How to Stop Negativity Creeping Into Your Daily Life Lessons from 2,029 Days of Running

Day 2,029. That is how many consecutive days I have now run in barefoot-style footwear as part of my mission to cover 40,075km — a lap of the world — and raise £1 million for children's causes. 20,290km covered. 19,785km still to go.

But today's run was not really about distance. It was about something I have been quietly working on for the past year, something that I think holds a lot of people back without them even realising it. Negativity. Specifically, the two emotions that I think carry the most destructive weight in daily life — hatred and jealousy.

I want to be honest here. I am not someone who sits on top of a mountain of perfect thinking. I found myself, if I am truthful, scrolling through social media and feeling a reaction to somebody else's perceived success that was not particularly generous. Or I would think about someone whose behaviour had genuinely affected me, and that old familiar feeling of resentment would creep back in. It happens. I think it happens to most of us, probably multiple times a day if we are paying attention.

The question is not whether those feelings arise. The question is what you do with them once they show up.

So here is what I have been working on, and it genuinely has made a measurable difference to my frame of mind over this past year.

The first is hatred, or rather what I now do instead of it.

Hatred is an extraordinarily heavy emotion to carry around. When you hate someone — and I mean that in the real sense, not just finding someone mildly annoying — you are spending significant mental energy on a person who, in most cases, is entirely unaffected by it. You are the one carrying the weight. They have moved on.

What I started doing instead was asking a simple question: what must have happened in that person's life to make them act the way they do? Because behaviour that is genuinely hurtful, manipulative, or just plain wrong rarely comes from nowhere. It comes from something — from pain, from poor modelling, from circumstances I probably know very little about. And when I shift from I hate that person to I genuinely feel sorry for that person, something changes. It is not about excusing what they did. It is not about pretending it was fine. It is about releasing myself from the weight of carrying that hate forward. Compassion is a lighter emotion than hatred, and it leaves far more room for clarity and focus.

The second is jealousy, and this one I think is more common than people admit, particularly in the world of social media.

We see someone doing well — buying a new house, growing a business, getting recognition — and something in us reacts. Sometimes that reaction is genuine admiration. But sometimes, if we are being honest with ourselves, it is closer to bitterness. Why them? Why not me?

Here is the reframe I started using. Either that person worked incredibly hard and made smart decisions over a long period of time and deserves every bit of what they have built. Or they got lucky, and good for them. Either way, my wishing it was different serves absolutely no useful purpose. What it does instead is pull my attention away from my own work, my own consistency, my own progress.

And this is where I think it connects directly to what I do every single day.

2,029 consecutive days of running. That did not happen through bursts of enthusiasm. It did not happen because every day was perfect or because I was always in the mood or because I never felt like quitting. It happened because I made a decision to keep going regardless, and I kept renewing that decision every single morning. Consistency is not glamorous. It does not attract the same attention as a one-off achievement. But over time it builds something that almost nothing else can — a body of work and a track record that speaks for itself.

When I see someone else with a big following or a big number on their fundraising page, the old version of me might have felt something uncomfortable about that. The version of me that has been working on this for the past year tries to genuinely wish them well and then return my attention to what I am actually building.

Because what I am building is this: 40,075km on foot, in barefoot-style shoes, one day at a time. A lap of the world. £1 million raised for children's causes — for Great Ormond Street Hospital, for BBC Children in Need. These are children who are fighting for their lives. That is the context. That is the thing that keeps me grounded on the days when the comparisons start creeping in, or when someone says something that stings, or when the old emotions show up uninvited.

I am 20,290km into this journey. I have 19,785km still ahead of me. That is a significant amount of ground left to cover. And I need a clear head to cover it.

Removing as much unnecessary negative emotion from my daily life as I can is not about being naive. It is not about pretending that difficult things do not happen or that people do not sometimes act in ways that are genuinely harmful. It is about choosing not to carry that weight any further than I need to. It is about redirecting energy towards things that actually matter.

Hate replaced with compassion. Jealousy replaced with admiration and focus. Two small reframes. But applied consistently, every day, over weeks and months, they genuinely change the quality of your thinking.

And for me, on day 2,029 of a streak that I intend to run until this lap of the world is complete, the quality of my thinking is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

If this resonates with you, I would be grateful if you shared it. The more people who find this content, the more awareness grows around the mission, and the more children we are able to help. That is why I do this every single day. Not for the numbers on a screen. For the children.