I’ve not been well. Nothing major, just anaemia, and perimenopause, but it does impact life deeply when every morning you wake up from a solid 9 hours and feel as energised as if you’d barely slept.
Do you take vitamins?
One of the things I have been doing for years is taking health supplements. Mainly iron, but also multi-vitamins, some vitamin D in the winter, some 5-htp as well, a B-complex for helping with energy levels… it adds up.
And it was driving me a bit crazy to open one bottle or packet after another to take them. To the point that I was foregoing it regularly, which is not helpful.
The solution is SO simple: one of each
Until this summer, when a friend suggested the simplest thing: chuck them all in one jar. As long as the jar has “one of each”, and each of the pills is a distinct shape and/or colour, you just open the jar, pick out one of each, and ingest. Job done.
You often just need two jars
After I came back from holidays I set it up. In the end I made two jars: one for the morning, and one for bedtime. They both live on my nightstand because for me out of sight truly means out of mind.
This was great, until I noticed I wasn’t sleeping well… and so I started omitting pills from the nighttime jar, one by one, to see which one affected me and yes, selenium at bedtime meant waking up at 4am.
I’d have to move it to the morning jar… except that it is near-identical to the Vitamin D pills. Now what?
Well… it’s obvious to me. If I can’t change its shape, perhaps I can change its colour?
So I bought food colouring, mixed it with water in a tiny bottle, and placed one drop of the now blue water on each side of the selenium pills. And left them out to dry (as much as is possible in one of the rainiest places on earth).
Now my morning jar has two sets of tiny pills, and one of them is blue, so I know to pick out one of each (one white vitamin D and one blue selenium), and the job is done.
Simple. But in a world where pill-makers often make identical pills… it’s a helpful solution.
Why is this a blog post?
Because this insanely simple lifehack is slowly saving my life by helping me remember to take all of these things, and helping remove that last blocker (3-6 packets / bottles to open each morning and night) from maintaining my health.
It will be months before my haemoglobin is back to normal, if it ever makes it. Or for my iron to get back to normal too. But at least I’m no longer hindering progress by forgetting to take the damn pills.