New Year’s Resolutions are, as we all know, a crock chock full of the chocolatey-brown stuff.

But if you’re overwhelmed, stuck in a rut, struggling with mental health, middle age, menopause, misery or run of the mill brain-muddle, maybe re-setting isn’t such a bad idea.

Here’s the thing: whatever you do, DON’T GO BIG.

Giving it all up at once and changing your whole lifestyle/personality/routine just isn’t going to stick.

Plus it sounds super exhausting.

And don’t go on 1 Jan! We’re all still reeling from Christmas. Right NOW is the time to go. And by go, I mean gently creep.

Go small, go gradual, and go a little bit every month (hence 12 resolutions). (Ish).

Now, the Good Lord (and everyone who’s ever met me) knows I’m NOT the person to be dishing out life advice to anyone… But the side effect of being a copy-writer in January is that everyone wants you to write New Year content. Which means you can now benefit from the left-over research I’ve been doing for clients!

Here are the best, smallest and most manageable resolutions to start the change you need but don’t have the energy for.

Some of which I may even try myself.

1. The One Minute Rule

If a task of any sort is going to take you less than a minute, do it IMMEDIATELY. Crumbs in the sink? Wipe them up. Email from a client? Dash off an acknowledgement. Towels on the floor? Hang them up. It’s a surprisingly effective way of being more effective.

2. The Ten Minute Tidy

If you’re anything like me, tidying takes forever.

Most of this time is spent thinking how much you need to tidy, worrying about how much tidying there is to do, not knowing where to start tidying, avoiding tidying, and doing things that aren’t tidying but also aren’t any fun, because you’re supposed to be tidying. The actual tidying bit DOESN’T ACTUALLY TAKE THAT LONG.

The Ten Minute Tidy takes away the procrastination. Set a timer, do what you can in that time, and then stop and do something better.

Get everyone involved! Possibly as a pre-screen-time condition! It’s only ten minutes, after all.

3. Timers and Rewards

This is a technique used by a lot of ADHDers to help them focus. Essentially, you time EVERYTHING. You time chores you avoid to see how long they really take, so you know it’s not that long, and then set a timer to do it – and try and beat it!

It works for work, too. You give yourself 20 minutes to check your email, or an hour to complete a task/article/spreadsheet. BUZZ! And then you get yourself a reward for sticking at it and focussing that long – eg. a cup of coffee. (You’d have had it anyway, of course, but you’re tricking your brain into compliance).

Invest in a real-life, old-fashioned timer. NOT your phone – you’ll end up on Facebook by mistake reading dumb-ass listicles.

4. Start your day differently

Most of us these days start the day by picking up our phone (our alarm), and starting to read it. Probably news or social media. Both of these things are proven to be depressing.

Stop mainlining climate change, war, suffering, murder, gang violence and other horrors as soon as you attain consciousness. Or other people’s curated lives and staged photos that make you feel inadequate. It’s madness.

Instead, try starting your day differently – even if it’s just at weekends – by reading something NICE. And even better, by reading it IN A NON-ELECTRONIC FORM.

This may be going too far for some. Fair dos. But do yourself a favour and try and get lost in a REAL BOOK. Remember those? With pages! And paper! It doesn’t even need to be a novel. Non-fiction also works – or essays. Eg something like Ross Gay’s ‘The Book of Delights.’

5. Practice Phone Discipline

It’s not your imagination, your phone IS making you more grumpy, more anxious, and less able to concentrate.

If your screen time is going up and up, if it’s the first thing you look at in the morning and last thing you look at at night, if you’re on it every toilet trip, mealtime or spare minute, if it’s eating up all your down time to the exclusion of other things/people you enjoy, you may be an addict.

Yes, this IS actually a thing. Says science, which I don’t have to cite, because I’m NOT AT WORK.

Going phone cold turkey is impossible – don’t attempt it.

Instead, try putting it across the room when you’re working. Try taking a phone-free poo. Try 4, and not looking at it first thing. Try banning it from mealtimes and leaving it in your bag when you’re out – not on the table. Set limits on the apps you get most lost in – or set your new TIMER for a finite amount of doom scrolling.

And try to end double-digi-ing. So if you’re watching telly, put the phone down, and vice versa.

One thing at a time is a GREAT 2024 resolution.

6. Resurrect a Hobby, or do Something Creative

Hobbies, it turns out, are dying out. No one’s collecting stamps anymore, because they can see all the ones that ever existed on the internet, plus cat videos and PORN. (I am not suggesting any of these things become your new hobbies).

But the thing is, you do need to do SOMETHING that’s not work, home/family running – or your phone. What did you used to like? Before the exhaustion? Pick it back up again. And make it something that takes a bit of concentration – and involves your hands. This takes your mind to a wonderful place where it rests in doing – and you probably don’t get enough of that. And it IS what makes humans happy.

If you’re stuck for ideas, doing something creative is a good place to start. It doesn’t matter if you’re terrible at it! It’s the process more than the result you’re interested in (although a nice result is a nice validatory-acheivy bonus). Do a colouring book. Knit a scarf. Get the kids’ paints out. Build a model. Write a short story. Describe your day, or something you found funny. Set a timer for ten minutes if it’s too hard.

7. Find your Third Place

A hobby is your Third Thing – after work and home. You also, apparently, need a Third Place. Somewhere you go that’s not either of those places, but that feels like it fits you. Think Central Perk in Friends. Or the bar in Cheers. Or Hogwarts. Or something.

Since the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, all of our lives have become smaller and less colourful. And when you’re overwhelmed you just want to hide and hibernate – but somehow it doesn’t actually RENEW you. Sound familiar?

Widening your life, finding a Third Place and spending time there, possibly doing your Third Thing, could be the one thing you’re missing.

8. Create a Sanctuary

Having said you need to get out more, you also need to NEST more, too.

When life has got too much, your house is the often the second victim – after your wellbeing.

The stair piles multiply, the bits-and-bobs draw overflows, the post and paperwork stacks up, and Washing Mountain achieves new heights of Everestial Grandeur!

And the worse it gets the more you feel like you’re failing. Like you can’t get away from your failure, like your life is out of control, like there is nowhere safe to go and hide, like there is nowhere you are happy, that is yours, where you are you. I know.

So reclaim ONE space. Take out all the junk and pile it precariously elsewhere, out of sight! It could be your bedroom, or even the bathroom. Clear it out, clean it up, and bring in and arrange all of your candles/fairy lights/cushions/cosmetics/knick knacks. Make ONE place where you can BE, and be happy.

A Sanctuary.

And maybe you’ll feel calm enough and inspired enough to do the next room. Or the next cupboard. Or whatever you can manage.

9. Give yourself Permission to Rest

Once you’ve made a Sanctuary, give yourself permission to rest in it. Doing nothing is not being lazy, or giving up, or letting yourself or others down. It’s what people DO.

We work towards this all our lives – it’s called retirement.

And because of gross mismanagement of politics, culture, economy and society, IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN TO ANY OF US! So start using it up NOW. Micro-dose retirement! A little bit every day. Because you have earned it. You do deserve it.

And you don’t have to achieve stuff to be worth stuff.

10. Start Micro-Exercising

Look, a new exercise regime is A LOT. But you don’t actually have to do a lot to feel a lot better. Again, Real Science!

Go super, super small.

Start heading to the toilet furthest away from you – at home or at work. Do 5 squats before you sit down on it (great challenge for the pelvic floor, which can see the toilet seat and starts getting all excited). Do some lunges or sit ups while the kettle boils. Park a bit further away on the supermarket/school run/commute. Take a ten minute walk round the block at lunchtime, in the company of your faithful timer, should you need the discipline.

11. Be Empty in Nature

OMG this is an actual thing. More Science! Trees are good for you. Walking is good for you. NOT HAVING INPUT is good for you.

So this one is basically about going for an old-fashioned walk.

Don’t listen to music, a podcast, or a book. Listen to the sounds. Look at the patterns in the leaves, the bark, the concrete. Let your mind wander with your feet. Let the thoughts come in. Don’t be afraid – don’t drive them away with SOUND. Welcome them. They’re telling you stuff.

And while they can be scary, NOT giving them time and space is also hurting you, and damaging your patience, creativity, and resilience.

12. Projects and Plans

The REAL secret to human happiness? PROJECTS AND PLANS!

You need to lose yourself in being interested in something, and you need to LOOK FORWARD to something.

What’s really weird, is that this bit BEFORE THE THING is actually EVEN BETTER THAN THE THING – and that’s okay and normal!

So start a project. Make some plans.

I know you don’t feel like it. I know you’re tired. I know everything is hard. But it really is the key to feeling a bit better. Start small. Re-organise or re-decorate your sanctuary. Start your hobby. Arrange a night out. A family games night. A cinema trip.

Build in the stuff that historically has made you feel most like YOU.

BONUS RESOLUTION!:

Mostly just as a reminder to myself:

12.5 – STOP RUSHING.

The dog days are over.

No one is chasing you anymore.

You don’t have to go at 100 miles an hour at everything to escape the demons.

You can’t outrun fate anyway. You can’t bargain with life not to knock you down if you drive yourself mad enough by bracing for it.

Walk at a normal pace.

Potter.

Stop rushing. Stop achieving. Stop performing.

2024 is going to be okay.

You’re going to be okay.

xxx

I’ve heard grief described in a lot of different ways. A journey with ups and downs. An ocean – vast and wild and coming in waves.

It is such a universal experience, but it has stunned me how little it IS actually talked about. How we ignore it, brush over it – how we don’t know what to say to each other.

And I suppose that’s because it is such a painful and private experience that looks very different for different people.

For me, grief is a snake.

It is secret, sly, and mostly very well camouflaged in the mundanity of my life – sliding silently along in parallel like a shadow.

Sometimes it is close, and sometimes it is far away. Sometimes I only know it’s there by the fear crawling across my skin.

Sometimes I’ll catch a glimpse of it, glittering in the grass, just out of the very corner of my eye, and I will run away – fast – in the other direction.

Sometimes it strikes from nowhere, sinks its fangs in, terrible and beautiful all at once, black diamonds flowing in impossible symmetry down its back.

And it is never where I expect it.

It is not in the anniversaries, or the big milestones. Because then I suppose I am watching for it. Instead it hides coiled in the little things, the gaps I didn’t know were there.

It is in a pile of papers, with his messy scrawling handwriting on it, in the relish of his g and y tails.

It is in his phrases as they drop unbidden from my own lips – you could get a Sherman tank through there, what’s that in real money? you little ratbag.

It is in the funny things he would love and the half-written texts and half-formed stories that don’t have anywhere to go – left hanging without their audience.

It is in the reminder pictures that pop up on my phone, in the tilt of a familiar expression not seen for months now – in knowing soul-deep what it meant and what he would say or do next.

It is in the small, dark moments where I am desperate for comfort and my heart leaps for him and he’s not there to catch it and hold it safe, like he always did.

I am afraid of the snake.

But I am also afraid it will leave – that if I avoid it for too long I will forget.

Sometimes I want the pain.

I want to feel the venom seep through my body and seize my breath, grip my chest in a vice. I WANT to be crushed. I want to BLEED. Sometimes I want to feel the cold burn of each individual poisonous needle pricking each cell of my body – I want to be filled to bursting by the thundering wrongness and emptiness until I am ripped apart by it. I welcome the violence of it, the power.

One day, maybe I will learn to live with the snake.

Maybe it will become a pet, and I will care for it, visit it, let it out of its enclosure to spend time in its presence, stroking my hands along its familiar muscled body.

At the moment, it finds me. And when it does so, the best I can do as it wraps itself around me and starts to squeeze, is to imagine its embrace is my dad’s.

A last hug.

And wish that I could stay there a little longer.

xxx

Sometimes, the Authenticity Gods, or even the more minor Small Talk Deities, are behind me. Other times they are most definitely not.

Sometimes I am this awkward marionette bent at grotesque angles to my own life, not quite fitting into it, into any given situation it presents – from work meetings to the school gate, supermarket checkouts to nights out, playing with the kids to coffee with friends.

Sometimes I am just too conscious of my body and my tongue and my thoughts. Of what other people are thinking. Of the world pushing in on me. And it throws me off my axis.

I’m slightly off kilter – a beat behind everything and everyone. Too loud. Too quiet. Too filtered and too unfiltered – saying or doing slightly the wrong thing at slightly the wrong time. Looking out of my own eyes from a long way away.

Sometimes I am just… Other. Othered. I’m not sure how else to describe it.

The really annoying thing is that I can’t really tell how or when it’s going to happen, but it is when I am stuck between selves that it is at its worst.

This is a particular problem (one of many) I think, for the co-parent. Because as a co-parent you end up living life in two halves; the one with your children, and the one without them.

In many ways it is a privilege – to get time in your own skin, to get the chance to play at being young and carefree, to shed the mantle of responsibility, to lower the mum mask.

But the flip side is that you’re split. You’re never a whole person in the same place and space.

Or at least I’m not…

I think I just didn’t know how else to do it on my own but to mum HARD, and then ‘me’ hard in relief/despair when I was without them. And I ended up with these two different lives that for various logistical reasons have never much crossed over.

Certainly the Big Small now always complains that I don’t feel like the mum she knows when she glimpses my other self – for instance when I’ve had a glass of wine and I’m with my friends, or The Boy.

It’s always hard when your parents suddenly feel like they don’t belong to you – I remember it from my own childhood, watching dinner partiers through the banisters. When your mum, your person, is suddenly not your mum but a stranger – and you feel them slipping away from you. So I get it. But sometimes, as I said to her, she doesn’t feel like she belongs to me either.

I feel the distance most keenly when she’s away on holiday with her dad – in the awkward, stilted phone calls that don’t flow like conversations do when we’re together. She’s not mine, in those moments. And I’m not me.

She KNOWS this about herself, as well as knowing it about me. She can articulate it. She said to me recently that she feels like she’s two people – the person she is with me, and the person she is at her dad’s, and that keeping up both is exhausting.

I feel that SO HARD.

Because I am tired, too.

Reconciling the different sides of myself, the different hats I wear, roles I play and moods I weather has always been a struggle. And it is both the cause and the effect of this Otherness.

I had this epiphany recently when I went away with a group, where I had to be two sides of me in both halves of my life AT THE SAME TIME. And I ended up doing neither very well… I wasn’t the mum I wanted to be, or the me I wanted to be. I was locked in weird self-conflict – as if the two halves coming together didn’t actually make a proper functioning whole.

I CAN be hugely present and in a moment and FLOWING.

But, sometimes – I can’t.

What I want for the Big Small as she grows up into whoever she’s going to be, is to be able to be her WHOLE self, the whole time. To embrace being different in different moments and emotions, without bowing to expectations – her own or others’. To live without the conflicts so many women face trying to please everyone and navigate their way through the binaries of personal/professional, mother/lover, leader/nurturer. To accept Otherness when it comes as a part of herself, as a part of being a human.

I want that for me, too.

Perhaps the best I can do at the start of mental health awareness week, is to try to be kinder to myself when I am stuck in Other. And shout out to all the other ‘Othered’, out there. The anxious. The autistic. The overthinkers. The hurt. The wary. The weary.

You are not alone, and you’re not actually out of sync with the rest of the world.

You are in sync with me, at least.

xxx