I Don't Do Wellness. I Also Haven't Slept Properly in Three Months. I'm Sure That's Fine.

I want to establish something before we begin.

I am not a wellness person. I do not have a morning routine. I have not done a cold plunge. I am not taking supplements. I have never once described my nervous system out loud in a non-ironic way, and I intend to keep that streak alive for as long as possible.

I am also, separately and unrelatedly, absolutely exhausted. Sleeping badly. Eating crisps I don't want at eleven pm. Lying awake with the specific quality of tiredness that doesn't actually lead to sleep, just sort of sits on your chest and hums. Going through my days feeling like I'm running on a battery that never quite charges back up to full.

These two facts — my disdain for wellness culture and my complete failure to be well — have been coexisting peacefully for several months. I saw no reason to examine the relationship between them.

And then I made the mistake of Googling something at one in the morning, and now I'm writing this, and I'm deeply annoyed about it.

The tabs I will be taking to my grave

I typed something into Google. I'm not going to tell you exactly what I typed, partly for dignity reasons and partly because I've already cleared my history. What I will say is that it contained the word 'stress' and also the word 'why' and also possibly the phrase 'is it normal to want to eat an entire kitchen at eleven pm' and we'll leave it there.

What came back was, frankly, more than I bargained for.

There was — and I cannot believe I'm about to type this sentence — a lot of content about cortisol. God, I hate that I know what that is. I hate even more that I read it. Cortisol is, for those of you who have successfully avoided the last two years of wellness content, the stress hormone, and apparently there's a whole thing where modern life keeps it running high for too long and then your sleep goes wrong and you crave sugar and feel simultaneously tired and like you've had too much coffee and cannot switch off. I read approximately four articles about this while absolutely refusing to identify with any of it, and then read four more.

And then — this is the part where it gets either interesting or embarrassing, depending on how charitable you're feeling — I found a study. From some institute or research centre. The Kinsey something, I want to say. The Kinsey School? The Kinsey Research Place? I'm sure it has a real name. The point is it exists and it has researchers and they published findings and I read those findings at one fifteen in the morning while pretending I was just casually skimming.

The findings were about what reliably brings cortisol — I'm just going to keep saying it, I've already committed — back down. Not eventually. That night. Immediately.

And the answer was not, to my great personal relief, a supplement or a breathing exercise or a cold shower. It was something considerably more straightforward that I will not spell out because I think you can follow the thread, given what website you're reading this on.

I lay in the dark for a moment processing this. Then I looked at the Thunder & Lightning on my bedside table where it had been sitting, untouched, for three weeks while I found extremely valid reasons to be too tired for it. Then I thought: fine. Fine. You win, Kinsey Research Place. Fine.

What happened, briefly, because I have some remaining dignity

I used it. It was excellent. I fell asleep within twenty minutes and slept for seven and a half hours.

That's it. That's the whole story. Except it isn't, quite, because seven and a half uninterrupted hours of sleep on a Tuesday is not something that has happened to me in recent memory, and I woke up the next morning feeling like a person who has their life together, which is a feeling I had started to assume was just not available to me on weekdays anymore.

I lay there for a moment — coherent, rested, offensively fine — and thought about the Kinsey Whatever and their findings and how I had, apparently, been accidentally running a sleep deprivation experiment on myself for several months when the solution was on my bedside table the entire time. The emotion this produced was less 'wellness revelation' and more 'genuine irritation at my own stupidity.' Which is, honestly, a more useful emotion. It's certainly done more for my behaviour change than any number of articles about morning routines.

A brief, reluctant word about the actual product

I'm going to try to explain why the Thunder & Lightning specifically worked for this specific application without sounding like I'm reading from a brochure or, worse, like I've developed opinions about my parasympathetic nervous system. Bear with me.

It heats up. To body temperature. 40 degrees, which I read somewhere is the point at which warmth stops feeling like an external thing and starts feeling like your own body confirming that everything is fine. I did not fully appreciate this until I used it in a state of high-grade Tuesday-night tension and noticed that the tension had, at some point I couldn't quite identify, simply stopped. Not gradually unwound. Just... stopped. The way a sound stops and you realise you'd been hearing it.

There's also something called EMS — microcurrent, used in physiotherapy apparently, though I learned this from a product page rather than any professional source, I want to be clear I'm not qualified — which produces a sensation I can only describe as the product being genuinely insistent in a way that is very difficult to half-heartedly engage with. Which matters, because the entire problem I was trying to solve was being unable to turn my brain off. The product solved that problem in the most direct way imaginable: it gave my brain something it had absolutely no choice but to pay attention to instead.

I am not going to describe this as a wellness tool. I would rather eat my own phone. But I will note — quietly, between us, in a way I'm going to maintain plausible deniability about — that it did the thing I'd spent three months hoping various other remedies would do, and it did it in about forty minutes on a Tuesday, which is a fairly compelling return on effort.

What I've changed (I'm not calling it a routine, don't)

I've stopped keeping it on the bedside table as decoration. That's the main change. I've also stopped treating it as the thing I'll get to when I'm in the right mood and have enough energy and the stars align, because that was clearly not working as a strategy and I've been tired enough long enough to be willing to try something different.

I have not told anyone I'm doing this on purpose. As far as my friends are concerned, I am simply sleeping better and being less openly miserable, which they have noted and attributed to a number of other things that I've elected not to correct. My wellbeing doesn't need to come with an explanation.

The eleven pm crisps situation has also quietly improved. I think the crisps were doing a job that something else is now doing better. I'm not going to examine this further because I am not a person who uses the phrase 'emotional eating' unironically and I'd like to keep it that way.

What I will say, with all the reluctance available to me, is this: if you recognise the Tuesday I described at the start of this — the tired-and-wired, can't-switch-off, eating-things-you-don't-want Tuesday — there is a solution that the Kinsey Whoever has been writing about for years. You already know what it is. The only reason you haven't been doing it consistently is probably the same reason I wasn't, which is that you've been treating it as a luxury for when you have time and energy rather than a tool for when you don't.

That, it turns out, is backwards. Deeply, frustratingly, I-can't-believe-I'm-saying-this backwards.

But here we are.