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We’re surrounded by advice on how to do better, be better, and optimize every part of life. But what if the constant effort to improve is part of what keeps us feeling tense? In this episode, I talk about my own habit of always learning, always doing, and what happened when I finally made space to stop fixing myself. We explore why easing pressure can lead to calmer choices, clearer thinking, and more sustainable change.
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Listen to Journey to the Sunnyside Podcast: https://bit.ly/4bxCqT3
Subscribe to Sunnyside’s YouTube Channel: https://bit.ly/3zuoID4
CONNECT WITH SUNNYSIDE:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joinsunnyside/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joinsunnyside/
- Twitter: https://x.com/joinsunnyside
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@joinsunnyside
ABOUT SUNNYSIDE: Sunnyside is the #1 alcohol moderation app that helps you drink less without any shame, guilt, or pressure to quit. Optimize your alcohol habits to achieve benefits like sleeping better, losing weight, feeling more energy, and saving money. We know that an all-or-nothing approach doesn’t work for everyone, so we focus on helping you set your own goals, celebrate small wins, and build a lasting system of accountability. As a result, 96.7% of our members see a big drop in their drinking after 90 days.
Disclaimer: This podcast is not intended as medical advice, and the views of the guests may not represent the views of Sunnyside. If you’re concerned about your health or alcohol use, please consider seeking advice from a doctor.
--
Listen to Journey to the Sunnyside Podcast: https://bit.ly/4bxCqT3
Subscribe to Sunnyside’s YouTube Channel: https://bit.ly/3zuoID4
CONNECT WITH SUNNYSIDE:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joinsunnyside/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joinsunnyside/
- Twitter: https://x.com/joinsunnyside
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@joinsunnyside
ABOUT SUNNYSIDE: Sunnyside is the #1 alcohol moderation app that helps you drink less without any shame, guilt, or pressure to quit. Optimize your alcohol habits to achieve benefits like sleeping better, losing weight, feeling more energy, and saving money. We know that an all-or-nothing approach doesn’t work for everyone, so we focus on helping you set your own goals, celebrate small wins, and build a lasting system of accountability. As a result, 96.7% of our members see a big drop in their drinking after 90 days.
Disclaimer: This podcast is not intended as medical advice, and the views of the guests may not represent the views of Sunnyside. If you’re concerned about your health or alcohol use, please consider seeking advice from a doctor.
Creators and Guests
What is Journey to the Sunnyside?
Journey to the Sunnyside is a top 1% podcast, reaching over 500,000 listeners every week. It’s your guide to exploring mindful living with alcohol—whether you're cutting back, moderating, or thinking about quitting.
While Sunnyside helps you reduce your drinking, this podcast goes further, diving into topics like mindful drinking, sober curiosity, moderation, and full sobriety. Through real stories, expert insights, and science-backed strategies, we help you find what actually works for your journey.
Hosted by Mike Hardenbrook, a #1 best-selling author and neuroscience enthusiast, the show is dedicated to helping people transform their relationship with alcohol—without shame, judgment, or rigid rules.
This podcast is brought to you by Sunnyside, the leading platform for mindful drinking. Want to take the next step in your journey? Head over to sunnyside.co for a free 15-day trial.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in our episodes do not necessarily represent those of Sunnyside. We’re committed to sharing diverse perspectives on health and wellness. If you’re concerned about your drinking, please consult a medical professional. Sunnyside, this podcast, and its guests are not necessarily medical providers and the content is not medical advice. We do not endorse drinking in any amount.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another one of these ten minute Mondays. It is 2026, the first one of the year, and I'm really excited to get going on the rest of the year together and just continuing to improve. But as I started thinking about improvement, this is something that I started to notice about myself most recently, and it's this awareness that I'd like to share in this episode that I think others can relate to, especially if you're sitting here listening to a podcast to get better. Here's the thing is that I like learning.
Speaker 1:I like growing. I like understanding how things work and how to get better at them. And I've gotten really good at this thing called self improvement. But in turn, that might be part of the problem. And let me explain here because if I'm honest, I've spent a lot of my life in this kind of permanent upgrade mode.
Speaker 1:And at some point, I realized I wasn't just learning a lot. I was rarely letting myself be quiet. And over time, I've realized that this quiet mode with ourself is so, so important. There's always a podcast on that I'm listening to. There's always a book that's playing in my headphones.
Speaker 1:There's always something in my ear that's supposed to make me a little bit sharper, maybe calmer, maybe more effective, maybe better at speaking here on the podcast. And even when I'm doing things that might look relaxing from the outside, you know, I go on a lot of hikes. I'm outside a lot. But for years on those hikes, they weren't really quiet. They were full of business books, full of self help, full of psychology and growth.
Speaker 1:And my Audible library, it's kinda ridiculous. Basically, it's this long list of ways to get better at being human, at being a better business person, at being a better dad. And one thing I noticed is there's almost no fiction, almost nothing in there that's just for the joy of entertainment. And one day, I was walking, listening in my headphones, and it started to make me think like something was off, off balance. And I just decided to take my headphones out that day and just walk with myself.
Speaker 1:And I realized something that even when I was out on this walk, taking time for myself, I was still in conversation with others. I was in conversation with the author of whatever book I was listening to or with the host with the ideas that they were talking about on a podcast, there was always some sort of input. There was always my mind being engaged. And what I wasn't actually spending much time doing was being with myself in my own thoughts. And it wasn't necessarily because I was trying to avoid them and keep myself busy.
Speaker 1:It was just because I didn't leave much room for that. And so I tried something small. After that day, took my headphones out. I went for another hike without anything in my ears. No podcasts, no audiobooks, no music, just walking.
Speaker 1:And I'll be honest, it was a little bit uncomfortable at first. My mind immediately wanted something to do, something to listen to, something to get better at, something to be productive with. But after a while, something else happened. That noise kinda went away. That need went away.
Speaker 1:Not all the way. Not like waving a magic wand and all of a sudden I feel better, but it was enough that I could feel a difference. And what that experience made me notice even bigger and broader in my life was about how I live. I'm almost always doing something. This has been something from childhood.
Speaker 1:Weekends, there are no lazy weekends. If it's a Saturday or Sunday, I'm out. I'm climbing mountains. I'm fishing. I'm at the gym.
Speaker 1:I'm exploring somewhere new in whatever city I'm in. And, of course, like, these are all good things. But very rarely, I was doing nothing. There was no lazy Sunday. Those didn't really exist for me.
Speaker 1:And at some point, I had to ask myself, what? Why does this stillness feel like optional in my life? Why does rest feel like something that I have to earn? And so I did a little bit of research, and there's actually a name for this. Psychology calls it self monitoring.
Speaker 1:So it's a habit of constantly tracking yourself, your behavior, your progress, how you're doing. And self monitoring, it can be helpful, but in small bursts. It's part of how we learn. But when it's always on, it raises stress and it makes it harder for your nervous system to settle in, to be calm. You're never really fully off duty.
Speaker 1:You're always a little bit on. And I think a lot of us live there without even realizing it. I know I did for so long where I actually just thought it was a positive quality. And now I'm realizing that while it is a positive quality, you have to be able to shut it down to actually get more progress in your life. And there is other research that I found that connects to this too.
Speaker 1:Studies show that people, they change better and stick with it longer when they're not constantly being evaluated. So when your behavior isn't tied to your self worth, it becomes easier to adjust. When your identity isn't at stake, your choices, there's not so much pressure and they get easier. And that lined up exactly with what I felt on those quiet hikes that I started to take. Nothing was being assessed.
Speaker 1:Nothing needed to be improved. I was just there in the moment with my thoughts. And this is where this idea of fixing gets pretty interesting because most of us aren't trying to fix every single thing. We're trying to fix enough so that we can finally relax. We can feel comfortable in our own skin.
Speaker 1:And once this thing gets under control, then I'm going to feel better. And once I figure this out, then I'll settle in and be able to relax. But what if the constant fixing is part of what's keeping you unsettled? And what if the system never really gets a break from being bandaged because there's always more to do? So here's something that I've been sitting with in my head leading into 2026 is that I don't actually need to be doing things all the time, And I don't need to push uphill so hard.
Speaker 1:I don't need to always be progressing with my time. I don't need to place value in every single thing that I'm doing. Because doing has been my default state for so long that not doing, it feels unfamiliar. But when something feels unfamiliar, that's where growth lies. And so I've been experimenting more recently.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to intentionally leave more space there. I'm taking walks without that outside input. I'm letting my weekends, like the afternoons, pass without having it filled with plans. And in fact, this past weekend, I didn't have any plans. I went for a nice bike ride with my son.
Speaker 1:I sat around, coffee, and I I didn't need to fill all my time with all these things I gotta do. And I'll be honest, it's a little bit challenging for me. There's times when my mind just keeps running around like I gotta do something, but this is something that I have to fix. But at times, it's also calming in a way that effort and plans and action never really can be. And this is the part that surprised me.
Speaker 1:When I'm not constantly fixing or improving other choices in my life. They're starting to get a little bit simpler. This is a new experiment for me, but I wanna pass this on because I think that there are a lot of people out there that are just like me. We're just constantly trying to get better, to to self improve. There's so much pressure behind that.
Speaker 1:But when you just kinda calm down, not needing it to be perfect, not needing it to be rigid, just a little bit more quiet. There's this less internal negotiation going on. There's this less back and forth going on. So when that happens, a lot of these urges that we have, they don't disappear, but they don't escalate either. They don't demand more discipline.
Speaker 1:And what happens is that your nervous system isn't always trying to be managed in this way that we want to control. And when it's always being controlled, what happens is that it can look for relief. But when it feels more steady with less effort, it needs less of that. And where I'm going with this is that I think we underestimate how much behavior is actually shaped by the background tension of all the pressure we put on ourselves. When our identity is constantly under review, relief becomes this louder thing in our life that we seek.
Speaker 1:But when that pressure eases, many of our habits, they lose some of their pull. And it's not because we're fighting against them, but because you just didn't need them as much because that pressure has been relieved. So here's the question I keep coming back to, not necessarily as a task or something that you have to answer, just something to hold on to and think about. Who are you when you're not fixing anything? When there's, like, no improvement plan that's running in your head, like, where are you in your progress?
Speaker 1:And this is where I wanna get to, and no internal evaluation happening. You know, not who you wanna become, not who you should be right now, but instead who you are when nothing needs attention. Now you don't need to answer this. Just notice what it's like when that pressure eases where you're just not in this constant hustle to get somewhere. So in this episode, I just wanted to draw some parallels for others that can relate to this.
Speaker 1:And for me, it isn't about stopping growth. It's actually the opposite. Even though it sounds different, it's more about changing the order, less fixing first and instead more space first. Letting ease lead instead of effort. And that's what I'm going to carry into this year 2026.
Speaker 1:Doing a little bit less, being okay with that now, and letting nothing at times be enough, and knowing that that's gonna take care of other things that I've always put so much effort into in realizing that I need to change the order. And trusting that that change doesn't need to be chased all the time for it to happen. Okay. Thanks for hanging out with me today. If you got anything out of this episode, it means the world if you could leave a review.
Speaker 1:Tell me how January's going. I'd love to know your progress. Send me an email to mike@sunnyside.co. Love to hear from you. And until next time, cheers to your mindful drinking journey.