Feeling Better

I had a stressful meeting today that went well and while many of the things I wrote about yesterday remain unresolved, I feel better. Thank you ALL for your thoughts and kindness yesterday.

One commenter (Jessica) wrote:

“I would be interested in learning more about how you keep sticking with your systems when you have hard things taking up your brain space. It is something I really struggle with. When my people are all doing well, I am quite productive and live my life intentionally. When I have emotional stress, I fall into bad habits (nothing dangerous- I just tend to eat more ice cream, scroll more, procrastinate bedtime, etc). I have had a hard month too with lots of extended family drama and a big health issue with a very close friend. And I can tell by looking at my exercise and reading that I didn’t handle it well (although some of my time was spent supporting my loved ones, lots was spent ruminating).”

I want to say that I 100% understand and I struggle with the same things.

Things that have not been recently an issue/impacted:

• Running
• Eating habits (still feel good about how I have been eating/fueling my training lately)
• Daily habits – mostly intact
• Planning. I could see how this could be tough with extremely emotional situations but I still get up each morning wanting to think through my day.

Things that have most definitely been a struggle this month:

• Reading dumb things online (particularly reddit + too many email checks)
• Biting my nails (THEY WERE AMAZING heading into Feb. Therefore I know they can be amazing again. But they are not now.)
• Strength training. Oops!
• Generally being distracted and unfocused — I only read ~65 pages of my novel over the past week despite really liking it (I also kept falling asleep because #tired)

So, there you go. I think the things I struggle with less are things that are truly on autopilot mode. I also always feel like negative habit goals are so much tougher than positive ones. You can take 5 minutes and remember to do your Duolingo, but it takes all day brute force not to scroll for some of us sometimes (ie, me in times of stress).

I will tell myself what I would tell any listener which is — it’s okay. We get to start over and try again all the time, whether it’s a new day / week / month / year. We can keep working on making things better without expecting them to be perfect. Rather than stressing over ‘missed’ habits and such during hard times we can try to observe + learn from them.

Some interesting new products in the planning world:

1- Full Focus LifeFocus – their new life planning system/conference that comes with aesthetically pleasing cards. Having now run my own planning conference, I am now especially curious what others are doing (but I also want to be careful because I never want to take others’ material!).

2- Atoms – James Clear’s new habit tracking app. I am going to try it for review purposes. Trying to decide what to track . . .