What book are you reading right now? Books are a great way to relax, immerse yourself in another world, and learn something. And paper books don’t affect your sleep like reading on a screen does.
People have announced the death of physical books for a long time, but 2020 saw more paper books sold than ever before. If you’re not reading a book right now, find one on your bookshelf that you have meant to get around to, and get started tonight.
Before lockdown, you spent much of your time in curated space. Someone carefully designed your experience in a restaurant or a coffee shop through decorations, choice of color, arrangement of furniture and many other things. Your workplace was also curated, though probably less obviously so. But somebody thought about plants, lighting, and more.
During lockdown, you spend all of your time in your own space, and that might not be a carefully designed. But it could be. After all, this is your space.
Pick up a pen and a piece of paper and sit in the place where you spend most of your time. Look around and make a note of the things your could improve. You might recycle some books from an overstuffed bookshelf, or replace a worn rug, or clear the clutter from a table. Improve your space, and you improve your well-being.
Be careful when you check email. Lots of emails contain things you need to do and meetings you will have to attend. Everybody starts thinking about the potential problems with the tasks or the possible unpleasant things that might happen at the meetings. Especially if you suffer from anxiety, you need to practice some email self-defense.
Here in Denmark, there is a citizen’s initiative aimed at forbidding government agencies, counties, and municipalities from sending out messages outside of normal working hours. It was started by a person who sometimes got anxiety attacks when receiving officiel mail, and getting a message on a Saturday morning when his therapist as closed for the weekend was a major problem for him.
In Germany, there is a law that forbids companies to send email to employees in the evening and weekend. The boss can send it, but the company email system holds it until the morning of the next working day.
Even if you are not protected by national regulations, you can help yourself by setting an email-checking schedule. Also consider removing your email accounts from your phone. In that way, you will have to open up your laptop to check mail. That extra work will give you the chance to reconsider if you really need to check email right now.
In the Western world, we tend to view time as a line. Our life started here, then this happened, and then that happened. In nature, however, time is a circle. There is a circular rhythm to the day and the year.
If you are feeling stuck, take inspiration from the signs that the annual circle is continuing. Here in January, the first early spring flowers are breaking through the ground, and the days are slowly getting longer. Even if you feel stuck in lockdown, life does move on.
Sleep is very important to our well-being. I used to struggle with my sleep and have to be very careful to follow my bedtime routines in order to get a good night’s sleep.
Some studies show that more than half of us have sleep problems. If you suspect you’re one of them, there are many things you can do to improve your sleep. Surprisingly, we’re not very good at noticing how we sleep, so it can be hard to tell if the changes we make actually make a difference. If you keep a journal, write down when you go to bed and when you get up, and rate your sleep on a scale from 1 to 10 shortly after you wake up. If you turn that into a routine, your times and self-rating will show you if hot showers before bedtime, less TV, or more herbal tea is the thing you were missing.
When you want to make changes to your life, it is a good idea to connect them to something else that changes. That’s why we make New Year’s resolutions, and why we decide on our birthdays to establish new habits.
If you live in American and got a new president yesterday, you can also use that as a trigger for a change in your life. If you have a goal or a change you want to implement, today is a good day to start.
In winter in the Northern Hemisphere, we get less light. That affects our mood, and if it becomes bad, psychiatrists call it Seasonal Affective Disorder. I live in Denmark where our days are almost back to eight hours, but that still means the night is twice as long as the day.
You need to get as much light as possible. Some you get from being outdoors, but you might also be able to make more of the natural light you have available in your house or apartment. If you have blinds, pull them up during the day – even opened blinds block a lot of light. If you have window sills wide enough to sit in, make a point of sitting there and soak up some rays every day. Or you might be able to pull your favorite chair into an area of sunlight. It doesn’t have to stand in the middle of the floor all the time. But when you take a break, try to take it in natural light.
Did you check your phone time last Monday? If you did and set the intention to change it, did you notice that the time spent on your phone dropped this past week?
Setting a clear intention and telling our mind what you want is a powerful tool to make a change in your life. When say what you want, your subconscious mind will start working to make that thing happen, often without your conscious mind even noticing. In cases like phone use, my clients report that their time dropped even if they did not think about “I have to use my phone less” at all.
Give your mind something to work on, and watch it do its magic.
A lot of people have a health goal among their New Year’s resolutions. Goals focus your attention, but health goals tend to be “I should” goals set with your mind instead of your heart. Ideally, you would work on finding your true “why” and set a heart goal that will be much easier to achieve. But the next best thing is to build a habit instead. If you can create a habit of exercising, or a habit of eating home-cooked food instead of takeaway, your health will improve.
In Denmark where I live, we have costal climate. That means it doesn’t really get cold in winter, and snow is a rare occurrence. But we just had snow and we’ll have freezing temperatures this weekend. I’ll be taking some long walks this weekend. What will you do to support your new health habit this weekend?
You can improve your life by reducing your carbon footprint. Scientists may argue over whether the individual choice you make has any actual impact on the climate, but that is not the point. The point is that we all need to feel we make a difference. Using a reusable shopping bag, eating less meat or taking your bicycle to work is one way to do so.
There are many ways to reduce your carbon footprint, and many websites with advice to help you. Find one thing you can easily do and start doing that. Track your progress and when you have established that one thing as a habit, you can start on the next.
