Stop Fighting Yourself. Why Changing Your Habits May Start With How You See Yourself
Most of us already know a surprising amount about what we’re supposed to do for our health. We know we should move more, eat differently, get enough rest and be more consistent. The harder question is why knowing all of that doesn’t automatically change what we do.
That question sits at the center of my conversation with Jane Msumba, a pharmacist, health coach and founder of Inner Glow Clinic. Through her clinical work and her own experience, Jane started noticing that people often weren’t struggling because they lacked information. They were struggling because information alone wasn’t enough to change the patterns they had already built into their lives.
What makes Jane’s perspective interesting is that she doesn’t begin by asking what is wrong with someone. She starts by helping people understand themselves more clearly, including the habits they’ve built, the pressures they’re carrying and the person they’re trying to become.
Jane Had to Understand Her Own Habits First
Jane’s work became much more personal during a stressful period in her own life. She was juggling postgraduate study and going through a breakup when emotional eating and late-night takeaways became a source of comfort.
She understood that the behavior wasn’t helping her. She knew the health implications. She tried telling herself to stop. None of that immediately changed what she was doing.
Eventually, she started noticing that fighting herself was becoming part of the problem. She would experience the craving, order the food and sometimes realize by the time it arrived that she didn’t even want it anymore. That pattern made her curious about what was happening before the behavior itself.
That curiosity led Jane deeper into neuroscience, mental imagery and what she now describes as future-self connection. Instead of focusing only on stopping a habit, she began thinking about the person who was creating the habit in the first place.
The Goal Is Bigger Than Telling Yourself What to Do
A central part of Jane’s work is helping people imagine the person they’re trying to become in much greater detail.
There is a difference, she explained, between saying, “I want to lose weight before my wedding,” and actually spending time imagining yourself on that day, how you feel, what you can see around you and what that future represents.
Jane uses that kind of mental imagery to help people connect their daily choices to something more meaningful than a rule they have been told to follow. For one client, improving her health was connected to the hope of becoming a mother. For another, movement became easier to imagine when she could picture herself running outside and actually feel that experience in her mind.
The idea is not that discipline disappears. Jane’s argument is that discipline becomes easier to sustain when the action feels connected to an identity and future you genuinely want.
Sustainable Change Can Be Much Simpler Than We Make It
Another part of our conversation that stayed with me was how often Jane returned to simplicity.
We can make health and behavior change feel enormous. We create new routines, strict plans and complete lifestyle overhauls, then become frustrated when we can’t maintain them.
Jane talks much more about small actions people can actually repeat. Walking. Making a few realistic changes to what you eat. Building moments of reflection into the day. Using accountability while a new habit is still unfamiliar.
She describes those small actions as “love notes to our future self.”
I love that framing because it moves the conversation away from constantly correcting ourselves. A habit can still require effort, but the effort doesn’t have to come from shame or from treating yourself like the problem.
Sometimes You Need Help Becoming Someone New
Jane is also realistic about how difficult it can be to change a routine you have repeated for years.
Our brains are comfortable with what is familiar, so deciding that you want a new habit doesn’t automatically make the new behavior feel natural. Jane uses daily accountability with clients partly because the early stage of change often requires more support than people expect.
That resonated with me because I see something similar in my own work. We often know we need to slow down, reflect or make a different choice, but knowing that doesn’t mean we’ve built the habit of actually doing it.
Sometimes the work is less about discovering another strategy and more about creating enough space and support to practice becoming the person who uses the strategy consistently.
The Bigger Lesson
Jane’s philosophy is rooted in a simple idea: we may already have more of the tools we need than we realize.
That doesn’t mean people should ignore medical care or that every health issue can be solved through mindset. Jane is a pharmacist and is very clear that medication can be necessary and important. Her point is that sustainable behavior change also requires us to understand the person living inside the plan.
In our full conversation on The She Can Work Podcast, Jane and I talk much more about emotional eating, future-self connection, accountability, discipline, self-compassion and why simple habits can sometimes create more lasting change than dramatic ones.
At the center of it all is a question worth sitting with: what might change if you stopped treating yourself like the problem and started paying closer attention to the person you’re becoming?
