I Gamified My Nighttime Ritual and My Brain Finally Cooperated

One spin. That's the whole thing.

I built a nighttime ritual I actually do now. One prize wheel, one spin, whatever it lands on. The decision gets made before my brain is too far gone to make it. That’s it.

But let’s back up a but to how I got here. I‘ve been on a longer journey of learning to actually listen to my body, and one of the things that accelerated it was doing DNA testing with Valentina Bain. What came back was specific enough to change how I think about my whole day: when my cortisol spikes, it stays high. And that directly impacts my sleep.

The end of my day, unbeknownst to me until now, is a cortisol management situation. What I do, watch, engage with, and think about in those last few hours before sleep either supports that or works against it. So rude, right?

My mornings are dialed. I’ve built a routine I actually love, one I revisit every six months so it stays fresh, and I feel genuinely supported by how I ease into the day. At night? That’s a different story.

The evening is the next frontier.

By 4pm, my brain is done. I wake up around six, I go to sleep around ten, which means 4pm is already two thirds of the way through my actual day. My nervous system has done the math even when I haven’t. And asking my 4pm brain to choose a restorative evening activity out of the blue is asking it to do the thing it is least equipped to do at that moment. So it reaches for whatever has the lowest entry barrier.

For a long time, the default at the end of the day has been putting on TV and numbing. Currently in rotation: Love Island. It’s literally on like every day so it’s reliable as a default. And I’m watching, and I’m scrolling, and I just feel like I’m numbing.

The insight that finally cracked it came from a call with my somatic movement coach Sam (she’s incredible and trains you on how to process the stored emotions in your body in a way that feels safe and supportive).

We’ve been doing movement and visualization work and this week, we landed on the topic of rest. On my relationship with it. On where I learned that rest needed to be earned.

My mom self-abandoned to host every holiday. The days of prep, the hours in the kitchen with no help while everyone else enjoys themselves. Started as just Easter, became every single one. My dad, an entrepreneur and the bread winner, also built the house we grew up in with his own hands. Weekends were projects. The message underneath all of it was: there is always more to be done.

The belief I’m still untangling is “if I stop moving, I’ll fall behind.” And when I’m in a rest cycle, I feel guilty about it, which creates pressure, which creates freeze, which means I have to dig myself out before I can actually rest. By that point I’m just putting on Love Island and calling it a night.

What my body has been trying to tell me is that numbing and resting are not the same thing.

I already knew this. It’s not NEW information. The sauna is where I feel it most clearly. No book, no phone, just existing. I feel amazing after. I don’t struggle to know what rest feels like. The struggle is trying to decide how to do it when my brain is already mush.

Think about when someone is grieving…you don’t ask them what they need. The part of the brain that generates preferences and makes choices is offline. The most useful thing you can do is show up with a plan and remove the burden of deciding. You bring the soup. You make the call. You take the choice off their plate entirely.

My brain at 4pm is in a similar place. Rest requires a micro-decision: pick the thing, get up, do the thing. Scrolling requires zero decisions. That is where the whole evening goes.

Here’s how I solved this in the most fun way I could think of

So I happened to have this prize wheel from a conference event I did. Obviously. Who doesn’t have a prize wheel?

When I mentioned my plan in my HOT GIRL FNDR group chat, the ideas came in immediately. My friends sent ritual after ritual. I now have a full backlog I’m still sorting through. The crowd-sourcing happened so naturally because the premise was specific enough to make it easy to contribute and I happen to be surrounded by the most brilliant baddies who make me feel super supported.

So there it was. I had everything I needed. I put rituals on the wedges. One spin, that’s the protocol. Whatever it lands on, I do it. I can spin again and stack if I want more. I can swap wedges whenever the novelty wears off. I don’t have to generate the idea from scratch when I’m already running on empty.

The wheel is working. The gap between knowing what would help and actually doing it is almost never willpower. It’s friction. And friction at the end of the day, when your brain has already closed up shop, compounds everything that didn’t get processed.

Here’s what’s currently on my wheel:

Building Your Own Wheel

🔒 The full annotated backlog, plus a framework for building your own wheel based on your Moon sign and your actual depletion window, is below for paid subscribers.

The wheel works because it removes the decision. But what goes on the wheel matters too. A list of rituals that don’t actually fit how you’re wired will still sit there unused, just in a different format.