Romanticizing Your Life (With Staci York)

·28 min·2 clips

Staci describes how noticing beautiful trees during a tough work grind sparked her journey to romanticizing life.

Romanticizing your life starts small here. Coach May and Stacey York treat it less like a glossy internet look and more like a way to make daily health habits feel less like a fight. The point is not Italy. Stacey pushes back on the idea that making life feel special has to mean travel, expensive decor, or acting like your budget is bigger than it is. She gets specific, which helps. After temporarily moving back in with her parents, she looks at her childhood bedroom, with the mustard yellow and dark corner-room feeling, and decides she cannot keep sleeping in a space that feels that way. That room becomes the whole lesson. She thinks about Airbnbs, hotels, friends' rooms, and other places where she has felt peaceful, comfortable, and ready to sleep. Then she works with what she has. Paint, a duvet cover, and decorations are not props for an aesthetic performance. They are small tools that make bedtime feel like something worth moving toward. Coach May keeps coming back to that part. Sustainable habits often need a setup that makes them feel desirable instead of forced. Sleep is the clearest example. Stacey says she is excited to go to bed at 10, excited to get hours of sleep, and less tempted to lie there scrolling. That is the trick. Change the space, change the feeling, and the habit gets support before willpower has to do all the work. Budget matters too. They make room for the peace that comes from living within your means, which keeps romanticizing from turning into overspending with nicer lighting. The advice stays grounded: look at what already makes you feel peaceful or comfortable, borrow that cue, and build a version that fits your actual life. It is a gentle correction. If a habit needs support, you may need to do things around the habit instead of just forcing the habit itself. The episode ends warmly, with Stacey pointing listeners toward Instagram, YouTube, and Lemonade, and Coach May returning to the show's nudge to make today the beginning of the tomorrow you want.

As heard by us

A practical take on using space to support healthier habits.

The episode frames romanticizing your life as a set of small, repeatable changes that make healthy habits easier to keep. It is strongest when that idea is made tangible through a room refresh, a new duvet cover, a calmer sleep setup, and the larger point that the surrounding…

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Make your routine easier by turning your space into somewhere you actually want to be.

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