For a long time I believed the only way forward was hard work. I pushed my way through life, always doing a little more. I gave 200% to everything I did, and it built me a career.
Then my body started asking for something else. And I approached it exactly the way I approached my job. I set out to live healthily: diets, supplements, protocols, whatever counted as "good" at the time. I gave all of it 200% too. And somewhere along that road, I became truly exhausted.
That always-doing mode, the one that worked so well everywhere else in my life, didn't work when it came to my health. If anything, it pulled me even further away from my body.
If I just do this too, I'll get better
In first sessions I hear this all the time, in different words. "I need to do this." "Oh, now I need to do that too, and the other thing as well." Being healthy becomes one more item on the to-do list. And the list never ends.
Underneath it there's usually a single belief: if I do everything perfectly, I'll heal. Someone once put it to me like this: "Well, if I'd done it a hundred percent, I probably wouldn't be having these problems." In that story the problem is never the method. It's always us, not doing enough.
Even a perfect plate might not be enough
The classical Ayurvedic texts have a verse that lists the causes of disease. Its second line says: hitepi ratam aahaare. Even someone devoted to wholesome food can fall ill. Every time I read it, I hear the same thing: you can eat very well, in a way that truly suits you, and still get sick, because illness doesn't come from the plate alone.
That's an important line for anyone chasing a flawless routine. Doing everything right is not the only condition for being well. Sometimes what's missing isn't on the plate at all. It's in how we come to the plate.
Between doing and being
Ayurveda describes three qualities of the mind: sattva, rajas and tamas. Today I want to look at the first two. Rajas is the quality of movement, of doing, of pushing forward. Sattva is the quality of clarity, of calm, of simply being.
There's nothing wrong with rajas. You need rajas to keep the engine running. You need tamas too, to fall asleep at night and to go to the toilet. But you can't get anywhere with your foot permanently on the gas. Keep it there long enough and one day you burn the engine out. That is what perfectionism looks like: everything turns into a task, health included. The morning routine becomes a duty, a meal becomes a test, even rest becomes a reward you have to earn. The mind keeps wanting more: more information, more methods, a stricter routine. And the body reads all of it as being permanently on alert.
One of my clients lived exactly this when she started giving herself oil massages. She told me: "At first I turned that into stress as well. Every day I'd think, 'I didn't manage it again today.'" The thing she had started doing to make her body feel good had quietly become another item on the list. Then she began to experience oiling as a moment she set aside for herself, and she stopped counting the days she missed. A few weeks later she said: "Oiling completely changed how I feel. Bringing that rhythm into my life makes me so happy."
Why do we keep doing it this way?
Because most of us grew up this way. Work hard and it'll happen. Want it enough and it'll happen. If it isn't happening, you didn't work hard enough. That belief may have given us a good career and a good life, and up to a point it worked. So it's only natural that we apply the same strategy to our health.
But in Ayurveda, one person's medicine can be another person's poison. Standard advice so often leaves you out, because it ignores how unique your nature is. A perfect list would only work if there were one right answer for everyone.
Moving without burning the engine
200% sounds great. But it isn't sustainable, and sooner or later it burns the engine out. Someone who lives by that logic can't see the power of small steps; anything small feels like too little. Yet the small steps are what actually transform you. The ones that say, every single day, "1 is always greater than 0", and make your nervous system stronger.
When Aylin and I started working together, she was tired too. This is what she wrote to me:
My long, restrictive diets were stressing me out. They never felt sustainable. I was anxious and afraid that if I did something incompletely, I wouldn't heal. That feeling exhausted me. I didn't see my effort, I only saw what was missing. I wanted to move forward with trust, without whipping myself.
What opened the way for her was that small sentence:
What freed me from feeling inadequate and stuck was the idea that '1 is always greater than 0'. The guiding words that freed me from always asking whether I'd done everything by the rules; in short, the words that brought a kind of awakening in me… Letting go of doing and allowing myself to simply be, to flow, transformed me and my nervous system so much. It turns out how I feel shapes my health more than what I eat.
So how are you approaching your health?
Maybe the real question is this. How long has your body been in survival mode? When did you last truly rest? I don't mean the hours spent scrolling or numbing out in front of a series. When did you last come to your health not with "I have to", but from a place of being, with kindness and love?
This is now a question I remind myself to ask every day. Because when I slip into autopilot, my body still runs back to where it used to feel safe: always doing, always catching up. The moment I notice, I stop and ask: am I doing right now, or am I being? And it happens less and less. Every time I pause, my body learns a new place to feel safe.
In between everything on my to-do list, when was the last time I simply let myself be?