Thoughtful Refresh: Check In 1
Green Refresh by Sarah Parsons
If you follow along with me on Instagram or subscribe to The B-List newsletter, you know that my big personal project for the summer is working on my routines. This past school year was busy and full in many wonderful ways, but completely annihilated the sense of routine I had been creating since 2020. For the first time in years I struggled to maintain my yoga and meditation practice and I felt my sense of priority around my health slipping into the background.
My routines started to evaporate in earnest this year but if I’m being honest, each year since the pandemic has felt more and more challenging. Life has gotten busy again, and I’m looking at it as a positive opportunity to recreate my habits and sustainably address my needs in a way that my work (and personal) life can accommodate.
I have a tendency to go all-in on whatever it is I decide to do. My gut reaction to wanting to meditate, exercise, or do yoga more would be to do those things every single day for a set amount of time. One of the reasons my routines suffered recently was that if I didn’t have my self-designated one hour block to practice yoga then I wouldn’t do it at all, meaning I didn’t utilize many smaller windows of time. To counteract this tendency, I’m reiterating to myself often that the goal is not to go big but to go long by addressing the amount of time, time of day, and the types of practices I build into my routine.
So, against all my impulses, I started out small and slow in the first week and a half after the school year ended, trying to pay attention to what I’ve been missing the most and what I feel like I need.
It turns out that this list includes quite a few things. I missed the mental clarity and calm that was generated by my regular meditation practice. I was also experiencing a lot of stiffness and tightness that isn’t an issue when I do yoga regularly. My initial needs were pointing to mindfulness and yoga, but I know that I can keep myself from getting bored and support those two primary practices well if I also do strength training and breathwork.
Initially, I did only one type of practice on any given day, for whatever length of time felt sustainable. That meant about fifteen minutes of yoga one day, five to ten minutes of mindfulness on others, and about fifteen minutes of strength training on the days I chose to do it. This felt like insufficient effort, but it started to add up after about a week allowing me to lengthen each session a bit.
Again, I had to remind myself that the goal isn’t marathon sessions. This was true for practicing my instrument as well, which had been sporadic for me at the end of the semester. Fifteen to twenty minutes was pretty much the max for true productivity, although I found I could do that a few times a day without losing precision.
What became clear was that these shorter sessions work and allow for detail, but I felt that they spread things out too far. I wanted to do a little more of each practice a little more often.
For the last few days, I’ve tried combining things that share similarities by pairing movement practices or mindfulness practices. Although this means I spend less time on each, I do them all a little more often which feels better and more impactful. By doing this, I can also hone in on specific needs. The stiffness and slight pain I was experiencing in my low back, for example, improved more when I was both strengthening the muscles around my low back and working on muscle movement and fluidity with yoga and myofascial release.
The biggest hurdle overall though has been the when. I’m struggling when it comes to this aspect, and I’m sure it doesn’t help that there’s almost no schedule structure right now without the rigor of the semester.
The only way I felt I could address this was to totally shake up what I’m inclined to do. I always have the sense that whatever I do first in the day is most important and end up stalled by trying to put too many things into the first part of the morning. For now, I’m using the morning for whatever sounds most interesting and then experimenting with doing things at various times of day while paying attention to how it feels to implement things at new times of the day with the intention of feeling more flexible about when I’m fitting things in.
Take-aways from the first week(ish) of my thoughtful refresh:
Start small: don’t try to do it all at once - nothing sticks when we do this
Tap your felt sense and intuition: what is your mind or body telling you that you need? (Ex: low back pain or stiffness, mental cloudiness, etc.)
Set attainable time limits: instead of committing to an hour of movement or mindfulness, try doing 5-15 minutes of activities like yoga, strength training, meditation or breathwork.
Pair similar activities: Combine five minutes of breathwork and ten minutes of meditation for one fifteen minute sitting, or do ten minutes of strength training followed by twenty minutes of yoga for a half hour of movement.
A little is better than none: Even if you can’t find a solid ten minutes to set aside you can add movement, mindfulness, walking or breathing easily into your day by incorporating them into your practice sessions, walking to or from your car, or the minutes around when you wake up or go to bed.
Experiment with the when: If you always try to exercise in the morning and always end up skipping your work out, try exercising for fifteen minutes when you get home in the evenings. Flip your perceived “correct” routine or timing on its head to see what you learn.