My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
The Year I Decided to Take My Wellness Seriously
By Jason, 36 — Denver, CO
I never used the word “wellness” before last year. Not once. If someone had asked me what my self-care routine was, I would have said something like “I drink water” or “I go to bed before midnight sometimes.” I would have meant it as a joke, but it was also the truth. I was a thirty-five-year-old man running on coffee, deadlines, and the vague hope that my body would just keep working if I ignored it long enough.
It did not keep working.
The thing that finally stopped me was not dramatic. There was no collapse at my desk, no ambulance, no tearful phone call. It was a Tuesday in November, and I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of a grocery store, unable to go inside. Not because anything was wrong. Just because my body felt like it belonged to someone else. My hands were on the steering wheel and I could see them, but the signal between my brain and my fingers felt like it was traveling through mud. I sat there for twenty minutes. Then I drove home without buying anything.
I told my doctor about it a week later. She asked me when the last time was that I had done something that felt good — not productive, not necessary, not for someone else. Just good. I opened my mouth and nothing came out. She nodded like she had expected that.
The Shape of Burnout
I had been a software developer for eleven years. I was good at my job. I liked the logic of it, the way a well-written function could make something complicated feel elegant. But somewhere along the way, the logic had taken over everything. My days were optimized. My meals were efficient. My sleep was tracked by three different apps, none of which agreed with each other, and I lay awake at night thinking about the discrepancies.
My girlfriend, Adrienne, had been gently suggesting for months that I was wound too tight. She would find me at two in the morning on the couch, staring at my laptop, and she would say, “Come to bed,” and I would say, “In a minute,” and we both knew I was lying. She started leaving little things around the apartment — a candle on the bathroom counter, a bag of fancy bath salts on the edge of the tub, a bookmark in a novel she thought I would like. I noticed all of them. I used none of them.
The disconnect was not just mental. My shoulders were concrete. My jaw ached from clenching it in my sleep. I had not touched my own body with any kind of attention or care in longer than I could remember. When Adrienne touched me, I flinched — not because I did not want her to, but because the sensation startled me, like someone tapping you on the shoulder when you have forgotten other people exist.
The parking lot incident was a Tuesday. By Thursday, I had the word “burnout” written on a prescription pad, along with a referral to a therapist and a suggestion that I take some time off work. I did not take time off. I did make the therapy appointment.
Small, Embarrassing Steps
My therapist, a calm woman named Dr. Reeves who wore chunky silver rings and never seemed to blink at anything I said, told me something during our third session that I have thought about almost every day since. She said: “You treat your body like hardware. Like it is there to run the software of your mind. But it has its own intelligence, and right now it is trying to tell you something, and you have the volume turned all the way down.”
She gave me homework. Not the kind I was used to — no spreadsheets, no tracking. She told me to spend ten minutes a day doing something purely physical that had no goal. No reps, no miles, no metrics. Just sensation. She suggested starting in the shower. “Feel the water,” she said. “That is the whole assignment.”
I felt ridiculous. I stood in the shower the next morning and tried to feel the water and instead I thought about a code review I had pending and whether I should switch to a different shampoo brand based on a Reddit thread I had read. But I kept trying. And on maybe the fourth or fifth day, something happened. The water hit the back of my neck and I actually felt it — not as information, but as warmth. My shoulders dropped half an inch. I stood there for an extra three minutes, just breathing.
It was such a small thing. But I called Adrienne from the kitchen afterward and said, “I think I felt something.” She laughed and said, “Welcome back.”
Building a Different Kind of Routine
Over the next few months, I started adding things. Not all at once. Not with a plan. I bought the novel Adrienne had bookmarked and read two pages a night, which turned into ten, which turned into finishing it in a week. I used the bath salts, awkwardly, in a tub that was slightly too small for me. I lay there with my knees sticking up out of the water like two pale islands and I thought: this is what people mean when they say they are taking care of themselves. This weird, unglamorous, slightly uncomfortable thing.
Adrienne and I started what we called “Wednesday shutdown.” No screens after eight. We would cook something together — nothing ambitious, usually pasta — and then just exist in the same room without performing productivity. Sometimes we talked. Sometimes we sat on the couch and she read while I stared at the ceiling and let my brain unspool. It was the hardest thing I did all week, every week, for a while.
The physical reconnection came slower. I had spent so long treating my body as a vehicle that the idea of it as something deserving of pleasure — real, deliberate, unhurried pleasure — felt foreign. Dr. Reeves and I talked about this a lot. She suggested I explore sensation on my own terms, without expectations. “You need to reintroduce yourself to your own body,” she said. “Like meeting someone you used to know.”
Something Shifted
One night in March, Adrienne was away visiting her sister, and I was alone in the apartment for the first time in weeks. Old me would have worked until I fell asleep on the couch. Instead, I ran a bath. I lit the candle that had been sitting untouched on the bathroom counter since October. I put on an album I used to love in college — Bon Iver, the first one — and I sank into the water and closed my eyes.
Afterward, still warm and loose, I tried a HiMoment device that Adrienne had bought for us a while back. I had never used it by myself. I had barely used it at all, to be honest, because I had always been too in my head, too focused on whether things were “working” to actually let them work. But that night, alone, with nothing to optimize and no one to perform for, I just let myself feel it. No goal. No metric. Just my body, awake and present, doing something that felt good for no reason other than that it felt good.
I lay in bed afterward and cried. Not sad crying. The kind of crying that happens when something that has been locked releases. I called Adrienne and told her I loved her and she said, “Are you okay?” and I said, “I think I am actually starting to be,” and she was quiet for a moment and then said, “Good. It is about time.”
What I Know Now
It has been almost a year since the parking lot. I still work as a developer. I still drink too much coffee. I still sometimes catch myself clenching my jaw or sitting in front of a screen at midnight, and I have to make a conscious choice to stop. The difference is that I make the choice now. I know what the alternative feels like, and I know what it costs.
I have a Wednesday night ritual with Adrienne. I have a Sunday morning ritual by myself — shower, stretching, twenty minutes of doing absolutely nothing productive. I have learned to recognize when my body is trying to tell me something, and most of the time, I listen. Not always. But most of the time.
The biggest thing I have learned is that wellness, for me, is not about adding things. It is about subtracting the noise long enough to hear what is already there. My body was never broken. It was just waiting for me to pay attention.
I am not someone who gives advice. I am a guy who sat in a parking lot unable to go into a grocery store. But if there is one thing I would say to another man who feels like he is running on fumes and calling it fine, it is this: you are allowed to feel good. Not as a reward for productivity. Not as a thing you earn. Just because you are a person in a body, and that body is yours, and it has been waiting for you.
Last Wednesday, Adrienne and I made pasta. She burned the garlic and I overcooked the noodles and we ate it anyway, sitting on the kitchen floor because neither of us felt like setting the table. She put her head on my shoulder and I could feel the warmth of her through my shirt and I thought: this is it. This is the whole thing. Not the perfect version. The real one.
That was my highlight moment.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
