You want to heal—but are you willing to change? That’s the paradox. We search for answers in therapy, coaching, books, breathwork, even plant medicine. And while those tools can help, they’re useless if you keep making the same daily choices that got you here in the first place.
Here’s the truth most people avoid: healing isn’t about discovering something new. It’s about choosing something better. Over and over again.
Healing isn’t mysterious. It’s a pattern of decisions. Nothing more, nothing less. You either change the pattern or repeat the pain.
The reason this feels radical is because we’ve been taught to see our pain as something that just happened to us. And while trauma is real, responsibility is still yours. Your morning habits. Your thoughts. Your inputs. Your patterns. That’s where change lives.
If that sounds too simple, good. That’s the point. In this piece, I’ll show you exactly why your morning routine, your thoughts, your patterns—all the “small things”—are actually the biggest levers in your life. And how to pull them, starting today.
Why Simplicity Scares Us
As humans we tend to want to overcomplicate things. We search for the convoluted answer, while the simple one stares us right in the face. I suspect this is because if we accept that the answer to our problems is simple, then the obvious conclusion is that we ourselves are the problem.
This is quite fitting, and aligns closely with my own view on healing and transformation. Our lives as human beings are an amalgamation of all the choices we make. We wake every morning and begin a constant stream of decision making until the moment we lie down in bed and go to sleep. Our life is the summation of all those daily choices. It’s really that simple.
Things happen that feel out of our control. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: You are in control—just further upstream than you think.
After all, can you be so sure those things that ‘happened to you’ would have happened in that same way had you made different choices, either that same day or much earlier in your life?
This is a ‘radical’ view on responsibility, one that makes many people feel very uncomfortable. Are we truly completely responsible for every aspect of our own lives?
Ask yourself: would that accident have happened if you were more prepared? More present behind the wheel?
I’ve lived the consequences of poor choices. 3 broken ribs will remind you of that real quick. But what they taught me was even more painful. I saw it coming—and didn’t act.
You may have gone through things you had no control over—especially in childhood. That’s real. But as an adult, your choices are yours, even if those choices are being influenced by a traumatic event that happened previously in your life.
This is the end goal of a lot of trauma healing. The problem is not always the trauma itself, but the choices you make on a daily basis which are being influenced by the trauma. This includes even the thoughts that we choose to think.
Are you not in control of the thoughts in your head? If not you, then who is exactly…?
In my opinion, the best way to move forward in all circumstances is to simply start making better decisions first. Find the biggest levers you can pull in your life, grab ahold, and pull.
Nike got it right. But let’s be honest. “Just do it” doesn’t always cut through the noise.
Sometimes, you need to say it how it really feels:
Just. Fucking. Do it.
Start Where the Day Begins
Let’s start at the beginning. If our life is an amalgamation of all the choices that we make, then the beginning would be each morning. A new day. A new opportunity to make different choices. Let’s start there.
What time do you get up in the morning? This is the first decision you make each and every day of your life, and it’s a decision that has direct and extreme effects on every aspect of your physical health and conscious awareness. (Read my other articles or do your own research if you don’t understand why, it’s really quite interesting.)
Are you getting up late? If so, you’re not off to a great start. This is a brand new day and the very first choice you’ve made is one that goes firmly against your health and wellbeing. Most people would prefer to gloss over this. “Yea ok I sleep in, but what else can I do? I have other problems.”
Hard stop. If you start every single day with a poor decision like getting up late, then for the rest of your life you will have this constant force working directly against you.
Every action you take for the betterment of your life will be in direct opposition to this ‘friction’ you have introduced into the equation. Sure, you can probably overcome some of it, but why not just make a better choice?
How do you know that the other problems in your life are not simply the result of this choice you’ve made, or some other choice you continue to make? This is the aspect of humans that seeks complicated solutions to ‘complicated’ problems. The answers and problems themselves are actually quite simple most of the time.
Every day, you’re turning gears. Most of them on autopilot. But if you don’t change the gear, you won’t change the direction.
Every time you hit snooze, scroll aimlessly, or reach for a distraction, you hand your life to someone—or something—else. One choice at a time.
Does a decision like what time you get up truly affect things so much? Let’s ask a better question. Do we truly think we can take a human being—the result of millions of years of evolution—and suddenly change one of the most fundamental aspects of his existence and expect there to be no effect? Did we not evolve all those millions of years with no artificial light, rising with the sun everyday? The average person has only been missing sunrises since the mid 1900’s. 70 years is the blink of an eye in human evolution.
A simple logical analysis usually yields the fruit we are looking for.
The Next Choice Is the Test
Ok so you’re out of bed now. What’s the next decision that you make? Do you grab your phone? Do you immediately ingest stimulants (coffee, tobacco, etc.)? And an even better question is: what is the downstream effect each of these decisions has on your life?
Many people like to start by analyzing why we make these decisions first. This is useful, and the result of these types of analysis invariably points to some sort of trauma that happened in our lives previously. I don’t want to downplay this at all.
But… There’s a much more effective way to move forward. Start making better choices. Period. You can go back and look at the why after, that will certainly help. But nothing will change until you make different choices.
You could spend years working through your trauma or history until you naturally arrive to a place where you will make better choices, and that’s the route most people go.
Or, you can start today and just fucking do it. Pick the biggest lever you can find that will move the needle the most in your life, grab ahold with both hands, and PULL.
Does it mean getting up earlier, giving up tobacco, sugar, or coffee, spending time in nature, avoiding social media, or exercising? I don’t know, that depends on you. But pick something and do it. The harder it is, the more important it is for your life and the more strength and willpower you will gain by doing it.
Choose the Thing You’ve Been Avoiding
Pick one thing at first. I tend to lean heavily into circadian alignment, so if you aren’t getting up every single morning at sunrise and putting your bare feet on the earth, then start there. This will absolutely have the biggest impact on your life. Think about it like brushing your teeth. You wouldn’t get up in the morning and go out into the world without brushing your teeth, would you? Would you…
Everyday you don’t see the sunrise, your body goes through the day out of sync with the natural rhythm of the Earth. You’re just, off… The hormone levels in your brain are out of balance. All the systems of the body are behind schedule.
You can decide in one single moment in time that you will never miss another sunrise again for the rest of your life. Imagine the power of that statement. Feel it for a moment. The sheer willpower alone you would gain by following through would be immense, in addition to the health benefits.
Or maybe it’s never smoking another cigarette, or going for a walk every single day. It might even be choosing to think better thoughts. Whatever it is, it’s there waiting for you to embrace it. That is healing.
Healing is not some magical therapy or some mystical guy that says magic words to you and suddenly things are better. Healing is making better choices. You are at the center of it. Those therapies and magical words can sometimes help, but only so far as they inspire you to make better choices yourself and you actually follow through.
If you find yourself in front of the same healer, therapist, shaman or doctor over and over and over—guess what? It’s not working. It might be helping you temporarily counteract some of the consequences of your own poor decisions, but how long will that last?
Why not remove the friction first? And then if you choose to work with a healer it can be truly effective.
The Choice Is Yours
You don’t need more information. You don’t need another podcast, another guru, or another excuse. You know exactly what you need to do. Maybe you’ve known for years.
The question is—will you do it? Not perfectly. Not flawlessly. But relentlessly.
Because the truth is, every day is a fork in the road. One path leads to more of the same: the delay, the drift, the quiet regret. The other leads to power. To ownership. To becoming the kind of man or woman your family, your body, your future needs you to be.
And it always starts small. Not easy. Small.
Wake up at sunrise. Touch the Earth. Breathe deeply. Put down the phone. Say no to what drains you. Say yes to what strengthens you. Over and over again.
Not someday—today.
Your healing isn’t waiting in the stars. It’s not locked in your past. It’s in the next choice you make. And the one after that. Stack enough of those, and your entire life will change.
You already know the answer. It’s not hidden. It’s just waiting for you to choose.
Pick the biggest lever you can find.
Grab it.
Pull.
And don’t stop pulling until your life aligns with your truth.
