I need to get my act together

[mousme]

I have been a terrible person to be around lately, both online and in person.

I'm going to try much, much harder to be better than I am. I kind of lost track of my goals in the last few weeks, especially once I started looking for another place to live, but even before then.

My resolution not to complain has been a total bust so far. I just can't seem to help myself. Resolution #1 is to try harder not to complain. I have it pretty good, especially when compared to most. No more complaining, self. This is the last post in which you get to do that.

I also have not been good at doing basic things to ensure good health. My eating habits are... well, they're okay but not great. I already decided to try the mason jar salad things, and in the interest of promoting better health, I'm going to try a few things in the coming weeks.

• Walk 30 minutes a day. Preferably shortly after "breakfast," but otherwise whenever I can squeeze it in. Take the dog with me when I'm home so he gets some exercise too.


• Stop drinking caffeinated beverages (coffee especially)


• Cut back drastically on my sugar intake


• Plan healthy meals for myself when I'm on my own


• Take my vitamins/supplements every day

I am going to make a more concerted effort to clean and tidy both my living spaces. I've been doing maintenance rather than in-depth cleaning (like dishes, or surface cleaning in the kitchen and bathroom), and I need to do a lot more than that. I will have to find a way to keep myself accountable for this, but I haven't thought of a good way to do that yet. Related to this, I need to finish organising the books in the bedroom and do another sorting of my clothes to get rid of some of the things I don't wear or that's too old or that doesn't fit anymore. I have overall too much stuff that's taking up too much space in the house, so I'm going to try to cull unnecessary things in the coming months. I guess it could be considered spring cleaning/reorganisation. :)

I've been letting myself sleep in on the days I'm home, sometimes not getting up until 07:30 or nearly 08:00 when the rest of the family is up at 06:00 or 06:30. This needs to change. I'm going to set a (very quiet) alarm for 07:00, to make sure I'm not oversleeping, because these days there is no way I can drag myself out of bed before then without an alarm.

I am also going to work a lot harder to find additional sources of revenue.

No idea if any of this is going to work, but I'm damned well going to try. Self-improvement for the win.

Comments

[griffen.livejournal.com]

I want to make a suggestion, but I don't want you to take it the wrong way.

Re: the complaining, and any other goal you have which is "I need to stop doing X," the mind doesn't work that way. If you tell yourself "I won't X," you've just focused your mind on X and it'll be harder to avoid. For example: Don't think about purple pigs. Now tell me your mind isn't imagining lavender-colored porcine creatures - of course it is! It was just primed to think about them.

Psych research has repeatedly shown that people who set positively-phrased or affirmatively-phrased goals have much better success than those who set negatively-phrased goals. Instead of "I won't complain," try "I will say what's good about my situation." I used to focus on how much we didn't have financially, and tell myself "I will not spend any money because we don't have enough." That didn't help. It just made me more miserable. Starting this past January, however, I found a technique that did help. I started to write down three things I'm grateful for every day. That moved my mind away from a focus on lack and towards a focus on abundance. It also made me less depressed and less anxious - win-win.

This isn't the same thing as "positive thinking," either. It's just shifting your mind's focus towards what you want to accomplish instead of what you want to avoid. It works better.

I hope this helps.

[sorceror.livejournal.com]

Of course you're allowed to complain! Complaining is a fundamental human right.

You are allowed to sleep in. Especially with your current schedule.

I admire your determination to work on things you want to improve, but please don't be so hard on yourself! There's nothing about you that needs to change.

[kiwano.livejournal.com]

Your to-do list reminded me of this blog post (http://www.raptitude.com/2013/12/find-balance-over-your-years-not-your-days/) over on a site that I feel takes a pretty sane, level-headed approach to self-improvement. This post (http://www.raptitude.com/2013/12/how-to-stand-up-straight/) (on the same site), also has a nice practical trick for making a particular change, which you might find adaptable to the sorts of changes you're looking to make. The latter is mostly about setting up triggers/reminders for behaviours that you want to make into ongoing habits (our minds are wildly associative, setting up reminders/triggers for things is one of those tricks for exploiting how our brain works that's on par with using positively phrased goals).

[kiwano.livejournal.com]

I just posted a comment with a pair of links to helpful blog posts elsewhere (not my blog--I never write anything helpful) and apparently that pair of outbound links was enough to get it flagged as spam. Boogers, I say. Boogers!