Tiny stupid habits

What’s the point of trying to feel well in a broken world?

Photo by Andrea Leon on Unsplash

Recently I’ve been joking to friends that if your twenties are all about building your career, your thirties are about balancing the hormonal cycles that your successful career absolutely wrecked. 

It’s funny because it’s true. My algorithm is full of people telling me what I should be eating during my luteal phase, the signs and symptoms of high cortisol, and why trendy things that mimic man’s primal fight for survival — cold plunging, bursts of high intensity cardio, fasting — are actually not that great if you’re a stressed out woman in 2024.

It’s one of the dramatic ironies of getting older that many of the things that seemed commonplace or even aspirational in your twenties also turn out to be less than ideal for your poor animal body. 

To name a few: High pressure work opportunities where you’re stuck in a hyper-cerebral mode all day long. Regularly traveling across time zones, leading to a permanently confused circadian rhythm. Considering a double shot white americano en route to the office a sufficient breakfast. Going to “after work drinks” that, in the tradition of the London drinking culture, invariably means you don’t eat dinner as a result. Having literally zero checks on screen usage to the point where eye twitches and migraines are commonplace. Taking birth control because you didn’t have time to deal with the inconveniently cyclical nature of your reproductive system. The list goes on.

All of these seemed reasonable, rather efficient, and even fun at the time. And they enabled me to chase the success I so desired. But then things changed: the world, myself, to name a few. And nothing will make you feel more at the mercy of your long-suffering body than pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. And so, as I emerged from those states in the last two years, I was no longer interested in the fixes of my twenties. I had been living on credit, and I wanted to know how to take care of my body by actually living within its means. 

That meant going to the root of the problem. Which unfortunately means you can’t go to the GP or any doctor trained exclusively in the tradition of modern medicine. I’m not dissing modern medicine as a whole, but it’s incredibly apparent that doctors tend to have a rather narrow frame of reference when it comes to being and staying well. Myself and virtually every woman I know has had this experience: Go to the doctor, complain of an issue — skin, mood, pain, digestion — be prescribed a pill or pharmacological intervention of some sort. Or told you’re probably just anxious. End of discussion. 

I didn’t want to do that, at least not this time around. And so it was time to negotiate the world of wellness.  

***

My relationship with wellness is more complicated, or perhaps more nuanced, than most. It’s certainly evolved over time. Longtime followers of my work will know that during the era of peak wellness, which I’d date at about 2017-18, I had something of a habit for calling bullshit on a lot of this stuff. See: the magical-thinking celery juice guy, Natural Cycles’ genuinely irresponsible Instagram advertising, that moment when Silicon Valley got super into fasting.

In many ways, I’m still a wellness skeptic. White women wellness has a lot to answer for. In too many cases it’s just a lazy potpourri of eastern practices offered without any rigor, consistency, or fidelity to cultural origins. And whether we apply the term “natural” to birth, food, chemicals, or healthcare, I think that modern humans tend to exhibit a profound misunderstanding of what it actually means. Nature is brutal, violent, and deadly a lot of the time. That’s why we invented antibiotics, vaccines, birth control, and assisted birth methods to begin with. Personally, I don’t want to live in a world without those things.

However, as I’ve documented in this newsletter over the last few years, my frame of view is much wider than it used to be. Much to the horror of a former version of myself, I no longer believe that something has to be evidence-based or peer-reviewed in order to be valid or true. In addition, I’ve had more experiences (like, say, the entirety of 2020) where I was shocked to find that the experts and highly-educated people who I believed had the answers did not, in fact, have much in the way of certainty at all. Nor did they have the humility to tell us that.

And when it comes to wellness or alternative health modalities, I’ve dabbled heavily at this point: acupuncture, osteopathy, non-evidence based therapy techniques that involve the chakras. I’ve done a yoga teacher training and on my nightstand is a book about Ayurvedic types. I strongly believe in the health merits of lying on the floor often.

Thirty four years of living in a body have taught me that “healing” is a very different matter than “healthcare.” What really ends up healing us is very individual, often not backed by peer-reviewed evidence, and thus can’t be replicated from person to person. This is tricky if you’re a fan of science, where replication is a fundamental requirement. While things like antidepressants, antibiotics, and vaccines may prevent or get us out of the acute stages of sickness or dysfunction, they’re only the beginning of being well. The farther and deeper you go, the more surprised you may be at the things that start to make you feel better. 

So I find myself continually frustrated by the binary we seem to have developed. The more I learn about how to feel well in a broken world, the more I’m struck by how varied and large the toolbox is. Why aren’t we encouraged to use all of it?

***

All of this led me to a functional medicine practitioner at the beginning of this year. If you have no idea what functional medicine is, Rachel Katz wrote this great explainer, which actually initially got me interested in going this route. But the most reductive way to describe it is perhaps a best of both worlds approach to healing. It’s often where people end up when they have symptoms or experiences that their regular doctor can’t provide answers for.

The process worked by doing a food diary for roughly four days, and filling out an extensive questionnaire about your life history. We’re not just talking about your past surgeries and medical events, but everything: Your lifestyle, your emotional health, your family’s health history, your traumas, your environmental exposure, your feelings and intuitions about what is holding you back or making you sick. In the world of functional medicine, everything is relevant. Not just what can be tested in a lab.  

Though lab tests are also part of it. A practitioner will order various tests — hormones, nutrient levels, allergy testing, gut health etc — based on your intake, symptoms, and goals. These results add some metrics and data points to the equation, and flag if anything serious that may need to be referred to your actual doctor for further inquiry.  

At my first session over Zoom, the clinician — who had the kind of radiant skin I will probably never possess — asked me what I most wanted to feel. There were specific symptoms I wanted to address: mood issues, hormonal issues, appetite issues, skin issues. But most of all, I told her I wanted my life-force back. 

“Life-force, what does that mean?” She asked me. I thought it was self explanatory but apparently not, so I explained it like this: 

Sometimes when I see my toddler running around, screaming and wailing and laughing with greedy delight, I feel jealous. Not because I don’t want him to feel every feeling and experience every sensation there is to have. (I do!) But because I sometimes feel, rightly or not, that he got all that energy from me. That he literally took it from me on his journey out of my body. I know moms aren’t supposed to say this, but I will: I want some of that back. I want the energy and urgency and enthusiasm that I know I used to have. 

But I knew that this wasn’t going to be as simple as reclaiming the pre-pregnancy version of me. Not only have I gone through the neuro-biological-hormonal-social transformation of Matrescence, which Lucy Jones describes in her paradigm-shifting (and genuinely page-turning) book of the same name. But the pre-Covid era me, pre-pregnant me, was powered by a bunch of coping mechanisms and low-key dependencies that I no longer want to rely on. I was operating on a model that was hardened, unsustainable, and overworked. That version of me, thankfully, no longer exists. I wondered if I could find a new one.

***

The broad takeaway of my initial functional medicine inquiry was that I have been on a roller coaster of blood sugar spikes, stress, and adrenaline every day. She described me as being in “active recovery” from way too much stress over the last decade or so (that was humbling), and having very high cortisol levels as a result. The things she suggested were part of a strategy meant to nudge my body into the right direction, to tell it that it’s okay to step off the ride. 

Most of her suggestions were not particularly groundbreaking. Eating a real breakfast (savory with protein, fat, and greens) which is something I’ve resisted my entire life. Radically reducing my caffeine intake to the point where I realized, for the first time, the actual impact caffeine was having on me. Giving myself the bedtime routine of a toddler, which I wrote about here. Eating regularly and properly in a way that balances my blood sugar and avoids spikes and crashes, rather than inhaling the first thing I can find when I’ve forgotten to eat (really easy to do when you are taking care of a child). Removing intensive exercise and adding in more low-impact weight training to my existing yoga practice.

I also started to prioritize small things that made me feel better and felt attainable: sun on my face, walks after dropping off my son or mid-afternoon instead of caffeine, putting my hands on my chest and taking deep breaths into my diaphragm way more often than is strictly necessary. It’s not that I wouldn’t have done these things before, but I started doing them with a kind of intentionality I lacked before. They became a have-to-have, not a nice-to-have. 

I will admit here that I did not follow all of her advice. I simply do not have time for saunas, nor am I up for the faff of a castor oil pack. I took (very expensive) supplements for a couple of months, but then ditched all of them but one. I still suspect most supplements are a grift.

I had been looking for the wellness silver bullet — the one weird trick or nutrient deficiency that might finally restore a more energetic version of myself. But in fact what I needed were those tiny stupid habits, done over and over. The things your ancestors did without trying or thinking, because there was no other way of doing things.

Though I began to see a significant improvement in about three or four months, she told me it was going to take a year of these nudges, at least, to start to undo a lot of what I’ve done. I appreciated the honesty. 

***

There’s a valid critique of wellness — one that I’ve made myself — that it proposes individualized solutions for structural problems. We cannot breathe our way out of structural inequalities, racism, and climate collapse. Of course that’s true. But it’s also important to be honest and clear-eyed about what we can control when it comes to how we feel. And if what we want is to live more in line with how our bodies were designed to, I think we have more control than we realize. 

That’s what the wellness-versus-science binary often doesn’t leave room for: the individual agency we all have to navigate our choices. The incredible knowledge-base we can amass about our own bodies if we proceed with an attitude of sustained curiosity, intention, and experimentation.

This means listening to the doctor, yes, but also crucially to yourself, and seeking out alternative paths when the strictly evidence-based framework is clearly too narrow to account for what you’re experiencing. I consider myself lucky to live in a time where I get to benefit from life-saving medical treatment and also seek out alternative methodologies that come from other cultures, frameworks, and ways of knowing. I really don’t know how that became a minority viewpoint. 

There are still many days when I simply feel overwhelmed by how much is required of me, how expensive it is to pay for childcare, and how it forces me to work too hard in too little time in order to fit everything in. Even in my privileged life, I frequently feel the burden of having to perform the care-based, administrative, and economic tasks that were once shared by a large extended network of people. I feel the unsustainability of it all deep in my bones, and I imagine how much harder it is for people who have more children and less resources than I do. 

I cannot change these things. But I’ve noticed this year how taking care of myself properly is a kind of prophylactic against the idea that I can outrun these truths. My cortisol levels were so high not because I’m outrunning a tiger, but because I had convinced myself that I should be trying to every day. The problem isn’t me, it’s the rules of the game I am playing.

The tiny stupid habits provide an anchor to the world as it should be, rather than foolishly trying to keep up with its default settings. They take effort, each and every day. But that effort is worth it, because by changing the way I feel, they change some of the decisions and choices I go on to make. And I’ve noticed how it’s become easier for me to notice when I’ve gone too far, past my human limits. How I’m better able to listen to my anxiety or whatever symptom, and see it as a helpful clue, rather than pathologize it as a disorder that needs treating. 

And the point of all of this is not just to feel better, or have more energy and glowing skin — though I’m honestly here for all of that. It’s that life-force I spoke about. It’s about showing up in the world with enough energy to properly engage with it. To do something more than merely survive. To take care of yourself, so you can extend that care outward. The hard work of doing that has become the entire theme of what I write about here. 

Things I enjoyed reading

• “I realise that night in Kakuma that I am at a midway point, looking at a life split in two: half lived as a refugee and half as a citizen of one of the richest countries in the world.” A beautiful excerpt from my former colleague Aamna Mohdin’s new book, Scattered. [The Guardian]

• Can slowing down save the planet? [New Yorker]

• A “chaotic pile of advice” on writing while also mothering, from

  Rebecca
  , whose Substack I always open and read right away. [This Is Me Trying]

• What’s up with all the divorce memoirs? [New York Times]

• Inside the production of the Netflix show Love Is Blind, which is a fascinating look into what people actually think falling in love is. Reading this actually made me feel better about how much I enjoy this show. [Vulture]

• Amanda Knox, poster-child for wrongful conviction, reckons honestly with a case she may have got wrong. [The Atlantic]

• “My life is boring and I’m grateful every day.” [Extra Honey]

Things I enjoyed listening to

• What happens when you decriminalize drugs with no social guardrails or safety net underpinning society? It does not work. [Ezra Klein show]

• Do trigger warnings actually stop people from feeling triggered? [Search Engine]

• On the moral transformation that happens when you become a caregiver. [Death, Sex, and Money]

From the archives

I’m going to start occasionally reviving older essays of this newsletter, so newer subscribers can get to know the archives a bit. Up first: My son was born two years ago this month, and he arrived seven weeks early. This essay was the first thing I wrote after I crossed through the portal. With some distance I now see how his early arrival was actually the perfect preparation for one of the central requirements of parenthood, and what I grapple with in this essay: Giving up control.

Word soup

“The world is full of magic things,
patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
—W.B. Yeats

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