I posted on facebook that I feel like I should be better at some things than I am and so I am going to focus and do my best – said for perhaps the 47 hundredth time….
First up: a daily schedule that builds in some mindfulness skills to help me accept me more. I’m actually going to a weekly class right now to help me learn some skills around being able to step back from stressful situations and not go into my own little spirals all the time.
Also some general medical stuff: Since Edgar joined us I’m definitely walking more every day which is great. I also need to follow up on a referral for a sleep study as well as putting some thought to some more focused activities than “walking the dog.”
Also important: thinking about what I need to do to decrease the stress I put on myself (and yes, I know I put it on myself). So one of the things is money, obviously. So I went back and found the #MoneyMasterClass that Gail Vaz-Oxlade did on twitter back in 2020. I’ll be doing that as I can – so sometimes more than one task in a day and other times skipping a few days in between.
Another is the house – I like our house but it’s so much to keep on top of and clean and stuff. So I have a household planner that I’m going to try and stick to as well.
I guess it’s a sort of “fuck I’m turning 50 soon” level of motivation.
A few years ago (2016) I signed up for NerdFitness. It looks all different now but I signed up for a lifetime plan so I still have access to the basics that I want, and need, right now.
I don’t know if these posts will make it on the blog or not but I definitely needed a place to also type out what I was doing, along with my little notebook.
So here’s the plan: on Sunday 27 August I will step on a scale and I will take all sorts of measurements. I have a chart in my notebook for both. Measurements will be redone every two-ish months. Weight will be redone every two weeks. I’ll see how that goes.
The chart for measurements is complete – it’s just boxes to fill in.
The chart for weight is gonna be a dot graph. So the X axis represents the dates – every two weeks from 28/8 to 29/1 fits on a single page of my notebook (this is gonna change though; I want a big enough notebook for 1 month of lines on a page so I will have a longer time scale for this graph too; I’m gonna pick up a new notebook as soon as we’re home). The Y axis is gonna be the weight.
Petty annoyance: I prefer thinking in KG but my scale is in pounds BUT now I figured out how to switch it to KG. So now the petty annoyance is just going to be that it seems like everyone else in the world thinks in pounds for weight. I’m still gonna stick to KG. So I’ll fill in the Y axis with whatever I weigh on the 28th and then each line will either be 0.5 of a kg or a kg – knowing I can put the damn dot for the weight anywhere in there.
The next is supposed to be finding my “Big Why” – I’m supposed to find the motivator for changing what I’m doing. The idea is that articulating the reason(s) will help when you get stuck: “Those who have a ‘why’ can bear with almost any ‘how.” The more personal, the more “deep” the better or something. So not just “It’s good to be healthy” – of course it is, we all know that but it’s not enough to have had me change up till now so it’s definitely not gonna be enough going forward.
And then I’m supposed to share the big why(s). I’ll have to think about how best to do that. I have a lovely group of online friends I’ve known, heck for over fourteen years now, and I have shared my start with them. We’ll see if I get around to sharing that part publicly or not. But for now, I guess it’ll suffice to say I’ve come up with a couple of Big Whys and shared them with Toby and a small group of friends.
Then my plan for the week from a health perspective:
– find time for mindfulness every day
– move a little bit more than yesterday
– drink water and take my iron & vit d
I did write all that up there before August 27, 2022.
And I started off well.
And then life happened and Toby went to BC for a couple of weeks and I just did my best to get the basics done while he was gone.
So now he’s back and I’m gonna re-start and so I am going to post this now as a way to help keep me accountable. By Sunday October 2 I want to re-read my notes from back in August and see how I can plan out a re-fresh starting on October 11 – yes, a Tuesday but that’s when I will be back from almost a week in PEI!
it’s amazing how motivating voicing my goal about the mindfulness posts out loud is.
So mindfulness day 2 part 2 – the idea here is a little bit of “fake it till you make it” and a little bit of “see yourself as others see you.”
It’s not always easy to be self-loving and self-confident and generally I know I am WAY harder on myself than I am on others – especially those I care about. Couple that with being very self-deprecating, brushing off praise with self-put-downs, and it can be a hard habit to break.
Step 1 – accept the compliment. No “it was nothing”; no “I could have done better”; just “thank you.”
Step 2 – start a compliments file. Last year I did this in my journal (for like 2 days or something). This year I am going to try and keep it on my phone – so if someone sends a text or message or posts something on my fb or ig I will screen shot it and save it in an album.
Step 3 – review the file – pretend you actually believe the kind things your friends / co-workers / random strangers / family say. Pretend you said “good job” to yourself. Eventually you’ll be able to say it and mean it!
found on dribbble by Katie Daugherty
Next up is thinking about your values. I know this is hard…
…la di dah we’re just gonna waltz on in here like it hasn’t been a month since my last post and a month and a half since my last mindfulness post…
There are a couple of activities on “day 2” and there’s no way I can do even one of them in a day so there are gonna be at least 2 “day 2 v.2” posts. I guess I should re-name this one day 2a v.2? Or maybe day 2 v.2a… Or just day 2 part 1 – y’all know it’s not the stuff from 2021. …anyway, back to the regularly scheduled programming.
Everyone knows what physical clutter is right? The stuff hanging around that really serves no purpose except for getting in your way, or making you feel guilty, or worry about unnecessarily. Well, it turns out emotional clutter is pretty similar.
That tchotchke isn’t inherently bad – it only becomes clutter if there are too many and they overwhelm you and don’t serve their intended purpose anymore (i.e. reminding you fondly of someone or some place). Negative thoughts and emotions are also not bad – fight or flight is a survival tactic. BUT most people don’t need survival tactics every damn day.
Feeling guilty about something is the same – you can use the feeling to see how to change and grow OR it can cause you to seize up and freeze and never evolve.
My “emotional decluttering” focus is definitely centred on guilt. It’s so easy for me to absorb any and all blame. My train of thought recently, as an example:
“We’re in a pandemic and we were going to go visit the family in BC but another pandemic wave hit and so we can’t go and it’s my fault I never thought we should move to be closer to the BC family.”
Seriously.
So this is my focus: Forget the mistake and learn the lesson. Don’t hold on to regret and guilt.
Toby took this awesome picture during a visit to Balmy Beach.
I got tested on this too soon though. I offended someone last week. I was trying to process something about how I felt after an online conversation and I forgot the cardinal rule that really there is no nuance online and while the second conversation would have probably happened very differently if it was in person, I made a mistake. I didn’t think through what I was saying before I said it and I completely missed an obvious interpretation.
I’ve given myself a couple of days to wallow and while I wish I had done it differently, I cannot go back and change it. I’ll consider a bit more about what I can learn from this and how to avoid – or at least minimize the chances of it – it in the future.
as an aside – I am going to try and make time for this. It’s important to me even if it isn’t (and probably because it isn’t) easy. So my calendar says I have to post something about this every Tuesday from now on… *fingers crossed*
In August I wrote: “Back in February, a friend who recognized how hard COVID and the pandemic was hitting me invited me to a FB group to focus on self-love and mindfulness and care for a month. I couldn’t do it then – I wasn’t ready, I didn’t have the focus, I don’t know what. But I’m going to try it again now. 28 days.”
Narrator (sounding a lot like Morgan Freeman): Reader, that did not happen.
And here I am again. But here is better than not here and so away I go.
Definition of affirmation
1a : the act of affirming // nodded his head in affirmation
b : something affirmed: a positive assertion // His memoir is a reflective affirmation of family love.
Day 1’s work is to ask “what positive affirmations do I need to say to myself this month?”. The important thing I think that I have recognized is that I often repeat a whole lot of negative affirmations to myself – I’m lazy, I’m can’t figure this out, I’m fat, I’m slow – and so I think this time I see that positive affirmations aren’t just a load of candy-floss / silver lining thinking.
Instead, I’m looking at positive affirmations as a way to disrupt negative thoughts that arise. I came up with a few back in August but I thought I would spend a day or two and think about them again now, what I need to hear now:
I make mistakes because I am trying to learn new things and grow.
