People don’t usually need another ideal routine.
They already know what they “should” be doing. More sleep. Less doom‑scrolling. Regular movement. Time in nature. A meditation practice. Better boundaries. Healthier food. Space to connect with loved ones.
They can list the recommendations without thinking.
The problem is not knowing what would help.
The problem is living inside conditions where there is very little room to actually do it.
For many people, the honest truth is:
the workload is bigger than their paid hours;
caring responsibilities stretch into the evenings and weekends;
the calendar is held together with patches and compromises;
the system they are nested in is not built around human rhythms at all.
So when we add “perfect practice” to that stack, even with good intentions, it easily becomes another source of quiet shame.
You know that feeling: the sense of falling short before you’ve even begun.
Why “more practice” sometimes makes things worse
Most nervous‑system writing quietly assumes you have time, energy, and privacy. A quiet room. A stable schedule. Space to feel. A life where stress is a spike, not a baseline.
If that’s not your reality, the usual menu of self‑care options can land like a joke.
You might recognise patterns like:
saving nervous‑system care for holidays or retreats, because there is no way to do it in the middle of life;
starting ambitious routines and then dropping them, and turning the drop into evidence that you’re failing;
using practices mainly as a way to push harder (“regulate so you can perform more”), rather than as honest contact with yourself.
Underneath all of that, the body keeps telling the truth.
It’s overloaded. It’s tired. It’s carrying more than it can metabolise. It’s doing its best to keep you functioning inside conditions that often don’t make sense.
When we respond to that by demanding more practice, more discipline, more optimisation, we accidentally reproduce the same logics that created the overload in the first place.
We make care into another performance task.
Minimum viable practice
I’ve been sitting with a different question:
What is the minimum viable practice that keeps some circulation, contact, and choice alive when you are already over capacity?
Not the ideal routine. Not the aspirational version of you.
Just enough practice to:
help your nervous system remember you exist;
give you a tiny bit more room to sense what’s happening;
keep you from slipping all the way into numbness or constant reactivity.
Minimum viable practice has a few qualities:
it is small enough to be realistically repeatable;
it is close to where life is actually happening (meetings, care work, inboxes, school runs);
it does not depend on everything else calming down first.
It doesn’t try to fix your life.
It tries to keep you in some kind of relationship with yourself while your life is unfolding.
What minimum viable practice can look like
For different people, minimum viable practice will look different. The question is not “What should I do?” but “What can I actually do, repeatedly, in the life I have?”
Some examples I see in practice:
Three breaths at thresholds.
Before opening the inbox, after a hard conversation, before picking up the kids: three slow, deliberate breaths. Not as a magic trick, but as a tiny moment of arrival.One point of physical contact with ground.
Feet on floor in meetings. Hand on a table or wall. Bare feet on earth for sixty seconds in the backyard. Letting the body feel something solid, even when everything else is moving.A daily “state check” in plain language.
Once a day, naming to yourself: “Today my system feels more activated,” or “Today I’m closer to shut‑down.” No fixing. Just noticing where you are in relation to your window of tolerance.One honest line in a conversation.
Saying “I’m near my limit” or “I need a pause” once a week in a real interaction. Letting the nervous system have a voice, instead of silently absorbing more load.Tiny contact with nature.
Opening the window. Noticing the sky. Standing under a tree on the way to somewhere. Watching light change. Nothing fancy—just letting your body register that it is part of a wider living system.
None of these are heroic.
That’s the point. Minimum viable practice stays intentionally un‑heroic, so it can survive real life.
Why “minimum” is not failure
In extractive cultures, “minimum” easily gets equated with laziness, low standards, or not trying hard enough. The nervous system hears that too.
But when you are already over capacity, minimum viable practice is not a compromise.
It is an act of proportion.
It says:
I’m going to relate to my nervous system in ways that match the bandwidth I actually have, not the bandwidth I wish I had.
I’m going to do small things consistently rather than big things rarely.
I’m going to treat care as part of my work, not as an optional extra I do if I deserve it.
Over time, these “minimum” practices can change things subtly but signifcantly:
they can make it easier to notice when you’re drifting into burnout;
they can create little pockets of presence inside days that used to be completely collapsed or fused;
they can give you enough space to see where the real constraints are, including systemic ones, and to consider different choices.
They won’t, on their own, fix an inhuman workload, heal moral injury, or make unjust systems just.pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih+1
But they can keep you from disappearing inside them.
Practising minimum viable practice together
Most people find it easier to begin and sustain these tiny practices with other people around, especially when those people understand complex work and care.
That’s one reason I created the Somatic Practice Circle for Practitioners.
It’s a small, online space for people navigating complex work with care—designers, facilitators, practitioners, leaders, carers, and others inside systems—who want to:
learn simple, trauma‑aware ways of being with their nervous system;
experiment with minimum viable practices in the middle of real life;
reflect together on what’s happening in their bodies and contexts, without needing to perform wellness.cocreatechange+2
Each session offers:
a little bit of nervous‑system literacy in plain language;
one or two grounded practices you can actually use between sessions;
time to notice, share, and integrate … at a human pace.
We’re not trying to turn anyone into an ideal practitioner.
We’re building a rhythm of minimum viable practice that can travel with you into the complex systems you already live and work in.
If that sounds like the kind of support your nervous system has been quietly asking for, you can read more about the circle here: Somatic Practice Circle for Practitioners