Most exhaustion and anxiety isn't caused by a life that's too hard. It's caused by running on a structure nobody ever consciously designed, one that simply accumulated, a little at a time, from whatever happened to be lying around when you weren't paying attention.

Wellbeing by Design names eight parts of that structure directly and goes deep into each one:

Foundational Self: the values you actually live by
Psychological Self: how you carry pressure without it reshaping who you are
Intellectual Self: how honestly you think
Physical Self: the body you actually live in
Familial Self: the people who shaped you and depend on you now
Social Self: whether your wider world nourishes you or just keeps you occupied
Professional Self: whether your work is actually yours
Financial Self: your real relationship with money

Each chapter opens with a real story and closes with a short, practical section called What Actually Helps, a handful of concrete things worth trying that week. Not a programme. Not a system. Just a place to start.

The ninth and final chapter, Alignment, makes the hardest admission in the book: there is no version of a full life where all eight dimensions sit in balance at the same time, indefinitely. None.

What's available instead is a practice for staying honest about where the trade-offs currently sit, rather than waiting for a harmony that was never actually on offer.