Good morning and welcome back to On the Brookeshelf! OTB is a weekly digest of the most interesting content, products and ideas I come across, so you can skip to the good parts.

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Let’s get into it.

🧠 Read/Watch/Listen

🌟 Favorite Of the Week

1. 🎥 All The Light We Cannot SeeFormat: TV Mini Series | available on Netflix Time commitment: 4 hours (4x 1-hour episodes)Why bother: If you’ve read the book, I am pleasantly surprised to share that this TV adaptation is actually as good as the novel. If you haven’t read the book, I still recommend doing that before watching the series. All The Light We Cannot See takes place in France—specifically, the sea town of Saint Malo—during WWII. The series opens just as the Nazis are taking over Paris and staking claims across the rest of France. Our protagonist is an incredibly bright blind girl named Marie-Laure, who escapes Paris with her father and ends up playing an unlikely part in the Resistance through the use of her uncle’s radio. Meanwhile, a young orphan is recruited and shipped off to Nazi training when his genius for assembling and repairing radios is discovered. We watch him fight to keep the frequency of his soul intact even as he is forced onto the front lines to fight alongside the Nazi party. It’s a short series with just four episodes and definitely worth a watch!

👩‍💻 Other interesting bits

• 🎧 I recently discovered a podcast called Unbiased which offers actually unbiased coverage on the top news headlines of the day. The woman running it, Jordan, has a law degree, and she does a good job of breaking down the legal concepts behind major news stories in a facts-forward way. It’s been a breath of fresh air for me, so if you’re looking for unbiased news, check out the UNBIASED podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 📰 Is this the end for Andrew Huberman? NY Mag published an article exposing a vast web of infidelity and narcissistic tendencies hiding in the shadows of one of Huberman’s glowing public image. Huberman’s podcast, The Huberman Lab, constantly tops the charts, reaching millions of listeners worldwide, and Huberman himself has become one of the world’s most popular podcasters, covering topics related to neuroscience, psychology and physical and mental health.

• 📰 A total eclipse is coming to North America on April 8. This is kind of a big deal, because the next two total solar eclipses in the United States won’t occur until 2044 and 2045. A total eclipse occurs when the moon slips in between the Earth and the Sun, casting a shadow across a part of the Earth. And in case you’re into it, here’s a primer on what this might mean for you astrologically.

• 📚 If you’re looking for a good book, check out How to Stop Time by Matt Haig. Haig is the author of NYT Bestseller “The Midnight Library”—a book I also highly recommend reading if you haven’t yet. Haig’s books are, in my humble opinion, the best kind of fiction: imaginary stories that point to very real truths about the human condition. This one is no exception. Like his other novels, you’re likely to find yourself considering life’s biggest questions as you make your way through it.

💡 Something to Think About

A friend said to me recently: “When something isn’t working at work, you hold a meeting to discuss what you’re going to do about it. So why aren’t we doing the same thing in our relationships? I mean, our life partnerships are objectively more important than work.”

Some people will have a visceral reaction to the idea of holding a meeting about their relationship, and that’s fine. But call it what you want, allocating time within the week to check in on the most important tenets of your relationship does a lot of things:

1. It fosters consistent communication. It’s easy to get lost in the banality of day to day life, especially if you and your partner are living together or have been together for a long time. But it is so important for the health of your relationship and for the happiness of both people in it, that you both feel like you have a space to share if and when you have a need that isn’t being met in the relationship, or just want to try something new.

2. It filters complaints. A lot of things may happen throughout the week that annoy or trigger you in your relationship. Of these, probably only a handful of them actually warrant being talked about, while the rest are trivial things that can be let go of. When we immediately bring up every little thing that frustrates us to our partner, we run the risk of becoming overly critical and potentially shutting the other person down. Having a set day where you agree to talk through anything that came up during the week and still feels unresolved allows you to mentally compartmentalize, so you don’t feel the need to immediately raise everything. Instead, you tuck it away, and by the time your check-in day of the week rolls around, the stuff that’s still lingering in your mind is the stuff that’s actually worth talking about. The small stuff will have already fallen to the wayside.

3. It provides a space to express gratitude. It’s easy to forget to vocalize our thank you’s, especially to someone that’s around us all the time. Expressing gratitude is the most important part of the weekly check-in, because it reminds you of why you’re with your person, and it reminds them that they are seen, valued and appreciated for the efforts that they make. It’s also a lot easier to take tough conversations well when they are preceded by a reminder of all the things you’re doing right.

Enter: the relationship check-in.

How does it work? You should feel free to come up with your own formula with your partner, as every relationship is different.

Here’s one that I like:

1. Gratitude: Start by each sharing something your partner did this week that made you happy, meant something to you, or that you are generally grateful for.

2. Week in review: This is the time to raise anything that may have come up for you during the week that feels like it needs to be addressed. Examples may include: a breakdown in communication that happened, feeling dismissed/ignored, observing that your partner shut down during an important conversation, a physical or emotional need that isn’t been met, something your partner said that hurt your feelings, something about the relationship that’s been weighing on your mind. Some weeks there won’t be anything and you’ll skip this section.

3. Highlight/Lowlight: This is a chance to share your highlights and lowlights of the week outside of the relationship. Depending on your schedules, you may feel like you’re not always in the loop about what’s going on for your partner at work or in their friend and family circles. This is an opportunity to connect on a deeper level about what each of you is currently experiencing outside of the relationship. This in turn creates organic opportunities to offer support, celebrate each others wins, and maintain a strong level of emotional connection—no matter how busy the days and weeks become.

NOTE: You might choose to go for a walk together while you chat, or hold your check-in over coffee in bed, or on your balcony on a Saturday mornings. Make it a ritual, but don’t confuse check-ins with date night. Because dates are for feeling light and flirty, and check-ins are for deep connection and, at times, wading through the heavy stuff. Make time for both, and leave some space in between.

That’s all for now, thank you so much for being here, see you next week!

Love,

Brooke