It's not you, it's all the mthfkers around you, that are throwing you off your course

You haven’t failed at your habits. You’ve just been trying to perform them inside an environment that was never designed for you.

Sit with that for a second. Most of us have spent years, decades, for some of you, treating this backwards. We’ve made it about willpower. About discipline. I just need to try harder, care more, be more consistent. And what that does is take something that is actually a design problem and turn it into a character problem. It makes it personal. It makes it about your worth.

I want to do something different here. I want to teach you how to actually audit the environment you’re trying to build your health, your training, your food, your rest inside of.

Not vibes. Not “clean out your pantry.” Not the ‘spark joy’ method.

A real framework, with the theory underneath it, so you understand why this works, not just that it does.

Before I was coaching bodies, I was trained as a social worker to look at people inside systems and I genuinely believe this gives me such a fucking coaching EDGE.

Family systems, social systems, structural systems.

One of the foundational ideas in that world is systems theory, and I want to borrow it today because it explains why “just try harder” was always going to fail you, as it failed them, albeit in the context of substance abuse, domestic violence or the like.

Systems theory says this: behaviour isn’t just a product of the individual. It’s the output of a system. You are not a closed unit generating actions purely from willpower and character. You’re one part, one subsystem, inside a much bigger set of interacting systems: your household, your relationships, your workplace, your culture, the economic conditions you live under, the bitches you hang out with, the messages you’ve absorbed since childhood about what your body is for and who it’s supposed to please.

When something in that system is misaligned, when the structure around you asks for something your nervous system, your time, your capacity can’t actually give, the output looks like “failure.”

Missed workouts.

The food plan you couldn’t stick to.

The rest you didn’t take.

But it isn’t a failure of character. It’s a system doing exactly what a strained system does: producing friction at its weakest point, and making that weak point look like it’s you.

There’s a concept called a feedback loop, where the outputs of a system become new inputs, reinforcing the pattern. In real life it looks like this: you’re exhausted, so you skip movement. Skipping movement makes you feel worse about yourself. Feeling worse increases your stress load. Increased stress load makes you more exhausted. That’s not a discipline problem looping, that’s a system stuck in a loop, doing exactly what it’s structured to do.

If the loop is the problem, the loop is also where we intervene. Donella Meadows, one of the key thinkers in systems work, wrote about leverage points, places in a system where you can push and push and get almost nothing back, and places where a small shift changes the whole pattern downstream. Most of us were taught to push on the lowest-leverage point there is: our own motivation, in isolation, with no structural support.

I gotta tell you that is the HARDEST FUCKING PLACES TO PUSH, the hardest possible place to intervene, and we’re taught it’s the only place because that’s the place of personal agency, personal responsibility.

Today, we’re going looking for the higher-leverage points.

They live in your environment.

When people hear “audit your environment,” they picture physical space, tidy the pantry, put your shoes by the door. That’s part of it, but it’s the smallest, most visible part. There are three layers worth walking through: physical, social, and digital. Each is its own system with its own feedback loops, and each is quietly setting the terms for how hard or how easy it is for you to get your actual needs met.

Movement, food, rest, a sense of who you are outside of what you produce.

One thing before we go layer by layer: this audit is not about optimising yourself into a more productive machine. Remember from our last essay - we are not here to be optimised. That’s the capitalist, individualist version of “self-improvement,” squeeze more output from the same overloaded system and call it wellness. What we’re doing here is closer to the opposite. We’re asking: where is this system currently asking too much of me, and where can I redesign it so it gives something back?

Ask yourself, honestly:

• Is your training gear, aka the shit you need to get out the door, actually visible and accessible, or is it buried, three (hundred) decisions away from where you’d need it in the moment you have the capacity to move?

• Is your kitchen set up for the way you actually want to eat, or for a version of you with infinite executive function who plans meals a week ahead and never runs out of time? Or for the 10pm raucous raccoon you inevitably become because you haven’t eaten enough through the day?

• Does your bedroom, your living room, your workspace actually support your nervous system coming down or is it quietly signalling “stay switched on”? Lighting, noise, clutter, the presence of work in a space meant for rest, all of it is input your nervous system is reading, whether you’re consciously aware of it or not.

Here’s the systems piece: every extra step, every extra decision point between you and the thing you’re trying to do, is friction. Fuck friction, because friction compounds, not additively, but multiplicatively. Three small points of friction don’t feel three times harder; they feel like the whole system is fighting you, because each one drains from the same limited pool of decision-making capacity you have that day.

For an AuDHD brain specifically, this matters more, not less. Task initiation is already one of the more effortful parts of executive function. If the environment adds three extra steps before you can start, finding your gym shoes, finding the nutritious food, finding the quiet, you’re not lazy for not doing it.

You’re accurately responding to a system with too much resistance built in.

The fix isn’t tidiness as a virtue. It’s lowering the number of decisions between intention and action, because the decision itself is where the energy leaks out.

This layer is less visible, but it might be the loudest one operating on you.

Who are you actually getting your health information from? Not who you’d say you trust intellectually, who’s the voice in your head in the moment you’re deciding whether to eat something, skip something, push through something you shouldn’t?

Me? Your coach? Or the IG/ TikTok/ skinnytok girlies who swear it’s the 2kg DB workouts that got them looking that way?

Who do you train with, or talk about your body with? What do those dynamics actually reinforce, comparison, competition, quiet shame dressed up as banter? Or capability, curiosity, care?

Friends with similar values on a similar journey or family members who helped dictate the discordant relationship you have with your body, in the first place?

What are the unspoken rules in the rooms you spend the most time in, at work, at home, in your friendship group, about what a “disciplined” woman looks like, what a “good” body does, what rest is allowed to look like, who’s allowed to take up space and who’s expected to shrink?

Are you absorbing conversations around shredding for summer, getting skinny for a holiday? Are you hearing people talk about how ‘lazy’ they are for actually resting on the weekend when they could have been optimising?

Social environment is where feedback loops get social reinforcement, which makes them stickier. If the people around you reward hustle, reward smallness, reward self-sacrifice as a virtue, every one of those interactions reinforces the loop, even if nobody involved means any harm by it.

It’s just the water they swim in. But you don’t have to swim there too.

You’re not immune to this just because you know better intellectually. Co-regulation is real, our nervous systems entrain to the nervous systems around us, below the level of conscious thought. If you’re consistently around people who are dysregulated, self-critical, or running on empty as a badge of honour, some of that lands in your own body whether you agree with it or not.

And here’s something worth naming clearly: not everyone who’s “supportive” is actually supportive of you getting your needs met. Some people are wonderful, kind, loving people who still, without meaning to, ask more of you than your capacity can sustainably give, more time, more emotional labour, more availability, because they’ve never had to build a system that respects limits.

That’s not necessarily a character flaw in them, but it is a cost to you, and it’s one this audit needs to see clearly, because you cannot build a sustainable health practice inside a social system that’s quietly running you down faster than you can rebuild.

Then there’s the layer most of us are steeped in for hours a day, without ever once auditing it.

Your algorithm is a mirror. Whatever you scroll, whatever you linger on, even just watching without commenting or liking, is being read, fed back to you, and amplified.

It’s a closed feedback loop, running in your pocket, all day, every day.

So ask: what is your feed actually reflecting back at you about your body, your worth, your productivity? What are you quietly consenting to every time you scroll, every account you keep following even though it makes you feel worse, every comparison you let sit in your body without questioning where the standard even came from?

I want to be specific here, because a lot of what gets reflected back at us in the health and fitness space isn’t neutral, it’s inherited from a very particular set of standards.

Thin. As small as possible. Easy to look at. Productive at all costs.

A lot of that traces back to colonial and patriarchal ideas about whose body is “acceptable,” whose labour is virtuous, and who’s allowed to rest without guilt. When your feed is built on that foundation, every scroll is a small, repeated act of absorbing a standard that was never built with you, with your body, your neurology, your actual life, in mind.

This isn’t about a digital detox or throwing your phone in a drawer for a month (but by all means if you feel that’s a good idea - do it!). It’s about noticing the pattern of consent you’ve been giving without realising it, and understanding, clearly and practically, that you get to revoke it when ever you are ready.

Here’s what I want you to actually do this week. Not perfectly. Not exhaustively. Just honestly, and with the systems theory in mind.

Walk through your physical space, your social circle, and your digital feed, and ask the same two questions of each:

1. Where is there friction: where is something harder than it needs to be, more costly to your limited capacity than it should be? What do I dread? What could I live without?

2. Where is there flow: where does something already work easily, and how can I get more of that, deliberately, on purpose?

That’s it. You’re not hunting for what’s wrong with YOU. You’re mapping the system you’re operating inside of, so you can find the leverage points, the small, high-impact shifts, instead of pouring more effort into the lowest-leverage point there is, which is asking yourself to just want it more.

You were never broken. You were operating inside a set of physical, social, and digital systems that weren’t built with your brain, your body, or your actual life in mind and then you were handed advice that told you the fix was more discipline, inside the same broken system. Once you can see the system clearly, you stop trying to change yourself to survive it, and you start changing the structure so it actually supports the life and the body you’re trying to build.

This is the essay version of a podcast from Disgustingly Easy: The Podcast For The Long Game. If you loved this and want to hear more - jump over to Apple or Spotify and subscribe to get updates on episodes in the future

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