A formal invitation to stop lying to yourself
On tracking patterns, interrupting feedback loops, and the mechanics of becoming a reliable narrator of your own life
We’re currently moving through that strange, compressed corridor of time between Thanksgiving and the new year, where normal routines dissolve and the pressure to reinvent oneself begins to quietly mount in the background. Most people wait until the first week of January to address the habits that are making them miserable, largely because they view the new year as some magical threshold where their willpower will spontaneously regenerate. However, if you are interested in actual structural change rather than just the performance of it, waiting for a calendar date to fix your life is usually a strategic error (and an unproductive coping mechanism, let’s be real).
I found myself in a similar position last January when I finally decided to quit smoking weed after nearly a decade of heavy daily use. The decision wasn’t driven by some dramatic rock-bottom moment, but rather by a quiet, nagging suspicion that I had sacrificed my mental clarity for comfort. The physical withdrawal that followed was objectively brutal, characterized by months of insomnia, irritability, and a level of exhaustion that made me question if the clarity I wanted was even attainable. The problem wasn’t just the physical discomfort, but the complete lack of perspective, because when you’re in the middle of a biological storm, you cannot tell if you are healing or simply suffering without purpose.
This is where I stumbled onto a psychological truth that I think is more important than the sobriety itself: we are terrible at observing ourselves in real time.
When you’re trapped inside a difficult experience, whether it’s substance withdrawal, a toxic relationship, or just a period of professional burnout, your brain loses the ability to distinguish between the immediate sensation and the long-term trajectory. Every bad day feels permanent. Every setback feels like evidence of failure. We become unreliable narrators of our own lives because we’re editing the story while we’re drowning in it. I realized that my memory of “how I felt” was constantly being rewritten by my current mood. If I was tired today, I convinced myself I had always been tired and would likely always be tired.
To try to break free from this self-defeating feedback loop, I started using AI to record the truth that my brain kept trying to distort. I started logging my daily symptoms—sleep quality, heart rate variability, mood fluctuations, cravings, you name it—and asking the model to act as a neutral historian. The shift was profound. The AI didn’t care that I felt hopeless; it simply pointed out that my sleep duration had increased by 14% over the last ten days and that my anxiety spikes were correlating with specific times of day. It gave me back the objective reality that my emotions had stolen from me. And in time, it absolutely broke the loop.
There’s a concept in physics called the “observer effect,” where the act of measuring a phenomenon inevitably changes the phenomenon itself. I found this to be equally true for behavior. The simple act of writing down a vague anxiety forces it to become concrete and finite. As long as a worry stays in your head, it is fluid—it can expand to fill the room. But once you trap it in a sentence, it becomes something you can look at, analyze, and ultimately dismantle. Writing converts your subjective suffering into objective data.
Once I realized how simple it was to actually break out of these negative feedback loops, I decided I wanted to create a system to help me in areas beyond just quitting weed. And so, The Daily 5 was born.
The Daily 5 was developed to operationalize this specific mechanism. It’s less of a journal and more of a laboratory for self-study. The premise is that you cannot change a pattern you do not understand, and you cannot understand a pattern while you are trapped inside the subjective experience of acting it out. By spending just five minutes a day recording specific observations and using an external system to audit them, you build a comprehensive map of your own contradictions, blind spots, and feedback loops. It effectively separates the person experiencing the life from the person analyzing it, which is the only vantage point from which genuine leverage is possible.
This distinction is why most New Year’s resolutions are statistically dead by the third week of January. The fitness app Strava has famously pinpointed January 19th as “Quitter’s Day,” the specific date when the “Fresh Start Effect” officially wears off. This collapse doesn’t happen because people lack willpower; it happens because they’re trying to run a marathon on a fuel source that only lasts for a sprint. The novelty of a resolution provides a temporary dopamine spike that mimics motivation, but once that chemical novelty fades, you’re left with the friction of a new behavior and no system to support it.
The Daily 5 is designed to bypass this failure point entirely. It’s not asking for a radical, overnight personality overhaul; it’s asking for five minutes of data entry. It replaces the exhausting reliance on willpower with the compounding interest of observation.
The program is structured quarterly to guide this excavation. The first twelve weeks—which are available in the archive—focus on establishing a behavioral baseline. We look at the external mechanics: decision fatigue, environmental triggers, and energy management. It is the necessary “pre-season” work of simply noticing how the machine (you) operates before trying to upgrade the software.
However, the upcoming quarter, which launches on January 1st, shifts the focus from observation to interrogation. Now that we have established the baseline of what you do, Weeks 13 through 24 are designed to explore why you do it. We will be moving into the deeper territory of identity and core narratives, examining the stories you’ve told yourself since childhood, the financial psychology that drives your scarcity loops, and the shadow emotions you have likely been suppressing to keep the peace, among other things. It’s a framework designed to take the raw data of your daily habits and convert it into genuine self-knowledge.
While you can certainly wait until the official January 1st launch to join, there is a strong argument for using December to establish your baseline data using the existing archive. It is significantly easier to navigate the deep work of the second quarter when you already have a clear picture of your starting position.
To keep with the rhythm of the week, and to show my gratitude for each of you, I’m discounting all annual subscriptions by 30%. This is the lowest price available for the program, and it is intended to lower the barrier for anyone who is serious about doing this work but has been hesitant to commit. If you want to enter January with a functioning system rather than a vague hope for improvement, I would recommend securing your spot now and spending the next month gathering your data.
Ultimately, whether you join us for The Daily 5 or just buy a cheap notebook and start doing this on your own, my advice is the same: stop waiting for January.
The calendar is arbitrary, but the patterns are real. And the sooner you start tracking them, the sooner you can stop being controlled by them. It’s terrifying to see yourself clearly because it ruins the fantasy that you’re just a victim of circumstance—but it’s also the only way to actually build the life you say you want.
P.S. I’ve been sober from weed for nearly a year now (5 years sober from alcohol), and while the sleep and clarity did eventually return, the most valuable thing I gained was the ability to debug my own operating system. That capacity for self-diagnostic observation is what I’m trying to share with this project, and I hope you’ll find it as useful as I have—and still do.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions! :)
I wrote a substack on this about why denial should be one of the other deadly sins called “denial is a river in egypt” and I would love to hear what you think (: