“Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.” — The Psychology of Money

I’m currently listening to the audiobook version, and when I heard that line, it was like the words were taken right out of my mouth. That line is one of the very real reasons I left my corporate career behind.

Three months ago I would have never written a post about “wealth.”

Why? Well, first off, when I heard the word “wealth,” the first thing that came to mind was money, and my relationship with money has been a little rocky for a lot of my life.

When you read that, your first assumption might be, “Okay, she’s just not great at managing money.”

Or maybe, “Where is she even going with this.”

And if I’m being honest with you and with myself, my relationship with money is driven by fear.

Fear of not having “enough,” which….what does that even mean, seriously.

Fear of not being able to provide, which is hard for a girl who has always been hyper-independent, including on the financial side of things.

Fear of not having control over my own time…the most precious resource in my opinion.

And since leaving my 10 year accounting career behind and pivoting into wellness, those fears have gotten loud.

Some weeks, debilitating. If you see me on my hot girl walks with tears rolling down my face, this topic is a lot of why.

Before we get into things….today I’m writing about the vulnerable, internal stuff. The money beliefs, the fears, the blocks. I believe that has to be addressed first for any real change to take place.

Next week I’ll break down my actual revenue streams…what’s worked, what hasn’t, the real numbers. If you’re not subscribed yet, this is a good week to fix that.

Part two lands in your inbox next Monday.

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Now back to the good stuff.

My relationship with money started young, as many of ours do, and as a very curious child, what I’m realizing now is that I picked up on everything.

Hearing my parents argue about it. My dad losing his job and not having one for 7 years, with 4 kids at home. My mom working 3 jobs just to keep the lights on..time she didn’t get to choose, spent on things she didn’t get to choose either. My dad asking my mom for her paychecks. Going around the house looking for quarters for school snacks. Learning my dad had a spending problem, and later, addictions. Learning about the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that had quietly piled up. Then going to college and realizing fast that I was going to have to pay for it mostly myself. It goes on.

And the honorable mention…the shame I feel about wanting to make money, and wanting to make a lot of it. Not for the flashy things, though don’t get me wrong, I like nice things too…I’d just rather spend on experiences than anything else.

It’s more so for the ability to control my time, which honestly, I think is most people’s goal if they’re being real with themselves.

My parents had their own money story, their own nervous systems, their own trauma, and the reality of life pressures while raising four kids and I don’t blame them for anything. I’m truly grateful for the experience I had…. if not for it, I would not be writing this.

But as you can imagine, growing up with that dynamic in the household sent me swinging to the complete opposite end of the spectrum.

That’s how I ended up in accounting, folks.

My whole plan was to never end up where my parents were, and that fear has driven this very ambitious part of me. That drive hasn’t gone anywhere…it’s just aimed differently now.

Two universal fears just about everyone carries in some form: not having their health, and not having money. The second one has been loud for me for six months now, ever since I stepped away from the “stable” paycheck, even though I prepared for this and knew it was coming.

So what actually made me write this. I believe that when something feels uncomfortable, that’s usually a sign to lean in, not turn away, and money has been the thing I’ve steered around for a long time.

Two months ago I decided to start sharing openly on Instagram about what I’m actually making from social media and other side hustles since leaving accounting.

Can take the girl out of accounting, but you can’t take the accounting out of the girl.

I love this money-minded side of my brain, and it’s been fun pairing it with the wellness side.

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Since I started sharing more openly, two things have happened. One, my fear around talking about money has actually started to shrink, despite it still being very uncomfortable….hello, exposure therapy, thank you. Two, people have questions.

Turns out a lot of us want to learn how to make money, and a lot of us were never taught how to talk about it without shame and guilt attached. AND we want to learn how to make money while also having control over our time. I’m actively working to build a career that fits into my life, not a life that fits into my career.

A few of these streams I’d already started building years before I left corporate. I started my personal brand on Instagram back in 2020 as a way to share my passion for wellness and educate others, and brand partnerships and content creation were already happening on the side. The rest came after, once I had the time and the reason to go all in. This isn’t something I figured out overnight after quitting. It’s something I’d been quietly laying the groundwork for.

So here’s the high level: right now this mix is what supports me while I build WellthyWell — brand partnerships, affiliate income, a digital guide, coaching calls, content creation, and corporate workshops on stress and the nervous system. Some months one or two of those carry more weight than the others. None of it looks like a straight line, which really activates the fear inside, and I’m still figuring out what actually works versus what’s just noise.

I’m going to do a full breakdown of each of those streams next week….what’s worked, what hasn’t, what surprised me. If that’s useful to you or you are just nosey like me, subscribe so you don’t miss it.

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But the bigger thing, the thing underneath all of it, is this:

three months ago I couldn’t have written this post.

Not because the money wasn’t there, but because the fear and shame around this topic was too loud to let me look at it directly. It’s still not silent. But it’s quieter than it was, and quiet enough that I could sit down and write this instead of scrolling past the topic again and keeping it bottled up.

And when I really sit with it, wealth was never about the number in the account (although that is important obviously ). It goes back to that line at the very top…

controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays

My mom worked three jobs and still didn't get to choose where her hours went. That's what I've actually been afraid of losing. Not money itself…the choice over my own time. So yes, I want to build wealth. I just don’t measure it the way I used to.

Money is the vehicle. Time is the actual currency I’m after.

If you know someone who needs to read this, forward it. That’s the best way to help it find the people it’s meant for.

And if something in here resonated, leave a comment - I’d love to hear from you.

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xoxo,

Aly

The Wellthy Wave goes out every Monday. If you’re not subscribed yet, link below. Glad you’re here.

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“Are you sure you want to do that?”

The question I received time and time and time again once I finally decided to tell people I was leaving my corporate career behind to pivot into wellness and “figure it out.”

I think one of the most difficult things in life is getting over the fear of what other people think or how they will perceive you, and learning to trust your intuition instead.

I myself have had several moments in my life where deep down, I know the answer and the direction forward, yet I choose the opposite, more familiar path as a way to prevent disappointing others.

A few weeks back I wrote about how throughout my life, I’ve tended to have a difficult time leaving something or someone. Read it here and subscribe below to get my latest posts right in your inbox.

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Now what’s funny is that me choosing to leave, actually making that decision, was an incredibly difficult decision for me. And I thought that once I made it, everyone who had been pushing me to take the leap would be excited.

Instead, something flipped the moment I told them I was actually putting in my two weeks.

Let me tell you, that moment was one of THE most disorienting moments throughout this entire journey.

I remember calling a family member, all excited to tell them I had finally made the choice and nailed down a date to leave. I was equal parts terrified and excited, and quite frankly, I called them hoping they would validate my decision and help me feel better.

Me, once again, outsourcing validation…. I’m working on that.

Here’s how the phone call went.

Me: “Guess what?”

Them: “You’re leaving your job?”

(this was a response I got often, and I was excited to hear it)

Me: “Yes. I am putting in my two weeks next week, isn’t that exciting?”

(that was me searching for validation that I had made the “right” choice)

Them: “Aly, are you sure you want to do that?”

(I heard that and internally, alarm bells went off….instantly my mind filled with voices doubting my decision)

Me: “Yes, I’ve made the decision I’ve been ruminating on for years, and I just need to take this leap.”

(despite me saying this, anxiety was pulsing through my veins)

I had built up this narrative in my head for months that leaving would look like failure, or “quitting,” to people. And hearing that response, after hours and hours of ruminating on it, validated that fear instead of validating the decision I’d made.

Talk about trippy.

But here’s what I didn’t expect.

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In that exact moment, right after she asked if I was sure, I had a choice. And thankfully, I had enough awareness to notice the two paths.

1. I could defend my answer. Walk her through every scenario I’d already run in my head a hundred times, every backup plan, every reason this wasn’t reckless. Basically prove to her, and to myself, that I’d thought about it enough to earn her approval.

Or

2. I could just let it sit there. Say what was true and not build a case around it.

Over-explaining had always been my move. I didn’t used to think of it that way, I thought of it as being thorough, being responsible, making sure people understood.

But if I’m honest, it was never really about them understanding.

It was me checking my own decision against their reaction.

If I could explain it well enough that they came around, that meant it was a good decision.

If they still looked worried, some part of me took that as a sign I’d missed something.

So this time I didn’t.

I said what I’d already said, and I let the conversation move on to something else.

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It felt strange. Not good exactly, more like standing somewhere new without knowing yet if the ground would hold.

I still felt anxious after we hung up.

That part didn’t go away just because I’d handled the call differently. I remember sitting with it for a while, journaling some of it out, trying to let the anxiety exist without needing to fix it or explain it away either…..which is apparently a theme with me.

But something had shifted. Not the fear, the fear was still very much there.

What shifted was that I didn’t need her to feel okay about my decision in order for me to feel okay about it.

Those two things had always been tangled together for me, and for the first time, I felt them come apart a little.

Six months outside of corporate now, here’s what I’d say to that version of me on the phone….

The fear people show you in the moment isn’t a verdict.

It’s just fear, theirs, not a review of your choice.

And you don’t have to talk anyone out of it for your decision to be solid.

Trusting yourself doesn’t mean the doubt goes away.

It means you stop needing someone else’s reaction to settle it for you.

So here I am 6 months since the day I left my 10 year corporate accounting career to reinvent myself and my career. Documenting my journey and what I’m learning to hopefully inspire you reading this in whatever chapter you are in!

If you know someone who needs to read this, forward it. That’s the best way to help it find the people it’s meant for.

And if something in here resonated, leave a comment - I’d love to hear from you.

Leave a comment

xoxo,

Aly

The Wellthy Wave goes out every Monday. If you’re not subscribed yet, link below. Glad you’re here.

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Last week I wrote about the realities of being 165 days outside of corporate, and the parts of my story I’ve quite frankly been embarrassed to admit. If you missed it, read it here.

Today I’m answering the questions I get asked the most.

Did you have a plan? What did you actually do to prepare to leave?

Diving into it all below and keeping it tactical.

My type A, detail-oriented, ADHD brain loves categories, so we’re going to group this into a few. Starting with mental/mindset piece, because that’s where any and all change begins, no matter how small or large.

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Mental Health:

In 2020, when I knew I eventually wanted to take a leap one day, I knew I was going to have to change, and change rarely happens without outside support to challenge your thoughts and hold you along the way.

So I decided I was going on a personal development journey, no matter how uncomfortable it was going to be. And as someone who learned to bottle things up from a young age, let me tell you….it was uncomfortable.

I knew something internally needed to shift, and I needed to be cracked right open. That led to years of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to unravel limiting beliefs, challenge my relationship with money, unravel my deep loyalty roots that often led to self sacrifice, and so much more. I could go on, but I promised to keep this tactical, so here’s a list of a few other things I invested in:

• CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) for 3 years consistently, at least once a month

• daily mindfulness, walks, meditation, breathwork (I love the book The Pivot Year for this)

• working with a life coach for my last 4 months at my job and diving into Internal Family Systems and somatic practices to support the nervous system (tbh I would have delayed the leave even more without this - an AMAZING investment)

• brain dumping, when anxious or fear-based thoughts popped up…writing them down was the best thing I found for me

• intentionally spending time with myself, solo date nights, weekends alone, living by myself to build self-trust. I may be biased, but I think living alone is a crash course in personal development and self-reflection. And moving across the country alone is that x 100 (which is what I did).

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Emotional Health:

No one really talks about this side of leaving a life that looked good on paper, and just how difficult it is. I’m not one to sugarcoat things, and I think this might be the most important section of this entire post. Here are a few things I had to come to terms with before leaving:

• I stopped asking other people for advice, hoping it would calm my fear. It never did. I already knew what I needed to do and more advice = more noise.

• I had to get okay with disappointing people, even about a career I’d worked so hard to build. Some people will be upset, but the people who matter most will just be scared (which brings me to the one below).

• The ones who love you will be fearful…that doesn’t mean you are making the “wrong” choice…it just means it makes them uncomfortable. It isn’t your job to manage their fears.

• The feedback that actually landed sometimes came from people who knew me less than my own family did.

Family and close friends will often project their own fear onto you, in the name of keeping you safe. That’s love, even when it doesn’t feel helpful in the moment. But some of the clearest, most useful feedback I got during this whole thing came from a friend who’s an investor, someone who didn’t know the full weight of my life or my history the way my family does, but who knew my work ethic and how I’d performed in my career. His read on me had nothing to do with fear. It was just an honest read of my track record. And somehow, that landed harder than anything my family said, because it wasn’t tangled up in anyone’s worry about me.

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Financial Health:

I think there’s a narrative on social media where people see someone leave corporate or take an unconventional path and instantly assume, well, their parents are probably floating them, or they have generational money.

Let me tell you, that is not the case for me.

Everything I know about personal finance, I’ve learned through podcasts, books, trial and error. I didn’t grow up with the most financially savvy parents, and that’s actually one of the reasons I think I fell into accounting in the first place, a fear of ending up in a similar situation as them. That said, here are a few things I did when I first started my career that I think have really helped:

Note: everyone’s situation is different, here’s mine. Debt-free, not married, no kids (minus my dog), renting.

Disclaimer: this is not financial advice, just based on my own experience. And disclaimer part two, I know there are things I could probably still be doing better.

• Building a money ecosystem. I see most things in life as an ecosystem, all intertwined, and money is definitely one of those things. Build the strategy, adapt as needed. Shoutout to Money with Katie for the hours of learning I did early in my career in my free time. My flow looked roughly like this: paid by my employer → 401k contributions → remaining goes to checking → bi-monthly deposit to HYSA → bi-monthly deposit to investment account → left over sat in my checking to cover expenses. There’s a lot more I could say about this, but I don’t want to go too deep into it right now.

• Not overspending, and actually checking in on it. Every couple weeks I go through my spending line by line. I still use Simplifi as my budgeting app to keep myself honest and make sure nothing’s creeping up on me.

• Paying off my credit cards in full every single month. Credit card interest is brutal.

• Keeping my near-term savings and emergency fund in a high-yield savings account (HYSA).

• Paying off my student loans as soon as I was able to.

• Saving for a car and paying for it in cash.

All of these habits compounded over time in a way I didn’t fully appreciate until I needed it most. By the time I actually left, I’d saved enough to float myself for a year and a half, assuming all my expenses stayed the same, without touching a single dollar in my investment accounts. That number is what let me finally breathe. It wasn’t about having a windfall or a safety net handed to me. It was years of discipline and small, very boring habits quietly adding up into the one thing that made the leap feel possible.

I think out of all of this and aside from the realities of the financial situation, the emotional piece of the plan was by far the most difficult and it took A LOT of time spent grieving a life that I thought I once wanted.

If you know someone who needs to read this, forward it. That’s the best way to help it find the people it’s meant for.

And if something in here resonated, leave a comment - I’d love to hear from you.

Leave a comment

xoxo,

Aly

The Wellthy Wave goes out every Monday. If you’re not subscribed yet, link below. Glad you’re here.

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Everyone keeps asking what I did to prepare to leave my corporate accounting career after 10 years, and while I think that topic is incredibly important (& it’s coming next week so make sure to subscribe to get it right in your inbox), I first want to get into the real gut punch I needed to actually take the leap.

So here’s a piece of my story I haven’t shared yet.

And honestly, I haven’t shared it because some part of it still feels like failure, even though I know now it was redirection. You’ll see what I mean, keep reading.

I’d been thinking about moving to California for a while, the way you think about things you’re not sure you’ll actually do. Then an interim leadership position opened up in sales, in San Diego, a brand new market the company had just opened.

I raised my hand immediately. Maybe a little bullish of me, but it felt like a hard intuitive pull, the kind you don’t really question. The company was taking a bet on me, and I was taking a bet on myself, and for a minute those two things felt like the exact same thing.

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So I moved, and I showed up and worked insane hours.

I was trying to prove I belonged in that seat, to the company and honestly mostly to myself, because deep down I didn’t feel worthy of it yet.

I was 30, and I went from managing three people to fifteen, most of whom had way more experience than I did. And for a while it worked. Or at least it felt like it was working.

A few months in, I had a standing call on my calendar with the then-CRO. I hopped on, we did the normal how are you, oh good, how are you.

Then it started. “Alysson, I have some news.”

I don’t know how to explain it, but I knew what was coming before he even finished the sentence.

“We restructured the sales organization, and you have two options. Take the Account Executive role, or we’re offering you severance if you don’t want that opportunity.”

He kept talking, probably because of the look on my face. I asked if he could explain how the decision was made, how my performance had been evaluated. Another ramble, nothing solid I could actually hold onto.

I don’t blame him, he was in a hard spot, one I’d been in myself back when I was in sales leadership. But there was no real answer waiting for me on the other side of that question.

What was actually happening internally was so many small parts of me, all talking at once.

“I told you you weren’t worthy of this. I told you you were eventually going to be left behind. I told you this isn’t where you’re meant to be, but you kept ignoring me.”

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It felt almost like God looking down on me saying….honey, I’ve been giving you signs to leave for years and you weren’t taking the hint, so I had to do this, even knowing how hard it was going to be.

So many of us tie our worth to our job. We wear it like a badge of honor, so when it gets taken away after everything we sacrificed to earn it, it hurts.

And it’s allowed to hurt.

The rest of the conversation became irrelevant. I sat there trying to process it, then left the office and headed straight to my favorite coastal walking path. My body just took me there, the way it always seems to know before I do. I walked for hours. It’s still my favorite way to process anything hard.

Here’s the part I didn’t admit to myself that day, or for a long time after.

I wasn’t just hurt.

Some part of me had been waiting for this.

I’d known for years I wanted out of corporate and into wellness. I felt it under every good performance review, every “great job, you’re crushing it.” Things that technically counted as success but never actually felt like it. Or maybe they felt good for a few days, and then it faded.

I stayed anyway.

The money was good, especially once I moved into sales. The stability was real.

But underneath both of those very reasonable justifications was something a little less reasonable, and it took me a while to actually see it.

I’m a loyal person, almost to a fault. And loyal people don’t leave, we tend to sacrifice even more just to try and stay. We tend to wait to be told it’s over.

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So that’s what I did.

Quietly, subconsciously, I waited for the job to end it so I wouldn’t have to.

But here’s the funny thing. Even that gut punch didn’t make me leave. (God, looking at me a little exasperated with how stubborn I can be.)

I didn’t take the severance. I still don’t fully know why, except that some part of me wasn’t ready yet to be the one who walked away….that felt scary and very unfamiliar.

But I also wasn’t going to just quietly roll over into the role they handed me. That Account Executive title was basically the job I’d already built for myself, just with a smaller title and a smaller paycheck attached. So I pushed back, and I got them to create a Senior Account Executive role instead, and put me in that. It was a real stretch for me, advocating for myself that directly in a workplace, in a way I hadn’t really done before.

It still felt like a demotion and it was one. But some part of me needed to prove I could at least shape the terms of it, even if I couldn’t yet give myself full permission to leave.

I sat in that role for about eight months, pushing for something more, trying to find my way back to where I’d been.

Then my salary got cut. Twice. (resulting in a near 50% decrease after just moving solo to one of the most expensive cities in the US)

And I remember thinking, so clearly, this is them pushing me out. Which honestly felt like a strange kind of relief. If they pushed, I wouldn’t have to be the one who jumped.

It took almost two years, start to finish, from that coastal walk to the day I actually left. And it wasn’t the leap itself I was scared of. It was something quieter underneath that. I was scared of what people would think.

I’d built this whole accounting career, ten years of it, real success by any normal measure, and here I was about to walk away from it for wellness, something people knew I loved, sure, but that didn’t make the questions any easier to imagine, or the pushback, or the well-meaning advice from family.

It almost felt like leaving would disappoint everyone else more than staying was disappointing myself. And as a people pleaser, someone loyal to a fault, I couldn’t fathom being the one who caused that. That was the harder part, if I’m honest. Not the leap itself.

The idea of letting people down to take it, even if that meant quietly letting myself down instead.

Those two years weren’t some clean, tidy stretch where everything clicked into place. If anything, they were confusing. I already knew, somewhere in me, that wellness was where I was headed, I’d been dipping my toes into it since 2020, quietly building it alongside my corporate career the whole time. A personal training certification. Coaching at Orangetheory, then friends and family. Eventually a health coaching certification, because I wanted the fuller picture, not just the fitness piece. None of that was new information by the time the demotion happened. What was new was finally being forced to sit still with all of it, and ask myself which piece was actually mine to build a life around.

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I loved learning health coaching. But a few sessions into actually coaching people one on one, I noticed something I hadn’t expected. I wasn’t lighting up the way I thought I would. Not because I didn’t care about the people I was working with, I did. I think I just realized I’m not built to hold one thread at a time. I’m built to connect a bunch of them together. More of a community builder than a one on one practitioner, even though I still love that work too.

So those two years were really just about being career confused, in a very specific and honest way. Knowing corporate accounting wasn’t it, having years of quiet proof that wellness was calling me, and still not knowing what shape any of it was supposed to take.

In February 2026, I didn’t walk away with a clean answer. I just got a little closer.

Breathwork is where I finally stopped asking everyone else and started asking myself. It was the first place I got quiet enough to actually hear my own answer, instead of collecting everyone else’s opinion of what I should do. I think we all know, somewhere in us, what we’re actually here to do.

We just negotiate with the fear long enough to convince ourselves we don’t.

I’m not going to pretend I’ve landed somewhere with a neat little bow on it. I built WellthyWell, and I love it, and some days I’m still figuring out what “right fit” even means inside of it. I think that’s just what it looks like to keep choosing yourself on purpose, instead of waiting for someone else to make the choice for you.

It took almost two more years to turn that walk into an actual decision, instead of just a reaction.

But it was the first time in a long time I left something before it could leave me first and that was a big step.

If you know someone who needs to read this, forward it. That’s the best way to help it find the people it’s meant for.

And if something in here resonated, leave a comment - I’d love to hear from you.

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xoxo,

Aly

The Wellthy Wave goes out every Monday. If you’re not subscribed yet, link below. Glad you’re here.

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5 months ago I walked away from my corporate accounting career that I worked so hard to build to fully pivot into the wellness space.

And last week, I was up late one night looking at accounting job openings.

Here’s what I’m realizing: there are so many millennial women who are either thinking about leaving corporate or just flat out leaving the career they worked so hard to build.

I did the same thing 5 months ago. Walked away from a career I had technically been building since I entered college in 2012.

Years of schooling. Thousands of dollars. Hours and hours in the library studying for the CPA exam. Countless hours working at EY in public accounting, then at a startup accounting firm. All of it, to just walk away….

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A lot of this conversation is about women being burnt out from being overworked, trying to balance work and life and parenthood (quite frankly, parenthood isn’t something I personally can speak to and yet I know the push/pull is so real).

But I think there’s a whole other part to this that doesn’t get talked about.

My story is a little different from the one I typically hear about from ~100s of women who have reached out in my DMs on Instagram and TikTok since I posted about me leaving corporate and sharing my journey in real time.

I didn’t hate the people I worked with.

I didn’t hate the job.

I wasn’t working wild hours for the company the last 2 years.

The company had amazing benefits, despite it being a rollercoaster most days (aren’t all startups??).

AND I was incredibly burnt out.

Which took me a while to make sense of, because everything I’d been taught about burnout was about hours and workload. Mine wasn’t…. and honestly for awhile I kept telling myself to just suck it up and that nothing was wrong. The good ole…. “just keep your head down and keep going and it will get better”… the classic case of Aly trying to white-knuckle her way through something that felt very off.

What I eventually came to realize is that my burnout was due to the cost of staying somewhere I’d already outgrown.

The root of my burnout…..ignoring my intuition.

It started as a little whisper back in high school: hey, you have a passion for wellness and one day you’re going to do something with it. (This passion of mine developed through my very own personal health journey).

The most difficult part….your intuition doesn’t yell. It whispers. And let me tell you, it is incredibly easy to ignore a whisper when you’re grasping for the financial stability you didn’t grow up with.

So for years, I leaned into an accounting career, grasping for that stability, and quietly ignored the whisper every time it showed up.

But ignoring your intuition has a cost, and eventually mine came due.

I hit a breaking point. I was unmotivated at work, going through the motions of a life that used to fit me, and if you know me, you know that is not who I am to my core. I wasn’t my fun, bubbly self. I was also dealing with chronic back pain, most of which has since left the body, along with the job (I could write an entire book on the correlation of chronic pain, the nervous system and misalignment one day…it really is fascinating and I’ve lived it).

That’s the part no one tells you about burnout.

Sometimes it’s not the workload.

Sometimes it’s the weight of ignoring what you already know.

I ignored my intuition following a path that I thought I “should” follow and the definition of success that I thought had to be mine…. later I learned it was one that was just fed to me.

So I left back in February 2026.

And quite frankly, it was one of the scariest decisions I’ve made to date.

I calculated my financial runway. Nixed a lot of expenses. Ultimately realized I could give myself 1.5 years without making a single penny and still be fine (which I knew was the worst of the worst since I already had a few side hustles bringing in some income).

Even then, there was a separate reckoning, the fact that my net worth was inevitably going to decrease, which is not a feeling I’m used to as a hyper-independent woman who is used to supporting herself. And her dog.

I spent about 14 years arguing with my intuition….first it was every few months. I’d get the nudge to take the leap and then talk myself out of it. Then eventually it became a weekly thing and then daily. As you can imagine, arguing with anyone daily, even if that anyone is your own intuition, is exhausting.

After a lot of quiet time to get clarity, to actually tap into my intuition instead of arguing with it, I woke up one morning, set a date to put in my two weeks, and then I was done. A lot and I mean A LOT of anticipatory grief went into that. In addition to seeking validation that it was the “right” choice (hint: that also doesn’t come from outside of you, it comes from within).

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Something I’ve learned since leaving…..the part of me that found stability and “safety” within a corporate structure and paycheck did not go away when I left corporate.

In fact it got really really loud.

When you strip away its home, it goes looking for another place to plant itself.

And it will cause a little chaos along the way.

That’s exactly what I’m working through right now. Building stability and safety within, because without it, that part of me is constantly searching for another avenue to feel “safe”. Grasping to control other parts of my life…relationships, my body, future income.

Like me, up late one night, looking through job boards for openings I might be interested in. Not because I feel like I need to take the hop back into corporate. Not because my ventures in the wellness space aren’t going well, although they are moving a lot slower than I’d like them to be. But because that part of me is searching for safety and job boards are just the most obvious place it knows to look.

I’m constantly reminding myself that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and if you’re a visionary or an entrepreneur, you probably also want things to match your vision yesterday. Realizing that things take time, and will never match the speed that lives in my mind, is something I’m learning in real time.

The whisper was right. It just took me over a decade to stop arguing with it.

If you know someone who needs to read this, forward it. That’s the best way to help it find the people it’s meant for.

And if something in here resonated, leave a comment - I’d love to hear from you.

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xoxo,

Aly

The Wellthy Wave goes out every Monday. If you’re not subscribed yet, link below. Glad you’re here.

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To be honest, there’s a version of me that would have read that title and rolled her eyes.

She had a six-figure salary, a title that sounded impressive, and a calendar so full it felt like proof she was doing something important. She was productive. She was driven. She was exhausted in a way she’d learned to call normal. And everyone said it would all be “worth it” one day.

That version of me left her 10-year corporate accounting career 150 days ago (truly wild to think about).

And what I know now, what I couldn’t have known then, is that I wasn’t just leaving a job. I was leaving an entire identity I’d spent over a decade building around someone else’s definition of success.

Here are 7 things being on the other side has actually taught me.

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1) You will grieve your old life. And just when you think you’re done, another wave will hit.

Nobody tells you this part.

We talk about leaving like it’s a single decision. Like you hand in your resignation and walk out into some kind of freedom montage. What nobody mentions is that grief doesn’t work on a schedule.

Mine actually started months before I decided to leave, back when I felt like I was throwing away everything I’d worked so hard to build: five years of college, a master’s degree, a CPA, long public accounting hours, a 6 year stint at a startup consulting firm….Then came the grief of leaving coworkers I genuinely loved working with.

But the deepest layer has been grieving the version of myself who convinced herself that career was what she wanted, while ignoring what her intuition had been telling her all along.

Since leaving, I’ve cried in grocery stores. I’ve had full breakdowns on my bedroom floor, more than once. I’ve cried at parks, at the gym, in the shower. I’ve had weeks where I felt certain and weeks where I questioned everything.

Then one weekend my partner and I took a quick trip to a state park. No phone, no laptop, just swinging in a hammock, and it hit me: my old life is actually over.

Not the version I’d been saying was over while still gripping onto it a little. The version where it’s completely, actually true.

The grief was proof that chapter mattered. The bigger the chapter, the longer the shedding. I’m still shedding, 150 days in, and I think that’s okay.

2) Learning to validate yourself is a skill. Nobody teaches it.

Corporate is a validation machine if you know how to play it. Performance reviews. Deal closures. Promotions. Manager approval. There’s always an external signal telling you whether you’re winning or losing, especially in a revenue-generating role.

When that disappears, when you’re building something from scratch with no scoreboard and no one to tell you you’re doing it right, you have to become your own source of certainty.

That’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to learn.

Here’s what I didn’t expect: the part of me that used to get validation from a closed deal or a manager’s approval didn’t just go quiet when I left. It went looking somewhere else.

I started noticing it in my relationships. The anxious checking. The over-explaining. The need for reassurance in ways I’d never needed before.

What I was really doing was outsourcing the thing I hadn’t learned to give myself: confirmation that I was doing okay, that I was enough, that I was on the right track.

My loved ones would say things like "I'm proud of you," "you're doing great," "look how far you've come." Most of it fell flat. I was searching for validation through them because I hadn't yet built the skill to give it to myself.

It took me a while to recognize it for what it was. The fear and anxiety that used to live inside the corporate structure didn’t disappear when I left. They just found new places to hide.

I’m still learning to be my own source of certainty. To look at what I’ve built, what I’ve shown up for, who I’ve become, and decide that’s proof enough. Some days I’m better at it than others. But I’m learning.

3) When the stability disappears, your nervous system will go looking for it, even in places that don’t serve you.

This one caught me off guard.

I left corporate to escape the patterns that were draining me. Then, in the uncertainty of the first few months, I found myself gravitating back toward versions of those same patterns: the overworking, the people-pleasing, the grasping for structure and control.

Because my body was craving something familiar.

Something that felt like ground under my feet. There’s an inevitable pull toward late nights and control when you’re building something of your own. Finding a way to work that actually fits this chapter, and designing from there, is what I’m aiming for now.

The thing is, your nervous system doesn’t care if a pattern is good for you. It cares if it’s known.

When everything is new and uncertain, it pulls you back toward what it recognizes, even if what it recognizes is the thing you were trying to leave.

The work isn’t just leaving the old life. It’s catching yourself recreating it in a new container. Noticing when you’re reaching for the familiar not because it serves you, but because your body is scared of what’s unfamiliar, even when what’s unfamiliar is exactly what you asked for.

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4) Your title is not who you are.

I spent ten years in a world where your title was your currency. Your compensation, your seat at the table, your identity: all of it ran through those two or three words on your LinkedIn profile.

150 days outside of it and I genuinely don’t care about titles anymore. Not mine. Not anyone else’s.

What I care about: Do you work hard? Do you have integrity? How do you make people feel when they leave a conversation with you? Are you honest? Are you kind? Do you show up when it’s inconvenient?

People will remember how you made them feel long before they remember what you did for a living or what your title was. I want to be remembered for the former.

5) We weren’t built to sit at a screen for 8 hours a day. We made that normal. It isn’t.

I didn’t realize how conditioned I was until I stopped.

The first few weeks outside of corporate, I felt physically restless in a way I couldn’t explain. My body didn’t know what to do with unstructured time.

150 days later, I take hour-long walks in the middle of the day. I try to work outside. When I feel restless, I move my body because it wants to be moved.

We were designed to move through the world. Sitting still under fluorescent lighting for the majority of our waking hours is a very recent, very strange invention (of course this is a little different if you WFH). And we weren’t built to work in 8-hour blocks either. Some of my best work happens in 90-minute sprints. I’ve learned to tell the difference between real output and the performance of productivity.

In corporate, being at your desk or online was the job. Presence often gets mistaken for output. Hours logged often gets mistaken for value created.

Out here, the only thing that matters is what actually gets built. And I build better in two focused hours than I ever did in eight performative ones.

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6) Who you become when nobody is watching is everything.

This one has surprised me most.

When there’s no manager, no performance review, no audience for your effort, you find out very quickly what your actual standards are. Whether you do the hard thing when it’s inconvenient. Whether you show up for yourself the way you would for someone else. Whether you have integrity when there’s nothing external requiring it.

150 days of nobody watching has taught me more about my own character than a decade of being evaluated ever did.

The person you are in private is the person you actually are.

I’m still becoming her. But I like her more than I expected.

7) The resistance isn’t always fear of failing. Sometimes it’s fear of what succeeding would mean.

Gay Hendricks calls it the Upper Limit Problem: the unconscious ceiling we set on how much good we’re allowed to have before we pull back, self-sabotage, or find a reason it won’t work.

I felt it with WellthyWell. I had built something real, something people were responding to, and I sat on the launch longer than I needed to. Not because it wasn’t ready.

Because I wasn’t sure I was worthy of what it could become.

That’s not laziness.

That’s a nervous system that learned to keep you safe by keeping you small.

An abundant future can feel just as threatening as a scary one when your body has never experienced it before.

The scarcity mindset is a protection mechanism….your mind keeping you inside the edges of what feels familiar, even when what’s on the other side is everything you’ve been building toward.

I used to think readiness came before the leap. But the door doesn't open until you believe you're allowed to walk through it. The becoming isn't just about courage, it's about expanding your capacity to hold what you've been asking for.

I'm still working on believing that. But I'm closer than I was 150 days ago.

I don’t have it figured out and I don’t expect myself to. I’m still in the middle of the messy, nonlinear, occasionally terrifying process of building a life and a career that actually fits.

But I know things now I couldn’t have known any other way. And I wouldn’t trade a single one of the 150 days it took to learn them.

If this resonated, I’d love to hear what landed most for you. Drop a comment below or reply directly to this email.

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And if you know someone who needs to read this, forward it. That’s the best way to help it find the people it’s meant for.

xoxo,

Aly

The Wellthy Wave goes out every Monday. If you’re not subscribed yet, link below. Glad you’re here.

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P.S. — the reason I sat on WellthyWell’s launch as long as I did is basically this whole essay in miniature. If you’ve ever built something you were scared to put your name on, that’s part of why WellthyWell exists. Membership launched recently, come see what we’re building.

🔬 What’s Trending

Wellness travel is no longer a vacation category…it’s a lifestyle priority.

The global wellness tourism market hit $990 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $2.4 trillion by 2035. But the more interesting story isn’t the size of the market…it’s what’s driving it. According to Simon-Kucher’s 2026 travel research, 44% of high-income travelers took a wellness trip in 2025, with 58% planning one in 2026. McKinsey data shows that 84% of Americans place wellness high on their list of everyday priorities and that priority is now showing up in how people spend their travel budgets. Consumers are placing spending priority on wellness travel over clothing and entertainment, even during economically difficult periods. When people protect a category through uncertainty, it tells you something about how essential it’s become.

The wellness traveler of 2026 has little patience for generic programming….a gym and a granola bar doesn’t cut it anymore. They want intentional, outcome-driven experiences that support the well-being practices they’ve already built at home. Four trends are defining the category right now and they all point in the same direction.

Hotels and resorts are racing to keep up. Luxury hotel groups are no longer treating wellness as a side amenity, it’s becoming central to their identity.

• Six Senses Rome, which opened in a 15th-century palazzo steps from the Trevi Fountain, built its entire spa concept around ancient Roman bathing ritual — a modern circuit of caldarium, tepidarium, and frigidarium designed for inflammation reduction and recovery, alongside a biohacking room, rooftop yoga, and a dedicated Alchemy Bar for custom treatments.

• Canyon Ranch launched its LONGEVITY8™ program at its Tucson flagship — a 4-day, $20,000 per person experience that includes 18 one-on-one consultations with board-certified doctors, 15+ diagnostic tests, and over 200 biomarkers reviewed, all to build a personalized longevity plan.

• CIVANA in the Sonoran Desert outside Scottsdale built its entire identity around accessible, non-prescriptive wellness — 10+ complimentary daily classes, desert bathing, sound alchemy, and a Women’s Health Summit launching this September with eight leading female physicians.

• Six Senses is expanding further with a new urban wellness hotel opening in Milan’s art quarter later this year. The spa is no longer a perk. It’s the product.

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Sauna culture is having a full mainstream moment. What was once a peripheral feature of Nordic hospitality has become its own tourism category….from Finland’s Sauna Village, a volunteer-run collection of 24 historic smoke saunas dating back to the 18th century, to corporate-backed social wellness clubs like Othership and Bathhouse in North America attracting institutional capital. The convergence of heat therapy, contrast bathing, and recovery-focused wellness has created a perfect storm around sauna that isn’t slowing down.

Luxury wellness is moving toward radical simplicity. Soneva — one of the most recognized luxury resort groups in the world, operating Soneva Fushi, Soneva Jani and Soneva Secret in the Maldives — just announced its new direction as “Bare Luxury,” evolving from its original “Barefoot Luxury” concept pioneered in 1995. The company describes it as the deliberate removal of everything that doesn’t serve, making space for nature, connection, and presence. Their CEO Neil Gallagher put it plainly: “Fast consumption, constant stimulation, the growth of AI and the pressure we all feel to optimize every hour has made the case for something quieter and more human.” Space and silence are the new status markers in luxury travel. This shift is being mirrored across the industry — research from the Zoe Report shows terms like “hushpitality” and “nervous system care” are now far more present in luxury travel forecasts than glamour or extravagance. The most remarkable thing a luxury brand can offer right now isn’t necessarily “more”….it is curating a calming place to slow down.

Longevity travel is booming. McKinsey research shows up to 60% of consumers across markets rank healthy aging as a top priority and that’s not just older generations. The Global Wellness Institute identifies traditional and complementary medicine, where much of the longevity and biohacking-related spend lands, as the second fastest-growing category within the wellness economy over the next several years. Wellness tourism is responding with multi-day stays built around diagnostics, biomarker tracking, and personalized health protocols. A wave of luxury longevity clinics has opened across the Middle East and the category is moving fast at every price point.

Digital detox is going premium. Deloitte data shows more than one-third of consumers worldwide check their phone within five minutes of waking up and growing numbers recognize they’re dependent on their devices throughout the day. The demand for disconnection is following. Hilton’s research shows 27% of travelers planned to cut social media use on their last trip, and the luxury rental platform Plum Guide reported a 17% jump in searches for tech-lite properties. Destinations are marketing the absence of Wi-Fi as a feature, not a limitation and off-grid properties are seeing unprecedented demand. The retreat that makes you lock your phone in a box on arrival is no longer a niche offering. It’s a product category.

Why it matters: What unites all of these trends is the rejection of wellness as an afterthought — something tacked onto a trip rather than the reason for it. Guests want the destinations they choose to actively support the well-being practices they’ve already built in their daily lives. The global wellness tourism is growing because people are hungry for an environment that accelerates what a morning routine can only inch toward. This is not a trend, it is a shift in the industry.

→ Full source: Wellness Tourism Trends: What’s Shaping Travel and Wellness in 2026 — EHL Insights

💰 Where the Money’s Moving

A 22-year old just raided $11.6M to put a hormone lab on your wrist

Most health wearables can tell you how well you slept or how many steps you took. What they can’t tell you is why you feel exhausted, bloated, or off in ways that don’t show up on a step counter. That gap is what Clair Health is building to close.

Founded by two Stanford graduates, Jenny Duan and Abhinav Agarwal, Clair Health raised $11.6M led by Khosla Ventures this month — with participation from a16z speedrun, Anne Wojcicki (23andMe founder), and a roster of health-focused investors — to build the first noninvasive wearable that continuously tracks women’s hormones. The jewelry-inspired wrist device uses 10 biosensors and 130+ proprietary biomarkers to track estrogen, progesterone, LH, and FSH in real time. No blood draws. No urine tests. No needles. The company already has a 25,000-person waitlist and sold out its first run of 5,000 units six months before its November 2026 launch.

Here’s what makes this different from what’s already out there: Oura, WHOOP, and Apple Watch have been gradually layering women’s health features onto platforms built around male physiology. Clair built from the ground up with hormones as the foundation, not an afterthought. As one investor put it — women’s health isn’t just an add-on feature anymore. It’s the whole product.

What this signals: the wearable category is about to get genuinely personal for women. The devices that understand that all of our sleep data, HRV readings, and recovery scores are being shaped by our hormones (and actually account for that) are the ones that will matter. This is the category to watch and one I’m personally tracking.

📍 On My Radar

Peptides - the longevity conversation I keep coming back to

Something keeps coming up in conversations within the WellthyWell community, and in the broader wellness world, that I’ve been sitting with and researching more: peptides.

If you’re not familiar, peptides are short chains of amino acids that act as signaling molecules in the body — essentially biological messengers that can influence everything from tissue repair and cellular regeneration to hormone regulation, immune function, and inflammation. The longevity community has been paying close attention to them because of their potential role in supporting the body’s natural repair mechanisms as we age.

Peptides hit 10.1 million monthly searches in 2026 and the conversation has moved well beyond biohacker circles into mainstream wellness.

What I find genuinely interesting about the peptide conversation is also what makes me want to tread carefully: we’re still early. Scientific American published a deep dive in April noting that most of the research on experimental peptides has been done in labs on animals, not humans and that the gap between what’s being marketed and what’s clinically proven is significant. Some peptides have decades of research behind them. Others are newer to the consumer wellness space, and the long-term data just isn’t there yet. The clinical applications — wound healing, muscle recovery, gut repair — are well-documented. The broader longevity use cases are more nuanced.

Here’s where I am on it: curious, watching, not jumping in yet. I want to understand more before I form a strong opinion, and that feels like the right posture for anything that’s moving this fast. If you’re in the WellthyWell community, you know this has been coming up in our conversations lately and I’ll keep sharing what I’m learning as I learn it. If you’ve tried peptides or have thoughts, I genuinely want to hear from you in the comments.

A company I’ve been following is The Protocole - an exclusive membership platform providing access to medical-grade peptides from trusted U.S. pharmacies.

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🌊 Current Obsessions

A few things I’m currently using and genuinely love.

BodyGuardz Red Light Converter + Privacy Screen Protector

I’ve been using this for a few weeks now and the eye strain difference is real. It converts blue light from your screen into red light rather than just filtering it out, which matters especially in the hours before bed. You also get a privacy screen built in. It’s a small swap that actually makes sense for your sleep.

Use code ALYSSON for 15% off — shop here

BodyBio Sodium Butyrate

As someone who has dealt with gut issues for years, this one has been a quiet game changer. Sodium butyrate is a short-chain fatty acid that nourishes the gut lining, helps reduce inflammation, and supports overall gut health. The gut lining piece matters more than most people realize — when it’s compromised, inflammation shows up everywhere else in the body. I take this daily and it’s become a non-negotiable for me.

Use code ALYSSON15 for 15% off — shop here

Perelel Hormonal Balance Support

I have PCOS and have navigated hormone challenges for a long time, so I'm particular about what I take. This is one of my favorites. Formulated by OB/GYNs specifically with PCOS in mind, it uses a 40:1 ratio of myo-inositol and d-chiro-inositol — the clinically studied ratio for supporting healthy ovulation and cycle regularity — alongside berberine, DIM, and alpha lipoic acid. What I also love about Perelel as a company: woman-founded, doctor-formulated, and pledging $10M to fund women's health research. The values match the product.

Use code ALY15 for 15% off all Perelel products — shop here

The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks

I've been listening to this and it's one of those books that explains something you've felt your whole life but never had language for. The concept is the Upper Limit Problem — the idea that we all have an internal thermostat for how much success, love, and joy we're allowed to feel, usually set in childhood based on what we witnessed and experienced. When things get too good, we unconsciously sabotage to bring ourselves back down to what feels "safe." Recognizing that pattern is one thing. Building the capacity to actually expand past it is another. That's what I'm working on. [listen on Spotify / buy on Amazon]

That’s all for now!

See you next Monday with something a little more personal.

The Report is written monthly. Let me know your favorite part and share with someone you think would like it!

-Aly

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That may not seem like much of anything to you, but as a “new” entrepreneur with a personal brand that runs solely on social and a wellness brand where 80% of the marketing is on social…..it was a big ask of myself and as you can imagine, my inner voices were running the show for a bit.

It was the first time since leaving corporate 4.5 months ago that I feel like I truly disconnected and my body and mind had been screaming for a bit to actually just chill the f out.

But here is the thing, it wasn’t the huge sigh of relief I was hoping for. At least not at first…

Within a few hours, I felt immense guilt. If I’m not working on WellthyWell (the wellness community I founded) or posting on my personal page, who is?

Knowing deep down that I needed to be still while also realizing that everything I’ve built depends on me to move, is a strange feeling.

And a feeling I knew I was going to have to face at some point in time.

My natural instinct was to control, think through business strategy, plan the next event, etc so my nervous system would not go into total freak out mode.

That is a veryyyyy familiar pattern for me.

To want to work and usually overwork as a way to control….control my finances, control my “success”, control others’ perception of me, etc.

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But what I chose was the opposite.

What I chose was a very unfamiliar and uncomfortable path, which is how change begins…. I chose to allow myself to simply be in search for even just a slice of head space. But I want to be very honest with you because I think we are sold “rested” and “clarity” as a reward for stillness. That isn’t quite what I experienced.

What showed up instead was grief. And a lot of it.

You see, I launched the WellthyWell platform last week and despite running events for the past 15 months, the platform launch made something else come to the surface….. WellthyWell isn’t just a thing I talk about anymore… it is real now and that can feel very scary at times.

No one talks about the feeling that rise to the surface and how strange it is to think and dream of something for so long and then for it to finally come to life.

Somewhere in the realness…it hit me that my old life is actually over.

Not the version I’ve been sitting in where I said it was over…. but the version where it is actually true. My previous career, that whole chapter, the version of me that fit neatly inside a box, that’s done.

And apparently, some part of me had been quietly holding onto it anyway, because letting it go all the way was something I realized I was never going to be fully ready for….. but it was time. (another post on my “relationship” with ending things coming soon because it deserves a whole section)

Swaying back and forth on a hammock under a tree within a state park listening to meditative music, I allowed myself to just simply be and truly grieve that version of me.

Nobody really prepares you for that. We talk about leaving a life that looked good on paper like it’s a single decision you make once, and then you’re just on the other side, “free”, moving forward.

Nobody mentions that even leaving a career you worked so hard to build is like leaving a relationship (one of 10+ years to be exact) and there are layers and layers of shedding.

Nobody mentions that you can be fully certain you made the right choice and still grieve what it cost you….in some regards, certainty, a steady paycheck, what felt like safety.

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The truth is…relief and grief aren’t opposites.

They just live in the same body at the same time.

And I think both can be true…. I left and I don’t have any regrets of leaving and I’m so glad I did AND, I’m not going to lie….I still miss the certainty of it most days.

If you’re sitting in some version of this, if you made a change you know was right and you’re still finding yourself grieving what came before, I don’t think that means you got it wrong.

I think it might just mean it mattered a lot to you and reasonably so.

You’re allowed to miss the old shape of your life while you build the new one.

If this resonated, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment below or reply directly to this email. And if you know someone who needs to sit with this too, restack it, that's the easiest way for it to actually find them.

xoxo,

Aly

Share The Wellthy Wave by Alysson Bluhm

Links if you are interested:

Brick (what I use to lock my phone & block apps): 10% off using this link

Fav Athleta shorts: high rise and not too short (currently on sale)

To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I was going to show up and write today. But on my morning walk something came to me that I’ve been reflecting a lot on and truthfully, struggling with.

WellthyWell launches in a little over a week.

And while it is so exciting to see something come to fruition that has lived inside of my brain for so long, recently instead of doing the thing I need to do, I’ve spent a lot of time convincing myself it’s not ready. That the date needs to move. That there are more pieces to figure out before I can let this actually be real.

What I’ve realized is that this is not a new feeling.…which is part of the problem. It is very familiar and one I know so many others come up against and I finally have a name for it.

Gay Hendricks calls it the Upper Limit Problem. (grab the book here, you won’t regret it)

The idea is this: we each carry an internal thermostat. An unconscious set point for how much happiness, success, love, and abundance we actually allow ourselves to experience.

And when we start to exceed it, we self-correct.

Not on purpose. Not even consciously. But we find ways to bring ourselves back down to the level that feels familiar (heavy on the “feels”).

We get sick right after the big win. We pick a fight the week things start going well. We procrastinate the one task that would move everything forward. We make the simple thing complicated. We tell ourselves it’s not ready when really, we’re the ones who aren’t ready.

Some may call it this self-sabotage… I think it’s about worthiness.

And those are actually different problems.

I’ve been running this pattern longer than I realized.

When I was in corporate making real money, good money, money I did not think I “deserved” based on my age, money I had worked hard for, I felt guilty for it.

When I got a promotion, more guilt.

Most recently, my health has been the best it’s been at 32. Genuinely. And somehow in the middle of that I’ve found myself skipping water. Cutting sleep short. And letting the small things slip through the cracks. As someone with a background in Integrative Nutrition and Health, having awareness that this is happening, yet still doing it is a weird mind-trip.

Nothing in isolation looks like a pattern.

But when you lay it all out, the money, the promotion, the health, the WellthyWell launch, it’s pretty hard to ignore. Every time something good starts to take hold, I find a way to loosen my grip on it.

Thankfully, I think I know where it comes from.

I grew up watching two parents who struggled. Financially, emotionally, health-wise. My mom was loving and the best mom I could ask for, she still is, but the baseline was strain. Photo below with my mom + 3 sisters who are simply the best.

Working multiple jobs, running from one place to the next, always busy. And when strain is what you grow up in, it becomes the thing that feels most like home. Not because I want it, I’ve quite literally journaled that I don’t want this type of strain.

But because my nervous system learned it first and that is the blueprint of how we operate our lives.

Struggle is familiar. Chaos is familiar. And familiar, even when it’s painful, registers in your body as safe.

So when things start going well? When the launch is a week out and the thing you’ve been building for years is about to become real? My nervous system doesn’t celebrate.

It in fact panics quietly and starts looking for the exit back to familiar ground. And it is painful to admit.

That’s what I think is actually happening when I make my own dreams harder than they need to be. It’s not self-sabotage for the sake of it. It’s a nervous system trying to return home to the only thing it’s ever known.

The problem is, that’s not home anymore.

Hendricks says the first step is just awareness. Noticing when you’re upper limiting. Not judging it, not forcing through it. Just seeing it clearly enough to name it. I’ve been sitting with it a lot recently and then practicing increasing my capacity with tools like meditation, breathwork and journaling (more on this in future posts).

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So that’s where I am right now. One week out from the thing I’ve been building toward for longer than I’d like to admit to myself. Sitting with the resistance instead of rationalizing it away.

I’m not writing this from the other side. I don’t have a clean conclusion. I’m writing this from inside it, and I think that’s actually the point.

If you’re in a reinvention, or craving one, or finally taking the leap you’ve been talking yourself out of for years, I want to ask you something.

Where are you making things harder than they need to be?

Not because you’re not capable. Not because the timing isn’t right.

But because some part of you isn’t sure you’re allowed to have what you’re building toward.

That’s not a discipline problem. It’s an upper limit problem.

And the first move is just to see it. I will be sharing more as I work through this because I know I’m not the only one walking through it.

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If this resonated, I’d love to hear from you — drop a comment below or reply directly to this email. And if someone in your life needs to read this, send it their way.

xoxo,

Aly

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The Wellthy Wave is my weekly Substack alternating between personal essays like this one and The Wellthy Wave Report — where I put my CPA and business development background to work covering trends, money movements, and what’s actually worth paying attention to in the wellness industry. Two very different reads, same honest lens. If you’re not subscribed yet, come join us.

P.S. If you’re not sure what WellthyWell is yet, more details are here.

🔬 What’s Trending

The sleep optimization boom is a signal, not a solution

According to the CDC, more than one in three American adults don’t get enough sleep, and roughly a quarter have chronic sleep disorders like insomnia or sleep apnea. Stanford Medicine researchers describe sleep and mental health as having a bidirectional relationship — poor sleep worsens mental health, and poor mental health worsens sleep, each amplifying the other in a cycle that’s hard to break. People with insomnia are 10 times more likely to have depression and 17 times more likely to have anxiety than the general population. None of this is new. What is new is what the market is doing about it.

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The sleep tech devices market is valued at $34.74 billion in 2026 and projected to nearly double to $79.88 billion by 2031, growing at 18% annually. CES 2026 saw a wave of new sleep-focused product launches; devices designed to address insomnia, nighttime anxiety, and sleep-disordered breathing, alongside updates to smart beds and connected sleep tracking systems, most emphasizing personalization and real-time biometric feedback. In January 2026 alone, LumiMind launched LumiSleep — a device using real-time EEG modulation and personalized sound to guide the brain into its natural sleep onset pattern. Mouth taping, circadian lighting, magnesium protocols, weighted blankets….the category is expanding fast and in every direction.

Here’s what I find worth sitting with: the explosion of sleep products isn’t evidence that we’ve solved the sleep crisis. It’s evidence that the sleep crisis has gotten bad enough to create a market. The nervous system dysregulation, the chronic stress, the screen exposure, the always-on work culture; none of that gets fixed by a better sleep tracker. The products are responding to a symptom. The root cause is a different conversation entirely.

Why it matters: When an entire product category emerges around something as basic as sleep, it tells you something about the state of the culture. We are not a well-rested society. And the wellness industry is both responding to that reality and if we’re being honest, profiting from it.

💰 Where the Money’s Moving

Function Health isn’t slowing down — and it’s worth paying attention to why

Function Health (the preventive health platform that raised $298M last fall at a $2.5 billion valuation) has been quietly moving fast in 2026. In April they acquired Getlabs, a mobile healthcare platform that brings licensed specialists directly to your location, so members can now get blood drawn at home instead of going to a lab. In May they acquired SuppCo — and this one is worth understanding in detail.

SuppCo provides independent evaluations of dietary supplement trustworthiness, combining Function’s biomarker testing and clinician-guided insights with SuppCo’s supplement verification and TrustScore system to deliver more personalized, evidence-based nutrition recommendations. SuppCo has rated more than 35,000 products and analyzed over 500,000 user routines — and doesn’t directly profit from supplement sales. That independence matters. A June 2025 report on creatine gummies found that four of six Amazon bestsellers contained little to no creatine per serving, with two containing none at all. Function just acquired the company that’s willing to publish findings like that.

This marks the next step in Function’s build toward an AI health operating system — one that spans labs, imaging, clinician guidance, and now an independent action layer for the inputs that shape human biology. The shift from “go get tested” to “your health data lives with you, everywhere, all the time, and the supplements you take are verified against it” is a meaningful one. Preventive health is becoming ambient.

I use Function personally and have for a while — the pace of what they’re building right now is worth watching. If you’ve been curious about it, membership is currently $365/year and you can get $25 off when you sign up through this link.

Wellness real estate just hit $876 billion — and it’s the fastest-growing sector nobody’s talking about

Most people think about wellness as something they do…a class, a supplement, a routine. Fewer people are thinking about wellness as something they live inside. That’s changing fast. The wellness real estate market grew from $151 billion in 2017 to $876 billion in 2025 and is projected to more than double to $1.8 trillion by 2030. It is the fastest-growing sector in the US wellness economy, expanding at an 18.8% compound annual growth rate from 2019 to 2024 — faster than mental wellness, faster than fitness tech, faster than anything else in the space.

What wellness real estate actually means: built environments proactively designed to support the holistic health of occupants — through design, materials, amenities, and services. Think buildings with air filtration, circadian lighting, walkability baked into the design, community spaces that reduce isolation. The premise is that where you live shapes your health as much as what you eat or how you move.

What this signals: wellness is becoming infrastructure — not just a product category or a lifestyle choice, but something being literally built into the places people live. If the social wellness movement is about how people connect, and the longevity movement is about how people age, wellness real estate is the physical container both movements will eventually live inside. Something I will continue to pay attention to.

📍 On My Radar

The most counterintuitive wellness trend right now

Every time we host a WellthyWell event, the same thing happens. People show up a little guarded and sometimes half-distracted on their phones. And then at some point during the event, the phones slowly disappear.

In an era of AI companions, personalized health data, and biometric sleep tracking — the most effective wellness intervention might just be putting your phone down and hanging out with other people.

There’s a real push right now toward more in-person connection and less screen time, and I think it’s a direct response to how unwell we collectively feel. The sleep issues. The anxiety. The nervous system that never fully settles. So much of it traces back to the same root: too much screen, too little presence. The blue light before bed. The dopamine loop of the scroll. The nervous system that never fully gets to down regulate because there’s always another notification.

Here’s the tension I sit with: the tools making it harder to disconnect…AI, always-on technology, the blur between work and life…aren’t going anywhere. If anything they’re accelerating. And yet the solution isn’t complicated. It’s almost embarrassingly simple. More connecting IRL. More meals without phones on the table. More mornings that start with light instead of a screen.

The things that would most improve our collective health aren’t expensive or complex. We don’t need more optimization necessarily. We just need to get back to the basics. We knew what they were all along.

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🌊 Current Obsessions

A few things I’m loving that I think you will too — from products to protocols, all sleep-focused this issue.

Hatch Restore 3

The sleep clock I won’t shut up about. I have mine programmed for a wind-down routine at night, it runs as my sound machine while I sleep, and the light slowly starts coming in 30 minutes before I wake up. No harsh alarm jolting me out of sleep. If you’re prioritizing sleep this year, this is the place to start.

Shop here

BodyGuardz Red Light Converter + Privacy Screen Protector

I’ve been using this for a few weeks now and the eye strain difference is real. It converts blue light from your screen into red light rather than just filtering it out, which matters especially in the hours before bed. You also get a privacy screen built in. It’s a small swap that actually makes sense for your sleep.

Use code ALYSSON for 15% off — shop here

Skinny Confidential Mouth Tape

Two years in. Mouth taping is one of the simplest things I’ve done for my sleep quality and my TMJ…I get deeper sleep, wake up feeling actually rested, and this version is breathable enough that it never feels claustrophobic. If you’ve been curious, start here.

Use code ALY15 for 15% off — shop here

Arrae Magnesium

What I love about this one is the triple blend — L-Threonate, Bisglycinate, and Citrate — three forms that work together differently in the body. The L-Threonate crosses the blood-brain barrier which is what makes it particularly effective for nervous system support and deeper rest. I take mine at night and it’s become a non-negotiable part of my wind-down.

Shop here

That’s all for now!

See you next Monday with something a little more personal.

The Report returns in two weeks. Let me know your favorite part and share with someone you think would like it!

Leave a comment

Sources:

https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/sleep-tech-devices

https://bedtimesmagazine.com/2026/02/sleep-tech-innovation-reflects-projected-market-growth/

https://www.globalwellnesssummit.com/2026trends/

https://www.nasm.org/resource-center/blog/top-fitness-trends

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/function-acquires-getlabs-bringing-healthcare-directly-to-you-302737483.html

https://insider.fitt.co/function-acquires-suppco/

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/wellness-real-estate-market-reaches-876-billionforecast-to-hit-1-8-trillion-by-2030--302768982.html

It’s Sunday morning and I’m writing this in my PJs before church.

This one isn't easy for me to write. But I've learned that the things that are hardest to admit to myself are usually the ones most worth saying out loud….for me as much as for you.

Since leaving corporate I’ve learned a lot about myself and what life looks like outside the corporate treadmill. I think people assume that once you leave, your problems go away.

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And while yes, a lot of them do (goodbye annoying internal politics, truly, god bless). But there’s a whole slew of new problems. Or really just old ones showing up in different clothes.

So I want to normalize some things I’m genuinely struggling with right now. As a 32 year old who left her 10 year corporate accounting career to pivot into the wellness space. Let’s get into it.

1. The doubt. And a lot of it.

Wondering if I’m actually built for this.

These thoughts consume my mind more than I’d like to admit. Some days I genuinely question whether entrepreneurship is something I’m capable of. I love the work…I really do…but the doubts about whether I’ll be able to make the right decisions, face the challenges ahead, handle all of it… those are very real.

The more I sit with it, the root is control. And the root of control is fear. So really it comes down to fears around my own capabilities and my capacity to hold it all.

I don’t have a playbook for this chapter of life. Some days that is incredibly liberating. Other days it is isolating and confusing and both of those things can be true.

What’s been helping: when the thoughts spiral, I pause and ask….what’s the fact here, and what’s the fear? When I identify the actual fact, it usually negates the fear completely or at the very least calms it down. Meditation too….getting quiet enough to let the feelings I’d love nothing more than to push down actually rise to the surface and move through.

2. Analysis paralysis.

I have been an indecisive person for a lot of my life and for awhile I just labeled myself that way. Constantly searching for reassurance, for validation, wanting someone else to just make the decision so the pressure isn’t on me.

What I’ve realized….through a lot of IFS work (if you don’t know what I’m talking about this work has actually changed my life - read about it here) is that that part of me is a people pleasing part. I look to others to make the call so I don’t have the option to disappoint them. A coping mechanism I picked up somewhere in childhood to keep my nervous system feeling safe.

In corporate, perfectionism looked like a strength.

In entrepreneurship it really is just a stall. I’m learning to make a decision and move on even when it doesn’t feel perfect. Still very much a work in progress.

What’s been helping: once again, meditation to gain clarity and get quiet and then actually taking action even when I don’t feel ready.

3. Watching my friends have babies while I’m building a business.

This one has been a push and pull for years and I might as well just say it.

I want a family one day. I know that deep down. But right now I want to build this and I carry guilt about that. Like I’m supposed to want things on everyone else’s timeline. The timeline we’re handed from a very young age.

Every birth announcement on Instagram is a small thing and also not a small thing. I let myself feel it. And then I remind myself — you cannot be behind if you are walking a completely different path.

This season is one I’ve wanted since before I even graduated college. Giving myself permission to actually live it feels really good. And a lot of emotions come up. And both of those things are allowed to be true at the same time.

What’s been helping: reminding myself that we are all on our own path and are also being uniquely guided….my path just looks a little different and that is okay.

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4. My expenses are higher than my income right now.

Dear god send help. Seriously though.

This has been the most challenging one despite me knowing it was coming. I built a buffer for it and yet that doesn’t make the mental game any easier. I have a HYSA, investment accounts, a 401k, a budget — I’ve always been pretty conservative with money (hence the background in accounting and CPA). The last time I was spending more than I was making was college when everyone said that was normal.

Now it just sits differently.

Some days it feels heavy and paralyzing in ways that are hard to explain. Knowing something is temporary and actually feeling that in your body are two very different things. I have so much trust in myself and in where WellthyWell is going and my mind still spirals. Frequently.

What’s been helping: checking expenses weekly and doing a deep dive monthly….that’s always been my routine and I’m keeping it. And I’m still letting myself spend on the little joys. A coffee from a local shop. The things that feel like mine. I have a history of disordered eating and disordered exercise and any kind of excessive restriction can send me somewhere I don’t want to go so keeping the little joys while cutting back elsewhere has kept that at bay. That line matters to me.

5. Waking up with anxiety before I’ve even opened my eyes.

We are officially one month out from the WellthyWell launch date. Just typing that gives me anxiety.

I love what I’m building. I also genuinely want to throw my phone and laptop into the ocean some days. Both at the same time. Social media is part of my job and also not great for my nervous system right now…still figuring out where those lines live.

(I’ve been loving my brick - truly a game changer. 10% off using this link)

What’s been helping: magnesium and ashwagandha and my brick. And reminding myself that I am not my anxiety….I know that sounds simple but when you detach your identity from the feeling it’s a lot easier to just coexist with it instead of letting it consume everything. Also this: anxiety and excitement run on the same wavelength. Your perception of the experience is what determines which one you’re in.

6. Figuring out how to show up for the people I love while building this.

A very tricky one honestly.

If you read all of the above you can probably see what happens when you package it all together…..the self doubt, the financial stress, the anxiety, the analysis paralysis. There is a very protective part of me (another IFS reference for anyone familiar) that just wants to work. Work more, control more, stay busy enough that the fears don’t actually become realities. That’s why so many of us default to control by the way…just putting that out there.

The challenge then becomes….how do I actually show up for my partner, my friends, the people who knew me before all of this? How do I spend time with them without the voice in the back of my head saying you should be working, you have so much to do, why are you out here having fun, there is no time for that?

Not to mention how many of my conversations are now about WellthyWell. I love it. And entrepreneurship has a way of consuming everything if you let it. I’m still learning where the lines are.

What’s been helping: honestly this one is still in the queue. My intuition keeps telling me I need a new hobby….something where I’m the student not the leader, something creative, something away from a screen. Pottery or gardening keeps coming up. So find me at the local pottery studio soon apparently.

And that’s a wrap. If you made it this far….thank you for being here. I hope this made you feel a little less alone, or helped you put words to something you’ve been carrying, or just gave you something real to read that wasn’t your work tasks.

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A little reminder I keep coming back to myself:

you don’t pull a flower open. It blooms in its own time. 🌿

Hold the vision. Stay consistent. Trust the process.

If this resonated, I’d love to hear from you — drop a comment below or reply directly to this email. And if someone in your life needs to read this, send it their way. The more we can make each other feel less alone in the messy middle, the better.

xoxo,

Aly

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The Wellthy Wave is my weekly Substack alternating between personal essays like this one and The Wellthy Wave Report — where I put my CPA and business development background to work covering trends, money movements, and what’s actually worth paying attention to in the wellness industry. Two very different reads, same honest lens. If you’re not subscribed yet, come join us.

Red light is having its mainstream moment

Red light therapy has been quietly building in wellness circles for years — the face masks, the recovery panels, the biohacker staples. But something shifted. CorePower Yoga, the nation’s largest yoga studio brand, just partnered with HigherDOSE to bring full-body red light therapy into select studios nationwide — introducing what they’re calling the “red light workout.” HigherDOSE Full Body Red Light Mats are installed on studio walls, immersing students in red light and near-infrared light while they move through class.

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This isn’t a niche offering anymore. Studios are now rolling out in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami, Denver, Austin, Boston, and San Francisco and CorePower isn’t the only one. Independent studios are building entire concepts around it (I’ve seen this personally in San Diego…a wellness mecca).

The science behind the trend is real: red light therapy is associated with cellular regeneration, reduced inflammation, improved oxygen utilization, and efficient sweating without excessive strain on the cardiovascular system. What’s new isn’t the technology — it’s the delivery. Recovery is being woven directly into the workout itself rather than treated as something you do after. That signals a shift in how we think about movement and restoration.

Why it matters:

When the nation’s largest yoga brand integrates a biohacking tool into its core class offering, it signals that red light has crossed from enthusiast to mainstream. If you haven’t explored it yet, now is the time.

I linked a few of my favorite brands below (some are on sale for memorial day weekend!)

⚡ Not all red light devices are created equal — here’s what to look for

If the CorePower x HigherDOSE news has you curious about trying red light at home, the device you choose matters more than most people realize. A few things worth knowing before you buy:

Wavelength is everything. Red light falls between 600–700 nm and works on the skin’s surface — think inflammation, skin repair, and cellular regeneration. Near-infrared light sits between 700–900 nm and penetrates about three times deeper into tissues, reaching muscles, joints, and bones. A combo device that covers both is the most versatile option.

Look for irradiance, not just wattage. Wattage tells you how much power the device uses — not how much light it actually delivers to your skin. What you want to see is irradiance, measured in mW/cm², which tells you the actual intensity hitting your body.

More LEDs = more coverage and shorter treatment time. Bigger panels with more bulbs are more effective for full-body use. Smaller handheld devices work for targeted areas.

Brands I trust:

Renew Red Light

Platinum Red Light Therapy (use code 5OFF - currently on sale)

HigherDOSE (use code MDW2026 for 20% off)

All three are transparent about their specs, which is the first thing I look for.

💰 Where the Money’s Moving

Nourish just raised $100M — and it signals where nutrition care is headed

Nourish, the country’s largest dietitian-led virtual metabolic clinic, just closed a $100M Series C round led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Thrive Capital, Index Ventures, and J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners. The raise brings their total funding to $215M and values the company at $1.75 billion.

What Nourish does: connects people with registered dietitians virtually, covered by insurance, for personalized nutrition care — with a particular focus on chronic disease and GLP-1 support. Their model generates an average 8% weight loss and a 1.3-point reduction in A1C levels per patient, translating to over $2,000 in annual cost savings for health plans.

What this signals:

Nutrition is no longer a lifestyle category….it’s a clinical one. The fact that J.P. Morgan is leading this round tells you everything. Registered dietitian access, once a niche or out-of-pocket expense, is being positioned as essential infrastructure for the future of healthcare. Food as medicine isn’t just a wellness talking point anymore. The money is betting it’s one of the next major category in preventive care.

Nike closed its own gyms then immediately partnered with one that already had community

Nike quietly shut down its HIIT, running, and strength studios earlier this year — and many assumed that meant the brand was stepping back from physical fitness altogether. Instead, Nike just announced its first ever global gym partnership with The Yard Gym, an Australian-born strength and conditioning franchise with over 100 locations across Australia, the US, New Zealand, and Mexico.

The deal makes The Yard Gym an official Global Nike Training Partner — Nike becomes the exclusive provider of footwear, apparel, and equipment across all TYG locations, and the two will co-create training experiences, activations, and community events.

What this signals:

Nike tried to build community from scratch and it didn’t work. So they found a gym that already had it and plugged in. That’s one of the most recognizable brands in the world acknowledging that authentic fitness community can’t be manufactured. It has to be grown. The brands that understand this right now are going to have a significant advantage over the ones still trying to build it top-down.

📍 On My Radar

The nervous system is having its moment — and the technology is catching up

Something has shifted in how wellness is being talked about. A few years ago, nervous system regulation was the language of therapists and trauma specialists. Now it’s showing up everywhere - in studio programming, in recovery protocols, in the products people are actually buying. And I think that shift matters more than most people realize.

The premise is simple but the implications are significant: you cannot optimize your way to well-being if your nervous system is stuck in survival mode. Sleep protocols, nutrition, movement — none of it works the way it should when your body is running on chronic stress. Regulation isn’t a trend. It’s a prerequisite.

What I’m watching right now: two technologies that are pushing this conversation into new territory.

Nuropod is a wearable earpiece that delivers gentle electrical signals to stimulate the vagus nerve — the nerve responsible for activating your body’s “rest and digest” state. It’s non-invasive, clinically studied, and backed by research out of Harvard and UCLA showing measurable reductions in inflammation, fatigue, and anxious thoughts.

Shiftwave takes a different approach — a zero-gravity chair that delivers pulsed pressure waves through the body while guiding you through breath-based protocols to reset the nervous system.

Both represent something I find genuinely exciting: the science of regulation being made accessible outside of a clinical setting.

I haven’t used either yet — but they’re on my list, and I’ll report back when I do. If you have tried them out, I’d love to hear about it in the comments section.

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🌊 Current Obsessions

A few things I’m loving that I think you will too….from products (mostly non-tox or low-tox) to podcasts

Clearstem’s new Vitamin C serum:

I shared Clearstem in the last report and I’m sharing again because everything is 21% off through today. I’ve been using these products for over three years. My current favorite is their new Vitamin C serum. What I love about it beyond the results: the ingredients are clean and it doesn’t have that signature sharp smell that makes most Vitamin C serums unbearable. If you’ve given up on the category because of that, this one is worth another try.

(linked here: use code ACTIVELYALY for 21% off their entire site)

BodyGuardz Red Light Converter + Privacy Screen Protector

Given that red light was the topic of conversation above, it felt right to include this. I've been using it for a few days and have already noticed less eye strain — which makes sense, because it converts blue light from your screen into red light rather than just filtering it out. You also get a privacy screen built in so no one can see your screen from the side. It's a small change that fits into the red light conversation in a way that actually makes sense for daily life.

(linked here: currently 25% off - no code needed)

Detached: How to let go, heal & become irresistible (audiobook)

I'm only a quarter of the way through this and it's already reshaping how I think about control. The core idea: stop gripping the outcome and put your energy into the effort instead. As someone who left a decade-long career to build something from scratch, that reframe hits differently. Worth a listen if you're in any kind of transition or find yourself white-knuckling the results of something you care about.

listen on spotify here

buy on amazon here

See a round up of Memorial Day Weekend sales on wellness products I love here

That’s all for now!

See you next Monday with something a little more personal.

The Report returns in two weeks. Let me know your favorite part and share with someone you think would like it!

Share The Wellthy Wave by Alysson Bluhm

90 days ago I walked away from a 6-figure, 10-year corporate accounting career to bet on an idea I had in the wellness space and to close a gap I personally lived within the industry.

That idea is WellthyWell.

(the above is from a WellthyWell event in San Diego last weekend…photographer: Rachel Becker)

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I still remember waking up the day after leaving. Reaching for Slack on autopilot. Trying to check emails before my brain had even fully registered that the life I’d built for over a decade was now behind me.

Here’s what I want you to know first: I didn’t leave because I hated it.

Most people assume that’s the story. Toxic environment. Terrible boss. Completely checked out. That wasn’t mine.

I genuinely loved the company I worked at. I loved the people…. they felt like family, especially after I uprooted my life in Dallas to move to San Diego. I had flexibility. I had autonomy. I had a title that sounded impressive on LinkedIn.

And I was deeply, quietly unhappy.

Unmotivated. Not driven. Numb. I didn’t feel like myself and hadn’t for a long time.

Leaving was something I’d talked about for years. Something I knew in my gut long before I could admit it out loud.

What kept me there? Loyalty.

I’ve always been a loyal person — in my career, in relationships, in everything. I’m usually the one who gets left, not the one who leaves. So the thought of walking away from something I’d given a decade of my life to felt like abandonment.

Like I was leaving a relationship, not a job.

Months of work with a holistic life coach, nervous system work, studying internal family systems — all of it pointed to the same thing:

I needed to build enough capacity to trust myself before I could actually take the leap.

And one day, after shedding more layers and limiting beliefs than I can count, I woke up and just knew. It wasn’t abrupt. It was a knowing.

The last 90 days have been a crash course in personal development.

Here’s what’s actually stuck:

The version of me that got me here isn’t the version that gets me where I’m going.

The first few weeks out, I kept trying to run the same routines I’d built over 10 years in corporate. There was nothing wrong with them — they just weren’t built for this chapter. Same inputs, same outputs. I wanted different results, so something had to shift.

The body keeps score — and mine had a lot to say.

I didn’t realize how long I’d been running on pure adrenaline until I stopped. The first week out I was exhausted in a way sleep couldn’t fix. And then I got sick. Twice. Which is not like me at all but I’ve learned enough about the nervous system now to understand what was happening. My body finally felt safe enough to rest. So it did. And everything it had been holding came out.

“What am I even doing?” is not a sign you’re on the wrong path.

I ask myself this at least once a day. What I’ve learned is that it just means the path is unfamiliar — not that it’s wrong. There’s a difference.

“Stable” and “safe” are not the same thing.

Staying in something misaligned has its own kind of risk. We just don’t talk about that one. And fear and excitement feel identical in the body — the only difference is the story you tell yourself about which one it is.

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Things aren’t perfect.

There are still days I question everything. There are still logistics I’m figuring out — health insurance, structure, what this actually looks like long-term.

But I trust myself more than I ever have.

And honestly? That feels like everything.

For anyone curious about what I’m actually building right now:

WellthyWell — a holistic wellness community launching this summer.

Brand partnerships and content creation with wellness companies.

Subbing as a breathwork instructor at a studio here in San Diego.

A handful of 1:1 coaching clients.

And a lot of trusting the process.

If you’ve been sitting on something — a knowing you keep pushing down — I hope this lands the way it’s meant to. 🌿

The Wellthy Wave goes out weekly. If this resonated, subscribe and bring a friend who needs to read it. Glad you are here!

xoxo,

Aly

Wellness is the new nightlife and the data is catching up

Something is shifting in how people are choosing to spend their social time. Alcohol consumption is at historic lows (only about half of American adults drink now) and in its place, people are building their social lives around movement. Run clubs. Cold plunge socials. Pilates classes. Pickleball leagues. Hiking groups.

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This is a generational realignment in how connection happens, and it’s showing up in the data. Eventbrite reported a 256% rise in thermal bathing events and a ~92% increase in what they’re calling “soft clubbing” — wellness, music, and sober socializing combined. Strava now has over 1 million clubs on the platform with a 4x year-over-year surge in run crews.

The cultural shift is real: wellness has become the social infrastructure for a generation that doesn’t want to meet people at bars.

The “daylife” movement — active, social, IRL — is being built right now. And I’m betting it is not a trend, it is here to stay.

Why it matters:

If you’re building anything in the social wellness space right now, you’re early to something that’s about to have a lot of money and attention behind it. The infrastructure is being built and the consumer behavior is already there.

(hint: exactly why I’m building WellthyWell (photos above) …. it is closing a gap that I’ve noticed for years and experienced personally

💰 Where the Money’s Moving

Two types of capital are entering wellness right now and they’re moving in opposite directions. Venture money is betting on what’s being built from scratch. Legacy money is buying what it missed. Together, they tell you everything about where the industry is headed.

Oura became an $11 billion company and most people missed it

If this one flew under your radar last fall, it’s worth catching up on. Oura, the company behind the sleep and recovery ring, closed a $900M+ Series E round in October 2025, landing at an $11 billion valuation. That’s more than double where it sat less than a year prior. The company has sold 5.5 million rings to date and hit $1 billion in revenue in 2025 (I was an early adopter back in 2021 and their growth is incredible)

What this signals:

Wearables are no longer a niche product category for biohackers. They’re mainstream, and the consumer appetite for personal health data is clearly enormous. People are willing to pay (consistently) to understand their own bodies. They are no longer waiting for a Doctor to tell them what is going on. That is a shift not only in the healthcare industry but in consumer behavior.

Check out Oura here!

Big food is buying its way into wellness and it’s worth watching

While venture capital is funding what’s being built, legacy consumer goods companies are writing acquisition checks for what they missed. In just the first few months of 2026: Unilever moved to acquire green gummy brand Grüns (for $1.2 billion). Danone bought Huel to bolster its functional nutrition portfolio. Herbalife acquired personalized nutrition company Bioniq. Companies whose core business is ultra-processed food are purchasing wellness credibility because organic entry is too slow and the consumer has already moved.

What this signals:

Consolidation at this scale means the wellness category has fully matured….it’s no longer a niche. That’s worth paying attention to, because it changes the landscape for independent brands and creators. The brands your audience trusts today may be owned by very different companies in 18 months. Whether that changes the product, the ethos, or just the cap table….that’s the question worth sitting with.

📍 On My Radar

The longevity conversation finally found me

Something shifted in how I’m thinking about movement this year. For a long time my routine was built around how to get smaller and more toned (which led me down a spiral really quickly).

But lately I’ve been pulled into a different question: what am I building toward?

The women’s longevity conversation has been quietly getting louder and it’s landing for me and others in a practical way.

The movement framework I keep coming back to: Pilates for control, precision, and the kind of deep stability that holds everything else together. Strength training to actually build muscle — which matters more for women in their 30s than most of us were ever told. Cardio for cardiovascular health (running, stairclimber, hiking — something to get the heart pumping).

It’s less about the workout and more about the intention behind it.

I’m not training for how I look. I’m training for who I want to be at 60.

The supplement piece is part of it too and creatine as entered the chat. I’ve been taking Morning Water daily (since January, discount below if you want to try) — it’s 5g creatine, electrolytes, and calm-focus amino acids in one stick, no sugar, no artificial anything. I drink it first thing in the morning, sometimes take it to the gym. Simple, clean, and it actually replaces a handful of things I was taking separately.

(use code ALYSSON for $25 off your first month of Morning Water… I swear by this)

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🌊 The Wellthy Edit

A few things I’m loving that I think you will too….from products (mostly non-tox or low-tox) to podcasts

Clearstem’s new Vitamin C serum:

I’ve been using this for a week and my skin is already visibly brighter. What I love about it beyond the results: the ingredients are clean and it doesn’t have that signature sharp smell that makes most Vitamin C serums unbearable. If you’ve given up on the category because of that, this one is worth another try.

(linked here: use code ACTIVELYALY for 10% off )

The Skinny Confidential mouth tape:

I’ve been using this specific one for two years and I’m not switching. Mouth taping is one of the simplest things I’ve done for my sleep quality — I get deeper sleep, wake up feeling actually rested, and this version is breathable enough that it never feels claustrophobic. If you’re curious about it and haven’t started, start here.

(linked here: use code ALY15 for 15% off)

The Hatch alarm clock:

Continuing on with sleep health….my Hatch alarm clock is one of the best investments I’ve made for my sleep. I have mine programmed for a wind-down routine at night, it runs as my sound machine while I sleep, and the light slowly starts coming in 30 minutes before I wake up. No harsh alarm jolting me out of sleep — just a gentle, gradual start to the day. If you’re prioritizing sleep this year, this is worth it.

(linked here)

On Purpose with Jay Shetty — the Leila Hormozi episode:

I’ve been thinking about this one since I listened. Leila talks about how many of us sabotage our own success because of an internal ceiling we built based on what we witnessed growing up — not because we aren’t capable, but because we unconsciously cap ourselves at what felt “normal” or safe in childhood. It hit differently. Worth a listen.

(watch on YouTube here)

That’s all for now!

See you next Monday with something a little more personal.

The Report returns in two weeks. Let me know your favorite part and share with someone you think would like it!

Share The Wellthy Wave by Alysson Bluhm

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The gap between where you were and where you’re trying to go. That sticky, crawling-through-mud feeling where nothing is fully behind you and nothing is fully in front of you yet.

That’s exactly where I am.

A little over 70 days outside of corporate and some weeks I feel like I walked on water. Like everything just flowed. And other weeks it feels like I was climbing a mountain and got hit by a thousand boulders on the way up.

Honestly it changes week to week.

Sometimes day to day.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about making a big life change — it’s not a clean arc.

It’s not steadily up and to the right. It’s messy and nonlinear and some days you genuinely cannot tell if you’re making progress or just surviving.

A lot like the picture below.

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with lately though.

A lot of the resistance I feel isn’t actually about the external stuff….the building, the uncertainty, the figuring-it-out. It’s about who I’m becoming in the process. And somewhere along the way I picked up the belief that too much success wasn’t really for me.

I grew up on a farm in south Texas. My family didn’t have a lot…we had enough, but not much more than that.

And “enough” became what felt familiar. Safe. Normal. So when things start to feel like they might surpass that baseline, something in me pulls back. Retreats to what it knows.

Five steps forward. Taste something that feels like success. Two steps back.

Not because I don’t want it. Because my nervous system doesn’t recognize it yet.

The good news — and this is the part I keep coming back to — is that we can actually build capacity for a new level.

We’re not fixed. The nervous system is trainable.

One of the tools I’ve been leaning into hardest right now is breathwork. It sounds simple and it is, but it’s also one of the most direct ways to signal to your body that it’s safe to keep going. Safe to expand. Safe to hold something new.

The resistance, the procrastination, the two steps back — that’s not weakness. That’s a nervous system doing exactly what it was conditioned to do. The work is building enough capacity that it can do something different.

Nobody really talks about this part. The in-between. The discomfort of not being where you were and not yet being where you’re going.

But I think sitting with it — instead of running from it — is actually the whole work!

So that’s what I’m doing this week. Sitting with it. Building the capacity. Not going backwards.

Thanks for being here. If this resonated, drop a comment….I’d love to know if you’re in your own messy middle right now. And share with a friend who you think could use this message!

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xoxo,

Aly

Hi from Ojai! 🌿

Writing this from a coffee shop where we stopped for a little break before the drive back to San Diego tonight. We’ve been on quite the trip — San Diego to Pismo Beach to Big Sur to Carmel and now here — and honestly, I didn’t want to leave without sharing something that came up this morning.

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I was meditating overlooking the Ojai mountains and it hit me: how much my life has changed in just under 70 days post-corporate. And how close I came to never letting it. And the most transformational changes have been mentally.

The meditation touched on something I keep coming back to — how often we delay our own blossoming and stay in “bud” form out of fear. Fear of the pain that comes with change. Fear of the unknown.

But here’s what I’ve learned, slowly and not all at once:

Growth is painful. Change is painful. But there is nothing as painful as staying stuck as a bud when it’s time to blossom.

The temporary pain of change is real.

It’s just smaller than the long-term pain of staying misaligned.

I made the decision to choose growth back in 2020. And I want to be honest — the path was not linear. I got pulled back to the comfortable route more times than I can count.

But something kept redirecting me. God, the universe, intuition — call it whatever resonates. It showed up as: waking up and dreading the day. A deep sense of misalignment I couldn’t shake. Feeling undervalued at work. Relationships that kept slipping through my fingers no matter how hard I held on. Burnout. Tension I was carrying in my body for months.

I could go on.

For a long time I treated all of that as something to push through. And there is a time and place for pushing through. But this was different — every time I tried to white-knuckle it, a bigger obstacle appeared. And then a bigger one.

At some point I had to accept: these weren’t obstacles to overcome. They were signs.

And staying a bud was hurting more than blooming ever could.

Here’s the thing about why this is so hard — your brain is literally wired to keep you safe and familiar. The unknown reads as a threat. Which means every step toward change is working against a deeply ingrained survival instinct.

But the more you practice it, the more evidence you give your nervous system that the unknown is survivable. That you can do hard, unfamiliar things and be okay. That safety isn’t only found in the familiar.

One of the best ways I’ve found to build that tolerance? New experiences. Like this trip.

p.s. these eye patches are incredible - linked here (use code ACTIVELYALY for 10% off)

Travel is full of unknowns and roadblocks, and things that don’t go according to plan (I genuinely cannot think of a trip where something didn’t go sideways). But each challenge you navigate, each moment you react differently than you would have before….that’s a deposit. More safety in the body. More confidence. A greater tolerance for change.

New environment. New data. Slightly new you.

So if you’ve been feeling stuck, or like the clarity you’re looking for just isn’t coming ….maybe you don’t need another plan. Maybe you just need to change your surroundings.

It doesn’t have to be a road trip through Big Sur (although I HIGHLY recommend & so does Margo - above). A solo coffee shop hour or a long walk somewhere new might do exactly the same thing.

Small interruptions count. Your nervous system is paying attention either way.

Thanks for being here — if this one landed, let me know in the comments.

And if someone in your life needs to hear this, feel free to pass it along. 🌿

xoxo,

Aly

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Morning routine. Supplements. Workout schedule. Eight hours in bed or something close to it. I was checking every box that every wellness account told me would make me feel better and that I had learned about through my various trainings. And I still felt like I was running on fumes. Still anxious. Still flat. Still waiting to feel like myself again.

For a long time I called it burnout and kept moving. But burnout felt like a finish line — something you crossed and then recovered from. What I was experiencing was different. My baseline had quietly shifted without my permission, and no amount of optimization was moving it back.

What I didn’t have language for then — and what I want to give you now — is this:

I wasn’t burned out in the traditional sense. I was in survival mode.

And survival mode doesn’t care how many green flags you’re giving your body. It has its own rules.

What survival mode actually is

I remember the first time someone explained the nervous system to me in a way that actually landed. I was attending one of my live coaching calls with my Life Coach, exhausted in the way that sleep doesn’t fix, and she said: your body isn’t failing you — it’s protecting you. And something in me just... broke open a little.

Here’s the mechanism, as plainly as I can put it:

Your nervous system has one job: keep you alive.

When it detects a threat — real or perceived, physical or emotional — it activates a stress response. (photo below shows what we use to determine whether something is a threat or not)

Cortisol spikes. Energy redirects toward protection and away from restoration. Heart rate up, digestion down, sleep disrupted, brain on high alert.

This system was designed for acute threats. A predator. A crisis. A moment of danger that passes.

It was NOT designed for a decade of back-to-back deadlines, always-on communication, the constant low hum of performing and producing and proving.

When the threat never fully resolves, your nervous system never fully comes down. And eventually, survival mode stops feeling like a state you’re in and starts feeling like just... who you are.

That’s the part nobody tells you.

You stop recognizing it because you’ve been in it so long.

5 signs your nervous system is running the show

1. You’re exhausted but can’t rest.

You finally lie down. Your brain immediately starts listing everything you didn’t finish. You’re tired in your bones but sleep won’t come — or it comes and doesn’t feel like enough. You wake up already behind.

This is not a willpower problem. Your nervous system has been in threat mode so long that stopping actually feels dangerous to it. Rest requires safety. If your system doesn’t feel safe, it will keep you alert even when every other part of you is begging to shut down.

This is exactly why I started using my Hatch Restore 3 — not as a sleep hack, but as a signal to my nervous system that it was actually okay to come offline. The same sounds, the same dimming light, the same sequence every night. For a system running on threat detection, consistent and predictable is exactly what works.

2. Small tasks feel impossibly heavy.

Replying to a text. Making a decision. Choosing what to eat for lunch.

When your system is running on empty, even low-stakes decisions take everything you have. Not because you’re falling apart — because there’s genuinely nothing left to give. Your cognitive bandwidth is already being used up by staying regulated enough to function. There’s nothing left over for the small stuff.

This isn’t laziness. This is resource depletion.

3. Wired at night. Foggy in the morning.

If this one hit you, you’re not alone.

Your cortisol should follow a natural rhythm: high in the morning to get you moving, gradually declining through the day, low at night so you can sleep. When stress has been chronically activated, that rhythm inverts (this is exactly what I found out through taking a cortisol test). Alert when you need sleep. Foggy when you need to function.

I spent years thinking I was just not a morning person. Turns out I was a person whose cortisol curve had quietly flipped on me. Your body isn’t broken. It is just stuck on the wrong schedule.

4. You’re doing everything “right” and still feel off.

Working out. Sleeping eight hours. Eating well. Cutting back on caffeine. Still anxious. Still flat. Still waiting to feel better.

Here’s what nobody in the wellness space says loudly enough: safety comes before optimization (I need to shout this for the people in the back!!).

A dysregulated nervous system cannot absorb what you’re giving it, no matter how clean the inputs are. You can take every supplement, hit every macro, nail every habit and still feel like you’re moving through wet concrete. Because the foundation isn’t there yet.

This was the hardest one for me to accept. I kept thinking I just needed to find the right thing. The right routine. The right protocol. What I actually needed was to stop layering inputs on top of a system that was still in threat mode.

5. Rest feels like something you have to earn.

This one is the tell.

If you feel guilty when you slow down, restless when you stop — like you’re falling behind by simply breathing….that’s years of conditioning that kept you functional in an environment that rewarded constant output.

Your nervous system learned that rest was a risk. That stopping meant falling behind. That your worth was tied directly to your productivity.

It worked then. It’s costing you now.

Where to actually start

I want to be honest here: the wellness industry’s answer to nervous system dysregulation is often just more things to optimize. More supplements. More routines. More tracking. More.

For an overwhelmed system, that is exactly the opposite of what should be done.

Here are a few things that have genuinely moved the needle for me, not because they’re trendy, but because they work with your nervous system instead of on top of it.

Magnesium. If you do nothing else, start here. Magnesium is involved in over 300 biochemical reactions in the body, including cortisol regulation and activation of your rest-and-digest response. Most people are deficient — especially those who’ve been under chronic stress. I take mine every night. This is the one I use.

Breathwork. I know. I know. Bear with me. Breathwork isn’t about relaxation — it’s about directly accessing your autonomic nervous system through the one thing you can consciously control: your breath. Even five minutes can shift your state measurably. I use Open — and I’m sharing my 30-day guest pass because I genuinely think everyone should try it before spending a dollar. It’s that good.

Consistency over intensity. The nervous system responds to predictability. Not perfect routines — predictable ones. A consistent sleep window. A real wind-down. A morning that doesn’t start with your phone. Small signals, repeated, that tell your system the threat has passed.

If you want a fuller starting point, my Aligned & Well guide walks through the foundation I built when I was rebuilding my own health from the ground up — nervous system regulation included. It’s not a protocol. It’s a framework that I come back to monthly.

The part I most want you to hear

Recognizing survival mode is the first exit ramp.

You cannot regulate your way out of something you’ve labeled a personal failure.

But when you understand that your exhaustion, your brain fog, your inability to rest — when you understand that these aren’t signs you’re broken, but signs that your nervous system has been doing its job without a break for years — something shifts.

You stop fighting yourself. You start working with yourself.

I spent a long time optimizing on top of a dysregulated system and wondering why nothing was working. I’m not on the other side of it — I’m still in the process of rebuilding. But I know what I’m dealing with now. And that changes everything.

If this landed, forward it to someone who needs permission to slow down.

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Affiliate Links

• Hatch Restore 3 — wind-down anchor

• Magnesium — the supplement to start with

• Open — 30 days free — breathwork app

• Aligned & Well Guide — foundation framework

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The doctor looked at my chart and MRI scans, looked at me, and told me nothing was wrong.

The back pain I’d been living with — the kind that made ordinary mornings feel like negotiations — wasn’t showing up in any way that concerned him. His professional opinion was that it was probably in my head (he didn’t say it quite like that but I knew exactly what he meant).

I nodded. I thanked him. I walked to my car and I cried.

Then I opened Google (which is what I typically did when I was trying to find providers in the holistic wellness space).

I wasn’t looking for someone to tell me I was right. I was looking for someone who would actually help. I found a pelvic floor physical therapist. I made the appointment. And that decision — made in a parking lot, eyes still blurry — turned out to be the beginning of an entirely different education.

That appointment wasn’t the first time the system had failed me.

It was just the time I finally stopped being surprised by it.

By that point I’d already been through burnout that I’d rebranded as ambition. Adrenal fatigue I was told was just stress. PCOS managed with prescriptions that addressed the symptoms and ignored everything underneath them. Disordered eating I’d normalized as discipline. Anxiety I’d learned to perform through. A body sending signal after signal that something was wrong, and a medical system that kept handing me paperwork and sending me home.

The message, delivered in different ways by different doctors over different years, was always roughly the same: the problem is probably you.

I think I knew early that health wasn’t something you could afford to ignore.

I grew up watching both ends of the spectrum play out in real time. One parent who knew health as everything (yet barely had time to take care of herself while raising four kids). Another who left mental health struggles unresolved for decades that bleed into other areas of their health. I watched what that costs. Not just the person carrying it, but everyone around them. The ripple of it. The weight of it.

That woke something up in me that never really went back to sleep.

Health wasn’t abstract.

It wasn’t a wellness trend or a morning routine aesthetic. It was the thing underneath everything — and I’d watched what happened when it was left unattended long enough.

So when my own body started breaking down, I wasn’t willing to accept it’s all in your head as a final answer. I just didn’t know yet where else to look.

The pelvic floor PT was the first door. Behind it were more doors.

Practitioners who asked different questions and did not invalidate your symptoms.

Approaches the conventional system had never mentioned — nervous system regulation, gut health, hormonal patterns, the way years of chronic stress rewires your body’s baseline. Things started connecting in ways they never had in any doctor’s office. Slowly, and then not so slowly, things started shifting.

I wasn’t fixed overnight. That’s not how this works. But for the first time I felt like someone was actually looking at me….not at a chart, not at a checklist….and trying to understand what was happening underneath.

That feeling changed everything.

I started talking about it. Sharing pieces of my journey. And something kept happening.

Friends would come to me privately.

I’ve been dealing with something similar. I don’t know where to start. I feel so alone in this.

Over and over. The same words. The same exhaustion underneath them.

At the same time I was having conversations with practitioners — genuinely brilliant people doing work that was changing lives — who were struggling to reach the people who needed them. Not because their work wasn’t good. Because there was no real infrastructure connecting them to the right people. No trusted bridge between the person lying awake at 2am Googling their symptoms and the practitioner who actually had answers.

I kept standing in the middle of that gap thinking: someone should build this.

And then, eventually: why isn’t that someone me?

I didn’t launch a company. I hosted a walk.

February 2025, San Diego. A walk and talk — people showing up, moving together, talking about their health and their lives and the things they were navigating. Nothing polished. Nothing scaled. Just people doing their wellness journey together instead of alone.

That was the first step. Small, real, in person. And it told me everything I needed to know about whether this was worth building.

WellthyWell is what came next.

A social wellness club — IRL and online — where people come together through curated events, expert education, and vetted wellness resources. Where the gap between great practitioners and the people who need them gets smaller. Where “I feel so alone in this” stops being the default experience of trying to take care of yourself.

We’re active in San Diego and Dallas. We’re just getting started.

I traded a stable career and a version of success that made sense on paper for this. Not because I had it all figured out. Because I’d spent too many years watching what happens when people navigate their health alone and not be connected to the resources they need to be — in my family, in my own body, in every friend who came to me whispering me too — and I couldn’t un-see the gap.

If you’ve ever walked out of a doctor’s appointment feeling more lost than when you walked in — if you’ve ever cried in a parking lot and then quietly figured it out yourself — this was built for you.

You don’t have to do this alone anymore.

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Sending you so much love and I’m grateful you are here!

xoxo,

Aly

I knew for years I was going to leave corporate.

Not in a vague, someday-maybe way. In a quiet, certain, it’s-only-a-matter-of-time way. The kind of knowing you carry around with you for so long it starts to feel like a secret you’re keeping from yourself.

I just kept waiting for a version of “ready” that was never going to come.

For ten years I built a career in accounting and business development — EY, consulting, the whole trajectory. Smart work. Good money. A path that made sense on paper and to everyone around me. My goal while in college was to leave with a “safe and stable” job, and that is what I did.

I like to say that I fell into accounting even though I knew I would not be in it for the long haul.

After two years at EY (Big-4), I moved to a boutique consulting firm (Embark) that is based out of Dallas, TX. It was new, it was fun (or at least as fun as it could be with it being accounting ya know). AND it allowed me to pursue interests in the wellness space outside of work.

For 6 years I was building on the evenings and the weekends. First on social media, then group fitness coaching, 1:1 coaching and then WellthyWell after moving my life across the country to San Diego (more to come on that leap).

WellthyWell is a wellness media and community brand I’d been quietly growing in my mind for years because I kept seeing a gap nobody was filling. For the last year it was a side hustle that started to become something…..just not something that paid my rent yet.

That last part matters. Because this isn’t a story about having a plan.

When I left in February 2026, WellthyWell was barely profitable (despite many people thinking the opposite). My content wasn’t fully monetized. I didn’t have a clean financial model that said: yes, go, the numbers work (despite everyone and I mean everyone saying I should wait for that).

I had a direction. I had something I’d been building for years. I had a deep, bone-level certainty that I was supposed to be doing this.

And I had no real proof it would pay off.

I left anyway.

Not because I was reckless. Because I finally got honest about what staying was costing me and the bill had gotten too high.

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from spending your days doing work that doesn’t fit who you are anymore.

It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly accumulates…..in the Sunday scaries dread, in the meetings that feel like they’re happening to someone else, in the growing distance between the person you are at work and the person you actually want to be, in the multiple rounds of burnout.

I’d been feeling it for years. I just kept negotiating with it.

One more year. Once I hit this milestone. Once WellthyWell gets to X. Once I have more saved. Once I’m more ready.

The goalpost kept moving because the real issue wasn’t the goalpost. The real issue was that I already knew. I’d known for a long time.

Leaving without financial certainty is terrifying in a way that’s hard to explain until you’re in it. It’s not just the money. It’s the identity. The structure. The coworkers who had become friends.

The answer to so what do you do? that you’ve had for a decade and suddenly don’t anymore. The changing the LinkedIn.

But here’s what I’ve learned in the months since:

The fear doesn’t mean you made the wrong decision.

Sometimes it means you finally made the right one.

I’m building WellthyWell full time now. I’m creating content that actually reflects how I want to live. I’m figuring out the revenue piece in real time, with no guarantees and a lot of faith in the direction.

And I’m writing all of it here.

The Wellthy Wave is where this story lives. The honest version, not the highlight reel. The nervous system stuff, the identity shifts, the financial reality of betting on yourself, the slow and sometimes terrifying process of building something aligned.

I am truly riding the wave and I’m bringing you along with me.

If you’re sitting on something you’ve been building quietly or you’ve been waiting for a version of ready that keeps not arriving, this space is for you.

You already know. You’ve probably known for a while.

The only question is how much longer you’re going to wait.

— Aly

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to read it. And subscribe below — I’ll be here every week, writing the parts of this journey that don’t usually make it to the feed.

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