Here you can find snippets of, and links to, all my Substack newsletters since I started writing them in spring 2022.
2025
A survey of my web presence… …in case it helps you with yours (28 November 2025)
Jinny Jana’s Giant Journeys Written by my mother and published by me (28 October 2025)
This weeks sees a major UK literary event taking place in Ivybridge, Devon: the launch of Jinny Jana’s Giant Journeys by Sue Blackmore!
In the spring of 2024, I sent my mother an email offering to publish her children’s story. It was a Friday night in Santa Barbara, California. I’d been on campus at UCSB all day and had stayed late into the evening for a concert. Back home, I had a glass of wine with some nibbles leftover from the writing workshop I’d run that afternoon. In my tired and tipsy state, I felt inspired to write to her, and a formulation of the purpose of my self-publishing “imprint” came easily: “intelligent weird books for and/or about intelligent weird girls and women (and other humans) who often don’t find it easy being alive”.
House versus boat? Autumnal musings on caring and commitment (14 October 2025)
First thing one morning a few weeks ago (when I first drafted this message before letting sit longer than intended!), I went out to the marina loos as I normally do, and then because it had been raining masses over the past week, and because the first red-gold leaves were mixed in with the raindrops, I took an enormous old bath towel (dyed dark blue in patches from a particularly messy iteration of hair colouring a few years ago!) and wiped off the whole of my narrowboat’s roof—all 40ish by 6ish foot of it.
Switching to Substack This newsletter is becoming The Tamarisk Letters (2 October 2025)
Lots of people seem to have been moving over to Substack from other newsletter platforms lately, and I’m about to join them. Mailchimp has served me well: It’s got me from never having thought of having a newsletter to discovering that it’s a genre I love. But I’ve also been finding that Mailchimp is designed for more commercial applications than I want or need (with a price tag to match), and over time it’s also come to seem more of a shame that it doesn’t create a public archive of posts—I suppose the blogger in me continues to find that odd!
How did/will you decide what to do today? My daily planning/tracking methods, and two principles that may be useful for yours (14 August 2025)
How do you decide what to do with your day? We all have our systems, more or less implicit or explicit, evolved over the years through some mixture of circumstance and deliberation, and through particular ratios of autonomy versus constraint and “work” versus other parts of life.
Both academia, which used to be my professional context, and the freelance life, which now is, offer a lot of freedom and not much pre-given structure; and I live alone or with my husband, without children or pets or other dependents. So I’ve been very near the “total freedom” end of the spectrum for all of my adult life, which I suppose is one reason I’ve put such a lot of thought and work into evolving my own methods for deciding what I’m going to do on a given day: Few answers come readymade.
Sludge, Facebook, and feedback dynamics An upcycled pair of Psychology Today posts on magical cascades of change (06 August 2025)
This phase of my life feels like it’s quite centrally about refusing what I’ve come to call “sludge”*: the stuff in our days that drags us down. With my career coach Jennifer during my Californian 2024, a recurring theme was sludge and how to get rid of it, or transform it—or just accept that every life must contain a certain amount of it. In one remarkable Zoom session in Santa Barbara, she had me walking around my room, letting the grey blobby carpet reveal more about what sludge is actually like, imagining what it would mean for these sturdy feet to find their way to other terrain—onto sand, grass, mountain rock—or into a void filled with sunshine from the open window. And all kinds of clarity flowed from that session, including heady desert lyric-writing about the sunny void that’s been a companion in my ears ever since.
Twenty-two years, two books, and a pair of withering reviews The strange comfort of perspective on getting panned in print. (31 May 2025)
It’s been a while since my last newsletter, for a few reasons:
- Given the floods of “content” being chucked at us all the time from all quarters, it seems unkind and irresponsible to send you something just for the sake of it, rather than waiting to actually have something to say.
- I’ve been incubating and progressing projects rather than bringing them to finished shareable states.
- I’ve been hovering somewhere between want and should about writing something about what the Trump administration is doing to the USA, and not quite knowing how.
- Life has been pretty damn lovely lately, but when I find myself thinking of things I could say about that, they feel as though they’re veering towards the genre of newsletter that’s primarily about envy elicitation.
Do we dare to make healthcare more disobedient? Paternalist beige works less well every year (17 April 2025)
A couple of weeks ago, a recovery coaching client and I ate doughnuts together on Zoom. She brought a big artisanal-looking chocolate-coated one. I had a cheap and childish 4-pack of sprinkles-covered ones. It was 10 am for her and 6 pm for me, and she’d decided on this as a way to help her eat 1) something long forbidden at 2) a difficult time of day. It turned out to help her a lot, perhaps even more than we’d expected, with getting out of a little stuck patch and reminding her of the freedom that comes from eating more than she thinks she should, and from breaking with aplomb the rules that have long been binding her.
I was aware, while nipping into a shop to get the doughnuts that morning, and while comparing our finds, and while eating, and while making my dinner afterwards, of how grateful I am to be doing this kind of work. So many people who do anything with health are doing the opposite: defaulting to fewer doughnuts and more jogging, reinforcing platitudes about health and healthy eating rather than helping individuals forge powerfully personalized concepts for themselves. I couldn’t do that kind of work, at least not without killing off a significant chunk of myself.
Dream Morning discount ending—and pleasure What makes a pleasure a good kind of pleasure? (25 February 2025)
I’ll just start by saying that if you’re interested in my Design Your Dream Morning course, I’ve just extended the 50% discount for another few days, because I meant to write with a little reminder about it ending last week and didn’t have time. […]
For now, I want to talk a bit more about pleasure, of both morning and nighttime varieties. At the end of my last newsletter, I said that when I leapt into the hot tub one morning only a few minutes before I had to be on a Zoom call, the only point was the pleasure.
I was contrasting this kind of morning with the kind that was possible for me when I had anorexia: the morning as a featureless first section of a day to be survived until I could eat again, right before I slept again.
Dream Morning discount code and sleep Two things I forgot, linked by a hot tub (8 February 2025)
I realized yesterday thanks to a message from a reader that in my excitement to share my Dream Morning course with you the other day, I forgot to actually include the 50% discount code. […]
I also remembered that I never shared with you a miniseries of blog posts on eating disorders and sleep that I published on Psychology Today at the end of the year. […]
And, well, then I wondered how I could, for the purpose of this newsletter, connect up these two items in a more interesting way than just “things I forgot”. And sitting in my parents’ hot tub this morning, I thought: This right here is plenty enough connection: the contrast between the dream morning and the unwell no-longer-asleep.
Design Your Dream Morning launches today! Helping you walk a confident line between realism and idealism (4 February 2025)
Today I’m excited to be launching a self-guided course called Design Your Dream Morning. The second little taster I’d like to give you (yesterday’s was the 6 dimensions of morning loveliness) is the distinction between the ultimate dream and the maximum viable ideal.
We often think of realism as a great virtue, but it’s more or less useless if it’s not preceded and guided by idealism. If you only ever conform to the status quo without having bothered to ask yourself whether it deserves conforming to, then you probably condemn yourself and/or others to something much worse than it might otherwise have been.
Six dimensions of morning loveliness A scoring system for our morning routines (3 February 2025)
Tomorrow I’m launching a course called Design Your Dream Morning, and the point of it is to help you ask the right questions about how your days start, and then answer them in ways that make your days feel better: feel more like how you want them to be rather than how they’ve just somehow ended up being.
To give you a little taster of what this means in practice, one thing the course introduces is the idea of 6 key dimensions for rating your morning: simple aspects of goodness in a morning routine that you can give scores out of 10 to. The course helps you explore why they matter and why our scores are often lower than they could be—and how to get them higher.
The intrigue of other people’s mornings What festive visits to the in-laws can teach us about ourselves (2 February 2025)
After a beautiful California year, I’ve been happy to return to the extreme Englishness of living on my boat on the Thames in Oxford. I flew back just before Christmas, and visits to my parents and my husband’s were a good way to settle back into British (English and Welsh!) life for a while. One thing I like about staying with them is that it’s a chance to parachute into some morning routines that aren’t my own.
The bits of other people’s day you don’t usually get to see are always the most interesting: the little routines they have for tea-making or breakfast or their afternoon nap or how they relax after dinner. Pre-bed rituals can be interesting, but for my money the place you learn the most is first thing in the morning.
The words that make us think and feel From the LA fires to eating disorder treatment (23 January 2025)
For the past fortnight, I’ve been grieving a burning Los Angeles from a frosty Oxford. It’s been agonizing watching the ruin of places I’ve loved and lived close to—the human-made and the wilderness. It’s been the kind of agony that is partly about the death of a dream, the death of the idea of a place as well as its reality. The LA I fell in love with, the LA of the mountains and the palm trees and the Pacific and the freeways, and especially the mountains, probably can’t exist anymore as an idea—not quite how it was.
2024
Why to care about your sense of smell The weirdly widespread health implications of our olfactory systems (12 December 2024)
If you like wine—and if you don’t!—you’ve probably rolled your eyes at the descriptions you find on labels: notes of ripe apricot, hints of beeswax, overtones of pencil shavings… It’s easy to assume that these are more or less made up, and it’s also easy to experience the power of suggestion: Once you read that there’s meant to be lychee in this sip, you can’t untaste it. All this is fun, and it turns out that it’s probably also rather important.
Ready to be disobediently grateful? On avoidance, festive rule-breaking, and losing your teeth (27 November 2024)
In my last newsletter, I shared historian Timothy Snyder’s idea “Do not obey in advance”. Not obeying in advance is, he says, a crucial form of resistance against political tyrants. Obeying in advance means guessing at what power might reward and punish in the future, and acting accordingly. Not obeying in advance means spotting our tendencies to do that, and acting otherwise.
Do not obey in advance On the power of wide-awake pre-emptive disobedience (4 November 2024)
Last week I came across historian Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. This is the first lesson:
Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
A roundup of new things to read Weekly reviews, Kafka, ED book ethics, lifting… (21 October 2024)
The past few weeks have been one of those phases where lots of little things have come out, so I’ve got plenty to share with you.
This feeling of lots of coming-to-fruition after a long time of feeling like nothing much is happening makes me think of a line from anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston: “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” You can say the same of months, of weeks, and of days. And you can also shift question-asking and -answering to something more like cultivating and reaping. I find questions about life seasons fascinating, at all points on the literal to metaphorical spectrum: from my feeling that having spent the first few decades of my life in a British climate, I have such a great hunger for sun that I wonder whether I could ever sate it; to other people’s seasonal life/career models (like Ramit Sethi’s Growth, Lifestyle, and Reinvention triad, a system that in a previous newsletter I talked about really really wanting to cheat); to other kinds of rhythmic cycles of energetic doing and reflective processing.
How to ethics-test a recovery memoir If you finish writing a book and realize you need to find out how it might land… (5 September 2024)
It’s quite a daunting feeling, realizing that you need to run an experiment on the book you’ve just written. I mean, “need” is always relative, but when your book is an anorexia recovery memoir and your previous research makes blindingly clear how often such books do a lot more harm than good, then the need can seem pretty pressing. Strange, with hindsight, not to have thought about it sooner. But I had a couple of excuses: 1) I’d never intended for the book to be a memoir—not least because it’s always seemed to me a bit of a suspect genre, in ways that that previous research confirmed. And 2) I’d been trying so hard and creatively to prevent it from being some boringly triggering account of an illness that I’d sort of ended up forgetting that I might not have succeeded.
The Very Hungry Anorexic: my recovery memoir is out now ...and it has scientific evidence behind it! (22 August 2024)
It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally published a book about anorexia. Well, about recovery from it.
The book is called The Very Hungry Anorexic. It started life as what was meant to be the book version of my blog. Then it metamorphosed into something uncomfortably close to being a recovery memoir—a genre that I’ve been ambivalent about (to put it euphemistically) ever since I knew it existed, and that my own research has given plenty more grounds to treat as suspect.
Despite being so uncomfortably memoir-like, I’m pleased with how this book has turned out. I think/hope it conveys something about the existential drama involved in getting better from anorexia nervosa: the way the world’s simplest medicine, food, transforms a life, over the course of a few years, from a cold dark monotonous thing to something replete with energy and desire and complexities.
A simple body lists idea How are you looking after your body, and how are you pushing it too hard? (8 July 2024)
A day or two after a chat with a friend about his health, I was in a yoga class. My mind was drifting around in that nice slow aimless way that yoga is good for, and I had a simple idea. It was an idea for a way to take stock of how we treat our bodies, and it was one that’s turned out quietly fertile for me the past few weeks.
The idea is simply to make a list of the ways in which you currently look after your body. I found it amazing how much came to mind when I gave myself an invitation to ask that question.
100 years since Kafka’s death—something for you to read, and draw Two short stories about strange creatures (4 June 2024)
A hundred years ago yesterday, Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis in an Austrian sanatorium. I’d marked the date in my calendar and made a point of reading some of his writing over breakfast and lunch. I wasn’t planning on posting anything here, partly since Oxford Uni has been flooding me with Kafka centenary emails for months already and I’m not convinced that the world needs more dead literary celebrity spam.
But then I read some little things of his, and I was struck all over again by just how wonderfully he writes.
Conference manners and a textbook on consciousness Reflections on a desert roadtrip and rudeness (5 May 2024)
Last week I was at the big biennial American consciousness conference in Tucson, Arizona. My mother Sue and I went two years ago to scope things out for the fourth edition of our consciousness textbook. This time, she was planning to go with my stepfather Adam and without me, but then they invited me to join them, and my love of a roadtrip won out over my lack of any burning desire to hear more about consciousness for a while.
Recovery podcasts and letting go A couple of eating disorder recovery resources for you (9 April 2024)
This week’s instalment is eating-disorder themed—or rather, recovery themed. I have a couple of things to share.
The first is a new webpage offering a great roundup of ED recovery podcasts. I can call it great without sounding immodest because it was created not by me but by a former coaching client, Sarah. During our 3-month follow-up call, she decided to create a “Finishing well” plan with deadlines for wrapping up the remaining parts of the recovery process, and she included a section called “Focus on living life (without an ED)”. One aspect of this involved shifting her online habits away from recovery-centric material by doing a social media cleanse and finding podcasts on other topics.
The Shellfish Nest I’ve just published my first children’s story (28 March 2024)
In January 2021, I had an idea for a children’s story. I started writing it that summer, and I wrote a couple of chapters for the elder of my two nieces, and she read the first and may or may not have read the second.
And then life got in the way and not much happened with the story until last summer, when I decided to devote a few days off work to getting back into it, upriver on my narrowboat north of Oxford with my partner. After those first few long sessions with coffee and beer and wine and crisps on the riverbank, I managed to quite reliably make time for a writing session every weekend, and I finished it just in time to give it to her (and a few other people) for Christmas.
Sunday yoga My Californian yoga teacher in the comfort of your own home (22 February 2024)
One of the loveliest things about my weekday routines at the moment is a fairly frequent 2.5-hour early-evening sequence that looks like: bike ride to gym + lifting + yoga + swim + hot tub + bike ride home. My gym is great in all kinds of ways, including having an extremely pretty pool area and an extremely hot hot tub.
It also has three great regular yoga teachers who teach at 5:30 Monday to Thursday.
So at least a couple of days a week, occasionally all four M-Th, I’ll aim to cycle over there for about 5 o’clock (it normally ends up being about 10 past) and do a mini bit of lifting (maybe some bench or Romanian deadlift, or overhead squats if I’m feeling energetic) before the class. Having the 5:30 deadline means I do actually stop at 4:45 or so more often than not. Or if not, I’ll just skip the lifting and head straight to the yoga.
“You are what you do” Mapping the layers of your life’s roles, goals, and tasks (23 January 2024)
I know you’ll have had a million “how to start the year well” tips in your inbox over the past month, so this may be the last thing you want, just when you thought the tide was finally receding. But I’d like to offer you an exercise I find works well at any time of the year when you want to zoom out a little and do some stock-taking.
2023
Bodybuilding and regret: some end-of-year reading matter Anticipated regret and a podcast critique (21 December 2023)
For some end-of-year reading cheer, I’m sharing some blog posts I’ve published recently. They include a Psychology Today series on how to avoid future regret and a little one-off on my personal blog (a slightly motley collection of things I think PT won’t accept or I’d rather keep for myself) on how not to interview someone with an eating disorder about their bodybuilding career and fitness business.
How to make a plan for next week that you’ll actually follow When did you last end the week with the satisfaction of having done everything you decided you would? (24 November 2023)
I call this weekly zooming-out that I’ve been devoting recent newsletters to the “weekly review”, but its pre-view part is just as important as the re-view. The point, after all, is to take your learnings from the week that was and apply them immediately to the design of the week that will be.
The preview part is the element that’s probably changed most in my reviews over the years since I first tried some rudimentary ones in 2015. Previewing the 7 days ahead includes asking both the what questions (“what’s the ask for the week ahead?”) and the how (“how am I actually going to make these things happen?”). In this instalment I’ll focus on the what: the choice of what makes it onto your agenda for the next 7 days.
Avoiding staleness in your weekly reviews How much variety is the right amount for you? (24 October 2023)
My late summer was a bit of a whirlwind, in ways that I may report on in future newsletters! In the meantime, I thought I’d share the next in my ongoing series on how to make a weekly review habit work well—whether in the context of a specific life endeavour (e.g. a career transition, recovery process, or new relationship) or simply to help life tick along with a satisfying feeling of giving time and energy to the right things week by week.
So far, I’ve talked about the usefulness of an instruction-to-self to *not* do something particular this week, and about downsizing a habit like the weekly review one to help it survive. (If you want a recap of the basics, see https://troscianko.com/weekly-review-template/, with password 45-minute-review.) This time, I’ll say a bit about variety versus consistency in the question-asking.
How tiny is too tiny for a weekly review? Downscaling to keep the habit going (8 August 2023)
One of the best ways to get a new habit off the ground is to make it tiny. Time is precious, and it’s natural to be sceptical, and hesitant, about things that seem likely to cost a lot of it.
So if a weekly review of some kind is the habit to be coaxed into existence, or defended against the week’s many reasons—or excuses—not to bother, then a good question to ask is: How small can it be?
“Do *not* do x this week”—and other ways to help things happen Dripfeeding weekly-review tips (2 July 2023)
How was your June? For me, it was a busy month. And whenever things are busier than usual, the weekly-review habit is easier than usual to not bother with, and more important than usual to bother with. Protecting the Sunday evening reflective patches let me avoid a nasty spiral into getting more tired and less efficient and making poorer decisions and so getting even tireder. Still, though, there were things I wasn’t doing that I wanted to be, and things I didn’t want to be doing that I was.
Writing boats and painting books, revisited Things it helps to know (and accept) about big projects (22 March 2023)
This winter, lots of annoying little bubbles have appeared in the paint on the roof of my boat. Like this: […] Some came last winter too, but there are many more this year. The worry is that they mean rust is forming in the steel underneath all the paint layers. Last year I asked my neighbour who knows everything about paint, and he said it might just be micro-blistering, which is fairly innocuous and happens if small amounts of moisture get in amongst the layers of primer or paint when you’re applying them. (If you’re DIYing this year, paintman.co.uk has lots more helpful detail on how to avoid this!) They mostly went away when the weather warmed up last spring; only a few of them collapsed and left broken paint circles behind.
Lining up wants and shoulds on an Atlantic writing retreat January in Madeira, updated textbook as bonus prize? (24 January 2023)
Have you ever done a writing retreat? Does it appeal? A colleague I Zoomed with last night said that when she travels, she wants to explore and be away from work, so a retreat somewhere lovely wouldn’t be right for her.
I realized how different my favourite kind of travel is: It’s the kind that takes me somewhere that makes the working routines even lovelier.
2022
10 steps to a New Year’s resolution that will work Take an hour on New Year’s Day to do it differently this year? (31 December 2022)
A few days ago I suggested that for any resolutions you’re thinking about setting for 2023, it could be good to help “what I want” and “what I ought to do” get better aligned than they might be by default.
Today I thought I’d say a bit more about how to do that and then translate that thing you both really want to do and think will do you good into reality.
So, here are my 10 steps to making a New Year’s resolution really work well for you this year.
How to do New Year’s resolutions better Try not making it a want/ought battleground? (28 December 2022)
I’m not quite sure where New Year’s resolutions sit these days on the spectrum from “thing people do” to “thing people laugh about the clichéd idea of doing”. Has the whole thing just become too much of a parody of itself to even bother with?
Maybe, maybe not. There simply is something about the change in the calendar that feels like a fitting time to reflect and maybe draw a little line and do things differently. Probably if you run a gym or sell salads you rely quite a bit on the fact that New Year’s resolutions are not passé. And probably if you sell alcohol you rely quite a bit on the fact that New Year’s resolutions don’t tend to last past January—maybe aren’t even designed to.
Where do your ideas come from—and what do they turn into? Growth, lifestyle, reinvention, and cheating the system (28 October 2022)
Do you have an anchor example that all your thinking tends to come back round to? A reliable touchpaper topic for thoughts you haven’t had before?
For me, for anything about how literature works it’s been Franz Kafka’s weird stories and novels; pretty much every new idea I’ve had about text/reader interactions has emerged from reflecting on something striking about how he writes, whether it’s how his kind of narrative perspective slips and slides so disorientingly or how bizarrely little—or just bizarrely—he describes most people and objects and spaces.
Which career season would you choose? Growth, lifestyle, reinvention, and cheating the system (30 September 2022)
On Monday, in a Barnes & Noble, I met one of my idols.
Well, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but Ramit Sethi has had more definable an impact on my career and life than most other people I could name who aren’t close friends and family. A friend recommended his newsletter to me back in 2017, I read his emails without a huge amount of interest and nearly unsubscribed a few times, and then at some point a few years later they started resonating.
Restaurant menus and free will Heading out this weekend? (26 August 2022)
At one of my favourite Oxford establishments the other night, the drinks list had many tempting things on it. After reading and deliberating with my companion for a few minutes, I narrowed it down to two and then stopped—knowing that when the barman asked, one cocktail name or the other would come out of my mouth.
Getting started Half-day writing event 1 September (11 August 2022)
Procrastination is “the act of needlessly delaying tasks to the point of experiencing subjective discomfort”.* Which makes it sound pretty incomprehensible why anyone would ever do it.
Of course, “needless” is a loaded term, and there are all kinds of reasons why we inflict this variety of unpleasantness on ourselves—everything from simple tiredness to the desire to keep this project in the state of beautifully potential perfection that it’ll lose as soon as I actually get started.
It’s funny how reliably and rapidly the discomfort tends to dissolve once we do begin, though.
Saying no Why is it so hard?! (4 August 2022)
When did you last say no to someone who asked you to do something? My latest example was harder than it should’ve been, and more satisfying than I expected it to be.
Writing sprint, reading group, and coaching This week I want to share a few bits of news with you, about a writing event, reading for wellbeing, and career coaching (30 May 2022)
In a few weeks (20-24 June), I’m running my first writing event not tied to a university. It’s happening in person at Pembroke College, Oxford (so OK, it’s still tied to the university physically, but not existentially!), and it’s one of my favourite formats: a week-long sprint that ends with everyone (including me) sending a completed writing project to their designated recipient before we all go and have a cocktail together. (The drinking bit is new; how nice to be off Zoom at last!) If you’re in or near Oxford and have a writing project that isn’t getting done, it’d be lovely to have you sprint with us.
Help me design a “Design your dream morning” course Like many people, I’ve always found other people’s morning routines fascinating (28 April 2022)
(OK, not always. 8-year-old Emily didn’t give much of a damn about anyone else’s mornings, or even her own particularly. But I guess “always” as in ever since I realized that I’m an independent adult who gets to make decisions about this kind of thing.)
Many of us have this kind of fascination because morning routines are a little window onto what someone else thinks is important enough to let into the first minutes or hours of being awake again, when the day still has so much potential in it. They give us a glimpse of each other’s priorities and how much they vary—and what they have in common.
How to have more ideas The tiny tool that’s powered my blog archive—plus 3 pieces of experiment news (8 April 2022)
The days are getting rapidly longer here in Oxford (even if the false spring followed by freezing nights properly messed up my daffodils), and the river has come down from its winter heights, which is always nice for reducing the imminent risk of having to get on and off my boat via garden-furniture stepping stones.
In this message I’d like to share a simple little tool: an ideas list. For many years now I’ve kept one for possible blog posts to write, and without it there’s no way I’d have remembered or therefore written about most of what’s there. The list makes an excellent resource to turn to when I need inspiration, and I wish I’d been doing the same thing for the rest of my research and writing activity all this time!
Emily T. Troscianko 