Tag: relaxation

Celebrating 2023: A Month of gratitude – Day 16

It’s been a challenging year. I share my wellness techniques including ample sleep, hot baths, walks, and more.

Hi there! I can’t believe I missed writing about day 15! I have to admit, though, that this year, I am super tired, and all I want to do these days is “veg”. This year has been fabulous, but it has also taken its toll on me.

Usually, I would feel terribly guilty because I would be worried that I am just being lazy, but I know I am not. I am just really, really tired. I know that if I don’t listen to my body now, I am likely to crash and burn at some point in the near future. That helps no one. Our well-being is so important, yet we take it for granted until our health takes a huge hit. I have a few tools in my well-being arsenal that have helped me through this year. These include:

  • Lots of Sleep: Some weekends and even some weeknights, I spend most of my time just sleeping as much as possible until the day arrives when I feel well-rested again. I don’t know about you, but I often find that it takes more than one night’s good sleep to get me back to feeling rested when I am exhausted. 
  • Hot baths – This is usually my weekend go-to when I need to sort my thoughts out. With a few candles, an essential oil burner, and my Spotify “Chill Beats” playlist, I am good to go. I love the smell of jasmine, wild orchid, ylang-ylang, and sandalwood. I also enjoy the scents of lime and clary sage and Ginger & lime. The latter has such a clean scent. 
  • Walking– walking in the afternoon with my friend, Megan, has helped as we bounce our thoughts, ideas and some of our frustrations off each other. Walking is known to help generate new ideas, so it has been great to have someone to walk with and talk through the ideas as they come through. 
  • Green Tea with Jasmine/Camomile Tea – These help me get a good night’s rest. I sleep like the dead when I drink jasmine-scented green tea. I woke up feeling like my brain had completely shut down. My sleep feels dreamless, although it probably isn’t.
  • Journalling – This is where I vent most of the time. It is so liberating to get stuff off my chest without any filters. Journalling is proven to help people get through difficult periods. In “Writing Down Your Soul: How to Activate and Listen to the Extraordinary Voice Within”, Janet Conner has a well-researched chapter on the science behind why journalling works. The entire book is beneficial as well. I don’t always do it daily, but knowing that I have somewhere to vent unfiltered when I need to is always reassuring.
  • Friends and family – sometimes, connecting with a friend is all you need to leave you feeling rejuvenated. It’s just my son and I at home, so I come to teenage conversations every day. Sometimes, I need to connect with a fellow adult in the evenings. Then I pick up a phone and call a friend. Thankfully, whoever I call is always available to chat. I am very grateful to my friends. I really don’t know what I would do without their support. I am blessed.
Photo by Jess Bailey Designs on Pexels.com

What tools do you have in your toolbox to get you through life? I would love to hear what works for you. Please add them in the comments.

Well, that’s it from me today. I think I will hop into the hot bath and then enjoy a cup of jasmine-scented green tea next :). 

Celebrating 2023: A month of gratitude – Day 10

Join me as I recount my laid-back day and reflect on my accomplishments of the past year, including professional development, academic completion, and personal growth.

Today was a lazy day. I was also a day of reflection of the year that was and all that I had accomplished.

I cannot tell you when last I slept so much through the course of a day. I put old episodes of Law & Order on and snoozed ever so often while watching. I love Law & Order and am thrilled to see that there is a new season. I love listening to that New York accent and guessing who did the crime. It also helped that it was a cool wet day as well. Perfect for reading, watching TV and napping.

I have also enjoyed long calls and quality time with great friends. This has been a soul restoring weekend. Just what the doctor ordered.

In addition, I spent the time reviewing what I had wanted to achieve this year as well as planning my goals for 2024. Below is a list of some the goals I had set and how I performed against them.

  1. Becoming disciplined: I set myself the goal of creating a system that would lay the foundations of becoming more disciplined. I also started reading ‘The Daily Stoic’ and ‘Discipline is Destiny’, both by Ryan Holiday. I didn’t finish either book so that tells you how close I came to achieving that goal! Lol! I did finish ‘Building a Second Brain’ by Tiago Forte though and that did help me create a system that allows me to store information better. I still have work to do on it though. The Universe also sent two highly disciplined new members to join my team at work. I think It saw that I was a bit of a lost cause so I got disciplined people instead :).
  2. Read more: I set myself the goal of reading 45 books this year and am sitting on 23 which is two more than I read last year. I will end the year on about 25 or 26. I may not have achieved the 45 but I did read more than last year so it’s a win in my books.
  3. Complete my Honours Degree: I also knew that I had to complete the last two subjects required for my honours degree this year. I am so thrilled that I have achieved this!
  4. Present more often: At work I came out of my shell and presented more often. It absolutely terrified me but I am still standing so I guess it wasn’t that bad. I presented at least once a month to a forum in which our Africa leadership team was present, led 2 training sessions for the same forum and joined our wellness team and ran a training session through this team as well. Considering I probably presented once or twice in the same forum last year, I would say that I outdid myself this year! Oh wait, the icing on the cake was the training sessions I ran as part of a workshop in Nigeria this year. I was so nervous as our Marketing VP joined my session first but, once again, I survived and in fact, I felt like I thrived! Whoop whoop!
  5. Develop an abundance mindset: I worked hard to change my mindset from that of scarcity to abundance. I have definitely made progress but I still have work to do. Here I have focused on asking myself “How can I afford it?” vs “I can’t afford it” as an example.
  6. Exceed expectations: I won 2 awards at work recognising my contribution to a squad I was apart of. That blew my mind. I did not expect it.
  7. Be More Visible at Work: Lastly, and very importantly, this year I felt seen and appreciated by the right people in the right places at work. I am very grateful that I was able to achieve this while dealing with a grieving son and completing my studies amongst other things.

Three commitments that I made to myself this enabled at least 90% of these accomplishments. I committed to:

  • feel the fear and do it anyway
  • be authentic in everything I do
  • Trust that God opened the door/put me in the room for a reason. My job was to do the work and always put my best foot forward. He would take care of the outcome.

This has been a very good year in so many ways. It’s definitely been a year worth celebrating! I am very grateful to have experienced it. I look forward to experiencing all the good things that 2024 brings and it will be an even better year!