I mentioned in my debut Substack that I had fallen for the smart ring hype and tracked down a used version on eBay saving some money and the import duty as this one only ships from the US. Much to my relief/surprise it was in full working order. The focus being less on up your exercise achievement but how to balance activity with rest and restoration. Key for me as a defining part of my adult life has been pushing my energy limits to the absolute limit and crashing and burning as a result. These days as I manage my health, diet and lifestyle infinitely better I am still prone to overdoing it on a daily basis.

This, in a way, is a lovely thing because we live somewhere that calls you to the outdoors and its many jobs and things to do, but still I am not great at managing myself and sometime find myself at 10-11am not having had breakfast having lost myself in one thing or another or pushing my way to a late lunch running my battery well into the red. And for some reason this long rainy cold start to the year has seen it all get a little more off course than usual.

You know when the entirety of your small family unit (husband and 11-year-old) are pleading with you to breakfast/lunch/take a nap that things need correcting. So of course I decided that a teched-up heavily marketed smart ring was the answer, ha.

To my surprise it has been brilliant so far. Why? Measuring my sleep quality and length has led to me finally breaking up the set-in-stone routine of a daily glass of red wine as I was able to see it was preventing me getting the deep sleep portion I needed – I’ve be toying with and attempting this for nearly 3 years now. It has also convinced me to allow myself a much earlier bedtime which sounds silly I know – for some innane reason I had decreed that I could/should not sleep before 11pm – now I am happily getting ready for bed earlier and earlier and sometimes even asleep by 10pm, unheard of to a late reading, late watching devotee.

And Now For the Crux…

But more importantly, I could see that when my heart rate upped into stress levels I was failing to adequately counterbalance with relax and restore sessions. I noticed that even the therapeutic action of weaving or knitting or deep breathing sessions were not taking me all the way down past Relaxation to that deepest healing stated of Restoration.

And then I saw it. The day I wrote and edited my first Substack post (the first time I had really written anything with intention for a while – read a little more about this on my About page which is really just a bit of a weird hidden away catch-up tbh) my heart rate lessened long enough to put me into a state of Restoration balancing out the stress levels of the day. I couldn’t believe it. Such an eye opener. And it made me feel really sad because while I have been focussing so hard on the healing and good health these last few years, the one thing I had essentially shelved was the one thing that was clearly essential to my healing journey.

And while there are a curious litany of self-inflicted reasons as to why I haven’t been writing much these last few years – poor Internet connection and a step away from regular work for a while to Get Better – I realise now that of course writing in my life had actually started to seep away back in the days when blogging sort of died (plus reader, I am ashamed to say I shelved my failed draft attempts at novel writing around the time Gus was born) and social media apps took over – which as I also write in my About/Catch-Up page don’t suit me as well as when I write longform.

It’s niggled at me definitely, this sense that something quite big has been missing from my life but I have tried to fill it with more outdoor busy-ness, an endless list of DIY house improvements and crafting (that predictably I hope to turn into something more than just a hobby…). But it hasn’t been enough. To see on a graph that I enter a pure state of deep restoration when I write and edit is like a huge gong going off and confirmation that my inklings that something wasn’t quite right were… right.

And so finally, the stars align with one thing and another and I finding myself drafting post after post to get my restoration fix and the hope that the urge to write, which is is something that has fuelled me since a teenager, drew me into a career that started in my 20s, that by my 30s had re-formed and reshaped into something else (sort of the same, but different) and which then, with the rocky uncertainty of life and self I carelessly abandoned.

So there it is in a nutshell, a smart ring has taught me that writing (good, bad, whatever) is a key part of me – whoever and whatever that may be. And here once again it starts. Sleep too is a big part of the overall health journey, read more about my new routine here.

Ps. This post will also appear on my Substack newsletter Unspun Nuggets which you can sign up for here.