Shruti Mundada Travel, Wellness & the Art of Living Well

Shruti Mundada

Travel, Wellness & the Art of Living Well

Latest Articles

Ditch the Dashboard: Building a Real Wellness Routine Without a Single Subscription
Wellness

Ditch the Dashboard: Building a Real Wellness Routine Without a Single Subscription

The wellness industry would love for you to believe that getting healthier requires a stack of apps, a monthly box delivery, and at least one wearable device. It doesn't. Here's how to build habits that actually stick — using nothing more than intention, consistency, and a little old-fashioned common sense.

Starting Over Socially: How to Find Your People When Life Has Scrambled Everything
Wellness

Starting Over Socially: How to Find Your People When Life Has Scrambled Everything

Major life changes — a cross-country move, a long stretch of travel, a career pivot — have a way of quietly reshuffling your friendships. The people who once felt like your whole world can start to feel like strangers, and making new friends as an adult is somehow both urgent and deeply awkward. Here's the honest guide to finding your people again.

When Your Kitchen Feels Like a Stranger: Rediscovering Home Cooking After Life Abroad
Travel

When Your Kitchen Feels Like a Stranger: Rediscovering Home Cooking After Life Abroad

You come home from months of eating your way through street markets and family-run trattorias, and suddenly your own kitchen feels weirdly unfamiliar. The spices seem wrong, the produce looks sad, and you're not entirely sure you remember how to just... cook. Here's what that disorientation is actually telling you.

Wellness

My Passport Ruined My Grocery Store: How Travel Permanently Rewired My Relationship with Food

Spending time abroad doesn't just change how you see the world — it quietly, irreversibly changes how you eat. Coming back to American grocery stores after living overseas can feel like a strange kind of grief nobody prepares you for, and learning to feed yourself well on the other side of that is its own adventure.

Travel

Going It Alone Was the Best Thing I Ever Did for My Social Life

Everyone assumes solo travel is a recipe for loneliness, but the opposite tends to be true. When you strip away your usual social safety net, something surprising happens — you actually start talking to people. Here's why traveling alone might be the most socially rich experience you ever give yourself.

Travel

Nobody Warned Me That Coming Home Would Feel Like Landing in a Foreign Country

You spend months or years dreaming about home — the food, the people, your old bed. But nobody tells you that walking back through your front door can feel just as disorienting as landing somewhere brand new. Reverse culture shock is real, it's messy, and it deserves an honest conversation.

The Unglamorous Truth About Wellness: Why the Boring Stuff Actually Works
Wellness

The Unglamorous Truth About Wellness: Why the Boring Stuff Actually Works

We've been sold a version of wellness that looks incredible on a grid and does almost nothing in real life. The practices that actually move the needle — the ones that create lasting change — are almost embarrassingly undramatic. It's time to talk about why boring is the new breakthrough.

How to Actually Live Somewhere Instead of Just Visiting: A Real-Budget Guide to Slow Travel
Travel

How to Actually Live Somewhere Instead of Just Visiting: A Real-Budget Guide to Slow Travel

What if your next trip wasn't a race to check off landmarks but a genuine chance to settle in, find your coffee shop, and learn a neighborhood? Slow travel — spending weeks rather than days in one place — is more affordable and more fulfilling than most people realize. Here's how to make it work without draining your savings account or your sanity.

Wellness Is Broken: What Happens When Self-Care Becomes Another Thing to Fail At
Wellness

Wellness Is Broken: What Happens When Self-Care Becomes Another Thing to Fail At

The wellness industry sold us a dream — wake up at 5 AM, meditate for 20 minutes, drink your greens, and unlock your best life. But for a lot of us, that dream has quietly become another source of anxiety. Here's why chasing the perfect wellness routine might actually be making you feel worse.

Travel

Why I Stopped Collecting Countries and Started Actually Experiencing Them

There's a certain kind of exhaustion that comes from returning home after a two-week European whirlwind — eight cities, eleven flights of stairs, and zero real conversations with locals. Slow travel flips that script entirely. Here's how spending more time in fewer places completely changed the way I move through the world.

Wellness

Your Phone Isn't the Enemy: 5 Sane Ways to Find Balance in a Hyper-Connected World

The wellness world loves to tell you to throw your phone in a river and go live in the woods for a week. But for most of us — with jobs, kids, group chats, and actual lives — that's not realistic or even desirable. Here's a more honest take on digital wellness that doesn't require going off the grid.