Nobody tells you that a career in music comes with this much silence. Not the good kind, not the silence before a take or the quiet after a show. The kind where you're sitting with your phone, wondering why you feel so flat when things are supposedly going fine.

Mental health in music gets talked about a lot, but usually in extremes. Crisis hotlines and burnout breakdowns. What gets said less is the everyday stuff, the low-grade heaviness, the loss of momentum, the feeling that you've drifted somewhere you didn't mean to go.

A while back I came across a simple formula in a book called The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. It's not a music book. But it stopped me in my tracks, because it reframes something we all feel but rarely examine: how much of how we feel is actually within our control. I've been thinking about it in the context of artists ever since, and I wanted to share it with you here.