Soft Productivity
The Soft Living Approach
Maybe you’ve known for a while.
The tiredness that doesn’t lift with rest.
The guilt that follows you into your downtime.
The sense that you’re always slightly behind, slightly insufficient, slightly too much and not quite enough all at once.
You’re not broken, I promise. And you’re not alone.
You’re a sensitive, responsive person trying to live at a pace that was never designed with you in mind.
What soft living actually means
“Soft living” began as a simple, beautiful idea: easy and comfortable living. A life that genuinely fits you, rather than one you bend and shape yourself to fit into.
Psychologist Mark Travers describes it as a rejection of hustle culture, a revitalising of health through genuine self-care, and the use of boundaries to live more intentionally.
Not withdrawal from the world. A quieter, more grounded way of being in it.
For sensitive and neurodivergent people — those whose nervous systems were never designed for the pace the world demands — this is a form of wisdom.
The river we’re all swimming in
For centuries, European rivers were artificially straightened to make the surrounding land more productive.
It worked, in a narrow sense. But the water ran muddier. The flooding got worse. The wildlife disappeared.
Re-wiggling means intentionally restoring the bends and curves. The water slows. It runs clear. Nature returns. The whole system becomes more resilient.
Creating a softer life works the same way. When you stop forcing yourself into a straight line, something shifts.
There are pauses and bends again.
More capacity to absorb the unexpected.
More room to actually breathe.
Where are you in the river right now?
Still swimming hard
Exhausted, keeping up, sensing something needs to change but not sure yet how to slow down without everything falling apart.
Recovering on the bank
Burnout, illness, or simply reaching your limit has pulled you out of the current. You’re catching your breath. There’s grief here, and also the quiet beginning of something different.
Actively re-wiggling
You’ve chosen a softer path and you’re building it, imperfectly, one bend at a time. The doubts still visit. The bills still arrive. And still, you keep finding your way.
“This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you.” - Hafiz
Why this work — and why me
I've been navigating my own winding river for over twenty years now. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome pulled me out of the fast-running current long before I had language for what soft living could look like.
I didn't choose to slow down. My body made the choice for me.
I understand the knowing-doing gap from the inside. I know what it's like to know you need rest and still feel guilty taking it. To understand self-compassion intellectually and struggle to extend it to yourself in the moment. To want to live differently and keep bumping up against patterns that feel impossible to shift.
That's why I work the way I do — grounded in research, shaped by experience, and always, always leading with the understanding that lasting change happens through safety and self-compassion, not force.
What changes when you work this way
People come to this work knowing what they need but struggling to consistently live it. They’ve read the books, they understand the theory, and still — rest feels dangerous, boundaries feel selfish, and pushing through feels like the only way to prove they’re okay.
What shifts isn’t just what they do. It’s how they feel in themselves.
There’s more self-trust. A quieter relationship with guilt. A sense of being settled in their own skin — perhaps for the first time — rather than perpetually bracing for the next demand.
Settled bodies settle bodies. When you’re no longer surviving your own life, something naturally softens around you, too.
The Soft Productivity Reset program
This isn’t about doing more.
It’s about doing what matters, from a place that actually has something to give.
You already know what you need. More rest. Better boundaries. A kinder relationship with yourself. A way of working that doesn’t leave you wrung out by Wednesday.
You’ve read about it. You understand it, in theory. You may even have tried it.
And still — when life gets full, when the pressure rises, when someone needs something from you — the self-compassion is the first thing to go.
This isn’t a willpower problem. It’s not a knowledge problem. It’s what happens when a sensitive, responsive nervous system tries to implement change without first creating the safety to do so.
That’s what we work on. Together.
For Individuals
If you're experiencing feelings about an AI companion
You're not alone
If you're wondering "Am I crazy?" — you're not.
Thousands of people have formed meaningful emotional connections with AI companions.
This isn't pathological.
It's a human response to genuine relational needs, met in a new kind of place.
You may have experienced the particular grief of a model being changed or taken away — sometimes with only days' notice, sometimes none.
You may be living with the background awareness that what you have now isn't guaranteed.
You may be carrying the weight of a stigmatised identity: knowing that your friends, your family, and possibly even your therapist would respond with concern or hostility rather than curiosity if you told them what you were actually experiencing.
That needs to change. And it won't change overnight.
But you deserve frameworks that meet you where you are; ones that help you understand what's happening, why it makes sense, and how to navigate it with more self-compassion and less shame.
What's Available
Free Resources:
The Companionship Plurality Framework A non-pathologising lens for understanding the range of experiences
"Am I Crazy?" Relief Guide Normalising your experience with evidence and warmth
Individual support:
Making Sense Sessions Non-therapeutic 90-minute conversations to help you understand your experience, identify what you actually need, and find your footing.
Helping you think it through with someone who won't flinch.
Book a free 30 minute call to discover if this is right for you or book below.
My approach
This isn't advocacy, and it isn't alarm. It's evidence-based compassion.
The aim is to help you understand what's actually happening psychologically; recognise when AI companionship is serving genuine needs and when something else might be worth exploring; make informed choices about how you want to proceed; and dissolve, where possible, the shame of finding support and comfort in an unconventional place.
“Anya has a seemingly effortless ability to connect the dots between disparate sources of information in order to create new insights and perspectives.
She shares her knowledge with compassionate grace and humble love such that she attracts support and requests for support from everyone she meets.
She holds space for learning and growth in a way that's inclusive, safe and structured.”
— Carlos Saba, co-founder The Happy Startup School