Hi everyone,
If you’re in the UK, I hope the bank holiday treated you well and that you managed to get outside in the sunshine.
I'm back from Japan — and the readjustment back to London life has been harder than expected. What an incredible country. The highlight was a few nights at a ryokan in Kaga Onsen — a traditional Japanese inn built entirely around slowing down, reflecting and being looked after. You wear a kimono the whole time, bathe in the onsen several times a day — hot spring water rich in minerals believed to support circulation, reduce inflammation and ease muscle tension — eat beautiful food and meditate. We did this for three days and I left feeling like a different person.
The Japanese have been practising this for over a thousand years. The ryokan isn't a wellness trend — it's a cultural institution built on the belief that rest has a form, and that the form matters. Being intentional about how you rest is as important as resting at all. It's something the modern world seems desperately short of — and something that runs through a lot of what we cover in this newsletter and on the podcast.
Emily x
🧬
🏥
🧬
🧠
There's a version of this you've probably lived. A decision you've been circling for months. A health appointment you keep meaning to book. A habit you've been about to start since January. Something you'll do when the timing is better, when life settles down, when you feel more prepared.
The problem with that framing is that readiness, for most things, isn't something that arrives on its own. It's something you create by starting. The longer you wait for it, the more your brain learns to treat waiting as the default — and what started as sensible caution, can over time, gradually harden into something much more difficult to shift.
Simon Alexander Ong, who joined me on The Health Review this week, put it in a way I haven't heard before: the answers to your path only appear at the level of your own willingness to act.
Staying in your comfort zone isn't a neutral pause either. Behavioural research consistently shows that the longer a status quo holds, the more threatening any departure from it feels — not because the action itself changes, but because your tolerance for discomfort narrows over time. Something that would have felt manageable a year ago now feels enormous. The exit cost grows the longer you leave it.
There's also the question of what waiting actually does to you. The anxiety you feel about making a decision is almost always worse than the thing itself. Studies on how we predict our own emotional responses have found repeatedly that people overestimate how bad future events will feel — which means staying stuck doesn't actually protect you from discomfort. It just trades the real thing for an extended, looping preview of it. An idle brain is not a restful one.
Worth saying clearly: for anyone living with clinical anxiety or depression, the gap between anticipated and actual distress can work very differently, and "just start" is not always the right advice. Genuine caution and avoidance are not the same thing. But if you've been telling yourself you're not ready for the better part of a year, it's an honest question — are you genuinely waiting for something, or has waiting just become the easier option?
On the motivation piece — the research is fairly consistent that it tends to follow action rather than enable it. You don't wait until you feel like doing something and then do it. You do it, and the feeling usually follows. Research across more than 100 studies found that people who planned exactly when and where they would do something were two to three times more likely to follow through than those who simply intended to. The vague intention — "I'll do it this week" — leaves all the decisions to a future version of you who is tired and distracted. The specific plan removes them.
So if there's something you've been deferring, a few things that seem to actually help. Find the smallest possible version of the action — something that takes under two minutes — and do it today. Not as a proxy for the whole decision, just as evidence to yourself that movement is possible. Book the appointment, send the message, open the form, tell one person and give them a date by which you'll report back. Private intention is very easy to revise, but saying it out loud changes things.
This feature is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult your own doctor before making changes to your health.
Emily x
