I love a beautifully styled bed. I like everything to match, some pretty scatters, a blanket or two for afternoon naps... My bed probably wouldn't make it into an interior design magazine, but it has Aspirations, if you know what I mean.

However, I've realised over the years that whether or not I make my bed is a very good indicator of where my head is at. When I'm feeling on top of things, I make my bed every day, without fail, with all its pillows and layers. When I'm struggling, well, it's a mess. I just get up and go about my day, and from time to time, I'll crawl back in to nap, yes, but if I'm honest, actually, it's to hide.

My goal, always, is to make my bed daily. It makes me feel in control, like I've already accomplished something. And of course, it's always nice to climb into a properly made bed at night.

But sometimes – when I am teetering on the edge of burnout especially, or just feeling very tired – arranging scatters and folding blankets and making sure everything is just so, feels extremely difficult. 

Martha Beck always says that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything, and in contemplating my rumpled bed one day, I realised that my all-or-nothing mindset was manifesting itself in this small daily ritual. Either my bed was perfectly made, with all the bells and whistles, or it wasn't made at all.

The result was that when it was perfectly made, I didn't rest when I was exhausted, because of the thought of "having to" make it all up again afterwards. Alternatively, I felt slovenly and icky because I could rest whenever I wanted to, but my bed was never made. It's a weird problem to have, I know, but when you sign up to these newsletters you get me, foibles and all...

And so, on that day, when I realised that it was my thinking that was at fault, I decided to start thinking differently. I decided that good enough is good enough. And that instead of all or nothing, I would aim for all or something.

I removed the scatters and the blankets, and I popped them in the linen cupboard, ready for the day when my energy levels would return. I dialled bedmaking back to simply straightening the duvet and putting my two pillows in their place. It would take a fraction of the time, and my bed would still be made.

Little by little, that change started seeping into other areas of my life. If I couldn't do a 45-minute walk but I had 10 minutes, I would do 10 minutes. If I was trying to read before bed, but found myself too tired to really focus on a chapter, I'd read a page, or sometimes a paragraph. And what that built was both consistency, and a tiny bit of movement. And soon my life started to feel more manageable and I wasn't constantly beating myself up.

It's a way of sneaking up on yourself, I guess. And it works. But it works because it begins with changing your thoughts. Changing your thoughts starts to change your behaviour – which is what we work on in coaching. We look at how you are thinking about things and change that – and the results show up in startling practical ways.

So, give it a whirl if you're an all-or-nothing thinker. Pick one thing you feel you're constantly failing at, and try to just do something to reach that goal. Take the five minute walk. Reduce your daily chocolate binge by one square. Write 100 words, not 1,000. Tidy one drawer, or one section of a drawer. Set an alarm so you doomscroll for 55 minutes instead of 60.

And let me know how it goes. I'd love to hear about your results.