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Welcome to The Wellness Rewind, your go-to weekly newsletter for practical tips and inspiration to create a balanced, mindful, and energized life. Forwarded this by a friend? Subscribe here to join the community and never miss out!
NEW MONTH
March was a lot. Good, hard, messy, full. I am not complaining about any of it but I am ready to turn the page.
April doesn't need to be a reinvention. It just needs to be different enough from March that I can feel the shift. Here are five things I'm doing intentionally this month.
🌿 Protecting my mornings again.
March travel knocked this completely off track for me. Phone stays face down until I've had water, moved, and written one thing down. The research on this is consistent: how you spend the first 30 minutes of your day sets your cortisol baseline for the entire morning. A reactive start (scrolling, emails, notifications) keeps your nervous system in a low-grade stress state before the day has even begun. The fix isn't a 90-minute routine. It's just not letting the phone be the first thing.
Try it: Pick one non-negotiable morning anchor. One thing that happens before you look at your phone. Keep it under five minutes if that's what it takes to make it stick.
🧴 Simplifying my self-care routine.
I overcomplicated it in winter and never scaled back. April gets the edited version. The basics, done consistently, beat the elaborate routine done sporadically every time. This applies to skincare, movement, sleep, all of it. Consistency compounds. Complexity collapses.
Try it: Write down your current routine. Circle the three things that actually move the needle. Do those every day before adding anything else back. You can also ask Claude AI to help you scale back your routine and identify what to keep based on your goals.
📵 Setting a hard stop on work at 7pm.
Entrepreneurship has a way of bleeding into every hour if you let it. I am letting it less this month. These last three trips to Mallorca, Lisbon and Berlin, I left my laptop at home. It was the first time in years that I’ve had a proper vacation without making it a workcation. That’s what brought me to this.
Beyond the obvious rest benefits, there is real evidence that cognitive performance the next day is directly tied to how fully you disconnect the evening before. Working until you fall asleep is not hustle. It is just bad recovery strategy.
Try it: Set a phone alarm at your chosen cut-off time. When it goes off, close the laptop. That's the whole system.
📚 Reading before screens in the evening.
Replacing the 9pm scroll with a book. Even twenty minutes. The quality of my sleep on the nights I do this versus the nights I don't is not subtle. Blue light aside, the cognitive wind-down that reading creates is genuinely different from passive scrolling. Your brain moves from reactive to absorptive mode, which is a much better state to fall asleep from.
Try it: Leave your book or kindle on your pillow or night stand in the morning so it's the first thing you see when you get into bed at night. Friction reduction works.
🤍 Letting go of timelines I didn't choose.
This one is less of an action and more of a practice. April is for showing up to what is actually in front of me, not measuring it against what I thought would be there by now. If March taught me anything, it is that the gap between where you are and where you imagined you would be is almost never as meaningful as it feels. The timeline was never yours to begin with.
Try it: Write down one timeline you have been measuring yourself against. Then write down whether you actually chose it or inherited it. The answer is usually obvious once you ask the question.
ONE THING I'M FINALLY LETTING GO OF
The idea that a productive day has to look a certain way. Some days the most productive thing I do is rest, think, or do nothing at all. April is for trusting that more.
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A MOMENT TO REFLECT
What is one thing you want April to feel like that March didn't? Write it down. One sentence is enough.
Until Sunday,
Valerie