Get Bored. Get better.
You want to change because you feel stuck.
Your life has become a perpetual loop.
Get up. Do the same shit. Lie in bed at night. Wish things were different.
Same mornings. Same evenings. Same patterns. Same thoughts.
A foreboding sense that time is passing quicker and you’re not moving with it.
And so you try to break out of the rut.
You train.
You clean up your diet.
You cut the drinking down.
You get stricter with your evenings.
You try a healthier life.
And what happens?
You feel worse.
Not because things are worse, but because your nervous system is used to being overstimulated.
Modern life feeds us constant dopamine spikes;
From the minute we wake up - scrolling, snacking, group chats, dating apps, bars, noise, drama.
When you pull away from that, your poor brain reacts the same way it reacts when you turn off a bright screen in a dark room.
It can’t see anything at first. It needs time to adjust.
That emptiness you feel is not a lack of progress.
It’s the withdrawal from a life that kept you overstimulated and underfulfilled.
Changing your life can get fucking boring.
Not always difficult.
Not always painful.
But, to begin with at least, it is genuinely boring.
And nobody prepares you for that part.
We’ve grown up on stories where transformation is loud, dramatic and inspirational. The montage in the first Rocky movie ends with him atop the steps in Philadelphia, his arms held aloft.
But in real life, the first phase of change feels like someone has turned the volume, and the colour of your world all the way down.
The nights get quieter.
The routines get repetitive.
The excitement goes missing.
Feelings of lifelessness. Joylessness.
And that’s exactly how the process should feel.
It's a sign.
Not a sign to stop, but a sign that you’re finally moving in the right direction. And this is where people fall apart - not physically, not emotionally, but existentially.
They don’t know who they are without their patterns.
Identity = the behaviours you can reliably predict yourself doing.
Scroll when bored → you’re “a scroller.”
Drink to cope → you’re “someone who likes a drink.”
Say yes to everyone → you’re “the reliable one.”
Stay up too late → you’re “not a morning person.”
These aren’t traits, they’re self-fulfilling loops. And loops defend themselves.
So when you try to change, you’re not resisting a bad habit.
You’re resisting the collapse of your self-image.
You don’t become a new person by adding habits. You become a new person by removing the behaviours that kept the old one intact.
Remove the drinking → lose the social identity.
Remove the scrolling → lose the dopamine identity.
Remove the people-pleasing → lose the approval identity.
You think you’re improving your life, but your nervous system thinks you’re killing the only version of “you” it recognises.
That’s why it feels like death.
Because in a way, it is.
The gap between stopping the old behaviours and becoming someone new can feel like a void.
Quiet, boring, bleak.
You stop being your old self instantly.
But your new self doesn’t arrive for weeks.
That gap is where identity collapse feels like:
“I don’t know who I am anymore.”
“My weekends feel empty.”
“My friends feel distant.”
“I don’t recognise my own reactions.”
“Everything feels flat.”
“I should feel better by now.”
The routines that held your personality together have been interrupted.
You removed the scaffolding before the new structure existed.
This is the part people mistake for “failure.”
But it isn’t failure.
It’s deconstruction.
Here’s some other fun news;
Changing your life massively reduces your social life.
Not because you become dull, or less of a social companion, but because you’re no longer participating in the habits that held those relationships together. You also don't feel as much in common with the people you once shared your life with.
Many adult friendships are built around convenience, not compatibility.
When you change, your environment doesn’t change with you.
If your friendships were built on:
drinking
drama
gossip
convenience
avoidance
codependency
Then improvement is a threat to the ecosystem.
You stop showing up for the behaviours that validated the group. The group stops showing up for you.
This gives people the illusion of loneliness.
It isn’t loneliness. It’s misalignment revealing itself.
You’re aren’t losing people - you’re losing the version of you they were attached to, and once those bonds loosen, your life defaults to something quieter.
So you start training more.
Sleeping earlier.
Choosing stillness.
Your phone gets quieter.
The weekends become unfamiliar.
The identity you built for validation starts dissolving.
We equate silence for loneliness, but I promise you, it’s not.
It’s the noise fading so you can hear yourself think.
Some of you haven’t heard your own mind for years.
Your mind, has two reward systems:
Dopamine: fast, volatile, spike-driven.
Serotonin: slow, stable, predictable.
When you strip out the behaviours that kept your brain on a loop, you remove dopamine before serotonin has recalibrated.
So you live in a chemical no-man’s-land:
Flat.
Bored.
Unrewarded.
That is not a mood. There is no emotion attached to it.
It’s the nervous system rewiring its reward hierarchy.
You’re detoxing from overstimulation.
And until your brain learns to generate reward from order and routine, the work you’re doing will feel meaningless.
This is the middle phase, the part most people abandon.
Silence. Beige. Repetition.
At a certain point, the routine stops feeling restrictive and starts feeling grounding - not because life got easier, but because your system finally caught up.
Calm.
The silence you’ve been avoiding becomes focus.
The discipline becomes pride.
The progress becomes visible.
And then soon after, the calm turns to excitement. The possibilities for You 2.0 open up in front of you. Experiences, relationships, careers, adventures.
And the life that once felt suffocating now feels manageable, predictable, and yours.
You stop craving stimulation because you realise that temporary stimulation isn’t the same as a life worth living.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, you become someone new.
Not because you had a breakthrough.
Not because you felt inspired.
But because you survived the part that felt meaningless.
That is the real transformation.
Not the end result… but the result of endurance.
The early signs of progress whisper.
You sleep a bit deeper.
Your cravings reduce.
Your thoughts slow down.
Your anxiety softens.
Your energy evens out.
You stop checking your phone every ten minutes.
You feel more in control, not because anything dramatic happened, but because nothing dramatic keeps happening.
These are not fireworks.
These are foundations.
The absence of chaos is progress. You’ve just lived so long in chaos you don’t recognise peace yet.
protocol:
1: Lower the bar for satisfaction
Stop waiting for big wins.
Start recognising the micro-wins:
You trained.
You cooked.
You got to bed on time.
You drank your water.
You read two pages.
You didn’t break your promise to yourself.
2: Measure something
Progress must be seen to be felt.
Track your lifts, your steps, your sleep, your calories, your consistency - anything tangible.
When you see a pattern, your brain forms belief.
And belief is what carries you through boredom.
3: Build an environment that removes decision-making
If the gym bag is by the door, training isn’t a decision.
If the food is prepped, eating well isn’t a decision.
If the phone is in another room, discipline isn’t a decision.
Your environment will beat your willpower every time.
So build one that makes the “right” choice automatic.
Embrace the boredom.
Don’t run from it.
Don’t try to escape it.
Lean into it.
Your nervous system is repairing itself.
Your new identity is being built.
You’re no longer living a life dictated by impulse and distraction.
Boredom is not the enemy.
Boredom is the turning point.
It isn’t a signal to stop. It’s the proof you finally have.
Take care
- James
