Oh my goodness, I did enjoy this one. And it stuck with me for a few days because of the level of details and authenticity. It's September 1939. A handful of women librarians who call themselves the Secret Society of Librarians are gathered in an attic flat in Bloomsbury, in London's West End, for their annual weekend of gin and grumbling about their male bosses. Then the radio announces that Britain is at war. Before the night is out, they've made a vow: if people can't get to the books, we take books to the people. The book follows two of these women. Joyce is a mousy, rule-following library assistant in Camden, London. Dorotha, their founder, is home in Łódź, Poland, where the war has already reached her. Soon she's trapped behind barbed wire in the Łódź ghetto. I loved the mobile library. Joyce has wanted a library on wheels for years, and her boss calls it ridiculous. Then the Blitz starts, the boss runs off to the countryside, and Joyce ends up with a secondhand six-wheeled black Ford "behemoth" with mahogany shelves and room for two thousand books. Joyce can't drive it. But Dorotha's teenaged sister Adela, a Jewish refugee who learned to drive farm trucks back in Poland, can. They name the van Nan, after a tough old woman they meet in a bomb shelter. At the launch, a newspaperman sneers about "women drivers and a van full of bodice-rippers." They take it out anyway, to air-raid wardens, to Tube shelters, and to a barrage balloon crew of women (they operated and maintained large, hydrogen-filled balloons tethered by steel cables to defend vital targets against low-flying enemy aircraft) who can't get enough whodunnits. (One volunteer quietly asks Joyce to reserve her a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. I laughed out loud.) The Blitz. Wow. It's vivid, and it doesn't hold back. A library's glass ceiling explodes, and the ash of thousands of burned books swirls through the air like a snow globe. Joyce spends nights wedged on a stopped escalator at Liverpool Street station. She reads The Secret Garden aloud in a street shelter while the bombs fall, providing small moments of relief to citizens as they huddled in an effort to avoid the bombs.

I started researching the gut–brain axis because I wanted to understand how the gut and brain actually communicate. I thought I was researching digestion. I ended up researching myself. The deeper I went, the more I realized that the gut–brain axis isn't simply “your gut affects your mood.” It is a two-way conversation involving the nervous system, stress response, hormones, immune signals, the gut, the brain, and even the microbes living inside us. But then my research wandered somewhere I wasn't expecting. Into motivation. Into stress. Into procrastination. Into learning. And finally, into the way we respond to ourselves when something is difficult. That made me stop. I've spent a lot of time thinking motivation had to come first. I need to feel motivated, then I'll do the thing. But what if sometimes I have that backward? Research into motivation and learning suggests that action can create new information for the brain. A small action can lead to a successful outcome. That successful outcome becomes experience. Experience influences what I expect the next time. And suddenly the next step may not feel quite as impossible. Then I started thinking about procrastination differently too. Sometimes I may not be avoiding the task itself. I may be avoiding what the task makes me feel. Overwhelmed. Confused. Bored. Uncertain. Afraid I'll fail. Avoiding it can give me immediate relief. And that relief can unintentionally teach my brain, “Hey, avoiding this worked.” That was an eyebrow-raising moment for me. Because beating myself up afterward doesn't necessarily solve that problem. If I procrastinate and then tell myself I'm lazy, useless, or should be doing better, I've just added another unpleasant feeling to the task I'm already struggling to approach. Maybe accountability doesn't require attacking myself. Maybe it can sound more like: “That didn't work. What happened?” “What was I actually avoiding?” “What does my body need right now?”

“I’ll get back on track when life settles down.” Sound familiar? This might be one of the most common things I hear from women when it comes to their health. But lately I’ve been thinking... What if the motivation we’re waiting for isn’t supposed to arrive when life gets easier? What if we actually create it by taking action while life is still chaotic? I wrote about this in my latest newsletter, including a story from years ago that completely changed the way I think about motivation. Because maybe motivation isn’t something you have to find. Maybe it’s something you create. Read the full newsletter HERE And feel free to comment : What’s one thing you’ve been waiting to feel motivated to do?