I used to try and set goals every year but I haven’t for a while, especially over the last couple of years, the plague and peri menopause have sort have driven everything else out of my head. Having said that, I’ve radically changed my attitude to how I source my food and I’ve worked to try and do less damage to the environment.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve struggled a bit, it’s working from home, it’s SAD, it’s peri and I’m a bit less in control than I’d like to be and that gives me some low level stress. The thing about this feeling is that I know I need to kick it out and I know how to do it (which is annoying because why can’t someone wave a magic wand?)

Yesterday I was saying that I had a good rest over Christmas so now is the time to take some action. This is not going to be be a veganuary, or dry January thing, I’m not going to be doing something radical and a bit harsh for a month and slump back into my bad habits in February (which, with the exception of November, is the worst of all months). I also remember back in 2013, I had a revelation about how attitude follows action and that this is a lesson that I often need to remind myself.

This January, I’m setting some intentions to help me with that lesson, so I have a couple of things to do this month..

Self Care and Exercise

Self care is different things to different people, I need a little more structure, I’m great at unwinding, not saying yes when I should say no, protecting my space. That’s fine, I don’t need any reason or feel any guilt about staying indoors and reading all day. Self care for me is more about giving myself a kick up the backside and doing the other things to show care for myself, the exercise, the care for my body and mind. So my goals are more rule based than yours might be…

• Yoga – I’m going to do yoga every morning, I’ve signed up to this year’s Yoga with Adriene 30 Day Yoga thingie and I’m just committing to turning up every morning, even if I don’t want to and end up doing it in my ‘jamas
• Walking – I’m going to aim for 70,000 steps a week
• Bedtime – I’ve been so slack about this so back to being a bedtime nazi and being in bed at 10pm Sundays to Thursdays
• Drinking – I’m going to save the big cafetiere for Fridays, drink two litres of water a day and cut out the booze on school nights, I’m not too bad at that but Christmas and work from home has sort of eroded that!

Home and Food

I’ve done my annual furniture change to the house which I’ll talk about next week but I know how much better I feel when the house is tidy and I know where things are:

• Weekly Chores – I do the laundry but I need to clean floors and hoover, every bleeding week
• Declutter and the cupboard of doom. I need less stuff, I need to work out what to get rid of and what to keep.
• Low spend January – I’ll talk more about this on Thursday but the bones of it are don’t buy anything. No clothes, books, cosmetics, toiletries. Obviously I will need to buy food but (and this ties in with the declutter) I want to use up the food already in the house, so I’ll keep my Oddbox deliveries on the 9th and 23rd January, eat from the allotment and then give myself £5 a week for essentials like eggs and milk and stuff like that. There is one exception and that’s the allotment, we have money for allotment spending budgeted and spending planned, mostly for compost, so that will happened.
• No treats I don’t make myself, this was such a good idea, so it’s time to put down the Minter Wonderland and do this again.

I think that’s enough to be going on with for January. None of it is all that burdensome, it’s just a case of giving myself the gift of discipline, I also promise that on the 1 February, I’ll report on how I did and talk about what I’m going to do in February.