Why Your Life Feels Harder Than It Should

For most of Q2, I felt like I was treading water, barely keeping my head afloat. I moved in April (and have very much so been loving every second), my work schedule was BUSY, and I was traveling constantly for weddings, much of it cross-country which gets old when you have to go back and forth a bunch of times. There were weeks packed with meetings, filming and flying, and after three months of operating that way, I was so overstimulated and having a much harder time sticking to the routines that I rely on to stay sane.

Any time I am feeling overstimulated like this, I find myself reaching for my phone ALL THE TIME throughout the day. Reaching for my phone is usually one of the clearest signs that I’m stressed or anxious, so the fact that I was doing it habitually should have told me something. Instead, I kept waking up already tired and assuming that I needed to try harder to get myself back on track instead of just taking a beat.

For a while, I thought the solution was more discipline. I tried waking up earlier, tightening up my morning routine and spending less time on my phone, which is basically a checklist of all the things I talk about constantly and know usually make me feel better. The problem was that discipline wasn’t actually the issue. I am already a disciplined person, and even when I followed through on those habits, they weren’t meaningfully changing the way I felt.

What I eventually realized was that my life had accumulated more friction than I was comfortable with, and I hadn’t noticed it happening.

Friction is any tiny point of resistance that makes the regular parts of your day (or life, really) require more effort than they should. It can look like digging through your closet every morning because you can’t find anything to wear, standing in front of the fridge at 7 p.m. with no idea what to make or having 37 tabs open on your computer because you keep telling yourself you’ll come back to them tomorrow.

None of these problems are particularly serious, which is exactly why they are so easy to ignore. You adapt to them, build your routines around them and eventually stop recognizing them as problems at all. Over time, though, they start to feel like a million open loops floating around in your brain, and you can put an enormous amount of effort into your day while still ending it with the sense that there is so much more you should have done.

Once I started paying attention to this, I realized that many of the systems that have made the biggest difference in how I operate have had less to do with becoming extraordinarily productive and more to do with reducing the number of decisions and points of resistance scattered throughout my day. When life feels harder than it should, the answer is not always to demand more discipline from yourself; sometimes, you need to make your life easier to live.

I’m not approaching this through the lens of decluttering because that is an entirely different conversation and one that I have, quite frankly, beat the dead horse on (see here and here). What I’m talking about is much more specific: whether your physical environment is cutting down the number of decisions you have to make each day, or adding to them.

For example: I have three phone chargers: one by my bed, one on my desk and one in my car. This is not because I love cords; it is because I never want to waste time thinking about where my charger is. I also have a purse drawer next to my front door with compartments for my keys, headphones and wallet, so when I walk in, everything goes directly into that drawer, and when I leave, I know exactly where to find it.

The same logic applies throughout my apartment. My dishes live in the cabinet directly above the dishwasher because it makes unloading them easier, and the pans I use every day are stored across from the stove instead of buried underneath all my other pots and pans (which I need to declutter anyways). When my Brita gets too low to fill another glass, I refill it immediately… stuff like this. We all know it’s simple to do, but in the moment we tell ourselves we’ll do it later, and then we don’t. Don’t lie to me!

None of these choices is about creating the most aesthetic or perfectly organized apartment. Sometimes I think we’ve lost the plot in terms of making every single aspect of life feel aesthetic. What they are meant to improve is the function of my environment by eliminating the small moments throughout the day when I would otherwise need to search for something, decide where something belongs or improvise a solution to a recurring problem. Any one of those moments is insignificant on its own, but repeated all day, every day, they add more to your mental load than you probably realize.

The easiest way to notice this type of friction is to pay attention to how you naturally move through your home. Think about the FLOW. When you walk through the front door, what are you holding and where do you put it? When you leave, what do you need to grab and how often are you searching for it? If you use the same pan every day, why is it buried at the bottom of a pile, and why are products you never touch taking up the most valuable space in your bathroom?

Your home should support the way you actually live, not the way you think you should live or the way someone else has arranged a similar space on Pinterest. Rearranging where things live according to your own habits and flow is one of the easiest ways to make daily life feel lighter, and it’s free.

The goal isn’t to make your space look more organized. It’s to make your life require less thought.

One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that small decisions don’t matter enough to require any planning. We assume that questions like what to eat for breakfast, what to wear to work, which workout to do, whether today should be a laundry day or when to stop for gas are too minor to think about in advance. While none of those decisions are particularly difficult, they are recurring, which means they continue to demand an answer from you over and over again.

The decision itself is not tiring because it is important; it becomes tiring because you have to keep making it. This is why defaults can make such an enormous difference. A default is a baseline option that you can return to when you don’t have the time, energy or desire to come up with something better.

My default meal is some version of a tofu stir-fry because I almost always have a vegetable, a sauce and tofu or beans available. It may not be the most fabulous thing I eat all week, but it does what it needs to do, takes very little time and doesn’t require me to really think. When I worked a 9-5, I had a few default outfits that I knew made me look and feel good, so if I was running late, had a presentation or just needed a little extra confidence, I already knew what I was going to wear.

You can apply this same idea to your workouts by choosing a class you already love, a video you can do at home or a familiar walking route that you return to when you feel bleh and simply need to move.

You can also create default routines, like washing your sheets every Sunday, doing a quick closing shift each night or emptying the dishwasher every morning, so these recurring parts of your life become something you do automatically instead of something you continually need to remember and negotiate with yourself about.

Defaults are not meant to make your life boring or rigid, nor do they prevent you from cooking an exciting recipe, putting together a creative outfit or trying a new workout when you have the desire and capacity to do so. They just give you a lowest-hanging-fruit option for the days when life is pushing you over the edge, which means you no longer have to produce an original answer every time a predictable question comes up.

A default is not a rule. It is an answer you have already chosen for the moments when you don’t want to choose again.

Many of us put a significant amount of energy into keeping our homes organized while allowing our phones and computers to become complete disasters, even though we spend a huge portion of our lives in those digital spaces. A bunch of unread notifications, open tabs, random screenshots and files scattered across your desktop may not be physically sitting on your floor, but your brain still registers all of it as unfinished business, creating a constant low-level hum living in the background.

On my phone, nearly all notifications are turned off except for texts and calls. During the workday, I use Do Not Disturb and allow only a few people to break through, which doesn’t mean that I ignore everyone or never respond to messages…. it just means that I choose when I am available instead of allowing every incoming notification to decide for me and pull me out of whatever I am trying to complete.

I have also organized my phone into three primary screens: a personal home screen, a work screen and one for all the rest of the apps I use less frequently. My photo albums have a system, too: screenshots get organized or deleted in the moment, and finished videos go into a dedicated folder so I am never searching through thousands of photos for the piece of content I need to post that day.

My computers follow the same general logic. My bookmark bar includes only the sites I use regularly, my desktop stays clean, my downloads are cleared out every week and the dock holds only the apps I use every day. I intentionally do not keep Messages pinned there because it gets distracting and I know that seeing a new message makes me feel like I should immediately stop what I am doing to respond.

Digital organization is probably not the sexiest advice I have ever given, but it is free, it doesn’t involve an enormous amount of time and it can turn your devices back into tools instead of allowing them to remain a source of constant overwhelm. Your brain doesn’t process each notification, open tab or random file as a completely separate issue; it experiences all of them together as a pile of unfinished business, even if that pile happens to live inside your phone rather than in the middle of your living room.

Some friction has very little to do with organization and much more to do with the things that annoy you repeatedly but never become urgent enough to address. It might be the jeans you don’t like but continue trying to make work and yet you wonder why your outfit never looks how you want it to. Or the chair you sit in every day even though it hurts your back or the broken cabinet door that has been there for so long you don’t notice it anymore. Or this could be the friend you have started avoiding instead of having an uncomfortable conversation with or the workout you dread every time you walk through the door.

Because none of these things has an obvious deadline attached to it, you adapt instead of dealing with it. You shift around the broken cabinet, adjust the jeans all day, keep working from the uncomfortable chair or rearrange your schedule to avoid the person you are frustrated with. Eventually, you have built entire routines around tolerating things that don’t work for you, and while each issue may seem too small to matter, their combined effect has a very real impact on how you feel and operate.

Some of these problems are obviously easier to fix than others, and replacing a pair of jeans is not comparable to moving out of an apartment you hate or changing the shape of a friendship.

The larger principle, however, is the same: you are allowed to edit and refine your life, and you may need to become a little more ruthless about doing it.

When I say ruthless, I do not mean that you need to be mean, impulsive or throw away anything that causes a minor inconvenience. I mean holding yourself accountable to doing the uncomfortable thing that will improve your life instead of adapting to what continues to make it worse. The goal is not to create a life without inconvenience, because that is obviously impossible; it is to stop treating recurring, fixable frustration as something you simply have to live with.

There is a difference between accepting that life will sometimes be inconvenient and building your life around problems you could actually solve.

The worst kind of friction happens when the life you are trying to maintain does not fit the person you actually are. You force yourself into a 15-step morning routine because the internet convinced you that productive people need one, or you continue pursuing a goal you no longer care about because you have already announced it and invested time into it. You may also find yourself living according to expectations that were never really yours, continually trying to become a completely different person instead of building better systems for the person who already exists.

There are, of course, times when growth requires discomfort, and I am not suggesting that we should organize our lives so nothing ever challenges us. There is a meaningful difference, though, between the discomfort that helps you grow and the constant resistance that comes from shape-shifting your life around an identity that is not authentic to you. Trying to maintain routines, goals, relationships or expectations that fundamentally do not fit will exhaust you in a way that no amount of calendar organization can solve.

This kind of friction does not have a quick organizational fix because it requires you to be honest about where you are forcing yourself into a routine that has never worked, which goals you are holding onto because changing your mind feels embarrassing and where you may be performing a version of yourself at work, in your relationships or throughout your daily life that you no longer want to maintain.

We need to normalize changing our minds, adjusting the system and creating lives that work for us even when those lives do not resemble the ones someone else would choose. Building a life that fits you is not the same as refusing to grow; in many cases, it is what finally gives you the capacity to grow in a direction you actually care about.

We have become so obsessed with optimizing ourselves that our first instinct is almost always to ask how we can become more disciplined, productive, efficient or motivated. None of those qualities is inherently bad (obviously), and discipline has made my life better in countless ways, but if you are already trying hard and your life still feels harder than it should, demanding even more from yourself may not be the answer.

A better question is:

What can I change, shift or remove to make my life feel easier?

Sometimes that means moving the pan you use every day, turning off a notification or deciding on a default meal before you are standing in front of the fridge starving. Other times it means making the appointment you have been avoiding, fixing the cabinet that annoys you every morning or finally admitting that a routine, goal or expectation has never really worked for you.

You do not have to earn an easier life by first becoming a more optimized person. Often, the most productive change you can make is simply removing the friction that made everything feel so difficult in the first place.

Take ten minutes and work through these questions without trying to overhaul your entire life at once:

• Your physical space: What do you search for, move around or get annoyed by almost every day?

• Your recurring decisions: What choice are you tired of making that could become a default?

• Your digital life: Which notifications, tabs, files or apps create a constant sense of unfinished business?

• What you tolerate: What keeps bothering you simply because fixing it has never felt urgent?

• Your identity: Which routine, goal or expectation are you maintaining even though it no longer fits you?

You do not need to fix everything on this list today. Choose the one point of friction you encounter most often and start there, because a change does not have to be major or dramatic to make your life easier.

What is one small point of friction you could remove from your life this week? Tell me in the comments - I’m curious which minor things are making the biggest difference for you right now!

xx

Michela