Hey there Reader,
There’s a particular moment many of us rarely reach.
It’s the moment where we stop explaining, stop theorising, and actually look at the evidence.
Not the stories we tell ourselves.
Not the version that sounds reasonable.
But the patterns, the numbers, the reality.
I’ve been sitting with that moment myself lately.
If I’m honest, I’ve been unhappy with my weight for a long time. I weigh significantly more than I did for most of my twenties and thirties. Right now, I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been.
For years, I was convinced this was largely about metabolism, hormones, and age. Those explanations sounded plausible and, if I’m honest, slightly relieving, because they placed the problem somewhere I couldn’t really see or touch.
Recently, I stopped assuming and started checking.
When I looked more closely at what I was eating, not just obvious treats, but everyday additions, a different picture began to emerge.
I love lashings of butter on warm, crusty sourdough. Piles of sour cream on our Friyay night nachos. Dollops of mayonnaise on salads.
None of these are “bad” foods. But they are calorie-dense, and they add up quickly, even before you get to snacks or sweet treats.
What I realised wasn’t that I’d been doing something terribly wrong. It was that I hadn’t clearly seen the reality of what was happening.
🔍 One thing to notice
Is there one area of your life where explanation might be standing in for evidence?
Not because you’re avoiding the truth.
But because the information isn’t especially visible, especially when behaviours are small, familiar, and repeated every day.
🌍 A wider lens
Psychological research suggests that people consistently underestimate how often things go wrong. This pattern has been described as the failure gap.
Research by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and colleagues show that people dramatically underestimate rates of everyday failure. People guess that hospital workers skipped handwashing about 28 percent of the time. The actual figure is closer to 50 percent. For every five weapons undetected by airport security, participants think one sneaks by.
The researchers suggest this gap exists not because people are dishonest, but because failures are systematically underreported and harder to see. The information people rely on is incomplete, filtered, or rarely talked about. The result is a shared picture that is far more optimistic than reality.
Seen through this lens, the issue isn’t lack of honesty or effort. It’s blind spots.
When it comes to eating, movement, or habits we repeat daily, the same dynamic applies. Small, familiar behaviours don’t register as data. They don’t stand out as events. They fade into the background. We don’t count the butter. We don’t notice the extras. And explanations fill the space where clear feedback is missing.
Until we’re willing to look at what’s actually happening, change stays theoretical.
If you enjoy working with ideas like this in a slow, practical way, this is exactly the kind of inquiry we bring into The Good Life Book Club, where reading and small experiments help turn insight into something usable.
👉 Click to join the book club
And if you’d like support working honestly and kindly with patterns you’ve been living with for a long time, coaching offers a steady space to do that without judgement or pressure.
👉 Click to explore coaching