Burnout prevention this month looked less like a checklist and more like a practice of presence. Of staying in my body, choosing beauty deliberately and often, and making small decisions in favor of my own care, even when grief made everything feel slightly muffled and far away.
What May taught me is that grief and joy are not opposites. They can coexist. Sometimes they sit in the same afternoon. I can be standing in a garden surrounded by wildflowers and horses and feel more grounded than I have all year (true story!), while also feeling my dying’s dogs, absence approaching like a tide I cannot stop. That isn’t a contradiction. I suppose it’s what it means to be a person paying attention.
So here is what I did in May to prevent burnout and keep it at bay.
May this list find you wherever you are.
MAY 2026
1. I Bought a Vibration Plate and Became Annoyingly Evangelical About It
I am not someone who buys into every wellness product that cycles through my Instagram feed. I have enough restraint for that. But when I kept seeing Melissa Wood Health using a vibration plate and it was not some expensive luxury version, just a straightforward one she clearly actually used, I thought to myself…hmm lets give it a shot!
I ordered the LifePro vibration plate during a sale and it arrived feeling completely unremarkable! And then I started using it every single morning and it became one of the more quietly impactful things I have added to my routine in a long time. It gets me back into my body before my day starts. It moves something. I cannot be more specific than that, but if you have ever felt like your nervous system needs a literal SHAKE before it will cooperate with you, you will understand immediately what I mean.
My husband, who views most of my wellness purchases with patient skepticism and not infrequently the expression of a man watching a very expensive mistake unfold in slow motion, tried it once and now uses it regularly! That is a high endorsement!
COST:$199
Booked a Last-Minute Lymphatic Facial at Spencer's Spa Because of a Promotional Text Message
I almost never read promotional text messages. I have exactly the right amount of friction built into my life to protect me from that particular category of impulse spending, which is to say that my marketing background makes me deeply suspicious of urgency tactics. I know what they are doing. I am usually immune.
And yet. One afternoon Spencer’s Spa sent a text offering fifty percent off a treatment if I booked within the hour, and something in me said yes before the skeptical part of my brain could object. I went that afternoon for a lymphatic facial. The space was beautiful. Calming in the specific way that feels intentional rather than decorative, the kind of room that clearly exists to make you feel like the whole world has slowed down and will still be there when you get back.
What I remembered lying there is how rarely I give myself permission to simply receive care without simultaneously planning something else inside my head. No thinking. No strategizing. Just two hours of being completely unavailable to anything except the room I was in. That is its own practice, and I needed the reminder.
COST: $125 (Promo Sale) // $229 (Full Price)
3. I Finally Read Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara
I read Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara this month and it arrived at exactly the right moment, which is to say I probably could have read it a year ago and not gotten what I got from it now.
Guidara co-owned Eleven Madison Park during the years it was ranked the best restaurant in the world, and the book is essentially an argument that excellence in any field is not a technical problem. His central thesis is that the greatest thing you can do for another person is make them feel genuinely, specifically, completely seen. Not served. The distinction sounds minor until you sit with it, and then you realize it is actually everything. There is a story in the book about a table of tourists who mentioned offhand that they had never had a New York City hot dog. His team sent someone out mid-meal to get them one! It became their most memorable course. That is the whole philosophy in a single moment.
What landed for me, reading this during a month of grief and transition and the vulnerability that comes with building something new in public, was the reminder that unreasonable care is not an operational strategy. It is a value system. It requires choosing to pay that level of attention to the people in front of you even when it costs you something extra. What I am trying to do with BURNT is not so different. The whole thing only works if people feel actually seen.
COST: $16.00
I Went to the Hurvin Anderson Exhibition at the Tate
While in London I visited the Hurvin Anderson exhibition at the Tate and LOVED it. Anderson is a British-Jamaican painter whose work deals in spaces defined by absence. His most iconic paintings are swimming pools, still and luminous and nearly empty, bodies of water that feel suspended between belonging and exclusion, between leisure and a longing that never quite resolves. They are paintings about what it means to be a Black man observing spaces that were not historically built for him, rendered in a visual language so serene and gorgeous that the tension lives just beneath the surface rather than announcing itself from the top. What I responded to most was the restraint. Anderson is looking at these spaces and asking you to look with him. Its brilliant
COST: £ 18.00
I Saw Proof on Broadway With My Friend Brooke
I went to see Proof on Broadway with my friend Brooke and I am so glad I did. David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play follows Catherine, the daughter of a recently deceased and mathematically brilliant but mentally ill father, as she navigates her grief, her own uncertain relationship to genius and sanity, and a mathematical proof that may represent either her greatest achievement or the beginning of her unraveling.
I have always believed that the THEATER does something that no screen can replicate. There is an electricity in a room full of people watching something unfold in real time, something that bypasses your analytical brain entirely and lands somewhere older and more honest. And then there is the part where you go to the theater with a friend you love and sit in the dark together and laugh and go quiet and feel things and walk out into the night and talk about it. That is not supplemental to the performance. That is the whole point. Burnout does not stand a chance against it.
COST: Tickets start at $80.00
I Stayed at Les Sources de Cheverny Instead of the Wedding Venue and It Was One of the Best Decisions I Made All Month
My husband and I traveled to France for a wedding in May. The wedding venue, it turned out, did not have air conditioning. Temperatures hovered around 92F degrees . In a different season of my life I would have pushed through staying here without a second thought. I would have sweated through formal clothes and told myself it was fine, even when it wasn’t. But this year is different. I am carrying grief in a way that has quietly but significantly reduced my capacity for optional discomfort. I simply do not have the same tolerance I once did for choosing suffering when I do not have to.
So my husband and I checked into Les Sources de Cheverny, approximately 30 minutes away from the wedding venue, and drove in each evening for the events. I am happy to report, this hotel is…MAGIC. It felt like stepping into a completely different relationship with time. Les Sources de Cheverny is deeply committed to regenerative farming. Horses, chickens, gardens, wildflowers, landscapes that felt grown rather than designed. Nothing about it was overworked or performative. It was just BEAUTIFUL in the most simple, classic and quiet way.
Our 3 nights there were special. We biked. We eat. We laughed. We explored and slowed down in ways that are genuinely difficult to manufacture back in New York. I came home reminded that we have far more agency over our environments than we tend to exercise. It was a burnout-free heaven.
COST: Rooms Start at €380
I Spoke With an Animal Medium and It Helped More Than I Expected
I am, at my core, a skeptical person. I also believe in things I cannot fully explain, which makes me a spiritual person too, and those two things coexist inside me without much conflict. I lean toward evidence and I also light candles and say intentions out loud and mean every word of them. I hold both!
This month I spoke with an animal medium named Marsha Lynn, recommended by a dear friend Olivia. My dog, Lou is dying. She has been with me for 14. I adopted her during my senior year of college and she quite literally changed the course of my life. She has moved with me, grieved with me, celebrated with me. She has been a constant in a life that has changed in nearly every other way imaginable. I have been in grief counseling. I have been in therapy. I have done everything I know how to do and I am still, in the most honest possible terms, not ready.
Some readers will think this sounds like exactly the kind of thing a person does when desperation outpaces logic. Others who have loved an animal deeply and are navigating anticipatory grief will not think that at all. They will understand immediately why, at a certain point, the question is no longer whether something sounds rational and entirely whether it helps you survive the weight of what you are carrying.
This helped. Marsha is a legend. That is all I need to say about it.
COST: $75
I Started Looking Up Again
This one requires no booking, no purchase, and no scheduling. I just started looking up.
For stretches of May, especially moving through New York, I put my phone in my pocket and walked with music in my ears and paid attention. To buildings I have passed hundreds of times without once registering. To the specific quality of late spring light on a particular block. To the strange, briefly beautiful moments that exist constantly in this city and vanish completely if you are not looking for them.
One of those moments was discovering Facade Foundation, a nonprofit that transforms scaffold netting across New York City into large-scale public art installations. I came across a piece by Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, whose work stopped me completely on the sidewalk. Standing there looking up at something that fun and that unexpected, in a city that rarely pauses for anything, felt like a small, private gift the city was handing me specifically because I had finally slowed down enough to receive it.
Attention is a practice. It atrophies when you stop using it. The city did not change. I did. That is the entire point!
COST: Free
Preventing burnout is never one sweeping gesture or one radical decision. It is the vibration plate at 8AM in the morning. The last-minute facial you almost talked yourself out of. The choice to stay somewhere beautiful rather than white-knuckle through something you did not have to endure. The conversation with the medium that you cannot fully explain but will not apologize for! The painting in the museum. The play in the dark with an old friend. The book that finds you at exactly the right moment. The city, finally seen again after too long looking down. Layered over time, these things change the tone of your life.
THANK YOU MAY.
JUNE, HERE WE GO. <3
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