Adjusting Your Brain is an independent blog for the slow, unglamorous work of changing how you think and respond. No clinical jargon, no overnight promises. Just reframing drills, focus habits, sleep and stress basics, and short exercises you can run between meetings or on a commute.
Posts are written for readers in South Africa and further afield: what worked, what flopped, how long it actually took, and when it makes sense to see a professional instead of pushing through alone.
New here? Start with the beginner series, or send a question for the monthly mailbag.
Three pieces that pair well with the front page. One is a drill you can run before a hard conversation, one is a six-week log of afternoon focus, and one is about the point where writing things down stops being enough on its own. Read them in any order, though the third is worth reading before you decide how far you want to take this by yourself.
Reframing drill
Name the automatic thought, test it against what you actually know, and carry one sentence into the room. Includes the prompts, three real meetings, and the cases where it did nothing.
For anyone whose stress spikes on the way in, not during.
Tracked experiment
A paper log, scored one to five, with sleep, meals and meeting load noted alongside. The clearest pattern was not caffeine or willpower but how many context switches happened before 2pm.
Not a productivity system. Just a record of what one person noticed.
Where the line sits
Thoughts that loop no matter how often you write them down, sleep that does not recover, routines that start to feel like punishment. Also how to find a psychologist or counsellor in South Africa.
Asking for help is not a failure of the method.
Notes from people who tried the drills, kept the logs and wrote back. Some of it is encouraging, some of it is a correction, and all of it is more useful than a star rating.
"I ran the two-minute reframe before a performance review and it kept me from rehearsing the worst version all morning. The part about naming the automatic thought first is what made it stick for me."
"The afternoon focus log felt almost too simple to bother with. Six weeks later I had actual evidence that my meeting load, not my discipline, was the problem. That changed how I plan my week."
"I appreciated the post about when journaling stops helping. It gave me the push to book a session with a counsellor instead of writing the same loop down for the ninth time."