Do you ever feel like you should do more meditation, more yoga, more breathwork, more therapy, more exercise, eat better, [add your other self help tools of choice here] ?

Does the whole health and self help sphere sometimes feel overwhelming or like a thing you 'should' also be good at? Does your mind ever pull a guilt trip on you when you don't hit those self help goals?

The Wellness Trap

There is a strange trap you can fall into when you become interested in health and wellbeing.

You start learning things that genuinely help. You learn that getting outside in the morning can support your sleep and circadian rhythm. You learn that strength training is important, particularly as you get older. You learn that cardiovascular fitness matters. You learn about protein, vegetables, sleep, meditation, yoga, breathwork, therapy, nervous system regulation, journaling, mobility, connection, time in nature.

The problem is that at some point all of this useful information can quietly turn into a very long list of things you feel you should be doing.

You want to be strong, athletic and healthy. You also want to be relaxed. You want to sleep well and eat well. You want to meditate and work on your emotional patterns. You want to be a good partner, a good parent, a good friend and good at your work. And then you open an app like Insight Timer, and there are thousands upon thousands of practices that could potentially help you.

It can start to feel a little like walking into a supermarket when you are already exhausted and being confronted with a thousand different kinds of peanut butter. Somehow you are supposed to know which one is essential, and which combination is optimal. And on top of that, every self help app tells you to check in daily, and hit your targets. And if you are not doing this correctly, the person responsible is… you.

I think this is one of the traps of the health and self help world. Tools that are supposed to make our lives easier can quietly become another standard we use to judge ourselves. Wellness apps tell you you should set daily goals, partly with good intentions (a daily practice does help you), but partly to have you spend more time on the app because that's in their (financial) interest.

I want to make it super clear that I am not against health apps making money, or promoting tools that are both in your interest and theirs. But the result of this is that some self help apps are becoming a bit like social media, and with that, comes the constant feeling of missing out on all the great practices that you are not yet doing enough of. And I think that issue requires awareness on their part, and on your part.

When Self Help Needs Boundaries

I regularly coach people who feel like they need to do everything all at once, and I see that this puts enormous pressure on their healing process. And I am no stranger to the feeling of wanting to rush towards a better version of myself. I can pressure myself into overdoing self help or wanting to fix things asap. And when this happens, I think of something my mum once told me.

My mum lost her mother when she was very young. During the final months of her mother's life, she paused university and moved back home to help care for her. A period that was both deeply meaningful and emotionally exhausting.

Years later she told me that one of the things she learned about caring and grief was that you have to put brackets around it. You need to create space for caring and for grieving, and give it your full attention. And then you also need to create space for not grieving. If you do not create space for it, it will catch up with you, but if you do not put boundaries around it, it will eat you alive.

I often think about that when I work with people now, and I think the same principle applies to self help, the use of self help apps, and therapy.

There needs to be time when you reflect, learn, practice, go to therapy, meditate, breathe, exercise work on yourself in other ways. But there also needs to be time when you are not a project. There needs to be time to recover. Learning and adaptation takes place during recovery. Just like you cannot exercise 8 hours a day every day without damaging your body, you cannot be a self help project 8 hours a day without going mad.

How Motherhood Changed My Health and Self Care Routine

I know this trap very well because before becoming a mother I had built myself quite an impressive morning routine.

I would get outside and get some sunlight, ideally while walking or running. Then I would do yoga, meditation, breathwork and journaling. On many days I would also do CrossFit mid day or after my work day. I exercised around six days a week and, although the routine was not completely unwavering, it was pretty close.

And for that phase of my life, it worked. Then we had our daughter, and the structure around those habits changed completely. I did not have the same amount of time anymore, but perhaps even more importantly, I did not have the same amount of sleep. Our upstairs neighbours owned a restaurant and would make noise every night from 23.00 to 01.00. Our daughter would then wake up early in the morning around 07.00.

I need about eight and a half to nine hours of sleep to really feel good. When I get that amount, I can feel the difference immediately. I wake up and want to move. Going for a run does not feel particularly difficult.

When I have slept six or seven hours, it is a completely different story. On those mornings, what I sometimes need is a class booked in advance and a coach telling me what to do for an hour. Getting myself onto a mat and doing a self guided practice: not an option.

The rest of my environment changed too: My old meditation room became my daughters bedroom. My yoga and meditation space moved into the garden studio, which is also where I work, where I coach, and which I sometimes share with my partner when he works from home.

CrossFit needs to happen in the morning because end of the day we have dinner as a family. Taking my daughter to daycare also happens in the morning. I tried having my partner take her, but this left me frustrated at the end of the day because that's when I have my peak work performance and I always had to pull myself out of my most productive moments feeling guilty for picking her up late. So mornings it is then. This means my natural meditation, yoga, breathwork, and journal window is gone.

And because I teach yoga, meditation and breathwork, for the past few years there has often been this slightly nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me that I should be doing all of those practices more consistently myself.

Even though I know better. Even though I use breathing techniques while I run, during CrossFit, when I walk, and when I put Nym to bed. Even though two minutes of meditation still counts. Even though the knowledge of these practices is with me even when I am not sitting formally on a cushion.

And then I added IFS to my work, and suddenly there was another incredibly valuable practice I could theoretically be doing. The more tools I learned, the longer the invisible checklist became.

What Injury Taught Me About Rest, Recovery and Flexibility

But then something unfortunate and at the same time very fortunate happened to me. I fell off a high boulder and injured myself. I had just finished an extremely busy period. My coaching practice had been growing, while at the same time I was working part time at the University of Amsterdam on breathwork research and supervising master theses. I had been working hard, but efficiently, and I was looking forward to summer.

I had this picture in my head that I was finally going to exercise more again. I was going to get fitter. I was going to create more Insight Timer content, start writing blogs again, and have more space for the work and practices I love.

Then, on a Friday evening, my partner and I went bouldering on a date night. Our daughter was with her grandparents. We were going to climb and then go out for dinner. I was feeling good, perhaps slightly overconfident, and I tried a difficult boulder that was a little above my pay grade.

I fell awkwardly, fractured my left elbow and ended up with a mild concussion spending date-night in the ER. Bye bye dream summer.

For the first couple of days I was honestly pretty upset about it. Movement is one of the main ways I regulate myself, and being someone with a brain that craves activity, the idea of weeks with very little yoga, CrossFit, bouldering or running felt horrible. I thought I was going to fall apart.

But after a few days something interesting happened. I actually felt pretty good. I wasn't falling apart. I felt less pressured. More relaxed. Better able to sleep.

Because I could not do CrossFit in the morning, I suddenly had more space for meditation. Because I was walking Nym to daycare, I was outside more. I started doing breathing practices while walking home. I had more time for journaling and IFS.

And then something clicked. The same variety of practices that had previously felt almost like pressure suddenly felt like freedom. Before the accident, I could look at all these practices and think, I am not doing enough of them.

After the accident, I looked at them and thought, thank goodness I know how to do all of these things so I have a back-up for when I can't exercise.

And then I realized that actually, they were there all along. As a mum, Cross-fit is the backup for my breathwork and yoga. Yoga has become more of a 10 minute downtime at the end of the day or I just lie in the park and let Nym climb on me as I stretch. Breathwork has become my winddown coregulation practice when I put Nym to bed. Meditation is something I do when I sit next to her when she plays and I am just there in mindful presence not interrupting her. Journaling is something I do when the combination of self employment, motherhood, and my romantic relationship overwhelms me.

It's all there, just in a different structure. It's less formal, more fluid, and it adapts to the season of my life. I just didn't see it that clearly.

Why Your Wellbeing Toolkit Is Not a Checklist

I think this is where we can easily misunderstand the purpose of learning health practices.

The point of learning yoga, meditation, breathwork, IFS, strength training, behavioural tools or whatever else supports you is not that you are now responsible for doing all of them every day.

The point is that you have options.

You have a toolkit. And different tools become useful in different seasons of your life.

There are seasons when you have the time, energy and physical capacity to build quite elaborate routines around one or two specific practices. There are also seasons when you simply do not, and you need a simple ritual to fall back on. And there are seasons where you get to a more advanced level and start weaving the practices into the rest of your life.

Healthy Habits and Identities Need to Change With the Seasons

Having a child can change your routines dramatically. But so can illness or injury, grief, caring for your parents or someone else you love, burnout, a major career transition, athletic retirement, puberty, perimenopause or menopause.

Our circumstances change, and it makes very little sense to expect our routines to remain untouched by that. James Clear talks beautifully about this idea that habits have seasons. I also talk a lot about the relationship between habits, identity and seasons in my own course on habit formation, because habits gradually become part of how we understand ourselves. When we experience a seasonal shift, we often become aware that we have become attached to, or identified with, the habit that we do.

In the period before my fall, I had become attached to an image of myself being fit and able to move. I thought that 'my healthy identity' depended on that. Even though I created a course around this topic that argues the exact opposite. This is what our minds have a tendency of doing. We attach our identity to what we do. I am a yoga teacher, therefore, if I don't teach yoga, who am I? I am fit, so if I don't do CrossFit, who am I?

Instead, our roles and practices can be different expressions of an underlying value or the kind of person we want to be. For example: I want to help other people connect to their physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual parts. Therefore, I can teach yoga, but I can also coach people, lead IFS and Breathwork retreats and events, or hold a compassionate space for my child to grow and learn.

If we attach our identity to the doing of specific things, we are lost when we lose that capacity. If we attach our identity to the underlying value, we learn to find expression in different things. And when one expression (CrossFit, Bouldering, Dancing, Yoga) disappears, another opportunity opens up (Coaching, Meditation, Breathwork, IFS).

The central message here is this: You are not what you do. You do not matter more if you do more. Your authenticity is in how well the expression of what you do aligns with what you value.

So perhaps the useful question is not always:

What are all the healthy things I should be doing?

Perhaps the better questions are:

What value do I want to express?

What do I need in this season?

And which tools help me with that?

I believe there is enormous value in learning many practices, precisely because we are complex systems and one rigid health protocol will never fit every phase of our lives, or fix all our problems. But the purpose of these practices is to increase our flexibility, not to bring more rigidity and pressure.

So trust that some of the tools you used in your past are in your backpack on your path towards change. These tools can be pulled out when your life path changes and it makes sense to use them. You don’t have to formally unpack your backpack and sit with all of these things every day.

Sure. Some tools may get a little rusty. But that's okay. You can polish them when the time is right.

We can decide that, in this particular season, these are the one or two practices that genuinely support us, and consciously allow the rest to stay packed in our backpack for a while. Not because we have failed at them, but because they are simply not what this season is asking of us.

And then, when the season changes, those tools are still there, familiar enough to pick up again when we need them.

If you are curious about a structured system that helps you connect the dots around this topic, check out my course on Habits & Identity Change (also available on Insight Timer).