Many patients prepare extensively for the procedure itself — but recovery preparation often gets overlooked.

Healing increases demand for nutrients involved in tissue repair, immune support, collagen production, and recovery. HealFast was designed specifically to support the body before and after surgery with physician-formulated nutritional support created for the recovery process.

Instead of scrambling afterward, many patients now prepare for recovery before surgery even happens.

Because supporting recovery starts long before the procedure is over.

Prepare to Heal

8:40 on a weeknight. The kids are finally down, the kitchen is mostly recovered, and your meditation app cheerfully suggests a 20-minute body scan.

You laugh, close the app, and open Instagram instead.

So here's a practice with actual research behind it that takes about 30 seconds, and you can do it standing in your driveway in pajama pants (YMMV on the pajama pants).

Awe is the feeling you get in front of something bigger than you that you can't quite explain. A thunderhead rolling in. The first 8 bars of a song that wrecks you. Your kid asking why the moon follows the car.

In 2020, researchers at UCSF ran a study on what they called awe walks. Older adults took one 15-minute walk a week for 8 weeks, with a single instruction: shift your attention outward, toward things that feel vast or surprising.

The awe group reported more positive emotion and less daily distress than the control group, who took the same walks without the instruction. Same legs, same sidewalks. The only variable was attention.

That's the part worth stealing. The benefit came from where they pointed their focus, and you can do it in 30 seconds.

Wellness writers have started calling these micro-moments of awe, and they're one of the few 2026 trends I'd actually defend. The bar to entry is the lowest in the entire self-care aisle.

The trick is treating awe as an attention setter instead of a destination. Skip the drive to a national park. Look at your own street like you just landed on it.

Some reliable triggers from my own week: the 9 pm June sky in Michigan (it stays ridiculous until almost 10) and my daughter's full forensic investigation of a roly-poly.

When one of these lands, I write a single line about it in my awe file. Mine lives in Mem (code MITTENDAD gets you 20% off 3 months of Pro), and on flat gray days I scroll it like a feed. It works better than the actual feed.

One honest caveat. Awe is a supplement. If the flatness has been hanging around for weeks and 30 seconds of sky does nothing, that's a different problem with a different tool, and the right tool is usually a human.

Online therapy through BetterHelp makes that first step smaller, which matters when you're already running on empty.

Tonight, after the kids are down, step outside for 60 seconds. Find the biggest thing you can see (the sky counts) and look at it like it's the first time.

That's the whole assignment. You can be back on the couch by 9:02.

Awe walks boost emotional well-being: the UCSF study writeup, short and worth the 4 minutes.

The wellness trends shaping 2026: where micro-moments of awe sit alongside the rest of this year's trend list.

Where did awe last sneak up on you? Hit reply. I read every one.

Matt

The Daily Refill goes out each weekday-ish. Subscribe at dailyrefill.beehiiv.com. It runs on Beehiiv, which gives new newsletters a 14-day free trial plus 20% off 3 months.

(Share this with someone who could use a gentle pause in their day.)

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