Category: lifestyle

Start your resolutions now:

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Hello December, its nice to see you again!

In the middle of all the holiday cheer you might find the idea of starting your resolutions now unsavory. Cutting down sweets during Christmas? Well why not, you don’t have to get rid of them, just practice a little more self control than you would if you were starting next month.

We like to hang on the idea of starting tomorrow or starting Monday. We misbehave more with bad habits when we know we want to start a good one “soon”. We also are more likely to push them off another day or another week, so starting now can really cut these factors off at the knee.

Also starting now means you’ll be a month ahead of were you would be if you started next month. You can have already started that new hobby or cleaning out that house or being kinder to yourself. Put yourself ahead of the curve, beat the rush at the gym, find a therapist before everyone else starts looking.

Another thing about starting early is you can give yourself permission to start slower. You can do a trial run, start slow, give yourself permission to make more mistakes, than really buckle down with the new year. It’ll go better than starting cold!

So make that resolution list and start early!

This too shall pass.

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We get very locked into our bad times, they swallow us whole and seem to threaten never spitting us out. When your in middle of a bad spell, whether it be situational or emotional, you feel like it’ll go on forever, even if you believe that there is a light at the end of the tunnel you feel like it is a million miles away. It’s terrible and it’s normal- but I still find that the best thing you can say during these times is that they will pass.

We can’t fix everything and if you have solutions then great! Share them! But it’s true that a lot of darkness just isn’t easily fought off, that we have to simply just get through it. Sometimes that’s really annoying to hear in the middle of the darkness, but it’s true. Surviving is the strategy. Surviving depression till you find the right medication or therapy. Surviving your bad job till you can financially quit or find a new one. Surviving until the timing just lines up.

It’s not glamourous and it’s hard to advise yourself to just get through, there is a reason why suicidal thoughts are common, but waiting while you work is the key to make it through. Try to make your situation better, even when it seems hopeless there is normally small things you can do to make it better, put that work in, but know that in the end it will get better. Life will move pass this and you should be there when it does.

The knowledge is said often but it’s not fully comprehended till you’ve seen it unfold and come to pass multiple times. Sometimes even then it can seem hard to swallow, but there is always a way out of the mess you are in and that way is not death or giving up.

Hang in there, love.

Announcing Oliver Scott:

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He’s about two months old now, so it seems fitting to finally announce him here. If you noticed that my posts seemed to disappear for a while this little guy is the reason! I’m still going to be hanging around, though I can’t promise that I’ll be posting every week. Things are different with a baby.

Oliver Scott was born on September 30th at 12:19 via scheduled c-section. He was a c-section baby because he was happily breech with no interest in spinning around. We had a brief scare where he inhaled amniotic fluid, but after top notch care both him and I were healthy and doing well!

These first few months have been beautiful. I honestly love motherhood and am so happy with everything. I was at a much higher risk of post-partum depression because of my bipolar disorder, but luckily I got to skip that, most likely because I was allowed to stay on my medications during pregnancy and continue them as normal after. I’m so glad I was sent to specialized doctors who weighed the risk and benefits and helped me come up with a plan that was safe for both me and Oliver.

Oliver is perfect. He looks like both me and his father and we are so over the moon in love with him. As we get closer to two months he has started smiling at us and he is constantly reaching and grabbing at things though he hasn’t mastered it just yet.

He makes everyday brighter and has made my entire outlook on life shift a little.

Everything from here on out is for him and our family, and that, is wonderful.

The single bad habit slippery slope:

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We all have a list of bad habits that is longer than we would like, and honestly, if you say you don’t I not only don’t believe you but I think you might need to check your pride.

I currently have a daily check list on my phone of habits- it has good daily habits that I’d like to pick up and a series of bad habits to cross off when I don’t do them. It’s been the only system I’ve found that helps, though of course it isn’t a magic solution and I still fall short of checking all my boxes a lot of time.

There are arguments about how many habits you should try to pick up and drop at the same time, and this post isn’t really about that. I don’t have an answer to how much you can personally take on at a time, I think a lot of it has to do with how linked your habits are. What this post is about is doing one bad habit can lead to a day of all your bad habits coming out.

I think a lot of us have an all or nothing mindset, in some ways that might be a good thing, if you’re checking off good habits to do today it certainly is! But it also applies to your bad habits, and once we’ve fallen short we tend to think the day is lost and spiral.

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Balancing our Feeds: We’re not meant to take in world changing information all the time

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A few years ago I got rid of all political news from my feeds. I still have a lot of it blocked, because it did good things for my mental health, but I let some of it back in because I wanted to be aware of what has happening in the world. I think this was a good call. I like having some knowledge without being knocked out by it. And you do get knocked out by it.

I don’t think it’s healthy to read all the tragedies of the world 24/7. That sounds like common sense, but sometimes I worry that it’s not. Sometimes I worry that people have built being hyper aware into their personalities. And if not their personalities, into their routines.

This is one of the reasons I think it’s important to follow accounts that post art, that post family updates, cleaning tips, garden inspiration, fashion goals, and all those types of things. And when I say follow those types of accounts, I mean mostly follow those types of accounts and people. Follow way more of those accounts than news accounts. Surround yourself with the good and let in a trickle of the bad.

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Picking back up the good habits we dropped during COVID-19:

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It’s been a hard year and a half for goals! It’s been a hard year and half for everything really, but, you get my point. We’ve been told to cut ourselves slack, which is true, we needed it. We needed a break during the madness so we could properly take care of ourselves during the trying times, but it’s time to break back into the real world and start getting stuff done again.

I use an app that allows me to create daily to do lists, I even paid the extra ten dollars for a lifetime of being able to set reoccurring ones have a few other features. The app is really not that important, but the fact that I’m faced with eight bullet points under the title “habits” is. They are in my face daily. This is just one of the things I’ve tried to do to force myself into good behavior. I’ve also gotten a little help with my diet/active lifestyle by the mere fact that I’m pregnant and know I’m not just doing this for myself anymore. I have to be on top of it. Other than that? A lot of prayer and reflection trying to figure out why I struggle getting certain things going. A few motivational books. And a whole lot of trying to remind myself that I have willpower.

Willpower is a funny thing, I’ve talked about the fact that you have to exercise it to make it stronger before, but it’s also strange how when we tone it down (even for survival mode) it’s very hard to start back up. You read motivational quotes about how you can’t wait for motivation you just have to act on things, and they are right, but it’s much easier said than done. Some things really are a struggle, it brings us back to the truth that we find everywhere from the Bible to psychology text books, we do things we know are bad for us (or don’t do things that are good for us) even though we know we shouldn’t (or should). It sometimes seems like our natural response. Sometimes, I’m pretty sure it is our natural response.

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On being a support person:

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Being someone’s support person is a hard job, but as a human being who needs support, we also need to be able to give it back.

Mental illness and life’s hard moments both are known for knocking us down, and when we get knocked down we need someone more than ever. But honestly, just being alive requires having support, having someone to cheerlead you on. We need that positive push to get us through, we need someone to cheer us on when we win, and comfort us when we lose.

When you have a mental illness, or have gone through a really rough patch, it’s easy to take more support than you give, that’s okay, sometimes we need that, but I really want to talk about giving support back and creating those kinds of relationships.

Going out of your way to support someone is hardly ever going to backfire, especially because to start out, those relationships don’t take a lot out of you. They start small with words of encouragement and some extra time spent caring, then it turns into some of those bigger support tasks (whether it be waiting in the ER with someone or watching their children when they need help). Support is about being there. It’s about being a kind voice of reason and being excited for people. It’s taking an everyday good relationship and pouring a little more effort into it than you feel like is a hundred percent necessary.

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