Year of Radical Self-Care: January

PSA:  This is a post about my goals.  I need to write it for myself, but I’m fairly certain nobody else actually cares.  No need to read.  It will not hurt my feelings.

In the past, I have done the Year of Butterflies, the Year of Don Quijote, and the Year of Trying to Clear Off the To-Read Shelf.  In 2024, I’m doing things a little differently, but the overarching theme is the Year of Radical Self-Care.

 

For Reasons, the last few years have been hard.  I mean, there was a pandemic in there, among other things.  I’ve been coping (you can tell, because I’m still here!), but recently I’ve begun to realize that I’ve been using up my reserves of, well, basically, everything.  I’m less healthy than I’d like to be, more stressed, and less cheerful.  In short, it is time to do some restoration work on myself.

 

The first challenge, in coming up with a way to make a goal for self-care, is that the goal itself could be counterproductive, adding more stress instead of reducing it.  I mean, writing “Relax” in a beautiful cursive script on my endless to-do list is not going to work, exactly. 

 

Then there is the whole question of what counts as self-care.  I recently read something somewhere (yeah, sorry; don’t remember where) about how we culturally conflate self-care with self-soothing.  Self-care can be hard things like dealing with bank stuff or doing tough workouts.  Self-soothing things, like hot baths or comfort foods, can also be self-care, but are not, by themselves, going to solve long-term life issues.

 

But wait!  There’s more!  I, as an overachiever, have many areas in my life that need some radical self-care.  Tackling them all at once would be… something between overwhelming and hilarious.  How do I figure out what is most urgent and/or important?

 

Here’s what I’ve decided to do:

 

Each month, I can choose up to two areas of focus.  For each area, I have a rule, a list of challenge options, and a list of soothing options.  I need to follow the rule and do one challenge and one soothing each day.  At the end of the month, I get to choose the focus for the next month.

 

In January, I decided that I would get the most traction from taking care of my body and improving my mind.  The body rule is:  no sugar.  No sugar means no soda, no candy, no cookies, no cake.  It does not mean that I can’t eat things like fruit.  Challenge things for my body could include things like longer than usual cardio, weight workouts, bonus workouts, and the like.  Soothing things are things like naps and baths and massages.

 

The brain rule is:  no TV.  It’s not that think TV is bad, it’s just that I get into a couch rut in the evenings.  Instead, I’m going to read.  I’ve had one particular anatomy book sitting on my to-read shelf for years now.  I did the math, and I’ll finish it handily if I just read 20 pages a day.  (Actually, I’ll finish early and I’ll start on some other nonfiction book in my shelf.)  That’s the challenge part.  For the soothing part, I get to spend at least fifteen minutes a day reading something fun.

 

I even made myself a mini vision board and checklist.  With luck and hard work, by the end of the month, I should be ready for a new couple of rules and the challenges they bring.