March was the month I stopped procrastinating on myself. I announced to my audience that I’m launching a YouTube show (I know, I know, more on that soon), and the feeling was less cinematic than I expected. It wasn’t a triumphant moment. It was more like: okay. F*ck. I now have to do this. No more circling it, no more almost. So here we go.
The problem is I am not very good at transitions. I love change (really!), but the actual window of time when things begin to shift, I get unsettled and jittery. Even when the shifts are exciting, like announcing my show or transitioning out of my role as Interim CMO at True Food Kitchen, the uncertainty still destabilizes me in ways I'm never fully prepared for. That chapter is one I'm deeply proud of, and one I'll grieve the way you grieve anything good when it ends.
So I was sitting with a lot of restless, wired energy this month and had to ask myself something I’d never really stopped to ask before: where is this actually coming from? What am I ignoring? One thing became very clear pretty quickly. I was diagnosed with ADHD five years ago and have been in full denial about it ever since. I vehemently hate stimulants, they do not work for my body, and so the diagnosis never had anywhere to live. It just floated in the background while I kept moving. This month I finally stopped moving long enough to look at it.
Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since: successfully preventing burnout has created its own disorientation I was completely unprepared for. For years, overwork was where I put everything. The fear, the restlessness, the drive, all of it metabolized into output. Now that burnout is no longer my default, I am sitting with energy that has nowhere familiar to go. That’s not a relapse. That’s recovery doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. Figuring out what to do with that energy is its own work, and I am squarely in the middle of it.
Here’s what I did in March while I worked through it.
1. I Met With Dr. Kavitha Kolappa and She Asked Me a Question I Wasn’t Ready For
My ADHD has never expressed itself in any way that felt familiar to me based on anyone I know who has it. I am not bouncing off the walls. I am not losing my keys every day or forgetting appointments or struggling to hold a conversation. Whatever the textbook version looks like, I do not look like that. Which made it very easy to talk myself out of the diagnosis every time it came up. And honestly? I’ve been deeply annoyed by what has started to feel like a cultural overdiagnosis of ADHD, everyone suddenly claiming they have it, everyone posting on TikTok and running to their doctor for meds, and I did not want to be one of those people. I still don’t. So I just... opted out of the whole thing mentally and kept moving.
However, my denial, it turns out, has run extremely deep. Apparently what I have been doing is masking, which is when your coping mechanisms are so well developed that the symptoms don’t look like symptoms to anyone on the outside, including sometimes yourself. You just look like someone who works very hard and holds it together. Cool! Great! Exhausting, as it turns out.
This march, I decided…well I’ve had enough. And was encouraged to go see Dr. Kavitha Kolappa, from Being Health. Dr Kolappa is a psychiatrist whose entire approach is rooted in holistic care first, prescription pad somewhere much further down the list. That distinction alone was enough to make me actually show up and stay in the room. What she did that no one else had done was slow the whole thing down and ask me to genuinely consider whether what I was experiencing this month, the restlessness, the jitteriness, the wired feeling I couldn’t shake, was my ADHD running hotter than usual, or anxiety about the uncertainty I’m currently living inside? She wasn’t dismissing one in favor of the other. She was asking me to get curious instead of reactive.
Her read, and mine, is probably both. And just having that framework, being able to name what’s happening instead of white-knuckling through it, made the energy feel less like something wrong with me and more like information I could actually work with. I genuinely wish I had found a doctor like her years ago. It probably would have helped me not burn out.
COST: Varies by provider and insurance.
I Started Rubbing Magnesium Butter on My Feet Before Bed and I Will Not Apologize!
This is exactly the kind of thing a hippie woman in a linen tunic at a wellness retreat would recommend. I know this. I am telling you anyway because it works!
Magnesium deficiency is wildly common, and it shows up as exactly the things I was dealing with this month: restlessness, disrupted sleep, that low hum of physical unease you cannot quite name. Sweet Sleep Magnesium Butter goes on the soles of your feet before bed because the skin there absorbs it quickly. I’m sleeping better! My legs are not doing their anxious restless thing at 11pm. A goodnights sleep is always key to preventing burnout and this damn butter helps!
COST: $35.09
3. I Added AndFocus to My Morning Routine and Gave My Brain Some Actual Support
Im going to start off and say…I LOVE this product. My brain has been doing a lot this month. Processing a public announcement, navigating a professional transition, managing the particular cocktail of excitement and fear that comes with building something from scratch. That is a significant cognitive and emotional load and I wanted to support it with something clean and intentional rather than just adding another coffee to the pile.
AndFocus Daily Focus Supplement is a non-stimulant approach to cognitive support and I started taking it as part of my morning routine. What I will say is after taking this product, my ability to sit with tasks requiring sustained attention has felt steadier.
COST: $38
4. I Found One Podcast Episode About Focus and Listened to It an Absurd Number of Times
The episode is “Why You Can’t Focus and How to Fix It in 25 Minutes” by Daily Stoic, and what I loved about it is that it refuses to let you off the hook. It doesn’t tell you that you can’t focus because something is wrong with you. It asks you to look honestly at how you are actually living: when are you going to bed, when are you waking up, where is your phone, what does your day look like before you even sit down to do anything requiring real attention. It takes what feels like a personal failing and reframes it as a logistics problem you have the power to solve. Which is both more uncomfortable and more useful than being handed a diagnosis and a shrug.
On a month where I was genuinely questioning my own brain, this was the right thing to hear at the right time. Go listen!
COST: Free
Watch or Listen to This Episode
I Went Back to Acupuncture for the First Time in Ten Years
I genuinely do not know why I stopped going to acupuncture, nor why it took me a decade to return. Last month, I asked my community on IG to share their favorite acupuncturist in NYC and this month I finally booked with Sanu Acupuncture (Dr. Margarita Russolello), as recommended by the always amazing, Brianna Lance.
After my first session, what I quickly remembered is that acupuncture does something that nothing else in my toolkit quite replicates. It works below cognition, below the part of you that can analyze or argue or reframe. You lie there, and your body starts doing something it clearly needed to do, and by the end you begin to feel like yourself in a way that is genuinely hard to explain and very easy to feel. I already have my next appointment. I will not be waiting another ten years!
COST: $250 for extended first session // $200 following for 1 hour.
Check Sanu’s site for details.
I Read Strangers by Belle Burden and Let It Break My Heart a Little
When I’m in transition and sitting with uncertainty, I reach for books that have NOTHING to do with my industry and everything to do with what it means to be a person alive in the world. Strangers was that book this month.
Belle Burden’s memoir chronicles the sudden collapse of her twenty-year marriage during the pandemic. Betrayal, self-love, uncertainty, the specific disorientation of watching something you built your life around become unrecognizable overnight. It is heartbreaking in the way only really brilliant writing manages, where the sadness is also somehow clarifying. I read it during a month when I was already sitting with my own uncertainty and it put everything in perspective in exactly the way I needed, without being tidy or prescriptive about it. Reading something genuinely beautiful when you are anxious is an act of self-respect. It reminds you that the world is larger than your particular worry, and that other people have survived the unsurvivable.
COST: $25.67
I Bought a Nuropod and the Jury Is Still Out But I Am Committed
I had been watching the Nuropod orbit my radar for a while and March felt like the right moment to stop watching and actually try it. The premise is genuinely interesting: it works by stimulating the vagus nerve, which is the body’s main communication highway between the brain and vital organs, regulating things like heart rate, digestion, and the inflammatory response. The Nuropod sends targeted electrical signals through the vagus nerve to produce what they describe as lasting calm, consistent energy, and peak biological performance. It is the world’s most studied wearable vagus nerve stimulator, apparently.
Does it work? Honestly, I cannot tell you with certainty yet. What I can tell you is that I bought it, I am using it, and I am committed to giving it a real shot before I render any verdict. My nervous system has been through a lot this month and it deserves a fighting chance. Ask me again in a few months.
COST: $800. I know. I KNOW. It is a significant amount of money and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But I am willing to bet on my own nervous system. Updates to follow.
March was messy and electric and uncomfortable in all the specific ways that stepping into something new tends to be. I don’t have the energy figured out yet. I’m still learning what to do with drive that used to go straight into overwork and now has to find a better, more honest home.
But I didn’t burn out. And I’m building something I believe in. For right now, that is everything.
APRIL, I see you. Let’s go. <3
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