People ask if this works. I don’t know how to answer that.
I can’t promise you results. I can’t show you a before-and-after photo or a chart of my progress. Bodies are complicated. Minds are complicated. The relationship between them is very complicated.
Here’s what I can say.
It’s working. Slowly. I can’t point to a moment when things changed. I just notice that they have.
What I notice now
The way I think about food is different than it was when I started. Some of that is the prompts. Some of it is probably other things. I can’t run a controlled experiment on myself.
I don’t promise anything. I don’t know if it will work for you.
What I know is this: Small thoughts, arriving regularly, change how I see things. That’s the bet. If it’s wrong, you’ve lost nothing but a few seconds each morning.
That’s why 365 Changes is free to try. One prompt a day, delivered by email. If it resonates, you’ll know. If it doesn’t, you can unsubscribe and move on.
These sound similar. They’re completely different.
The first one is a battle. It assumes I want the sugar and I’m resisting. Every day is a new fight. Willpower required.
The second one isn’t a fight at all. It’s just who I am. The decision has already been made, somewhere upstream, and the moment-to-moment choices flow from it.
I’m not trying to be someone who eats well. I’m trying to become someone who already does.
Becoming, not battling
The prompts help with that—not by giving me rules, but by putting identity questions in front of me. Who do I want to be? What would that person do here?
Eventually, I stop asking. I just do what I do.
That’s the long game with 365 Changes. Not behavior modification. Not willpower training. Just small questions, arriving daily, that slowly reshape who I think I am.
Tell me I can’t have bread and suddenly I want bread. Tell me dessert is forbidden and I’m thinking about dessert all day. The harder I grip the rules, the more I want to break them.
I don’t think I’m unusual in this. Rules create resistance. The moment something becomes off-limits, part of me starts scheming.
Diet rules made me want to rebel. So I stopped following them and started noticing what I was already doing.
Noticing instead of restricting
The prompts I use don’t tell me what to eat. They don’t give me rules or meal plans or forbidden foods. They ask me to notice what I’m already doing.
That sounds soft. It is soft. But it’s also the only thing that’s ever worked for me.
Noticing is neutral. It doesn’t demand anything. It just asks: What’s happening here? Why did I reach for that? What am I actually feeling right now?
Most of the time, I don’t know the answer. That’s fine. The noticing is enough. Over time, patterns emerge. Things I didn’t see become visible. And once I see them, they’re harder to unsee.
That’s the approach behind 365 Changes—not rules to follow, but questions to sit with. One each morning. No judgment, no tracking, just attention.
Over the years I’ve learned about the food pyramid, serving sizes, how to read labels. Whole grains vs refined, good fats and bad fats, processed vs whole foods. Fiber, added sugars, protein and carbohydrates.
And yet… the more I learn, the more my body tells me I’ve missed the point.
I decided to stop trying to make myself eat better. Stop trying to change my body. Instead, I’d change my mind—so my mind and body could be well together.
Information taught me facts about food. Daily prompts teach me to notice how I actually eat.
I don’t know how many books I’ve read. The ones about habits, about willpower, about the science of satiety and the psychology of cravings. I understood them. I agreed with them. Then I closed them and continued eating the way I always had.
Sound familiar?
There’s a difference between learning something and having it change you.
You can read about pull-ups. Or you can do one pull-up a day for a year. Only one of those changes your body.
Why information doesn’t stick
The problem isn’t information. The problem is that information doesn’t stick unless it arrives repeatedly, in small doses, over time.
The prompts are small on purpose. A single question. A single thought. Something you can hold in your head while you make coffee. That smallness is the point—it’s what lets them accumulate.
I didn’t need another book. I needed the same few ideas to show up again and again, from different angles, until they stopped being things I knew and started being things I did. That’s what I built.
What does it take to stop avoiding pain and instead use it as a guide for rebuilding the body?
The same movements that caused injury can heal it when performed slowly, partially, and with intention.
What we try to do is get people to understand that if you have pain, if you have a limitation, you don’t stop doing the thing that hurt it. You do the thing that hurt it, slow, partial, light, take it down to the baby amount, the tolerable amount, and then start pushing it back up the scale. And by the time you can do it fast and heavy again, you’re healed. Congratulations.
~ Sean Hannah (9:19)
The conversation explores why most people avoid the slow, deliberate work required to truly rehabilitate injuries rather than just return to basic function. The distinction between physical therapy (designed for baseline recovery) and full joint remodeling (a months-to-years process typically reserved for elite athletes) forms the foundation of the discussion. The key insight is that healing requires doing the same movements that caused injury—but slower, lighter, and more partial—rather than avoiding them entirely.
Pain emerges as a multifaceted phenomenon with three distinct layers: actual tissue damage, neuropathic pain (trauma responses encoded in nerves and fascia), and centralized pain (psychological amplification based on beliefs and language). The conversation addresses how someone might present with a knee problem but actually need a full head-to-toe biomechanical remodel, with the knee simply being where the dysfunction surfaces most visibly. The discussion also touches on the origins of the nickname “Seanobi” (an Irish ninja wordplay), the value of intuitive three-dimensional movement versus linear athletic training, and the importance of having something worth playing for as the motivational spark that makes the difficult rehabilitation process possible.
Takeaways
Remodeling versus physical therapy — Physical therapy aims for basic function, but returning to athletic capability requires a separate, longer process called remodeling that most people don’t know exists.
The spark — Without something you love doing that’s disappearing or already gone, you won’t sustain the slow, frustrating work of rehabilitation.
Same movements, different parameters — Healing doesn’t require new exercises; it uses the same movements that caused injury, performed slower, lighter, and more partially.
Three layers of pain — Pain includes actual tissue damage, neuropathic responses stored in nerves and fascia, and psychological amplification based on perception and language.
Language affects pain signaling — The words used to describe pain directly influence how much pain is felt; changing the narrative can dampen signaling and allow greater loading.
The blowout point — A presenting injury like a knee problem is often just where a full-body biomechanical imbalance surfaces most visibly.
Tissue-specific protocols — Pace, load, and angle can be adjusted to target specific tissues: nerve and fascia respond to different parameters than muscle and bone.
Guarding responses — Much of chronic pain isn’t damage but protective contractions and nerve issues that require precise loading to release.
Threading the needle — Effective rehabilitation requires enough stress to trigger healing responses without crossing the threshold into new damage.
Intuitive versus linear training — Three-dimensional, intuitive movement serves rehabilitation and durability, while linear athletic training like Olympic lifting builds speed and power for sport.
The dial metaphor — Training exists on a spectrum from slow, rehabilitative, three-dimensional work to fast, linear, athletic work, and the dial can be adjusted based on daily capacity.
Becoming your own maintenance mechanic — The goal of guided rehabilitation is independence—learning to address pain and maintain the body without ongoing professional help.
Resources
Monkey Do — “What Moves You?” Sean Hannah’s guided mobility and joint remodeling programs.
Monkey Do on YouTube — video content related to the mobility and rehabilitation approach.
I’m tired of the scale. Tired of the mental math—what I ate, what I’ll eat, what I shouldn’t have eaten. Tired of the number defining whether today is a good day or a bad day.
I didn’t call what I built “a daily prompt about weight loss.” That framing points at the outcome—the number, the goal, the destination. But the number is a result. It’s downstream of something else.
Weight is a result. It’s downstream. I got tired of obsessing over the number and started paying attention to eating instead.
The behavior, not the outcome
The something else is eating. Not food, exactly—food is just the stuff. Eating is the behavior. The when, the why, the how much, the stopping or not stopping. The thousand small moments that add up.
I don’t want to manage my weight. I want to stop thinking about it entirely. That only happens if eating becomes unremarkable—if I just eat like a person who eats well, without the constant negotiation.
The prompts are about eating because that’s where change actually lives. Not the number on the scale. Not the calories in the app. Just the ordinary moments when I’m deciding whether to eat, what to eat, when to stop.
This might be the most important decision you make about your notebook practice.
Your notebook needs to live where you already are, not where you think you should be.
Here’s the common mistake: putting the notebook in an aspirational location. The beautiful desk in the home office with perfect lighting. The special reading chair. The dedicated workspace you set up but rarely use.
The problem is simple: If you’re not already spending time there, you won’t use the notebook.
Think about where you actually spend your day. The kitchen counter where you drink your morning coffee. Your desk at work. Next to your laptop if you work from home. In your bag if you’re always on the move.
Not where you wish you spent time. Where you actually are, during the main part of your day, when you’re doing things and thinking about things.
Physical proximity matters more than you’d think.
If you’ve started a notebook practice and it’s not sticking, check where the notebook lives. If it migrated to a drawer or a shelf, that’s your answer. Move it back to where you actually spend your day.
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This is part of a series about Hand-Write. Think Better.—a method for people who feel overwhelmed to start simply writing more on paper. Get the book → or grab the free quick reference →
Why I always overeat at night — and what I tried instead →
By 9pm, I’ve already lost. The day has worn me down. I’m tired. My defenses are gone. And somehow I find myself standing in front of the pantry, not really hungry, negotiating with myself about whether I’ve earned a snack.
Evenings are when I tell myself I’ll start fresh tomorrow. Just this once. I worked hard today. The excuses come easy when I’m exhausted.
I tried fighting harder at night. It doesn’t work. Willpower is a depleting resource, and by evening it’s spent.
Evenings are when I negotiate. Mornings are when I can still hear myself think.
The window before the noise starts
The prompts arrive in the morning for a reason.
Mornings are different. The day hasn’t happened yet. I haven’t made any food decisions. I haven’t failed at anything. There’s a small window before the momentum builds, before the habits wake up.
That’s when a thought can land. Not because mornings are virtuous—they’re just quieter. The noise hasn’t started yet. A question about eating, arriving before I’m thinking about food, has a chance of being heard.
The evening battle didn’t change until I started putting something in my head in the morning. That’s the idea behind 365 Changes—one prompt, early, before the day fills in.
I used to have a tag here for “Artificial Intelligence.”
But those words really annoy me. The artificial isn’t interesting; and we don’t currently actually have artificial intelligence, since [I aver] that agency and physical embodiment [which create the possibility of feedback from reality into the entity, without which intelligence is not possible] are necessary [among other things.] /rant
For some time I’ve wanted to be able to think of a better phrase. “LLM” is actually the thing we have now; but the things we have now are getting to be more than just a language model. It would be cool to find a new word, like bibliofervor.
Cogitant — from Latin cogitare (to think). Something that cogitates, or appears to. Doesn’t claim intelligence, just describes the activity. “Working with a cogitant.” Has the Latinate elegance of “bibliofervor.”
