Today, I am supposed to send an email about the risk of writing with AI.

I was also meant to finish the third draft of my book, Magnetic Writing, this week. And send two videos to my YouTube editor.

But I haven’t finished any of it.

I’ve been incredibly frustrated by my lack of output. I have stuff I need to produce. But I realised this is the email I need to send instead.

…Because what is scary to admit is most important to write:

I have been feeling completely overwhelmed.

Icing on the cake: instead of admitting my overwhelm, I have been so self-critical:

• You used to be able to work so hard!
• You’ve just taken a 3-day meditation retreat, why aren’t you rested?
• You’re stressed because you aren’t running your business well. Maybe if you hired more people for YouTube and built better systems, you wouldn’t be in this position.

I woke on Wednesday with a terrible neck ache. I was angry at that too, because I slept terribly and couldn’t focus on my book. But thankfully, I’m reading BOOK–which suggests that back and neck pain is not a result of injury, but stress and repressed emotions.

Considering my back has had over 20 hours of surgery, I was skeptical. But if I looked back at my week, I was fine until I started setting deadlines and goals. So I entertained the thought.

When I asked myself what I might be repressing, the truth slapped me in the face:

I was repressing my overwhelm.

I noticed, for example, when I told Carolina I had hurt my neck, she suggested it might be stress-related. I immediately shut her down, telling her that I was happy and had nothing to be stressed about.

But f**k, I am working hard. And have been for a long time. The transition from dentist to writer and everything in between has been a rollercoaster. When I added writing a book and launching YouTube, I didn’t remove anything.

I just told myself I could handle it.

Imagine if you spoke to someone on your team like that. They would resent you. And they would not do their best work. And yet we do it to ourselves all the time—believing that overwhelm is a positive sign of productivity.

I told myself I could fix it by doing more work. Smarter systems, more AI, more leverage.

…Which is like a cocaine addict sniffing one more line to kick the habit.

But in fact, I have simply been too scared to stop and feel my overwhelm. Or more accurately, what overwhelm is trying to protect me from: the fear of being a failure, of not being enough.

The problem is that this is a terrible state to operate from. You snap into fear-based thinking. You become agitated and pessimistic. You feel like you’re going to explode. Like, your only choice is to burn things down.

This is not an accurate map of reality.

The only thing you need to do with overwhelm is sit with it.

Because it is your intuition trying to tell you something. That perhaps there’s a smarter path, a cleaner way of operating, a more effective pace. A way to work with a smile on your face.

As an entrepreneur, judgment is your most important skill. Not work ethic. Not your ability to grind until there’s nothing left. But making smart, long-term decisions that lead you to building the life you want.

So you can make the impact you were born to make.

So here I am, writing a quick email for the week.

This isn’t really edited. It sure as shit isn’t optimised.

But I’m hoping it helps you all the same.

Kieran