Programs on this site are not courses with a certificate at the end. They are structured blocks of practice you run yourself, at your own pace, usually alongside a normal working week. Each one lists what it covers, how long a session takes, and what to do when it stops being useful.
Short written exercises for catching an automatic thought and testing it against what you know. Built for corridors, parked cars and the ten minutes before a hard conversation.
Blocks that reduce context switching, protect a working stretch, and rebuild the ability to stay with one task. Includes a paper log format for tracking what actually changes.
Plain groundwork on wind-down routines, evening screens and the physical signs of a nervous system that never quite clocks off. No clinical jargon, no promises.
Prompt sets for different moods and situations, including the ones that work when you have nothing to say. Also notes on when writing stops helping and something else is needed.
Each experiment runs for four to six weeks with a simple scoring method, so you can see whether a routine held up or quietly fell apart. Results are published as they come, including the ones that went nowhere.
If you want the shorter formats first, the weekly plans are a lighter entry point, and the applied solutions cover specific situations like pre-meeting nerves.
A few honest answers about how the programs work, what they ask of you, and where the limits sit.
No, but it helps. The beginner series covers the vocabulary the programs assume: reframing prompts, attention blocks, and how to log a week without turning it into a second job. If you skip it, expect the first two sessions to move slower while you catch up on the basics.
The short exercises run ten to fifteen minutes and fit between meetings or on a commute. The weekly review takes longer, closer to forty minutes, and it is the part people drop first when a week gets crowded. Dropping it once is fine. Dropping it for a month usually means the routine has stopped matching your actual schedule.
No. These are self-directed drills, journaling prompts and habit structures. They are useful for everyday stress, focus and the stories you tell yourself, but they are not a substitute for a psychologist or counsellor. If thoughts loop no matter how often you write them down, or sleep does not recover, that is a signal to talk to a professional rather than push harder on the exercises.
That is the point. The routines are built for real weeks, not retreat conditions. Most readers in South Africa run them around a full workday and a commute. What matters is consistency over weeks, not intensity in one good weekend.
Then say so. The monthly reader mailbag exists partly for that. Plenty of the posts describe what flopped, and the programs are meant to be adjusted rather than followed to the letter. If something consistently makes you feel worse, stop and reassess before continuing.
Still unsure which format fits your week? Read the common questions or get in touch and describe your schedule.
Every format on this page follows the same five steps. The pace changes, the drills change, but the sequence does not. Here is what happens between signing up and running your own week without checking the plan.
You answer a short set of questions about sleep, meeting load, and the thought patterns that keep returning. We log a two-week baseline before changing anything, so there is something honest to compare against later.
A reframing drill and one attention habit, chosen to fit your actual day. If you commute, the drill runs on the train. If your mornings are chaos, it runs at lunch. Nothing gets assigned that you cannot do in under ten minutes.
Paper log, one line a day. You note what you did, how it landed, and what got in the way. Weekly check-ins look at the log together and adjust the drills rather than adding new ones.
We compare the log against the baseline and separate the patterns that survived from the ones that were wishful thinking. Some drills get dropped here. That is the point of the review, not a failure.
You leave with a written routine you can run alone, plus a clear line for when self-directed work is not enough and a psychologist or counsellor is the right next call.
Not sure which format fits your week? The comparison page lays out the differences in time, structure and level of support.
These notes come from people who ran the drills in the programs and wrote in about what actually shifted. Not dramatic turnarounds. Mostly small, repeatable changes that held up on ordinary Tuesdays.
I started the two-minute reframe before client calls because my hands used to shake on the drive over. Three weeks in, the shaking is mostly gone. The drill itself takes less time than finding parking.
The focus log felt almost too simple to bother with. Six weeks later I could see that my worst afternoons followed mornings with four or more context switches. I changed my meeting layout and the log proved it, not my memory.
I came for the journaling prompts and stayed for the honesty about limits. The post on when to see someone pushed me to book a counsellor after two years of trying to write my way out of a loop. That was the right call.
The sleep basics module was the least exciting part and the one that changed the most. I stopped treating a bad night as a personal failure and started tracking what preceded it. Bedtime got boring, which turned out to be the point.
I do the commute exercise on the train between Rosebank and Sandton. It is short enough that I do not skip it, and after a month I noticed I was replaying fewer arguments in my head on the way home.
What I valued most was the "what flopped" sections. I had tried three other habit systems that assumed everything works if you are consistent. Here I could see which parts failed for the writer too, and adjust without feeling like I was doing it wrong.