A while back, Lucy McBride interviewed me on her podcast, Beyond the Prescription. She’s a primary care physician with 25 years in practice, and she writes about medicine the way I try to write about parenting—with honesty, evidence, and a refusal to flatten complexity into a tidy answer.
Her newsletter, Are You Okay?, has over 40,000 subscribers on Substack. Her book, Beyond the Prescription: A Doctor’s Guide to Taking Charge of Your Health, comes out today from Simon & Schuster. If the post below is any indication, it’s going to be worth your time.
Today she’s writing about something particularly timely for parents: how we can use back-to-school as our own health reset by subtracting rather than adding, so we don’t fail before the first fall soccer game even begins. I love this piece. I hope you do too.
The Anti-Reset Reset, by Lucy McBride, MD
Every year around back-to-school, I see women who understandably abandoned their health goals during the summer—trading protein for popsicles and gym routines for gin and tonics—and they are determined to “reset” come fall. They come in with the fresh energy of the new school year, recommitting to regular exercise, a no-sugar diet, 8 hours of sleep, and daily meditation. But within a few weeks, the wheels have fallen off the school bus. They’re quietly defeated because the list was never going to survive contact with real life.
I get it. Back-to-school is a more apt fresh-start moment than January for most families—the calendar resets when kids scurry back into classrooms. The problem isn’t the impulse to get healthy. It’s what we tend to do with it: treat a clean slate as an invitation to optimize, when what most of us need is to pause and possibly to do less.
So here’s the anti-reset reset. Not ten things to add, but ten ways to think differently about the season ahead.
1. Subtract before you add. The September reflex is to pile on. But before you take on a single new habit, name one thing you’re going to put down—the social media feeds that drain your energy, the urge to say ‘yes’ before thinking it through. A fresh start works by making room, not by filling every inch of it.
2. Get curious about what you’re reaching for. The second glass of wine or the 3 pm fistful of whatever’s in the pantry. The typical advice is to cut these out. I’d start somewhere gentler: notice what these habits are doing for you. A coping tool that you’ve haven’t looked at honestly is one you can’t change. Ask yourself what feeling emerges right before you reach for the thing—is it boredom? hunger? anxiety? a need for comfort?—and explore whether there’s something else you could do to more effectively meet it.
3. Reclaim the smallest version of what makes you feel like yourself. Instead of being your own drill sergeant or expecting overnight transformation, ask instead what you let slip over the summer that left you feeling worse—the morning walk, eight hours of sleep, the friend you keep meaning to call. Then start by reclaiming just ten minutes for that. The smallest sustainable thing will always outperform the ambitious plan you abandon by October.
4. Bring one question to your next appointment—not a symptom list. Booking your annual physical is a great idea. But the visit is only as good as the question you walk in with. Before you go, ask yourself: what’s the one thing I’ve been avoiding bringing up? The fatigue, the mood, the drinking, the thing that feels too small or too embarrassing to mention. The most important data about your health rarely shows up on a lab report. It’s the thing you almost didn’t say out loud.
5. Drop the “good moms worry” math. Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the idea that worry is a form of love—that if we’re not anxious about our kids, we’re not doing the job. Your child’s health does not run on your anxiety. It also suffers when your basic needs aren’t being met. The reset that actually moves the needle here isn’t a new green smoothie for the family. It’s noticing your internal narrative and considering that a grounded parent may be the most therapeutic thing in the house.
6. Stop letting one number define your health. The scale, the step count, the sleep score, the ring that grades your night. Pick one metric you’ve been checking compulsively and stop for a month. Then notice how you actually feel: your energy, your mood, your patience at 5 pm. Data is useful, but health that’s outsourced to a number on a screen isn’t really yours.
7. Beware the wellness rabbit hole You can’t just put the phone down. Your kid’s soccer schedule, the class group chat, the carpool thread. They all live there. So this isn’t about screen-time discipline. It’s about what happens once you’re in. You open the app to check the practice time, tap a strength-training video on the way out, and you feel inspired. Then the algorithm serves another, and another, and twenty minutes later you’re three creators deep and quietly sure you’re doing all of it wrong. That descent is the thing to watch. Be mindful of the content you’re consuming, in the same way you’re careful about food and alcohol. Here’s a test I give patients: catch the moment a feed stops informing you and starts making you feel behind. That’s your cue to close it, not because the advice was wrong, but because you’ve scrolled into the abyss of aspirational advice.
8. Fix the thing that’s actually stealing your sleep. The internet will sell you a $300 ring and a fourteen-step wind-down routine. Skip it, and ask the harder question: what’s the one thing actually keeping you up? More often than not, it isn’t a supplement you’re missing—it’s the worry you’ve been avoiding all day that finally gets the floor at 11pm. Address that, and you’ve done more for your sleep than any gadget.
9. You don’t have to have it all handled by October. The reset-industrial-complex sells transformation on a deadline: new you by fall, fixed by the holidays. But health isn’t a problem you solve by a date on the calendar. It’s a process you live. Pick the one change that matters most this season and let the rest wait. Doing one thing well beats doing ten things anxiously and none of them past Halloween.
10. Ask yourself the only reset question that matters. Before you commit to any of it, ask: what am I actually seeking? Is it health—or is it control, certainty, or relief from anxiety wearing the trappings of “health”? Naming the difference changes everything that comes next. After 25 years of seeing patients, here’s what I’ve come to believe: health isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about asking better questions—of yourself, and of the people responsible for your care.
That’s the reset worth making this September.
You can order Lucy’s new book here.
Did you know you can now watch me latest conversations on YouTube? Search “Raising Good Humans Podcast”, hit subscribe and like, and stay all the way through — it makes the algorithm very happy, and so do you. So grateful for this community.
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