I sometimes feel like a fraud writing a blog about personal digital wellness. The irony isn’t lost on me. Here I am talking about reducing reliance on technology while this very article has probably been “polished” by AI. My daily newsletters? They’re curated automatically through an n8n workflow and an AI agent. Hardly a monk-like rejection of the machine.

And yet.

Somewhere in the noise of podcasts, newsletters, productivity hacks and self-help books, a few ideas have started to land. Not perfectly. Not consistently. But enough to make me pause.

I’ve been addicted to self-help for years. My bookshelf reads like a parade of promises. Most of them never stuck. They were interesting, maybe even inspiring, but they didn’t resonate in the places that actually matter – the moments when you’re stressed in a meeting, standing in the kitchen staring at a multipack of crisps, or feeling the creeping anxiety before a social occasion.

But a handful of ideas keep resurfacing. They’re not magic solutions. I’m still very much a work in progress. Still wavering. Still forgetting the lessons half the time.

These are simply the ones that are beginning to work for me. No guarantees they’ll work for you.

Radical Acceptance

The concept of Radical Acceptance, taught by psychologist Tara Brach, gave me something incredibly simple but strangely difficult: the ability to pause.

That pause matters.

Often my reactions feel automatic. An urge to binge eat. A low-level agitation during a work meeting that I can’t quite explain. My instinctive aversion to conflict. Or the familiar knot of anxiety before I see family and friends – a fear of rejection or ridicule that probably formed years ago and never quite left.

Radical acceptance invites a small interruption.

Instead of reacting immediately, you pause and ask: What am I actually feeling right now?

Interestingly, this idea appears elsewhere too. In The Chimp Paradox, Professor Steve Peters also emphasises the power of pausing before reacting to emotional impulses. It’s a moment where the emotional brain doesn’t get full control of the steering wheel.

When I remember to pause, something changes.

The feeling becomes visible instead of invisible. The urge becomes something I can observe rather than obey.

Of course, the catch is obvious: I often forget to pause.

That’s where the wavering happens.

Radical Accountability

Acceptance has a softer tone to it. It’s rooted in understanding yourself with a degree of compassion.

Radical accountability, on the other hand, feels tougher.

I first heard the idea discussed on a Brian Keane podcast with guest Megan Shtab, and it stuck with me because of its blunt simplicity: no one else is coming to fix you.

Your emotions might explain your behaviour. Your upbringing might explain your beliefs. Your environment might make things harder.

But ultimately, only you can change you.

It’s not about blame. It’s about ownership.

If a finger must be pointed, point it at yourself – not as punishment, but as empowerment. Because the moment you truly accept responsibility, you also reclaim the ability to change direction.

The interesting tension is whether radical acceptance and radical accountability can coexist.

I think they can.

One offers compassion for why you feel the way you feel. The other demands responsibility for what you do next.

Acceptance softens the internal dialogue. Accountability keeps you moving forward.

Both seem necessary.

Ditching the Ego

I’ve been reading Stoicism for a while now. These days it seems almost fashionable to quote Marcus Aurelius. At least judging by the corners of the internet I inhabit, Stoicism is having something of a renaissance.

But beneath the Instagram quotes is a fairly uncomfortable truth.

The world does not revolve around me.

Ryan Holiday’s book Ego Is the Enemy explains this idea beautifully. Much of our suffering comes from the belief that we are at the centre of everything – that the universe is somehow conspiring to frustrate us.

The slow colleague in a meeting.
The difficult email.
The person who cuts us off in traffic.

Our ego tells us these things are personal.

But most of the time, they aren’t.

People are living inside their own stories, just like we are. Their actions rarely have anything to do with us at all.

Letting go of that ego-centred worldview is strangely freeing. If the world isn’t conspiring against me, then maybe my frustration doesn’t need to spiral into resentment.

It also leads naturally into the next realisation – one that might be even more grounding…