awellnessworkinprogress.com

As a self-confessed perfectionist and somebody self-diagnosing as an Autistic ADHDer, finding balance can sometimes be tricky. As a result, I feel like I am constantly teetering on the brink between a state of thriving and potential burnout.

I have so many passions, hobbies and interests, sometimes it’s difficult to focus on just one or two. Its common for me to become hyper-focused on one interest then quickly run out of time for all the others which leaves me feeling frustrated and overwhelmed.

At the start of the year, I listened to so-called lifestyle experts recommending, that to cultivate new, healthier habits, one should focus on one habit at a time. Of course, I shunned this advice and, set about trying to create multiple new habits with my shiny new habit tracker desk pad close at hand.

At first it was a buzz, checking off those little boxes throughout the day or all at once (oh, the exhilaration) at the end of the day: go me with my daily walk, my working out for at least 30 active zone minutes a day, completing 10,000 steps, getting 7.5 hours of sleep every night, practicing yoga, meditating, flossing my teeth, reading a chapter of non-fiction, decluttering my inbox, using up the backlog of (vastly over-priced and now out of date) foody health snacks accumulated as a result of various trips to Holland & Barrett, learning Italian, posting consistently on social media, maintaining my daily skincare regime, and the list goes on…

I posted about this frequently on Instagram; on a wellness account no less, and, although I’ve kept the posts up for authenticity purposes (I believe in showcasing my flaws and weird idiosyncrasies and celebrating my wins as well as my epic fails), with the benefit of hindsight, these posts probably don’t represent me in my most positive, healthiest light but perhaps they might prove beneficial to others by illustrating how not to cultivate good habits!

I was fixated on my new habit tracker and trying to do it all and the results were a bit scary.

I recall one day in particular: I was recovering from my latest mini burnout from having tried to achieve too much and was frustrated that I wasn’t maintaining my habits or doing these activities consistently (I think 3 days had passed between Instagram posts and this would not do, and don’t get started on the days I missed my daily walk!). I decided, out of curiosity more than anything, to see just how challenging it would be to do everything on that list. Everything. Even the activities that I’d long since reconciled myself with being acceptable to do maybe 2-3 times a week, like working out, or socialising with friends.

I remember getting to end of the day, feeling exhausted yet completely wired after a day of completing activities on top of working; it was mid-evening, I was sitting down to reflect on my achievements thus far and to establish what boxes I still needed to check. Despite barely pausing for breathe the entire day, by 7pm, in the pursuit of this crazy goal, I had still to:

• Practice Italian
• Read a chapter of my non-fiction book
• Meditate
• Delete 100 emails from my Inbox (I have around 14,000 unread emails in my personal inbox, just to shed some light on why this feels like a priority)
• Post on Instagram
• Achieve my 12 active hours (more on that later)

As someone who can take hours drafting an Instagram post, due to my perfectionist tendencies, this, in itself, would have been enough of a challenge. However, undeterred, I set about my intention with grim determination. As the finishing line drew closer, I hit a stumbling block when it looked as though I’d lost the draft Instagram post which had taken me the best part of an hour to create. I was just about let out an animalistic wail of distress when I inadvertently recovered the draft.

As I clicked post, I let out an audible sigh of relief – only then to discover that I’d missed my target of 12 active hours because I’d been sitting for so long.

In case that doesn’t make sense, allow me to explain: in the Fitbit app, I have a goal to stay ‘active’ for 12 hours each day. Every day, between 8am – 8pm, I get a gentle reminder to move every hour, aiming for at least 250 steps. This is based on the premise that human beings are not designed to be sedentary creatures, and many experts recommend spreading our physical activity throughout the day to avoid sitting for long periods of time (as supposed to squeezing in our recommended daily quota of activity into one hour working out at the gym when we have been essentially inactive for the remainder of our waking hours).

I am luckier than most in the sense that I work part-time so I can fit in physical activity before and after work. I also work from home most days which means I have the autonomy to get up and move around throughout my working day; this means I am not sedentary for long and can stay active even when I’m essentially sitting for large chunks of the day.

That said, even I find it challenging to hit all 12 active hours, probably averaging closer to 8 or 9.

And so, it was to be the final task on the list that ultimately sabotaged an entire day of performing habits and prevented me from completing this bonkers challenge that I had set myself.

It was an interesting experiment in wiping oneself out and certainly not one I would recommend to others. Of course, by this point I had already begun to recognise that my approach was not healthy and essentially a one-way ticket to burnout: what I had set out to do in terms of regularly completing these tasks, was both unrealistic and unsustainable in the long term.

And it wasn’t making me happy.

I spent some time reflecting on the intentions I set back in January. One was to let go of the need for perfection; another was to enjoy the process instead of fixating on the end goal. What good was it to simply check off a series of boxes each day if I wasn’t reaping any of the wellbeing rewards from any of these actions? What good would come from this need for perfection that left me feeling frazzled physically, frustrated and overwhelmed with a sense of failure when I could not achieve my goals with any kind of regularity or consistency?

One by one, I worked my way through this list and reflected on my “why”: why did I want to cultivate these habits? Because performing them implies a sense of positive wellbeing – but they certainly weren’t boosting my wellbeing – at least not in the way I was attempting to perform them.

I still have my habit tracker, still complete it every day, still get a kick from checking off those little boxes, still get a sense of achievement when I see them adding up to a week or month stretch of checked boxes – but if I miss a yoga practice or forget to do my Italian lesson, I don’t let it affect my confidence; I no longer feel like I’ve failed in some way.

I do worry that missing a few days means I’m falling off the wagon, that if I don’t maintain the habit consistently, I’ll lose it forever. This is because I’m prone to flakiness and because I get easily fixated on certain topics or activities then eventually lose interest or move onto something more simulating. I dislike this trait in myself, viewing it with a sense of failure so this probably explains why consistency is so important to me: for me, consistency represents success.

My “why” for tracking certain habits – like completing 10,000 steps every day – is to to see at-a-glance how I’m doing; to compare one month with another to see how I am progressing. For others – like learning Italian – it’s to keeps me accountable.

Sometimes habits stick and they can come off the list; that always feels good. Sometimes priorities change or I want to try new things so I’ll add these to the list: that can be tricky when a list is already overwhelming so I have tried to simplify the list and the expectations I have.

I have tried to align the activities/habits/tasks with my core values so learning, growth and creativity will feature highly and this is why I continue to learn Italian, explore ways to be creative, and read as much as I can. Spirituality is also important to me but I have recognised that can encompasses a number of things – like meditation, yoga, mindfulness practices in general, even journalling, and these things can be categorised together. This gives me the flexibility to choose one of these things to focus most days – whatever resonates most on any given day – rather than trying to fit them all in, which defeats the purpose.

Recently I have been giving myself permission to rest more. As somebody who is always “doing”, rarely “being“, this doesn’t happen often. This is why having COVID in early 2021 was such a joyful experience for me because, apart from one day of feeling sub-optimal, I had ten, blissful days when I didn’t have to see anyone, go to the gym, go to the supermarket or do any of the things that I would usually think I should be doing or which I attribute value to. In short, COVID gave me time off from the need to be productive – and it felt great. I think this might resonate with millions of women, across the world, who feel like they are being stretched in multiple different directions, stretched to capacity, stretched to breaking point, not necessarily because of society’s expectations but because of their own, unrealistic expectations of themselves and how they should show up in everyday life as mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, friends, colleagues and so on.

Rest for me will never be doing nothing or simply being: I’m just not made that way. Thank goodness then for restful activity like a gentle stroll in nature or sticking on a favourite genre of music and becoming quietly nostalgic for a more carefree time, or noisily rocking out or dancing my socks off as if nobody was watching (my younger son was and he was appalled!!).

This might be the most important habit of all: certainly something to reflect upon and to hyper-focus on another day (cue quite contemplation and misty eyed, far away expression)…but, right now, I need to floss my teeth, perform an act of kindness, listen to a podcast episode, complete a jigsaw puzzle and bake some flatbreads.

The next batch of habits won’t cultivate themselves, I won’t get my next dopamine hit by resting, and besides, I can hear my habit tracker calling…