I have started over more times than I can count.
New journals. New morning routines. New planners with colour-coded sections and weekly goals and motivational quotes at the top of each page. I’ve had the apps, the spreadsheets, the “this time it’s different” energy that lasts about eleven days before it quietly dies somewhere between a Wednesday night shift and a Thursday morning where I’ve only slept four hours.
And every time — every single time — I’d treat the restart as the solution. Fresh start Monday. New month, new me. I’ll begin properly in January. This time I’ll actually stick to it.
What I didn’t realise for years is that the restarting was the problem. Not because there’s anything wrong with trying again. But because of what was happening in the gap between stopping and starting.
That gap is where the punishment lives.
You miss a week. You don’t post, don’t exercise, don’t do the thing you told yourself you’d do. And instead of just… going back to it… you spend the next three days mentally reviewing everything you should have done differently. You add more rules. You make the plan stricter. You convince yourself that what you need is more discipline, more structure, a better system.
You don’t need a better system. You’ve had forty systems. The systems were never the problem.
The problem is that when you fall short of your own expectations, your first response is to turn on yourself. Not gently. Not with curiosity. With this quiet, efficient ruthlessness that sounds like: well, clearly you can’t be trusted to just do the thing, so here are the new rules.
That’s not accountability. That’s self-punishment wearing a productivity costume.
I’ve done this with everything. Exercise. Content creation. Eating. Journaling. Learning new things. The pattern is always the same. Start with enthusiasm. Hit a rough patch. Stop. Punish myself in the gap. Restart with stricter rules. Hit the same rough patch. Stop again. Repeat until the thing I was trying to do feels contaminated by failure and I quietly abandon it forever.
Not because I’m lazy. Not because I lack discipline. Because the punishment made the thing unbearable to return to.
Moving to Portsoy was the first time I broke the pattern without meaning to. We just… moved. No plan, no vision board, no “this is the fresh start that will change everything.” We packed up and went to a fishing village in Scotland because something about it felt right. And because for the first time in my life, I did something for me without needing to justify it with a five-step improvement plan.
It wasn’t a fresh start. It was just… a different day. And it turns out that’s all you actually need. Not a restart. Not new rules. Just the next available moment, without the punishment attached to it.
I still catch myself doing it. Last week I missed something I’d planned and my immediate thought was right, so clearly I need to restructure the whole week. No. I just need to do it tomorrow. That’s it. No restructuring. No review. No emotional audit of what went wrong. Just: tomorrow.
If you’re someone who’s restarted a hundred times and you think the problem is that you can’t commit — it’s not. The problem is what you do to yourself in the gap. And once you can see that, you stop needing the fresh start. Because there’s nothing to start fresh from. You just continue.
I wrote something about this pattern — how it works, what it costs, and what happens when you stop running it. If you want to understand what I mean by punishment vs repair, the quiz in my bio is a good place to start.