The Small Spring Reset

I almost let World Mental Health Day go by without doing anything about it. I saw the posts on the 10th of October, felt the familiar flicker of guilt, and kept scrolling. Then I put my phone down and sat with a question that annoyed me: why does a day meant to make me feel less alone usually just make me feel behind?

I think it’s because “mental health” gets talked about in huge, abstract terms — therapy, burnout, boundaries, healing — and I nod along and then do absolutely nothing differently. So this year I tried something smaller. Not a wellness overhaul. Not a retreat. Just a spring mental health reset I could actually finish in a weekend, built out of things I was already half-doing anyway.

It wasn’t dramatic. But it’s the first version of “taking my mental health seriously” that has actually stuck past the first week, so I want to write it down while it’s still working.

Why October Hits Differently

Spring in South Africa is supposed to feel like relief. Longer days, jacarandas starting to threaten Johannesburg with purple, that first evening you can sit outside without a jacket. And it does feel like relief — for about an hour. Then the admin of a new season lands on top of you: half the year’s targets suddenly due, garden beds that need turning, a body that still feels like winter even though the calendar says otherwise.

World Mental Health Day lands right in the middle of that gap. Everyone online is talking about checking in with yourself at exactly the moment most of us are too busy restarting the year to check in with anything.

I’d been running on a low hum of tired that doesn’t look like a crisis from the outside. Still showing up to calls. Still getting the dogs walked. Still, technically, fine. But snapping at small things. Dreading my inbox before I’d even opened it. Lying awake doing math about deadlines instead of sleeping. That’s usually my signal that something needs to change, even if nothing is officially wrong.

My Spring Mental Health Reset, Smaller Than You’d Expect

I want to be honest about this part, because most reset content implies you need a sunrise routine, a green juice, and forty-five minutes of journaling before 6am. I have never once managed that, and I wasn’t about to start for a Tuesday in spring.

Here’s what the reset actually was:

I moved one work call a week to a walk instead of a desk. Not all of them — just the one-on-ones where nobody needs to see a screen. I put the dogs on leads, took the call through earphones, and let the conversation happen while we walked the block. It sounds like a small logistics change. It changed my whole Thursday.

I stopped opening my laptop before coffee. This one was harder than it should have been, because checking email first thing had quietly become a way of proving to myself that I was already working, already on top of things, already enough. Giving myself fifteen unearned minutes with a cup of coffee and absolutely no inbox felt almost illegal at first.

I planted something I didn’t need. Spring is prime planting season here, and I usually only put in what I plan to cook with. This time I put in a tray of sweet peas, purely because they’re pretty and do nothing useful at all. Watching something grow that has no deadline attached to it did more for my head than I expected.

I told one person, honestly, that I was tired. Not “busy,” which is the socially acceptable version. Tired. Saying it out loud to someone who wasn’t going to try and fix it, just hear it, took the pressure off in a way I didn’t see coming.

The reset wasn’t about adding more calm to my life. It was about removing one or two things I’d stopped noticing were costing me anything at all.

What Didn’t Work

I’d be lying if I said all of it landed. I tried a strict no-phone-after-8pm rule and broke it by day two, mostly because I use my phone’s torch to let the dogs out at night and kept “accidentally” checking Slack while I was out there. I also tried meditating for ten minutes every morning and mostly just sat there thinking about my inbox with my eyes closed, which is not meditation, it’s just worrying with better posture.

I’m mentioning the failed parts on purpose. A reset that only reports the wins isn’t useful to anyone, including me in six months when I inevitably need to do this again.

I also want to be clear this isn’t a substitute for actual support when things are genuinely heavy. If you’re not just tired but struggling, the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG) has a 24-hour helpline and it exists for exactly that. Small resets are for maintenance. They are not a replacement for help.

Try This, If You Want a Version That Actually Fits a Normal Week

None of this fixed anything big. I still have the same workload, the same looming deadlines, the same tendency to measure my worth by my inbox. But I’m sleeping better, I’ve stopped dreading Thursdays, and there’s a tray of sweet peas on my back step that owes me nothing.

If you’ve been circling your own version of a reset and keep waiting for the big, dramatic one to arrive before you start, maybe don’t. Start with the small, slightly embarrassing version instead — the one that’s actually realistic given your actual week. I wrote about doing something similar when I started logging off on Sundays, and the lesson keeps repeating itself: the small, unglamorous change is usually the one that survives contact with real life.

If this is the season you’re trying to build a routine that actually holds, I’ve also written about building a morning routine that works for you rather than one borrowed from someone else’s life — worth a read if an overhaul still feels tempting.

If you try any version of a spring mental health reset, I’d genuinely like to know how it turned out — drop a comment below.