At Brighter Health we take a holistic approach to health and wellness that incorporates physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental well-being. These characteristics of a person are all essential and interconnected. We offer distinctive viewpoints to help you build and develop a life with more awareness, meaning, energy, fulfillment, and purpose.
I THOUGHT I WAS JUST “HIGH-STRUNG.” IT TURNS OUT MY NERVOUS SYSTEM WAS DOING EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS WIRED TO DO
Friends have called me high-strung for as long as I can remember, usually affectionately, sometimes less so. I notice a shift in someone’s tone before they’ve finished a sentence. I scan a room within seconds of entering it. I have…
EVERY PAINKILLER MY DENTIST PRESCRIBED EITHER DID NOTHING OR KNOCKED ME OUT FOR A DAY
My relationship with dental procedures has always come with an asterisk: whatever painkiller gets prescribed afterward is a gamble. One wisdom tooth extraction left me barely covered, gritting through real pain on the standard dose. A different prescription after a…
MY PMS WAS SO DIFFERENT FROM MY SISTER’S THAT I GENUINELY WONDERED IF SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH ME
My sister and I grew up in the same house, eating mostly the same food, sleeping on similar schedules. When it comes to PMS, we might as well be describing two different biological processes. She gets a little tired, maybe…
MY JOINTS ACHED LIKE I WAS SIXTY. I WAS THIRTY-TWO, AND NO ONE COULD TELL ME WHY
I started describing my knees as “creaky” at thirty, the kind of self-deprecating joke people usually make decades later. It stopped being funny somewhere around thirty-two, when the joke had become a genuine daily reality, stiff fingers in the morning,…
I’D SEEN A CARDIOLOGIST, A DIETITIAN, AND A SLEEP SPECIALIST SEPARATELY FOR YEARS. ONE REPORT FINALLY CONNECTED THE DOTS
By my late thirties, I had a small team of specialists, each managing their own piece of me. A cardiologist for occasional heart palpitations that never quite qualified as alarming but never fully went away either. A dietitian for a…
HEART DISEASE RUNS IN MY FAMILY. I FINALLY STOPPED ASSUMING THAT MEANT NOTHING I DID WOULD MATTER
My father had his first heart attack at fifty-two. His father had his at fifty-five. An uncle didn’t make it past fifty-eight. By the time I was in my thirties, I had absorbed a quiet, unspoken belief that my own…
JET LAG NEVER BOTHERED MY HUSBAND. IT WRECKED ME FOR A WEEK EVERY TIME
We take the same flights, cross the same time zones, land at the same hour. Within a day, my husband is fully adjusted, cheerfully suggesting dinner reservations at what should feel like the middle of the night to either of…
I GOT CALLED “TOO SENSITIVE” MY WHOLE LIFE. MY GENES FINALLY EXPLAINED WHAT THAT ACTUALLY MEANT
I cried at a phone commercial once, genuinely moved by thirty seconds of manufactured sentiment about a father teaching his daughter to ride a bike. My family has never let me forget it. “Too sensitive” has followed me since childhood,…
I COULDN’T STOP SNACKING AT NIGHT, NO MATTER HOW DISCIPLINED I WAS DURING THE DAY
By any reasonable measure, my daytime eating was fine. Balanced meals, reasonable portions, hardly any snacking between breakfast and dinner. Then somewhere around nine at night, almost without fail, I’d find myself standing in front of the open pantry looking…
I KEPT LOSING FOCUS AT WORK AND ASSUMED I WAS JUST UNDISCIPLINED. MY GENES SAID OTHERWISE
I have started more productivity systems than I can count. Bullet journals, time-blocking apps, the tomato timer method, a brief and ill-fated attempt at waking up at five in the morning. Each one worked beautifully for about ten days. Then…












