not every sentence needs analysis. Sometimes you can let it be what it was.

When I stopped trying to repair every tiny flaw in real time, I started trusting myself more. And trust quiets the mind in a way analysis never can.

5. Growth should feel safe.

This might be the most important lesson of all.

If your self-improvement journey feels tense, punishing, or relentless, something needs adjusting.

True growth feels steady. Spacious. Encouraging. It challenges you, yes—but it doesn’t attack you.

The moment I stopped treating myself like a project to fix and started treating myself like a person to support, overthinking began to lose its grip.

Self-awareness became something softer. More like companionship. Less like surveillance.

My Gentle Reminder

You don’t have to monitor yourself into healing. You don’t have to dissect every reaction. You don’t have to earn peace through perfect self-analysis.

It’s okay to grow at a human pace.

It’s okay to leave some conversations unanalyzed.

It’s okay to be aware without being harsh.

If self-awareness has started to feel heavy, maybe what you need isn’t more insight.

Maybe you need more safety. And safety doesn’t come from thinking harder. It comes from being kinder.

Growth isn’t about catching every flaw. It’s about learning to stay on your own side.

And when you do that, self-awareness becomes what it was always meant to be: a bridge back to yourself.

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About Dakota J. Dawson

Dakota J. Dawson writes about overthinking, emotional healing, and self-sabotage recovery. She explores gentle, practical ways to build self-trust and inner calm. Author of "Quit Letting Everything Affect You - Unshackled." Find her e-book and Free PDF of 13 Daily Practices for Inner Peace : https://linktr.ee/dakotajdawson Join Instagram with Daily Inspirational Posts:  https://www.instagram.com/dakota_j_dawson/

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