FIELD NOTES

Short reads on the stuff that gets in the way.

Why words go missing under pressure, why you scroll when you’re lonely, why confidence is a pattern rather than a personality trait. Written to be useful in one sitting and sourced from public-health and peer-reviewed work.

Side profile of a person with a visible brain full of anxious thought bubbles, feeding a conveyor belt of filler words ('well', 'so', 'like', 'you know') to a mouth emitting only empty speech bubbles, on a yellow background.
Anxiety5 MIN READ

Why words vanish when you’re anxious

Going blank mid-sentence is one of the most common ways anxiety shows up — and least talked about. What’s actually happening, and what tends to help.

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Side profile of a head silhouette with white clouds drifting inside the skull, against a yellow background.
Anxiety6 MIN READ

Anxiety and brain fog

When your head feels packed in cotton wool, your eyes pass over the same paragraph three times, and nothing quite lands. Why this happens — and what to try.

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Two silhouetted figures on a yellow background — one with hands raised, the other pointing a gun that fires speech-bubble small talk reading 'hello' and 'how are you'.
Confidence5 MIN READ

Freezing in conversations

The pause that lasts too long. The reply that lands after the moment. The replay later. What the freeze actually is — and the small reps that wear it down.

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A figure curled up with head in hands, sitting in a corner built entirely of oversized keyboard keys, with phones and tablets scattered across the floor around them.
Connection6 MIN READ

Lonely while always online

Three feeds open, hundreds of unread messages, and the week still feels like it happened to someone else. What changes when contact stops counting.

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An anxious figure stands in the middle of a yellow background, hands clasped, surrounded by other people turned away or looking past her.
Anxiety6 MIN READ

What social anxiety feels like

It isn’t party nerves. It’s the morning-after rerun of every sentence, and the quiet calculation that doing the thing will cost more than skipping it.

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A wall calendar covered in coloured sticky notes labelling specific days and times with commitments — gym sessions, meetings, deadlines, dinner plans.
Habits5 MIN READ

If-then plans that stick

“I’ll spend less time on my phone this week” sounds like a plan. It’s a hope. Here’s the small reshape that turns it into something you actually do.

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A wooden rubber stamp resting on a yellow background next to a red “CANCELED” mark freshly pressed beside it.
Connection6 MIN READ

Friendships that survive cancelling

Cancelling once is a Tuesday. Cancelling four times is a pattern your friends will quietly start to plan around. Low-effort moves that hold the thread.

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A smartphone lit up showing a social media feed at night, propped on a table in a dimly-lit room with warm lamps and a houseplant in the background.
Focus6 MIN READ

How to stop doomscrolling

The loop is engineered to be hard to leave, and willpower at 11pm is unreliable. What works in the moment — and how to stop the loop starting at all.

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Three side-profile heads in a row against a yellow background, each with a pink brain holding a battery meter — full and green, half and orange, nearly empty and red.
Focus6 MIN READ

Why your attention span feels broken

You sit down to read and end up on a different planet thirty seconds later. The capacity isn’t gone. The training environment changed, and the reps disappeared.

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A person crouched on one knee under a heavy tray balanced overhead, piled with a buzzing phone full of notifications, a broken heart, a tangled scribble, a worried emoji and a storm cloud.
Focus6 MIN READ

Overstimulated all the time

It isn’t weakness and it isn’t one thing. Sensory, decision, social and scroll load all stack. What that looks like — and what tends to help.

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A cartoon pink brain on a yellow background, plastered with Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok app icons and the words SKIBIDI, RIZZ and SIGMA scrawled across it.
Focus8 MIN READ

What is brainrot

The half-joke for too much short-form video, too little sleep and too many tabs. Where the word came from, what it’s pointing at, and what brings you back.

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Two black power plugs floating apart against a yellow background, sparks between them, the cables trailing off in opposite directions.
Connection8 MIN READ

Why I feel disconnected

Not depression, not loneliness in the usual sense, and not a moral failing. The modern feeling of being slightly outside your own life — and how to come back.

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A row of six friends in brightly coloured sweatshirts standing arm-in-arm, smiling at the viewer.
Connection7 MIN READ

Making friends as an adult

The conditions that made friendship cheap — school, uni, a first job — have quietly gone. What actually works when you have to build it deliberately.

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Cartoon ghosts drifting out of a smartphone showing an unanswered text conversation, against a yellow background.
Connection6 MIN READ

Ghosting people you like

It isn’t coldness. It’s decision fatigue plus a shame loop, on text-shaped repeat. What the loop is — and how to break it without a three-paragraph apology.

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A black corded telephone handset floating against a yellow background, its long coiled cord winding off in a loose S-curve.
Connection6 MIN READ

Why calls feel exhausting

The dread isn’t laziness — it’s async-default culture meeting a high-overhead medium. What changed, when it’s telephone anxiety, and what to do about it.

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A cartoon family of four — two adults and two children — sitting in a row on a sofa, each absorbed in their own phone or tablet, in a stylised blue-and-white lounge.
Habits6 MIN READ

A family screen-time challenge

Everyone agrees to use their phones less. It holds until Wednesday. Why household screen-time rules collapse — and the small reshape that makes a shared challenge worth doing.

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