18/06/2026
The modern world has a very simple solution to most problems:
Add more.
Feeling tired? Add a morning routine.
Feeling unfit? Add a training plan.
Feeling stressed? Add a meditation app.
Feeling distracted? Add a productivity system.
Feeling behind? Add a podcast, a supplement, a tracker and a water bottle the size of a toddler.
We’re very good at adding.
We are not very good at taking away.
Engineer Leidy Klotz tells a brilliant story about building a Lego bridge with his three-year-old son. The bridge was wonky, so Klotz immediately tried to fix it by adding more bricks to one side. His son simply removed bricks from the taller side, instantly levelling it.
The better solution was subtraction.
Klotz went on to study this tendency and found that people systematically overlook the option of doing less.
Wellbeing culture often falls into the same trap. When we feel out of balance, we reach for another protocol, another tracker, goal, challenge, run… another thing to squeeze into the day.
Before long, we’ve overcomplicated the very thing that was supposed to help us feel better.
So recently, I ran a small experiment: thirty days of doing less.
Less social media.
Less screen time.
Less overcommitting.
Less pressure.
No smartwatch.
No tracking workouts.
No phone on walks.
No podcasts filling every quiet moment.
It wasn’t dramatic. I didn’t disappear to a mountain retreat or start describing myself as “deeply aligned”.
I just removed some noise.
And by doing less, I found I had more.
More quiet.
More stillness.
More peace.
More presence.
More space to hear myself think.
At the end of the thirty days, most of those habits became part of my new routine. My phone now lives in the office and is never present during family time. I only use social media a couple of times a day, but it is brief and has boundaries attached. By spending so little time on it, I focus on what I enjoy and don’t beat myself up about the rest.
After ten years of wearing a smartwatch that tracked my every move, I switched back to an analogue one. Instead of being fixated on numbers, I found a pressure I hadn’t even noticed was there had lifted. I had moved from quantity to quality. This need to put a number on things is a fairly new phenomenon - how many steps we walk a day, how many calories we consume, how many followers we have, how fast we run a marathon. The modern world rewards us when it comes to numbers. As Michael Easter writes in Scarcity Brain, we quantify everything and believe those numbers have power, but they don’t account for the full human experience.
Metrics are great. But not everything that matters can be counted, and not everything that can be counted matters.
For me, wellness has become less about adding new habits and more about letting go of things that no longer fit.
Because routines need to change as life changes. What worked in one season might become stressful in another.
So here’s an interesting thought - maybe doing less is not the opposite of wellbeing. Maybe it’s the doorway back to it.
In a world that constantly tells us to add more, optimise more and become more, there is something quietly rebellious about subtraction.
Sometimes the bravest thing is not another goal.
It’s a gap.
A pause.
A walk without your phone.
A watch that only tells the time.
A life with a little more space in it.
Hannah x
