About Noemie Mooney
Most wellness advice is total BS.
Hey, I'm Noemie. I help smart, sceptical people cut through wellness BS and design a healthier life that survives the real world.
Less discipline, more design.
Free. Sent every Tuesday. Unsubscribe any time.
Former Queen
of Bad Habits
Every Tuesday
2,000+ readers in 80 countries
Modern wellness has morphed into a multi-billion-dollar marketing machine with 1 business model: make you feel inadequate, then sell you the fix.
Biohacking bros. Supplement swindlers. Detox teas, $100 superfood powders, 25-year-olds with fast metabolisms telling you to wake up at 5am for ice baths.
Most of it is pseudoscience dressed as self-care, often creating toxic anxiety over unachievable standards. And that anxiety is not a side effect. It is the product.
We are so done with that.
You've read the books. You know the science: drink water, sleep 7 to 8 hours, move your body, manage stress. You could coach someone else through this stuff.
But knowing and doing? That's where it gets messy. Because real life has deadlines, difficult conversations, and days when ordering takeaway genuinely is self-care.
You're not missing information. You're missing an approach that works with your real, complicated, beautifully messy life.
The newsletter
What is Unwritten Potential?
Unwritten Potential is a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing, and health behaviour change, written by certified health coach Noemie Mooney, for smart, sceptical people who are tired of wellness BS and want a healthier life that works in the real world.
1 essay lands every Tuesday. The podcast returns on Friday 9 October, and lands every Friday from then. 3 things run through all of it: decoding what in wellness deserves your attention and what is just marketing, working out why real life keeps eating the plan, and running small experiments to find what actually works for you.
The name is the philosophy: your story is still being written. Your last chapter isn't the whole book, and you get to write the next one at any time.
Hi, I'm Noemie
Who is Noemie Mooney?
Hey 👋 I'm Noemie and I am SO happy you're here!
- ACE Certified Health Coach
- ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist
- Certified yoga instructor
- Stanford d.school, design thinking
Unwritten Potential is about the gap between knowing and doing, and how to close it without shame, willpower, or a whole new personality.
I've spent over 20 years working, the last 10 of them in legaltech and innovation in Singapore.
I trained in design thinking at the Stanford d.school, where I learned to solve complex problems by starting with the people you're solving for, testing small, practical solutions and improving them until they work.
Then I retrained as an ACE Certified Health Coach and ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist and pointed those exact tools at the hardest problem of all: getting a real human to change their own behaviour and feel better in the life they actually have.
I'm not writing this from a wellness bubble. I still work in legaltech and innovation, so I'm close enough to the machine to know exactly how it works.
And I'm not writing from a podium either. I spent years knowing exactly what I should do for my health. And doing the opposite.
Smoking 20 a day, drinking in a way that had stopped being fun, running on 5 hours' sleep.
This led me to spectacular burnout, The Great Debacle (yes, I branded my breakdown…)
I've completely transformed my life in the past 5 years. Physically, mentally, emotionally, professionally.
No dramatic "aha moment" here, just gradual change spiralling upwards.
The real breakthrough was unglamorous.
I stopped seeing habit change as FIGHTING myself and started seeing it as UNDERSTANDING myself, with the same kindness and compassion I freely give to others.
The problem was never willpower. It was that I was trying to fit 'healthy habits' into a life (and a mind) that didn't have room for them.
Also
I'm French, sober since 2023, a certified yoga instructor, and an electro DJ who has played the Singapore Grand Prix. I swear a bit. Dog videos make me cry. Disciplined and chaotic in roughly equal measure.
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, certified yoga instructor, and creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™. Trained in design thinking at the Stanford d.school, she writes Unwritten Potential, a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing and health behaviour change, for smart, sceptical people who are tired of wellness BS.
Where I stand
What I stand for (and against)
I'm for
- Evidence, especially the inconvenient kind.
- The boring basics that keep winning: sleep, movement, real food, people you love, less noise.
- Behaviour change designed for your actual life instead of demanded from it.
- Medication when it is clinically right, with zero moralising.
- Subtraction before addition. Joy. And you, trusting yourself again.
I'm against
- Wellness as an aesthetic, and wellness as moral superiority.
- Optimisation as a full-time job.
- Marketing that manufactures anxiety so it can sell you the cure.
- Supplements sold as salvation.
- Pseudoscience with a discount code, and anti-science with a podcast.
Why subscribe?
Join 2,000+ readers who have stopped chasing perfect health and started designing what actually works.
Less mental noise. Clearer priorities. Decisions with less guilt. And follow-through that does not depend on being motivated that day.
That voice that says "I'm NEVER drinking/scrolling/skipping the gym again!" every Sunday?
You'll finally understand why willpower fails and what to design instead. No shame, just better strategy.
That massive gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it?
It closes. Not through motivation or discipline, but through understanding how your brain works and designing tiny experiments that fit your real life.
Can't stay consistent with exercise, sleep or eating well?
Consistency isn't a personality trait, it's a design problem, and design problems can be solved.
Tracking everything, optimising everything, and somehow feeling worse?
You'll learn when the data helps and when the dashboard becomes the problem. Health without the performance review.
People-pleasing and perfectionism until you're depleted, then feeling guilty about resting?
You'll learn the difference between rest and avoidance, and between saying yes because you want to and yes because you're afraid to disappoint.
Getting derailed by travel, work or life and starting from scratch every. single. time?
You'll know how to restart in minutes, not months, without the shame spiral.
What you'll get every week
- 01
1 essay every Tuesday on behaviour change, evidence-based wellbeing, and cutting through wellness BS, written for your real, messy life
- 02
1 podcast episode every Friday from 9 October, with practical strategies you can use the same day
- 03
Tools, frameworks and coaching questions that work with your actual life, not some idealised version of it
No bullshit wellness, no shame dressed up as empowerment, no hustle culture.
Curiosity, small experiments, kind self-awareness, and practices that survive the life you actually have.
Here are some of my most popular articles to get you started:
- No. 9How to Break Free from Toxic Wellness?Unfollow, Unsubscribe, Unbothered
- No. 11The Subtraction MethodStop these 3 things to design a life you actually love
- No. 12Reclaim your brain. It's being robbed.You don't need more focus. You need less noise.
- No. 20I Wasn't Ready to DJ at the Singapore Grand Prix. I Did It Anyway.On doing things before you feel ready.
- No. 19How to Make Friends as Grown-Ups?Your friendship playbook
Less discipline, more design
What is Wellbeing by Design?
Design thinking plus coaching: that combination is the whole thing. I call it Wellbeing by Design.
Wellbeing by Design is design thinking applied to wellbeing. It is a framework and a mindset.
The framework
- 1Understand what's really going on
- 2Subtract what's draining you
- 3Design 1 small thing that fits your life
- 4Keep it going when life gets loud
The mindset
Treat your wellbeing like an interesting problem to solve, with:
- Curiosity instead of judgement
- Experiments instead of perfection
- Enthusiasm instead of shame
- An open mind instead of a rulebook
There's a problem. We get to go and solve it.
The method
What is the MAKE SPACE Method™?
The MAKE SPACE Method™ is a subtraction-first approach to behaviour change, created by certified health coach Noemie Mooney, who trained in design thinking at the Stanford d.school.
It takes that human-centred design discipline and points it at personal change. Rather than piling new habits onto a life (and mind) that is already full, it works through 4 phases, UNCOVER, SUBTRACT, DESIGN and SUSTAIN: clear the space first, then design habits that actually survive real life.
- 01UNCOVER
- 02SUBTRACT
- 03DESIGN
- 04SUSTAIN
Ready to rewrite
your story?
Join 2,000+ readers designing wellbeing for real life.
Free. Sent every Tuesday. Unsubscribe any time.
So glad you're here. Let's make this good.
With love, Noemie x
