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Pratyahara: A Mid‑Year Review for High Achievers
If you've sleepwalked through life chasing goals that were never yours, now is the time for course correction
Every year starting July 15th, my birthday, I pause for three days. It’s a meditation ritual I call the ‘deliberate pause’. In Yogic language, it can be called pratyahara, which means withdrawing from the senses. During this period of introspection, I stay in my apartment without food, screens, or outside noise so that I may really hear myself. It might seem extreme, but it’s honestly the most grounding thing I do in the whole year. It’s a deliberate pause because this is also when I carry out a mid-year self-appraisal, to reflect on course correction, just in case I was following someone else’s dreams.
I started this practice after reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. Franklin spent almost an hour every night reviewing his actions. Ever since reading his story, I’ve been a fan of self-reflection. Along with my weekly self-reviews, this three-day voluntary discomfort has given me direction to achieve goals that once seemed out of reach for a startup founder. I became a yoga teacher, learned to do a handstand, got fit (under 10% body fat), and started writing my first book.
We’re almost halfway through the year. Before you read on, take a moment to write down the resolutions you made in January. List every goal, from fitness to career, even the ones you kept private. If you’re like most people, you’ll see how much you’ve drifted from your list. You set a goal in January, lose focus by March, and then blame it on one reason or the other. The real reason may be somewhere else. In pursuing goals that were not yours.
Almost every high achiever I know speaks the same language on this. So I started to wonder: do even the motivated, disciplined people have such a hard time with their own goals? Success and failure as such are just feedback from reality and not final verdicts on a life. And therefore, I’m not here to give you a productivity tip or a shortcut to reach your goals faster. But pursuing goals that never deserved your devotion in the first place is certainly a tragedy. Failures can come into your life for several reasons, sometimes even just bad luck. But introspect hard to reassure yourself that you didn’t give up on your list because you’re weak or undisciplined. Maybe you were chasing goals that weren’t really yours, and that calls for course correction. A deliberate pause.
The irony is that you can be highly competent, disciplined, and even successful while moving in the wrong direction. Because what feels like success in that case is actually a trap. Primarily one of these.
The Gratitude Trap
The first trap is love. Many of the goals that shape your life actually come from the people who love you most. Your parents set you on a path before you were old enough to choose for yourself. Get good grades. Earn a degree. Land the job that sounds impressive to relatives. If your family made sacrifices for you, their goals can start to feel like debts you have to repay. I know this feeling well. I grew up in Kathmandu with very little, and for years I carried my family’s hopes for the better part of a decade. Their dream became my plan, and I never stopped to ask if it was also my own.
Psychologists Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill studied this over thirty years. They found that the pressure to meet others’ standards grew by a third, much faster than the standards we set for ourselves. We’re more driven by outside expectations and less by our own choices than any generation before us, and we call that ambition.
This is why gratitude can be a trap, not just a feeling. You can’t easily walk away from a goal your parents gave you, because it feels like betrayal. So you keep chasing a path that isn’t right for you and call it honouring them. We rarely question goals given to us out of love, which is exactly why they go unexamined. If this is not the case, then check for the next thing.
The Busyness Trap
The second trap is constant motion.
From the outside, this looks like progress. You train for Hyrox before work, listen to podcasts on your commute, jump from call to call, fit in a workout at lunch, go to networking events in the evening, and fill your weekends with plans. It seems like you’re making the most of your life and investing in yourself. But in reality, you don’t leave a single unplanned hour where tough questions might come up.
Whenever things get quiet, doubts start to surface. Instead of sitting with those feelings, you reach for something to distract you like another episode, another scroll, another task. You call it learning or productivity, but really, you’re just filling up the silence where real reflection could happen.
Therapist Annie Wright calls this an anaesthetic. In her work with high achievers, she’s found that constant work and self-improvement aren’t always about ambition. Often, they’re ways to avoid pain, grief, fear, or emptiness. In this sense, busyness isn’t just a habit but a painkiller.
When you chase borrowed goals, you rely on outside validation, which never really ends. There’s no point where you feel finished, so you just keep going. Staying busy also numbs you, so you never have to ask if these goals are truly yours.
You thought you were busy because your goals mattered, but the truth is tougher. You hold on to these goals because they keep you busy. Busyness becomes like a drug, and stillness feels like withdrawal. That’s why my three days are so tough without the painkiller. The podcasts stop, the meetings disappear, the notifications go quiet. Everything I’ve been avoiding finally catches up with me.
If you've sleepwalked through life chasing goals that were never yours, now is the time for course correction
Every year starting July 15th, my birthday, I pause for three days. It’s a meditation ritual I call the ‘deliberate pause’. In Yogic language, it can be called pratyahara, which means withdrawing from the senses. During this period of introspection, I stay in my apartment without food, screens, or outside noise so that I may really hear myself. It might seem extreme, but it’s honestly the most grounding thing I do in the whole year. It’s a deliberate pause because this is also when I carry out a mid-year self-appraisal, to reflect on course correction, just in case I was following someone else’s dreams.
I started this practice after reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. Franklin spent almost an hour every night reviewing his actions. Ever since reading his story, I’ve been a fan of self-reflection. Along with my weekly self-reviews, this three-day voluntary discomfort has given me direction to achieve goals that once seemed out of reach for a startup founder. I became a yoga teacher, learned to do a handstand, got fit (under 10% body fat), and started writing my first book.
We’re almost halfway through the year. Before you read on, take a moment to write down the resolutions you made in January. List every goal, from fitness to career, even the ones you kept private. If you’re like most people, you’ll see how much you’ve drifted from your list. You set a goal in January, lose focus by March, and then blame it on one reason or the other. The real reason may be somewhere else. In pursuing goals that were not yours.
Almost every high achiever I know speaks the same language on this. So I started to wonder: do even the motivated, disciplined people have such a hard time with their own goals? Success and failure as such are just feedback from reality and not final verdicts on a life. And therefore, I’m not here to give you a productivity tip or a shortcut to reach your goals faster. But pursuing goals that never deserved your devotion in the first place is certainly a tragedy. Failures can come into your life for several reasons, sometimes even just bad luck. But introspect hard to reassure yourself that you didn’t give up on your list because you’re weak or undisciplined. Maybe you were chasing goals that weren’t really yours, and that calls for course correction. A deliberate pause.
The irony is that you can be highly competent, disciplined, and even successful while moving in the wrong direction. Because what feels like success in that case is actually a trap. Primarily one of these.
The Gratitude Trap
The first trap is love. Many of the goals that shape your life actually come from the people who love you most. Your parents set you on a path before you were old enough to choose for yourself. Get good grades. Earn a degree. Land the job that sounds impressive to relatives. If your family made sacrifices for you, their goals can start to feel like debts you have to repay. I know this feeling well. I grew up in Kathmandu with very little, and for years I carried my family’s hopes for the better part of a decade. Their dream became my plan, and I never stopped to ask if it was also my own.
Psychologists Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill studied this over thirty years. They found that the pressure to meet others’ standards grew by a third, much faster than the standards we set for ourselves. We’re more driven by outside expectations and less by our own choices than any generation before us, and we call that ambition.
This is why gratitude can be a trap, not just a feeling. You can’t easily walk away from a goal your parents gave you, because it feels like betrayal. So you keep chasing a path that isn’t right for you and call it honouring them. We rarely question goals given to us out of love, which is exactly why they go unexamined. If this is not the case, then check for the next thing.
The Busyness Trap
The second trap is constant motion.
From the outside, this looks like progress. You train for Hyrox before work, listen to podcasts on your commute, jump from call to call, fit in a workout at lunch, go to networking events in the evening, and fill your weekends with plans. It seems like you’re making the most of your life and investing in yourself. But in reality, you don’t leave a single unplanned hour where tough questions might come up.
Whenever things get quiet, doubts start to surface. Instead of sitting with those feelings, you reach for something to distract you like another episode, another scroll, another task. You call it learning or productivity, but really, you’re just filling up the silence where real reflection could happen.
Therapist Annie Wright calls this an anaesthetic. In her work with high achievers, she’s found that constant work and self-improvement aren’t always about ambition. Often, they’re ways to avoid pain, grief, fear, or emptiness. In this sense, busyness isn’t just a habit but a painkiller.
When you chase borrowed goals, you rely on outside validation, which never really ends. There’s no point where you feel finished, so you just keep going. Staying busy also numbs you, so you never have to ask if these goals are truly yours.
You thought you were busy because your goals mattered, but the truth is tougher. You hold on to these goals because they keep you busy. Busyness becomes like a drug, and stillness feels like withdrawal. That’s why my three days are so tough without the painkiller. The podcasts stop, the meetings disappear, the notifications go quiet. Everything I’ve been avoiding finally catches up with me.
Pratyahara: A Mid‑Year Review for High Achievers
If you've sleepwalked through life chasing goals that were never yours, now is the time for course correction
Every year starting July 15th, my birthday, I pause for three days. It’s a meditation ritual I call the ‘deliberate pause’. In Yogic language, it can be called pratyahara, which means withdrawing from the senses. During this period of introspection, I stay in my apartment without food, screens, or outside noise so that I may really hear myself. It might seem extreme, but it’s honestly the most grounding thing I do in the whole year. It’s a deliberate pause because this is also when I carry out a mid-year self-appraisal, to reflect on course correction, just in case I was following someone else’s dreams.
I started this practice after reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. Franklin spent almost an hour every night reviewing his actions. Ever since reading his story, I’ve been a fan of self-reflection. Along with my weekly self-reviews, this three-day voluntary discomfort has given me direction to achieve goals that once seemed out of reach for a startup founder. I became a yoga teacher, learned to do a handstand, got fit (under 10% body fat), and started writing my first book.
We’re almost halfway through the year. Before you read on, take a moment to write down the resolutions you made in January. List every goal, from fitness to career, even the ones you kept private. If you’re like most people, you’ll see how much you’ve drifted from your list. You set a goal in January, lose focus by March, and then blame it on one reason or the other. The real reason may be somewhere else. In pursuing goals that were not yours.
Almost every high achiever I know speaks the same language on this. So I started to wonder: do even the motivated, disciplined people have such a hard time with their own goals? Success and failure as such are just feedback from reality and not final verdicts on a life. And therefore, I’m not here to give you a productivity tip or a shortcut to reach your goals faster. But pursuing goals that never deserved your devotion in the first place is certainly a tragedy. Failures can come into your life for several reasons, sometimes even just bad luck. But introspect hard to reassure yourself that you didn’t give up on your list because you’re weak or undisciplined. Maybe you were chasing goals that weren’t really yours, and that calls for course correction. A deliberate pause.
The irony is that you can be highly competent, disciplined, and even successful while moving in the wrong direction. Because what feels like success in that case is actually a trap. Primarily one of these.
The Gratitude Trap
The first trap is love. Many of the goals that shape your life actually come from the people who love you most. Your parents set you on a path before you were old enough to choose for yourself. Get good grades. Earn a degree. Land the job that sounds impressive to relatives. If your family made sacrifices for you, their goals can start to feel like debts you have to repay. I know this feeling well. I grew up in Kathmandu with very little, and for years I carried my family’s hopes for the better part of a decade. Their dream became my plan, and I never stopped to ask if it was also my own.
Psychologists Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill studied this over thirty years. They found that the pressure to meet others’ standards grew by a third, much faster than the standards we set for ourselves. We’re more driven by outside expectations and less by our own choices than any generation before us, and we call that ambition.
This is why gratitude can be a trap, not just a feeling. You can’t easily walk away from a goal your parents gave you, because it feels like betrayal. So you keep chasing a path that isn’t right for you and call it honouring them. We rarely question goals given to us out of love, which is exactly why they go unexamined. If this is not the case, then check for the next thing.
The Busyness Trap
The second trap is constant motion.
From the outside, this looks like progress. You train for Hyrox before work, listen to podcasts on your commute, jump from call to call, fit in a workout at lunch, go to networking events in the evening, and fill your weekends with plans. It seems like you’re making the most of your life and investing in yourself. But in reality, you don’t leave a single unplanned hour where tough questions might come up.
Whenever things get quiet, doubts start to surface. Instead of sitting with those feelings, you reach for something to distract you like another episode, another scroll, another task. You call it learning or productivity, but really, you’re just filling up the silence where real reflection could happen.
Therapist Annie Wright calls this an anaesthetic. In her work with high achievers, she’s found that constant work and self-improvement aren’t always about ambition. Often, they’re ways to avoid pain, grief, fear, or emptiness. In this sense, busyness isn’t just a habit but a painkiller.
When you chase borrowed goals, you rely on outside validation, which never really ends. There’s no point where you feel finished, so you just keep going. Staying busy also numbs you, so you never have to ask if these goals are truly yours.
You thought you were busy because your goals mattered, but the truth is tougher. You hold on to these goals because they keep you busy. Busyness becomes like a drug, and stillness feels like withdrawal. That’s why my three days are so tough without the painkiller. The podcasts stop, the meetings disappear, the notifications go quiet. Everything I’ve been avoiding finally catches up with me.
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The Comfort Trap
The third trap is comfort, which comes as an incentive with small wins that keep you attached to goals that aren’t really yours. Every time, the win tells you that you’re almost there and just need to keep going. You accept this because it feels safer than questioning your whole path. You push the goal a little further and keep moving, using the last win as proof you’re on track even if part of you isn’t sure.
This is the hardest part. If you failed clearly, you might pause and ask yourself why you wanted this goal at all. But that rarely happens, because you’re disciplined and hardworking, always pushing toward the next milestone. Still, the wins never feel big enough to bring real joy, so you feel empty even though your life is comfortable.
Over time, this can feel like sleepwalking through life. On the surface, everything looks fine. You can point to your progress and rewards, and tell yourself and others that things are going well. But inside, the part of you that knows these goals aren’t really yours starts to go numb. The closer you get to someone else’s idea of success, the further you move from the life you truly want.
In this trap, comfort is just as numbing as busyness. As long as these borrowed goals keep giving you small wins, it never feels like there’s a good reason to walk away. You might think leaving would be irrational, ungrateful, or wasteful. But the real waste isn’t the effort you’ve already spent. It’s the life you could have built if you had asked yourself sooner and more honestly whether these goals were ever really yours.
The deliberate pause
The drive, the work ethic, the discipline, the love of your close ones aren’t the villain. In most cases, the real problem is chasing borrowed goals. It may also be that goals you are following are truly yours, but our productivity culture as a moral identity often makes us play safe. And if you keep following the assigned goal, your discipline will only take you further from your own life.
Psychologist Carsten Wrosch has found that people who can release a dead‑end goal and commit to a new one report greater well‑being than those who just keep pushing out of principle.
So, each July, when I get a year older, I ask myself the same question: whose race am I running? This ritual isn’t about suffering. It’s about clearing away distractions so I can find an honest answer.
Here are three steps you can take for your mid-year review:
First, answer three simple questions to see if you are living with a borrowed goal.
Can you pause without feeling anxious?
If you take a day off, does it actually feel restful, or does guilt show up quickly?
Do you actively look forward to the weekend?
When CreditVidya was acquired, I thought I’d feel relieved, but instead I felt empty, which didn’t make sense to me. It’s not that CreditVidya was not my goal, but something must have been missing. So I packed a bag, got on my Royal Enfield, and rode across India. In that quiet, I finally asked myself: whose race am I running? You don’t need a motorcycle. You just need twenty minutes, a blank page, and the courage to write down your answer.
Second, be willing to walk off the track.
Reshma Saujani had the impressive résumé her parents worked so hard for: finance, law, a Yale degree, and a life that impressed others. But it wasn’t truly hers, and she knew it. At thirty-three, she quit and ran for Congress against an eighteen-year incumbent. She lost, getting only nineteen per cent of the vote, but the campaign helped her discover what really mattered to her. From that experience, she started Girls Who Code. Letting go of the wrong path isn’t failure. It’s the first step to finding the right one.
Third - and you can start this today - is to pick one small thing that is truly yours and do it every day for the rest of the year. Don’t pick a big, impressive goal because those are often borrowed from others. Instead, choose something simple, something you’d do even if no one noticed. Taking one small step that belongs to you each day helps you reconnect with your own motivation.
You still have half the year ahead. That’s enough time. Look at your list, cross out the goals that aren’t really yours, pick the one that is, and take your first small step before the day ends.
Because in January, when you sit down to review the year, you want to reach a different verdict than the one you reached this morning. For the first time, you may feel confident to say the goals you pursued truly belonged to you, whatever the outcome.
That’s the power of pratyahara - the ability to listen to your true self.
To be continued…
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