For a long time, I’ve been intentional about my day-to-day habits and routines — building them around productivity, fitness, and both physical and mental wellbeing. I'm careful and disciplined about training, nutrition, recovery, from workout planning, supplements and nutrition, down to a strict sleep routine à la Huberman. But even with all of that effort to live well, life in London — working full-time as a software engineer — still felt relentless with little breathing room, and I found myself in a constant state of physical and mental depletion.

The Slow Journey began during a career break, while I was travelling through New Zealand. Somewhere between quiet mornings with bird songs, long walks by glacier lakes, and unstructured days that almost always included a few hours in the great outdoors, I started to feel a sense of calm and restfulness that I was never able to achieve in my tightly managed routines in London.

What struck me most was the contrast: nothing dramatically changed in what I valued or how I approached life — but how I felt internally, day to day, especially when I woke up in the morning, shifted completely. In London, even when everything on paper was right — including a full 9 hours of sleep — I often woke up anxious and already bracing for the day ahead, moving into work demands, commutes, and a kind of low-level fight-or-flight state that became constant and normal. In New Zealand, mornings carried a very different quality. There was a sense of calm and steadiness in the body, a crisp clarity in my mind, and a feeling of being totally at ease with the day ahead.

This blog is an exploration of that gap.

The name The Slow Journey might sound almost countercultural in the world I come from. If you work in tech, start-ups, or live in a big city like London, you’ll know how deeply everything is oriented around speed — moving faster, shipping faster, scaling faster. And now, with AI accelerating so much of what we do, that pressure to keep up only seems to increase. In that context, slowing down can feel almost irrational and irresponsible.

I’ve found myself questioning how sustainable all that hustling really is. We’re human beings, not systems to be optimised indefinitely. While productivity, ambition, and achievement can be deeply fulfilling, they are still only one part of a much bigger picture, and not the same as living a truly well and wholesome life.

Here, I think and write about how to move into a sense of wellness from the ground up. Not just through building routines and habits, but through choosing and shaping an environment where our nervous system can relax and feel safe — and through giving ourselves the full permission to rest and slow down in a world with ever-increasing demands.

I hope some of these reflections resonate with you, or at least serve as a gentle reminder that there are other ways to live beyond the ones we’ve been taught. Welcome to this space. 🌸

— Junyuan