What? It’s been almost 6 months since my last post?

It’s been six months since my last blog post! If you’ve been following Square One Active Recovery for a while, you might have noticed that October 2025 was the last time I published anything here. For someone who built Singapore’s most-read chiropractic blog with over 300 posts and 10,000 readers, that’s a pretty significant break.

The problem with hitting the pause button

There are definitely between parallels between me taking a break from writing and people taking a break from exercising. Without yourself realising, a short break can quite quickly turn into a permanent habit.

Here’s the thing about taking a break: time moves differently when you’re not paying attention. One month becomes two. Two becomes four. Before you know it, half a year has passed and you’re thinking, “wait, when did that happen?”

I think that’s why I almost never recommend people stopping their exercises completely. It is true that if you are injured, you may need to take a break from the exercises that have contributed to the injury in the first place. However, this doesn’t translate to a complete rest. It is good to fill the gap with other exercises that do not make your injury worse or, better yet, get some rehab and prehab going to expedite your recovery.

Every decision we make comes with consequences

I can’t say that I did actively plan for a six month break. I did intentionally decide to stop writing because it didn’t bring me joy. I didn’t want to write for the sake of writing or write so Google and other AI tools won’t forget about me. To a very large extent, writing is personal to me. It’s about sharing my thoughts and beliefs. It’s also about educating others to give some perspective or context to their chronic pain and/or exercise journey.

When you do stop exercising, the effects are obvious. The body will start to decondition, you start to lose muscle mass and also aerobic fitness. Overtime, your joints become stiffer and your previous pain may start to resurface again. Humans are designed to move and not moving enough does have an undeniable impact on our physical and even mental health.

This is why Ministry of Health (Singapore) and the World Health Organisation encourages physical activity. Not just the 150 minutes per week but also 2-3 days of muscle strengthening exercises per week. The truth is we need to exercise to keep ourselves in good physical health.

Similarly, regular writing does indeed help with the marketing side of business. When it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), blogging about related topics did indeed help me rank on Google. For a couple of years, we were ranked number one for “chiropractior singapore“. As I started to post less content, our rankings started to dip.

Last year, our website was still rank on the first page of Google and now we are somewhat on the third page.

We don’t always need to be winning in material sense

Yes, my Google rankings dropped. Yes, fewer people might find Square One through search now. Yes, that has business implications. And you know what? That’s okay.

Over the six months break, I have more time to focus more on myself. I caught up on physical rest. I create space for myself to have a clearer headspace, that sort of allowed me to take things slower. Exercise, thankfully, became more regular for me. I think sometimes in the hustle and bustle of Singapore life, it’s very hard to prioritise exercise. Exercise feels like a drag. But with the extra time and headspace, I could actually invest time and attention to exercise.

For someone who doesn’t innately love exercising, but yet do it for the health benefits it brings, this is a big win. At the expense of more potential clients? Sure. And that is okay. We don’t always need to measure the success or goodness of our lives based on material outcomes alone.

Life has competing priorities

It should be clear now that life has competing priorities. This is particularly salient for me as I run my own business. If I don’t work on the business, I get less clients, and I earn less. If you are employed, you may (or may not) have more buffer. But it doesn’t matter what it is cos life is almost always about competing priorities.

This would relate to one of the core concepts I teach about pain management. Given the physical limitation of our body, load management becomes very important. It’s about being able to manage competing priorities so you don’t over push and over train. In other facets of your life, burnout is common. For physical health, it can lead to more pain and more injury.

When evaluating load capacity, you have to look at everything that has a demand on you:

• Work stress
• Family obligations
• Financial pressures
• Relationship dynamics
• Sleep quality
• Emotional load

Your pain doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Neither does recovery.

It may seem like work stress may not relate to physical but it does. Work stress can translate to poorer sleep. It can lead to sensitisation, which can increase your pain experience. Being tired and having more pain may make it more difficult for you to show up for the treatment that you need to start feeling better.

What can you free up to give yourself more space to breathe?

Sometimes we need to create space before we can do what is necessary for ourselves. I’m not saying you should tender your resignation tomorrow or make any drastic life changes. But what I am suggesting is this: go through your life and do a stock-take.

What commitments are you holding onto out of obligation rather than genuine value? What activities are draining you without giving much back? What relationships or responsibilities could be paused (not permanently abandoned, just paused until things improve)?

For me, it was the blog. For you, it might be:

• That side project you feel guilty about not finishing
• The gym membership you’re not using but keep paying for “motivation”
• The social commitments you say yes to out of fear of disappointing people
• The perfectionist standards you’re holding yourself to at work
• The extra responsibilities you’ve taken on because no one else would

Creating space doesn’t mean being lazy or irresponsible. It means being strategic about your finite capacity. It means acknowledging that you can’t do everything well all at once, and that’s not a personal failing. It’s just reality.