Is your life a mess? Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Sometimes things just need to reboot, both humans and machines alike. Work, school, relationships, pandemics (!!) etc. are all stresses that can accumulate negative energy in our lives. Eventually these things can cause us to feel burned out — and crash.
Ideally, you don’t want to wait until your life goes up in flames before troubleshooting, so let’s take the start of a new year as an opportunity to be proactive. (If your life is already a dumpster fire, don’t worry. I can definitely relate lol. We got this.)
Unplug <TURN OFF>
🔅Turn off your device. (Literally).
📵 Try doing a digital detox. Take a break from social media, and doom-scrolling to spend some quality time with yourself.
✨ Taking breaks can be hard when we’re overwhelmed because simply “doing nothing” still allows your brain to ruminate on the issues. Instead, you need to find activities that are all-encompassing and will distract you.
📖 Reading a book or watching a movie are great options because they allow you to escape to another world. Reading, in particular, requires your full attention and lets you get out of your head and into someone else’s.
🌳 Getting outside and exploring the great outdoors is another great option. You get the benefits of moving your body and get to experience a change in environment. Try to stay engaged with the walk instead of letting your mind wander to your to-do list. Notice and appreciate the things around you, take pictures of things that you find interesting, use an app to identify local plants, smile at the neighbours.
Wait 10-15 seconds <RESET>
🪄 Reset to baseline. Free up your proverbial RAM.
According to Maslow, there are core human needs that must be met in a particular order of importance. A person can only move on to addressing the higher-level aspirations once their basic needs are adequately met. So start by making sure all of your needs are being met. Take care of your body. Eat some healthy foods, take your vitamins, hydrate. Sleep.
🧹 Declutter your physical space & digital space, delete apps and unfollow people that don’t make you feel good.
🧠 Take care of your mental health.
🛁 Try out some self-care activities.
📓 Use your journal to do a brain dump (let it all out.)
Plug back in <TURN ON>
🔆 Turn on the device. Boot Correctly.
You are hopefully feeling more relaxed and refreshed and can use your mental clarity to assess your life and put systems in place to optimize for success going forward.
🤔 Reflect on the past year. Self-reflection is a powerful tool that can help you understand who you are, how you have changed and what is important to you.
💭 Think about what happened: good and bad. What is the best thing that happened to you? What are you most grateful for? If you set goals for yourself last year, did you achieve them or not, if not why? Do you still want to achieve those things? Why or why not? If you do, what can you do differently this year to make sure that you do achieve them? If not, what else do you want to focus on this year?
🥅 Set goals. Now you need to decide what your priorities are & what you are going to be spending your energy on so that you don’t spread yourself too thin going forward (doing too many things at once disperses your energy, like computer RAM we also only have a limited amount of mental space and a limit to how many actions we can perform at once without our performance suffering).
🌈 Create a vision board. Use your answers from the reflection questions to create a vision board, an inspirational collage of images and quotes that acts as a visual reminder of what is important to you and what you want to achieve. Choose images that you think are pretty so that you enjoy looking at them. Put it somewhere you’ll see often, like on your phone wallpaper, computer desktop background, printed out and put it near your desk or bedroom or in the car visor.