Joshua Fletcher: Self-optimisation culture, productivity anxiety and learning to fail better
Dial Emma
Emma Reed Turrell
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 15 September 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome back to Dial Emma! Each week, I'll be answering your dilemmas with honesty, empathy, and a few therapeutic truth bombs to help you make sense of life's stickiest moments. If you've ever wished you had a therapist in your back pocket, Dial Emma is here to help.
This week, I'm joined by psychotherapist and author Joshua Fletcher, aka Anxiety Josh, to help a listener who is struggling with anxious feelings around self-optimisation - the pursuit of trying to be our 'best selves' (whatever that actually means). From 5am clubs to wellness trackers, we explore why trying to do everything right can leave us feeling wrong, and how embracing failure, feelings, and self-acceptance offers a far more authentic path to wellbeing.
If you have a dilemma for Emma, please fill out this form.
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Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.
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Social media:
Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell
Dial Emma @dialemmapodcast
Email: [email protected]
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is sponsored by ProteinWorks, on a mission to help you feel good and smash your goals through the power of nutrition. |
| 0:09.1 | Hello and welcome to Dial Emma, the podcast where your dilemmas meet my therapeutic insights. |
| 0:15.7 | I'm Emma Reed-Torrell, psychotherapist, author, and well-recovering people-pleaser. |
| 0:20.3 | Each week, I'll be unpacking |
| 0:21.8 | real-life questions from listeners just like you. The big ones, the small ones, the ones that keep you |
| 0:27.3 | up at night, offering practical tools and gentle truths to help you find your way through. So if |
| 0:33.6 | you've got a question, you don't know how to ask out loud. You've come to the right place. |
| 0:46.2 | Today I'm joined by Joshua Fletcher, a psychotherapist, author, and one of the UK's leading voices on anxiety. |
| 0:53.3 | You might know him online as Anxiety Josh, |
| 0:55.8 | where he's built a huge following for his down-to-earth, compassionate take on mental health. |
| 1:00.2 | He's written the best-selling book, How Does That Make You Feel? And he also hosts the Disordered |
| 1:04.7 | Podcast. What I love about Josh is how he makes sense of the pressures we face in modern life |
| 1:09.5 | and helps us find kinder, more realistic ways to look after ourselves. I couldn't think of anyone better to talk about |
| 1:15.0 | the traps of self-optimization culture and why striving to be our best selves so often leaves |
| 1:20.9 | us feeling worse. Welcome, Joshua. Thank you so much for joining me today. Morning Emma. Thanks |
| 1:26.8 | for having me on. I'm excited for this. |
| 1:29.2 | Good. You sound it. So sarcastic. I just said to Josh, because Joshua has just established |
| 1:38.1 | for me that his author name is Joshua, but his friends call him Josh and I'd like to adopt him as a |
| 1:42.8 | friend. That's why I'm forcing this on him today and calling him Josh from now on. So Josh, I'm going to kick us off with |
| 1:48.7 | this dilemma. So listen to this. Dear Emma, I feel like I'm constantly failing at being the best |
| 1:55.7 | version of myself. Everywhere I look, people are getting up at 5am, plunging into ice baths, running marathons, |
| 2:03.1 | tracking their steps, their sleep, their mood, their productivity. |
... |
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