New Year, New Lifestyle
07 January 2024
My goal for 2024 is to completely overhaul my lifestyle. What could possibly go wrong? 2023 was a year of excess in all forms and I was tuckered out before it finished. I'm lucky to get a long holiday break at my job, three weeks, it's coming to a close now and I'm dreading my return to work. I've realized that the pace of my life is unsustainable for my health. For this upcoming year, I'm planning on making small changes across the board to downsize the way I live my life. With these changes I hope to improve my physical health, my mental health, and my neurological health, to become a better person and feel more fulfilled by the life that I am living.
In 2023, I lived life at 120% capacity and it caught up to me right when the math said it would. I don't regret it! In the summer of 2022, I had a catastrophic knee injury that left me unable to walk for nearly 6 months. On top of that, I was living away from my spouse, so my life got very small very quickly. Simple things that able-bodied people take for granted became extremely exciting after a surgery in November 2022 began to correct the injury. Being able to ride a stationary bike, walking, getting down the stairs without clutching a hand rail, using an elliptical, jogging, squatting, and even being able to get out of a chair after several hours without pain. I was getting my life back! I took every opportunity available to me all year. I traveled for work, I traveled for family, attended multiple weddings, I drank, I smoked, increased my fitness, took on more responsibility at work, and I was able to move back in with my spouse.
The side effect to all this is that if you live 6/5 of a life, it catches up with you 5/6 of the way through the year. So on cue, 5/6 through the year at the end of October or beginning of November, I started experiencing burnout that I wouldn't recognize until December. Everything became a mountainous obligation, every simple task becoming so taxing that I needed to take a nap. Always irritated and irreversibly upset at the smallest slight, life felt challenging in ways I could not handle. My exercise routine fell off the map. I barely ate. I hated my job. I resented every social interaction I had. My doom scrolling went on for seemingly forever. My health, in all aspects, was declining.
The journey to a healthier Jobee begins chiefly with my physical health. With no severe mental illnesses, a lot of my mental issues can actually be solved by solving physical issues. First up: I need to eat better. I stop feeling hungry when I am stressed, until the switch flips and I am painfully nauseous. This means that I rarely have patience for cooking and need convenient food. That convenient food for the past few months has rarely included a vegetable, often too few carbs, and too much salt. I really enjoy vegetables and healthy meals, but they require a bit of forethought, and I didn't have much spare effort to be meal planning. One of the recommended macronutrient splits between carbs, fat, and protein for an adult is 55-60% carbs, 15-20% fat, and 25-30% protein. I was probably working with a 20-40-40 split, which mostly made my skin break out and left me feeling lethargic. I have a few meals planned for the upcoming weeks that include lots of vegetables, more rice, a macro balance that will make my body feel better, and still taste amazing. I want to clarify that this unhealthy eating has not impacted my weight at all, nor is weight change a goal with this new diet. I simply want to reap the benefits of feeding my body in a healthier way.
Properly fueling my body will allow me to achieve many more of my goals because I will have more energy to work on them. I would like to return to the state of fitness I had in the fall before my time in the gym petered out to almost nothing. This will simply require discipline on my part, but I am more likely to make good progress and feel better about each workout when I have the right food to feed my muscles for the workout. Stretching is a piece of this that I need to incorporate more into my daily routine, not just when I make it to the gym. My knee injury has made me sensitive to tight muscles, so a tight quad can make it painful to walk if I am not careful. I want to be able to run 5km without stopping to take a breathing break, and I want to increase the size of my bad leg - the atrophy from a year ago still haunts the size and strength of it.
I may have a plan to take care of my body, but the brain is still a part of the body. When my mental health is in the toilet, it is difficult to maintain any type of discipline for healthy meals or exercise, so I need to tackle the major stressor leading to my burnout at its source: my job. The additional responsibility I took on at work made my job more stressful and less fun. What made my job fun wasn't my responsibility anymore, I was mostly doing the parts that I hated, and my hours increased for no additional pay. My current workload leaves me a zombie, and I am completely unable to do anything when I get home except stare at the wall or doom scroll. Sometimes even watching a show feels like too much work. I will ask my supervisor to be moved back into my old position, which should lift a huge weight off my shoulders.
Another stressor in my life is my social life. I am a very introverted person, but I am successful in social situations and most importantly I do not know how to say no. This has my calendar full to the brim with plans to see friends, family, attend events, with very little or no time to recharge. I didn't even want to see my family this Christmas because of the social aspect of my burnout. I need desperately to carve out more time for myself this year, close my circle of friends not due to any negative qualities on their part but just to give me some space alone.
Since I come home from work so brain dead most days, and feel like I am struggling to keep my feet underneath me, I have to admit that I am completely addicted to my phone. I am checking it all the time, regardless of notifications, regardless of whether there are any new posts to see on any social media, and filling the rest of that time with playing mindless phone games. I know that phone usage has a negative impact on attention span, so I need to be distracting myself with other things. I don't need to replace that scrolling time with productive measures, but I do need to reintroduce healthy attention to my life. I want to spend time doing things that I don't feel embarrassed to talk about with my peers.
My solution to battling phone addiction is actually to be more creative. Instead of using my phone while watching shows and movies, I am going to try to knit or crochet to keep my hands busy. I want to spend more time reading paper books with my phone out of reach. Completing projects and books will allow me to write for this website, which I really enjoy. I would even like to spend more time playing video games, because I feel like I don't get to play as much as I'd like (I just bought Baldur's Gate 3, so maybe all these goals will be dashed in pursuit of D&D romance). I hope that working to repair my attention span will improve my mental health even just by eliminating the guilt of feeling like I've "wasted time".
So this is the plan to overhaul my lifestyle. It's definitely a bold task to undertake when I have very few measurable goal posts, but a general tenet of my goal is to downsize a life of excess. Even recognizing the burnout and building a plan to get out of it are a great first few steps. Only time will tell if I am successful, and I'm sure the state of this website at the end of the year will be an indication.
