My gentle wellness shelf — what I actually take and why

I want to open this with a very clear statement: I am not a health professional. I have no qualifications in nutrition, medicine, or anything adjacent to either. What I'm about to share is not advice — it's personal reflection, in the same spirit as everything else I write here. If anything on my shelf interests you, please do your own research and talk to someone who is actually qualified. I mean that sincerely, not as a disclaimer I'm tacking on reluctantly.

With that said — people have asked about my wellness shelf. I mention it occasionally in passing in videos, never really dwell on it, and the questions keep coming. So here is the honest version: what's on it, how it got there, what I've actually noticed (which is less dramatic than you might expect), and the most important wellness thing in my life that doesn't come in a bottle at all.

How I approach this stuff

Slowly and sceptically. That's the short version. I've watched the wellness world from a distance for a few years and what I've noticed is that it has a very particular rhythm: something gets declared essential, it's everywhere for six months, and then quietly it retreats and something else takes its place. There's always a new protocol, a new supplement, a new morning routine that is going to be the one that changes everything. I don't think there is a one that changes everything. I think health is deeply individual and deeply boring compared to how it gets packaged online.

I also notice that I have a particular scepticism about things that are sold to me specifically as a creator — "support your gut for clearer skin," "reduce brain fog with X," "natural energy without the crash" — because I spend enough time on the internet to recognise the difference between a genuinely useful product and a product that has been very cleverly aimed at the anxieties of people who spend too much time sitting at a laptop. I am not immune to this marketing. I am, however, trying to stay aware of it.

My rule, such as it is: I only add something if it's been recommended by a source I trust (usually a doctor or a registered nutritionist), if it has some reasonable evidence behind it, and if I'm prepared to take it consistently for long enough to notice anything. I try one thing at a time. I am extremely willing to abandon something if it doesn't seem to be doing anything. I'm not precious about it.

The thing I've had for three months — and notice when I skip it

I've been taking a magnesium supplement in the evenings. That's the one thing I've had consistently long enough to feel like I have any data on it at all.

When I first heard about magnesium — from a video by an actual nutritionist I follow, not from a brand sponsorship — I was the appropriate amount of sceptical. Magnesium is one of those things that everyone seems to think they're deficient in and that gets credited with everything from better sleep to reduced anxiety, and in my experience when something is credited with everything it usually does none of those things very well.

And I can't tell you that it cured anything. What I can tell you is that on the mornings after I've taken it the previous night, I tend to wake up and feel like the quality of my sleep was slightly deeper. And on the mornings where I forgot to take it, or didn't take it because I got distracted, something feels slightly different — harder to name than that, more a vague absence than a clear symptom. It could be placebo. It genuinely could be. But after three months of noticing the same pattern I've stopped second-guessing it and accepted that, for me, this thing seems to do something. Please talk to someone qualified before you add anything to your own routine. That caveat is real.

The thing I tried and abandoned — because honesty matters more than a tidy narrative

Sea moss gel. I tried it for about six weeks because it was everywhere in my algorithm and several people I follow were enthusiastic about it and I read enough about the potential benefits to feel like it warranted a fair experiment.

The topic of when to take sea moss gel, how to take it, what to mix it with — I went deep on this, watched many videos, read several articles. I added it to my morning smoothie for six weeks exactly. I can't tell you I noticed anything. Not nothing dramatic — literally nothing I could attribute to it with any confidence. My skin didn't change. My energy didn't change. My sleep, which is the thing I always notice most, was exactly as it had been before. Six weeks felt like a long enough trial to me, and at the end of it I put the jar in the back of the fridge, and I haven't thought about it much since.

I'm including this because I think the honest version of a "what's on my wellness shelf" post has to include the things that didn't make the cut, otherwise it's just an advertisement for a curated list of things I'm endorsing. Not everything works for everyone. Some things work for nobody. The willingness to try something and then decide it isn't for you is, I'd argue, the most sensible approach to this whole category.

The morning ritual — what the shelf actually feels like

My morning, when it goes the way I want it to, has a quiet texture to it. I get up before I have to. I make tea — properly, loose leaf in the little clay pot — and I stand at the kitchen counter while it steeps and that's when I do the shelf.

Currently it's very modest: a vitamin D capsule (I live in England, the sun is a rumour for six months of the year, this one feels non-negotiable), a probiotic I've been trying for the past month and haven't formed an opinion on yet, and my water. That's it. I take them and I drink a full glass of water and I go and sit with my tea and my journal and I try not to look at my phone for the first half hour.

The ritual of it matters as much as the contents. It's a small, contained, tactile act — the particular taste of the capsule, the cold of the water, the immediate transition to the tea — and it signals something to my morning brain about intention. I'm not claiming the supplements do the heavy lifting there. I'm saying the ritual of having a morning shelf, of doing this small deliberate thing before the day has any demands in it, has become a kind of anchor. I'd keep the ritual even if I changed everything on the shelf.

The most important thing on my wellness shelf that isn't in a bottle

You can have the best supplement stack in the world and it will not do what eight hours of sleep does. Nothing will. Sleep is the base layer that makes everything else possible.

I've been trying to be more serious about this for the last few months. Not perfectly — there are still nights where I'm editing too late and the lamp is on and I'm telling myself I'll just finish this one thing — but as a genuine priority rather than as something I sacrifice whenever something else demands the time.

The things I've noticed from consistently sleeping enough are more visible to me than anything on the shelf. My mood is more stable. My decision-making is less erratic. The morning feels like mine rather than like something I'm surviving. I feel present in the afternoon instead of managing a fog. None of this is revolutionary information; we all know that sleep matters. But knowing it and actually organising your life around it are different things, and I've found the organising harder than the knowing, which I suspect is a fairly universal experience.

So that's my wellness shelf. It's small, it's modest, it contains things I've tried and abandoned, and it's underpinned by the entirely unsexy foundation of trying to go to bed at a reasonable hour. If you take anything from this post, let it be that your health is personal — borrow ideas from wherever feels right, apply them gently, give yourself permission to let go of anything that isn't serving you, and please, please talk to someone qualified before you add anything you're unsure about. This is just what worked for me, on the days it works. That's all.

The noise and how I try to filter it

I want to say one last thing about the wellness content landscape, because I think it's relevant and I don't see enough honest acknowledgement of it.

Wellness content is one of the most aggressively commercial categories on the internet. Behind almost every supplement recommendation, every "what I take every morning" video, every routine post, there is a financial relationship of some kind — affiliate code, brand deal, gifted product — that may or may not be disclosed as clearly as it should be. I'm not saying everyone who makes wellness content is dishonest; I don't believe that. But I think consuming it critically is genuinely important, because the incentive to present something as life-changing is always present when someone benefits from you believing it.

The way I try to filter it: I look for creators who have actually stopped taking things, who share the failures alongside the finds, who are transparent about their relationships with brands. The willingness to say "I tried this and it didn't work for me" is, in my opinion, the clearest signal that someone is being honest with you rather than curating a story. The honesty is the marker. If everything on someone's shelf is working brilliantly all the time, I become sceptical. That's not what personal health looks like for any real person I've ever met.

I also try to remember that the wellness industry profits from the belief that you are currently not well enough. Every protocol, every stack, every morning routine exists in a space that has first established the premise that your existing morning routine is insufficient. I try to hold that lightly — to borrow ideas without accepting the premise that I'm fundamentally lacking something a supplement could fix. My health is mostly fine. Sleep, movement, food I actually like, enough light, enough rest, some time outside. The shelf is a supplement to that, in the literal sense: a supplement, not a foundation. The foundation is older and simpler and free.