Small things that quietly saved my brain this year

I am not a wellness influencer. I want to be extremely clear about that before we go any further.

I don’t have a supplement stack. I don’t journal with a specific pen at a specific time. I haven’t done a single thing that would make a good Instagram Reel — and trust me, nothing on this list photographs well.

But this year was a lot. For a lot of us. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a handful of tiny, almost ridiculous things kept me from completely losing the plot. So here they are.

Does it have to be a big thing to actually help?

It doesn’t. That’s kind of the whole point.

We’ve been sold this idea that fixing your mental state requires a full lifestyle overhaul — new gym, new routine, new you, new you but make it a brand partnership. And look, I get why that content exists. It’s aspirational. It’s pretty. But it’s also completely useless when you’re in the middle of a genuinely hard stretch and you can’t even make yourself a real lunch.

Small things are underrated. Small things are available when big things aren’t.

The specific playlist thing

Not a vibe playlist. Not “lo-fi beats to study/chill to.” A very specific playlist I built myself of songs that existed before anything hard happened.

There’s something about music that your brain tied to a neutral time that just… resets the temperature a little. I don’t know the science behind it — though researchers have found that familiar music activates the brain’s reward system in a way that genuinely lowers cortisol — but I know it works for me. Fifteen songs. Shuffle off. That’s the whole move.

If you don’t have a playlist like this, make one today. Not tomorrow.

What about the stuff everyone tells you to try?

Some of it’s fine. Meditation apps — fine, if that’s your thing. Gratitude journaling — sure, good for some people. But what nobody tells you is that when you’re in survival mode, “good for some people” doesn’t mean anything. You need the thing that’s good for you, specifically, right now, when you’re running on four hours of sleep and a gas station coffee.

For me, that thing was not yoga. It was making a very specific soup on Sunday nights. Every Sunday. Non-negotiable.

The soup itself isn’t the point. The ritual is the point. Giving your brain something reliable when everything else feels sideways — that’s the move.

The embarrassingly simple habit I almost didn’t admit to

I started making my bed. I know. I KNOW.

But here’s the thing — I don’t make it because of some productivity guru who told me it would change my life. I make it because walking into a room with one thing already done correctly feels like winning a very small, very sad argument with entropy. And sometimes that’s enough.

The American Psychological Association has noted that a sense of control over your physical environment directly affects stress response. So there’s actually something to the “one small done thing” theory. But what do I know? I just wanted my pillows straight.

Getting off the phone — but not in the dramatic way

I didn’t delete Instagram. I didn’t do a digital detox. I’m not doing that.

What I did was stop keeping my phone on the nightstand. That’s it. It’s in another room now when I sleep. The result was that I stopped starting every single morning by immediately reading something upsetting. Revolutionary concept, apparently.

Small barrier. Big difference in how the first twenty minutes of my day felt. I don’t think I’d have believed it if someone told me, but here we are.

Is “permission to do less” an actual strategy?

Yes. A hundred percent yes.

Somewhere this year I stopped treating rest like something I had to earn. That shift was quiet but it mattered more than almost anything else on this list. Not every evening needs to be productive. Not every weekend needs an agenda. Sometimes the brain-saving move is just sitting somewhere and not doing a single thing of value, and letting that be completely okay.

The hardest part is that we’ve been conditioned to call that lazy. It isn’t lazy. It’s maintenance.

The snack thing — and yes, I’m serious

I started keeping something I actually liked eating at arm’s reach during the part of the day when everything gets hard. Not a “healthy snack” chosen out of guilt. Something I genuinely wanted.

Turns out when your blood sugar tanks and you’re already overwhelmed, being mildly hungry on top of it is just an accelerant. This is not a revolutionary nutritional discovery. This is just me admitting that I sometimes forgot to eat real food and then wondered why everything felt terrible.

Fix the obvious thing first. Repeat as needed.

The part where I tell you what actually connected all of it

None of these things are impressive. Not one of them would make a before-and-after post. And honestly, that’s exactly why they worked — because I could actually do them on a bad day, not just on a good one.

If you’re looking for the thing that’s going to quietly save your brain, it’s probably not the complicated thing. It’s probably something you’ve dismissed as too small to matter. In my old post about stuff that sounds dumb but isn’t, I basically landed on this same conclusion without realizing it. The common thread is always the same: low effort, repeatable, actually available to you right now.

That’s the whole bar. Clear it however you can.

And if you’re in a stretch where even the small things feel hard — that’s real, and worth paying attention to. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline exists if things are heavier than a playlist can fix. No judgment, just worth knowing it’s there.

For what it’s worth, I also wrote up some thoughts on the stuff I stopped doing this year — which is honestly just as important as the stuff I started.

This isn’t a wellness list. It’s a survival log.

The things that saved my brain this year were small and quiet and kind of embarrassing to write about publicly, which is exactly why I did it. Because I think a lot of us are out here doing our tiny weird rituals and our specific playlists and our Sunday soups and not admitting any of it because it doesn’t look like the content.

But what do I know? It worked.

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