Spring wellness edit: what I kept, what I changed, what surprised me

Every season I do this thing that I've started calling the shelf audit. I stand in front of the little marble-look shelf in my bathroom and I look at everything on it with honest eyes and I ask: is any of this actually doing anything? The question sounds ruthless. It's actually quite kind. Because the things that survive the audit are the things that genuinely earn their place, and the things that don't survive get put away gently, without drama, without me having to feel like I wasted money or got something wrong.

Spring is the best time for this. Something about the energy of the season — the longer light, the warmer air coming through the slightly-open bathroom window, the general sense that things are stirring and renewing — makes it feel natural to take stock. Winter is not the time. In winter I cling to everything. But in spring I can let things go.

This is what's on my shelf right now, and the honest story behind all of it.

What survived winter

The face oil is still there. It will always be there. I've been using a few drops of it every night for almost eight months now and the ritual of it — the warmth of it pressed between my palms before it goes on my face, the slight smell of something botanical and calming — has become so deeply embedded in my nighttime routine that I genuinely couldn't tell you where the skincare ends and the winding-down begins. They're the same thing now. That's when something earns its place permanently: when it stops being a product and starts being part of the feeling.

The magnesium supplement also made it through. I started taking it in autumn on the recommendation of approximately every person on the internet and also my own body's rather insistent hints that sleep wasn't going as well as it should. I'll be honest: I didn't expect to notice anything. I'm naturally sceptical of supplements (this is just what worked for me; I'd always say talk to someone qualified if you're thinking about adding things in). But by December I was sleeping differently — a heavier, slower kind of sleep that I hadn't had in years. The magnesium is on the shelf, it has earned its space, it's staying.

The little jade roller is still there too, though I'll admit it's more ritual than result. I use it on mornings when I want my face to feel like it's been attended to. The coolness of it, the gentle pressure — it's meditative in a five-minute way. I'm not sure it does much beyond that, and I'm completely fine with that. Not everything has to be transformative. Some things just make you feel like you're being gentle with yourself, and that counts.

What I quietly put away

The collagen powder didn't make it. I want to be neutral about this rather than dramatic, because I think wellness things that don't work out often get treated like failures, and this one just... wasn't for me. It made my morning smoothie taste slightly wrong in a way I couldn't identify precisely but couldn't ignore. I kept trying to adapt around it for two months. Eventually the jar went into the back of the cupboard, and I stopped missing it the day it disappeared.

The sleep spray — the one that smelled like lavender and chamomile and promise — also went away. I'd been using it since October and had developed genuine affection for the smell of it, but I realised around February that I was relying on it in a slightly anxious way. Using it and then lying in bed waiting for it to work. Watching it work like it was a test. That's not really how relaxation should operate. I put it away and found that my sleep was no worse, which told me something useful: the ritual of the spray mattered more than the spray itself. I've replaced it with a few minutes of just lying in the dark with no expectation, which is free and arguably more effective.

Putting something away doesn't mean it failed. It means the season changed. This is a principle I've been trying to apply more broadly, and wellness is a good place to practice it.

The spring addition

I've been curious about sea moss gel for months. I kept seeing it mentioned in the kind of wellness conversations I find myself genuinely interested in, and I kept doing the thing where I almost ordered it and then got distracted and didn't. This spring I finally did.

I want to be careful about how I talk about this because I'm new to it and I'm not making any claims about what it does or doesn't do — again, personal experience only, and nothing here is medical advice. What I can tell you is that it's become part of my morning routine in a way that feels sustainable. A small amount stirred into a glass of water, first thing, before the tea. It's not unpleasant. It's not exciting. It's the kind of thing that takes a few weeks to assess, and I'm in those weeks now.

When to take sea moss gel was one of my bigger questions going in — morning or evening, with food or without — and I settled on first thing in the morning, before anything else, because that felt like the right rhythm for me. Empty stomach, before the tea, before the phone, before the day. It fits there. Whether it does anything lasting remains to be seen and I'll report back when I have more to say. For now it's on the trial shelf, which is different from the earned shelf.

The morning ritual in May

This morning the bathroom window was open for the first time this year at six-thirty, which is the clearest signal I know that spring has properly arrived. The air coming in was cool and smelled faintly of the hawthorn from somewhere down the street. The light on the marble shelf was this pale gold that only happens in May, when the sun is at that particular angle that turns everything it touches slightly warm.

I did the whole routine with the window open: the sea moss gel in water, then the face wash, then the jade roller because it was a jade-roller morning, then the face oil warmed between my palms. I had my tea waiting on the kitchen counter, and the birds were starting up outside, and the whole thing took maybe twelve minutes and felt — I want to use this word carefully — nourishing. Not productive. Not optimised. Just nourishing. Like I'd been attended to before I had to go and attend to anything else.

That quality of morning is what I'm trying to protect with all of this shelf-auditing. Not the products themselves but the space they create. The twelve minutes of being gentle with myself before the day starts asking things of me.

The things that don't live on the shelf

The most important wellness shift this spring has nothing to do with the shelf at all. It never does, really — I think the shelf is a support structure, not the main thing. The main things are the habits that don't live in a jar.

I'm walking more again. In winter I walk out of obligation and duty and the vague awareness that I should; in spring I walk because I want to, because the air is worth being in, because there's something on the path that wasn't there last week. This is a different quality of movement and it does something different to my nervous system. I come back from spring walks feeling fed rather than depleted.

• Earlier mornings — not by alarm, just by light and birdsong waking me at a more natural hour.
• More water, which I always drink more of when the weather warms and I stop relying on tea to hydrate me (tea does not count, I know).
• Longer time outside in the late afternoon, which costs nothing and adjusts my sleep in a way that no supplement has yet matched.

These are the things that come back every spring without me having to decide to start them. That tells me something. The things that feel natural to your body in a particular season are probably the things your body actually needs in that season. The shelf supports. The season leads.

Wellness is seasonal too — and the kindest thing you can do is let it evolve instead of forcing last winter's routine into May.

Next time I do the shelf audit I'll probably be in late summer, standing in front of that little marble shelf in a different quality of light, asking the same honest questions. Some things will have earned a permanent place by then. Some will have quietly revealed themselves as seasonal visitors. And something new might have arrived — I don't know yet what it'll be.

That's the part I've come to like most about the edit: you never know exactly what the next season calls for until you're in it. You just show up, look honestly at what you have, and let things be what they are. 🤍