The Better Life Perspective
There may be nothing dramatically wrong with your life. Work is going reasonably well, responsibilities are being met and from the outside everything looks much as it should, yet the stress has increased, the weight has crept on and the things you keep promising yourself you will change somehow remain unchanged. This article explores whether staying where you are is genuinely what you want, or whether previous attempts have gradually made change feel harder than just carrying on with things as they are.
The Better Life Founders Journal
Are You Staying Where You Are Because Changing Has Always Felt Too Hard?
There is a point in life when being reasonably successful can make change surprisingly difficult.
Nothing is sufficiently wrong to force your hand. You have built a career, created a home, accumulated responsibilities and worked hard enough to reach a position that a younger version of you might have regarded as success. Yet somewhere along the way the working week became more demanding, the stress you once assumed was temporary became fairly normal and the extra weight around your middle proved rather more permanent than you’d like.
You know there are things you would like to change and, in all likelihood, you have tried before, maybe several times.
There have been periods when you exercised consistently, lost weight, drank less or promised yourself that work would no longer occupy quite so much of your life. You may have thought seriously about changing direction, reducing your hours, building something of your own or making more room for experiences that keep being postponed until life becomes less busy.
Then normal life returned and the old patterns came with it and after enough attempts, the conclusion can subtly change from this approach didn’t work to perhaps I simply can’t change this. The belly fat becomes something you have, pressure becomes part of the job and those larger ideas about what you might do next begin to feel increasingly unrealistic.
Carrying on starts to look less like a decision and more like common sense.
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Does this feel familiar?
You know there are parts of your life you would like to change, yet previous attempts have rarely lasted long enough to convince you that this time would be different.
Maybe staying where you are feels easier because experience has taught you that changing it is hard work.
Discover how Better Life can help you design what comes next →
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At Better Life, we think there is an important difference between being content with the life you have and becoming accustomed to it.
We call the latter The Familiarity Trap. It is the point at which the life you know begins to feel safer than the life you might prefer, partly because everything around you has become organised to keep the current version running. Your diary supports it, your habits support it, your income may depend upon it and the people around you understandably organise parts of their lives around it too.
Even apparently simple changes can therefore become difficult. Losing weight may mean creating head space for better food and more motivation for regular exercise inside a working week that has spent years pushing both aside. Reducing stress may require more than learning how to relax if the structure of your week continues recreating the same pressure.
Sometimes we keep trying to change the symptom while preserving every condition that produced it.
You decide to lose the belly fat, but the working pattern remains unchanged. You promise to exercise three times a week, yet those sessions are still the first things removed when somebody else needs your time. You try to manage stress without asking whether parts of the life creating that stress still deserve the priority you give them.
Previous failures then become evidence that changing is difficult when, in reality, the change may simply have been fighting against the rest of your life.
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Better Life does not begin by telling you to reinvent yourself.
It begins by understanding what you genuinely want to keep, what is no longer working and why previous attempts to change have struggled to survive the life around them.
See how Better Life helps you design your next chapter around the life you actually want →
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One useful way to test where you stand is to move the decision five years forwards.
Imagine your working life remains broadly as demanding, your weight stays roughly where it is, the stress continues at its current level and the things you currently intend to do when life settles down are still waiting.
Would that life be terrible? Probably not.
But would you be pleased with it?
You may discover that 80 per cent of your current life is exactly what you still want, which would be a very good answer. Designing your next chapter does not require dramatic reinvention. Perhaps the remaining 20 per cent means losing the weight that has bothered you for years, protecting time to exercise, reducing the operational demands of work or finally giving proper space to something you continue describing as important.
The difficulty is often knowing which change deserves to come first.
Our in-app Coach Max begins by understanding the life you are trying to change within, including your health, work, stress, routines, responsibilities and previous attempts, then helps you identify where changing one part of the picture might make several others easier.
The belly fat may be the reason you arrive, while the real blocker is a working week leaving too little room for sleep, exercise and better food. Stress may feel like the problem, while the deeper issue is how much of your time is being absorbed by responsibilities you no longer consciously choose.
There is nothing wrong with staying where you are. You may look carefully at the life you have built and decide that much of it is exactly where you want to be. You may see areas that you’d really like to get on top of, once and for all.
That then means arriving five years from now without the same stress, the same weight and many other changes you’d like to make, simply because you decided that carrying on as the previous five years did not mean they were the same as the five before.
Your Next Step
If you have been thinking about changing something for longer than you care to admit, Better Life starts by understanding what has been keeping you where you are.
Through Coach Max, we help you identify your real priorities and build a personalised roadmap for the next chapter you actually want.
Design Your Next Chapter →
The Better Life Founders Journal
Written while suspicious of any five-year plan whose main strategy is waiting for life to become less busy.