Custom-fit wellness guidance that cuts through the noise and speaks your language.
Wellbeing built from everyday habits ,How we move · breathe · rest · pay attention
Wellbeing built from everyday habits ,How we move · breathe · rest · pay attention
THE WELLNESS ALCHEMIST WORKBOOK
27 Threads for Radical Root-Cause Healing
You have been treating the symptoms. This workbook finds the root.
A structured coaching workbook drawing on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and twenty-five years of frontline mental health practice — for anyone who is ready to stop managing and start healing.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not show up on any test. It is not depression, exactly. It is not burnout, exactly. It is the slow accumulation of years spent solving the wrong problem — treating the anxiety without asking what is generating it, addressing the sleep without looking at what the mind is doing at 3am, managing the mood without ever reaching the belief underneath it.
You are not broken. You are working very hard on the wrong level.
This workbook works on the right one.
WHAT THIS WORKBOOK IS
The Wellness Alchemist Workbook takes twenty-seven Sutras of Patanjali — threads of wisdom from one of the most sophisticated psychological frameworks ever written — and puts them to work in the context of your actual life.
Each of the twenty-seven chapters follows the same structure. It opens with the Sutra in its original Sanskrit, with its English rendering. It unpacks the teaching — what Patanjali was pointing to, and why it still applies with precision to the way the modern mind suffers and the way the modern body holds that suffering. It then grounds that teaching in contemporary clinical and lifestyle science — neuroscience, psychology, lifestyle psychiatry, breathwork research. And then it puts it directly to work, through reflection exercises, coaching prompts, and practical daily tools you can use the same day.
Ancient in its source. Rigorous in its science. Immediately usable in your life.
THIS IS NOT A YOGA BOOK
There are no postures here. No requirement to sit cross-legged, to have a spiritual practice, or to believe anything in particular before you begin. The Yoga Sutras are a map of the human mind — how it creates suffering, how it perpetuates it, and how, with the right understanding and the right practice, it learns to do something else. That map is as accurate in 2026 as it was when Patanjali wrote it. This workbook simply makes it navigable.
WHAT IS INSIDE
Twenty-seven chapters, each built around a single Sutra and a single root-cause theme — from the nature of mental noise and the mechanics of anxiety, through the physiology of stress and the neuroscience of habit, to the deeper questions of identity, purpose, and what it actually means to live well.
Reflection exercises designed not to produce the right answer but to surface the honest one — the one that has been there all along, waiting for the right question.
Coaching prompts drawn from motivational interviewing, CBT, NLP, and lifestyle psychiatry — practical, evidence-based, and grounded in twenty-five years of clinical experience.
A daily practice framework that builds progressively across the workbook, so that by the final chapter you have not just read about change but begun to live it.
A Sanskrit glossary and full bibliography for those who want to go deeper into the source material.
THE BEFORE
You pick up this workbook carrying something you have not been able to put down. Perhaps it is anxiety that sits just below the surface of an otherwise functioning life. Perhaps it is a creeping sense of disconnection — going through the motions, productive but not present. Perhaps it is the exhaustion of having tried everything and found that nothing quite held. Perhaps you cannot name it precisely, only feel its weight.
THE AFTER
You put this workbook down — or more accurately, you stop needing to carry it, because what it contains has become part of how you live. You understand, at a level that goes below the intellectual, what has been generating the pattern. You have a daily practice that is yours — simple, sustainable, and built from what actually worked for you across the chapters. Your nervous system is steadier. Your mind is quieter. You are responding to life rather than simply reacting to it. You are not a different person. You are more fully yourself than you have been in years.
WHO THIS IS FOR
This workbook is for you if you are a professional carrying more than you show. If you are drawn to both the scientific and the contemplative and have never found something that honours both. If you have tried therapy, coaching, mindfulness, or wellness programmes and found something missing. If you are ready to go deeper than symptom management. If you want a guide that takes you seriously — clinically, intellectually, and as a whole human being.
It is not for you if you are looking for quick fixes, positive affirmations, or a five-step formula. The work here is real. So are the results.
FROM THE AUTHOR
"I wrote this workbook because I could not find it anywhere else. After twenty-five years of clinical practice in mental health — and three decades of personal practice in yoga, pranayama, and contemplative study — I kept meeting the same person in different consulting rooms. Intelligent. Capable. Exhausted. Working extraordinarily hard on the wrong level. The Sutras of Patanjali gave me the framework. The clinical science gave me the tools. Twenty-five years of sitting with people in their most difficult moments gave me the understanding of how to bring the two together in a way that actually works. This workbook is the result."
— Ruben Seetharamdoo, Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health, Senior Lecturer, Registered Mental Health Nurse, Lifestyle Psychiatry Coach
Coaching
Workbook and three-month coaching programme: See coaching page
DIGITAL DETOX
The Workbook for Breaking Free from Phones, Social Media, Gaming and AI
You check it before you are fully awake. You check it in the queue, in the meeting, in the bed beside someone who is trying to talk to you. You have tried to cut back before, and it has not worked — not because you lack willpower, but because nobody gave you a method built for the actual mechanism of the habit.
This workbook is that method. Drawing on three decades of NHS addiction work, neurolinguistic programming, motivational interviewing, cognitive behavioural therapy, lifestyle medicine, and the twelve-step tradition, it turns the evidence on compulsive phone, social media, gaming and AI use into direct, practical work: a self-screener that shows you exactly where you stand, worksheets built to be written in rather than merely read, and a twenty-one-day structure for the reset itself.
Chandramani, the recurring teacher who runs through every chapter, keeps the work honest rather than abstract. The evidence, cited throughout and gathered into a full bibliography at the back, keeps it credible rather than hopeful.
You are not the behaviour you are trying to change.
This is where you start proving it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ruben S. Seetharamdoo is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health and was named UK Health Coach of the Year in 2013. A Senior Lecturer at the University of West London, lifestyle psychiatry coach, and founder of Unleash the Alchemist Within Ltd, he brings twenty-five years of clinical experience across the NHS and the United States — spanning psychiatry, palliative care, and substance misuse. He is a licensed HeartMath coach, a member of the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine, and a Yoga Alliance certified yoga and pranayama teacher.
This workbook brings that practice to the hardest habit of the age — our relationship with the screen.
This follows your series bible: Digital Detox is Book 2, with the subtitle “The Workbook for Breaking Free from Phones, Social Media, Gaming and AI,”
THE ALCHEMIST’S PEN
The Workbook for Building Confidence and Discipline, One Line at a Time
“Your handwriting is the lead.
Shall we begin?”
Your handwriting is more than a style. It is a visible trace of your habits — how you hold yourself, hesitate, persist, open, or pull back.
In this thirty-day workbook, Ruben S. Seetharamdoo introduces graphotherapy as a reflective practice for personal change. Guided by Chandramani — part sage, part alchemist — you will learn to observe your script, choose one or two qualities to strengthen, and practise new pen movements until they begin to hold.
Inside you will find:
• an introduction to graphology and graphotherapy
• guided exercises for confidence, persistence, optimism, and emotional expression
• a thirty-day tracker and week-by-week programme
• worksheets, practice pages, a glossary, and further reading
This is not a promise of instant transformation.
It is a quiet daily practice: pen, page, attention, and change.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ruben S. Seetharamdoo is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health and was named UK Health Coach of the Year in 2013. A Senior Lecturer at the University of West London, lifestyle psychiatry coach, and founder of Unleash the Alchemist Within Ltd, he brings twenty-five years of clinical experience across the NHS and the United States — spanning psychiatry, palliative care, and substance misuse. He is a licensed HeartMath coach, a member of the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine, and a Yoga Alliance certified yoga and pranayama teacher.
This workbook turns that practice toward a quieter instrument of change: the pen in your hand.
Hands-On Help, Minus The Hassle
A Single Session — One Hour
Not everyone's ready to commit to a full programme. Sometimes you don't need months of work — you need one focused hour to get unstuck.
This is that hour.
A single, one-to-one coaching session designed to create real movement on whatever matters most to you right now. Whether you're weighing up a bigger programme and want to experience how I work first, or you simply have one knot to untangle — a decision, a habit you can't shift, a moment of overwhelm — this session meets you exactly there.
In sixty focused minutes, we'll:
Get clear on what's really going on beneath the surface
Identify the one or two shifts that would make the biggest difference
Leave you with a concrete, doable next step — not a vague intention
No lengthy intake forms. No slow build-up. Just a calm, direct, deeply focused conversation with someone who has spent more than two decades helping people live and work well.
Think of it as laser coaching: precise, practical, and designed to send you away lighter and clearer than you arrived.
And if you decide to go further, your £250 is credited in full toward any coaching programme you enrol in afterwards — so there's nothing to lose by starting here.
Ready to begin? Book your session below.
Your attention has been sold. This is the programme for taking it back.
A 12-week, one-to-one coaching programme with Ruben S. Seetharamdoo, Registered Mental Health Nurse and author of Digital Detox: The Workbook. Built for professionals who pick up their phone a hundred times a day without deciding to, and who are done pretending that a screen-time limit will fix it.
[Book a free 20-minute call]
The problem, plainly
You do not have a willpower problem. You have a well-resourced industry on the other side of the glass, engineering the exact behaviour you keep blaming yourself for. The evening disappears into a feed. The first ten minutes after waking belong to the phone. The meal, the meeting, the conversation with your child, each one interrupted by a check you did not choose to make.
I spent thirty years in NHS clinical and managerial roles across addiction services, at Harley Street and at the Priory. If you had asked me in 1995 to name the behaviour doing the most damage to the most people, I would have said alcohol without hesitation. Ask me today and I will tell you plainly: it is compulsive digital use. The mechanism is the same one I treated for three decades. So is the way out.
What the programme is
The Great Work is twelve weeks of structured one-to-one coaching, built on my workbook and worked in the order it was written: four weeks mapping the habit and resetting its triggers, four weeks on the body, the ambivalence and the thinking that keeps the pattern in place, and a final month running a measured 21-day detox with daily structure and weekly data.
You will not be asked to throw your phone in a drawer. Total blackouts are the version of a detox most likely to fail. The research points the other way: a detox that is realistic, specific to the one behaviour causing the most harm, and proportionate to the actual pattern, consistently outperforms an attempt to quit everything at once. That is what we build.
Everything is measured. You take a validated-style self-screener in Week 1, Week 8 and Week 12, alongside the screen-time numbers your own devices record. By the end you are not guessing whether it worked. You are comparing three numbers.
How it works
Twelve weekly sessions on video, sixty minutes each. Worksheets between sessions, taken from the eighteen in the workbook. Message support on weekdays for the moments that matter, which are rarely the moments a session happens to be scheduled. Your copy of the workbook is included and posted to you before we start.
Who this is for
The professional whose focus, sleep and evenings are being spent by an app rather than by them. The person who has deleted Instagram four times and reinstalled it five. The parent who wants to be able to say "put the phone down" without hearing the obvious reply. The methods apply to phones, social media, gaming and, increasingly, AI companions and chatbots.
It is not therapy, and I will say so directly if what you describe needs clinical care rather than coaching. Persistent low mood, harm to yourself, or a pattern that is costing you your safety deserves a GP or a therapist, and part of my job is knowing the difference and telling you honestly.
About me
I am a Senior Lecturer at the University of West London, a Registered Mental Health Nurse and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health. The programme draws on the same evidence base as the workbook: motivational interviewing, cognitive behavioural therapy, lifestyle medicine and the recovery traditions that have helped people change compulsive behaviour for a century. Chandramani, the teacher whose stories run through the book, comes along too. A pattern learned can be unlearned, though rarely by arguing with it directly.
Short FAQ
Do I have to give up my phone? No. You will change your relationship with the one or two behaviours doing the most damage. Most clients keep every app they actually value.
What if I relapse in week ten? Then we have information we did not have in week nine. A lapse is data about a trigger we have not finished with yet. The relapse prevention session exists for exactly this.
Is this therapy? No. It is structured coaching built on clinical experience. If what you bring needs treatment rather than coaching, I will tell you, and help you find it.
How much time does it take each week? One hour with me, and twenty to forty minutes of worksheet time. The detox itself, in the final month, gives you time back rather than taking it.
Reclaim: The Root-Cause Coaching Programme for Mental Wellbeing
Twelve Weeks of Lifestyle Psychiatry Coaching with Ruben Seetharamdoo
What This Might Actually Feel Like
In Your Body
A tightness in your chest that doesn't have a clear cause. Waking exhausted no matter how much you slept, or not sleeping properly at all, mind running the moment your head hits the pillow. A low hum of tension in your shoulders and jaw that's been there so long you've stopped registering it as tension. Appetite that's either vanished or become the only thing that feels manageable.
In Your Mind
A worry that doesn't have an off switch, quietly running in the background of everything else you're trying to do. Thoughts that loop, replaying conversations, rehearsing worst cases, well past the point of being useful. A fog that makes concentrating at work feel like wading through water. An inner voice that's harsher with you than you'd ever let anyone else be.
In Your Days
Things that used to bring you something, a hobby, a meal out, time with people you love, now feel flat, or like effort you can't quite justify. Getting through a to-do list has replaced actually living most days. You cancel plans more than you used to. You've started saying “I'm fine” so automatically it barely registers as a lie anymore.
In Your Relationships
Feeling present in the room but somewhere else entirely. Snapping at people who don't deserve it, then feeling worse for it. A creeping sense that you're a burden, or that no one would really notice if you pulled back further. Isolating in small, hard-to-name ways: the message you don't reply to, the invitation you decline before you've even really considered it.
If any of this is landing, you are not broken, and you are not alone in it. These experiences are common, they are real, and for many people they are deeply connected to the upstream, modifiable factors this programme addresses, not because willpower was missing, but because no one ever built the structure that makes change actually hold.
A direct word on safety: if what you're reading here feels urgent, more than difficult, or you are having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact your GP, NHS 111, or the Samaritans on 116 123 first. This programme is not crisis support and is not a substitute for clinical care. Coaching sits alongside good clinical treatment, never in place of it, and part of my job is helping you find the right care first if that's what's actually needed.
Programme Structure
Reclaim runs across three months, twelve weekly sessions, built around the five ways to wellbeing and the two methods in my book, 5½ Ways to Well-Being: The Workbook.
Month One — Naming What's Real
Week 1: Full intake, your history, your Well-Being Check-In baseline
Weeks 2–4: Connect, Be Active, Take Notice, one at a time, worked into your actual week, not a generic plan
Month Two — Building What Holds
Weeks 5–7: Keep Learning, Give, Nutrition
Week 8: The Critical ½ Step, why motivation fades, and what replaces it when it does
Month Three — Making It Last
Weeks 9–10: Review every outcome you've built, strengthen what's stalled
Weeks 11–12: A maintenance plan for after we stop meeting, final Well-Being Check-In, honest comparison against week one
Format
12 × 50-minute one-to-one sessions, weekly. Your own copy of the workbook included. Message support between sessions, replies within 48 hours on weekdays.
Ruben takes a limited number of clients at a time, alongside his academic and clinical work.
A Few Honest Questions People Ask
Is this therapy?
No. I'm not delivering psychotherapy, and this isn't a substitute for it. If therapy is what you need, I'll say so, and help you find it.
What if I'm already on medication or in therapy?
Then this can sit alongside that care, addressing the lifestyle factors your other treatment may not have room to cover. I'll ask about your current care during intake.
How do I know if this is right for me, versus needing clinical help first?
If what you're experiencing is manageable but stuck, this is likely a good fit. If it's acute, unsafe, or you're not managing day to day, clinical care comes first, and that's a conversation we can have honestly before we begin.
FROM BURNOUT TO BALANCE
The Wellness Alchemist Method — A Three-Month Coaching Programme
You are not falling apart. You are running on empty — and there is a difference.
A three-month programme for professionals who are functioning on the outside and exhausted on the inside — and are ready to get to the root of it.
OPENING
You are not someone who falls apart easily. You have kept things moving — the career, the relationships, the responsibilities — through more than most people would guess. And that is exactly the problem.
Because somewhere along the way, keeping things moving became the only mode you know. The anxiety sits just below the surface. Sleep is rarely restorative. You reach for the same coping strategies and get the same temporary relief. You know something needs to change. You just cannot find where to actually start.
This programme is where you start.
THE BEFORE
You wake up tired before the day begins. Your mind rarely stops — even when your body has. There is a low-level anxiety that has become so familiar you have almost stopped noticing it, except in the moments when it spikes. You are productive, perhaps even successful, but increasingly disconnected from any real sense of purpose or ease. You have tried things — therapy, meditation, perhaps a retreat or two. Some of it helped, for a while. But the patterns came back, because the root was never reached.
THE AFTER
Three months later, your nervous system has learned to settle. You have a daily practice that is simple, sustainable, and built around what actually works for you — not a generic protocol borrowed from a book. You understand what has been driving the patterns, and you have the tools to interrupt them before they take hold. You are sleeping better. You have more energy. Your mind is quieter. You are not reacting to life in the same way. You are not fixed — you are more conscious, more resourced, and more yourself than you have been in years.
WHAT THIS PROGRAMME IS
From Burnout to Balance is a three-month one-to-one coaching programme drawing on lifestyle psychiatry, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, HeartMath heart-coherence training, and twenty-five years of frontline clinical experience in mental health.
Each month has a clear focus: understanding the root cause of what is driving your exhaustion and anxiety; regulating the nervous system so that real change becomes physiologically possible; and transforming that understanding into a daily practice that holds long after the programme ends.
It is rigorous without being clinical. Spiritual without being vague. Practical without being superficial. It meets you exactly where you are.
THIS IS FOR YOU IF
You have been managing symptoms for years without getting to what is underneath. You are a professional who holds a great deal together and rarely admits how depleted you actually are. You are drawn to both the scientific and the contemplative — you want evidence, not just encouragement. You have tried other approaches and found something missing. You are ready to do the real work, not just talk about it.
YOUR GUIDE
Ruben Seetharamdoo is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health, Senior Lecturer at the University of West London, and lifestyle psychiatry coach with twenty-five years of clinical experience across the NHS and the United States. He is a licensed HeartMath coach, a member of the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine, and a Yoga Alliance certified yoga and pranayama teacher.
He has sat with people in the most acute moments of psychological crisis and in the quietest moments of personal reinvention. He brings both to this work. The Wellness Alchemist Workbook — the foundation of this programme — is the distillation of that lifetime of practice.
PROGRAMME STRUCTURE
Format: One-to-one coaching, online or in person
Duration: Three months
Sessions: Bi-weekly, 60 minutes per session (6 sessions total)
Between sessions: Workbook exercises, daily practice, email support
Workbook:The Wellness Alchemist Workbook included
Month One — Understand: Getting to the Root
What is actually driving this, beneath the surface
Most people have been managing the symptoms for so long they have forgotten there is a root. The first month slows everything down enough to find it. Drawing on lifestyle psychiatry assessment, HeartMath coherence tools, and the opening Sutras of Patanjali, we build a clear picture of what is actually happening in your body, your mind, and your daily life—not a diagnosis, but an honest map. You cannot change what you cannot clearly see.
What shifts this month: clarity. You will know, perhaps for the first time, what you are actually dealing with and why the previous attempts at fixing it did not hold.
Between sessions: Workbook chapters 1–9, daily Aum and breathwork practice, lifestyle audit.
Month Two — Regulate: Settling the System
Building the physiological conditions for real change
Understanding the root is necessary but not sufficient. The nervous system that has been running on stress for years needs to be retrained, not just understood. This month works directly with the body — pranayama, HeartMath heart-coherence practice, sleep, movement, and nutrition as clinical tools — alongside the Sutra teachings on sustained practice and non-attachment. Many clients describe this as the month where something tangible and physical shifts for the first time.
What shifts this month: stability. A quieter body, better sleep, more energy, and the physiological ground on which the deeper change can actually land.
Between sessions: Workbook chapters 10–18, HeartMath Inner Balance practice, personalised lifestyle protocol.
Month Three — Transform: Living the Change
Making it real, making it yours, making it last
With the root visible and the system steadier, this is where the specific life problem you came with gets worked on directly — relationships, purpose, identity, career, health, or simply the sense that something is missing. Drawing on NLP, motivational interviewing, and the final Sutras on discrimination, surrender, and liberation, we do the focused work and then build the daily practice that will sustain it long after the programme ends. You leave equipped, not dependent.
What shifts this month: direction. A clear, personalised daily practice, a concrete sense of what has changed, and the tools to keep it moving.
Between sessions: Workbook chapters 19–27, personal practice design, closing reflection and integration.
include a hard copy of The Wellness Alchemist Workbook. In-person sessions available in London. All other sessions delivered via video call.
Why We Exist
Because late-night Web searches and fad diets aren’t working. We translate evidence-based health science into everyday moves you’ll actually keep.
Follow The Journey
Follow The Journey
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