4d ago
Okay so I've been wanting to write this out for a while because my brain is full and maybe putting it here will help it make sense. I am 44. I have been staring at the supplement aisle at CVS for approximately six months. I have watched probably forty Instagram videos from women who are Very Confident about what I should be taking. I have a notes app full of things I've screenshotted and never looked at again. I have spent real money on things I took for two weeks and then forgot about. This is not a system. This is chaos with a credit card. So I decided to actually try one thing at a time and write down what I notice. Just one. Not a stack. Not a protocol. One thing. I started with vitamin D because my OBGYN mentioned my levels were low at my last physical and that felt like the most boring, least hype-adjacent place to begin. No one on Instagram is going viral about vitamin D. It felt safe from a noise perspective. What I'm tracking: sleep quality (just a rough 1-5 in my notes app each morning), how I feel around 3pm (the crash is real), and whether the low-grade anxious hum I walk around with feels any different. I'm not expecting miracles. I'm just trying to see if I notice anything after a few weeks versus the baseline I wrote down before I started. The baseline thing was actually useful. I spent three days just writing down how I felt before I changed anything, which sounds extremely boring but now I have something to compare to instead of just vibes. I'm also trying to eat actual protein at breakfast before I take anything because I kept reading that food context matters and also I was just eating half a granola bar and calling it a morning, which, no. I'm not going to tell anyone this is working or not working yet because it's been like two and a half weeks and I genuinely don't know. But I feel better about it than I did when I was buying four things at once and hoping something would stick. If anyone else is doing a one-thing-at-a-time experiment I'd love to hear how you're tracking it. Not what you're taking, just how you're keeping notes. My system is messy and I'm open to ideas. TL;DR: stopped trying to do everything at once, picked one thing, wrote down a baseline first, now actually watching for patterns instead of just hoping. will report back eventually.