2026-01-22 18:16:42
Jan 21, 2026 | Watch on YouTube | Download the transcript
When Dr Anne-Laure Le Cunff was told she might die, her first instinct was to check her calendar. In this talk, she reveals how our desperate need for control keeps us stuck and how tiny experiments can set us free. Dr Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a neuroscientist, author, and entrepreneur who studies curiosity – both in the lab and in life. Her research at King’s College London explores how our brains seek, learn, and adapt, spanning areas from ADHD to AI and mental health. She founded Ness Labs, a science-based learning platform helping people live more experimental lives. Her bestselling book Tiny Experiments offers a practical guide to transforming uncertainty into curiosity, creativity, and self-discovery. Through her research and writing, she bridges science and everyday life, showing how curiosity can help us loosen control, embrace change, and uncover who we truly are.
In that moment, despite the seriousness of the diagnosis, or perhaps because of it, I wanted to feel in control. I wanted to believe that I could stay in charge of what happened next. And so when I heard the news, instead of shifting my footing, I held on tighter to the calendar, to the identity of being the one who never falls behind.
I’m sure you’ve had your own version of that moment when something cracked open in your life and your first instinct was to ask, “How do I stay in control?” In those moments, we tell ourselves, “I’m the productive one. I’m the calm, the quiet, the supportive one, the one who never drops the ball, the one who always has it together, the one who keeps everyone happy.” We all carry these deep assumptions about who we are. And when life feels uncertain, we tighten our grip, not just on the situation, but on the identity we’ve built.
So, here’s the question I’d like to explore with you. What if the thing keeping you stuck isn’t your circumstances, but your grip on who you think you need to be? Let me explain how that works. Our minds crave a sense of order. So, when real control disappears, the brain will manufacture an artificial sense of control however it can. That’s why when things feel uncertain, we reach for anything, absolutely anything that helps us feel steadier. How many of us have added another app, another routine, another system when life felt chaotic? We all do this to the point where this behavior has a name.
Psychologists call it compensatory control, which is our attempt at restoring order by creating structure, even if it’s artificial. And we’re not just wired that way. We’re trained this way. Our schools and our societies reward us for being prepared, for being certain, for being right. And so when things feel wobbly, we try to escape that liminal space as quickly as possible rather than pausing to explore.
And now here’s the tricky part. In the short term, it feels like it works. Predictable structures help lower the perceived threat and downregulate the stress response. Planning feels responsible and productive, so you feel a bit calmer, and yes, in control. But over time, this artificial sense of control narrows your options.
You can’t receive what life is actually offering when you’re too busy managing what you think it should be offering. And when you’re trying to control everything, you leave no room for discovering anything, including about yourself. And that’s the real trap. Control doesn’t just keep us stuck in our circumstances, it keeps us stuck in our current identity.
So if control isn’t the answer, what is? That’s what I started wondering after this absurd moment at the hospital. And I know, I know that in that kind of talk, you’re supposed to say that you had a big breakthrough. But in my case, the shift came from something a bit smaller. It came from a little bit of experimentation.
See, as a neuroscientist, I’ve been trained to conduct experiments in the lab. But I’ve come to realize that experimentation is much more than just a scientific method. It’s everywhere. It’s how nature evolves. It’s how species adapt. It’s how we learn to walk and talk as children. Experimentation is the fundamental way life moves forwards.
And there’s something in particular that’s very interesting about experimentation, something that can help us move forward while loosening our grip. The thing is, we don’t run experiments to get to a specific outcome. If we already knew the outcome, there would be no point running the experiment in the first place. We experiment to learn something new, whether that’s a new data point, a clearer picture of reality. Instead of asking how can I stay in control, we ask what can I try?
So if compensatory control is really about clinging to what you know, or what you think you know, experimentation is about letting go of the illusion of certainty. So I started wondering, how can we take this experimental mindset out of the lab and into our daily lives? The beauty of lab experiments is in how actionable they are. You know exactly what you’re going to test and how you’re going to test it.
And it turns out you can bring that same sense of forward momentum to your everyday life by distilling your own experiments down to just two essential elements. Just like a scientist who needs to know, first, what they’re going to try, and second, the trial period. You can choose a specific action to experiment with for a specific duration. I call these tiny experiments, and they follow a very simple formula. It’s like a mini protocol where you just say: I will [action] for [duration].
That’s it. This is not a habit. You’re not committing to this for the rest of your life. This is not a goal either. You’re not trying to get to a specific outcome. This is just an experiment. No targets, no success metrics, no illusion of certainty, just the courage to be curious for a moment and to step outside the story you’ve been telling yourself about who you need to be. Let me show you what that looks like in practice with a few examples from people I worked with.
I’m going to start with Jay. Jay was stuck in that familiar spiral that I think we’ve all experienced, so busy with work that he had lost touch with many of his friends. Weeks turned into months of radio silence. But every time he thought about reaching out, he’d freeze up and tighten his grip. He thought he had to craft the perfect message, to find the right timing, the perfect words to explain everything. And obviously all of this overthinking just kept him stuck. So instead, he said, “I will message one friend every week for four weeks.” No perfect apology, no grand explanation, just a tiny experiment.
What happened? Well, his friends were generally happy to hear from him. Nobody demanded an explanation or an apology or made him feel guilty about the silence. And now here’s what really shifted. Jay started seeing himself as someone who belonged in those friendships, even after the silence, not someone who needed to earn his way back in.
I have thousands of examples from people from my community. People who painted watercolor for 20 minutes every day. People who practiced saying no for just 24 hours. People who stopped consuming social media content for 5 days. And each and every one of them, in the process of experimenting, discovered something unexpected about themselves.
I’m actually one of those examples. When I started writing online, I was pretty anxious. I thought, I’m not a writer. English is not even my first language. And my instinctive response to that anxiety was control. To craft the perfect plan with subscriber targets, a content calendar, marketing strategies. But having learned everything that I had learned about the power of experimentation, I decided to apply an experimental mindset and I said: “I will write one short essay about neuroscience every day for 100 weekdays.” Again, no specific goal other than learning more about the world, about my work, and about myself and the process.
That shift from control to curiosity changed everything. I discovered a new professional path and parts of myself I hadn’t fully known yet. All because I decided to let go of that limiting fixed sense of identity and to experiment instead.
[Pause] So, huh… Let me take a deep breath. That wasn’t planned but that’s experimentation too. When I started experimenting, I also experienced an immense sense of freedom… Just like what I just did. Because when you start experimenting, when you start approaching life like a scientist, you break out of binary thinking. There’s no success or failure, right or wrong, fixed or broken. All you do is collect data. There is no imaginary leaderboard. All there is is your own personal laboratory.And now here’s the fun part. The uncertainty that once felt threatening starts feeling energizing. Just like a scientist, not knowing becomes exciting. There’s almost a sense of… An anticipatory quality, a sense of juiciness. What will I discover? What will I learn? And this is what makes those experiments very powerful.
In that way, experimentation rewires your relationship with uncertainty instead itself. Instead of trying to control everything, you let go of this illusion of knowing what happens next. Instead of forcing answers, you give yourself space to learn. And that very same uncertainty that once triggered your need for control becomes a doorway for discovery.
But now, what if you’re so frozen that even a tiny experiment feels impossible? What if the problem is so charged that you can’t even get close to it? This is when, and I know this is going to go against every instinct you might have, but this is when you need to loosen your grip even further by letting go of solving the problem directly.
Not all experiments need to happen inside the problem space. In fact, some of the most powerful ones don’t. Think of Julia Child, unfulfilled as a diplomat’s wife, who didn’t seek marriage counseling but enrolled in French cooking classes. Or Pierce Brosnan, faced with his wife’s cancer, who returned to painting. In both cases, the experiment seemed unrelated to the problem at hand, but not only did it help them cope, but it also reconnected them with their sense of agency.
Again, it might feel counterintuitive, but if the problem is too painful to touch directly, experimenting with something completely different can be more effective than pushing through. That’s because it bypasses resistance. By shifting your focus to a lower stake domain, your psychological defenses don’t get triggered. You’re not confronting the fear, you’re side-stepping it.
And this is where lateral experiments come in. Small tests in a completely different area of your life. They follow the exact same protocol, I will [action] for [duration], but with no attempt at solving the original issue. All you want to do here is try something new and observe what it opens up.
One woman I worked with had been trying to write to her estranged feather for over a year. But every time she sat down, she froze. The stakes were too high. So instead, she decided to experiment for something unrelated. She said, “I will attend one pottery class every Saturday for six weeks.”
On the surface, this had nothing to do with family. But pottery is messy. You start over, you get it wrong, you try again. And slowly her belief that everything had to be perfect started to loosen. She discovered she was someone who could tolerate messiness, and even embrace it. Until one day, she finally wrote that letter to her father.
Someone else was stuck in a job that wasn’t right, but couldn’t get himself to leave. Every attempt to plan an exit led to more paralysis. He was thinking, what about the money? What will my family think? So instead, he experimented with something uncomfortable. He said: “I will swim in cold water every morning for 10 days.”
Turns out, he could handle it. This experiment was all about discomfort. Physical immediate chosen discomfort. And the cold water revealed someone who could choose that discomfort, someone braver than the person stuck in that job. And so two weeks later, he resigned.
As you can see, these experiments weren’t aimed at solving the original problem. They were aimed at changing the conditions around it, at creating an environment where something new could emerge, at creating space for a surprising insight. And this is really what makes them so powerful.
By experimenting in this way, you interrupt the story you’re stuck in, and you let a new story start to form. You surprise yourself not because you tried to change, but because you stepped outside of the frame that was keeping you stuck. And when you surprise yourself, you create a new insight which can become a new story about who you are.
Writing your own story and keeping that story alive, this is really what living an experimental life is all about. Every experiment brings you closer to becoming you. And this is how you become the fullest, freest version of yourself. Not through self-improvement, but through self-discovery.
Tiny experiments help you release control. They teach you that you can act without knowing the outcome, that you can learn from uncertainty instead of being paralyzed by it. They teach you that curiosity is the key and that every time you loosen your grip, you let life become your laboratory.
At a deeper level, they expand your sense of self. Every time you act outside of your usual patterns, you discover parts of yourself that were hidden or stuck. Parts of yourself you didn’t even know were there.
Whether you decide to experiment directly or laterally, the result is the same. You stop trying to control who you think you should be, who you’ve trained yourself to be, and you start uncovering who you already are.
So now, here’s my invitation for you. Design one tiny experiment that you can start this week. Not next week, not after you’ve planned it perfectly. Think of an area where you feel stuck, and then use the protocol that I shared with you: I will [action] for [duration].
If the problem is too painful, too overwhelming, too charged to approach directly, then forget about that problem completely. Don’t try to be strategic. Pick something completely unrelated. Something where the stakes are low but your curiosity is high. Something creative, playful, physical, maybe a little bit uncomfortable. Something that has nothing to do with solving the problem at hand and everything to do with discovering who you are.
Know that the path to discovering yourself isn’t straight. Sometimes you have to go to pottery classes to write a difficult letter. Sometimes you have to swim in cold water to quit the wrong job. But with practice, whenever you feel stuck, you won’t panic about losing control. You’ll take a breath. Maybe you’ll smile. And you’ll ask: “What tiny experiment could I try?” Because you’ll know, you’ll truly know, that control keeps you small but curiosity sets you free. Thank you. [Applause]
The post How tiny experiments can set you free | Anne-Laure Le Cunff | TEDxNashville | Transcript appeared first on Ness Labs.
2026-01-15 18:24:17
When we’re stuck creatively, productively or intellectually, we often tend to frame the problem as a lack of ideas, discipline, or motivation. So we try to push, to think harder, or to optimize our tools and systems.
But “stuckness” is rarely a thinking problem. It’s a nervous system state, which can be regulated much more efficiently through the body than through effortful thought.
Cognition doesn’t operate in isolation. It’s continuously shaped by signals from the body, whether that’s your posture, movement, breathing, muscle tension, or other sensory input. These signals all modulate arousal, attention, and threat perception before conscious thought even begins.
This is why small physiological changes can have surprisingly large cognitive effects. A slight change in breathing pace, a brief bout of movement, or a shift in posture can alter how clearly you think and how flexible your cognition is.
Somatic regulation is the practice of using your body to change cognitive and emotional states instead of relying on top-down thinking alone.
You may have heard the term somatic healing. Somatic regulation uses similar tools, but with a different orientation:
| Somatic Healing | Somatic Regulation |
| Past-focused | Present-focused |
| Release | Momentum |
| Long protocols | Tiny experiments |
Somatic regulation treats bodily signals as useful inputs, creating the conditions for movement – mental movement included.
There are many ways to feel stuck. Rumination, avoidance, and perfectionism… These loops tend to persist because there’s a mismatch between what the task requires and your current physiological state. Change the state, and the loop often loosens on its own.
Here are three ways to get unstuck, depending on the kind of “stuckness” you’re experiencing:
1) Creatively stuck. Creative work benefits from variability. Changing posture – such as sitting to standing, collapsed to upright – or changing location can be enough to introduce new sensory input. A short walk outside without additional stimulation (no phone, no podcast) can also help when you feel creatively stuck.
2) Productively stuck. Difficulties with being productive often reflect an arousal mismatch: your energy may be too low or too high for the task. Brief, gentle movement such as stretching, swaying, or light dancing can help bring your arousal level into a workable range. So get up from your desk, put your favorite song on, dance like no one’s watching, and then only get back to work!
3) Intellectually stuck. Deep thinking relies on working memory and a sense of safety to give the task your full attention, both of which degrade under stress. Slowing the breath slightly, especially by lengthening the exhale, can help reduce stress and give your nervous system a cue of safety before returning to the problem you’re trying to solve.
After the state shift, reflect to notice patterns. What kind of stuckness was this? What changed after adjusting the state?
This simple metacognitive practice doesn’t have to take a lot of time. One or two sentences in your journal or note-taking app.
Over time, these field notes will become a personal map of how different states interact with different kinds of work and tasks.
Getting unstuck is rarely about better ideas or stronger discipline. It’s about restoring movement – first physical, then emotional and cognitive. When you feel stuck, start below the neck. Change the state first.
The post How to Get Unstuck: Simple Somatic Regulation Practices appeared first on Ness Labs.
2026-01-08 17:55:17
Most advice about consistency sounds the same: try harder, be more disciplined, push through resistance. Discipline is often seen as the difference between people who succeed and people who don’t. And if you fall off, the explanation is usually moralized: not enough willpower, lack of grit, laziness.
But people don’t fail because they don’t try hard enough. They fail because the system they’re operating in makes sustained effort too costly.
From a scientific perspective, discipline is the ability to apply self-control to override impulses in service of longer-term goals.
Decades of research suggest that self-control does predict positive outcomes. But it also shows something more subtle: self-control works best when it’s used sparingly. When people rely on constant “effortful inhibition” (forcing themselves to act) their performance degrades over time.
That’s because this kind of effortful inhibition activates brain networks that are metabolically expensive and sensitive to stress and fatigue.
Instead, research finds that people who appear highly disciplined are not constantly exerting more willpower. Rather, they tend to rely on habits, routines, rituals to maintain their wellbeing, and ways to design their environment that reduce the need for active control.
This is where devotion becomes a more useful tool than discipline. Etymologically, devotion comes from the Latin devovēre: to dedicate by a vow, to promise solemnly. Devotion implies commitment rooted in meaning and identity rather than forceful compliance with a rule.
When you’re devoted to an action, you don’t force yourself to act; the action expresses something you value.
Instead of effortful inihibition, this maps onto what researchers call “harmonious passion” – engagement that is freely chosen and integrated into your identity. Harmonious passion has been linked to greater persistence, better well-being, and being more likely to get in the flow.
You’ve probably noticed that caring deeply about something doesn’t guarantee that you can act on it consistently. That’s because devotion doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and its impact depends heavily on friction – the total resistance between intention and action.
Friction can come from your environment, from a lack of skills or routines, or from the activation energy required to get started.
Two people can be equally devoted and have radically different outcomes because one is operating in a low-friction system and the other in a high-friction one.
The Devotion-Friction Matrix of devoted action has four states:
There’s no point optimizing for maximal devotion or minimal friction in isolation. To get in the flow, you need to optimize for devoted action, where what you care about deeply is also easy enough to do repeatedly.
Here are three evidence-backed ways to do that:
1. Lower your activation energy. You might care a lot about working out or writing, but find yourself procrastinating. When that happens, stop focusing on finishing and focus on starting instead. For example, don’t say you’ll do a work out. Just put on your running shoes and step outside. Don’t say you’ll write the piece. Just open the document and write one sentence.
2. Design your environment. Make the desired action the default and the distractions slightly inconvenient. For instance, eave your book on your pillow and charge your phone in another room, or make unhealthy ones high-friction by putting them out of reach.
3. Run tiny experiments: Turn curiosity itself into an act of devotion. Pick one action to test for a specific duration, playing with variables such as timing, location or accountability, then observe what reduces effort and increases intrinsic reward.
If you want to show up reliably, don’t ask how to force yourself to work harder. Ask what you’re devoted to and what unnecessary friction is standing in the way. This way, consistency becomes a property of the system itself.
The post Discipline is Overrated: The Devotion–Friction Matrix appeared first on Ness Labs.
2025-12-18 21:42:32
This year hit me like a bulldozer. There was no amount of reading and research that could have prepared me for this level of intensity, and I want to start this annual review by saying thank you.
I’m grateful to my body and brain for mostly holding up. I’m grateful I have access to spaces and tools such as psychedelic medicine, ecstatic dance, and entrepreneur retreats that have helped support my mental health throughout this journey.
Most of all, I’m grateful to the people in my life – my family, friends, colleagues, and the entire Ness Labs community – who all showed up in wonderful ways this year.
So much happened, but here’s a quick bullet-point overview before I dive in:
I consider myself a child of the internet. As a teenager, I had a hand-coded blog and a community of online friends from all over the world, whom I’d only ever communicated with in writing via phpBB forums and our ‘blogring’ (remember those?).
Although I had a bunch of odd jobs when I was younger, my first ‘real’ job was at Google, and Ness Labs is largely an online business – with an online newsletter, online community, and online courses.
So I thought I was prepared for the influx of online attention I’d get when launching the book. Boy, was I wrong.
Going on dozens of podcasts was not only exhausting at times, but getting featured on big YouTube channels meant millions of people heard from me for the first time – and not all of them were nice. When the book came out in March, I really struggled with the rare but still hurtful comments on my accent, my appearance, and my supposed unchecked privilege.
I didn’t have to deal with Tim Ferriss levels of threats, but to give you an idea, some commenters said my accent made their ears bleed, that I must be funded by my parents, and that I should go back to my country. I knew I shouldn’t care, but I did, and it took a couple of months to build a digital immune system.
In general, my physical and mental health wasn’t great during the launch. Being in the US meant I didn’t have my healthy routines, including my favorite snacks, familiar local walks, and coffee catch-ups with close friends. I did go to ecstatic dance a couple of times in New York and Austin, but it wasn’t the same as having my regular practice in London.
All the traveling also meant I cancelled meaningful annual rituals. Each year, we organize a psilocybin ceremony with my best friends; that didn’t happen (but I did get to organize one for my family). I spent part of my teenage years with a foster family and normally visit my second mom once a year; that also didn’t happen.
I gained weight, my sleep was all over the place, and I even skipped many days of daily journaling – something I hadn’t done in years.
Part of me felt guilty about promoting a book that includes an entire chapter on mindful productivity when clearly I still had lots to learn myself. But I was also incredibly grateful for the tools and mindset I’d developed that kept me from completely burning out, even if this pace wasn’t sustainable long-term.
Then, in July, when I had planned to take a much-needed break, I discovered that the French translation of Tiny Experiments was so bad that I couldn’t bear the idea of putting my name on it. So I ended up spending the entire month translating my own book into French. This didn’t help with my mental health, but it gave me deep appreciation for the craft of a translator.
Fortunately, just when you’re stuck in a rut, life has a way of jolting you awake – even if it’s not how you’d choose to be woken up.
This year, my mom turned 70, and for her birthday she asked that we all go back to Burning Man as a family so they could renew their wedding vows. This was a magical week. Not just the serendipitous encounters, the heart-opening conversations, the art and the music, but having my phone off for an entire week, with no sense of time, waking up and going to bed when my body wanted to, eating when I was hungry and not as a way to cope with stress, and walking, cycling, dancing every day – it healed me deeply.
That is, until the last day, when my dad collapsed in my arms and had to be rushed via helicopter to the hospital in Reno, where he was unconscious for the longest 48 hours of my life.
I wrote about it elsewhere so I won’t repeat it here, but this terrifying experience had the effect of reconnecting me with what truly matters: to share the precious little time we have on this earth with the people we love, to connect with other human beings on this messy journey that is life, and to be as present as possible for each of those beautiful, challenging, magical moments.
The second half of the year was a slow process of rebuilding, reprioritizing, recentering. I decided to let go of two members of the extended Ness Labs team and to invest more in the growth of core team members. We agreed on shared mental models to drive our day-to-day business decisions and built new systems to support these.
In the spirit of learning in public, I also decided to publicly embrace the messiness of the process, letting go of my fear that people wouldn’t trust my expertise if I looked like I was still figuring it out.
When I froze on stage during my TEDx talk in front of 800 people, I decided to share that experience instead of hiding it in shame. The post went somewhat viral and resulted in many new people discovering my work. I also shared screenshots of some of the rude comments and emails I received instead of processing them on my own.
I think this vulnerability played a big part in the growth of the Ness Labs community this year by attracting like-minded people who want to live more openly, honestly, and kindheartedly. Tiny Experiments sold more than 60,000 copies in its first six months, and my Instagram account grew from 3,000 to more than 50,000 followers in the past twelve months.
And ultimately, the kind and constructive messages from people of all ages and backgrounds around the world vastly outnumbered the hurtful ones.
I write an annual review every single year because looking back helps me move forward. Reflecting on 2025, I see several themes I’d like to keep exploring and trends I’d like to shift.
Professional life – I couldn’t have hoped for more success in this area, but a lot of it was built on sheer effort and willpower, which aren’t sustainable. Moving forward, I’d like to keep building systems with my team and say no more often so I can focus on the projects that can truly have a meaningful impact.
Intellectual life – While I did manage to produce research, my academic work felt very output-oriented: data collection tasks, grant proposals, ethics applications. In 2026, I want more space for reading and thinking. I know how it might sound after the year I’ve had, but I’m also starting to outline my next book, which shows me that I truly love writing (or that I might be a bit crazy, or both).
Spiritual and personal life – Rituals and time in community are crucial to maintaining my physical and mental health. I want to build my life around those foundations, with work fitting around them rather than the other way around.
Lastly, this year made me even more grateful for the amazing people in my life. I’ve been terrible at staying in touch – my WhatsApp is an absolute mess and I’ve been slow to respond or completely missing messages. Thankfully, my friends are wonderful and nobody resented me for not being a great friend this year. If you’re someone I haven’t replied to, please follow up with me; that would be the best holiday gift 
Thank you for reading, and happy new year!
The post 2025 Year in Review: Presence versus Performance appeared first on Ness Labs.
2025-11-20 19:39:44
Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Gregorio Zanon is the founder of Popt, a mobile notes app built for seamlessly connecting ideas, contacts, places and time.
In this interview, we discussed the nature of mobile note-taking, developing a product culture of digital privacy, why it makes sense to navigate our notes as an interconnected map, and much more. Enjoy the read!
Hi Gregorio, thank you for joining us. You built Popt around the idea that note-taking should be quick, private, and intuitive. Can you tell us about the moment you realized there was room for something different?
Mobile note-taking is very much its own thing – it’s not about sitting down to write an essay or organize a knowledge base. It’s about capturing thoughts in motion. Say you’re in a conversation, or walking out of a meeting, or halfway through a film, you don’t want an app that makes you think about structure and hierarchies. You just want to jot something down.
At the same time, our smartphones pack an insane amount of power, so why not leverage that and enhance how useful mobile notes can be?
With Popt, we want to bring the depth of networked note-taking to mobile, without slowing you down. Instead of hashtags or manual links, you link real-world objects as you type: people, places, dates, movies… Those tags add extra dimensions to your notes, turning them into reminders, contact cards, maps and collections – all without ever forcing structure on you.
We also made a deliberate choice not to rely on cloud-based LLMs such as ChatGPT. Your notes should be a safe space. You shouldn’t have to wonder where they’re going or who could read them. Sending them to an opaque server would be slow, waste resources, and compromise your privacy. So we built our own text analysis pipeline that runs entirely on-device. It’s not an AI, but a human-designed layer of tagging suggestions that helps you connect things together without interrupting your flow.
You’ve said that note-taking should “work the way your mind works.” How did that shape the way you’ve approached design and development?
Let’s slightly rephrase for emphasis: “Note taking should work the way your mind works.” Now, of course we don’t know how your mind works.
So we try to do the next best thing – to support diverse note taking flows. For example, you can use the notepad at the bottom of the screen as a scrapbook to jot down a quick shopping list. Or to start a new page. Or add a note to an existing page. You can name pages and pick cute stickers to make them stand out. But you can also entirely ignore pages and just have a list of plain notes, à la Apple Notes.
You can accept a tagging suggestion as you type, or keep going – the suggestion will simply disappear, until you move the cursor back to where it made sense. You can set a reminder for a day (without setting a time). Or for a week (without picking a day). Or for next year. And be more precise later – or leave it fuzzy.
Popt strives to stay out of your way and let you do your thing, in whatever order you see fit. You don’t have to tag / name / choose / organise, but you can if you choose to.
Let’s talk about how Popt works. A core feature is that it automatically recognizes people, places, and dates as you type, turning plain text into an interconnected map of your life.
Instead of manual tags, Popt offers to link your words to the real world, which is more human and much less taxing for your brain than having to think about a tagging scheme. It sounds pretty abstract so I’ll give an example – let’s say I’m planning a trip to Paris in December.
Because I’m a foodie, the first thing I want to do is book lunch at my favourite vietnamese joint there. I open Popt and write in the notepad: “Lunch with Flavia at mam from hanoi dec 11 1pm.”
As I type, I accept Popt’s tagging suggestions for my sister Flavia, the restaurant Mam from Hanoï, and the date. Here’s what the note looks like when I’m done:
I press the bell icon to set a reminder, and submit the note just like you’d send a message. I’ll return to it later to add more trip planning items.
A few weeks pass and I’m finally having that delicious noodle soup with my sister. As we chat, she recommends a movie, Arco. I easily locate the note about our meeting, through the Dates tab (it’s just there under Today), and add the movie thanks to our integration with The Movie Database:
You can see that I turned the initial note into a page named Paris trip, and added a few more notes to that page. I can quickly insert a comment about the food, and the movie suggestion, which becomes a widget.
In just a few words, I’ve linked together a moment in time, a place, a contact and a movie. Places show up in a dedicated tab, reminders and dates on an agenda-like timeline, and movies in their own collection:
I can get directions to the restaurant, watch the trailer for the movie, and call my sister to let her know I loved it, all from the same note. Not bad!
You often talk about your deep respect for privacy, and everything happens on-device. Why was that so important to you?
We’re based in Switzerland, a country where privacy is very much part of the culture. But even beyond that, would you feel comfortable taking notes knowing that the thoughts you commit to your phone can be read and analysed by third parties? We think it’s 100% worth the extra hassle to make sure that Popt can work fully offline and that your words are yours only.
For now, Popt doesn’t sync to any cloud so the problem remains relatively simple – the notes just don’t leave your phone. And when Popt needs to connect to an external service, like The Movie Database or Apple Maps, we never send text from your notes to those services – instead, we show you a search box that’s clearly clearly labelled to make sure you’re aware that what you type there isn’t 100% private anymore.
On the flip side of the privacy coin is data ownership. You own your notes and can export them in bulk as plain text files. Our export format is also compatible with Obsidian, so that if for any reason you want out, you can always export them to another app or device and browse your Popt content without requiring paid software.
What about you, how do you use Popt?
I personally use Popt multiple times a day. The most common notes are quick to-dos and reminders, but I also plan trips, list movies and grow a collection of my favourite foodie joints. Then, I should mention that I document Popt bugs in Popt – whenever I notice something that doesn’t work as it should, I add that to my Popt Bugs page, which is very meta… I’ll let you guess the sticker I chose for that one.
Finally, a good use case for the sharing feature came up very recently. My wife and I were both extremely busy last week so her dad stayed with us and helped with the kids. We made a Popt page for him, containing a daily schedule for school hours, music and swimming lessons, and the birthday party one of them was invited to.
The page also included tags for places and contacts, so it was super easy for my father-in-law to get directions, call a parent or teacher if needed, and even add reminders to any of the numerous items on schedule. Definitely a proud moment
And finally… Looking ahead, what’s next for Popt?
We soft launched Popt barely 2 months ago and still think of it very much as our baby app. Of course, we’d love to add more refined suggestions, more tag types (books, games, music), more sharing options, more platforms… but as a small team we have to take things one at a time and prioritise features which our users need the most.
It’s super easy to give Popt a whirl and send feedback our way – no sign up and no paywall, just Popt. We hope your readers will give it a go!l
Thank you so much for your time, Gregorio! Where can people learn more about Popt?
Thank you! You can visit our website, blog, and follow our updates on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.
The post Tap into smarter notes with Gregorio Zanon, founder of Popt appeared first on Ness Labs.
2025-11-20 19:21:57
I still remember an assignment where our history teacher asked us to create an ‘artifact’ about a historical figure of our choice. I chose Jesus and spent hours at the school library, asking the librarian for every book that mentioned him, and made a mini book with hand-drawn illustrations.
I was completely absorbed in the process and it remains one of my favorite school projects. (although I did a terrible job separating historical fact from later additions and got a bad grade!)
Around the same time, I also remember sitting in my bedroom for hours trying to solve math equations, hating every second of it.
Same brain, same time investment, completely different experience.
Why do we sometimes love learning while other times we can’t wait to escape and something else? How does this affect how well we actually learn? And what can we do about it?
When we’re genuinely curious about something, our brains release dopamine – the same neurotransmitter involved in other rewarding experiences. This creates a positive cycle: curiosity leads to exploration, which leads to discovery, which triggers more dopamine and makes us want to keep going.
But this system only works when we feel safe to explore. When learning feels threatening – i.e. when we’re worried about failing or being judged – our brains shift into survival mode.
The prefrontal cortex, responsible for complex thinking, becomes less effective under stress. That math problem stops being a puzzle to solve and becomes something to endure.
The ingredient that transforms learning from threat to opportunity is agency: when we have confidence and some autonomy over what we learn and how we learn it, and understand why we’re learning it.
But what shapes our sense of agency in the first place? Understanding this can help us create better conditions for loving learning. Three key forces influence our learning experience:
When your biology, your psychology, and your social environment align positively, learning becomes more fun. You retain information better, think more creatively, and persist through challenges. But when they work against you, you tend toward surface-level processing and giving up quickly.
And these patterns compound over time! Early positive experiences build confidence, while negative experiences can create the opposite trajectory, leading to avoidance and deepening this belief that you don’t like learning.
Your relationship with learning isn’t fixed. Neural plasticity research shows we can rewire how we respond to learning. The key is starting small and building positive momentum. Here are five practical steps you can try:
1. Decouple the topic. Recognize that hating math doesn’t mean you hate learning – you might just hate how you’ve been taught math. Focus on how you’re learning, not just what you’re learning.
2. Run tiny experiments. Try different approaches to discover what works for you: visual diagrams, talking through problems aloud, or working with others. Mix up your environment, timings and methods.
3. Practice metacognition. Pay attention to how you feel. Track what energizes you and what drains you. Notice when you feel engaged or bored. Identify your optimal learning zone – not so easy that you’re bored but not so hard that you’re overwhelmed.
4. Learn with others. Find a learning community, a study group, or opportunities to teach others. Share your struggles, ask questions and celebrate discoveries together, including what you learn about yourself.
5. Focus on growth. This is about embracing mistakes as data, focusing on what you learned rather than how you performed. An easy way to focus on growth is to track your progress with the PACT framework instead of measuring your success with SMART goals.
Your relationship with learning is shaped by biological, psychological, and social factors that you can influence. Just choose one tiny learning experiment to try this week, notice how it feels, and adjust as you go.
By understanding what makes learning feel good and experimenting with different approaches, you can rebuild a positive relationship with learning.
The post How to Love Learning Again appeared first on Ness Labs.