What do you think?
Rate this book
Unhinged Habits: A Counterintuitive Guide for Humans to Have More by Doing Less
What would it take for you to wake up excited about the monotony of the mundanity of your day-to-day tasks? To stop feeling guilty about the stuff you’re not doing, and instead be energized by what you’ve chosen to do?
This is the guide to building an awesome, aspirational, and fun life, to reclaiming optimism and meaning when the things we were once so excited to have—the dream job, the family and kids—become tedious obligations, each with a mounting daily task list that we can never seem to fully catch up on. It’s a book for the person who, already exhausted, keeps thinking they can “have it all” if they just work a little smarter or a lot harder.
We are all in a constant struggle to balance the primary competing priorities in our lives. Simplified, those Money, Health, and Relationships. Within each category, there are main elements. Within health, you have fitness, resiliency, and exploration. Within money, there’s guilt, comparison, and work. And within relationships, there’s family, community, and friendship.
The secret to self-improvement is simply a matter of strengthening one arm of the triangle at a time, without letting the others collapse. Over time, the entire structure strengthens.
This is the guide to building an awesome, aspirational, and fun life, to reclaiming optimism and meaning when the things we were once so excited to have—the dream job, the family and kids—become tedious obligations, each with a mounting daily task list that we can never seem to fully catch up on. It’s a book for the person who, already exhausted, keeps thinking they can “have it all” if they just work a little smarter or a lot harder.
We are all in a constant struggle to balance the primary competing priorities in our lives. Simplified, those Money, Health, and Relationships. Within each category, there are main elements. Within health, you have fitness, resiliency, and exploration. Within money, there’s guilt, comparison, and work. And within relationships, there’s family, community, and friendship.
The secret to self-improvement is simply a matter of strengthening one arm of the triangle at a time, without letting the others collapse. Over time, the entire structure strengthens.
240 pages, Hardcover
Published January 27, 2026
47 people are currently reading
11636 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Goodman
14 books144 followersJonathan Goodman has spent 13 winters exploring the world—first solo, then with his wife, and now with their three children—challenging educational conventions while building multi-million-dollar businesses. Featured in Men's Health, Forbes, Robb Report, Entrepreneur, the New York Times, and Inc., Jon proves that you don't have to choose between professional success, meaningful relationships, and fulfilling adventure. He is based in Toronto.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 3, 2026
Well, there is nothing wrong with the contents of this book, just that it brings absolutely nothing new to the table. It follows the formula; middle aged man finds himself questioning his actions in life, how to optimize, weave in some personal details, completely disclose his thinking in the formulation of the chapter titles; reading these is enough; and add nothing new. For some classics that do bring the goodies: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones and Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.
February 1, 2026
This Book Is a Counterspell for Modern Brain Fog – My Review of “Unhinged Habits” on Attention, Anxiety, and the Myth of ‘More’
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 1st, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Unhinged Habits” is the kind of self-help book that refuses to float above ordinary life. It is not written from a mountaintop; it’s written from inside the cluttered, negotiated, half-chaotic reality most readers recognize: kids with sticky hands and urgent needs, a marriage that is both refuge and logistics, a phone that always seems to be within reach, and the strange modern problem of having too many options and too little peace. Its central wager is not that you can become a brand-new person in thirty days. It’s that you can stop being quietly owned – by your stuff, by your screen, by your reflexive obligations, by the identity you keep performing because it once worked.
The author, Jonathan Goodman, packages this as “unhinged” living, but the book’s secret is that it is less rebellious than its title suggests. It’s “unhinged” mostly in the sense that it refuses the default settings. It asks, again and again: Who installed this setting in your life? Did you consent to it? The proposed alternative is a form of pragmatic freedom: keep your “walking costs” low, protect your attention like a scarce resource, and invest in a smaller number of relationships and projects deeply enough that they can actually hold you.
What distinguishes “Unhinged Habits” is the voice. Goodman writes in brisk, conversational bursts, with humor that often arrives right when the material threatens to become sermon. He doesn’t build arguments in an academic key; he builds them in scenes. A family travel moment becomes a lesson in subtraction. A domestic observation becomes a critique of lifestyle inflation. A friendship realization becomes a taxonomy of adult connection. It’s a structure that makes the advice feel earned rather than harvested – and it keeps the reader from feeling lectured, which is no small achievement in a genre that so often mistakes certainty for wisdom.
The early chapters operate as a corrective to what Goodman calls the “cave” problem: the way comfort can slowly become a kind of self-made prison. Modern life encourages optimization – safer routines, smoother commutes, more convenient deliveries, a calendar that is always full enough to prove your importance. And then, one day, you notice you are efficient but strangely numb, “successful” but oddly absent from your own days. Goodman’s prescription is exploration, though he defines it less as glamorous travel than as a stance toward uncertainty. Schedule less. Let yourself get lost sometimes. Choose a general trajectory, not a tyrannical itinerary. His point isn’t that everyone should become an adventurer; it’s that presence requires a little unpredictability. When every moment is pre-solved, the senses go to sleep.
From exploration, he pivots to what might be called calibrated hardship. One of the book’s most repeatable ideas is the phrase “choose your hard” – a reminder that discomfort is unavoidable, so you might as well select the version that builds you rather than drains you. Goodman contrasts purposeful struggle with the passive struggles many people accept without naming: scrolling as “rest,” task-switching as “productivity,” convenience as “freedom” even when it leaves you weaker and more dependent. He makes a case, refreshingly concrete, that physical strength and basic endurance aren’t aesthetic accessories but infrastructure – the hardware that keeps the mind stable. It’s an argument against the fantasy that life can be lived entirely in the head.
Then he turns that same lens onto relationships, and this is where the book becomes unexpectedly tender. Adult friendship is often treated as sentimental background music, but Goodman gives it structure without making it clinical. He offers a “garden of friendship” model that sorts relationships into categories that feel instantly recognizable: “grass” friends (utility ties, professional ties, convenience ties), “flowers” (seasonal acquaintances, community relationships), “birds” (parasocial, one-sided attachments that can be enjoyable but have a ceiling), and “trees” (true friends, the rare people who remain meaningful even when nothing is being traded). The chapter’s provocation is blunt: if you spend most of your social energy on grass, don’t be surprised when you feel lonely. Depth is not an accident; it’s an allocation.
He sharpens that allocation with a three-part “true friend” test – usefulness (can the relationship exist without ambition or utility?), needless effort (would you do the mildly inconvenient thing to be with them?), and celebration (are they genuinely happy for your wins?). This is the kind of checklist that could feel gimmicky in the wrong hands. Here it works because it is braided with lived realism: adult life does skim relationships, and busyness does become an excuse. Goodman’s antidote is simple and slightly bracing: cancel on your deal friends for your real friends. Turn “scrolling” into “texting.” Trade feed-time for a real conversation, even if it’s clumsy. It’s a secular sermon on attention as love.
The relationship chapter extends this philosophy into partnership, and it is notably free of soulmate fantasy. Goodman is skeptical of the modern romantic ideal that says you should find someone who mirrors you: same politics, same hobbies, same rhythms, same tastes, same everything. He argues that the most durable couples are often complementary rather than identical – two people who share values and respect, but divide the cognitive load of life according to natural strengths. That division is not presented as a rigid gendered arrangement; it’s presented as sanity. If one partner is better at scheduling and social logistics and the other is better at finances or planning, pretending you must split every task fifty-fifty can become a quiet, constant war. Complementarity, in Goodman’s view, is not inequality; it is design.
He also pushes a surprisingly mature claim: healthy love requires two whole people. “Lift your own weight,” he insists, not as a cold slogan but as an act of devotion. The book’s relationship ideal is not codependence; it is two people growing separately and bringing that growth back into the partnership. It’s a corrective to a particular modern trap: the way couples can fuse into one identity, then resent each other for the loss of oxygen. Goodman’s approach makes room for solitude, for personal projects, for separate interests – and argues that stagnation is not romantic. The best partnerships, he suggests, are not merely compatible; they are mutually energizing.
To prevent ambition from turning life into an endless treadmill, Goodman introduces his “4S Celebration Protocol”: Shared, Scheduled, Sacred, Significant. The idea is deceptively small. Pick two or three milestones for a meaningful project. Define what “done” looks like. Attach each milestone to a specific celebration with people you love – not someday, but scheduled. Make the celebration feel sacred (protected, not easily canceled). Make it significant (something you’ll remember). The insight beneath the acronym is psychological: if you postpone joy until the finish line, you train yourself to experience the process as deprivation. Celebrating the process turns anticipation into fuel and keeps the work from hollowing you out.
These chapters build toward the book’s most forceful move: its insistence that you are not the author of your life, but you can be the editor. Great editing is subtraction. Goodman reframes minimalism as three intertwined practices – physical space, mental bandwidth, and identity – and this is where “Unhinged Habits” feels most tightly tuned to the present. Many people are not suffering from a lack of information. They are suffering from too many competing claims on their nervous systems. The book argues that subtraction is not austerity; it is mercy.
The physical minimalism is the obvious entry point because it’s visible: fewer objects, less maintenance, less “stuff tax.” But Goodman is more interested in the invisible clutter: the tyranny of choice, the constant pinging of attention, the role fragmentation that turns one life into a dozen selves. He advocates a practice that is almost aggressively doable: ten minutes a day, choose one drawer or one screen, ask one question – does this help me maximize what matters? The point is not to become a minimalist saint. It’s to train the muscle of deciding. The practice scales: ten minutes becomes a habit; the habit becomes a default; the default becomes a life that feels less like a storage unit.
His digital suggestions are familiar but well-delivered: grayscale the phone, remove tempting apps from the home screen, kill most notifications, add friction where addiction thrives. What makes the advice land is the tone. Goodman does not moralize about willpower. He assumes weakness and designs around it. That’s a crucial shift in a world where the attention economy is not neutral. It aligns with the environmental approach of “Digital Minimalism,” but Goodman is less interested in philosophy as such than in immediate behavioral architecture: make the bad habit harder, make the good habit easier, and stop pretending you can out-discipline an ecosystem designed to hijack you.
He extends that argument into consumerism, taking aim at the modern performance of “informed purchasing.” We research everything to death, compare endless options, read reviews, watch unboxings, and call it prudence. Goodman calls it what it often is: anxiety wearing a lab coat. His alternative is disarmingly blunt. Admit you don’t know. Find a domain expert. Ask one or two good questions. Default to their opinion. Sometimes you’ll get a dud. That’s the price of reclaiming your time. The goal is not the perfect purchase. The goal is to stop donating hours of your life to choices that will not matter next month.
Underneath the minimalism is another through-line: depth over breadth. Goodman rejects the “well-rounded” myth – the idea that excellence is an averaged-out competence across opposing aptitudes. He argues that burnout is often not simply overwork, but misdirected work: the exhaustion of trying to be everything. His remedy is to find your “thing,” obsess over it, and design everything else around being merely competent. This is not an invitation to become selfish; it’s an invitation to become honest. You have finite attention. If you spread it thinly across too many identities, you will feel perpetually behind.
That message lands especially hard in the current climate, when many people feel their careers being constantly re-priced and their attention being constantly raided. Goodman never turns the book into a treatise on technological disruption, but the subtext is clear: if you do not choose what you give your life to, something else will choose for you. In that way the book shares a philosophical neighborhood with “Four Thousand Weeks,” not because it shares the same style, but because it shares the same realism: you are finite. The tragedy is not that you can’t do everything; it’s that you keep trying anyway.
What keeps “Unhinged Habits” from becoming grim is its appetite for play. Goodman celebrates “doing something slightly unreasonable” – saying yes to uncertainty, saying no to the status performance, letting life be a little messier so it can be more alive. He is suspicious of the suburban dream not because he despises comfort, but because he suspects comfort often functions as fear. More square footage can mean more maintenance, more isolation, more spending, more obligation, more rigidity. The book’s best jokes are often at the expense of this quiet cultural bargain: we buy a bigger life and then wonder why we have less time.
The most ethically expansive section is Goodman’s meditation on giving. Borrowing from the concept of tzedakah – giving as obligation and righteousness rather than optional generosity – he argues that wealth is not merely money. It is time. Attention. Knowledge. Space. Connections. Encouragement. He reframes generosity as a practice that can enlarge life rather than shrink it, and this is where the book’s minimalism reveals a warmer core. The endgame is not emptiness; it’s capacity. Less clutter creates more room for people. Less noise creates more room for care. Less compulsion creates more room for choice.
All roads lead to his definition of freedom: optionality. Freedom is not permanent leisure. It is the ability to walk away, even if you choose to stay. Goodman names the forces that erode optionality “walking costs” and sorts them into three categories: financial (debt, recurring costs, lifestyle inflation), relational (obligations that drain you, commitments you never chose), and identity (titles, status, self-perceptions that no longer serve you). This framework is one of the book’s strongest because it refuses the fantasy that freedom is an emotion. Freedom is a structure. It is built.
The “walking costs” idea also gives the book its sharpest contemporary edge. In a decade defined by housing pressure, subscription creep, and an always-on work culture that colonizes evenings with pings and expectations, the ability to leave – a job, a city, a social scene, even an old version of yourself – has become rarer. Goodman’s insistence on keeping fixed costs low and commitments intentional can sound like lifestyle advice, but it also reads like economic self-defense: the fewer your non-negotiables, the more your life belongs to you.
The book does have blind spots. Like much of the “life design” shelf, it is written from a life with a certain elasticity – the kind of flexibility that makes travel stories and entrepreneurial pivots possible. That elasticity can inspire, but it can also create a quiet friction for readers whose constraints are structural, medical, or caretaking-based. Goodman acknowledges constraints, especially when he notes that minimalism looks different inside shared lives and different seasons, but the book’s default posture is agency – and agency is unevenly distributed. A more explicit engagement with that unevenness would have deepened the work.
There is also a tension in Goodman’s dismissiveness toward news and the informational commons. He is right that compulsive consumption rarely produces happiness. But attention is not only personal; it is civic. The challenge is not to strip away awareness entirely, but to right-size it – to refuse the feed without refusing responsibility. To his credit, the best version of his argument is not anti-engagement; it is anti-obsession. It’s a plea to stop treating every headline as if it carries a personal summons, and to re-enter the world on terms you choose.
As writing, “Unhinged Habits” succeeds because it understands something many habit books forget: readers don’t need more information; they need fewer competing claims on their nervous systems. Goodman’s prose is built to move. Paragraphs snap shut like suitcase latches. The jokes arrive at the moment earnestness threatens to curdle. The frameworks are simple enough to remember, but not so slick that they feel like a keynote. And the emotional engine is real: the recurring images of family logistics, friendship seasons, and the small betrayals of self that happen when you keep saying yes to things you don’t even want.
The title gestures toward bravado, but the book’s real temperament is gentler than its branding. “Unhinged” is mostly a synonym for nondefault: refusing the auto-pilot purchase, the obligatory hangout, the endless scroll, the status-driven upgrade. The provocations are meant to wake you up, not to make you feel superior. It’s less “burn it all down” than “stop letting your life be designed by accident.”
In the end, the message can be summarized without losing its force: to maximize what matters most, minimize everything else. The trick is that Goodman makes “everything else” feel newly visible – the extra couch, the extra car, the extra obligation, the extra app, the extra role, the extra self you keep performing for people who aren’t even paying attention. He doesn’t ask you to become someone new. He asks you to stop being owned. The closing sensibility, rooted in Toronto, feels almost insistently unpretentious: you don’t need a grand transformation, just a series of clean edits that return your days to you.
My rating: 86 out of 100.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 1st, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Unhinged Habits” is the kind of self-help book that refuses to float above ordinary life. It is not written from a mountaintop; it’s written from inside the cluttered, negotiated, half-chaotic reality most readers recognize: kids with sticky hands and urgent needs, a marriage that is both refuge and logistics, a phone that always seems to be within reach, and the strange modern problem of having too many options and too little peace. Its central wager is not that you can become a brand-new person in thirty days. It’s that you can stop being quietly owned – by your stuff, by your screen, by your reflexive obligations, by the identity you keep performing because it once worked.
The author, Jonathan Goodman, packages this as “unhinged” living, but the book’s secret is that it is less rebellious than its title suggests. It’s “unhinged” mostly in the sense that it refuses the default settings. It asks, again and again: Who installed this setting in your life? Did you consent to it? The proposed alternative is a form of pragmatic freedom: keep your “walking costs” low, protect your attention like a scarce resource, and invest in a smaller number of relationships and projects deeply enough that they can actually hold you.
What distinguishes “Unhinged Habits” is the voice. Goodman writes in brisk, conversational bursts, with humor that often arrives right when the material threatens to become sermon. He doesn’t build arguments in an academic key; he builds them in scenes. A family travel moment becomes a lesson in subtraction. A domestic observation becomes a critique of lifestyle inflation. A friendship realization becomes a taxonomy of adult connection. It’s a structure that makes the advice feel earned rather than harvested – and it keeps the reader from feeling lectured, which is no small achievement in a genre that so often mistakes certainty for wisdom.
The early chapters operate as a corrective to what Goodman calls the “cave” problem: the way comfort can slowly become a kind of self-made prison. Modern life encourages optimization – safer routines, smoother commutes, more convenient deliveries, a calendar that is always full enough to prove your importance. And then, one day, you notice you are efficient but strangely numb, “successful” but oddly absent from your own days. Goodman’s prescription is exploration, though he defines it less as glamorous travel than as a stance toward uncertainty. Schedule less. Let yourself get lost sometimes. Choose a general trajectory, not a tyrannical itinerary. His point isn’t that everyone should become an adventurer; it’s that presence requires a little unpredictability. When every moment is pre-solved, the senses go to sleep.
From exploration, he pivots to what might be called calibrated hardship. One of the book’s most repeatable ideas is the phrase “choose your hard” – a reminder that discomfort is unavoidable, so you might as well select the version that builds you rather than drains you. Goodman contrasts purposeful struggle with the passive struggles many people accept without naming: scrolling as “rest,” task-switching as “productivity,” convenience as “freedom” even when it leaves you weaker and more dependent. He makes a case, refreshingly concrete, that physical strength and basic endurance aren’t aesthetic accessories but infrastructure – the hardware that keeps the mind stable. It’s an argument against the fantasy that life can be lived entirely in the head.
Then he turns that same lens onto relationships, and this is where the book becomes unexpectedly tender. Adult friendship is often treated as sentimental background music, but Goodman gives it structure without making it clinical. He offers a “garden of friendship” model that sorts relationships into categories that feel instantly recognizable: “grass” friends (utility ties, professional ties, convenience ties), “flowers” (seasonal acquaintances, community relationships), “birds” (parasocial, one-sided attachments that can be enjoyable but have a ceiling), and “trees” (true friends, the rare people who remain meaningful even when nothing is being traded). The chapter’s provocation is blunt: if you spend most of your social energy on grass, don’t be surprised when you feel lonely. Depth is not an accident; it’s an allocation.
He sharpens that allocation with a three-part “true friend” test – usefulness (can the relationship exist without ambition or utility?), needless effort (would you do the mildly inconvenient thing to be with them?), and celebration (are they genuinely happy for your wins?). This is the kind of checklist that could feel gimmicky in the wrong hands. Here it works because it is braided with lived realism: adult life does skim relationships, and busyness does become an excuse. Goodman’s antidote is simple and slightly bracing: cancel on your deal friends for your real friends. Turn “scrolling” into “texting.” Trade feed-time for a real conversation, even if it’s clumsy. It’s a secular sermon on attention as love.
The relationship chapter extends this philosophy into partnership, and it is notably free of soulmate fantasy. Goodman is skeptical of the modern romantic ideal that says you should find someone who mirrors you: same politics, same hobbies, same rhythms, same tastes, same everything. He argues that the most durable couples are often complementary rather than identical – two people who share values and respect, but divide the cognitive load of life according to natural strengths. That division is not presented as a rigid gendered arrangement; it’s presented as sanity. If one partner is better at scheduling and social logistics and the other is better at finances or planning, pretending you must split every task fifty-fifty can become a quiet, constant war. Complementarity, in Goodman’s view, is not inequality; it is design.
He also pushes a surprisingly mature claim: healthy love requires two whole people. “Lift your own weight,” he insists, not as a cold slogan but as an act of devotion. The book’s relationship ideal is not codependence; it is two people growing separately and bringing that growth back into the partnership. It’s a corrective to a particular modern trap: the way couples can fuse into one identity, then resent each other for the loss of oxygen. Goodman’s approach makes room for solitude, for personal projects, for separate interests – and argues that stagnation is not romantic. The best partnerships, he suggests, are not merely compatible; they are mutually energizing.
To prevent ambition from turning life into an endless treadmill, Goodman introduces his “4S Celebration Protocol”: Shared, Scheduled, Sacred, Significant. The idea is deceptively small. Pick two or three milestones for a meaningful project. Define what “done” looks like. Attach each milestone to a specific celebration with people you love – not someday, but scheduled. Make the celebration feel sacred (protected, not easily canceled). Make it significant (something you’ll remember). The insight beneath the acronym is psychological: if you postpone joy until the finish line, you train yourself to experience the process as deprivation. Celebrating the process turns anticipation into fuel and keeps the work from hollowing you out.
These chapters build toward the book’s most forceful move: its insistence that you are not the author of your life, but you can be the editor. Great editing is subtraction. Goodman reframes minimalism as three intertwined practices – physical space, mental bandwidth, and identity – and this is where “Unhinged Habits” feels most tightly tuned to the present. Many people are not suffering from a lack of information. They are suffering from too many competing claims on their nervous systems. The book argues that subtraction is not austerity; it is mercy.
The physical minimalism is the obvious entry point because it’s visible: fewer objects, less maintenance, less “stuff tax.” But Goodman is more interested in the invisible clutter: the tyranny of choice, the constant pinging of attention, the role fragmentation that turns one life into a dozen selves. He advocates a practice that is almost aggressively doable: ten minutes a day, choose one drawer or one screen, ask one question – does this help me maximize what matters? The point is not to become a minimalist saint. It’s to train the muscle of deciding. The practice scales: ten minutes becomes a habit; the habit becomes a default; the default becomes a life that feels less like a storage unit.
His digital suggestions are familiar but well-delivered: grayscale the phone, remove tempting apps from the home screen, kill most notifications, add friction where addiction thrives. What makes the advice land is the tone. Goodman does not moralize about willpower. He assumes weakness and designs around it. That’s a crucial shift in a world where the attention economy is not neutral. It aligns with the environmental approach of “Digital Minimalism,” but Goodman is less interested in philosophy as such than in immediate behavioral architecture: make the bad habit harder, make the good habit easier, and stop pretending you can out-discipline an ecosystem designed to hijack you.
He extends that argument into consumerism, taking aim at the modern performance of “informed purchasing.” We research everything to death, compare endless options, read reviews, watch unboxings, and call it prudence. Goodman calls it what it often is: anxiety wearing a lab coat. His alternative is disarmingly blunt. Admit you don’t know. Find a domain expert. Ask one or two good questions. Default to their opinion. Sometimes you’ll get a dud. That’s the price of reclaiming your time. The goal is not the perfect purchase. The goal is to stop donating hours of your life to choices that will not matter next month.
Underneath the minimalism is another through-line: depth over breadth. Goodman rejects the “well-rounded” myth – the idea that excellence is an averaged-out competence across opposing aptitudes. He argues that burnout is often not simply overwork, but misdirected work: the exhaustion of trying to be everything. His remedy is to find your “thing,” obsess over it, and design everything else around being merely competent. This is not an invitation to become selfish; it’s an invitation to become honest. You have finite attention. If you spread it thinly across too many identities, you will feel perpetually behind.
That message lands especially hard in the current climate, when many people feel their careers being constantly re-priced and their attention being constantly raided. Goodman never turns the book into a treatise on technological disruption, but the subtext is clear: if you do not choose what you give your life to, something else will choose for you. In that way the book shares a philosophical neighborhood with “Four Thousand Weeks,” not because it shares the same style, but because it shares the same realism: you are finite. The tragedy is not that you can’t do everything; it’s that you keep trying anyway.
What keeps “Unhinged Habits” from becoming grim is its appetite for play. Goodman celebrates “doing something slightly unreasonable” – saying yes to uncertainty, saying no to the status performance, letting life be a little messier so it can be more alive. He is suspicious of the suburban dream not because he despises comfort, but because he suspects comfort often functions as fear. More square footage can mean more maintenance, more isolation, more spending, more obligation, more rigidity. The book’s best jokes are often at the expense of this quiet cultural bargain: we buy a bigger life and then wonder why we have less time.
The most ethically expansive section is Goodman’s meditation on giving. Borrowing from the concept of tzedakah – giving as obligation and righteousness rather than optional generosity – he argues that wealth is not merely money. It is time. Attention. Knowledge. Space. Connections. Encouragement. He reframes generosity as a practice that can enlarge life rather than shrink it, and this is where the book’s minimalism reveals a warmer core. The endgame is not emptiness; it’s capacity. Less clutter creates more room for people. Less noise creates more room for care. Less compulsion creates more room for choice.
All roads lead to his definition of freedom: optionality. Freedom is not permanent leisure. It is the ability to walk away, even if you choose to stay. Goodman names the forces that erode optionality “walking costs” and sorts them into three categories: financial (debt, recurring costs, lifestyle inflation), relational (obligations that drain you, commitments you never chose), and identity (titles, status, self-perceptions that no longer serve you). This framework is one of the book’s strongest because it refuses the fantasy that freedom is an emotion. Freedom is a structure. It is built.
The “walking costs” idea also gives the book its sharpest contemporary edge. In a decade defined by housing pressure, subscription creep, and an always-on work culture that colonizes evenings with pings and expectations, the ability to leave – a job, a city, a social scene, even an old version of yourself – has become rarer. Goodman’s insistence on keeping fixed costs low and commitments intentional can sound like lifestyle advice, but it also reads like economic self-defense: the fewer your non-negotiables, the more your life belongs to you.
The book does have blind spots. Like much of the “life design” shelf, it is written from a life with a certain elasticity – the kind of flexibility that makes travel stories and entrepreneurial pivots possible. That elasticity can inspire, but it can also create a quiet friction for readers whose constraints are structural, medical, or caretaking-based. Goodman acknowledges constraints, especially when he notes that minimalism looks different inside shared lives and different seasons, but the book’s default posture is agency – and agency is unevenly distributed. A more explicit engagement with that unevenness would have deepened the work.
There is also a tension in Goodman’s dismissiveness toward news and the informational commons. He is right that compulsive consumption rarely produces happiness. But attention is not only personal; it is civic. The challenge is not to strip away awareness entirely, but to right-size it – to refuse the feed without refusing responsibility. To his credit, the best version of his argument is not anti-engagement; it is anti-obsession. It’s a plea to stop treating every headline as if it carries a personal summons, and to re-enter the world on terms you choose.
As writing, “Unhinged Habits” succeeds because it understands something many habit books forget: readers don’t need more information; they need fewer competing claims on their nervous systems. Goodman’s prose is built to move. Paragraphs snap shut like suitcase latches. The jokes arrive at the moment earnestness threatens to curdle. The frameworks are simple enough to remember, but not so slick that they feel like a keynote. And the emotional engine is real: the recurring images of family logistics, friendship seasons, and the small betrayals of self that happen when you keep saying yes to things you don’t even want.
The title gestures toward bravado, but the book’s real temperament is gentler than its branding. “Unhinged” is mostly a synonym for nondefault: refusing the auto-pilot purchase, the obligatory hangout, the endless scroll, the status-driven upgrade. The provocations are meant to wake you up, not to make you feel superior. It’s less “burn it all down” than “stop letting your life be designed by accident.”
In the end, the message can be summarized without losing its force: to maximize what matters most, minimize everything else. The trick is that Goodman makes “everything else” feel newly visible – the extra couch, the extra car, the extra obligation, the extra app, the extra role, the extra self you keep performing for people who aren’t even paying attention. He doesn’t ask you to become someone new. He asks you to stop being owned. The closing sensibility, rooted in Toronto, feels almost insistently unpretentious: you don’t need a grand transformation, just a series of clean edits that return your days to you.
My rating: 86 out of 100.
February 2, 2026
Ever notice it’s always men who write these type of books?
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I went into this book expecting to be told to eat cereal out of a shoe to "disrupt my routine," but it turns out the only thing "unhinged" about this guide is the title. It’s actually a shockingly grounded manual for reclaiming your sanity. While the formatting is definitely block-text heavy (your eyes might need a map to find the exit), the quick activities and chapter summaries at the end of each section are the literal lifesavers that keep you from drowning in prose.
The advice itself is gold: I’ve officially stopped treating every minor decision like a permanent tattoo when most of them are just hats you can take off if they don't fit. I’m also obsessed with the delegation filter—if a task doesn't create memories, growth, or connection, it’s going straight to someone else’s plate. Between the "social ecosystem" audit and the concept of synchronized time off, I’ve realized I don't need to do more; I just need to stop wasting my "tattoo energy" on "hat-level" problems. If you can survive the dense paragraphs, the takeaways are worth the workout.
The advice itself is gold: I’ve officially stopped treating every minor decision like a permanent tattoo when most of them are just hats you can take off if they don't fit. I’m also obsessed with the delegation filter—if a task doesn't create memories, growth, or connection, it’s going straight to someone else’s plate. Between the "social ecosystem" audit and the concept of synchronized time off, I’ve realized I don't need to do more; I just need to stop wasting my "tattoo energy" on "hat-level" problems. If you can survive the dense paragraphs, the takeaways are worth the workout.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Informative, challenging, thought-provoking, entertaining...well done Jonathan! I have so many notes and highlights to review and reflect upon. Chapter 8 is worth the price of the book alone.
A few ideas that really hit me...
* Strategic subtraction - creating space for what's essential and discarding what is not
* In a modern world designed to distract us, we dont actively architect our lives. We default into them
* You only own your time if you can afford to waste it
* Our attention has been weaponized against us, fractured into a thousand notificiations, each promising that this email, this post, this message is the one that demands immediate attention
* Chaotic ambition without boundaries is a fire that burns your life to ash while you stand there holding the match
* Mental minimalism involves reducing the cognitive burden of constant decisions, notifications, and information overload
* Treating our attention as a precious resource
A few ideas that really hit me...
* Strategic subtraction - creating space for what's essential and discarding what is not
* In a modern world designed to distract us, we dont actively architect our lives. We default into them
* You only own your time if you can afford to waste it
* Our attention has been weaponized against us, fractured into a thousand notificiations, each promising that this email, this post, this message is the one that demands immediate attention
* Chaotic ambition without boundaries is a fire that burns your life to ash while you stand there holding the match
* Mental minimalism involves reducing the cognitive burden of constant decisions, notifications, and information overload
* Treating our attention as a precious resource
January 26, 2026
A Case for Living Deeper, Not Busier
Unhinged Habits is a refreshing, grounded reminder that more isn’t better—deeper is. Jonathan Goodman challenges the obsession with optimization and balance and instead makes a compelling case for intentional focus: fewer professional goals, fewer commitments, fewer but richer relationships. The through-line is clear—what you give sustained attention and care to is what actually flourishes.
What I appreciated most is how consistently this philosophy is applied, from work to friendships to how we move through different seasons of life. This isn’t about doing less for the sake of it; it’s about editing ruthlessly so the things that truly matter get the energy they deserve. If you’re tired of living wide and shallow and are craving a more deliberate, well-lived life, this book delivers that invitation with clarity and conviction.
Unhinged Habits is a refreshing, grounded reminder that more isn’t better—deeper is. Jonathan Goodman challenges the obsession with optimization and balance and instead makes a compelling case for intentional focus: fewer professional goals, fewer commitments, fewer but richer relationships. The through-line is clear—what you give sustained attention and care to is what actually flourishes.
What I appreciated most is how consistently this philosophy is applied, from work to friendships to how we move through different seasons of life. This isn’t about doing less for the sake of it; it’s about editing ruthlessly so the things that truly matter get the energy they deserve. If you’re tired of living wide and shallow and are craving a more deliberate, well-lived life, this book delivers that invitation with clarity and conviction.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Unhinged Habits is a sharp wake-up call for anyone who’s been living wide instead of deep. Jonathan Goodman makes a persuasive case for focusing on fewer professional goals, fewer commitments, and fewer but more meaningful relationships—so the things that matter actually get the care they deserve. The idea of seasonality alone reframes guilt, ambition, and burnout in a powerful way.
This book isn’t about doing less to escape responsibility. It’s about choosing with intention and giving your best energy to what truly counts. If you’re successful on paper but feel spread thin in real life, this book helps you recalibrate with clarity and honesty.
This book isn’t about doing less to escape responsibility. It’s about choosing with intention and giving your best energy to what truly counts. If you’re successful on paper but feel spread thin in real life, this book helps you recalibrate with clarity and honesty.
January 29, 2026
I loved this book and all of Jon's words of wisdom he shares through experience and stories. It's very reflective and puts you in deep thought. I was in a chokehold in the first chapter.
I also didn't expect to feel so deeply from reading it. Maybe it's my life stage right now, but I really reflected on my own life, productivity, expectations, and priorities.
I also didn't realize Jon was reading it and I think that has a huge impact on the tone. I pre-ordered the audiobook which also came with the pdf files for the worksheets.
I was expecting more action but was surprisingly met with depth.
I also didn't expect to feel so deeply from reading it. Maybe it's my life stage right now, but I really reflected on my own life, productivity, expectations, and priorities.
I also didn't realize Jon was reading it and I think that has a huge impact on the tone. I pre-ordered the audiobook which also came with the pdf files for the worksheets.
I was expecting more action but was surprisingly met with depth.
February 3, 2026
A truly insightful book - especially for the over achiever - Here are my 3 favorite takeaways:
#1: Not all decisions are equal. Some are hats (easy to take off) and some are tattoos (permanent). Stop treating every choice like a tattoo.
#2: Before you delegate something, ask: will this create memories, growth, or connection? If yes, do it yourself.
#3: Money isn’t the only way to be generous. You can give attention, knowledge, time, space, connections, and encouragement.
Thanks for writing this Jonathan!
#1: Not all decisions are equal. Some are hats (easy to take off) and some are tattoos (permanent). Stop treating every choice like a tattoo.
#2: Before you delegate something, ask: will this create memories, growth, or connection? If yes, do it yourself.
#3: Money isn’t the only way to be generous. You can give attention, knowledge, time, space, connections, and encouragement.
Thanks for writing this Jonathan!
February 1, 2026
I am not a huge self-help fan in general, and like many self-help groups, there are definitely moments when you will find yourself thinking, "This book could have been a Powerpoint." In addition, Goodman's tendency to self-congratulation can be extremely grating. Having said that, though, I did find more useful nuggets in this book than in most others in the genre, and I made a couple of notes of strategies I'll be trying out in the future, so fine, take your three stars, dammit.
January 28, 2026
Top-notch guide to have more by doing less. Unhinged Habits embraces the "weird" rituals and the non-linear paths that actually lead to breakthroughs. It helps you tap into your own messiness, authenticity, and intuition. This is a deeply inspirational and well-written book. I've already recommended it to several colleagues and friends.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews