I was talking to a teenager recently who’s going through it.
School. Friends. The whole brutal business of being fourteen.
We got onto mental health, and one thing kept coming up—bed. Getting out of it. Making the journey from warm and safe to a schoolyard full of kids who feel like they’re judging every breath you take.
I know that feeling. I know it too well.
For most of my twenties, depression kept me bedridden for huge chunks of the day. Not lazy. Not tired. Trapped.
I couldn’t hold down work. I flopped in and out of relationships. My friendships had no substance, and my confidence bottomed out.
That fight raged well into my early thirties before I found any weapons worth using.
One of the first came from James Clear’s Atomic Habits. It’s simple, it’s a little sneaky, and it’s still one of the most useful things I know.
“Make it easy”
Clear’s third law of behaviour change is three words: make it easy.
Reduce the friction.
Shrink the task until your brain can’t find a reason to say no.
His example is the morning workout.
The goal shouldn’t be “exercise in the morning.” That’s daunting. Your brain looks at it and immediately starts negotiating.
The goal should be: wake up and put your exercise clothes on.
That’s it.
You don’t have to go to the gym. You don’t have to stretch. You don’t have to finish a session—just the clothes.
And if you put them on and crawl back into bed? Fine. Tomorrow you try again.
The trick is that once the clothes are on, the gym is suddenly a much shorter walk than it was from under the doona. You’ve tipped the odds without ever telling your brain a fight was coming.
Your brain is not on your side (yet)
Our brains evolved to keep us alive, not to make us great.
They want warmth. Safety. The known.
They do not want to leave a nice bed on a cold weekday morning for a yard full of teenage dirtbags primed to poke every insecurity you’ve got. To your brain, that’s not school. That’s a threat.
So it does what it’s built to do. It keeps you in bed.
But what if the brain is wrong?
What if those hard mornings are exactly what builds the foundation you’ll stand on for the rest of your life?
Epictetus got there two thousand years before Atomic Habits:
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
If that’s true, then the job isn’t to wait for your brain to feel ready. It never will.
The job is to trick it.
1. Collect data
You can’t run a play without knowing the field.
Where are the traps? What sets you off? What do you avoid without even noticing you’re avoiding it?
In a podcast I recorded with mental health coach Nadia, she talked about having conversations with yourself to learn who you actually are.
The best tool I’ve found for that is a pen and a page. Journaling. Marcus Aurelius ran an empire and still made time to write to himself every day. Meditations is just a bloke collecting data on his own head.
Learn yourself:
Triggers, flaws, fears
Values, passions, dreams
Standards, principles
Non-negotiables
You’ll be surprised how much of the fog lifts once it’s written down.
2. Pick a target
Start small. Painfully small.
Sift through what you’ve written and find one thing. Not five. One.
What do people keep calling you out on?
What keeps getting you in trouble?
What’s the one thing you know is holding you back?
Pick one habit, fear, reaction or ritual you can actually move on this week.
You want early momentum, not a grand plan. Grand plans are where good intentions go to die.
3. Deploy the trick
Now you do the old switcheroo on yourself.
Your brain needs to feel rewarded for doing the thing it doesn’t want to do, over and over, until it forgets it ever objected. You are playing the long game.
Back to my young mate.
You don’t want to get up and go to school? Fine. Don’t.
When the alarm goes off, just get up and walk to the bottom of the stairs.
That’s the whole task. If you want to go back to bed after that, go.
But you’ve done something. And we can build from there.
Some other tricks I’ve used:
Low-level anxiety every morning: don’t sleep with your phone. Put it on the desk or outside the room.
Want to build resilience: do one more. One more push-up, one more sales call, one more edit.
Struggling to read: stack an audiobook onto your walk.
Not present: close your eyes, breathe in slow, open them as you exhale.
Need more empathy: send genuine gratitude toward every experience, good or bad.
Want to be happier: expect less.
I’ve got dozens of these. Every problem has a workaround if you’re willing to look for it.
Final thoughts
Your brain is going to keep trying to protect you. That’s its job. It’s going to reach for comfort every single time.
Don’t let it call the shots.
Seneca wrote: “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” The schoolyard, the gym, the sales call, the blank page. They’re all far scarier from under the covers than they are once you’re standing in them.
Your job is to get to the bottom of the stairs.
Put the clothes on. Do one more.
Tiny tricks. Stacked daily. That’s how you take the wheel back.
So, is your brain tricking you? Reckon it’s time to trick it back?
Hit reply and let me know what you’re working on. I read every one.
That’s it from me this week, gang.
With gratitude,
SAV
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Every week I show up and write the truth about the work—what it costs, what helps, and the small tricks that actually move the needle.