Where does your life tend to return to?
We spend a lot of time trying to improve the peaks. This is about understanding—and gradually changing—the line underneath them.
Not a happiness score. Not a promise to feel good all the time. A way to understand what keeps shaping ordinary life.
Ordinary life is not flat. It fluctuates around a level that can feel surprisingly familiar.
Learn through visual, interactive explanations.
Follow the argument from beginning to end as it is written.
Keep reflections and gradually build a map of your own patterns.
Six doors into the same system
You do not need to read the theory first. Start with the problem that currently feels most familiar.
Understand the line beneath the peaks and troughs.
Explore HighsWhy do I keep wanting more?Explore reward, anticipation, adaptation and what pleasure leaves behind.
Explore LowsWhy does this keep affecting me?Understand pain, avoidance, recovery and the ways lows can linger.
Explore TidesWhat changes me everywhere?Find the capacities and conditions that affect several parts of life at once.
Explore LoopsWhat keeps recreating this?See how thoughts, behaviours and circumstances begin reinforcing one another.
Explore LeversWhat can I actually change?Find the smallest changes with the greatest downstream effect.
ExploreRead it as it is being written.
Each chapter will appear here as the manuscript develops. Read in order, jump to a question that interests you, or move between an essay and the interactive model that explains it.
See the full book →Highs should enrich ordinary life, not make it feel intolerable by comparison. Lows should be felt without being allowed to become unnecessary systems. And the ordinary days between them deserve far more attention than we usually give them.