Return to What You Love

September 9th 2019

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When life has you down, return to what you love~

Since my last post was me sulking about my life and how I feel everything is going, I wanted to turn it around at the start of a fresh week and talk a little bit about self-help and getting yourself out of a rough spot. You see, when I am feeling down, I often find myself in a bit of a slump. I begin to cut down on doing things I love and spend most of my time either laying in bed or working myself like crazy to keep busy.

In this particular slump, I found myself falling behind on my blog first, I missed a couple of posts and fell really far out of my posting schedule. I have even stopped using my precious spreadsheet as much (and if you have been following me for a while, you would know that I live and die by my blog spreadsheet). The next thing to lose traction was my health and fitness. I was no longer motivated to work on my yoga practice and I stopped caring what kind of food I was putting into my body (I am still working on fixing that, honestly). And lastly, I fell out of watching YouTube which is what I consider to be my favorite relaxation activity. To find something I considered relaxing to be tedious was a big wake up call that I was really letting myself go.

But lately I have been motivated to get my shit in order and I plan on doing that by forcing myself to push through the apathy and return to the things I love. I am going to blog every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday again. I have signed up for 4 fitness classes a week with my mom and I plan to try to fit in a trip to the gym every once and a while. And I plan to schedule in some time to relax before bed every so often. To me, getting over the initial hump of being too apathetic to do things is the hardest part, but I think that holding myself to scheduled activities will make things a lot easier.

I feel like the best way to find yourself when you feel lost is through doing and enjoying what makes you most happy. And if it has been a while since you’ve thought about what makes you happy, try writing a list and see what you can incorporate into your life more. Here is my list:

• Yoga/Exercise
• Writing
• Reading
• Taking Pictures
• Reading Tarot
• Spending Time Outside
• Talking to My Friends
• Spending Time with My Family and/or Boyfriend
• Traveling

I feel like everything I listed could feasibly fit into my life right now if I am willing to make time for it. Currently, I think I am doing the best with spending time with my family and/or boyfriend, as well as spending time outside. I am improving with my integration of exercise and writing into my routine and I have been pretty good at talking to my friends.  However, I haven’t really explored or traveled much recently, haven’t done much reading lately (neither books nor cards), and haven’t been taken many pictures. However, all of those things are things that can be integrated into my life if I just have the patience for them.

I think I miss taking pictures the most. I used to love putting new pictures up on my Instagram and creating a pretty feed and lately I feel like I just haven’t been with it. Part of it has been a self confidence thing and another part of it has been a lack of motivation. Not only has not taking pictures held me back from creating a creative feed, it has also sort of hurt my blogging too because I’ve done some fun stuff that I forget to photograph then I get too frustrated by my lack of photos to even write about it. So I think that challenging myself to take more photos will really help me not only feel better, but knock off 2 things on my happiness list.

So, since it is self-care September and all, I am challenging myself to make this month a happy month. I am going to try to do more of what I love, focus on my mental health, and planning a future that makes me happy.

What is one thing on your happy list that you hope to do more this month!?

Jess~