My playlist for Whole Heart Health

The "Maiah Shred Playlist" if you want to Shred, stretch, turnaround and affirm along with me!

I made the "Maiah Shred Playlist" last year with my roommate, before Covid-19 changed the whole world. Heidi and I were starting Jillian Michael's "30 day Shred". We didn't get through the 30 days. I think we made it to day 14. We got busy, prioritized other stuff over our health and went back to long days at our computers. The playlist collected digital dust.

Fast forward to August of this year and suddenly we were still in quarantine and confronting the bad habits that could no longer sustain us. We knew if we didn’t make some big changes that our hearts both emotionally and physically were not going to make it through THIS.

Michelle Obama put the "THIS" best in Episode 2 of her podcast: “I have to say, that waking up to the news, waking up to how this administration has or has not responded, waking up to yet another story of a Black man or a Black person somehow being dehumanized or hurt or killed, or falsely accused of something, it is exhausting,” she said. “It has led to a weight that I haven’t felt in my life... In, in a while.”

Mrs. Obama then spoke about her routine and how that routine was helping her. She inspired us to blow the dust off our old playlist and we started doing the Shred again. We found that M.I.A “Bad Girls” was the perfect kick off song to get us pumped. If one of us really didn’t want to work out and curled up into the couch, the other would go start the playlist and blast it. We had been reading a book called “Tiny Habits” by BJ Fogg and realized that “Bad Girls” had become our Prompt to exercise! We had tried alarms, bribery and just plain nagging and nothing worked like MIA and a chain banging from her chest.

This prompt song helped us to finally work out every day for 30 days! (Which we had attempted countless times since 2017.) We even went past 30 days and got to 90 days of the Shred, with the adjustment of working out 5-6 days a week with 1 or 2 days off depending on how full our week was. This playlist helped us build a good habit we had been attempting for years!

As we are going into what the media describes as a “Dark Winter” we’ve been adding things to our playlist and trying to build off of this habit. We’ve found heart healthy things to add and we think of our “work out” as not just exercising our bodies. We are trying to add in more mental health helpers to our routine.

Sometimes it’s just stretching, which goes so well with Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine” or Birdy's “Keeping Your Head Up” or we listen to affirmations. It was actually ridiculously hard to listen to affirmations and not roll my eyes at first. But now with exercise, I’m learning to say them out loud and let them slowly reprogram the negative self talk inside me. Plus I love the one we found, “Affirmations for Belief Strength and Success” by Fearless Motivation. The person doing it is so committed to the performance it makes me smile every time I listen. (check it out for yourself, it's at the bottom of my playlist)

I’ve been taking classes from First Aid Arts. They have been teaching me how art, especially music, can help with all sorts of things hurting our hearts. One of the things they teach is a “Turn around song” - a song that can reach through my depression, my anxiety, my panic attacks to pull me out and get me singing again. My turn around song is Nappy Roots “Gonna Have A Good Day”. My roommate’s turn around song is Sia’s “Elastic Heart”. So those are on the list now too! Our list has grown and expanded along with our good habits that we’ve been building along the way. There’s a free tool kit here if you want to try too. I hope this inspires you to create your own routine, your own playlist and your own good habits to fight back the dark.