New Year's Reset

Of course, it’s the first year where I don’t try to make a New Year’s resolution that one falls into my lap unbidden.

We all know how resolutions tend to go; they hang out for a week or so before you’re back to old habits - now with the added guilt of failure on top. Well, as a chronic goal-failer, I’d decided to simply not set a resolution for this year, and to just let things happen as they saw fit to happen. I’m mentally ill and disabled, with severe chronic pain, and year-long goals have just never been very achievable for me. Sometimes my brain, sometimes my body, sometimes all of me will just shut down and I will lose all momentum, coming to a screeching halt as I drop my plans like hot potatoes. So no, I’d decided, no huge lifestyle changes this year. No pressure to maintain momentum, and no guilt to feel when it inevitably all falls apart.

And the universe, with its ironic sense of humour, gave me three simple gifts as the new year rolled around:

• A notebook
• A YouTube video
• A heatwave

How did these three things become an accidental resolution? I’ll begin with the notebook:

It was a Christmas gift from my uncle. A usual gift for me, as a lifelong writer (and empty-notebook-hoarder), although this particular notebook in particular had wonderful soft paper and plenty of pages. The perfect journal.

I tried to discard this thought almost as immediately as it had arrived. I’ve tried journaling so many times in my life, and I’ve never been able to keep it up. I have rather severe ADHD and, while journaling has sometimes helped me to keep that in check, there was never any external structure pushing me to remember the journals themselves - and so the habit always died within a few days of beginning.

For a simple explanation of how ADHD can impact motivation and functioning, I recommend this short article from ADDept!

This brings me to the second item on our list: A YouTube video.

I’m sure we’ve all heard of bullet journals before, seen pictures of them on Instagram - beautifully decorated journals filled with affirmations, perfectly curated to the artist’s aesthetic. Well, that was never going to work for me. I don’t do “perfect” and I can’t motivate myself to spend hours making my journal look pretty. I'm sure this works for some people, and more power to them - but I saw no chance that these journals truly functioned how I needed them to.

Well, on December 31st 2021, I came across a post detailing the origin of these journals. Interestingly enough, bullet journals were originally conceptualised and popularised by a man with ADHD who wholeheartedly insisted on function over form - in other words, the journals were meant to be a quick and easy way to organise your plans, goals, to-do-lists and more, without concern for even general neatness. Imagine my shock!

In this post was a link to a YouTube video made by him, detailing the systems they had come up with for organising and maintaining a bullet journal. It was absurdly simple, and no decoration required!

Here is the video in question:

And as I went to the company’s website to learn more about this world-shattering discovery, I remembered the lovely new notebook I had received for Christmas. Internally I sighed as I made a half-plan to begin setting up my journal the next day. If I’m honest with myself, I wasn’t really expecting to follow through on even that plan. I was expecting to be tired, sore, maybe a tad hung over. I had actually skipped my anti-depressants on New Year’s Eve, so that I could enjoy my night without concern of alcohol interacting with my medication and making me ill - so I was wholeheartedly planning for the lethargy, nausea, and irritability that come with medication withdrawal.

And this is where a heatwave brought it all together.

For context, I live in Australia, where we are currently experiencing summer. Unfortunately for me, I’ve always been incredibly heat sensitive. Hot weather makes me uncomfortable, sticky, and cranky. It makes my chronic pain flare, it brings incredible headaches, and it makes sleep near-impossible. I truly loathe summer. And yet here we are, with my long-time nemesis as the driving force behind changes I’ve been sorely needing.

So far this summer, our typical daily temperatures have been 25-33°c (or, 77-92°f). Unfortunately, December 31st and January 1st were set to be almost 40°c (104°f), with temperatures slowly decreasing throughout the week. Incredibly unpleasant for me, however these temperatures prompted two notable events.

The first: I set up a bird bath in our front yard on the 31st. Caring for our wild critters is incredibly important to me and, after giving some cool water to an unwell bird on the street, I had just realised that these temperatures would kill many of them. After a brief moment of research, I discovered that I would need to change the water every day if I wanted to avoid spreading disease or becoming a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The idea of needing to do this task daily was somewhat daunting to me, given my history of not-doing-things, but I decided to give it my best shot. If it turned out I couldn’t keep it up, then so be it - at least I would try. It would be a good excuse to force myself outside at least once a day, as well.

The second event prompted by the heatwave may seem smaller, but it was perhaps the most important aspect of this entire situation for me.

Overnight during times of extreme heat, I like to open my bedroom window to circulate some slightly cooler air. The issue with this, though, is that the air begins heating up quite early the next day - making my night air circulation entirely redundant. The way I counteract this is by checking my weather app the night before, to see what time things really get sizzling, and setting an alarm to wake up ahead of the heat so I can close my window. Usually what this means is I will wake briefly around 8am, close my window and curtains, and go back to sleep until my regular 11am wake-up alarm.

I’ve always had a relatively late sleep schedule. From a 7 year old secretly reading by lamplight at 4am, to a 16 year old with online friends in different time zones, to a young adult who found late night to be the most calm and stress-free time to exist - over the years I fell into this pattern of sleeping between 1-4am, and waking after 10am whenever possible. It’s just the way my circadian rhythm has run for as long as I’ve been a person. A late sleep pattern is also related to ADHD, so I had that knowledge confirming my belief that I am just naturally a night owl. And to top it all off, I was filled with a spiteful reluctance to give in to every damn condescending “early bird catches the worm” morning person who’d ever judged me for sleeping late. This sleep pattern absolutely worked for me for years - night was the only time I was ever able to get my creative energy out without an interruption of some sort; it’s the only time I could ever feel real peace.

But this just hasn’t been working for me lately. As my pain inevitably grows worse, and I become more aware of my body’s changing needs and energy cycles, I’ve been realising that the later I’ve been sleeping, the more fatigued I’ve been feeling - regardless of how many hours of sleep I’m actually getting. I keep waking up dehydrated, hungry, headachey, in pain, and then I spend two hours checking social media before I can actually drag myself out of bed. I can’t keep doing this - I have medication I need to take regularly, and I have both a body and a mind which need a lot of care. I need to be eating, moving, talking to people, I need the motivation to get myself out of bed. I can’t sit in bed, staring at my medication on the table next to me, wishing I could just convince my unmanageable brain to reach out and take it. I was barely finding substance in my day.

And here, on January 1st, my open window brought me back to myself.

On the first day of 2022, I woke up for an 8:30am alarm to close my window. I fully planned to go back to sleep after doing this. But as I laid back down on my pillow I realised that as sleepy as I was, I wasn’t actually very tired. I wasn’t exhausted from being up early, as I’d previously thought. I was just sleepy from having woken only two minutes ago. If I went back to sleep now, I’d wake up at 11am feeling miserable from oversleep. So I decided to stay awake.

I still didn’t do anything of particular note - I still stayed in bed for two hours checking all the socials and trying to convince myself to get up. But this time, those two hours were over by 10:30am instead of 1pm, and I’d adequately primed myself to get out of bed.

I was, indeed, feeling the slow lethargy of not taking my medication the day before, although I wasn’t in a bad mood as expected - my body just felt heavy and slow. And being up early meant that I’d been able to take those meds at a decent time for once, and they took effect relatively soon. I felt functional within a few hours.

As I ate my lunch, my partner asked if I had any plans for the day. In that moment, I remembered my plan to set up a bullet journal, and I told them about it - creating an external motivator to actually get it done.

The process of setting up the journal itself wasn’t overly complex - for the most part I followed the guides I’d found via that heavensent video - the difficult part came when I needed to populate the journal with my actual tasks, goals, and thoughts. I spent around an hour agonising over it, racking my brain, trying to remember any upcoming plans I had or work I wanted to try and get done. But once I started filling a few things in, it all started to flow. I started with marking in the birthdays of loved ones, medical appointments I’d planned, upcoming job interviews. Eventually I got to writing in less defined plans for the month: tidy my room, draw this thing, write that piece. When I got to filling in my plans for individual days, I decided to deviate slightly from the given system. I added a “pain rating” and a “brain rating” - so I can track how I’m feeling and pick up on any patterns - and I made a column to write in specific "every day" tasks.

My daily tasks were:

Refresh my bird bath

Take my medication (with individual tickboxes for each specific med)

Eat some fruit

That’s it! These were the tasks I wanted to stick to each day. Small, simple, low-pressure.

The list of one-off tasks that I gave myself for Jan 2nd included tidying my bedroom floor and vacuuming, among a few other small things. What actually happened, though, is that I woke up at 8am on the 2nd, to close my window, and decided to get out of bed almost immediately. It is a rare thing to find me out of bed before my housemate, but I had taken my medication, put on a load of washing, and replaced my birdbath water before they got out of bed around 9am! I felt good and ready to go.

I even decided, despite my pain, to go for a short walk, to keep my body moving and my blood pumping. I felt so refreshed upon returning home, that I added "walk" to my list of daily tasks.

When it came time to clean, I was so motivated that I didn’t just tidy my floors - I organised my entire bedroom and purged half of my book collection. Most of these books were attained between the ages of 10 and 17, and most of them were unread. I'd been carrying hundreds of books around for years, just because of the potential that I might one day want to read them. Well, no more. I was finally ready to let go of them.

I didn’t just vacuum the house, I mopped as well. I moved the washing machine and the dryer, and I scrubbed the floor underneath. I put away all of my now-clean washing, instead of leaving it to sit in a pile on my desk chair for a week. I used up every ounce of the motivation I’d been given, and it felt incredibly cathartic.

I had been fully prepared to be intensely sore the next day - the price usually paid by my body for any sort of physical work. I'd already decided it would be worth it to remove the Mess Stress from my space. A clean space meant I could give myself permission to take it easy for a while - even if I needed a day or two to recover from the exertion of cleaning. I started setting my wake-up alarm for 9:30, instead of 11, to see if I could maintain the routine. I was determined not to be upset with myself if I couldn’t, but I wanted to know. I was largely expecting to be exhausted enough to sleep through the alarm.

Imagine my surprise on January 3rd, when I woke up at 9am - half an hour before my alarm - feeling well-rested with only slightly-higher-than-average pain levels. I got out of bed, did all of my daily tasks, and spent the rest of the day relaxing, satisfied.

I’ve been sleeping before 1am and waking up before my alarm every day since. I’ve been rising rested and refreshed, ready to slip into my routine of small self-maintenance tasks, ready to at least attempt some of the more difficult items on a given day’s list. I won’t hold it against myself if I can’t do a listed task on a particular day - as it stands, I’ve spent all of today writing instead of working on the other creative options I’d planned. That's okay. The journal system I’m using is incredibly self-forgiving - if I don’t do something on one day, I can either shift it to another list or simply recognise that it won’t happen, and cross it off my list permanently. There is zero shame associated with non-completion - the journal is a guide for my day, not a hard set of rules or goals which must be acted upon. And it only takes five minutes each day to utilise it.

Shame and guilt can be paralysing. My resolution for the year is to stop striking myself with them, and to let my body and mind direct my days as needed. I'll be aware of the habits and routine I’m trying to settle into, but I'll also recognise that it needn’t be set in stone. We do better when we feel good - and I've learned that sometimes the feeling of a good rest comes from the least expected of places.

~

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