I believed that there would come a day when I’d finish the list and scrape the bottom of the self-help barrel. Instead, the list got longer.

The thing about self-help is that it rarely stays in the self-help section. I’ve gotten my fix from business books, psychology, spirituality, leadership, memoirs, even books that would never dream of calling themselves self-help. Anywhere there was a promise that I could think better, communicate better, lead better, love better, organize better, set better boundaries, understand why I felt the way I felt, or finally let shit go, I was interested.

At one point I was reading one of these self-help books a week, fully convinced that if I just kept going, I’d eventually run out of things that needed fixing. But for every book I checked off the list, another one came in to fill its open spot. Every self-help book seemed to recommend another self-help book. Friends would bring up titles I’d never heard of but definitely needed to read. As those recommendations filled my Amazon cart, the algorithm started serving me even more tantalizing titles, each one promising to be the missing piece.

Before long, my home library had become a smattering of those promises, the spine of each book beckoning me to pour at least ten hours into it so that I could finally fix my life.

I got a dopamine rush just reading the titles. I didn’t even have to read the books to feel hopeful. For a brief moment, I got to imagine myself as the person waiting on the other side of them. Then my reality came back into focus, along with all the ways I still wasn’t measuring up to the task of life, which of course just made me want to get on with my reading faster, damnit!

Looking back, the whole thing feels embarrassingly obvious. The cover of my podcast is literally me sitting on the floor surrounded by stacks of books with this exasperated look on my face, like, Can somebody please help me make sense of all this?

Apparently I made my self-help addiction my personal brand without realizing it.

The really seductive thing about self-help is that it is actually, well, helpful.

I can point to many ideas that have made my life measurably better. It sharpened my judgment. It strengthened my pattern recognition. It gave me language for experiences I’d had but didn’t know how to describe. It introduced me to ideas that changed how I make decisions, build habits, navigate relationships, and think about my work.

In some ways, I think self-help exists because our education leaves enormous gaps. School assumed home was teaching me how to do all this stuff. Home assumed school was doing it. Somewhere between the two, I graduated knowing algebra but not how to apologize well.

So I went looking for teachers.

Every book handed me another useful tactic, framework, mental model or checklist. Of course I wanted more. Why wouldn’t I? Every successful insight reinforced the belief that the next book might contain something I still hadn’t found. Like any good foraging expedition, the possibility that just around the corner is the best Easter egg, mushroom, or mystery pin hooked me into a perpetual cycle of needing just one more. (Just one more! Just one more!)

Along the way, reading turned into another obligation. Alongside work, bills, maintaining a home, and the thousand tiny administrative tasks of adulthood, there was yet another assignment waiting for me: whatever self-improvement project I’d decided to tackle next.

At some point, I stopped asking whether I actually wanted to read a book. The only question became whether it might improve me. Reading had transformed from leisure into treatment. And treatment only makes sense if you believe there’s something wrong with you.

But the longer I sat with all these tactics, the more I started noticing something really sneaky.

I had become extraordinarily good at collecting strategies for living, but I still wasn’t enjoying the experience of living.

Somewhere along the way, I became so focused on collecting tactics that I forgot there was a human being with a nervous system underneath them.

My nervous system was fried, always on the lookout for a threat from the environment that my self-help addiction might be able to solve. An awkward social interaction no longer felt like an ordinary part of being human. It became evidence that I needed better conversation skills. A stressful week at work suggested I needed another productivity framework. Feeling reactive meant there was probably a book on emotional regulation I hadn’t read yet. Every uncomfortable experience triggered another research project.

The more tactics I collected, the more life started to feel transactional. Every problem had a solution. Every weakness had a framework. Every difficult emotion felt like evidence that I hadn’t yet found the right system.

About 200 self-help books later, I’m beginning to suspect that self-help’s greatest strength is also the source of its greatest weakness.

It gives us tactics, sometimes brilliant ones.

The problem isn’t the tactics themselves. The problem is that tactics operate at the level of behavior, while the person using those tactics is operating from a much deeper layer.

Every time I felt uncomfortable, uncertain, socially awkward, emotionally reactive, or stuck, I reached for another book.

Every time I reached for another book, I rehearsed the same belief:

I don’t have what I need.

Someone else does.

200 books later, that assumption no longer felt like a thought. It felt like reality.

Self-help had slowly conditioned me to distrust my own experience.

I had started treating my humanity like a knowledge problem.

If I felt awkward after a social gathering, my instinct wasn’t to wonder why I felt awkward or simply allow myself to be an awkward human being for an evening. My instinct was to wonder whether I needed better conversation starters.

That pattern showed up everywhere else, too. Procrastination meant I needed another productivity framework. A harsh inner critic meant there was probably another self-compassion book I hadn’t read.

Every uncomfortable feeling quietly became another research project.

That’s the trap.

Because what I actually wanted wasn’t better conversation starters–I wanted to feel comfortable around people. I wasn’t really looking for better productivity systems–I wanted to feel calm enough that work didn’t constantly feel like a threat. I wasn’t looking for another framework–I was looking for self-trust.

Those aren’t behavior problems, they’re nervous system problems. A nervous system doesn’t learn primarily through information. It learns through repeated experience. And no amount of tactics can convince a nervous system that it’s safe if the nervous system itself still believes it’s fundamentally deficient. Every time I picked up another book, I wasn’t just learning a tactic. I was rehearsing the belief that someone else knew me better than I knew myself.

I’m tired of feeling like there’s something fundamentally wrong with me.

When I finally stopped reaching for another recommendation and simply sat with that feeling, I found myself returning to the same handful of questions.

What if life is unfinished by definition? What if striving to become “complete,” “enlightened,” or “perfect” is the very thing keeping me from feeling at ease inside my own life? What if my only real problem is believing there’s a problem?

If I stop believing that, does my life actually fall apart? Am I suddenly incapable of having relationships, doing my work, or taking care of myself? Or am I far less dependent on outside expertise than I’ve been taught to believe?

I don’t know the answers to those questions yet.

What I do know is that something has shifted.

Lately, I’ve become strangely allergic to the unread self-help books on my shelf. Instead, I keep reaching for the genres that used to nourish me before I decided every hour of reading needed to produce measurable self-improvement. I’m abandoning the books that hold prime real estate on my bookshelf and bending down to the dusty lower shelves, where my memoirs have been waiting patiently for me to stop drinking the self-help Kool-Aid. Sometimes I even open the closet where the overflow books live, hunting down novels that lost their place years ago when I surreptitiously demoted every book that wasn’t promising to make me better.

I’m beginning to suspect that reading for pleasure might be more transformative than reading for repair, if only because it doesn’t begin with the assumption that I’m deficient.

Memoirs don’t ask me to optimize myself. Novels don’t promise to unlock my potential. Poetry doesn’t offer five actionable steps. They simply invite me to spend time with another human being’s way of seeing the world.

I don’t have a control version of myself who never read those books. I have no way of knowing whether I’d be better or worse off without them. Maybe I needed every single one to arrive here.

But I don’t think I need the next one.

The unread self-help books are still sitting on my shelf.

For the first time in years, they don’t feel like unfinished homework.

They just feel like books.

Today is my 38th birthday.

For my birthday, I told Oli I wanted to rent a cabin in the middle of the woods and have a weekend of writing. Initially I thought I was going to spend this weekend working on my big fiction project. I set goals. I had a minimum goal and an extra-credit goal, just in case things got real good out here. I’ve met neither of them.

As soon as we got out here, my brain basically decided without my consent that it was not going to cooperate with the writing assignment I had in mind. I sat on the porch and argued with my Word doc for a few hours before I had the sobering realization that the goals I set for myself were by no means requirements, and that I was actually free to spend this weekend any way I wished. I was free, in fact, to be a complete rebel and not write one word at all.

If you’d asked me a week ago how I imagined this trip, I would’ve told you it looked like getting up in the morning, cracking open my laptop, and not getting up until after sunset. A whole ass-in-chair kind of thing.

I’ve been rethinking a piece of my identity recently that has been foundational for as long as I can remember: the belief that I have to rush around all the time. Each morning I write in my journal: “I am an architect of my days who designs a slow, nourishing rhythm that fuels deep work, play and rest.”

As I washed my face last night before bed, on the last day of being 37, I looked at myself in the mirror and asked, “What do you want to not bring with you into 38?”

Definitely not my toxic tenacity. Nor the sense of rushing. For that matter, let’s nix forcing too. Just trust that the universe has a way of getting things done, with or without me constantly intervening to remind it of the next thing on the to-do list.

So on my birthday eve, I decided it was as good a time as any to put my new identity statement into practice. Instead of demanding the usual tenacity from myself, I’m leaning into slow days where the plans are loose and the flow makes space for about equal parts rest, play, and deep work.

And it’s been lovely.

I’ve gotten nothing on my to-do list done, but I’ve been doing things the whole time. Napping, that’s a big one. Exploring the mountains on scooters. Taking little walks—or sniffaris, as we call them now that we have a dog—into the woods. Making scavenger hunts out of Olaf’s mealtime and relishing the time spent watching him sniff for all his piles of food. Spending quality time with Oli. And, of course, writing. Just not the kind of writing I thought I’d be doing here. Less daunting-fiction-project writing and more chicken-soup-for-the-soul writing.

The Airbnb is exactly what I wanted. A little cabin tucked away in the woods with tall ceilings, warm wood and tile, and thoughtful design. Who cares that the TV in the bedroom has turned on by itself in the middle of the night every night we’ve been here? Or that the lighting options are either really dark or really bright? Or the power outage my check-in instructions warned me might happen? I also got the ceilings of my dreams, a cozy shower that never runs out of hot water, and a gas stovetop that reheated my leftover pizza perfectly.

There was this moment last night where I was washing the dishes by hand because this place doesn’t have a dishwasher, and I realized I was washing them for the next guest.

Because I hadn’t spent all day forcing my brain to comply with my plans, I was relaxed enough to notice this little thing I do all the time. It’s so subtle and sneaky that it usually goes undetected.

I have this habit of editing the relationship out of things.

My default thought was that I was washing these dishes for a group of strangers, and maybe a light sort of absent-minded cleaning was all these strangers really needed from me. But then I thought, “Wait, what if the next guest were my dear friend Rachel?”

As soon as I said it, I noticed I was paying much more attention to the coffee mug in my hand than I had been thirty seconds earlier.

Nothing about the dishes had changed. The only thing that changed was that the next guest stopped being “whoever comes after us” and became a person I felt connected to, even if only in my head.

It’s the same shitty tendency I have to start emails with, “Glad you were able to carve out the time,” instead of, “I’m glad you were able to carve out the time.” Why am I running from the word “I”? Why do I keep deleting myself out of the relationship? And why am I washing these dishes like the next person who’s going to use them is just another nobody I don’t need to care about?

I started cleaning the dishes differently after that.

I’m having my full-blown period today. I apologize if that phrase conjures images that push your disgust button. For me, it just means periods have the potential to be–how do I say this?–really fucking painful. Sometimes it feels like a drum circle is pounding away at my insides for five days straight. Today it’s about a 2 out of 10 on the awfulness scale, and that makes me so happy my eyes strain not to fill with tears at yet another example of things getting better over time.

Let’s not forget. Last year on my birthday, I was at Six Flags where Oli and I were having an on-and-off conversation about ending our relationship.

One year later, I’m celebrating my birthday with the same person, now my fiancée, sitting on the deck while he plays music and I write this, watching our dog tear open a pine cone. Add in the shiny new communication skills we’ve learned in couples therapy, and I feel like I’m several iterations of people away from who I was this time last year.

My favorite part of getting older is watching myself learn the shit I need to learn. I always know I’ve learned some life shit when I can look back and say, “Oh my gosh, thank you. I really needed to learn that. Life got so much better after I learned you.”

This year has had a lot of that.

I’m actually a bit surprised I’ve written this many words without bringing up my mom. It seems like something I would’ve done by now.

Since she was 38 when she first got sick, I’ve always wondered what this year would have in store for me. More than wonder. It’s also a kind of worry. Am I also going to get sick when I’m 38?

I have a feeling there’s something there. Why that thought scares me as much as it does feels like its own little quest to go on someday. Just not tonight.

For now, it’s the evening of my birthday, and my brain is tired in a really satisfied kind of way. I can tell by the way it’s buzzing.

The sun is getting lower in the sky. It’s starting to feel more like evening and less like daytime. The Padres versus Dodgers game just started, so I’ve got to wrap this up (iykyk). Oli and the dog are both on the couch, and I can’t wait to join them.

I’m also looking forward to seeing if I can find the end of the hot water tonight.

As you can imagine, it was a difficult decision to make, and even harder to share with others.

I had an inkling of this decision during my New Year’s reflection process last year. At first, it was just an inkling in the pit of my stomach, one of those things that’s really easy to ignore or override.

But inklings, like dogs or loved ones, don’t like to be ignored, and so it started gnawing at me a little more loudly.

It was something I went back and forth on for a long time. I would share it with a small group of people in my inner circle as if I were asking for advice, hoping they would say something that would make my next step more clear.

But the only thing that became more clear to me was this: making decisions is really effing hard.

So hard, in fact, that I started rewriting the entire story I had been telling myself about the type of person I was.

I am the type of person who can’t make up their mind.

Gosh, that didn’t feel good.

And around this time, God showed up for me in God’s own way, which is usually not the way I would prefer.

It began when I started seeing LinkedIn posts from someone I had been following for a long time who was talking about stuff I had never heard him, or anyone else, talk about. At first I ignored it. Then I started paying attention. From there, God nudged me toward his podcast. And from there, there was a Eureka moment.

The person I’m talking about is Chris Walker. I had been following him for years because of his insights on marketing. But Chris stopped talking about marketing a while ago and started talking about something else entirely: what he calls frequency.

Now, frequency is not a new term for me, but it’s new in the way he uses it. When Chris talks about frequency, he’s describing the subconscious belief systems that drive our thinking, decision-making, and behavior. It’s what folks in other communities might call our vibe or our energy, but Chris is a little too grounded in science for those terms to have strong resonance with him.

As I began to understand more about what he was talking about, I started realizing that I have a pretty big problem with frequency, as evidenced by the fact that I just could not get clarity on the next direction in my life.

At some point, Chris mentioned that what we are attempting to solve with meditation, therapy, and self-help books is actually a frequency issue, and that the reason we hit a ceiling with all of those interventions is that they don’t actually address the root of the problem.

They never come right out and say: hey, you’ve got a problem with how you’ve decided the world operates and who you’ve decided to be in it, and until you fix that, you’re always going to be on the hunt for a real solution.

This is not to say that those modalities are not helpful. It’s just that there is a limit to which they help, and then we find ourselves stuck at a new ceiling.

When I heard Chris talk about this, I felt that sickly feeling in my stomach that I get when I’ve been called out on something, because I have tried, nay, obsessed over every single one of those interventions.

Meditation? Check. I’ve been trying to find something there for 20 years.

Therapy? Also check. And while therapy has been quite helpful for me in many ways, it’s never solved the deep ache of being human I carry in my bones.

Self-help books? Um, obsessed. I am known amongst my friend group as the person who poo-poos fiction because who has the time for pleasure reading when there’s so much unread pragmatism lining my bookshelf?

And as he talked about the limitations of these things, that sickly feeling in my stomach started turning into something else:

Recognition.

He was right.

No matter how many minutes I carve out to observe my thoughts, repeat a mantra, or engage in conscious relaxation; no matter how many expensive therapy sessions I buy myself to talk about my childhood trauma; no matter how many self-help principles I apply to my life, there is always something wanting, always a deep yearning that hasn’t been touched that is begging to be addressed.

But Chris wouldn’t lay out this problem if he didn’t have a real solution for us. Oh no, no, no, no, no. He’s not that type of fellow, you see.

And that brings me to my next point:

Enter frequency training.

Frequency training starts by helping you understand the current state of your belief system. Sounds straightforward enough, but when you get into the weeds of it, it’s really tricky because our beliefs are programmed at the subconscious level. That means they often look like facts about how the world operates rather than our own biased take on reality. In this way, you can totally sincerely look someone straight in the eye and tell them, “I understand my belief system,” and be completely lying about that.

This is the part of the process where you weep on the couch for an hour after being confronted by your deepest world views that, up until this point, you have held to be self-evident facts about the universe. You spend this hour trying to defend yourself and argue that these are not merely beliefs--no! They are cold hard facts about how the world is, and if you didn’t think this way, your entire life would surely crumble under your feet. Surely, damnit!

But fear not. It gets better from there.

The next part of the process involves laying out what your best life would look like. Not the life that seems practical or realistic, or the life that you promised your parents or your spouse you would build, or even the life that’s been advertised to you as the fanciest of the fancies, but the dopest and most authentic expression of living you can possibly imagine for yourself.

And then the really fun part happens. Frequency training helps you bridge the gap between your current state and that future state through a daily guided handwritten journaling practice where you reprogram your fundamental belief system about who you are, how the world works and what your future holds for you.

My thoughts on this?

Hell fucking yes.

I mean, what do I have to lose? I’ve tried everything else. Worst case scenario, this is less helpful than those things. Best case scenario, I build the life of my dreams.

So I signed up.

And you want to know what changed for me?

Pretty much everything.

Within the first day (yes, the first day), I had clarity on the yoga teacher/writer dilemma that I had been wrestling with for months.

Within the first week, I was feeling more capable of building the life that I want.

Within the first month, I could see the changes trickling through into my thoughts, words, and actions.

That deep alignment between what you think, say and do is powerful. It’s the end of fighting with yourself.

But maybe the biggest change for me wasn’t that I narrowed in on a particular decision. It was that I finally trusted myself enough to make a decision at all.

This has been such a game changer for me, and for Oli, who’s been doing it with me, that I invited Chris onto my podcast. It’s been over a year since I released a new episode, and I knew this had to be the conversation that brought it back.

I thought this would be an hour-long conversation, maybe 90 minutes.

Instead, it clocked in at 2 hours and 45 minutes.

We dove deep into the process of frequency training, why it works (backed by science), and how it will help us navigate a future landscape that is likely to look orders of magnitude different from the present.

So I want to warn you before you dive in: it’s an investment.

But I also think it’s the kind of conversation that’s best listened to over time. Listen to 30 minutes on a drive, then come back a day later for another hour. The ideas are going to be new, and I think your brain will appreciate having time to chew on them.

I’m still chewing on parts of it myself.

This conversation has the potential to change the way you think about yourself, your decisions, and the future you’re trying to build.

It certainly changed mine.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

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You are the baby, baby, baby.
You are the baby, baby boy.
You are the Boy! Boy! Boy!
You are the Boy! Boy! Boy!
You are the ba-a-a-by boy.
Baby boy!