Wellbeing is earned, not purchased.
011 | Hue's Cues: your weekly dose of inspiration and insights for your brain, mind, body, and soul.
The body keeps a faithful record: emotional, mental, physical; stored with precision.
You’ll wear it on your skin, your posture, even the way you move through a room. It’s energy, radiance, and it’s merit too.
Wellbeing cannot be purchased or outsourced. No hack, neither a shortcut has the final world. Only hard work, discipline, and consistency over a lifetime do.
The research is unambiguous: what presents as crisis in our forties, or sometimes in our thirties, is never sudden. It was an accumulation of a million small choices made long before the moment things started to announce themselves.
Which is why the most important shift isn’t a new protocol. It’s perspective and also lifestyle. It’s the small unglamorous and unseen daily choices that compound steadily that matter most.
The thought I keep returning to is: how you choose to live today is the greatest investment in how you’ll feel tomorrow.
I only write about the small things that do big things for your health and creativity. If you haven’t yet, subscribe free or become a patron to my mission. I’m in!
“Maybe we don’t need to wait until death to appreciate simple moments in life.” Palliative care physician Luyi Kathy Zhang takes to the TED stage with a question that’s quiet yet feels urgent to contemplate. It transported me back to a mini-series I did on Instagram years ago: Simple Pleasures. A small, deliberate effort to notice and savor the everyday joys I’d otherwise zoom past. It was how I trained my brain to find delight in the ordinary everyday; and perhaps, a ritual that’s overdue for a comeback.
How we see ourselves is the most powerful signal to how we show up in the world. Science agrees: self-affirmation is one way that can help show meaningful improvements to self-perception and overall well-being; with effects that are immediate and lasting. On the days when writing three pages of morning pages (thanks Julia Cameron!) feels like an impossible task, I nourish my mind with a handful of handwritten declarations: “I am generous. I am kind. I am capable.” Always leaning on uplifting and hopeful words. It’s a small act towards myself that’s monumental in self-returns.
Lately I’ve been stimulating my body with resistance bands. Exploring angles and time under tension as new modalities, because friends, muscle is complex. Contracting in a variety of directions, while it may operate just as one layer within the remarkable system that is our human body, it’s vocabulary for motion is multi-dimensional: isotonic, dynamic, eccentric are some of it. But it’s also about lengthening, shortening, and stimulating the layers of muscle tissue and fibers within.
Time with girlfriends is the rest and recovery for my soul. No performance. No competition. Just love and shared values. Mutual respect isn’t just the vibe, it’s the entire energy radiating and being exchanged between one another.
Only once Harry Styles departed the boyband that made him famous, where his second album Fine Line graced me with, a rare song I love to sing-a-long to: Watermelon Sugar. But it was post my two second chance eye lock with the star himself (in the flesh!), walking by Little Nap Coffee Stand by Yoyogi Park Tokyo that won me over. True story. I’ve since become a Styles fan, and his latest album has been on repeat this week. Apeture and American Girls are the irresistable chart toppers simply too good to ignore.
Sometimes an object you didn’t know needed reinventing arrives: Kelly Wearstler Timbra piano, created in collaboration with contemporary British piano maker Edelweiss proves us otherwise. The birchwood grain, preserved in nature’s unmistakable imprint, front and centre, on an instrument generations old is what I admire most. Classical in form, yet radical in finish. In an era like today, it’s a comforting reminder that nature and human hands has always had a hand in it.
Here’s an all natural electrolyte drink to keep you hydrated: coconut water, half a lime or lemon, and a touch of Manuka or high-grade honey. A pinch of pink salt is optional, but honestly, considering the sodium that’s circulating in most of our meals it’s unnecessary. Adding more sodium may only do us more harm than good.
“When you're truly connected to what you're building, structure stops feeling like sacrifice. You naturally stop spending time on things that don't align. You stop leaking energy. And that's what makes everything else possible.” — source, Kelly Wreastler