I know I’m about 5 days late on that, but hey, better late than never, right?
So…
Happy New Year!
Did you come up with your New Year’s Resolutions yet? Did you give up on them already? Not judging, but most resolutions don’t last very long. I didn’t even come up with any this year, it’s easier to not come up with any than to deal with the feelings of failure when I don’t follow through with them.
It’s a new year, it’s time to start over. It’s time for a new you. It’s time to make all the changes you’ve ever wanted to make in your life. All at once. All now.
It seems like the beginning of the year puts a lot of stress on people to change everything about themselves and become perfect. Lose the weight, become organized, get the better job, the bigger house, the better car, give up junk food, exercise more. Become better than you currently are.
That’s an awful lot of pressure to put on someone just because we change from one year to the next.
I’m not a mental health professional, but from personal experience, that kind of pressure to change has caused me to suffer from mental health issues in the past. I’m going to share how I’m heading into 2019.
To begin, I need to go back to 2018. I learned a lot about myself and my anxiety last year. I learned some things I can do to lessen my anxiety on a regular basis, like get enough sleep ( which is a struggle itself since I also have insomnia), eat healthy, and exercise. Just doing those things have taken my daily anxiety levels from a 5 on a scale of 1-10 to about a 2. That’s a huge difference. I feel like I can breath, everyday. I feel like I can relax on the shore instead of constantly treading water, just waiting to be pulled beneath the surface to drown in the demands of life.
I will take those new found skills into 2019 with me. An area I will work on this year is being nice to myself and to stop listening to the liar that takes up residence in my brain occasionally.
I’m cruel, belittling and horrible to myself. If I make a mistake, if I forget something, if I let anxiety win a battle, if I eat extra junk food, if I drink caffeine too late in the day, if I misspell a word, if I get a student’s name wrong, if I make a wrong turn, if I…., If I…
I let myself know how stupid I am. How idiotic. Unlovable, undignified, unprofessional, unloving, uncaring, fat, lazy, never good enough, always making bad choices, can’t make good choices, incapable, worthless.
Now, if one of my kids or a student did any one of those things, I’d encourage them to do better next time and remind them that their one mistake doesn’t define who they are. They can make better decisions in the future. I would offer them grace and hope. I need to do that for myself as well.
Sometimes I’m able to do that, but sometimes, that liar, Anxiety, takes up residence, and I start believing it. I start talking like it.
For 2019, I will be nicer to myself, not as a New Year’s resolution, but as a part of my continuing, growing, expanding self-care regimen. So that when a day happens like earlier this week when I went out to breakfast with my kids, went out to lunch with my friends and then went out to dinner with my husband, I will not call myself a fat, loser who can’t stick to eating healthy for anything. I won’t tell myself that I might as well give up now and just eat everything, all the time.
I will tell myself that I had a good time with three different groups of people and that sometimes spending time with people means eating food with them.
I will tell myself that nurturing my relationships with family and friends is just as important to helping ease my anxiety as eating healthy is and remind myself that I made healthy(ish) choices while eating at restaurants.
Here’s to not being better in 2019, but to being the best you that you can be in 2019!
Happy New Year!
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