What a long commute to the studio taught me about self-care

For years, the longest relationship in my working week was not with a producer or a co-host, it was with the bitumen between my front door and the studio gate. Some mornings meant driving from the southern suburbs towards the ABC headquarters in Ultimo, others meant an early flight from Sydney to Melbourne for a live cross. Looking back, a long-distance commute to a studio taught me more honest lessons about self-care than any glossy wellness manual ever did.

I started paying attention because I had to. The early calls did not forgive a foggy head, a sore throat or a temper sharpened by a missed meal. What follows are the habits that turned a punishing travel day into something gentler on the body, kinder to the mind, and far more sustainable for the people waiting on the other side of the camera. If you have ever white-knuckled your way through a marathon journey to work, you will recognise a few of these.

The pre-dawn ritual that changed everything

The first honest change was admitting that the day did not begin in the makeup chair. It began in my kitchen, in the dark, half an hour before I was technically allowed to call myself awake. I would lay out everything the night before, clothes pressed, in-ear monitors in their case, a flask of warm water with lemon, a banana, a small bag of almonds. I stopped treating preparation as a task and started treating it as an act of self-care, because nobody else in the building was going to hand me a banana at 4.45am.

There is a particular loneliness to a 4.30am start in suburban Sydney. The streetlights are still on, the magpies are just beginning to tune up, and the world is not yet asking anything of you. I learned to sit in that silence for a few minutes before reaching for the car keys. Two minutes of slow breathing, a stretch, a glance at the day's script so the first read was not a shock. By the time I was on the road, my nervous system had already met the day, and the day had not yet won.

The car became a sanctuary, not a waiting room

A commute can be a waiting room, those minutes you simply endure before the real work begins. I refused to let mine stay that way. I curated what came out of the speakers, an audiobook in the first stretch, a quiet news bulletin, and absolutely no scrolling on my phone. Phones stayed in the boot for the first twenty minutes of every drive. The car became the only space in my day where nobody could schedule a meeting, send a press request or ask for an opinion on a wardrobe choice. I treated that protection as a non-negotiable boundary.

I also stopped feeling guilty about arriving too early. Pulling into the studio car park with fifteen calm minutes to spare meant I could walk in as myself, rather than as a breathless apology in heels. The work I do now, hosting events and running the This Girl Is On Fire community, is full of advice like this. Some of the best of it is gathered in the articles section, if you want to read more.

Surviving Australian heat, one water bottle at a time

A studio commute in this country is rarely just a commute. It is a small adventure in climate. I have driven into the city on 38-degree January days when the bitumen was soft enough to mark, and I have crawled through autumn fog in the Blue Mountains with the heater on full. The Australian heat is not a metaphor, and Smartraveller's own guidance on hydration and sun protection applies as much to a one-hour drive to the ABC as it does to a flight to Bali. I keep a two-litre insulated bottle in the footwell and I drink the whole thing before the first script meeting, every single time.

Food, too, became a discipline. Servo pies were a rite of passage, and I will not pretend otherwise, but I stopped relying on the smell of burnt onion to carry me through a long broadcast day. Overnight oats in a small jar, a thermos of miso soup in winter, a thermos of cold rooibos in summer. Australians love a good flat white, and I still queue at the same Parramatta café as everyone else, but a long work day drinks more water than caffeine, and the body always sends the bill. I learned to read the warning signs faster, a dull headache, a slightly thick tongue, a yawn that would not quit, and to act on them before the autocue did.

Every line on the right was earned by a bad line on the left.

Voice care before the first cue

The voice is the only piece of equipment a broadcaster carries inside their own body, and I treated mine like a rental car for far too long. Long drives mean dry cabin air, recycled air-con, hours of quiet followed by sudden loud speech. I started running a humidifier in the bedroom the night before, steaming my face over a bowl of hot water on heavy days, and avoiding the second coffee that I had once considered a personality trait. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's own health and safety guidance for staff reinforces what any speech pathologist will tell you, warm up before you perform, and cool down after.

I also took the question of finding my voice on stage far more seriously once I realised the microphone was the easy part. If public speaking makes your stomach drop, I wrote about finding your voice in a piece that has travelled further than I expected. The same rule applies in the car, hum gently, project a few lines of the script, treat the journey as a vocal warm-up rather than a silent wait. Your future audience will thank you, and so will your throat at 11pm.

Learning to switch off in a country that never quite sleeps

Australia likes to pretend it is laid-back, and in some pockets it genuinely is. In the media, it is not. There is always a fresh scandal, a fresh leak, a fresh press release that needs a quote. I used to read every notification on the drive in, and I used to arrive at the studio as a knot of other people's opinions. Now the phone stays face-down until the engine is off, and I have a small rule about not checking the news between the front door and the car park. The first hour of my day belongs to me, not to the cycle.

This matters more than it sounds. The modern economy flatters itself on being always-on, and a country as connected as Australia can make you feel guilty for resting. The Privacy Act 1988 and the Fair Work Act both protect an employee's right to disconnect in spirit, if not always in letter. I am no lawyer, but the point is simple. If the law can recognise that people need rest, the rest of us can stop pretending we are too important to take a lunch break away from a screen.

Saying no without the guilt

A long commute has a useful side-effect, it gives you hours to think, and I thought my way out of several jobs I should never have accepted. The work I said yes to, late-night panels, last-minute podcasts, charity lunches three suburbs away, was costing me sleep, recovery and a personality my family still recognised. I started to write the real cost in my diary, in hours, not in dollars, and the picture became obvious. A gig that paid well and cost me a Tuesday with my daughter was, in the end, a bad trade.

Women in particular are coached to be useful. Saying no is treated as a kind of professional failure, and the longer I broadcast the more I saw brilliant colleagues burning out at forty-eight. The trick, I discovered, was to separate the no from the apology. I stopped saying sorry, and I started saying, that week is full, here is the next one. The work did not dry up. If anything, the work got better, because I turned up rested. A line I now share in every keynote, and which I unpack in a piece on a signature phrase, is this. Boundaries are a broadcast, not a boundary at all.

Carrying the lessons off the road

The honest twist of this whole story is that I do not have a punishing studio commute any more. The lessons, however, refuse to leave. The night-before ritual still runs my week. The phone still goes in the boot for the first stretch of any drive. The water bottle is still empty before the first meeting. When I work from home now, in a small office overlooking a quiet stretch of suburban garden, I treat the morning the way I once treated the long road into Ultimo, with the same care, the same non-negotiable slowness, the same quiet refusal to begin the day as a stranger to myself.

A self-care routine is not a luxury you add to a busy life, it is the architecture that lets the busy life stand up. I now build that architecture into the kiflimally work, the corporate keynotes, the women's circles, and the everyday conversations I have with readers and listeners. The long commute did not teach me to be perfect, it taught me to be kinder to the only body and the only voice I will ever have. If you take one thing from this article, take the small one, the banana, the silence, the phone in the boot, the water bottle that empties before nine. The big changes always begin with the smallest, most unglamorous choices.

Practical habits for the road and the morning

• Lay your kit out the night before, clothes, snacks, water, scripts, and remove every decision from the morning brain.
• Keep the phone in the boot, the bag, the glovebox, anywhere that is not your hand, for the first twenty minutes of every commute.
• Drink two litres of water before the first meeting and treat hydration as a working tool, not a wellness cliché.
• Warm up your voice in the car with quiet humming, a few lines of the script, and skip the second coffee on heavy broadcast days.
• Write the real cost of any extra job in hours, not in dollars, and notice how often the trade stops making sense.