Bringing Joy Back to My Everyday
The holidays passed in an absolutely whirlwind. Traveling, wrapping the year up at work, spending time with family and friends, and the general madness of the holidays just totally took the energy right out of me.
In addition, I kind of ate like crap, wasn’t going to the gym as regularly as I should have been, and wasn’t taking great care of my mental and emotional health. It was a general mess. Fun and lovely and wonderful. But still a mess.
I was super fortunate that our CEO made the decision to close our offices from December 22nd to January 2nd. And when I say close, I mean truly close. We shut down our social media, didn’t have any emails to answer, and were told to actually take a real break to spend time with our family and friends. It was honestly one of the best Christmas presents I could have asked for this year.
As we started to get closer and closer to the end of the year, I knew it was time to do my 2017 review in my bullet journal and plan out my beginning of 2018 pages. I created the usual goal pages and progress pages and then set the journal aside to do all of the holiday things.
When I finally picked my journal up again to finish, it was the new year and I hadn’t really thought about any goals. I had a few in mind: get to 170 pounds, get back to morning workouts, eat better, stick to a budget. But those were my everyday goals. Those never really change from year to year and frankly, they took more care of my physical and financial health than my mental and emotional health.
I started thinking at the beginning of the week about how much of a drag my everyday life after work had become. With Nate being gone three to four nights every week, I felt pretty unmotivated to do anything that verged away from the rigid routine I had developed.
Said routine was essentially, get home, make dinner, clean house, watch Netflix, try to read, scroll endlessly thorough Instagram instead of read, try to force myself to sleep my 9:30 pm and repeat.
It got to the point when I kind of hated cooking and felt like my life was ruled by an endless parade of chores that I created for myself. Mostly consisting of vacuuming, washing the floor, scrubbing the bathroom, doing the dishes, doing laundry and feeling really stressed out about accomplishing all of those things.
I was forcing myself to do all of these things every week even though that was totally unnecessary and I dreaded doing them every time I got home. This essentially caused me to spiral into hating being at home because I felt like I wasn’t accomplishing anything real or fulfilling. It was bad.
I started hating cooking and cleaning and typically ended up wasting the whole night with Netflix.
As I thought about all of this during this week, I decided that I needed to make a change on Tuesday.
I got home from work and did one thing on my chores list: put away the Christmas ornaments, ribbons, and little odds and ends. I didn’t watch TV while I did this. I just focused on the task. And you know what? I actually enjoyed it.
After I finished that, I made myself dinner, still boring but good, and watched Netflix for a bit. I put my dinner dishes in the dishwasher and then sat down at our kitchen bar and worked on my bullet journal. It was honestly super fulfilling and made me feel really good.
I looked at the clock and saw that it was getting close to the forced bedtime and I decided to ignore it. I stayed up an hour past that forced bedtime to read without any distractions. Put my phone on my nightstand and didn’t look at it again until I set my alarm for the next morning and guess what? I woke up super refreshed and happy and ready to get to the gym and workout. My whole day was better.
I did the same thing last night. Put away the garland and the Christmas tree, cooked dinner and made my lunches for next week, sat at the bar to eat my dinner and then worked on my wedding bullet journal while I drank some tea. I could literally feel the stress melting away. After that, I read for an hour with my phone on airplane mode, curled up with my gravity blanket, set my alarm and slept more peacefully than I had in a long time.
I woke up this morning the same as I had yesterday morning: refreshed and ready to go. I worked out with kettlebells at home, took a long shower, got ready for the day and then treated myself to a homemade cashew latte and reading time before work.
Both of these days confirmed what I already knew. I had let the joy seep out of my everyday life at home and I am determined to get that joy back.
So, in addition to some concrete resolutions like the 170 pounds and learning what the heck an IRA is and why I have one and how to use it, I am committing to a few more abstract goals for 2018.
Doing only one chore a night when I get home
Cook 2 meals a week with actual recipes (AKA fall back in love with cooking)
Taking time in the morning to have a cup of coffee/tea out of a mug
Doing one fun and creative thing each night
Not forcing myself to sleep
These things are what I need to rebalance my life. I still want to have a big focus on both my physical and financial health, because I have goals for those areas of my life that are both achievable and measurable. But these five areas are less concrete but no less important. I’m excited to rediscover things I used to love and get some of the drudgery out of my life.