This post was inspired by a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a founder I interviewed on the podcast. Rather than writing it up as a traditional interview recap, I wanted to pull out the lessons and ideas that stuck with me and write them in a way that felt more like a reflection than a Q&A. If you want to hear the full original conversation, it’s linked here. Everything below is my own takeaway from what she shared, not her words, just what it made me think about.

There’s a version of entrepreneurship that exists on Instagram, polished launches, sell-out drops, gorgeous campaign shoots, a founder living her best life. And then there’s the version that actually happens, which is messier and slower and way more interesting than the highlight reel suggests.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it actually takes to build something from nothing. The one where the first iteration of your idea looks nothing like what it eventually becomes. The one where you’re doing every single job yourself for longer than feels sustainable. The one where the growth is invisible for so long that you have to just keep going on hope that it’s compounding.

The Best Ideas Come From a Specific Frustration

Vague interest in an industry doesn’t build a business. A very specific problem that isn’t being solved and that you can’t stop thinking about does.

The founders and builders I find most interesting didn’t sit down and think I want to start a company. They noticed a gap. Something that should exist and didn’t. Something they kept looking for and couldn’t find. And eventually the frustration of that gap became louder than the fear of trying to fill it.

That specificity is actually the whole thing. The more specific the problem, the more clearly you can see the solution, and the more likely it is that other people have the exact same frustration and have just been waiting for someone to do something about it.

The First Version Is Just You Figuring Out What You’re Actually Making

Whatever you build first, the first version of the brand, the first iteration of the idea, the first way you show up, it’s probably not quite right. Not because you did anything wrong, but because you learn things by doing that you can’t learn any other way. You figure out who you actually are, what you actually want to make, who you actually want to make it for. And sometimes that looks completely different from where you started.

You’re allowed to look at what you’ve built and say this isn’t it. This doesn’t represent me. And then start again with more clarity than you had before. The people who build things that last almost always have a version one that they slowly moved away from

The Unglamorous Part Nobody Posts

Rounds and rounds of something before it’s right, because the gap between what you imagine and what you get the first time is real and you have to be willing to iterate.

Logistics that are discouraging when you’re small, minimums and requirements designed for companies 10x your size, systems that weren’t built with beginners in mind, barriers that feel arbitrary until you find your way around them.

The long stretch where it’s just you doing everything. The content, the customer service, the operations, the outreach, the creative, all of it. No one to hand anything to. No backup. Just you showing up every day and doing the next thing.

The timeline being longer than it feels like it should be. Most things that look overnight from the outside took 3 - 5 years of invisible compounding before anyone noticed. That’s not discouraging. It means the work you do right now matters even when nothing visible is happening yet

Community Is the Strategy

One of the things I find most interesting about brands that actually last is that the ones doing it well aren’t just selling a product. They’re creating a point of entry into something bigger, a community of people who care about similar things and want to be around each other.

The organic word of mouth from someone who genuinely loves something and tells 3 friends is worth more than almost any paid placement. And the way you build that kind of loyalty isn’t through volume or reach, it’s through making people feel seen and welcome and glad they showed up.

Events, gatherings, spaces where people can actually meet each other, these aren’t marketing tactics, they’re relationship builders. And the relationships compound in ways that algorithms can’t replicate. When someone meets a friend through a brand they love, that brand becomes part of the story of their friendship.

I actually got to see this play out in a really tangible way at work. We’ve been running a book club, we read HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing, working through concepts around low-hanging fruit, community building, and revenue growth. You don't always need more people. Sometimes you just need to go deeper with the people already paying attention

Saying No Is Part of the Strategy Too

Early on, you say yes to almost everything because you’re building momentum and you don’t have the luxury of being selective. But as things grow, one of the most important skills is knowing which opportunities are actually aligned with what you’re building and which ones just look good on paper.

Not every collaboration. Not every stockist. Not every event or partnership or direction you could go. The ones that fit, the ones that actually speak to the person you’re trying to reach and the thing you’re trying to build and let the rest go even when it’s flattering to be asked.

Dilution is quiet. You don’t notice it happening until you look up one day and can’t quite articulate what you’re about anymore. Staying specific is the thing that keeps that from happening.

What Patience Actually Looks Like

It’s not waiting. It’s continuing to work while nothing visible is happening yet.

It’s sending the next sample even though the last 3 weren’t right. Showing up to the event even when turnout is small. Posting the content even when it doesn’t perform. Building the thing even when the timeline is longer than you thought it would be.

The compounding happens underneath the surface for a long time before it shows up anywhere you can measure. And the people who are still building when it finally surfaces, those are the ones who make it look easy from the outside, even though what you’re really seeing is just the result of not stopping.

That’s the part that actually isn’t that complicated, even though it’s the hardest part. You just have to keep going.

This one is for anyone who’s about to graduate, anyone who’s already post-grad and feels like they’re somehow doing it wrong, and anyone who just wants to feel a little less alone in the messy, weird, exciting, terrifying transition that is your early 20s.

Making Friends Is Harder Than Anyone Tells You

I made an podcast before graduating where I basically said I’d just go to workout classes and compliment the girl next to me and instantly have a whole friend group. That was delusional of me and I say that with full love for my former self.

What I didn’t account for was time. Real friendship, the kind where you can sit in comfortable silence, where you know each other’s stories, where you don’t have to be “on” every time you hang out, takes hundreds of hours to build. You can’t rush it. And when you’re working full time, trying to build a career, managing adult responsibilities, you have significantly less free time than you did in college, which means those hours accumulate slower.

But here’s what worked for me:

I reached out first, every time. I DMed people I found on Instagram who seemed like they lived nearby and had similar interests. I messaged girls from TikTok. I went to every event I could find, walk clubs, run clubs, book clubs, Pilates events. I showed up even when I didn’t know anyone. And I kept showing up, because that’s when people start to recognize you, remember you, and eventually want to grab coffee.

I joined things where I’d see the same people repeatedly. This is the key difference between a workout class you drop into once and a weekly run club you commit to. Consistency is what builds familiarity, and familiarity is what eventually turns into actual friendship. I joined a run club that met every week in the summer, I’m not even a huge runner but I went consistently because I knew that was how it would work.

I started a book club. This has become one of my favorite parts of my life here. Seeing the same women once a month, having conversations about something we all read, and building a shared experience over time, it's one of the most natural friend-making environments I've found as an adult. We're currently reading The Mistake (off campus book#2), and I have to say, I liked the first book more. This one has felt a little anticlimactic, but it's still a super easy, enjoyable read. It also has a little less smut than book 1, if that's something you care about.

I let the rejection roll off me. Sometimes I’d follow someone or reach out and nothing came of it. That’s okay. It just means we weren’t the right fit and it’s better to find that out before you’ve invested months into the friendship.

One of the most important reframes I’ve had in the last year is community is more important than your career. More important than how much money you’re making. When I looked up at almost a year post-grad and realized I’d been working 70-hour weeks between my jobs, my podcast, and my social media and my social life had taken the back seat, that didn’t feel like success. Your 20s are for finding your people. Don’t let the grind eat the entire decade.

I spent so much of senior year hearing people talk about their post-grad salaries. Everyone had a number. Six figures. $70k. $90k. And I did not know that entry-level jobs in most fields pay significantly less than what we all convinced ourselves they’d pay. Almost everyone I know who graduated into communications, marketing, or similar fields has 2 jobs just to afford their life. That’s not a personal failure, it’s just the reality of the job market right now and it’s worth knowing before you walk out of graduation expecting a certain income.

Here’s the advice that actually helped me. Have a job that pays your rent, and have a job that builds your resume.

They don’t have to be the same job. One of my friends was panicking about post-grad finances and I told her: go serve tables, make good money, and spend that time also building something that’s actually moving you toward what you want. Serving is not a step backward. It’s a funding mechanism. Some of the most ambitious people I know have served tables or bartended while building something on the side, because it gave them the financial breathing room to not take a terrible corporate job out of desperation.

The people you meet through a job, even a job that feels below your qualifications can change everything. I met the person who got me my current job through a connection I never would have made if I’d been holding out for the “right” corporate role. Networks are built in unexpected places.

Your 20s are statistically when you’re going to make the least money of your career. That is normal. Comparing yourself to the tiny percentage of people your age who are traveling full-time on brand deals or making six figures at 22 is comparing your beginning to someone else’s highlight reel. Most people our age are figuring it out too, they’re just not posting about it.

The FOMO Is Real

I graduated early, which meant all my friends were still in college for a year after I left. I had a lot of FOMO. I kept thinking, did I not make enough memories? Did I not do enough? Did I make the wrong choice?

And then I’d remind myself that when I was there, I wanted out. I had real reasons. And I was right.

But the FOMO taught me something. What I was actually missing was time. In college, I had an almost embarrassing amount of free time. I barely went to class. I could do whatever I wanted most of the day. I went to Europe. I read books. I worked out whenever I felt like it. I didn’t realize how much of that I was taking for granted until it was gone and I was working 11-hour days.

If you’re still in college reading this, I say this with so much love, please stop being in a hurry to leave. The real world is great and I love my life now, but you will never have as much free time as you have right now. Join the weird elective. Join the intramural sport. Take the surfboard-making class, the pottery class, the adult gymnastics thing. Go to the events that feel silly. Say yes to more than you think you should. The FOMO runs both directions, and one day you’ll be at your desk job wishing you’d gone to that random Thursday afternoon thing your friend invited you to sophomore year.

Living Alone Is One of the Best Things I’ve Ever Done

I didn’t know how much I needed my own space until I had it.

Living alone after college is transformative. Coming home to your space exactly the way you left it. No one else’s energy to manage. Total control over your environment, your quiet, your routine. I am at more peace in my apartment than I have been anywhere I’ve lived.

I know that’s not realistic for most people. But if you can make it work for even a year, I think it does something for your relationship with yourself that’s really hard to replicate any other way. You figure out who you actually are when nobody else is around. What you like, how you want to spend your time, what environment makes you feel good.

Hobbies Are Not Optional

This is one I feel strongly about because it’s easy to let hobbies disappear entirely post-grad when work takes over.

In college, your social life is built in. There are always things to go to, people around, activities happening. Post-grad, if you don’t intentionally create the things you enjoy, your life outside of work can become weirdly empty. Work, come home, scroll, sleep. That’s not a life.

Find the things that have nothing to do with productivity or making money and protect them. Reading. Pickleball. Coloring in a coloring book. Surfing badly. Walking with your dog. Going to a workout class you love. These are not frivolous, they’re the things that make you a full person with a life outside of your output.

And hobbies are one of the best ways to meet people. Suggesting a shared activity to a new potential friend is so much lower stakes than “do you want to hang out?”, it gives you something to do together and makes the whole thing feel natural. Next time you want to see someone new, suggest a walk, a pottery class, paddle boarding. It’s infinitely less awkward and more likely to actually happen.

I wouldn’t go back to college if I could. I want to be clear about that. I love my life right now more than I loved my life in college, and I think I made the right call leaving when I did. But here’s what I wish I’d known going in:

The first year is just hard. Not because you did anything wrong, but because everything is new and you haven’t had time to build anything yet. Your friend group, your sense of place, your financial footing, your confidence in your career, all of it takes time. Give yourself the year to figure it out before you decide you’ve failed at post-grad.

The anxiety you feel about not being where you thought you’d be? Almost everyone feels it. The friend group you haven’t built yet? It’s coming. The job situation that doesn’t look like what you imagined? That’s more normal than social media would have you believe.

And the things that actually make your life good is community, time spent doing things you love, relationships that feel easy and safe. Those are worth prioritizing at least as much as your career, maybe more.

You’re going to figure it out. You’re in the middle of it right now, which is why it’s hard. The middle always looks like nothing is working before you can see that everything was coming together.

I share all of this because I think money is one of those topics that nobody talks about truthfylly, especially among women in their 20s. We’re either pretending we’re fine, feeling ashamed about where we are, or not knowing where to start. So this is me just sharing what I actually do, what I’ve learned, and what I wish I’d known sooner.

The Mindset Piece First

Before any of the practical stuff, I want to talk about the way you think about money, because I believe this is where most of it starts.

I have a scarcity mindset around money. I’ll be transparent about that. Even when I’m objectively doing well, saving more than most people my age, investing consistently, not in debt, I still get anxious about money constantly. I’m always bracing for the moment something goes wrong financially, always mentally calculating worst-case scenarios. It’s something I’m actively working on.

A scarcity mindset basically means you operate from the belief that there’s never enough, that money is finite and precarious and could disappear at any moment. And while that fear can be motivating (it’s definitely part of why I save so aggressively), it also makes it really hard to feel good about where you are, even when where you are is actually solid.

What’s helped me shift this even slightly is affirmations around money, which I know sounds cheesy but works on a subtractive level. Things like money comes to me easily, I deserve to be financially successful, there is more than enough for me. The book I’m a Badass at Making Money goes into this really well if you want to dig deeper. The other thing that helps is gratitude, actually listing out the ways money has shown up for you, the things you’ve been able to afford, the times it worked out. It retrains your brain to look for evidence of abundance instead of automatically scanning for scarcity.

You also need to believe that the things you want financially are actually possible for you. You are young. There is time. The financial position you’re in right now is not permanent.

The Basic Numbers to Know

A few percentages worth having in your head:

Your rent should not exceed 30% of your income. This is a standard benchmark and for good reason, when housing takes up more than 30%, it’s really hard to save, invest, or have any breathing room for the unexpected. I know this feels impossible in certain cities (it feels impossible in Orange County, trust me), but it’s a useful north star when you’re making housing decisions. If you’re at 50%, something needs to change, whether that’s finding a roommate, moving neighborhoods, or increasing your income.

Your car costs should stay under 1/3 of your annual salary. And that includes everything, not just your car payment, but insurance, gas, and maintenance. Cars are one of the sneakiest ways people overspend because the payment feels manageable but the full cost of ownership adds up fast.

On student loans: if you’re taking them on, try not to exceed your expected income in the first 10 years after graduating. If you’re going into medicine or law, borrowing heavily makes more sense because the salary trajectory justifies it. If you’re a communications major at a private school that costs $100k a year, that math is a lot harder to make work. Be really honest with yourself about what entry-level salaries actually look like in your field before you commit to a certain level of debt. Entry-level marketing and communications jobs pay significantly less than most people expect, almost everyone I know who graduated into those fields has 2 jobs just to afford their life.

Track Your Spending Not Budget It

I don’t formally budget. I’ve tried and I find that rigid budgeting creates more anxiety and a more restrictive mindset around money, which doesn’t work well for me personally.

What I do instead is track everything I spent at the end of each month. I go through every credit card and debit card statement, categorize every purchase, and see what the total looks like across categories. No judgment in the moment just data.

This is illuminating. Most people have no idea where their money actually goes until they look. For me, it’s consistently Amazon and eating out, 2 categories I consistently want to reduce and consistently overspend on.

After you’ve done this a few times, you’ll start to see patterns. And from those patterns, you can identify your real priorities, not the ones you think you have, but the ones your spending reflects.

Here’s the framework I actually use: from your non-essential spending, identify the top 3 things that matter to you. Mine are travel, wellness, and Miso. Everything that’s not a necessity and not in those 3 categories gets scrutinized. If I’m spending heavily on something that isn’t on my list, I ask myself why and I try to redirect that money toward the things I actually care about.

This is fundamentally different from traditional budgeting because it’s based on your values, not an external template. Someone shouldn’t tell you to cut your daily matcha if that’s one of the highlights of your day. Cut the things that don’t matter to you. Protect the things that do.

Where I Actually Save Money

Read more

You’re Not Behind. You’re Just on Your Own Timeline.

Something I keep coming back to is everyone in their 20s feels behind. Like everyone else got the memo and you missed it. Like everyone else has their career figured out, their apartment sorted, their relationship locked in, their body where they want it.

But behind of who, exactly? Who’s the reference point?

The only person you could theoretically be behind is yourself, the version of yourself you thought you’d be by now, which is a version you made up when you were younger and had no idea what any of this actually felt like. That imaginary future self is not a valid standard. She was a projection, not a prophecy.

Your path is uniquely yours. Nobody has the exact same set of variables you do, your family, your history, your specific combination of what’s going well and what’s still being figured out. Comparison is a trap precisely because it takes your specific situation and holds it up against someone else’s highlight reel and asks why they don’t match. They were never going to match. They’re different people.

I know this doesn’t make the feeling go away. But at least name it for what it is, you’re comparing your insides to everyone else’s outsides. That game has no winners.

Your Purpose Often Comes From the Painful Stuff

I’ve noticed this pattern in myself and in almost everyone I respect. The things that ended up mattering most usually came from something that hurt first.

A breakup. A loss. A year where everything felt like it was falling apart. A moment where you looked at your life and thought this is not what I thought it was going to be.

And then, slowly, something shifted. You started doing the thing. You started talking about the experience. You started building something out of the wreckage, not because it was some clean narrative arc but because you needed somewhere to put all of it.

The tricky part is when proving yourself to the person who hurt you becomes the only fuel. That can get you started. It probably will get you started. But at some point you have to shift the why from I’ll show them to I’m doing this for me or you’re going to run out of fuel. External validation is a renewable resource until the day the person you were trying to prove something to stops mattering. Then what?

Know your why. Let it be something that will still be true when the person who hurt you is a distant memory you barely think about.

Self-Awareness

You can be too much in your own head about your own growth.

There’s a version of self-development that becomes its own kind of obsession, reading every book, listening to every podcast, going to therapy, tracking your patterns, identifying all your triggers and attachment styles and childhood wounds. And this is good work. Until it becomes the only thing you’re doing, and you’re so busy analyzing your life that you’re not actually living it.

At some point you have to give yourself permission to just... be in it. To not know all the answers. To try something without having fully processed why you’re doing it or what it means. To let some things resolve on their own instead of dissecting them before they’ve even finished happening.

Self-awareness is a tool. It’s not a destination. You don’t graduate from working on yourself and arrive somewhere perfect. You just get a little more equipped, a little less blindsided by your own patterns, a little more able to catch yourself before you do the thing you always do. That’s the real win. Not becoming a completely different person.

Forgiving People Who Don’t Know They’re Forgiven

This is one that’s changed things for me, and I don’t think it gets talked about enough.

Forgiving someone in silence, without them knowing, without a conversation, without any acknowledgment from their side is one of the most freeing things you can do for yourself. And it has nothing to do with them.

When you hold onto resentment about something that ended, a friendship, a relationship, a falling out, you’re the one who’s still living inside it. The other person has moved on. They may not even remember it the way you do. You’re the one carrying it.

Forgiving them in silence isn’t the same as saying what they did was okay. It isn’t minimizing what happened. It’s just choosing to put it down. It’s saying that hurt me, I felt it, I’m not going to let it be the thing I’m still organizing my life around.

You can be done with someone, wish them well, and never speak to them again. Those things can all coexist. You don’t need a conversation. You don’t need closure from them. You can give yourself the closure

Attachment Style

Disorganized attachment, anxious and avoidant at the same time is, I think, more common than anyone talks about. It’s the version where you simultaneously desperately want closeness and are terrified of it. Where you want someone to really know you and also keep people at a safe enough distance that they can’t hurt you. Where getting close to someone almost automatically triggers the part of you that wants to leave.

It makes relationships complicated. Friendships too. You end up in this weird middle ground where you’re keeping everyone just far enough away that you feel in control, but then also feeling lonely and like nobody really knows you. Both things at once, all the time.

The thing is this comes from somewhere. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a strategy you developed when you were young and needed it. The people in your life were unpredictable, or unavailable, or both, and you learned to manage that by not fully attaching. It worked then. It doesn’t serve you now in the same way.

Knowing your attachment style is useful not because it gives you an excuse but because it helps you catch yourself. Oh, I’m pulling away right now. Is this because something’s actually wrong, or is this just my pattern activating?

Female Friendship

I said somewhere recently that female friendships are so emotionally entangled that you’re basically doing everything with your best friend except for the one thing that would make it officially a romantic relationship. And I stand by that.

Girl friendships are intimate in a way that I don’t think we give enough credit to. You share everything. You know the details of each other’s lives in a level of granularity that most romantic partners don’t reach. A friendship breakup is its own kind of heartbreak, one that doesn’t have a cultural script, doesn’t get a period of mourning that people acknowledge, and often ends without any real explanation.

One thing I’ve been sitting with is jealousy is a dealbreaker for me in friendships. Not occasional, normal, human flickers of comparison but the persistent kind, where someone can’t celebrate your wins, where your good news consistently lands flat or gets subtly undermined. That’s not just personality incompatibility. That’s someone whose relationship with themselves is so painful that your success feels like a threat.

You can have compassion for why that happens and still step back from it. Those 2 things aren’t mutually exclusive. The test isn’t whether someone is a good person in the abstract, it’s whether being in this friendship makes you smaller or bigger. Whether you edit yourself around them. Whether you feel more like yourself or less

You’re Going to Be Someone’s “Before”

Every person who has come out the other side of something hard and built something meaningful from it, they were someone’s before. Someone is going to look at where you are right now and see something that gives them permission to believe things can get better.

That’s not pressure. It’s just perspective on why it matters to keep going even when the in-between phase is uncomfortable and unclear and not what you pictured.

The painful stuff teaches you things you can’t learn any other way. The hard seasons make you someone who understands, not theoretically but actually, from the inside, what it feels like to be stuck, or heartbroken, or lost, or figuring it out. That understanding is a resource. It’s what makes connection real instead of just polished.

So stay in it. Feel the feelings. Do the work. Not because you owe anyone a redemption arc, but because the version of you on the other side of this is going to be worth knowing.

This sounds simple. It is not simple. It took me losing a friendship, getting it back, losing my mind over people I loved making choices I disagreed with, and eventually just getting tired of being angry at situations I had no control over before I actually changed how I showed up for the people I care about.

I think a lot of us are learning friendship for the first time in our 20s. Nobody really teaches you how to handle conflict, how to support someone without absorbing their problems, or how to love someone while still letting them make their own choices. A lot of us are just figuring it out through trial and error.

So let’s talk about it.

Advice Nobody Asked For

When you’re young, high school, early college and your friend is crying to you about a boy or a friendship situation, the instinct is to fix it. You give advice. You tell them what you would do. You say things like you deserve better and I don’t understand why you put up with that and just leave as if it’s that simple, as if you’re the one who has to live inside their relationship and their feelings and their history with that person.

I did this constantly. And I lost a friendship over it.

Not because I was wrong, necessarily. But because I kept giving advice that wasn’t asked for, kept getting frustrated when it wasn’t taken, kept letting my feelings about her situation bleed into how I showed up for her, until eventually I was so irritated every time she brought the person up that the friendship became genuinely untenable for me. I pulled away. We didn’t talk for about a year.

And I’ve been the bad friend in this situation too. I think it’s easy to read this and think, “Yeah, my friend needed to hear this.” But I think most of us have been on both sides. I’ve been the person giving too much advice. I’ve been the person who thought I knew what was best. I’ve been the person who made someone else’s problem my own because I cared so much.

Caring about someone does not mean taking ownership of their choices.

And in that year, my sister helped me understand something I hadn’t really absorbed before. Long-term friendships cannot be replaced. You cannot go out and find a new friend who has known you since you were a teenager, who has context for who you’ve been across multiple versions of yourself, who was there for the things that shaped you. Long-term friendships are built over years and they are maintained by doing the work of staying friends, which sometimes means figuring out how to get through a conflict rather than letting it end something irreplaceable.

I reached back out. We became close again. And I had to change how I operated in that friendship.

I decided that unless someone specifically asks me what would you do? or what do you think I should do? I don’t offer my opinion. I listen. I validate. I let them vent.

Your job as a friend is not to be their therapist, their parent, or their relationship manager. Your job is to be their friend.

This sounds passive, but it’s one of the more active and demanding things you can do as a friend. Sitting with someone in their mess without trying to clean it up, without inserting your judgment, without steering them toward the conclusion you’ve already arrived at, that takes real restraint, especially when you love them and you think you can see something they can’t.

You are seeing maybe 5% of their relationship. You see what they tell you when they’re upset. You don’t see the good moments, the private tenderness, the full context of why they’re still in it. You’re making a judgment about something you only have a sliver of information about, and then you’re getting angry when they don’t act on that judgment. That’s not fair to them.

I had to remind myself of this when people gave me unsolicited opinions about my relationship. We’ve been together since I was 16. People told me constantly, especially in college that I shouldn’t have a boyfriend in college, that long distance never works, that dating an athlete is a bad idea. And I had to be really firm with myself. I am the only one in this relationship. I am the only one who knows how Max loves me, what his commitment looks like, what we’ve built together. Nobody else gets a vote on whether that’s worth it.

If I needed that grace extended to me, I needed to extend it to others.

Who to Go to for Advice & Who Not to

One thing I’ve gotten much more intentional about as I’ve gotten older is being very careful about whose advice I seek out.

If you’re going through a friendship conflict and you want outside perspective, don’t go to someone who doesn’t have good long-term friendships. Their advice will reflect their patterns, not the outcome you’re trying to create. If you want advice about a romantic relationship, don’t go to someone who has a complicated or unhealthy relationship history and ask them how to navigate yours. You’re going to get advice that comes from their wounds, not from the kind of relationship you actually want to have.

Go to the person who has what you want. The friend who has a handful of close, long-term, stable friendships. The person in a relationship that looks like what you’re hoping for. Not because they’re smarter or better than anyone else, but because the patterns they’re drawing from are actually relevant to the outcome you’re working toward.

This sounds obvious and I think most people don’t do it. We go to whoever is available, whoever is willing to listen, whoever will validate what we already want to hear. And then we wonder why the advice doesn’t help.

Watching Someone Stay

This is genuinely one of the most difficult things about being a good friend, and I don’t want to minimize how hard it is.

Watching someone you love stay in a friendship or relationship that you can see is hurting them and not being able to do anything about it, is its own kind of painful. Obviously, this changes when there is abuse, manipulation, isolation, or someone’s safety is at risk. That is not the same as disagreeing with someone’s choices. There is a difference between saying “I’m worried about you” and saying “I don’t understand why you’re still with them.”

One comes from love. The other often comes from frustration. You’re watching it happen in slow motion. You know what you would do. You can see things from the outside that they can’t see from inside. And you have to just... be there, without fixing it.

What I’ve had to accept is that people don’t change when their friends are ready for them to. They change when they’re ready. When they’ve had the experiences they need to have, when something shifts internally, when they finally see clearly what they’ve been in. That timeline is entirely theirs and has nothing to do with how correct or urgent your advice was.

The friend who stays in a bad relationship often stays longer when they’ve lost their support system because of it. If a controlling partner or a toxic friend has pushed everyone away, leaving that situation becomes even scarier because where do you go? The most important thing you can do is make sure they know you’re still there. That no matter what, when they’re ready, you’ll be on the other side of it waiting.

That’s actually a profound act of love. It’s not passive. It’s choosing to stay close even when you disagree, so that when things shift, they have somewhere to land.

A Few Things I’ve Learned to Never Do

Don’t talk badly about their partner or friend to other people in the shared friend group. This almost always gets back to them. And when it does, they’ll stop telling you things because they know you’re not a safe container for what’s actually going on. You lose access to the real relationship, which means you also lose the ability to actually support them.

Don’t share their secrets or overshare what they’ve told you, even after a friendship breakup. The chances of reconnecting with that person are high. The chances of running into mutual friends who will relay what you said are even more probable. I’ve had people come to me after a friendship ended and tell me what they actually thought about our dynamic the whole time and it recalibrated how I saw things. People do that in both directions.

Don’t make your feelings about their situation so obvious that they stop sharing. If every time they mention a person, your face changes or your voice tightens or you launch into what they should do, they will notice. And they will stop telling you things. Not because they don’t trust you, but because they already know your response and they’re not in a place to hear it. You’ll end up with less information and less influence, not more.

Be careful what you say about someone’s partner when things are bad. Relationships and friendships go through rough patches. What you say when your friend is in the middle of a terrible week about their partner doesn’t disappear when things improve. If they get back together and often they do, they now know exactly what you think about the person they love. And that changes things between you.

Being the Friend Who’s Struggling

I also want to say something for the person on the other side of this, the one who’s in the situation their friends don’t fully understand.

You are not obligated to share things with people who make you feel judged. If you have a friend whose response every time you bring up your relationship is to tell you why you shouldn’t be in it, it is completely reasonable to stop bringing it up. You’re not being deceptive. You’re protecting yourself from a dynamic that isn’t helping.

That said, be honest with yourself about why you’re not sharing. There’s a difference between not sharing because your friend is not supportive, and not sharing because you know on some level that what they’d say is probably true and you’re not ready to hear it. Both of those things can be happening simultaneously and it’s worth sitting with which one is driving the quiet.

Also the people who have known you longest, who loved you before the new relationship or friendship, who knew you when you were just you, keep those people close. Those relationships are the ones that ground you, that give you perspective, that still exist when everything else shifts. Don’t let any new dynamic, no matter how consuming it feels, be the thing that cuts you off from your roots.

What Being a Good Friend Actually Looks Like

A good friend listens without immediately problem-solving. A good friend asks do you want my thoughts or do you just need to vent? before launching into advice. A good friend holds space for someone being in a place they wouldn’t be in themselves, without making that person feel stupid or naive for being there. A good friend trusts that the people they love are capable of figuring things out in their own time and stays close enough to be there when they do.

A good friend also knows when something is serious enough to say something directly. Genuine safety concerns, situations that are escalating in dangerous ways, things that cross lines that can’t be uncrossed, those warrant a conversation. That’s different from not liking someone’s boyfriend because he’s messy, or not vibing with a friend’s new best friend because the dynamic feels a little off. Know the difference between intervening because you see harm and intervening because you’re uncomfortable.

The older I get, the more I realize that most of what I thought was good friendship advice in my younger years was actually me projecting my own values and preferences onto someone else’s life and getting frustrated when they didn’t apply them. That’s not friendship. That’s just control in a caring outfit.

Real friendship is staying when you disagree. Showing up even when it’s inconvenient. Being the person they know they can call at any stage of whatever they’re going through, not just when they’re following the path you’d choose for them, but when they’re deep in something hard and need someone to just be there.

I think we’re all just learning how to do this for the 1st time. We’re learning how to love people without controlling them. How to support people without losing ourselves. How to be honest without being judgmental.

I’m still learning how to be a better friend. I know I’ll probably get it wrong again because I’m human, but I think the goal is becoming someone people feel safe with.

Someone who can tell you the truth when you need to hear it, but also someone who can sit next to you while you figure things out on your own.

It Started with Suki

Before Miso, there was Suki.

My family dog Spunky died when I was in high school, and I am one of those people who cannot just sit with the absence of a dog. I immediately need to fill it. My parents weren’t ready to get another dog right away, so I decided I would just buy one myself. My sophomore year of high school, I purchased a family dog with my own money, with the understanding that my parents would eventually pay me back. Her name was Misha, and she was our family dog, but I always thought of her as mine.

So when I left for college, my position was I’m taking Misha. My parents said absolutely not. And my response was okay, then I’m getting another dog.

Winter break of my freshman year, I was 18 & I went on Craigslist. I know. I didn’t know Craigslist was sketchy. I found a listing for a mini golden doodle in San Diego, and my friend and I drove down to meet the seller. She told us to meet at a police station. She never showed up.

We went back the next day. This time the dog was there. She needed a bath, the seller seemed a little evasive, kept changing her phone number, mentioned she’d been in Mexico. But there were papers, and the dog was in front of me, and I was 18 and emotional and I wanted a dog. I paid $2,000 cash and named her Suki.

Right away, Suki had diarrhea. She smelled wrong. She wasn’t eating. She was small and bloated at the same time. My mom took her to a local vet who said she was fine. I took her to a different vet. She tested positive for Parvo.

If you don’t know what Parvo is, it’s one of the most deadly diseases a puppy can get. Many don’t survive. Suki was maybe 2 pounds. I was told that if a dog survives 5 days of treatment, the odds improve significantly. She made it to day 4.

I spent nearly $10,000 in total, the purchase price and the medical bills, trying to save her. I authorized every treatment, every intervention, because my thinking was if she ends up with anyone else, she’s already dead. I was the only person willing to do this. If she lives, it will have been worth it. She didn’t live. I got the call at work. I went into debt to my aunt paying it back.

I was already struggling with depression my freshman year. Suki’s death made everything worse. And somehow, within weeks, I was back on Facebook Marketplace, back on breeder websites, back in doodle rescue Facebook groups, looking at dogs every single day because the grief was so acute and the only thing that made sense to me was trying again.

But I made myself stop and think logically. If I didn’t plan this carefully, I was going to make another impulsive decision out of sadness and end up with another sick dog from a questionable source. So I did the research

Finding Miso

I kept hearing people talk about getting golden doodles from breeders in Utah. I went on Instagram, searched for Utah golden doodles, and found a breeder called Legacy Doodles, a mom who bred her own dog once a year as a side project, not a business. She had kids and cats and a big backyard. It wasn’t a puppy mill.

I messaged her and told her my whole story about Suki, about what I was looking for, about why I needed to do this the right way. I put a deposit down in February of my freshman year, $500, to get on the waitlist. The litter wasn’t even conceived yet. It wouldn’t be born until Sept.

I was 6th pick. I waited almost a year.

The breeder was incredible throughout the whole process, constantly posting updates on social media, sending photos, being transparent about every step of the pregnancy and birth. When it came time to pick, all the girls had been chosen by the time it was my turn. I picked Miso from the remaining boys. She FaceTimed me, told me about each dog’s personality. Miso, she said, was the most quiet and isolated, always on his own, didn’t demand attention. I laughed when she told me that, because he has spent the subsequent 4 and a half years demanding every ounce of attention from every person within a five-foot radius.

His name was Pumpkin before I renamed him. He had a straight coat, lighter coloring that would darken over time, and was going to be easier to groom than some of his curlier littermates.

I drove from SLO to my parents, flew from LAX to Utah, picked him up, flew back, had him meet my family and friends, drove him to meet Max, and then drove from LA all the way back up to SLO all in one weekend. He slept in my lap the entire car ride.

I was immediately, completely, irrationally in love

Getting a Dog in College

A lot of people told me not to do it. You’re too young. You won’t take care of it properly. It’s not humane to have a dog in college. You’ll regret it.

I got into real arguments about this. And I understand where people were coming from, there are genuinely irresponsible people who get dogs in college and then neglect them. The frat guys who get a puppy, can’t afford the vet bills, and the dog just suffers. Those people exist and they’re a real problem.

But I also knew myself. I knew this dog was going to be my child. I had already spent $10,000 trying to save a dog I’d had for 4 days. I was not going to half-ass this.

Here’s what the reality actually looked like:

I was in SLO, which is an incredibly dog-friendly town. Miso wasn’t stuck in an apartment, we went outside constantly. I had roommates who loved him. I crate trained him, which meant he was safe and contained when I was in class. Cal Poly’s class schedule meant I only had a few 2-hour blocks each day, which for a puppy that needs to sleep most of the time anyway was completely manageable.

Was it hard? Yes. He bit everything. The potty training took longer than it should have because I moved so much and every new environment reset his progress. He cried in the crate. He brought dirt inside constantly. It was a lot.

But I also got training immediately. I found a group class in SLO that I did with him once a week for over a year. He did great the first 6 weeks, and then hit a wall where he just barked for the entire hour of class, stressed out, and nothing worked. Which leads me to one of the biggest things I’d do differently

What I’d Do Differently

The training situation. The classes I put Miso in were clearly stressing him out. Every week I was bringing him into an environment where he was anxious and reactive, which was making his anxiety worse, not better. The trainers kept telling me it was a phase, he’d grow out of it. They should have told me to stop bringing him. I should have recognized sooner that I was creating a pattern of stress around being around other dogs, not helping him work through it.

Miso is now what I’d describe as reactive, not aggressive in the sense of biting, but he has a big, scary bark and gets easily frightened. Other people see this fluffy adorable dog and then he barks ferociously at them and they’re terrified. He’s actually terrified of them. The anxiety is his, not aggression. But it looks scary from the outside.

I’ve tried a lot of things to address the barking over the years, some of which I regret, because certain methods (shock collars, spray bottles, anything that startles or scares them) can break your dog’s trust in you in ways that are hard to repair. There was a period where Miso stopped cuddling with me on the bed, wouldn’t come close to me, seemed genuinely unhappy. Looking back I think I’d done things that scared him trying to correct the barking, and he was angry with me. That was really painful. Lesson learned: never use fear-based correction with a dog who is already anxious. You will make it worse.

The moving. I moved Miso constantly between SLO during school, back to my parents’ house for breaks, to visit Max, everywhere I went. I think the constant change of environments significantly contributed to his anxiety. Dogs are deeply creatures of routine and place. If I could go back, I would have been much more intentional about keeping his environment stable, especially in those early months.

Starting with a private trainer. Group classes made sense logically, more affordable, social exposure, structured curriculum. But for a dog with Miso’s personality, one-on-one would have been better from the start. Know your dog before you commit to a training format

Get dog insurance immediately. This is my absolute #1 recommendation. I pay about $50 a month for Miso’s insurance. I probably don’t make it back in an average year. But if something goes wrong, a serious illness, a surgery, an injury, the coverage is there. After what happened with Suki, I will never own a dog without insurance. If I had insurance on Suki from the moment I bought her, the $10,000 in medical bills would have been a fraction of that. The month you skip insurance is the month something expensive happens.

Your friends will not actually help you. Everyone says oh, I’ll watch him anytime! Almost nobody actually does, or they say yes and then bail. Build a real support system before you get the dog, people who will genuinely show up. For me that’s been my family (especially my mom, who essentially co-parented Miso during my internship by picking him up in the mornings when she got off her night shift) and Max’s family. That’s it. Plan for those people to be your actual support, not the friends who mean well but aren’t reliable.

Housing will be harder than you think. A lot of places don’t allow dogs, or add significant pet deposits and monthly fees. This is especially true in college towns and increasingly in expensive rental markets like Orange County. Factor this into any housing decision and have a realistic plan before you get the animal.

They need to come to work or you need to work from home. A puppy can’t be alone for 8 to 10 hours a day. This isn’t just a logistical issue, it affects their mental health and behavior. I’ve been lucky that Miso can come with me to work where there’s another dog for him to play with. This has been essential to his happiness and to mine.

You will not go everywhere you want to go anymore. Last-minute trips, spontaneous overnight plans, anything that requires you to leave for more than a few hours, all of this requires a plan for your dog. You have to be okay with that constraint or you’ll end up resenting the animal.

They are more work than you think and also more rewarding than you think. Both of these things are true simultaneously. Miso has given me more anxiety as a worried dog mom than I anticipated. He has also made living alone actually feel like coming home to someone. He forces me outside every day. He makes me laugh constantly. He’s made me less depressed in ways I didn’t expect. These are not small things

Miso is going to meet my kids one day. He’ll be an old dog by then, but he’ll be there. I think about that sometimes.

I also think about Suki a lot, even now. I think about the people who sold me a sick dog a few days before Christmas knowing the whole litter probably had Parvo. I think about the $10,000 and the debt and the grief of my freshman year piling on top of that. I think about how I made myself plan carefully after that loss so I wouldn’t make another impulsive decision out of pain, and how that planning led me to the right breeder and the right dog.

I’m glad I didn’t wait. I had more flexibility in college than I do now. I could barely go to class and nobody cared, which meant I had time to be home with a puppy. Now I work 11 hours a day and trying to raise a puppy in this life would genuinely break me. The timing, as chaotic as it was, was actually right.

Miso is always a work in progress. He’s 4 and a half. I’m slowly, patiently reintroducing him to the world, coffee shops, walks in new neighborhoods, sitting outside restaurants with a bully stick. Progress is slow. I’m not fighting it anymore. He’s happy. I’m happy. That’s actually the whole thing.

If you’re thinking about getting a dog do it for the right reasons, with a real plan, real financial preparation, and realistic expectations about how much your life will change. And then love that dog like your child, because that’s what they are

Miso’s non-negotiables that I’d recommend for any new dog owner:

• Research the breeder thoroughly, meet them virtually if you can’t in person, ask about health testing, understand the environment the dog is coming from. Even better friend a rescue for the breed you want.

• Get insurance the moment you bring them home

• Start training immediately, even basic commands in the first weeks make a significant difference

• Know your dog’s personality before committing to a training method

• Build your actual support network before you need it

• Never use fear-based correction, it damages trust in ways that are slow to repair

• Accept that your social life and spontaneity will look different, and that’s okay

These are the things I’ve actually been doing consistently and loving right now. Some are new, some are habits I’ve had for a while that I keep coming back to. All of them are worth trying.

1. Sea Moss

Okay, starting with the one that costs money so we can get it out of the way.

I was skeptical of sea moss for a long time. It felt like a trend, and when I saw it at Mother’s Market for $45 a jar I genuinely laughed and walked away. But then I found it at a local organic restaurant called Vibe in Orange County for $35, which is still not cheap, and I decided to just try it. I’ve been taking a spoonful every day for a couple of weeks now.

The nutrient profile is genuinely remarkable. Sea moss contains iodine, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, phosphorus, and vitamins A, B, C, D, E, and K. It’s basically a multivitamin in food form. But the specific reasons I wanted it were for my skin, my gut, and mold detox.

For skin: sea moss is known to help with inflammation, acne, eczema, and psoriasis. Its high sulfur content also supports hair and nail health. My skin has been breaking out more than usual lately and I’ve been trying to address it from multiple angles & this is one of them.

For gut health: sea moss contains a type of soluble fiber called carrageenan that acts as a prebiotic, meaning it feeds the beneficial bacteria in your gut rather than just adding bacteria the way a probiotic does. Your gut microbiome needs both, the bacteria themselves and the food to sustain them. I’ve noticed my gut health shifting over the past year or two in ways I haven’t fully figured out yet, and anything that supports the microbiome without downside feels worth adding.

For detox: sea moss has mucilaginous properties, meaning it naturally binds to toxins in the digestive tract and helps your body eliminate them. Since I’m actively working on detoxing from mold exposure, this was actually the tipping point for me. It also helps alkalize the body, which reduces acidity and by extension reduces inflammation.

It has a strange texture, somewhere between applesauce and gel and essentially no flavor, which is both good and weird. I just do one spoonful and chase it with water. You could also blend it into a smoothie and not notice it at all.

I haven’t been taking it long enough to report dramatic results yet. But I don’t see any downside to it and the nutrient profile alone makes it worth the experiment. I’ll give a proper update once I’ve been on it longer.

2. Yoga

I have a complicated relationship with yoga. I love how it makes me feel, I love certain studios and instructors, and also sometimes I’m lying in a pose thinking about how many minutes are left in class. Both things are true.

But I’ve been going consistently, multiple times a week now, and I want to talk about why because I think yoga gets undersold as a health tool, especially for women and especially for people dealing with stress or hormonal issues.

I go to 2 different kinds of yoga regularly. One is a slow, meditative morning class at a studio called Home Yoga, at 6am before work. It’s small and intimate. They come around and adjust you throughout class. There’s no phone, I don’t even bring mine in. The sun comes up through the windows. It’s quiet in a way that almost nothing else in my day is quiet.

The other is heated yoga, which I had avoided for a while because I’d read that it can spike cortisol. But I’ve been incorporating it back in and the sweat and the sense of accomplishment after make it worth it for me. The heat stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, your rest and digest response which is the opposite of the fight-or-flight state most of us are in all day. It forces your body to slow down in a way that other workouts don’t.

Both versions have something in common that I think is therapeutic. No phone or notifications. No one needing anything from me. Just an hour of being completely present in my body. For someone who struggles with anxiety and an overactive nervous system, that’s not a small thing. It’s actually one of the best things I do for my mental health week to week.

I also want to say something about the workout culture conversation more broadly. I spent a long time running a lot and prioritizing high-intensity cardio, and at a certain point I noticed I felt inflamed constantly, I was starting to get stress fractures in my feet, and I had basically no muscle definition despite how much I was working out. Switching to a rotation of yoga, Pilates, and strength training changed how my body feels day to day more than anything else I’ve done. High intensity isn’t always the answer, especially for female hormones. Low and moderate intensity movement done consistently and well is where the real long-term results live.

3. Sleeping 8 to 10 Hours

I need to say something about our culture’s relationship with sleep deprivation because it genuinely bothers me.

We have normalized, actually kind of celebrated getting very little sleep. People say things like I only got 4 hours with a tone that implies hustle and productivity. And I don’t understand it, because being sleep deprived is not a flex. It’s just damaging your body.

Sleep is when your body repairs itself. It’s when your muscles recover from workouts. It’s when your brain processes and consolidates memories. It’s when your hormones regulate. And for women specifically, inadequate sleep is directly linked to imbalanced estrogen and progesterone, elevated cortisol, irregular cycles, and increased risk of developing PCOS. The research on sleep has historically been conducted mostly on male subjects, which is why the general recommendation of 7 to 8 hours gets cited everywhere but women’s hormonal complexity means most of us actually need 8 to 10 hours for our systems to function optimally.

I’ve been knocking out around 9 o’clock lately because my body is exhausted, and I’m not fighting it. I used to feel guilty about going to bed that early. Now I think of it as one of the most important health decisions I make in a day.

Around 7:40pm I do a 20-minute cleanup of my apartment (never actually takes 20 minutes, I set the timer and usually finish faster). Then shower, skincare, and at 8pm I take my Arrae Sleep supplement and magnesium glycinate. By 9-9:30 I’m usually asleep. The magnesium in particular has made a significant difference in how quickly I fall asleep and how rested I feel when I wake up.

If you’re struggling with sleep, I’d start there before trying anything else, magnesium glycinate, a consistent wind-down routine that starts before you’re already exhausted, no phone for at least an hour before bed. It sounds basic because it is. It also works.

4. Eating Larger Meals Earlier

This one is a complete flip from how most people eat and how I used to eat, and it’s made a noticeable difference in my energy, my hunger levels, and my sleep quality.

The pattern I see constantly and used to follow myself is skip breakfast or just have coffee, maybe eat something small at lunch, and then eat a huge dinner because you’ve been restricting all day and you’re finally home and hungry. The problem with this is multifaceted.

Eating a big meal late at night means your body is spending the hours it should be repairing and restoring doing active digestion instead. It disrupts sleep quality. It also doesn’t match when your metabolism is most active, your digestive system is most efficient earlier in the day, which means you’re actually absorbing and using the nutrients from food better in the morning and afternoon than at night.

More importantly for me is eating a substantial, balanced breakfast (protein, fat, and complex carbohydrates), regulates 2 key hunger hormones, ghrelin (which triggers hunger) and leptin (which signals fullness). When you start your day with real food, you suppress ghrelin and elevate leptin, which means you stay satisfied throughout the day and you’re not ravenous by evening. The opposite pattern of skipping breakfast, having coffee, going until noon, creates a cortisol and blood sugar spike in the morning, followed by the inevitable crash, followed by intense cravings for whatever is highest in sugar or calories because your body is trying to recover from the depletion.

I’ve found that when I eat a solid breakfast, I genuinely need less food for the rest of the day. My lunch can be lighter. My dinner can be lighter. And I’m not standing in front of my fridge at 9pm eating whatever I can find because I’m desperate.

For female hormones specifically, eating within 30 minutes to an hour of waking up, before caffeine is one of the most impactful things you can do. Coffee on an empty stomach spikes cortisol. Your body is already in a mild cortisol state when you wake up. Adding caffeine before food amplifies that. Eating first gives your body something to work with before you introduce stimulants into the mix.

If you do nothing else on this list, try eating a real breakfast for 2 weeks and see what happens to your energy, your hunger, and your mood throughout the day.

5. Opening Your Windows

This one is completely free and most people don’t do it enough.

Indoor air quality is something we almost never think about, but it’s frequently worse than outdoor air quality. Our homes trap volatile organic compounds from furniture, building materials, household cleaners, candles, synthetic fragrances, and basic accumulated dust. If you keep your windows closed, all of that just circulates. Proper ventilation allows fresh air in and pushes stale, polluted air out.

For me specifically, this matters because I’m very sensitive to mold. Mold thrives in damp, humid environments, and poor ventilation contributes to the moisture buildup that lets it grow in bathrooms, closets, behind furniture. I keep my windows open as much as possible and I’ve also started using moisture-absorbing bags in my closet and bathroom, they’re small bags filled with beads that absorb moisture and literally turn into water. They’ve been surprisingly effective at keeping certain areas dry.

Beyond mold prevention, there’s the straightforward benefit of just bringing fresh air and natural light into your space. There’s something about it that feels regulating. I think we were meant to have more exposure to outdoor air and natural light than most of us get in our current lives, and opening a window is the simplest possible way to get more of both.

I want to come back to something I said at the start, because I think it’s worth being direct about.

The wellness industry has figured out how to monetize things that are either free or have been free for thousands of years. Grounding, putting your bare feet on the earth, is one of the most ancient and well-studied practices for nervous system regulation and inflammation reduction. And now there are grounding mats that cost hundreds of dollars. The mat is a fine product if you genuinely can’t go outside. But the free version is also available to you literally right now.

I’m not above buying supplements and devices, the sea moss and the magnesium and the red light therapy (code SHELBY) are all things I spend money on and think are worth it. But I want to be really clear that the foundation of feeling good doesn’t require any of that. The foundation is sleep enough, eat real food earlier in the day, move your body in ways that feel good rather than ways that just feel sufficiently punishing, get some fresh air, find a way to be present without your phone for at least a portion of your day.

Everything else builds on top of that foundation. If the foundation is shaky, no supplement is going to fix it.

Nobody told me that was going to happen. So I’m telling you.

Why I Graduated Early

Let me back up and give you the full picture, because the decision to graduate a year early wasn’t simple and it didn’t happen in one moment.

I went into Cal Poly SLO as an agriculture major, which if you know me at all is genuinely hilarious. I’m a beachy girl who grew up in LA/OC. My first college class was literally about soil and cows. I switched majors almost immediately, attempted to get into the nutrition program (got denied because I got a C in chemistry, which, fair), attempted to get into business (denied, impacted), and eventually landed in communications which actually turned out to be a great fit. Lots of marketing, business psychology, free electives. I nearly minored in psychology without planning to. I loved it.

But somewhere in my sophomore year, I was sitting in my house doing summer school, working as a barista, and I did the math. My sister had dropped out of college and already had 2 tech companies by the age I was then. What was I doing? I called her and told her I wanted to drop out. She told me in no uncertain terms: you go to one of the best Cal States in California. Do not drop out. I went to a small private school nobody knew about and my degree meant nothing. Don’t do that.

So I didn’t drop out. But I also decided I was not going to spend another extra year there. I made a deal with myself: graduate early or leave. And I graduated early.

Every single quarter from that point on I took 18 to 22 units. We were on the quarter system, 10-week classes and I was stacking 4, 5, 6 classes at a time while working part time. I also took summer school both summers. I didn’t even know for certain I was going to graduate early until my very last quarter, because I couldn’t guarantee I’d get into the right classes. That’s why I barely told anyone. I didn’t want to deal with the housing situation, the roommate drama, the whole logistical nightmare of it and honestly I was also running away from some friendship issues that had made the social environment there feel exhausting. So I just kept taking classes until one day the credits added up and I was done.

I graduated in July, barely 21 years old. I had turned 21 about 2 weeks before walking.

What I Thought Post-Grad Would Look Like

I thought having a year head start on my graduating class meant I’d be a year ahead in my career. More time to work, more experience, more savings, more of everything. I thought leaving college meant leaving behind the fake, party-heavy social scene and trading it for deeper friendships and more intentional living. I thought the hours I’d spent on classes and homework would magically convert into free time once I graduated.

None of that is how it worked.

The Job Search Was Humbling in Ways I Wasn’t Prepared For

2 months before graduation, I still didn’t have a job. I was applying to everything on LinkedIn. I genuinely did not care what industry, what position, what city. I just needed something. My one real dream job never called back. The first interview I got, I got the job immediately, a construction company internship. Not exactly what I envisioned, but it paid well, I loved the people I worked with, and I learned an industry I had 0 exposure to.

During that internship, a marketing position opened up. I wanted it badly. I reached out to the marketing director within the 1st month to express my interest. She told me the position wasn’t open yet but she’d keep me in mind. When it did open, I went through the entire interview process. I was essentially told I had the job. Multiple people on the team wanted me to have it. I had arranged my whole life around the assumption that it was mine.

And then she told me they’d hired someone else. He was starting Monday. He had so much more experience, she said.

I found out later that he had graduated the same time I did and had been working the same number of months I had. The difference between our experience was minimal. I still don’t fully understand what happened. But what I realized was that if I had gotten that job, I’d have been working under a team with very fast turnover and management issues and that probably wasn’t the environment I needed to be starting my career in. So I made peace with it eventually. In the moment I was devastated.

I spent my last week at that internship just applying to jobs all day, every day. I applied to hundreds of positions. I got rejected or ghosted for jobs I was overqualified for. I knew someone who worked at a company where I applied for a part-time internship and still didn’t get a call back. It was demoralizing in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

I was about to start applying to restaurants, not because I thought it was beneath me, but because I needed income and I knew the money was good, when my sister called and asked if I could come work at her streetwear brand, Basketcase, while I kept applying elsewhere. I said yes immediately. And then through a connection from my sister’s friend, I found out a physical therapist was looking for someone for admin and social media. I got coffee with the person who made the connection, she vouched for me, and I got a 2nd part-time job.

So right now I’m working 2 jobs, running a podcast, and going to school to become a certified health coach. I worked from 7am to about 6:30pm most days. 11 hours.

I actually love both jobs. Basketcase feels like family, I can bring Miso, I can see the physical results of my work, and it’s genuinely fulfilling in a tangible way that sitting at a screen all day never quite was. And working for a physical therapist is in the health and wellness space I care about, it’s all remote, and the connections I’m building there feel like real long-term career assets. I didn’t plan either of these. They just fell into place at exactly the moment I needed them to.

But it took 6 months of genuine stress to get here. 6 months of rejections, uncertainty, financial anxiety, and nights spent spiraling about whether any of this was going to work out.

The Money Spiral

I want to talk about this because I think a lot of people my age are going through something similar and nobody says it out loud.

I have a savings account. I saved 43% of my income last month. By most measures, I am doing ok financially for a 24 year old. And yet I regularly go through phases where I am convinced I’m broke, behind, and somehow failing because I follow people on Instagram who are traveling the world and living their dream lives and seemingly have endless money, and I wonder why I’m not there.

The thing I keep having to remind myself is that I’m looking at the 1% of 24 year olds. The ones who went viral, or have wealthy parents, or stumbled into the right opportunity at the right time. They’re not a representative sample of what’s normal at this age. They’re just the most visible.

Entry-level jobs do not pay enough to live in Orange County, California. That is just true. It’s not a personal failing, it’s a structural reality that affects basically every young person trying to live in a major metro area right now. I work 2 jobs because I have to, not because I’m bad with money or made wrong choices. The math just doesn’t add up any other way right now.

What’s helped me is zooming out. I graduated a year early. I found 2 jobs that I actually like in a market where that was hard. I have my own apartment in a city I love.None of that happened on accident. When I look at where I am as a whole rather than comparing myself to whoever showed up in my feed today, the picture is actually pretty good.

That doesn’t mean the spiral doesn’t still happen. It just means I’ve gotten better at catching it.

I Didn’t Expect to Mourn College

This is the part that surprised me most.

If I had stayed for my senior year, the year I technically would have graduated, I would have been taking maybe 2 easy classes a quarter. Free electives. Probably pickleball or pottery or something fun. I’d have worked out every day. Gone on hikes with friends. Had free therapy through the university counseling center. Spent one more year with people I loved before everyone scattered.

That sounds incredible now.

At the time, I couldn’t wait to leave. I hated the social dynamics. I hated the limited job market in a small college town. I was done with the party culture and the randomness of who you ended up living near. I was ready for something more adult.

What I didn’t realize was that the stuff I was escaping, the free time, the low stakes, the built-in community, was the good part. I was so focused on what I didn’t like that I couldn’t see what I was actually giving up. And then I got out here and started working 11 hours a day and realized I used to have so much time and I didn’t know it.

I’m not saying I made the wrong choice. I think I made the right choice for who I was at that time and what I needed. But I do wish I’d let myself appreciate college more while I was in it. I was always looking forward to the next thing, the same way I’m always looking forward to the next thing now. That pattern doesn’t go away just because your circumstances change.

If you’re still in college, please enjoy it. Actually enjoy it. The structure and the safety net and the friendships and the time, it’s a version of life that you don’t get back. Go to the thing. Say yes more. Study abroad if you can. Take the weird elective. Let yourself be in it before it’s over.

And if your parents are paying for it, I mean this genuinely, do not take that for granted for a single second. Go, work hard, get a part-time job, but go. I cannot imagine graduating with debt on top of everything else. The fact that I didn’t have that hanging over me is one of the biggest reasons I’ve been able to take risks and figure things out. Not everyone has that and it matters enormously.

Making Friends as an Adult Takes Longer Than You Think

I knew going into post-grad that making friends was going to be harder than in college. I’d even made podcast episodes about it, the clubs I was going to join, the events I was going to attend, the intentional efforts I was going to make. I felt prepared.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the time math.

There’s research suggesting it takes roughly 100 hours of time with someone to consider them a friend, 200 hours to be a good friend, and 300 hours to reach best friend territory. When you’re in college, those hours accumulate almost automatically, you’re in class together, you’re eating at the same dining hall, you’re at the same parties, you’re running into each other constantly. The proximity does the work for you.

When you’re working 11-hour days and trying to protect your sleep and your recovery time, you have maybe a few hours of social energy per week. I try to do one planned hangout per week. Sometimes I do more, but one is my sustainable baseline. That means the 100 hour friendships are going to take a while. And that’s ok but it’s just slower than I expected.

I’ve met a lot of people in Orange County over the years. I’ve been to events, I’ve introduced myself to strangers, I’ve asked people to get coffee. I know more people here now than I did a year ago. But most of them are still in the acquaintance getting to know you zone rather than the actual friends zone, and that’s just the reality of how this works at this age, in this life stage. It’s progress. It’s just slower progress than I was used to.

This Week’s Reader Question

I want to start doing a Q&A segment where I answer 1 question per substack, because I love being a resource for you and I think writing things out is so much more useful than a short text response. If you have anything you want my take on, health, post-grad life, relationships, social stuff, anything, DM me on here or Instagram.

This week’s question came from a 20 year old who has been dealing with a cluster of symptoms her doctors keep attributing to anxiety like severe neck pain, chronic fatigue, tingling in her legs, bloating, leaky gut, constipation, and intense hunger. She’s seen a functional doctor, done x-rays, MRIs, blood tests and keeps being told it’s all in her head.

I hear you. I know how infuriating and isolating it is to walk out of a doctor’s office feeling like your symptoms were dismissed. I’ve had that experience multiple times. And the hard truth about autoimmune and inflammatory conditions is that biomarkers often don’t show up on standard tests until the disease has progressed significantly which means millions of people are sitting on that teetering line of something developing, and nobody is helping them stop it before it gets worse.

I’m not a doctor and I want to be really clear about that. But here’s what I’d be thinking about if I were in your position:

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The problem is most women don’t know this is happening, so they can’t intentionally take advantage of it. And then it passes and they wonder why last week felt so much better than this week. Understanding your ovulatory phase is one of the most practically useful things you can do for your energy, your workouts, your social life, and your productivity, so let’s get into it.

I had a coworker during my internship come up to me at lunch and tell me she’d listened to my follicular phase episode and learned things about her own body that she’d never known, at 40 or 50 years old. We genuinely were not taught this stuff, and we should have been. So whether this is your first introduction to cycle syncing or your fifth, I’m glad you’re here.

What Is the Ovulatory Phase?

The ovulatory phase happens roughly around day 14 of your cycle, right in the middle, and it’s actually the shortest phase, lasting only about 24 to 48 hours for the actual ovulation event, though you’ll feel its effects for a few days on either side.

This is the phase when your body releases an egg. It’s the only window during your entire cycle when pregnancy is actually possible, which is wild to think about given how many unplanned pregnancies happen, the fertile window is quite small.

The key hormones at play here are estrogen and the luteinizing hormone (LH). Estrogen surges to its highest point of the month right before ovulation, which is largely responsible for the way you feel during this phase, confident, energized, social, clear-headed. LH is what actually triggers the release of the egg from the follicle. If you’ve ever used ovulation test strips (the ones that work like a pregnancy test), what they’re detecting is that LH surge.

Physical signs of ovulation include changes in cervical mucus, a subtle rise in basal body temperature, and sometimes mild pelvic discomfort on one side. My Oura Ring tracks my body temperature every night and flags the temperature shift, which is one of the ways I know I’ve entered or passed this phase without having to think too hard about it.

Why You Feel Like a Different Person This Week

The estrogen peak during your ovulatory phase directly influences your neurotransmitters, specifically serotonin and dopamine. This is why you feel more positive, more confident, more talkative, more interested in other people. It’s not in your head. Your brain chemistry is actually different this week.

Some specific things you might notice during your ovulatory phase: you want to be around people more than usual, you feel more comfortable in your body, conversations feel easier, you’re more likely to want to go out or make plans, and your libido is higher. All of this is your body’s way of maximizing the chance of reproduction, even if that’s not your intention, the hormonal drive is still there.

This is also one of the reasons video content, public speaking, social events, and anything that requires you to be “on” tends to feel easier and more natural during this window. If you’re a content creator, this is your batch content week. If you have a big presentation or a difficult conversation or a first date, the ovulatory phase is when you want to schedule it.

How to Eat During Your Ovulatory Phase

I want to be upfront that cycle syncing your nutrition doesn’t mean completely overhauling what you eat every week. It means layering in a few specific foods that support what your body is doing hormonally, on top of however you already eat. You’re not replacing your diet. You’re adding to it.

During the ovulatory phase, your estrogen is at its peak. The goal with nutrition during this window is to support your body’s ability to metabolize that estrogen efficiently rather than letting it accumulate, which can lead to symptoms like bloating and mood fluctuations. The foods that help with this are specifically ones that support liver function and estrogen clearance.

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I had different ideas.

I had this enormous vision of what high school was supposed to be. The movies, the TV shows, they sell you this idea that high school is the main event of your adolescence. Dances and sports and friend groups and the kind of memories you carry your whole life. I was texting my best friend on my little flip phone about how excited I was to be 16 and drive and finally be in high school. I had built it up so completely in my head that I think nothing could have fully lived up to it. But I was determined to try.

School #1

I ended up going to the small private school, the one my siblings went to. About 500 kids total, though roughly half of those were international students from Asia who mostly stayed in their own classes and social circles, so in reality I was going to school with maybe 250 people.

I actually loved my freshman year. I know that sounds like a contradiction given that I transferred, but I genuinely did. I was still a competitive gymnast at the time, so school was mostly just the thing I did between practices. I had friends from middle school already there. I was in honors classes, I went to all the dances, I had a good time. It was small and simple and honestly kind of perfect for what I needed as a freshman.

But then I quit gymnastics.

I’d been having back pain since 4th grade, and by freshman year it had gotten bad enough that quitting was the only real option. I did one final competition because I needed that, needed to finish on my own terms and then I was done. 10 years of my life, just over.

And suddenly high school mattered in a completely different way. I wasn’t going to school just to check a box while I lived my real life in the gym. I was actually there. I needed friends, social life, community. And the small pond I’d been a big fish in started feeling very, very small.

There were a few other things piling up. I had tested into French 2 based on my actual level, but because the school was so small there was only one French class and it didn’t fit my schedule so they put me in French 1. Sitting in a class I’d already passed, with a teacher who didn’t particularly like me, learning things I already knew. I was also on the track team, which I had picked up as a new sport, but we practiced on a dirt track and competed against other tiny private schools. I had a private coach who was working with me seriously, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to develop as an athlete in that environment.

I made a PowerPoint for my parents. Pros and cons, full presentation. I was always making PowerPoints for my parents when I wanted something. This one made the case for transferring to a big public school, free tuition, D1 track program, 4,000 students, top academic rankings. My parents, being religious, were worried about what public school would expose me to. They weren’t entirely wrong, as it turned out. But they let me go.

School #2:

Going from 250 kids to 4,000 was a genuine shock to my system. For the first time in my life, I walked into a school knowing exactly 1 person.

I had my eye on a specific friend group almost immediately. There was a guy in my French class who I liked, and he was part of the group I wanted to be part of, and I basically made getting into that orbit my social project for the year. Looking back I can see how transparent this probably was. At the time I just thought I was being friendly.

I also had a small problem. I didn’t actually live in that school’s district. My family had gone through some creative logistics to get me enrolled, which meant I had to maintain a cover story about my address for the entire time I was there. Every time I told someone where I lived I was technically lying. It added this low-level anxiety to every social interaction that I could never fully shake.

The guy from my French class and I started hanging out. He’d invite me to surf. I would have my dad drop me off nearby on his way somewhere and then wait, sometimes for hours outside a tattoo parlor near the beach because I had nowhere to go and didn’t want to admit I’d been dropped off. I looked completely homeless. Did I tell my dad I was waiting for a boy? No. Did this boy probably think I was a little too invested? Almost certainly yes.

It didn’t go anywhere. He told me he wasn’t ready for a relationship and then had a girlfriend a week later. Classic.

Meanwhile, public school was exactly what my parents had been worried about. Kids were vaping in French class, just tucked under their hoodies like that was a completely normal thing to do. I wanted to seem like I fit in. I vaped for about 2 months before I noticed it was destroying my skin and made an immediate cost-benefit analysis, my skin mattered more to me than my social reputation. I stopped.

By the end of sophomore year I was going to parties, I was drinking, I was experiencing things I definitely hadn’t been exposed to at my small private school. On the last day of school the whole grade went to the beach and I got drunk and smoked for the first time simultaneously, which is truly not the recommended introduction to either of those things.

But here’s what actually made me leave. I got religious. Genuinely, not performatively. I started going to church 4 times a week. I looked at the people I was spending time with and realized we didn’t share values anymore, maybe we never really had. I wanted to be around people who believed what I believed, who weren’t partying every weekend, who were thinking about their lives the way I was starting to think about mine.

I made another PowerPoint.

School #3:

My junior year, I transferred to a well-known private school in Orange County. It was bigger than my first school, around a thousand kids, had a real track program, good academics, and the kind of community I thought I was looking for.

The wealth was a culture shock I wasn’t prepared for. I’d grown up in private school surrounded by people with money, but this was different. This was Tesla as a first-car money. Cafeteria with In-N-Out and Chick-fil-A and a waffle maker. Girls during COVID making TikToks about their designer collections and foreign cars. I was driving my parents’ truck, working 3-4 days a week on top of school, probably the only person in my social circle with an actual job. I wasn’t embarrassed by it exactly, but I felt the gap constantly.

I also had a dress code again, which my very much does not like being told what to do personality handled poorly. I kept parking in the senior lot because there wasn’t a junior parking and I was not going to walk a mile to school every day. I got dress coded. I accumulated enough infractions that Saturday school became a real possibility, which I was also not going to attend.

I joined the surf team, which I genuinely loved. But because of my schedule, surf practice started at 5 or 6am and track occupied more time, I’d arranged to not come to school until after lunch for most of the semester. Which meant I was barely there. Which meant it was very hard to actually build relationships.

There was a friend group of girls who seemed to like me initially. They invited me to things, included me in the beginning. And then slowly, steadily, one of them started cutting me out. Walking past me on the sidewalk and not making space. Leaving without me when we were all supposed to go somewhere together. Not inviting me to parties. Standing close enough together at football games that there wasn’t quite room for me in the circle. It was never one big moment. It was a thousand small exclusions that accumulated into something unmistakable.

I still don’t know why she didn’t like me. To this day I genuinely don’t know. Maybe she wanted to be closer with the girl I’d bonded with. Maybe I’d done something I wasn’t aware of. Maybe she just decided. Whatever the reason, I was out.

At the same time, I was getting more and more pulled back toward the friend group from my public school years. We’d stayed in loose contact, and now they were actively telling me to come back. Transfer back. Come hang out with us. You belong here.

And there was a guy. There is always a guy in these stories. He invited me to winter formal. I said yes. I convinced my parents to let me transfer for a third time.

I didn’t even finish out the full year

Back to School #2:

I transferred back to the public school in the middle of junior year. And this time, somehow, it worked. I was in the friend group I’d wanted to be in from the beginning, the athletes, the fun ones, the people who had parties and invited everyone and made you feel like you’d finally arrived somewhere. It was genuinely one of the best stretches of my high school experience. The last semester of junior year, I was happy.

And then senior year started.

I had been talking to Max since junior year. We’d never met in person. I’d found him through the baseball team Instagram, followed him, and we’d just started talking but by senior year things were progressing. My best friend at the time decided she didn’t like this. I’m not sure exactly when it shifted or what specifically triggered it, but somewhere in there she decided she was done with me.

The first big moment was at a party. My heart condition, I have AFib, which means all 4 chambers of my heart can fire simultaneously, making it race dangerously fast, flared up. I left. I told people my heart was hurting because my heart was actually hurting. On the way home it settled down, Max texted and invited me over, and I went. My best friend saw my location, decided I’d lied about leaving, and that was the beginning of the end.

From there it unraveled fast. She screamed at me at a football game in front of everyone. I froze. I don’t do well with confrontation and I never have, and there was nothing in me that knew how to handle being publicly humiliated like that. I still went to lunch with the group for a while because I didn’t want to be alone, but then one day someone mentioned a group chat and I watched the realization move across someone’s face, oh, Shelby isn’t in this group chat. There was no old group chat. They’d created a new one. Without me.

I spent the rest of my senior year eating lunch in my car. Ditching school constantly because I couldn’t stand being there. Having classes with people who had been my friends and were now looking through me. I was planning my 4th transfer, back to the 2nd private school, which had a fully online program, when COVID shut everything down and made the decision irrelevant.

I found out freshman year of college when I ran into one of the girls from that group and she told me, my best friend had claimed I was trying to hook up with her boyfriend. She’d said she had screenshots. Everyone believed her. I had been dating Max. I wasn’t interested in anyone else. It was a complete lie.

I cried when I found out. Not just because of the lie but because of all the months I’d spent being devastated and confused about what I’d done wrong, when the answer was that I hadn’t done anything wrong. Someone had decided I was a threat and made something up, and everyone followed along without asking me. She is no longer apart of their friend group but neither am I. She exhaled us both.

College

I went to Cal Poly SLO. I got in despite the fact that I had basically stopped going to high school for significant stretches of time, which still surprises me. I arrived, ran into the girl from that friend group on essentially the first day, and being the person I am who always tries to reconnect, we became close again. We built an entire friend group together in college.

And then it happened again. Same dynamic. Same feeling of slowly realizing I was being excluded. Same confusion about why. Same waking up to the sounds of people hanging out next door and not being invited. The girl who’d spread the rumor in high school wasn’t the one who did it in college, but she was the one who had been the leader of that friend group, and I had walked directly back into her orbit.

I don’t know what happened in college. I genuinely still don’t know. I left mid-freshman year, went back to Orange County, got a job, came back for sophomore year with a completely clean slate and completely different social circle. Met better people. Found my footing. Graduated a year early.

What I’d Do Differently

If I’m honest, I transferred so much because I ran from things instead of staying to work through them. Every time something got hard, the wrong French class, a teacher who didn’t like me, a friend group that excluded me, my instinct was to leave rather than navigate. I didn’t have great models for conflict resolution. I didn’t know how to advocate for myself within a system. I just looked for the exit.

I don’t think transferring once would have been a mistake. The move from the tiny private school to the big public school made sense, I needed more room, more people, more opportunity. But I should have stayed longer in each place. I should have given things more time to develop. I kept leaving right before things might have settled.

The friend group drama in high school was real and the hurt was real, but I think I also spent so much energy trying to get into the right group that I didn’t invest enough in the people who were already choosing me. I was always looking sideways at whoever seemed like the cool ones instead of going deeper with the people right in front of me.

And the college situation, walking back into the same dynamic with the same people from high school, that was the one I most clearly should have seen coming. You can’t undo history by pretending it didn’t happen. You can forgive people and still recognize that the pattern is the pattern.

If You’re In It Right Now

If you’re in high school and hating it, I want you to know that I genuinely understand that specific misery. The feeling of eating lunch alone or in your car. The confusion of not knowing what you did wrong. The way a friend group can make you feel completely invisible while standing right next to them.

It gets so much better. Not because the people get better necessarily, but because you get more agency. You get to choose your environment. You meet people who are looking for the same things you are. You figure out who you actually are when you’re not spending all your energy trying to fit somewhere you don’t belong.

And if you’re thinking about transferring: one transfer for the right reason can be a good call. Transferring every year chasing something better is usually just chasing. The issues tend to follow you because sometimes the issues are about the patterns you’re in, not the place you’re at.

I wish someone had told me that at 15. I’m telling you now.

When Friendships Were Simple

I’ve had friends since 3rd grade. I’ve also had more friendship breakups than I can count. And I think the reason the losses hit so hard is because I remember what it felt like before any of that complexity existed.

When you’re a little kid, friendship is the purest thing. You don’t care what someone’s parents do for a living. You don’t care about their aesthetic or their follower count or whether they’re in the right social circle. You like each other and so you’re friends. That’s it. My best friend Brooke and I met in 3rd grade at a small private school, and we spent our elementary school years coordinating outfits, wearing matching hair bows she brought for everyone, having sleepovers, and pulling elaborate pranks on the boys in our friend group that I will not fully detail here but involved a lot of anonymous love letters. We thought we were so clever. We thought we ran everything. Looking back we were just little kids being kids, and it was genuinely one of the most wholesome periods of my life.

I was also a competitive gymnast through most of my childhood, and those friendships were their own category entirely. There’s a bond that forms when you’re doing something physically and mentally brutal with the same group of people every single day. You’re crying together, you’re scared together, you’re pushing through conditioning that most people couldn’t imagine. You make goals together. You fail together. You can’t replicate that bond with school friends because school friends don’t see you in those moments. My gymnastics friends knew me in a way that was completely different from everyone else, and even though we’ve all grown up and gone separate directions, I still feel that connection when I think about them.

The thing about childhood friendships is that they’re formed before you’ve developed any kind of self-protective instinct. You’re just open. You haven’t been hurt enough yet to have walls. And I think part of what makes adult friendship feel so much harder is that most of us are carrying years of accumulated hurt and disappointment that we bring into every new connection whether we mean to or not.

Peak Social Drama and Also Peak Fun

I peaked in middle school. Not literally (lmao) but middle school was genuinely one of the most socially active, chaotic, fun periods of my life. I met my friend Carrie in 7th grade and we became immediately inseparable. We bonded over our family dynamics, over sports, over the weird shared experiences of being in a small private school where everyone knew everyone.

And then there was FAM. I cannot stop laughing at some of this.

Fam was the friend group that formed in the least organic way possible but somehow became the most defining social structure of our middle school years. Basically a few of us were on the messenger app Kik, this was the era before everyone had a phone, so Kik on an iPod was the social currency and we just added every girl in our grade who had the app into a group chat. Named it Fam. And somehow that random group chat became our actual friend group. We had a designated lunch table. We went on the DC trip together. We thought we were the coolest people to ever walk those halls, which, again, we were not, we were just middle schoolers but it felt real and it felt fun and I’m so glad I had it.

And then the last week of school before high school, 2 of the girls in our group were walked out of science class in handcuffs. I’m not going to share details because it’s not my story to tell, but it involved serious criminal charges and it effectively dissolved the friend group overnight. Just like that, Fam was over. That was my first real experience of a friendship group ending, and even though it had nothing to do with me personally, it taught me something about how fragile these social structures can be, how something that feels permanent and solid can just disappear.

Friendship Breakups Are Their Own Kind of Grief

I’ve never had a romantic breakup. I’ve been with Max for years and we’ve navigated the normal challenges of a relationship but never broken up. But I have had more friendship breakups than I can count, and they are devastating in a way that I don’t think gets enough acknowledgment.

There’s a specific kind of hurt that comes from losing a friend that’s different from losing a romantic partner. With a romantic relationship, there’s at least a cultural script, you know what a breakup is, you know how to grieve it, people understand why you’re sad. With a friendship, especially one that ends quietly rather than in a dramatic falling out, there’s often no script at all. People don’t quite understand why you’re still upset about it years later. There’s no closure ritual. There’s just absence where connection used to be.

The friendship breakups that have stayed with me the most are the quiet ones. The ones where I realized, over weeks or months, that I was always the one reaching out first. Always the one initiating. And at some point I stopped, just to see what would happen. And nothing happened. The silence was deafening. No fight or drama. It happened to me in sophomore year of high school, again in senior year, again freshman year of college. Each time I was left with this unresolved question of why, and the not-knowing has honestly been harder than the loss itself.

I’ve thought about reaching out for closure. Sometimes I still think about it. But I’ve come to accept that I might never get that answer, and I’ve had to find a way to be ok with that. The phrase I keep coming back to is: choose people who choose you. It sounds simple. It’s actually one of the hardest things to practice when you love someone and they just don’t love you back the same way.

I was also exiled from a friend group in high school based on something someone said about me that wasn’t true. Found out years later, in college, when one of the girls from that group reached out to apologize and explained what had actually happened. A lie had been told, nobody verified it, and I lost a friend group I genuinely loved being part of. I still don’t fully understand how people can do that to someone. I don’t understand the group mentality that lets everyone just follow along without questioning. But I’ve had to make peace with it, because the alternative is carrying anger about something I can’t change.

What I’ve Learned About Friendship Breakups

If you’re in the middle of one right now, here’s what I wish someone had told me:

You might never know why. And as much as that hurts, learning to move forward without the closure is a skill worth developing. Some people won’t give you the explanation you deserve. That’s a reflection of them, not of your worth.

Don’t talk badly about them to mutual friends. This is one of the things I feel most strongly about. Your experience with someone is not someone else’s experience with them. Taking drama into shared friend groups almost always makes things worse and rarely makes you feel better for long. Find someone completely removed from the situation to vent to, someone who’s never met them, who has no stake in it. Get it out there. Then let it stay there.

Go no contact and actually mean it. Don’t stalk their Instagram. Don’t follow them on a burner account. Don’t check their stories to see if they’re having fun without you. Remove them from your aura as completely as you can, at least for a while. You cannot heal from something you keep reopening.

Spend time with people who want to spend time with you. It’s almost embarrassingly obvious advice but it helps. When you’re grieving the loss of a friendship, the instinct is often to fixate on the person who left. The antidote is to pour that energy into the people who stayed.

Know that it probably wasn’t all your fault. Friendship breakups, like romantic breakups, are almost never entirely one person’s fault. There are usually 2 people with different attachment styles, different expectations, different communication skills, and different capacities for what they can give and receive. That doesn’t mean nobody did anything wrong. It just means the full picture is usually more complicated than any single narrative.

Something I came across recently stopped me in my tracks. The idea that some people have fewer friendship breakups not because they’ve been lucky, but because they’re more selective from the start. They notice the early red flags and simply don’t pursue it further, before there’s history, before there’s attachment, before there’s anything to lose. And in doing that, they protect themselves from a lot of the hurt that comes later.

I’ve been sitting with that. Because I’ve always told myself I had more friendship breakups than average because I just met more people than average, different schools, different sports, church, gymnastics, college in a different city. I’m friendly. I’m easy to talk to. I give people the benefit of the doubt. And I genuinely think all of that is true.

But I also think there’s a character flaw woven into it that I’m only now naming: I’m not picky enough at the beginning. I’m not bad at reading people. I usually sense something is off pretty early. I just ignore it and let things play out anyway. I let the friendship develop past the point where it would have been easy to simply not pursue it, and then I’m surprised when the thing I sensed at the start eventually becomes the thing that ends it.

Being selective isn’t the same as being closed off or cold. It’s just being honest with yourself about what you’re noticing and trusting that instinct before you’re already in too deep to leave without it hurting.

That’s the thing I’m working on now.

One of the most important things I’ve learned about being a good friend and this came from years of doing it wrong is that my job is to listen, not to fix.

I had a close friendship that went through several cycles of breaking up and reconnecting, and a recurring theme was me getting frustrated when she didn’t take my advice. I’d hear the same problems over and over, offer what I genuinely thought was good counsel, watch her do the opposite, and then we’d be back at the beginning again. At some point I got so tired of it that I pulled away, and that created its own set of problems.

What I’ve come to understand is that people don’t change until they’re ready. Not when their friends are ready. Not when the advice is objectively correct. When they are ready. And my job as a friend is not to drag someone toward a decision they haven’t made yet, it’s to be a consistent, non-judgmental presence so that when they do get there, they have someone in their corner. If I push too hard, I don’t speed up the process. I just make them feel judged and they stop coming to me. And then I’ve lost both the friendship and any influence I might have had.

Attachment Styles in Friendships

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and I don’t think we talk about it enough in the context of platonic relationships. Attachment styles are the patterns of connection and security we develop based on early relationships, they don’t just apply to romantic partnerships. They show up in friendships too.

I’m a disorganized attachment style, which means I oscillate between anxious and avoidant depending on the relationship and the context. In some friendships I can get anxious and clingy. In others I become avoidant and distant. It’s inconsistent, which is confusing for people who care about me.

A recent significant friendship involved me pairing with someone who was anxiously attached in our dynamic, while I was avoidant. If you look up that combination it’s genuinely one of the hardest pairings, the anxious person pursues more intensely, the avoidant person withdraws more, which makes the anxious person pursue even harder, which makes the avoidant person feel even more suffocated. It becomes a cycle that’s very hard to break without explicit communication and a lot of self-awareness from both sides.

I didn’t have the language for that while it was happening. I just knew that I felt like I was constantly failing, like I could never be enough for that friendship, like the bar was always moving. And I’m sure from her side it felt like I was always pulling away, always unavailable, always holding something back. We were probably both right. We were also probably just incompatible in ways that had nothing to do with either of us being bad people or bad friends.

The Case for Low-Maintenance Friendships

I am an ambivert. I can be social and I genuinely love connecting with people, but I also need significant amounts of alone time to function. I have a long-distance relationship that requires a lot of emotional investment. I’m building a career and a creative life simultaneously. I’m working on my health, my home, my sense of self. I simply do not have the capacity to be someone’s everything.

And once I accepted that about myself, my friendships got so much healthier.

Low-maintenance friendship is built on a specific kind of security. The kind where you both know you’re still friends even when weeks go by without contact. Where you can pick up the phone after a month of silence and fall right back in. Where neither person is keeping score of who texted first or who made the last plan. Where the connection doesn’t require constant maintenance to stay alive.

My longest friendships are like this now. Brooke and I might go months without really talking, but I know without question that if I called her today she’d answer. Carrie and I have been through 3 complete cycles of friendship, breakup, and reconciliation, and the version of our friendship that exists now is the best it’s ever been, partly because we’ve both grown enough to communicate better, and partly because we’ve stopped expecting the other person to be available in ways that were never realistic.

I think one of the biggest traps in friendship is expecting one person to fill every role. Your best friend, your therapist, your emergency contact, your person for the hard 2am calls and the Tuesday afternoon coffee and the group trip to Europe. That’s a lot to put on one human. The friendships that have relieved me most are the ones where I stopped needing them to be everything and just let them be what they naturally were

Making Friends as an Adult Is Hard

I moved to Orange County 3 years ago and I’ve been actively, intentionally trying to build community here. I’ve gone to a Pilates event. I’ve started a book club. I’ve gone to an Orange Theory class specifically to meet people. I’ve introduced myself to strangers and asked if they wanted to get coffee. And it’s working, slowly, awkwardly, imperfectly, but working.

What I’ve noticed is that most people in Orange County are in their late 20s and there’s a moment when I tell people I’m 23 and I watch them recalibrate slightly. Like oh, she’s younger than I thought. And I understand why it gives them pause, because 23 and 27 can mean very different life stages. But what I’ve also found is that when people actually spend time with me, the age thing stops mattering. We’re on similar wavelengths. We’re interested in similar things. We’re at similar points in how we’re thinking about careers and relationships and who we want to become.

Age is just one data point. Values, communication style, where you are in your own journey, those things matter so much more in terms of whether a friendship is going to work.

Having friends near you is genuinely important in a way that long-distance friendships can’t fully replace. Long-distance friendships are real and valuable and I have several that mean the world to me. But there’s something irreplaceable about a friend who can just come over. Who you can text at 6pm and say I need to get out of my apartment and they say I’ll be there in 10 minutes. That kind of spontaneous, low-friction connection is what builds real intimacy over time, and you can’t manufacture it across a 400-mile distance no matter how many FaceTime calls you make.

So if you’ve moved somewhere new, or you’ve been in a place for a while but haven’t really built community there, I want to encourage you to do what feels awkward and keep doing it. Go to the event. Take the class. Introduce yourself. Ask for the coffee date. Most adults are secretly also lonely and also wanting new connections and also not quite sure how to make them. You’re usually not the only one who wants a friend

I am not naturally good at conflict resolution. I grew up in an environment where the response to conflict was often just to cut people off, and I carried that into my adult relationships for a long time. I’ve gotten better at it. I’ve also made mistakes that I would handle completely differently now, responses that were more reactive than thoughtful, exits that were more dramatic than necessary.

The thing I keep coming back to is that long-term friendships require conflict resolution. You cannot maintain a deep friendship across years and life stages without navigating disagreements and misunderstandings and periods where one person needs more than the other can give. The friends I’ve had the longest are the ones where we’ve been able to say the uncomfortable thing and come back from it. That skill, staying in the discomfort long enough to actually work through something is one I’m actively trying to build.

I’ve also been working on opening up more. This is probably my biggest personal challenge in friendships. I genuinely have close friends who know me mostly through what I post on social media, not through what I actually share with them. And some of the friendship losses I’ve experienced were at least partly because I was going through something hard and instead of letting the people who cared about me in, I went quiet. They experienced it as me pulling away. I was just trying to protect myself.

I lost a friendship a couple years ago partly because of this. They thought I was shutting them out. I was just drowning privately and didn’t feel safe enough yet to share it. There was no easy solution to that, we were just at different places in terms of what we could give and receive from each other. But it made me want to practice being more open with the people I trust, even when it’s uncomfortable. Even when the vulnerability hangover feels awful the next day. Because the cost of staying closed is that people can’t actually know you. And that’s a different kind of loneliness.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after all of it, the childhood friendships and the gymnastics team and FAM and the breakups and the girls who chose me and the ones who didn’t:

Friendships are supposed to evolve. The ones that last aren’t the ones that never change, they’re the ones where both people are willing to change together, to give each other room to grow into different versions of themselves, to hold the relationship loosely enough that it can shift without breaking.

Not everyone is meant to stay. Some people are in your life for a season and then they’re not, and that’s not always a failure. Sometimes it’s just the natural shape of 2 lives moving in different directions.

And the people who do stay, who know you across multiple chapters, who’ve seen you at your worst and chosen you anyway, who you can call after months of silence and have it feel like no time has passed, those people are among the greatest gifts your life will contain.

I don’t take them for granted. I’m trying harder every year to tell them that.

I’ve been into health and wellness basically my whole life. like I was that kid who told people their food wasn’t organic (I’m sorry, I didn’t know that was weird). I grew up in this really blended cultural household, my mom’s an immigrant, my dad’s first-gen so I never really had the traditional american diet ingrained in me. I think that set me up so differently. and now I got my health coaching certification so I’m not just pulling this out of thin air, I actually have some knowledge behind what I’m saying.

but more than any of that, I’ve spent a long time learning what actually works vs. what sounds good on a wellness instagram account. and those are two VERY different things.

I broke this into steps because I think that’s the only way it makes sense. you might be at step 1, you might already be at step 3. start where you are, not where you think you should be.

the word of this summer: simplify

before I even get into the steps, there is SO much noise in the wellness space. 5 morning routine hacks, 10 supplements you NEED, this test you have to get, that ingredient to avoid. it’s so overwhelming and I think it’s doing more harm than good, especially for people who are just starting out.

if you’ve never eaten a vegetable in your life and someone tells you to go get your gut microbiome tested... you’re going to close the tab and eat a hot pocket. and fair.

the word for this summer is simplify. strip it back. focus on the basics. that’s it.

nutrition

step 1: crowding out

this is something I learned in school and it changed how I think about food. instead of focusing on everything you shouldn’t eat, you focus on adding more good stuff in. that’s it. that’s the whole concept.

so instead of me saying don’t eat the sugary cereal, I’m saying, eat your cereal, but maybe have some cucumber on the side. or an apple. you’re not restricting, you’re just... adding. and what happens over time is that the more good stuff you add in, the less you crave the other stuff. your body starts to actually want the things that make it feel good. wild concept I know.

I went through a period where a doctor basically told me all I could eat was chicken and rice because of an elimination diet and I lost it. when you take everything away from someone they have nothing to work with. crowding out is the opposite of that.

colorful fruits and veggies are your best friend here, every color represents a different set of vitamins and minerals. I realized when I was in school that I almost never eat blue or purple foods. like... blueberries & grapes.

also drink more water. I know that sounds so basic but so many people are just walking around chronically dehydrated and wondering why they feel like that. start with half your body weight in ounces. get a water bottle you actually love, one with a straw if that helps (it helps me so much, I drink way more water with a straw idk why). keep one in your car, at your desk, by your bed. if you hate the taste, add lemon, berries, or even a tiny pinch of salt, it helps you absorb the water better instead of running straight to the bathroom every 5 minutes.

step 2: eat before your caffeine & cook at home more

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This is the one I wish someone had told me when I was younger, because I spent a lot of my childhood telling people what I wanted to be and then letting their reactions talk me out of it. I wanted to be a surgeon. I wanted to go into law. I was fascinated by detective work. And every single time I mentioned it to someone, there was a reason it wouldn’t work. And because I was young and hadn’t built up enough belief in myself yet, I just absorbed what they said and quietly let the dream go.

I’m not bitter about it. I genuinely believe I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. But I do think about how many things I didn’t pursue because I shared them before I was ready to defend them.

Moving in silence doesn’t mean being secretive or mysterious. It means protecting your goals during the vulnerable early stage when they’re still just seeds. Before you’ve made any real progress, before you have evidence that it’s working, your idea is fragile. It can be killed by one dismissive comment from someone who doesn’t understand your vision. It can be deflated by a well-meaning person who just wants to be realistic with you. It can be diluted by telling so many people that you feel like you’ve already done something when you’ve actually done nothing yet.

There’s also a psychological element to this that I find really interesting. Research suggests that when you tell people about a goal, your brain gets a small hit of satisfaction from the social acknowledgment, almost as if you’ve already achieved it. That hit can actually reduce your motivation to follow through because part of your brain thinks the work is done. Telling fewer people means your drive stays intact.

The caveat: there’s a difference between moving in silence and isolation. Your closest, most trusted people, the ones who will hold you accountable without judgment are worth looping in. It’s the general audience you want to protect your goals from. Let your actions be the announcement. There’s nothing more powerful than a before and after that nobody saw coming.

2. Take Care of Your Mind, Body & Soul

We talk a lot about physical health. Eat well, move your body, stay hydrated. And that stuff matters enormously. But I think the reason so many people still feel off even when they’re doing all the physical things right is because they’re neglecting the other 2/3 of the equation.

Your mind needs nourishment just as much as your body does. That means actively engaging it with reading, learning, challenging yourself intellectually, doing things that require real focus and thought. Your brain is a muscle. It atrophies when it’s not used, and it thrives when it’s challenged. There’s also real evidence that keeping your mind active throughout your life significantly reduces your risk of cognitive decline as you age so this isn’t just about feeling sharp now, but protecting yourself for the long run.

Your soul and I know that word makes some people uncomfortable, so substitute inner self or sense of purpose if that lands better, also needs tending. This is the part of you that needs to feel connected, grounded, and aligned with something bigger than your to-do list. For me it’s the ocean. Standing near the water, hearing the waves, feeling small in the best possible way. It might look different for you. Maybe it’s time in nature, time in community, creative expression, spiritual practice, volunteering, or just sitting in quiet for a few minutes at the end of the day with nothing to consume and nowhere to be.

When all 3 of these are reasonably in balance, life just feels more navigable. You have more capacity to handle hard things, more genuine enjoyment of good things, and more clarity about what actually matters. When one is significantly out of balance, it pulls the others down with it. Take the holistic view.

3. Be Picky About Who You Let Around You

This one sounds harsh but it’s actually one of the most loving things you can do for yourself.

You are genuinely shaped by the people you spend the most time with. Their habits, their mindsets, their energy, it all transfers. When I used to spend time with people who loved to shop and were always talking about the newest thing or what was on their wish list, my spending went up dramatically. When I stopped spending as much time in that environment, my non-essential spending dropped just as significantly. I didn’t change my values around money just my environment changed, and my behavior followed.

This applies to every area of your life. Spend a lot of time around people who complain constantly and you’ll start noticing more things to complain about. Spend time around people who are excited about their lives and working toward things and you’ll feel that energy pulling you forward too.

A few things I’ve learned about friendships specifically is not every friend has to be every type of friend. You can have a friend you call when you want to go deep on something emotional, and a different friend you call when you want to laugh and not think about anything heavy, and a different friend you talk business and finances with. Those are all valid friendships even if they serve different purposes. What matters in each of them is do they make you feel good? Do they genuinely root for you? Are they kind?

The friendships worth reconsidering are the ones where you notice a flatness or even a negativity when you share good news. Where you can feel that they’re not quite happy for you, even if they’d never say it directly. That’s not malicious most of the time, it usually just means they’re struggling with their own comparison and it’s coming out sideways. But it’s still worth paying attention to.

You don’t have to make dramatic exits from every friendship that doesn’t perfectly serve you. But you can be intentional about who gets your energy, your time, and your most vulnerable moments. The right people will make you feel seen, supported, and safe. Protect access to that version of yourself.

4. Work Toward a Goal

I’ve made this mistake myself. At the start of last year I set a goal to read 36 books, 3 books a month which felt reasonable given that I’d read almost 30 the year before on a particularly motivated streak. I didn’t hit 36. I still read a lot of books and got really far. But I’d set the goal just slightly beyond what was genuinely sustainable, which meant I was always running a little behind, which made the whole thing feel like failure even when it was actually progress.

The way I’ve learned to think about goal setting now is to ask: what’s the smallest version of this that I could actually be consistent with? Not the version that sounds impressive. The version that I’d actually do on a Tuesday when I’m tired and unmotivated.

Because consistency over time beats intensity every single time. If you go from no exercise to 2 hours of intense training every day, you’ll burn out within a week. If you commit to 20 minutes of movement a day and actually do it, the compound effect over a year is enormous. That’s how I built my workout habit. I started with 30 minutes, any form of movement. Once that felt automatic I added time. Once that felt automatic I added intensity. You build the habit first. You build the capacity 2nd.

The same principle applies to morning routines, nutrition changes, creative projects, financial goals. Any area of your life you want to improve. Don’t try to do everything at once. Pick the 1 thing that would make the most difference and do that 1 thing consistently until it’s part of who you are. Then add the next thing.

5. Decide Your Boundaries

Here’s the thing about boundaries that took me a long time to understand: having them isn’t enough. You have to enforce them. And enforcing them is actually the hard part.

I remember being in therapy talking about a friendship that was draining me, asking what new boundaries I could put in place. And my therapist said: Shelby, you already have boundaries. You just don’t enforce them. Every time she crossed a line I’d say to myself it’s fine this time and let it go. And then the next time. And the next time. The boundary existed in my head but nowhere in reality.

What I learned from that is that a boundary you don’t enforce is just a thought. It has no power. The only person responsible for upholding your boundaries is you, not the other person, not your therapist, not your friends who are watching from the sidelines. You.

When you actually start enforcing your limits, things shift. Some people respect it and the relationship gets healthier. Some people don’t, and you learn something important about that relationship. I won’t pretend it’s comfortable. I lost some friendships in the process of finally holding my ground. But I look back on every single one of them and think the same thing: why didn’t I do this sooner? Because every month I didn’t was another month of giving my energy to something that wasn’t giving it back.

Start small if the idea feels overwhelming. You don’t have to overhaul every relationship at once. Pick one boundary in one area of your life and practice holding it. Then practice it again. The muscle gets stronger with use.

6. Let Your Actions Do the Talking

This one is connected to the move in silence principle but it’s also its own thing. It’s about the gap between what we say we’re going to do and what we actually do and how easy it is to live in that gap indefinitely.

Talking about your goals feels productive. Posting about your goals, telling your friends about your goals, making vision boards about your goals. All of it creates a sense of forward motion that can be mistaken for actual progress. But the only thing that actually moves you toward the thing you want is doing the thing.

I think about this with the podcast a lot. I wanted to start one for 3 years before I actually started. 3 years of thinking about it, talking about it, telling people I was going to do it. And the thing that finally changed wasn’t a plan or a strategy, it was just starting. Recording a bad 1st episode and posting it anyway. You genuinely cannot optimize something that doesn’t exist yet. The doing has to come before the refining.

So whatever you’ve been talking about wanting to do, the project, the career change, the creative thing, the health goal, the most important next step isn’t to plan more or prepare more. It’s to take one concrete action toward it today. Not a big one necessarily. Just a real one.

7. Stay Focused on What’s in Front of You Right Now

I am someone who lives in the future. Always have been. In middle school I couldn’t wait to drive. In high school I couldn’t wait for college. In college I couldn’t wait to graduate. Now I’m post-grad and I notice myself already looking ahead to the next milestone instead of actually being in the one I spent years looking forward to.

The present moment is the only place your life is actually happening. The future exists only as a projection in your mind. The past exists only as a memory. Right now, this exact moment, is the only thing that’s real and the more of it you spend mentally somewhere else, the more of your actual life you miss.

I had an unexpected lesson in this recently when I didn’t have my phone for almost 2 weeks. Walking Miso with no music, no podcasts, nothing to scroll or consume. Just the walk. The moon. The sounds of the neighborhood. It forced me into the present in a way I don’t usually allow myself to be. And I noticed things I’d been walking past without seeing. I had thoughts I hadn’t had room for. I felt something close to peaceful in a way that’s harder to access when I’m always plugged in.

Boredom is actually good for you. Your brain needs unstructured, un-stimulated time to process, to create, to rest. We’ve engineered boredom almost completely out of modern life and I think we’re worse for it. Let yourself be bored sometimes. Put the phone down, don’t put anything on, just exist for a few minutes. It feels strange at first. It gets better.

8. Figure Out What You’re Actually Good At

This sounds obvious but most of us spend more time trying to fix our weaknesses than we do developing our strengths and I think that’s backwards.

There’s a school of thought in psychology that says the highest returns on personal development come from doubling down on what you’re already naturally good at rather than grinding away at what doesn’t come naturally. A D student spending years trying to get a B in math might get there eventually, but a student with a natural gift for communication who focuses on developing that skill could become genuinely exceptional at it in the same amount of time.

I want you to write down 3 things you’re genuinely good at, skills, traits, natural tendencies. Not things you wish you were good at. Things that actually come easily to you, that other people notice, that you lose track of time doing. Then ask yourself: how could I use these more intentionally? Is there a way to build my goals, my work, or my creative life around these things rather than fighting against my nature?

This is one of the things I’m most certain about when it comes to my own path. I’m good at talking. I’m good at connecting with people. I’m good at taking complex wellness topics and making them feel accessible and personal. So I make a podcast. It doesn’t feel like pushing a boulder uphill because I’m working with my nature instead of against it. That’s the sweet spot you’re looking for.

9. Tell Yourself Better Things

I am genuinely terrible at this and I know it. I speak to myself in a way I would never speak to someone I love, and I think a lot of people reading this are the same.

Positive affirmations get a lot of eye rolls and I understand why. They can feel performative or hollow, especially when you don’t believe the thing you’re saying yet. But that’s actually the point. You’re not affirming what’s already true. You’re planting seeds for what you’re becoming. You’re training your brain to look for evidence of the positive instead of defaulting to the negative.

A trick my sister taught me: any time someone, including yourself says something unkind about you, make them follow it with 3 positive things. 3 good things to outweigh the 1 bad. I’ve tried to do this with myself when I catch the inner critic getting loud. Instead of just shutting down the negative thought, I counter it with 3 specific positive ones. It feels awkward at first. It starts to feel more natural with time.

Some of the affirmations I come back to: I am good enough as I am right now. I am intelligent. I am capable of figuring things out. My body is doing its best for me. I deserve good things not because I’ve earned them but because I exist. You can borrow any of those or find the ones that resonate most with where you are right now.

The goal isn’t toxic positivity, it’s not pretending everything is fine when it isn’t, or bypassing real emotions with cheerful statements. It’s choosing to also tell yourself the true good things about yourself, regularly and deliberately, until they become the dominant story.

Be excited about who you’re becoming. Appreciate where you are right now. And know that there’s so much good ahead of you, even if you can’t see it yet.

What Burnout Actually Is

I think a lot of people hear the word burnout and picture someone completely falling apart, quitting their job, not getting out of bed. But most burnout doesn’t look like that. Most burnout looks like a headache that’s been there all day. Like being inexplicably exhausted at noon even though you slept. Like your to-do list looking the same as it always has but suddenly feeling completely impossible. Like being around people you love and not having the energy to actually be present with them.

Burnout is a state of chronic physical and emotional exhaustion. The physical signs are things like persistent fatigue, headaches, disrupted sleep, getting sick more than usual. The emotional signs are subtler, feeling detached, not finishing things you started, dreading things you normally enjoy, withdrawing from relationships even when you don’t want to. That last one has been big for me lately. I genuinely want to be a good friend, a good partner, a present and engaged person and I just don’t have the reserves for it right now.

What I’ve realized is that burnout almost never comes from one thing. It comes from the accumulation of everything. For me is working full time, trying to build a social life, taking care of Miso, managing my health, staying on top of social media, cooking from scratch because I care about what I put in my body, and keeping my apartment clean enough that my brain can function. Individually, none of these things are overwhelming. Together, all at once, with no real breaks built in, that’s how you end up sleeping 13 hours on a Saturday and still feeling like you need more.

What Actually Causes My Burnout

Before I get into what I do to recover, I want to name the real sources because I think recognizing them is half the battle.

Work and money stress. I’ve worked since I was 14 or 15. I’ve always had multiple jobs, always chased more hours, always been someone who ties a lot of my sense of security to my income. Right now I’m at the warehouse, making enough to get by, but not making enough to feel okay and I know logically I’m fine, I have savings, I can manage. But the anxiety around money that I developed growing up with less doesn’t respond to logic. It just hums underneath everything. And simultaneously I’m trying to build something with social media that I believe in deeply but that isn’t paying me consistently yet, and I can feel the pull between practical stability and the thing I actually want to be doing with my life. That tension is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain.

Time scarcity. I did the math once. There are 168 hours in a week. Sleep takes roughly 49. A 40-hour work week leaves 79. Working out daily takes another 7. Cooking, cleaning, walking Miso, social media, by the time you account for all of it, the hours disappear fast. And when you’re someone who genuinely cares about doing all of those things well, not having enough time to do them well is its own source of stress.

My health journey. I say this as someone who is passionate about holistic health and navigating hormone imbalances, gut issues, and joint pain is exhausting. Not just physically, but emotionally. I’m a years into trying to figure out why my period runs over 40 days, why my energy is chronically low, why certain things that should be better aren’t better yet. Our bodies are so bio-individual that what works for someone else might not work for me at all, and that means a lot of trial and error, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of money spent on things that may or may not make a difference. Sometimes I just want someone to tell me exactly what’s wrong so I can fix it. The not-knowing is its own kind of burden.

Connection. I moved to Orange County post-grad expecting to build a solid friend group and underestimating how hard that actually is. Most of my close friends are long distance now. I’m going to a girls’ walk club, I’m inviting people from TikTok to hang out, I’m reaching out but when you’re already running low on energy, putting effort into building something new is hard.

What I Actually Do to Reset

These are not revolutionary. They’re not a 30-step protocol. They’re just the things that actually help me come back to myself when I’ve run out of steam.

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1. Taking a Break Does Not Mean You’re Lazy

This one has been genuinely hard for me to internalize. There’s a part of me that loves to do nothing, to lay on the couch, watch Netflix, let the day be slow. And then there’s another part of me that immediately starts the internal monologue about my to-do list and how I’m wasting time and what I should be doing instead. It’s like having an angel and a devil on your shoulders simultaneously, which is exhausting in its own right.

Something I learned in my health coaching program completely changed the way I think about rest. There are 2 kinds of rhythms your body runs on. The 1st is your circadian rhythm, the internal 24-hour clock that follows the rotation of the earth, governing your sleep and wake cycles. The 2nd is something called the ultradian rhythm, which most people have never heard of but which affects literally every hour of your day. Your ultradian rhythm operates in 80 to 120 minute cycles throughout the day and night, and at the end of each cycle, your body needs approximately 20 minutes of rest to reset.

The signals your body sends when you’ve hit the end of an ultradian cycle are things most of us have been trained to push through: fatigue, brain fog, difficulty concentrating, hunger, needing the bathroom, fidgeting, suddenly finding everyone around you incredibly annoying. We’ve all been there. And most of us respond to those signals by telling our bodies not right now and pressing on.

Here’s what actually happens when you do that: your productivity doesn’t just plateau, it actively declines. Your body starts making micro-repairs to cells and tissue during those rest windows, restoring your energy, hormones, and blood sugar balance. When you skip the window, those repairs don’t happen. You accumulate inflammation. You make more mistakes. You get sick more easily. The thing that feels like powering through is actually working against you.

The practical version of this is simple: set a timer for 90 minutes when you start working, and when it goes off, actually stop for 10 - 20 minutes. Walk around the block. Make a coffee. Go outside. You’ll come back sharper than if you’d kept grinding. Everything in nature operates in waves and cycles like the ocean, the seasons, the sun. We are not designed to be machines running at constant output. Rest is built into our biology. Honoring it isn’t laziness. It’s how you actually sustain yourself

2. Growth Can Still Be Found in Stillness

We live in a world that rewards constant motion. There’s always something to consume, somewhere to be, something to produce. Going out of your way to be still and quiet feels almost countercultural at this point because it is. You have to actively choose it against the pull of every notification and every platform designed to keep you stimulated.

Stillness creates space for reflection. It lets you ask yourself where you actually want to go, what your goals really are, whether the path you’re on is the one you chose or the one that just happened to you. It allows creativity to surface in a way it can’t when you’re constantly in consumption mode. Some of my best ideas for this substack have come on walks with no music, or in the few minutes before I fall asleep when I’ve finally stopped doing.

It’s a practice, not a personality trait. It doesn’t come naturally to most of us. But creating even small intentional pockets of quiet in your day with your phone down, no podcast, no TV is one of the most underrated things you can do for your own development.

3. What Other People Think of Me Is Not My Business

This is the hardest one on the list for me, and I’ll be honest that I’m very much still learning it.

I grew up caring a lot about what people thought. A lot of my choices including graduating early from college were motivated at least in part by wanting to prove something to people who doubted me. And the humbling truth is that most of those people weren’t even thinking about me. Everyone is so consumed by their own lives, their own worries, their own social presence. The mental real estate I was giving to imagining what other people thought of me was not being returned.

Something I read in 101 Essays to Change the Way You Think stopped me in my tracks. It asked me to write a list of everything I don’t like about other people and then to look at that list and notice how much of it was actually things I don’t like about myself. What you fixate on in others is almost always a projection of what you’re struggling with internally. When I was really down about my skin, I noticed everyone else’s skin constantly. That wasn’t about them. That was entirely about me.

The other thing that’s helped isI can only be offended by words I believe might be true. If someone tells me I’m going to fail at something, the only reason that lands is if some part of me already believes it. Which means the real work isn’t managing what other people say but it’s building a relationship with myself that’s secure enough not to need external validation to feel ok. Nobody else can do that for you. And the more you look outward for it, the emptier you’ll feel, because other people’s opinions are not a reliable foundation for your own self-worth.

4. Vulnerability Is Not Weakness

I used to walk away from vulnerable conversations and immediately want to take everything back. My friend described it perfectly as a vulnerability hangover. That morning-after feeling of why did I say all of that, what are they going to think of me now, I shared too much.

Part of why I developed that reflex is because I genuinely have been burned. I’ve opened up to people who responded with judgment, or who got mad at me, or who listed all the reasons I shouldn’t feel the way I feel. Those experiences taught me to keep things close, to only show people the version of me that was easy to be around.

But this year a friend of mine created a space where I felt genuinely safe to be honest, and I opened up more than I usually do with anyone. And the next day I had the vulnerability hangover with anxiety, regret, and second-guessing. And then she just... treated me exactly the same. Like what I’d shared was normal and human and not too much at all. And I realized I’d been carrying around a belief that vulnerability always leads to pain, based on the times it had, and ignoring all the evidence that it doesn’t have to.

My therapist once told me that when you meet someone new, give them a small pocket of yourself and see how they respond before you give them more. You don’t have to trust everyone with everything. You just have to be willing to test the water. Because when you never let anyone in, you also never get to experience being truly known. And that kind of loneliness is its own particular kind of painful.

5. What I’ve Been Taught Is Not Always Fact

This one sounds simple and it’s actually quite deep the more you sit with it. We absorb so much information over the course of our lives from parents, teachers, culture, social media, the internet and so much of it gets filed away as truth without us ever stopping to question it.

But facts are things that are objectively verifiable. And a lot of what gets presented as fact is actually opinion, or perspective, or a current understanding that will be updated as new information emerges. The food pyramid is a perfect example. It’s been revised dramatically over the decades as nutrition science has evolved, and what was considered gospel guidance for years turned out to be significantly wrong in some areas.

This isn’t about distrusting everything. But developing a relationship with information that includes curiosity and critical thinking rather than automatic acceptance. When someone tells you something with great confidence, it’s worth asking: is this a fact, or is this their perspective? What’s the source? What’s the context? Whose experience does this reflect?

Your own lived experience is also valid data, even when it doesn’t match the mainstream narrative. Some of the most important things I know about my health came from paying attention to my own body, not from what I was told was supposed to be true.

6. People Change

People say this all the time in the context of relationships, usually as a warning. He won’t change. You can’t change someone. And I think there’s truth in that when it comes to trying to force change in another person. But I’ve started looking at it differently, from the inside out.

I have changed dramatically. Max has essentially dated 3 different versions of me. When we first started talking, I had been unintentionally sober for almost a year, I was running track, I was deeply insecure, and I was constantly seeking male attention even while refusing to commit to anyone. When we started dating I was working 12-hour shifts and obsessed with making money and not particularly close with my family. Now I’m working full time, a dog mom, genuinely more at peace with who I am, and I care deeply about the people in my life in a way I didn’t know how to access before.

None of that happened quickly or on a schedule. Change happens slowly, in the background, usually when you’re not watching for it. I didn’t plan 5 years ago to care about hormone health and cycle syncing. If you’d told me that’s where I’d be, I would have had no idea what you were talking about. Growth like that happens through accumulation, through everything you read, experience, go through, survive, and slowly integrate.

So if you’re looking at yourself right now and feeling frustrated that you’re not who you want to be yet, I really want you to hold onto this: you are not a fixed thing. You are still in the process. And so is everyone around you.

7. Sometimes Less Is More

I used to think more meant better. More friends, more plans, more clothes, more achievements, more going on. And I’ve slowly come to realize that more often just means more noise.

The friendships that actually fill me up are the ones where I can be completely honest. I don’t have a hundred of those. I have a few. And those few are worth more to me than a wide social circle where I’m performing a version of myself nobody actually knows.

The same applies to how I’ve been simplifying my home, my wardrobe, my schedule. I don’t have a lot of clothes, but what I have I actually love and wear. My apartment is a one bedroom. There’s less to manage, less to clean, less visual clutter making me anxious. The simplicity creates a kind of calm I didn’t know I needed until I had it.

I think a lot of us spend our 20s accumulating, experiences, followers, connections, things because we were told that’s what building a life looks like. And then at some point you have to figure out what actually matters to you specifically, and let the rest go.

8. Slow Down and Enjoy the Present

I am someone who is always looking forward to the next thing. In middle school I couldn’t wait to drive. In high school I couldn’t wait for college. In college I couldn’t wait to graduate. Now I’m graduated and part of my brain is already looking ahead to getting engaged, getting married.

And I had a moment recently where I caught myself and thought: I waited so long to be exactly where I am right now. I spent years looking forward to this exact phase of my life. And now that I’m in it, I’m already rushing past it toward the next one.

The Power of Now is a book I come back to whenever I notice this pattern in myself. The only moment that actually exists is this one. The past is a memory and the future is a projection, and both of them are happening in your mind right now, not in reality. All of your actual life takes place in the present moment and the more you’re mentally living somewhere else, the more of it you miss.

Losing my phone for a few days recently was actually an unexpected gift in this regard. Walking Miso with no music, no podcasts, nothing to scroll. I had to just be there. I noticed the sky. I noticed the moon. I let myself be a little bored. And it reminded me how much I filter out when I’m constantly plugged in. Boredom is actually underrated.

9. Struggling Does Not Mean You Failed

This one is for anyone who has had a hard year and interpreted that as some kind of personal failing.

When my social media doesn’t perform well and I’ve put real time and energy into it, my first instinct is to spiral into I’m failing, I should quit, this isn’t working. But the reframe I keep coming back to is this: I only fail if I stop. Everything else is just information. It’s feedback. It’s the process looking exactly like the process is supposed to look.

Every business that didn’t work out, every relationship that ended, every goal you didn’t reach, none of it means you failed at life. It means life happened, which it does to everyone, including the people whose highlight reels make it look otherwise. You have survived every hard thing that has ever happened to you so far. 100% of your bad days, your hardest seasons, your most painful moments. You’re still here. That is not failure. That is resilience.

10. Expect Nothing, Appreciate Everything

I have a tendency to build things up in my head before they happen. Trips, birthdays, milestones, dates. I construct entire scenarios about how they’ll go, what will be said, what it will feel like. And then when the actual experience happens, no matter how good it is, it can’t quite live up to the version I invented because that version wasn’t real.

The expectations weren’t the other person’s fault. They didn’t know about the story I’d written. I just created it and then held them to it without telling them.

Something that’s genuinely helped me is ending each day by writing down 3 things I’m grateful for and going as small and specific as possible. Not just I’m grateful for my health but I’m grateful that the sun came out for an hour this afternoon or I’m grateful that Max made the bed this morning. When you train yourself to notice the small things, you stop needing the big things to be perfect in order to feel good. You stop needing the birthday to go exactly right or the trip to look like the photos because you’ve already been noticing a hundred tiny good things all week.

If you don’t expect him to make the bed, and he makes the bed, you feel grateful. If you expect him to make the bed and he doesn’t, you feel let down. Same outcome either way but your experience of it is completely different based on what you were carrying into it. Expectations are optional. Appreciation is a choice.

11. I Can Only Be Offended by Words I Believe Are True

This one hit me differently when I first encountered it. The idea is that an insult or a criticism only truly lands if some part of you already believes it might be true. If someone tells me I’m stupid, and I don’t believe I’m stupid, it bounces off. But if someone touches something I already feel insecure about, it sticks not because of them, but because of me.

Which means the work isn’t really about managing what other people say. It’s about getting honest with yourself about where you’re still not fully secure. The things that sting the most are usually pointing directly at the places that still need attention. That’s uncomfortable to sit with. But it’s also useful information.

12. What I’ve Been Taught Is Not Always Who I Am

There’s a difference between the beliefs you’ve inherited and the beliefs you’ve actually chosen. A lot of what we carry into adulthood, about money, relationships, our own potential, what we deserve, what’s possible for us, was handed to us before we were old enough to question it. By parents, by school, by culture, by the specific circumstances of where and how we grew up.

Part of growing up is doing the inventory. Figuring out which of your beliefs are actually yours and which ones you absorbed from someone else’s fear or limitation or experience. Some of what we were taught is genuinely useful and worth keeping. Some of it is someone else’s ceiling that we accidentally accepted as our own.

You get to decide what you believe. That’s one of the most powerful things about being an adult, and one of the most disorienting. Nobody hands you a new belief system when the old one stops fitting. You have to build it yourself, slowly, through experience and reflection and being willing to change your mind.

13. Prioritize Your Peace

The last one and maybe the one I’m working hardest on right now.

Something I’ve had to accept is that not everything gets an explanation. Not every friendship that faded, not every opportunity that didn’t come through, not every situation that hurt and didn’t make sense. Sometimes you can spend so much energy trying to understand the why, why did this happen, why did they do that, what did I do wrong, that you exhaust yourself looking for an answer that isn’t coming.

Prioritizing your peace means reaching a place of acceptance even without the resolution. It means deciding that your own inner calm is more valuable than the answer to a question that might not have one. It means letting yourself move forward even when you don’t fully understand what happened, because dwelling in the not-knowing isn’t protecting you from anything, it’s just keeping you stuck.

When I retired from gymnastics it was one of the hardest things I’d ever gone through. Gymnastics was my whole identity, my whole life, for 10 years. And for a long time I was angry and sad about how it ended. But the more I’ve let myself accept it instead of resenting it, the more peace I’ve found. It happened. It shaped me. And I can appreciate the lessons it gave me without needing it to have gone differently.

Choosing peace isn’t passive. It’s one of the most active choices you can make. It’s deciding that your wellbeing matters more than being right, more than having every answer, more than holding onto things that are already gone. And when you can actually lay down at night with a quiet mind because you’ve made peace with where things are, that feeling is worth more than I can put into words.

These are 13 things I’m still very much learning. The learning doesn’t stop. You just get a little clearer, a little softer with yourself, a little more able to recognize when you’re in the old pattern and choose differently.

So I learned to keep it quiet.

But I started this substack because I wanted to say the things that don’t get said. And this is one of them. So here it is, my actual mental health journey, what I’ve been through, and everything I do now to manage it.

My Brain Has a History

When I was in college, my therapist, her name was Allison, and I genuinely loved her, asked me something that I still think about. She asked whether I thought my depression was seasonal, or whether I’d had it my whole life. And without really having to think about it, I said: I think I’ve always had it. Because as far back as I can remember, I was the kid who cried all the time. The kid who felt things too deeply and couldn’t explain why. Life sometimes felt heavy in a way I didn’t have words for yet.

Recently, I started consuming a lot of content about brain health, podcasts, interviews, deep dives into neuroscience and a psychologist who specializes in brain imaging completely shifted the way I see my own history. He talks about how physical trauma to the head, the kind you get from soccer headers, football tackles, gymnastics falls, can actually change the brain on a structural level. The brain is soft tissue, and every time it gets rattled around inside your skull, it bruises. It shows up differently on scans. Parts of it can essentially go offline.

And I was a gymnast for 10 years!!!

When I tell people I did gymnastics, they picture graceful. What they don’t picture is the learning-to-fall part, the part where you drill how to bail (not go full out for the skill), how to crash, how to land wrong so you can eventually land right. I hit my head constantly. But more than the general wear and tear of the sport, I had this specific mental block. And not the kind where you’re just a little nervous. I mean I would stand at the end of the floor for 10 minutes, completely frozen, before a tumbling pass. My body knew the skill. I’d done it hundreds of times. But something in my brain just wouldn’t let me go.

I’d finally go for it, something would feel slightly off mid-skill, a shadow in my peripheral vision, a step that landed wrong and I’d bail. Which in for means I would absorb the impact with my head and neck instead of my feet. And then, because I was stubborn and horrified at myself, I’d get right back in line and do it again. My coach had to physically make me sit down.

Looking back now, that was OCD. I didn’t know that word yet. Nobody called it that. It just looked like a “mental block,” which coaches tend to treat as a character flaw more than a medical issue. I had all these rituals, hand movements, body movements that had to go a certain way before I could perform a skill. If anything disrupted the ritual, I couldn’t do it. That’s textbook OCD, and I was experiencing it as a child with absolutely no framework for understanding it.

There’s also research showing that childhood trauma, not just physical, but emotional too can literally alter brain function. If you grew up in a chaotic household, if there was a lot of fighting or instability, your nervous system adapts to that environment. And those adaptations don’t just disappear when the situation changes. They stay in the body. They stay in the brain. I grew up with a lot of anxiety around money and stability, and I think that left a mark I’m still reckoning with.

The Part I’ve Told Maybe 5 People

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That’s the energy behind this post. These are 6 small, realistic things I do. Some of which I’ve been doing for years without realizing why they were helping, some of which I just learned about recently and immediately added in. None of them require a major overhaul. All of them have real benefits for your hormones, your mental health, or your overall wellness. And I’m pretty confident that almost everyone reading this can add at least one of them today.

1. Audit Your Skincare and Makeup

I know I’ve talked about this before, but it belongs on this list because it’s genuinely one of the simplest swaps with some of the longest-reaching impact and most people still haven’t done it.

Here’s the thing about skincare and makeup that the industry doesn’t advertise: a lot of conventional products contain ingredients that are endocrine disruptors. Parabens, phthalates, synthetic fragrances, these chemicals interfere with your hormonal system, and your skin absorbs them directly into your bloodstream. Your skin is your largest organ. It’s not a barrier that blocks everything; it’s a permeable surface that absorbs what you put on it, which is why things like nicotine patches and hormone patches work. That same absorption applies to your moisturizer, your foundation, your shampoo, your body lotion.

The reason this compounds over time in a way regulators aren’t accounting for: when a product is approved as safe, that determination is usually based on the concentration of a single ingredient in a single product used a single time. Nobody is calculating what happens when you apply that ingredient every day from age 14 onward across multiple products simultaneously. That’s the actual exposure most of us have, and it’s dramatically higher than what any safety assessment models.

The most frustrating part is that the word “fragrance” on an ingredient list is essentially a black box. Brands are not legally required to disclose what’s inside their fragrance blend because it’s considered a trade secret. That single word can represent dozens of individual chemical compounds, some of which are known hormone disruptors or allergens. So even a product that looks clean on the surface might be hiding a lot under “fragrance.”

I use the Yuka app to scan barcodes and the EWG database to look up anything Yuca doesn’t cover. EWG is more comprehensive and rates products based on their full ingredient profile. When I need to replace something, I’ll search for it on EWG, filter by their highest safety certification, and pick from what comes up. You would be genuinely shocked at how many highly rated products are available at Target or Amazon at a fraction of the price of the designer alternatives and how many of those expensive “clean” brands still don’t score well. It’s almost entirely marketing.

You don’t have to throw everything away at once. Use what you have. When you run out of something, replace it with a better version. That’s it. One product at a time.

2. Wear Looser Clothes More Often

I want to be upfront that this one was new to me until recently, and when I first heard it I kind of brushed past it. But the more I looked into it, the more it made sense.

Your lymphatic system is essentially your body’s waste removal network. It runs throughout your entire body and is responsible for filtering toxins, transporting immune cells, and moving excess fluid out of your tissues. Unlike your cardiovascular system, your lymphatic system doesn’t have a pump, it relies on movement, breathing, and muscle contractions to keep fluid circulating. And it turns out, compression from tight clothing can physically restrict lymphatic flow.

The areas most affected are the places where you have major lymph node clusters: your armpits, your groin, and around your chest. These are also, not coincidentally, the exact places tight clothing tends to compress the most like underwire bras, tight waistbands, shapewear, compression leggings worn all day. When lymphatic flow gets restricted in these areas, the downstream effects can include joint pain, skin issues like acne, bloating, and even immune dysfunction over time.

I’m not saying never wear a bodycon dress or your favorite workout leggings. But for your everyday, at-home, running-errands life? Loose, breathable clothing is genuinely better for your lymphatic health. The relief you feel when you take off a tight waistband at the end of the day isn’t just psychological, your body is literally releasing compression that was restricting circulation.

And at night especially, try not to sleep in tight underwear or restrictive clothing. Let your body breathe. Your lymphatic system does a lot of its processing while you sleep, and giving it room to function properly is one of the simplest things you can do

3. Eat Within an Hour of Waking Up & Before Your Coffee

This one I feel strongly about, partly because I spent years doing the opposite and I can tell you firsthand how much it messed with my body.

When you wake up in the morning, your cortisol levels are naturally elevated. This is called the cortisol awakening response, and it’s actually a healthy, normal part of how your body wakes itself up and prepares for the day. The problem is when you add caffeine on top of an already elevated cortisol spike, on an empty stomach, you’re essentially amplifying that stress response significantly. Your blood sugar drops, your cortisol climbs further, your body goes into a mild stress state before your day has even started, and then when you eventually eat you’re more likely to overeat or crash.

Eating something within an hour of waking up stabilizes your blood sugar right from the start. It signals to your body that food is available, which calms the cortisol response and sets you up for more stable energy throughout the day. It doesn’t have to be a big meal. A banana, a handful of nuts, some yogurt, anything with a combination of carbohydrates and protein will do it.

The eat-before-coffee thing specifically: having even something small before your matcha or your coffee means the caffeine is entering a system that has some fuel in it and isn’t in a cortisol spike. The difference in how you feel, less jittery, more sustained energy, fewer afternoon crashes, is noticeable pretty quickly when you make this switch.

And since we're talking about coffee, the quality of what you're drinking matters too. I switched to Purity Coffee beans a while back and it's the one thing I won't compromise on. Most conventional coffee is one of the most heavily sprayed crops in the world and is also a common source of mold and mycotoxins, which, as someone who has been dealing with mold-related health issues, is not something I'm willing to ignore anymore. Purity tests every batch for mold, mycotoxins, pesticides, and heavy metals, so you're actually getting clean coffee without hidden toxins undermining everything else you're doing for your health. If you want to try it, use code SHELBY for a discount.

I want to say something about this directly because I’ve been seeing a lot of content lately that encourages intermittent fasting, drinking black coffee on an empty stomach, or skipping breakfast as weight management strategies. I have a lot of feelings about this. When I was in high school, I drank black coffee specifically to suppress my appetite because I thought it would help me lose weight. I hated the taste of black coffee. I did it anyway because I thought zero calories meant progress. It didn’t help me lose weight, it disrupted my hormones, tanked my energy, and made me miserable. I actually didn’t start to see any real changes in how I felt until I stopped doing that and started eating consistently.

I’m not here to tell you what to do with your body. But I am very intentional about what I talk about here because I know how easy it is to take wellness advice to an extreme when you’re young and already struggling with how you feel about yourself. If you’re going to make one nutrition change, eating something small before your coffee is one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort things you can do for your hormones and your energy.

4. Add a Pinch of Salt to Your Water

This one sounds counterintuitive, I know. We’ve all been told our whole lives that we need to reduce sodium. But hear me out, because this is specifically about hydration.

You can drink a gallon of water a day and still be functionally dehydrated if your body isn’t absorbing and retaining that water properly. You’ve probably experienced this, drinking a lot of water and then spending half the day in the bathroom, still feeling thirsty. That’s a sign that the water isn’t actually staying where it needs to be.

Sodium ions play a critical role in regulating your body’s fluid balance. When you consume a very small amount of salt with water, it helps facilitate absorption of that fluid in your digestive system. It also helps your body retain fluid at a cellular level, preventing excessive loss through urine. This is particularly important right after a workout when you’re sweating and replacing fluids, first thing in the morning after 8 hours without water, or on hot days when you’re losing more fluid than usual.

The amount is genuinely tiny, we’re talking a literal pinch, not a meaningful flavor addition. You may not even taste it. But the difference in how hydrated you actually feel, especially first thing in the morning, is real. I’ve also started adding trace minerals to my water because I realized I was probably drinking so much that I was flushing out electrolytes I needed. Both of these are incredibly low-effort additions to something you’re already doing every day.

5. Swap Your Cooking Oils

This is one of the smallest physical changes you can make with one of the most consistent daily impacts, because you’re using cooking oil literally every time you cook.

Seed oils like vegetable oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, palm oil, corn oil are highly processed, high in omega-6 fatty acids, and inflammatory to your body when consumed regularly. The refining process they go through to become shelf-stable involves high heat and chemical solvents that degrade the oil and create byproducts that your body doesn’t handle well. These oils also have a very high omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, and chronically elevated omega-6 intake is associated with increased systemic inflammation which touches everything from joint pain to hormonal imbalance to skin issues to cardiovascular health.

The swap is simple: olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, butter, ghee, algae oil or tallow instead. All of these are either more stable at heat, less inflammatory, or higher in beneficial fats that your body actually knows what to do with. Olive oil is my everyday go-to for lower heat cooking and dressings. Avocado oil is great for higher heat. Butter and ghee for things that need that richness.

You can’t control what oil a restaurant uses, and that’s fine, you don’t need to be perfect. But in your own kitchen, this is a completely painless switch. You just buy a different bottle next time you’re at Trader Joe’s. That’s the entire change. And because you cook at home multiple times a week, this small swap compounds into a significant reduction in your daily inflammatory load over time.

6. Protect Your Peace from Your Phone

I debated whether to include this one because it feels like something everyone already knows they should do. But knowing something and actually doing it are very different things, and I think the specifics matter here more than the general advice.

Don’t pick up your phone for the first hour after waking up, and put it down at least an hour before bed. I’m not perfect at this, there are mornings I wake up and immediately check my phone, and I can feel the difference in my cortisol level within minutes. You open one stressful message, you see one negative comment, you scroll past one piece of news that bothers you, and your nervous system is in a stress response before you’ve even gotten out of bed. That elevated state colors your entire morning and often bleeds into your whole day.

Your morning hour is genuinely precious. It’s the window where you can set your nervous system’s baseline for the day, through movement, sunlight, a slow breakfast, a few minutes of quiet. Once you open your phone, that window closes and you’re reacting to the world instead of choosing how you want to start. Even if what you see isn’t negative, the act of consuming information and content immediately activates your brain in a way that’s different from allowing it to wake up gradually.

A practical thing I do: put your phone on Do Not Disturb at night, and if you’re worried about missing something urgent, most smartphones allow you to designate specific contacts who can still reach you through DND. Your whole contact list doesn’t need 24/7 access to you. You are not a customer service line.

Something else that’s helped me is treating my phone’s availability the way I treat my actual availability. When someone calls you, they’re entering your time and your attention. If you don’t have the capacity for that conversation right now, it’s not rude to not answer, it’s actually more respectful to call back when you can be fully present than to half-listen while you’re in the middle of something else. You can always send a quick message saying you’ll call back. The expectation that we should be reachable and responsive at all times is very new, very culturally specific, and not actually good for any of us.

I also have a second Instagram account that I use more than my personal one, and I’ve found that logging out of my personal account for stretches of time is one of the most genuinely relieving things I do. My personal account follows hundreds of people. My “influencer” account follows maybe 100. The difference in how I feel scrolling one versus the other is enormous.

Your nervous system is not designed for the volume of information, stimulation, and social comparison that a smartphone delivers all day. Giving yourself defined windows of phone-free time isn’t a productivity hack but a basic form of taking care of yourself.

Start With One

I know 6 things still sounds like a lot. But none of these require a purchase, a complete lifestyle overhaul, or any significant time investment. Most of them are just a slight shift in something you’re already doing.

If I had to pick one to start with, I’d say the coffee-after-food switch because it’s immediate, the benefits are noticeable fast, and it builds awareness around how you’re fueling your body first thing in the morning. But honestly, the right one to start with is whichever one you read and thought I could actually do that today. Start there. Let it become automatic. Then add the next one.

The big changes are made of small habits. That’s not a cliché, it’s just how it works.

Let’s start with the thing that I think is the most important reframe when it comes to cycle syncing in general: your hormones change every single week of the month. Not every day like men’s do, every week! Men operate on a 24-hour hormonal reset cycle, which is actually why the traditional 9-to-5 work schedule was built the way it was, it maps onto the male hormonal rhythm. But for women, our energy, our mood, our focus, our physical capacity, and even our social appetite shift meaningfully from phase to phase. So when you drag yourself to a spin class one week and crush it, and then go back the following week and feel like you’re dying, that’s not weakness, that’s not laziness, that’s not a lack of discipline. That’s your hormones. And once you understand that, everything starts to make a lot more sense.

The follicular phase specifically is one of the best phases of your cycle. And I want to show you exactly how to make the most of it.

What Is the Follicular Phase?

Quick overview before we get into the good stuff. Your cycle has four phases: menstrual, follicular, ovulatory, and luteal. The follicular phase begins the day you stop bleeding, so it immediately follows your period and it typically runs from around day 6 to day 14 of your cycle, ending when you ovulate. If your cycle is fairly regular, these days will be roughly consistent every month, which makes it easier to plan around once you start tracking.

A note on tracking: before I got my Oura Ring, I used the Flo app and the 28 app, both of which are free and give you a solid overview of where you are in your cycle. Ovulation test strips are another really reliable option because they detect the actual LH surge that signals ovulation, meaning you can work backward from that to identify your follicular window with a lot of accuracy. The one situation where cycle syncing doesn’t really apply is if you’re on hormonal birth control, because the pill essentially gives your body a synthetic, consistent dose of hormones every day, your body stops producing its own hormonal fluctuations because it doesn’t need to. Cycle syncing is for people who are either not on hormonal birth control, on a non-hormonal option like the copper IUD, or in the process of coming off hormonal birth control and wanting to reconnect with their natural cycle.

The Hormones Behind the Phase

I’m not a doctor or a scientist, so I’ll keep this accessible rather than technical but understanding what’s actually happening hormonally makes everything else click.

The dominant hormone of the follicular phase is estrogen, and it gradually rises throughout this entire phase. That rise in estrogen is responsible for most of what you’ll feel: more energy, more optimism, more desire to be social, better focus, clearer skin. Estrogen influences your neurotransmitters, specifically serotonin and dopamine, which are the hormones associated with mood, motivation, and happiness. This is literally a biological reason why you might feel like a different, more vibrant version of yourself during this phase compared to, say, the week before your period.

As estrogen rises, it triggers the release of 2 other important hormones: LH (luteinizing hormone) and FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone). Both of these work together to prepare your ovaries for ovulation, FSH encourages follicle development early in the phase, and then around the midpoint, there’s a surge in LH that actually triggers the release of an egg. That LH surge is what ovulation test strips detect, and it’s what marks the transition from your follicular phase into your ovulatory phase.

The short version: rising estrogen = more energy, better mood, increased sociability, improved focus, and heightened physical capacity. Your body is essentially gearing up for ovulation and giving you everything you need to perform at your best.

Work & Creativity

The follicular phase is genuinely the best time of your cycle for cognitive work, creative thinking, and starting new things. Your estrogen-driven boost in dopamine and serotonin gives you more brain capacity, better focus, and a stronger drive to initiate. If you’ve been putting off a project, a business idea, a difficult conversation, a goal you set back in January, this is the week to actually do it.

Some specific things this phase is ideal for: starting new projects, brainstorming, setting goals, enrolling in courses or programs, pitching ideas, taking on more responsibility at work, or doing anything that requires you to be mentally sharp and motivated. In the luteal phase, a lot of us feel mentally foggy and just want to finish existing tasks rather than start new ones. In the menstrual phase, inward reflection is more natural than outward action. The follicular phase is where you have genuine creative momentum so use it.

I actually noticed this firsthand without even realizing it. The night before I wrote this post, Max and I stayed up watching social media strategy videos and brainstorming ways to grow the substack. I was full of ideas and energy in a way that I hadn’t been the week before. It wasn’t until I sat down to talk about the follicular phase that I connected the dots, of course that was happening. I was right in the middle of my most creatively energized phase. Your body knows what it’s doing even when you don’t.

Social Life

You will genuinely want to be around people during your follicular phase, and that’s not random, it’s biological. Rising estrogen makes you more communicative, more open, more affectionate, and more interested in connection. You’ll find it easier to express yourself, go deeper in conversations, and just feel good in social settings.

This is the time to say yes to things. Book the dinner you’ve been putting off. Go to the event you’ve been on the fence about. Plan the date night. Schedule the friend hangout. If you’ve been meaning to reach out to someone new, a neighbor, a coworker, someone you want to know better, this is the week where that kind of outreach will feel natural rather than forced.

I also want to gently mention the flip side: heightened emotions in the positive direction can sometimes mean heightened sensitivity in general. You might feel more confident and social, but also slightly more vulnerable to certain things, criticism, rejection, feeling left out. Just be aware of that so you can navigate it. It’s not a reason to stay home; it’s just good self-knowledge.

Workouts

This is where the follicular phase really shines. Your energy is up, your endurance is improved, and your body is genuinely primed for high-intensity cardio in a way it simply isn’t during other phases. Running, cycling, HIIT, spin classes, boxing, hiking, anything that gets your heart rate up and challenges your cardiovascular system is ideal right now.

What’s interesting is that the timing of your workout matters too during this phase. Midday workouts are particularly effective in the follicular phase because of what’s happening hormonally throughout the day. Your cortisol levels, the hormone that drives energy and focus, hit an optimal point in the middle of the day, giving you sustained power without tipping into excessive stress on your body. Your body temperature also naturally rises throughout the day, peaking in the late afternoon, which improves muscle function and flexibility and reduces your injury risk. If you can swing a lunchtime run or an after-work spin class rather than a 5am session during this phase, your body will respond better.

I can run a 3-5 miles during my follicular phase without even thinking about it. In my luteal phase, that same run feels like a different sport entirely, I’m dragging, I’m struggling, and I’m not getting the same output. That’s not a mindset problem. That’s physiology. Working with it instead of against it means you’re not wasting energy forcing your body into something it’s not equipped for, and you’re actually getting more out of every workout you do.

You’ve also probably heard of the runner’s high, that euphoric feeling some people get from sustained cardio. That happens because exercise releases endorphins, and when you’re already in an estrogen-elevated state with higher baseline dopamine and serotonin, those endorphins land differently. This is also why things like run clubs feel so appealing during this phase , you’re social, you’re energized, you want to be around people, and cardio releases the neurotransmitters that amplify all of that. It’s the perfect combination.

ClassPass has been my go-to for actually executing this kind of varied workout schedule. Being able to book a spin class one day, pilates the next, and a vinyasa yoga class after that, without being locked into a single studio means I can actually match what I’m doing to how I feel. If you’re not on it yet and want to try it, I have a link for 20 bonus credits to get you started.

Nutrition

This is my favorite part of cycle syncing because it gives me a framework for grocery shopping that gets me out of the rut of buying the exact same things every week. I keep a list on my phone for each phase so when I’m at the farmer’s market or walking through Sprouts, I know what I’m looking for.

Before I get into specifics, I want to say the same thing I always say about food: this is about adding in, not restricting. You’re not replacing your entire diet with phase-specific foods. You’re incorporating more of what your body needs right now alongside everything you already eat. Push out the less nutrient-dense stuff by crowding it out with good things, don’t eliminate, just add.

Folate and folic acid are particularly important during the follicular phase because your body is preparing for ovulation and potential egg release. Great sources include leafy greens like spinach and kale, citrus fruits, avocados, and beans. If you’re thinking about getting pregnant at any point, this is also why folate is so emphasized in preconception nutrition, it supports egg quality and early fetal development.

Iron is something you need to replenish after your period, since you lose a significant amount of iron through menstrual bleeding. Red meat (ideally grass-fed & grass-finished), poultry, fish, beans, lentils, and tofu are all solid sources. Pair iron-rich foods with something high in vitamin C, an orange, some strawberries because vitamin C dramatically improves iron absorption. This is one of those nutrition details that sounds small but actually makes a real difference in how effectively your body uses what you’re eating.

Omega-3 fatty acids, found in fatty fish like salmon and sardines, as well as flaxseeds and walnuts, support hormone regulation and reduce inflammation. They also support egg quality, which matters whether or not pregnancy is on your radar, healthy eggs are part of a healthy cycle regardless.

Vitamin D is something a huge percentage of women are deficient in, and deficiency has been linked to hormonal imbalances, fatigue, and mood issues. Sunlight is the best source, but supplementation is important if you’re not getting adequate sun exposure. You can also get vitamin D from fatty fish, egg yolks, and dairy.

Antioxidants from berries, nuts, and seeds help protect your cells and reduce oxidative stress, blueberries, strawberries, walnuts, and artichokes are all excellent options during this phase. Zinc (found in lean meats, poultry, whole grains, beans, and nuts) and calcium (dairy, leafy greens, plant-based milks) both support muscle function and hormone regulation.

Protein and complex carbohydrates deserve emphasis here too. Protein supports the cellular repair and development happening as your follicles grow. Complex carbs like brown rice, quinoa, and oats release energy slowly and help keep your blood sugar stable which, as I talked about in my skin post, is one of the most important things you can do for your hormonal health overall.

And on caffeine and alcohol: everything in moderation always, but if you’re actively trying to rebalance your hormones, reducing both will make your body’s job significantly easier. Your liver is already processing the hormonal changes happening this week, giving it less to work around means everything runs more smoothly.

How to Actually Start Cycle Syncing

I want to be really honest here: cycle syncing is not an all-or-nothing system. You don’t need to be scheduling every social interaction around your cycle or refusing to go to a yoga class during your follicular phase because it’s supposed to be a cardio week. That is not realistic and it’s not the point.

The way I’d suggest approaching this is in layers, over time.

Start with your workouts. Just become aware of which phase you’re in and try to match your exercise intensity to your energy levels. Do that for a couple of months. Once that feels natural, start incorporating the nutrition layer, bring your grocery list to the store and just add a few things that support your current phase alongside everything you normally buy. After you’ve done both of those for a while, you can start thinking about how you structure your social calendar and your work projects around your cycle.

The goal is to eventually reach a place where you’re not fighting yourself, where you’re not forcing a 6am HIIT class on a day you have zero energy, or pushing yourself to be social when all you want is to be home. It’s building self-awareness first, and then letting that awareness quietly inform your choices.

Start with one thing. Let it become natural. Then add another layer.

What I want to talk about today is small, gradual, manageable switches, the kind that don’t require you to blow up your entire life or spend a fortune. I’ve been making these changes slowly over the past couple of years, and the key word there is slowly. I didn’t do everything at once, and I don’t expect you to either. The goal is progress, not perfection.

I also want to cover something that I think gets left out of most low-tox conversations: it’s not just about what you eliminate, it’s also about actively supporting your body’s ability to detox on its own. Your liver and kidneys are already doing incredible work every single day. The question is just whether you’re making that job easier or harder for them.

So let’s get into it, starting with your kitchen, moving through your home, and then finishing with ways to actually help your body do what it was designed to do.

The Rule I Live By

Before I get into anything specific, I want to give you the one rule that made all of this feel achievable for me: finish what you have, then upgrade.

Don’t throw away a full bottle of moisturizer because you just learned it has sketchy ingredients. Don’t toss your entire cabinet of cleaning products because you heard Branch Basics is better. Use what you have, and when you run out, replace it with something cleaner. This approach saves money, reduces waste, and keeps you from getting so overwhelmed that you do nothing at all.

And on that note, pick one area of your life to focus on first. Just one. Your kitchen. Your skincare. Your cleaning products. The food you’re eating. Pick the one that feels most accessible to you right now and start there. My family started with kitchen appliances, then moved to water quality, then food. When I moved out on my own, I focused on my kitchen first, then my skincare. It’s been a gradual layering process, not a one-day overhaul.

The Kitchen

Your kitchen is one of the highest-impact areas you can address because you’re literally preparing food there every day. The tools you cook with, the containers you store leftovers in, the water you drink, all of it matters more than most people realize.

Ditch the non-stick pans. This is the big one. Non-stick pans are coated with PTFE (you might know it as Teflon), which releases harmful fumes when the pan gets overheated. Those fumes don’t just disappear, they can get into your food and into the air you’re breathing in your kitchen. The alternative is cast iron or stainless steel, and I promise it’s not as difficult to cook with as people make it sound. The trick with eggs, which is everyone’s first objection, is to heat your pan on high first, then add your olive oil or butter, then add the egg. It won’t stick. Your hormones will thank you.

Switch to wooden or stainless steel utensils. Plastic spatulas, plastic stirring spoons, plastic tongs, when these get exposed to high heat, they release BPA and other chemicals directly into your food. If your plastic spatula has ever melted even slightly against a hot pan (we’ve all been there), that contamination is already happening. Wood is durable, lasts longer, and costs maybe a few extra dollars. TJ Maxx almost always has a great selection if you don’t want to spend much.

Glass containers for food storage. This one is a really easy switch that most people overlook. Plastic containers, especially when used with hot food or acidic ingredients, leach chemicals into whatever you’re storing. BPA is the most well-known culprit, but even BPA-free plastics contain other hormone-disrupting chemicals that often get less attention. I recently ordered a set of glass containers with bamboo lids from Amazon and also found some at TJ Maxx. They look better, they last longer, and you’re not microwaving plastic onto your leftovers. Just make sure your food has cooled down before you seal it in the container, putting hot food into a sealed glass container creates steam and pressure, which isn’t ideal either.

Get a real water filter (code SHELBY). I cannot stress this enough: tap water is not as clean as you think it is, and a Brita is genuinely one of the lowest-quality filtration options available. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s true, Britas filter some things but do very little for heavy metals, chlorine byproducts, or fluoride. If you want to go all out, a reverse osmosis system is the gold standard, my parents have had a Kangen machine since I was in middle school and it’s incredible, but it’s a significant investment. Whatever you can afford, go one step above a Brita. You buy it once, replace the filter occasionally, and you’re done with plastic water bottles forever. And speaking of which, stop buying single-use plastic water bottles.The BPA and phthalates in plastic leach directly into the water, especially when the bottles have been sitting in a warm car or warehouse. Get a Hydroflask or a glass bottle and fill it up everywhere. Water stations are everywhere now. There is no excuse.

The microwave situation. Okay, I’ll be transparent, I’m aware that the science on microwaves is mixed and I may just have a deeply ingrained fear from the time I put a pot lid in the microwave at age 12 and nearly burned the house down. My mom threw out our microwave that day and we never got another one. So I’m biased. But here’s what I genuinely believe: convection ovens heat food more evenly and don’t use radiation to do it, which means the nutritional value of your food is better preserved. I’ve talked to a lot of people dealing with autoimmune issues and chronic illness who have eliminated microwaves, and there seems to be something there. At minimum, if you do use a microwave, never heat food in plastic containers. That’s non-negotiable regardless of where you stand on the microwave debate.

Cleaning Products

This category is one of the easiest to upgrade gradually because you run out of cleaning products regularly anyway. Next time you finish your dish soap, your laundry detergent, your all-purpose spray , replace it with something cleaner instead of grabbing the same thing again.

I use Branch Basics for almost everything, but I also want to be realistic: you don’t have to find the single most perfect product. You just need to find something better than what you’re currently using. Seventh Generation, Molly’s Suds, and Branch Basics are all solid options depending on your budget and where you shop. If you’re at Target and none of your usual options are available, just pick the one with the fewest ingredients you can’t pronounce.

You can also make your own cleaning solution incredibly easily, white vinegar, baking soda, and lemon are genuinely effective for most household surfaces and cost almost nothing. I mop my floors with hot water and a small amount of soap in a bucket rather than using Swiffer pads soaked in chemicals. My former roommates thought I was insane. I stand by it.

One note: if you have a cleaning person who comes in, remember to ask them to use your products instead of their own. I completely forgot to do this for months and kept wondering why my apartment smelled like conventional cleaner after every visit.

Skincare

I talked about this in depth in my acne post, but it’s worth revisiting here in the context of overall toxin exposure. Conventional skincare is one of the sneakiest sources of endocrine-disrupting chemicals because we apply it directly to our skin every single day, and skin is absorbent. What goes on your body goes into your body.

The way I navigate this is through two tools: the Yuka app and the EWG (Environmental Working Group) database. Both let you look up products and see ratings based on ingredient safety. I use EWG specifically for skincare, I’ll search something like “brown mascara,” filter by EWG certified, and choose from whatever comes up. It has consistently led me to products that are not only safer but often cheaper than the designer alternatives I used to buy.

What you’ll find when you start scanning things is that a lot of products marketed as “clean” or “natural” still have ingredients that are endocrine disruptors or linked to long-term health issues. The branding is incredibly misleading. And it’s not about being afraid or paranoid, it’s just making more informed choices when the information is right there and easy to access.

I also want to mention candles here because I know people have feelings about this. Most conventional candles are made from paraffin wax, which releases benzene and toluene when burned, both known carcinogens. Synthetic fragrance compounds the issue. If you love candles and you’re not willing to give them up (totally fair, pick your battles), look for beeswax or coconut wax candles with essential oil-based fragrance. If you’re open to an alternative entirely, I’ve been using an essential oil diffuser and I actually prefer it now. Lavender, eucalyptus, and mint are my go-to scents. It’s cheaper than candles and better for your air quality. I also put a cinnamon stick near my front door to deal with dog smell in a way that doesn’t involve spraying anything into the air.

Open Your Windows

This is so simple and so underrated. Indoor air quality is often worse than outdoor air quality because homes trap volatile organic compounds from furniture, cleaning products, paint, and yes, candles and synthetic fragrances. Opening your windows regularly improves circulation, reduces mold risk, and just genuinely makes your home feel and smell better. Shoes track in pesticides, chemicals, and dirt from outside, which then sit in your carpet and contribute to indoor air quality issues, so leaving shoes at the door is another easy win. Neither of these things costs anything.

Now Let’s Talk About Helping Your Body Actually Detox

Everything above is about reducing your exposure. This section is about supporting your body’s ability to process and eliminate what it’s already been exposed to because none of us live in a bubble, and our livers have been working hard for a long time.

Drink a lot of water. I know you’ve heard this a thousand times, but I genuinely cannot overstate it. Your kidneys need water to flush toxins out of your body. Without adequate hydration, waste products accumulate. I drink over a gallon a day, water is genuinely my emotional support animal and has been since I was a kid. If you struggle with plain water, try adding trace minerals or electrolytes. I’ve actually started doing this because I was drinking so much water that I was potentially flushing out minerals I needed.

Dandelion and nettle leaf tea. These are two of the most underrated teas for supporting detox and they’re incredibly affordable. Dandelion root specifically supports liver function, which is your primary detox organ, it helps with bile production, which is how your liver processes and eliminates fat-soluble toxins. Nettle leaf is rich in antioxidants and also supports kidney function. Both have a slightly earthy flavor, I’ll mix them with mint or spearmint to make them more palatable. I get huge organic bags of both on Amazon for just a few dollars.

Sweat intentionally. Sweating is one of the body’s most direct pathways for eliminating toxins, including heavy metals. This is why regular exercise matters beyond just fitness, you are literally sweating things out. Saunas serve the same purpose in a more concentrated way. And here’s something that might surprise you: if you’ve been using conventional antiperspirants with aluminum (which physically blocks your sweat glands), your body hasn’t been able to use this pathway effectively. Natural deodorants (code SHELBY) let you actually sweat, and while there’s an adjustment period, your body will recalibrate. People who say they can never switch to natural deodorant are often just in the middle of that adjustment and quit too soon.

Activated charcoal. This one is a game changer, especially if you drink alcohol occasionally. Activated charcoal works by binding to toxins in your digestive tract before they get absorbed into your bloodstream, it essentially acts like a magnet for harmful substances. I take it before and after drinking and genuinely don’t get hangovers. If you’re on any medications, talk to your doctor before taking activated charcoal because it can also bind to and reduce the effectiveness of certain drugs. Don’t take it within a few hours of medication.

Dry brushing. I talked about this in my skin post too, but it belongs here as well because it’s a legitimate lymphatic support tool. Using a dry brush with gentle upward strokes toward your lymph nodes (up your legs toward your pelvis, up your arms toward your armpits, down your neck toward your collarbone) stimulates lymphatic circulation and helps your body move waste out more efficiently. It also exfoliates, helps with bloating, and feels kind of amazing in a scratchy, satisfying way. Do it before a shower, morning or evening.

Oil pulling. This one sounds strange until you try it, and then it becomes one of those things you can’t believe you weren’t doing. You take a spoonful of coconut, swish it around your mouth for 15 to 20 minutes, and spit it out. Your mouth is actually a significant entry point for bacteria and toxins that then travel into your body, oral health is connected to heart health, gut health, and overall inflammation levels in ways that are well documented in research. Oil pulling pulls bacteria and debris from between your teeth and from the mucous membranes of your mouth before they get swallowed. It also helps with bad breath (guilty), can help with cavities, and some people notice their teeth whitening over time. Just don’t swallow it, you’re spitting out what you just pulled out.

A quality probiotic. Your gut is connected to quite literally everything, your immune system, your hormones, your mental health, your skin, your ability to absorb nutrients. A disrupted gut microbiome is one of the most common underlying factors in a huge range of health issues. I currently use Seed, which is a pre and probiotic, and I want to try Ritual next because they include a postbiotic as well. Quick tip when buying probiotics: if it needs to be refrigerated, it’s likely not stable enough to survive your digestive tract because your body is warm, not refrigerator temperature. Look for shelf-stable strains that are specifically formulated to survive stomach acid and make it to your intestines intact.

Eat foods that actively support detox. Garlic, onions, broccoli, cauliflower, and turmeric are all sulfur-rich foods that support the production of glutathione, one of your body’s most potent antioxidants and a critical player in your liver’s detox process. These aren’t supplements you need to buy; they’re just foods. Adding them more regularly to your meals is one of the simplest things you can do to support your body’s natural processes.

You can’t control everything. You live in a world with pollution and plastic and processed food and chemicals in the water supply, and no amount of wooden spatulas will fully change that reality. The goal was never perfection. The goal is to reduce your unnecessary daily burden so your body isn’t fighting quite so hard all the time.

Think about it economically if nothing else: what’s more expensive, a $5 reusable water bottle or years of chronic health issues that compound quietly over time? Prevention is almost always cheaper than treatment, but our culture doesn’t talk about it that way.

If you live with roommates or family and can’t control shared spaces, do what I did, control your own sphere. Use your own pans when you cook. Buy your own laundry detergent. Keep your bedroom windows open. Go through your personal skincare. You don’t have to change anyone else’s habits to start changing yours.

Pick one thing from this post. Just one. And start there.

How It Started

I started breaking out my sophomore year of high school, right around the time puberty finally decided to show up for me (very late, for what it’s worth). I’d had pretty clear skin my whole childhood, so when acne hit, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I tried everything, washing my face with coconut oil, using Mario Badescu spot treatments, cutting out gluten and dairy, experimenting with every home remedy I could find on the internet. Nothing worked. Looking back, I was essentially throwing things at the wall with zero understanding of what was actually causing my breakouts in the first place.

Eventually, I went on birth control. My skin looked flawless. Like genuinely clear and smooth in a way it hadn’t been in years. But birth control was doing a number on other parts of my body that I didn’t fully connect at the time. When I eventually switched pills and then got off hormonal birth control entirely, my skin never went back to how bad it was at 15 or 16, but the breakouts definitely came back. And that’s when I had to actually figure out what was going on beneath the surface instead of just putting a band-aid over it.

What’s Actually Causing Your Acne

This is the part I wish someone had explained to me years ago. Acne isn’t just a skin problem. It’s a symptom. And it can be caused by so many different things, stress, gut health, hormonal imbalances, environmental toxins, what you’re eating, what you’re putting on your skin. All of it plays a role, and that’s exactly why there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

For me specifically, I can trace my acne back to a few things. Growing up as a competitive gymnast, my body was in a near-constant state of fight or flight. That kind of chronic stress does real things to your hormones. I also started puberty really late, which likely meant some hormonal imbalance was already in play. On top of that, I had terrible gut health, chronic stomach pain, headaches, frequent doctor visits where they eventually just said “IBS” and sent me home. I now know that the gut-skin connection is incredibly real. Your skin is often reflecting what’s happening inside your digestive system, and when your gut is inflamed or out of balance, it will show up on your face.

The stress piece is also hugely underrated. When you’re stressed, your body produces more cortisol. Cortisol tells your sebaceous glands to produce more oil. More oil means more clogged pores. It’s a pretty direct chain reaction, and yet most acne advice completely ignores it.

The Birth Control Conversation We Need to Have

I want to talk about this because I think it’s something a lot of people go through and not enough people are honest about. Birth control is a tool. It has its place, and it does work for acne for a lot of people, it worked for me. Certain pills reduce sebum production and regulate the hormonal fluctuations that trigger breakouts, so the results can feel almost miraculous.

But here’s what I wish someone had told me at 16: birth control doesn’t fix the underlying issue. It suppresses it. It essentially tells your hormones to quiet down and creates a kind of artificial hormonal environment where breakouts are less likely. The moment you come off it, if you haven’t addressed the root cause, your skin will likely revert. This is actually so common that it has a name, post-pill acne and it can sometimes be even worse than what you had before because your hormones are essentially going through a rebound.

I’m not anti-birth control. I just think it’s worth having a more honest conversation about it, especially when it’s being prescribed primarily as an acne treatment. If I had known then what I know now about gut health, blood sugar, and hormonal balance, I would have at least tried those avenues first.

The Food Piece

For years, the advice I kept hearing was: cut out dairy. Cut out gluten. Cut out sugar. And I did try all of it, at various points, in various combinations. The problem is that this elimination approach is both exhausting and in my experience not actually that effective on its own. It also creates this really restrictive mindset around food that starts to feel unhealthy.

What actually shifted things for me was learning about blood sugar balancing. I first got into it through the Glucose Goddess, she has a book and a podcast and essentially breaks down how blood sugar spikes and crashes affect nearly every system in your body, including your skin. When your blood sugar spikes, your insulin levels spike too. High insulin triggers your body to produce more androgens, which stimulate your oil glands and lead to, you guessed it, more breakouts. It’s a direct hormonal chain that most people never hear about in the context of acne.

So instead of obsessing over eliminating specific foods, I started focusing on how I eat them. The order you eat your food actually matters a lot here. Starting with fiber or vegetables, then moving to protein and fat, then carbs or sugar at the end of a meal dramatically slows the rate at which glucose enters your bloodstream. It sounds almost too simple, but it genuinely works. I walked to get a donut recently, ate it, then walked home, a 30-minute round trip and that movement alone helps your muscles absorb glucose and blunt that spike.

The Teas That Actually Helped

Two teas changed my skin more than any topical product ever did, and I want to talk about them because they’re cheap, easy, and so underrated.

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