That Turning Point.

It was a windy Sunday evening in mid May of 2026. I brought a friend with me and we went all the way to the rooftop of one of the residential buildings in the Northeast part of San Francisco.

We caught the golden hour. It was beautiful.

We were filming my Tai Chi routine on the rooftop of a building when, at some point, I realized I couldn’t bring myself to approach the glass barrier. Every step toward the balustrade made me feel anxious.

Then it struck me: I wasn’t afraid of the heights/ After all, the odds of me actually falling were close to zero. What I was afraid of was myself.

For a brief moment, I felt that strange, unsettling impulse people sometimes describe. The sense that I could suddenly jump before I even had time to think about it. Not because I wanted to, but because the possibility flashed through my mind.

And that was the moment I realized something had to change…. As I feel overstimulated, chaotic, and in general, not safe — both from the inside and from the outside.

In fact, that feeling of discomfort and lack of safety didn’t appear overnight. It was a slow-burning problem, quietly brewing in the back of my mind for the better part of the past twenty years.

And sometimes I wonder: am I simply extraordinarily unlucky with the circumstances I find myself in? Or do I, consciously or not, keep putting myself in these situations?

Do I have a tendency to seek out difficult paths, challenging environments. And impossible problems—constantly testing my own limits without even realizing it?

Nevertheless, I’m still not sure which explanation is closer to the truth.

The Long Story that Led me Here.

When I was choosing my undergraduate studies, I faced a real dilemma. My mind seemed to have a remarkably flat profile: I could learn almost anything reasonably well.

Yet I wasn’t a prodigy in any one particular direction. Indeed, there was no obvious path calling my name.

In the end, I chose the College of Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in Mathematics and Natural Sciences because it felt like the perfect playground for a curious mind that refused to be confined to a single discipline. Looking back, I still believe it was the right choice.

That said, the program was exceptionally demanding. It was considered one of the most competitive and prestigious courses of study in Poland, offered by the University of Warsaw—the country’s top university then, and arguably still today.

From the very beginning, I found myself in an environment filled with some of the brightest young minds in the country, where high expectations and relentless ambition were simply the norm.

Needless to say, these studies demanded an enormous amount of attention, discipline, and effort. From the very beginning, I had to work hard to keep up with the sheer volume of knowledge I was expected to absorb. Yet I threw myself into it wholeheartedly, trusting that one day all the seemingly disconnected pieces would come together—that the diverse disciplines I was studying would eventually form a coherent picture.

Along the way, I developed a deep fascination with brain science. At the time, however, neuroscience was not yet available in Poland at the level I aspired to pursue. I quickly realized that if I wanted to study the field that truly captivated me, I would have to leave the country.

Leaving Poland.

That realization became another significant source of stress. Up until then, I had never lived abroad, and the prospect of leaving behind everything familiar to start a new life in a foreign country felt both exciting and deeply intimidating.

Next, I moved to the Netherlands, where I embarked on what would prove an exceptionally demanding research project. My task was to develop new algorithms capable of reproducing the structural and statistical properties of human cortical networks. To do so, I had to work with advanced mathematical concepts such as Lagrange multipliers and thermodynamic cost functions.

In other words, it was an intellectually formidable challenge. After more than a year of struggling to make meaningful progress, I was ultimately dismissed from the project. In fact, I was fired from my first PhD.

Fortunately, I managed to secure another PhD position at the same institute. But, in hindsight, I seem to have had a peculiar talent for finding the most difficult problems imaginable.

The Second PhD

This time, I was assigned a project focused on inferring causal influences from fMRI data. For those familiar with the field, this was widely regarded as a near-impossible task.

fMRI measures blood flow rather than neural activity directly. It operates on timescales that are much slower than the underlying brain processes.

And it provides only indirect observations of what is actually happening in the brain. Trying to extract reliable causal relationships from such data was considered one of the most pointless problems in computational neuroscience.

Fortunately, the second time around, I had become much better at managing my time and balancing my main research project with several side projects. I was also working in a more diverse environment, with multiple supervisors and collaborators bringing different perspectives to the table. Somehow, against the odds, I managed to complete the PhD.

Nonetheless, it was a difficult journey—not only scientifically, but diplomatically as well. Throughout those years, I often felt as though I was negotiating from a position of weakness. As a junior researcher, I had little leverage or influence over decisions, and my voice carried little weight.

In the end, the journey concluded with a PhD title. But it also ended with something else: a profound burnout. According to the World Health Organization, burnout is classified in the ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, marked by exhaustion, mental distance from one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy.

What Did the Second PhD Cost Me?

After years of pushing myself through increasingly difficult challenges, I found myself exhausted and questioning the path I had taken. For the first time, I began to wonder whether there had to be something more to life than constantly struggling within a system that often seemed designed to extract more than it gave back.

According to Levecque et al. (2017), one in three PhD students is at risk of a common psychiatric disorder, so this was hardly unusual.

Starting Over.

Therefore, seeking stability and safety, I eventually decided to start my own small education and research business.

At first, the idea was quite modest. I wanted to build an R&D-driven organization dedicated to helping talented PhD graduates and researchers find their place in the job market. Having gone through the difficult transition myself, I knew how confusing and disorienting it could be to leave academia and discover that there was no clear roadmap waiting on the other side.

My hope was simple: to help others navigate that journey more smoothly than I had. Ideally, no one would have to face the same uncertainty, frustration. And identity crisis that I experienced when trying to find the right place for myself outside the academic world.

I started the company in 2019. At the time, I had no idea that a global pandemic was just around the corner, nor could I have predicted the AI revolution that would soon reshape entire industries.

According to Brooks et al. (2020), the lockdowns that followed carried measurable psychological costs for almost everyone.

What followed was a rollercoaster ride that, in many ways, has never really ended. The world changed dramatically, the labor market transformed, and the questions I had originally set out to explore suddenly became far more urgent than I could have imagined.

Is It Doom?

The thing is, when I started applying to PhD programs—around 2008, 2009. And 2010—neuroscience was still a relatively young, emerging field.

It certainly wasn’t the pop-culture phenomenon it has become today. Back then, very few people outside academia paid much attention to brain science.

Over the following decade, however, neuroscience exploded in popularity. The field became mainstream, books about the brain filled bestseller lists.

And some neuroscientists became public intellectuals and even celebrities in their own right. As interest in the field grew, so did the competition.

When I chose this path, competitiveness was never the point.

My motivation for pursuing a PhD was simple: I wanted to study a subject I genuinely loved. My plan was to become a professor, spend my life investigating fascinating questions about the human brain and mind.

And build a career around curiosity, discovery, and learning. At the time, that felt like my dream life.

But as the years went by, I became increasingly disillusioned with how the academic system actually operated. And at the same time, the field itself became far more competitive than it had been when I first fell in love with it.

In a way, I never consciously signed up for that level of competition. I wasn’t chasing prestige or trying to win a race.

It was simply that the field evolved around me. The discipline that had once felt like a niche intellectual pursuit gradually transformed into a highly competitive arena, and by the time I realized it, I was already deeply invested in the journey.

A Recurring Pattern

And when I started the company, then once again, I found myself in a familiar situation: it felt as though the world had caught up with me.

What had started as a niche project focused on helping highly educated professionals navigate career transitions suddenly became deeply relevant to a much broader audience. The uncertainty, disruption, and need for reinvention that I had witnessed among PhD graduates began spreading across the entire workforce.

In a strange way, I found myself studying the future of work just as the future arrived. I was wondering: why again?

It was the second time in my life that I found myself standing in the eye of the storm.

Sometimes I wonder whether each of us is given a particular lesson, a mission, or an overarching theme that quietly shapes our lives. And given that I have always been naturally prone to worry and anxiety, perhaps this is mine.

Perhaps I keep finding myself in turbulent circumstances—not because I seek them out, but because they are the classroom in which I am meant to learn. Time and again, I seem to be placed in situations that feel like sailing through a thunderstorm at sea: uncertainty all around, forces far beyond my control, no clear map to follow.

And perhaps these storms will continue for as long as it takes for me to learn the lesson—to stop worrying about things I cannot influence, to stop resisting uncertainty, and to trust that I can navigate whatever comes next.

Sometimes I wonder whether this is my fate: not to avoid the storm. But to walk into it, again and again, until I finally learn how to remain calm beneath the thunder.

The Unequal Race. What To Do Next?

Anyway, standing on that rooftop in San Francisco, I realized I felt trapped in a battle I could never truly win.

It was as though I were running two separate races against time—completely alone.

On the one hand, I was a bootstrapping solopreneur, building a company with a philosophy and business model fundamentally different from those of almost everyone around me. I was fighting to reach profitability while trying to keep pace with a world that seemed to accelerate by the day. Technology, the labor market, client expectations—everything was evolving so rapidly that, no matter how hard I worked, I often felt I was barely keeping up.

On the other hand, I was a forty-year-old woman who still hoped to build a stable personal life and, perhaps, a family. Unlike business goals, however, that aspiration came with a biological clock.

Every year mattered. Every year narrowed the range of possibilities available to me. It felt as though time was quietly closing doors, one by one.

The painful part was that these two ambitions seemed to compete for the same finite resource: time.

Every hour invested in one mission was an hour not invested in the other. Every decision felt like a trade-off. If I focused on building the company, my personal life stood still.

If I focused on my personal life, the company slowed down. There was no way to fully pursue both at once.

And so I found myself playing a game that seemed unwinnable.

No matter what choice I made, something was always left behind. Something was always sacrificed. Deep down, I knew that despite all my effort, I might eventually lose one of these dreams.

Or perhaps both.

That was the thought that frightened me the most.

Something Needs to Change.

In the end, standing there on that rooftop, I made a decision.

I would stay on the battlefield.

But I also realized that something had to change.

I needed to find a way to feel safer—not necessarily by changing my circumstances overnight. But by changing the way I navigated them. Perhaps the solution would come from a collection of small, everyday habits.

Perhaps from taking better care of myself. Whatever the answer, I knew I could no longer afford to neglect my mental well-being.

That said, I wasn’t clinically depressed, nor was I facing any dramatic crisis. But I could recognize the familiar signs of mild burnout—the kind that seems almost inevitable when you spend years pursuing missions as long, uncertain, and emotionally demanding as this one.

Going Home to Poland

Fortunately, I also knew that in just a few days I would be returning home to Poland, to my parents’ house. Ahead of me lay a long, green, sunlit summer.

There would still be work to do—plenty of it. My projects would not disappear. But there would also be space to recover, regroup, and regain perspective.

Space to rebuild my strength. Space to reconnect with myself. Room to rethink the mental model through which I viewed the world.

Because perhaps the deepest problem was not the uncertainty itself, but the way I related to it.

I wanted to cultivate a worldview in which I felt more grounded, more secure. And less afraid of what the future might bring.

A worldview in which I could genuinely believe that the things I desire are not slipping away from me. But are simply taking time to unfold.

And perhaps, above all, I wanted to learn to trust life a little more than I do now.

To trust that not everything has to be controlled.

To trust that not every opportunity is vanishing forever.

Trusting that some doors close only so that others can open.

To trust that the future may contain more possibilities than I am currently able to see.

And to trust that anything I truly want may already be within reach—that sometimes the missing ingredient is not effort, but patience.

Strong Resolution: No Anesthetics.

Before I talk about “what to do,” let me start with “what not to do.”

After I first came back from India in early 2025, I went entirely clean: I dropped all substances that were changing my perception in my daily life — mild SSRIs I used to heal my anxiety since the pandemic (and most likely, part of this anxiety was a result of the vaccination), and the contraceptives.

When I went clean, my hormones started working. Of course, the level of anxiety went up.

Then, I started drowning all the fears in wine for a change. The year 2025 was probably a year I drank an average of a bottle a day or more; I’m not even kidding.

Now, I went clean of that as well. Then, all monsters came out from underneath my bed — the “basic fear” experiences in childhood came back. If you want to know how that feels, I guess Stephen King described that fear best in his masterpiece “It.”

But I knew I didn’t want any drugs anymore. I wanted to live and suffer, and get out of this for real, and without aid.

I wanted to let my brain work freely and wild, even if it’s far from perfect, and it yells and cries and squeaks way too much, and produces all kinds of catastrophic visions; let it be.

One option was to take a pill (and I have a cupboard full of those) and see a peaceful, silent sea in an instant.

But I said to myself: “Hold” — no drugs no matter what, despite it meaning walking into a thunderstorm.

“Let it be thunder. I don’t care.”

The Course of Action.

So, if I knew what not to do, the next question was: what should I do instead?

I decided to switch into what I jokingly call “pseudo-therapist mode” and deliberately redesign a few aspects of my life. In a sense, I set out to design and administer a form of therapy to myself.

The first thing I noticed was that I felt mentally dull, discouraged, and depleted. My mind seemed clogged.

So I concluded that the most important priority was to improve my cognitive performance—to make my brain more operational again, to regain my ability to focus deeply, and to enter states of concentration and flow more easily. I ended up writing a separate essay about that process, which you can find HERE.

The second decision was even more practical.

I resolved to spend the first 100 days after returning to Poland working quietly and consistently on my product and go-to-market strategy. No grand announcements. No distractions.

There was no chasing validation. No worrying about what other people thought of me. For one hundred days, I would dedicate myself to a single mission (and then, if everything goes well, go to Burning Man 2026 as a reward).

Why?

Because sometimes, when several areas of your life are blocked at once, the best strategy is not to tackle everything simultaneously. Sometimes you need to unclog one channel first, and somehow the others begin to flow on their own.

This Situation Happened to Me Before.

I’ve seen this happen before.

Back in 2010, I found myself in a remarkably similar situation. I was finishing my studies in Warsaw and simultaneously working on three Master’s theses while applying to PhD programs abroad. Needless to say, I felt completely overwhelmed.

Despite years of education, I had no clear idea how I would eventually monetize all the knowledge I had accumulated in mathematics, physics, psychology, and neuroscience. On top of that, I had very few contacts abroad.

I was preparing to venture into the unknown, and I had never lived outside Poland before. Frankly, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to pursue a PhD despite it feeling like the most obvious option.

The pressure was immense.

What Did Life Look Like Back Then?

At the time, I was living alone in a tiny one-room apartment in Warsaw. Many of my friends had already started their PhDs or moved away to pursue their own opportunities. The city felt emptier than it had before, and I often felt left behind.

According to Holt-Lunstad et al. (2015), such isolation is a serious risk factor for health, not a mere inconvenience.

I was juggling three major projects at once, carrying uncertainty about my future, and trying to make life-changing decisions with very little information.

Plus, despite being very young at that point, I felt like youth was coming to an end — it was cognitive error coming from the end of an era (i.e., the end of undergrad studies).

I even thought to myself: “If I’m single now after I attended my studies and met all the smartest students in the country, how would I even find a partner in the future? All the best individuals are already all taken.”

The future loomed ahead like a dark, frightening abyss.

Of course, I laugh at those thoughts now. But looking back, it was a period of considerable stress and emotional pain.

The Simple Solution.

Most importantly, it felt exactly the way I felt now: cornered.

That said, it felt as though I had been backed against a wall, facing multiple impossible challenges at once, with no clear way forward.

Eventually, the solution revealed itself—and it was surprisingly simple.

I just had to endure the discomfort and tackle the challenges one by one.

One Step at a Time

In February 2010, I completed my Master’s degree in Psychology. Then, in mid-July, I graduated with my Master’s degree in Mathematics. That exam was probably the most stressful of them all, because unlike the others, it was one I could realistically fail.

When I finally passed—and even received a higher grade than I had expected—I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. For the first time in months, I could breathe.

To celebrate, I decided to give myself a gift. I spent four days completely alone in Mikołajki, in the Masurian Lake District, simply resting and enjoying my own company.

Looking back, it was one of the first conscious acts of self-care I can remember. After months of pressure, uncertainty, and relentless work, I allowed myself to stop.

In August, I completed a month-long internship at a neuromarketing company in Warsaw. The experience turned out to be valuable for a reason I hadn’t anticipated: it helped me realize what I did not want.

By the end of that internship, I knew that a commercial career was not for me. So, my mind was made up. I wanted to pursue science.

And suddenly, everything became simpler.

Just a few months earlier, I had been facing an uncertain future while trying to finish three separate master’s degrees. Now, I had clarity. I had made a decision.

I knew where I was heading. There was only one thesis left to complete. And for the first time in a long while, I felt that the future was beginning to take shape.

An Unexpected Turn.

And then, in September 2010, something unexpected happened.

I met my future fiancé.

We connected almost immediately and started a relationship soon afterward. As a result, it felt as though life began to reorganize itself once I had solved the first major bottleneck. The uncertainty that had consumed me for months started to dissolve.

Within a matter of months, my subjective life satisfaction went from what felt like a two out of ten to an eight out of ten.

Not because every problem had disappeared, but because I was no longer carrying all of them at once.

100 Days of Peace.