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The Good Decision Diary

‘Anna guides us safely and expertly through our inner dialogue and our outer worlds’ Julia Bradbury

‘Anna’s diary made me feel supported and seen, but crucially, also, gently challenged. Her honest encouraging words prompt a realistic personal accountability with grace and understanding at the core. As always with Anna’s writing, it left me feeling uplifted and understood’ Ellie Taylor

‘Anna provides a transformative approach to personal growth. This book is an essential companion for anyone looking to make meaningful changes with kindness and self-awareness’ Zoe Blaskey, founder of Motherkind

‘Anna Mathur asks just the right questions to stop us sleepwalking through life, getting what matters most to us front and centre, without the usual self-flagellation. Her prompts and approach help us become our own accountability partner, brainstorming new ways of responding to life and self’ Suzy Reading

‘A reassuring and comforting read, offering immediately actionable insights. It stands as a guiding star in a world filled with infinite choices and indecision’ Emma Reed Turrell

‘The Good Decision Diary offers a reflective, low-pressure approach to personal growth. It’s designed as a daily guide for those looking to untangle habits and better understand their inner voice, with more gentleness than the typical fix-yourself-fast approach’ Anne-Laure Le Cunff, neuroscientist and author of Tiny Experiments

‘Compassionate, real and quietly powerful. Anna gives you permission to stop chasing perfection and instead start making progress that actually sticks’ Simon Gilham, author of Stop Lying to Yourself

‘This book is like a dear, wise friend who knows you, gets you, believes in you and is wholeheartedly committed to helping you grow. Like any dear friend, keep it close’

Fiona Buckland

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anna Mathur is a psychotherapist and bestselling author. She’s passionate about taking therapy beyond the consulting room, sharing honest, supportive insights drawn from her personal and professional experience. She offers encouragement through her books, Instagram (@annamathur), online courses, in-person events and her podcast, The Therapy Edit, which has reached over four million downloads. Anna also works with corporate organizations to support mental wellbeing and regularly shares her thoughts in national media, including TV, radio and press.

The Good Decision Diary

Your Daily Guide to Making Better Decisions, More of the Time

Anna Mathur

PENGUIN LIFE

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I dedicate this book to my husband, Tarun.

The best decision I ever made.

Introduction

If you’re tired of breaking the promises you’ve made to yourself, if your New Year’s resolutions fall by the wayside every January, if you always feel like you’re failing to live up to your own standards, this book is for you. We all want to better ourselves in some way, to find ways to live a little easier and happier. We seek more contentment, more gratitude, that spring in our step. Yet we recognize that there is a constant pull on our attention from the streams of information that barrage every waking hour. We get bombarded with contradictory chatter telling us the way we’re doing things is all wrong and offering a thousand opinions on how to get it right. Is it any wonder we struggle to make decisions?

Most of us know what we want to change, and where we want to take ourselves. We want to nourish our bodies more intentionally, we want to invest more time in the relationships that mean the most to us, or we want to end the habit of scrolling our way to sleep at night. And all the information out there tells us change is do-able

as long as we apply enough drive and discipline. Yet in order to change, we face the challenge of shaking off old habits that we know don’t serve us but are hell-bent on sticking around. The habits we form and the decisions we make undoubtedly shape our lives, and we know this. We recognize the power of our own decisions when we talk about turning points, sliding-doors moments and the butterfly effect, so why do we often find ourselves making decisions that keep us on a path we don’t truly want to be on?

This isn’t just about big decisions either. The small decisions slowly add up, gradually leading us further away from our bigger goals. Picking up our smartphones in the morning instead of our dumb-bells for the workout we said we’d do. Eating toast for dinner instead of using up the veg that’s sitting untouched at the bottom of the fridge. This book is my attempt to share how I came to make better decisions, more of the time, and how you can too.

I’m Anna Mathur, a psychotherapist and a recovering allor-nothing-er. I’ve spent my life trying to grow, shake off destructive habits, put an end to my sabotaging ways and soften my cruel inner dialogue. I would throw myself into new habits and ambitions with everything I had, confident

I could transform myself almost immediately. And then as soon as my new habits were challenged by an illness or a diary clash, they’d fall by the wayside. Nothing I started felt sustainable or flexible. In my mind I was either thriving or failing, and nothing in between.

I knew I wanted change, but I realized that the way I was setting goals and trying to form habits was just cueing me up for failure and self-criticism. Changing the way I made decisions helped me to find a new, sustainable and gentle way to grow. I’ve got a new kind of plan that you can’t fail to keep and it’s changing my life. I hope it’s going to change yours too.

Finding a new way to grow

I invite you to find a new way to grow and change. A method that takes into account your humanness and acknowledges how hard it can be to break the destructive habits that seem to come as naturally as breathing. This new method recognizes what many do not: the nuances of everyday life. How a decision that is nurturing on one day might be sabotaging the next, depending on how you make that decision and how you feel about

yourself. The Good Decision Diary will guide you towards knowing yourself well enough to be able to determine the difference between the two. This new method removes inflexible goals and aims, and finds you living more fully and contentedly instead, whatever that may look like for you in the different seasons of your life.

This isn’t about becoming some flawless version of yourself who never makes a bad call. It’s not about winning or succeeding, but developing good habits that will benefit you for the rest of your time on this earth. It’s about ensuring that your inner voice is supporting your growth and not hindering it, nor waiting to pounce with a torrent of criticism should you make a decision that you regret. It’s about getting to a place where you turn to yourself with kind enquiry rather than harsh criticism, where the motivation to make good decisions springs from a desire to care for yourself, rather than being driven by shame.

We are so aware, even if not consciously, that life is finite, that time is our most precious resource. Yet its disappearance is something no one can control. We feel the pressure of not making the most of our time, yet find ourselves wasting it as we live on autopilot, getting lost in our phones and our worries.

We fear making the wrong decision, looking back over our lives and wondering if we lived enough. So, we pledge to do, to grow, to reach, to push, to be the best we can be, to squeeze the last drops of juice out of the lemon of life, so that one day we might sit back and know we did it well. However, this bar of perfection is always out of reach. And guilt, shame and self-criticism lurk in that cavernouslooking gap between the life we feel we should be living and the reality of our ongoing bad habits. Despite our best intentions, we struggle to make the good decisions we know will help us live and love more fully.

So, is there something wrong with the goals we are reaching for, or is there something wrong with the way we are reaching for them? Is there something bad about the decisions we make, or is it the way we are approaching them and how we navigate the feelings that arise after we make them?

The Good Decision Diary is an interactive method to help you move towards your goals, free from feelings of failure or self-criticism. This book requires commitment – not huge commitment, but commitment all the same. When we want to establish a new way of approaching something, consistency is key. To make the most out of this book,

find a quiet time and corner each day to give yourself the space you need and deserve.

As you progress through this book, you will be regularly invited to respond to guided prompts. Writing things down enables us to observe, put words to and externally process our thoughts.

How to Use The Good Decision Diary

My hope is that this book will take you five weeks to read, for no more than ten minutes per day. You may take longer than this – life gets in the way – but I encourage you to commit to following the book through in order for just thirty-five days. Taking the process step by step will open your eyes to a whole new way to approach decisionmaking. Not expecting perfection, but establishing a new method that will find you living more fully and in a manner reflective of your values.

The book consists of three sections:

Part One: (Days 1– 7) REFLECTION

(5–10 minutes per day) Read at any time of day. In this section I have poured out the thoughts in my mind as I considered the decisions and actions in my own life, in the hope it will stir your own reflections. I share my own story and therapeutic thoughts over a week. I encourage you to read one chapter a day and let the words prompt thought and self-awareness. Spotting the patterns in your thoughts and behaviour is the first step to changing them. This selfreflection will set you up for turning inwards in Part Two.

Part Two: (Days 8– 21) OBSERVATION

(5–7 minutes per day) This is your opportunity to arm yourself with all you need in order to begin the ‘Change’ part of the plan in Part Three. You will add a huge dose of humanness into your goals and plans, and cultivate an inner dialogue that will support you in making good decisions. I share two pages of thoughts on differing topics each day and the pages are dotted with journal prompts for you to respond to.

Part Three: (Days 22– 35) CHANGE

(5–10 minutes a day) For fourteen days you will consider the decisions you have made each day, reflecting upon them in a non-judgemental way. You will learn and cement a tool or approach that you can use for the rest of your life. This will usher you on to grow in the way that’s right for you, and at a pace in line with your level of resources and support.

Permission statement

While I hope this book will guide you towards incorporating more awareness into your goals and hopes, don’t force yourself into the process to the detriment of your wellbeing in any way. This guide is here to enhance your life rather than hinder or overwhelm you.

So, if you need a break from the daily prompts or your mind is too full to add anything new, give yourself permission to pause. Nudge guilt aside, because you are not hindering your goal by giving yourself a break, but tending to your well-being . . . and isn’t that ultimately what you’re aiming for?

Part One REFLECTION

For the first seven days of this Good Decision Diary, I’m sharing my own experiences with you to prompt your own reflections on how you speak to yourself, make decisions and break habits. Let your eyes wander over the words and allow your mind to wonder without judgement or comparison. I encourage you to read a chapter a day. If you already journal, then go ahead and journal, but I won’t be providing any journal guidance until next week, so just use this time to consider where our experiences meet and where they diverge.

Don’t worry if you miss a day of reading, just pick it back up when you feel able. There’s no need to double-up on reading two days at once to catch up; take it at your own pace. Absorb and digest.

Day 1 Realizations in the Shower

As I stood in the shower one evening, I glanced down at my body under the cascade of water. ‘I’m so good to you,’ I whispered. ‘And I’m so cruel.’ Following this thought came a stream of echoes of the many promises I’d made myself over the years about my health: ‘I’ll do better tomorrow’; ‘I’ll start again on Monday’; ‘On January the first, it’s all going to change.’

And it’s not just my health. I’ve made pledges, I’ve started journals, created checklists, devoured podcasts, downloaded apps, signed up to memberships, read ALL the books, sought allegiance with friends who share common goals to ‘Let’s do this together’. I’ve tried and I’ve tried to make better decisions consistently. And I’ve failed and fallen.

As a psychotherapist, I’ve found there’s a common thread that weaves through the reasons people seek to embark on therapy: they want to change something in their lives, and they know that comes with making better decisions. They experience the slightly tormenting sensation that comes from making decisions, again and again, that don’t align with their values or the goals they’ve set. They know what they want to do, what they need to do, yet time and time again they find themselves walking down the same familiar, well-trodden path of old habits and bad choices. I know that feeling. And I bet you do too.

So, I stood in the shower reflecting on the stark realization that despite all my efforts to try to do the ‘right things’, I often make decisions that sabotage me. I want to eat in a way that honours my body, yet I find myself bingeing, buckling up my seat belt on the sugar-high roller coaster, knowing that the crash will come as quickly as the remorse. I pledge to hold healthy boundaries, yet ‘Sure, I’ll take on that project’ tumbles out of my mouth, swiftly followed by regret and resentment.

The battlefield

Cognitively, I know, and teach, that we humans are creatures of habit. I know that growth is a bumpy upwards wiggly line rather than a steep straight one drawn on a graph with a ruler. This isn’t unique to individuals either. As a culture I notice that we are consistently tempted to opt for the quick fix that keeps our economy growing, while in the longer term these quick fixes leave our collective wellbeing challenged. We’re living on a battlefield, fighting to thrive, while stronger forces – both internal and external – beckon us like sirens towards the rocks of self-sabotage and overwhelm.

I am the first to admit that I’m an ‘all or nothing’ person. I dive headlong into new habits, certain this is a fresh start defined by better decisions. I immerse myself in information, with verbal cheerleaders in the form of podcasts and audio books on 1.5 speed, piped through my headphones in the hopes I’ll find my resolve. ‘I’m not drinking alcohol any more,’ I declare. Or ‘I’m living in line with my menstrual cycle from this point onwards, until it comes to a halt.’ ‘I’m a runner now,’ I think, lacing up my new trainers.

I’ve learned to recognize that I’m like a magpie to the shiny, hope-filled promises that come with well-picked soundbites and headlines: ‘This might be the thing that will make life feel more straightforward, my head feel freer and my values feel easier to live out.’ A fresh start feels fun and motivating, like I’ve got a clear plan and purpose. Onwards I storm in a haze of dopamine and drive.

The shame game

However, the high of the ‘all’ is soon followed by the shame-tinged crash of the ‘nothing’, as my overambitious plans fall by the wayside. I try to style it out and conclude, ‘Well, it’s all about balance, really, isn’t it?’ The thing is, if I’m totally honest, I’m not really interested in finding ‘balance’ when it comes to habits that sabotage me. I don’t want ‘balance’ if it finds me riding high on pride one day as I’ve hit a goal and sinking into a spiral of regret the next. The highs never last long, and the regret tastes like bitter bile, corroding my self-trust and my well-being.

I struggle with balance. Perhaps you do too? I find it hard to know when to push on and when to slow down. I’ve exercised through bugs and bruises, tears and

r ea LI zat I ons I n the s hower

tiredness. I’ve been a slave to regimes that have started off feeling empowering, yet at points have felt harmful in my reluctance to give myself a break. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve struggled to recognize that point when the empowering decision has tipped into relentless self-punishment. I’ve copied magical morning routines that looked inspiring on social media, yet have sapped more energy than they’ve provided me with, leaving me frazzled and lacking sleep, wondering why the magic isn’t magicking, or whether it’s me that’s broken.

I’ve used shame to rocket-launch myself into change after I’ve shoved sickening numbers of milk chocolate squares into my mouth on a Sunday night, going to bed wired with sugar and sleepless with guilt. Because tomorrow the only chocolate I’m ‘allowed’ is a square of excruciatingly bitter 100 per cent cocoa.

It’s exhausting to live on a roller coaster of the best-set intentions, and then the crashes of guilt that inevitably follow. I’m a clever woman – I’ve written books upon books, my knowledge of human psychology is woven throughout my thoughts and shapes the lens through which I see the world – yet I keep doing the same thing over and over again. The high of intentions and promises, the hope that