I’m pretty happy with how Planuary has gone this year.
I’ve managed to make some plans, test out a few ideas, and do some structured thinking about how I want to roll out some projects.
I haven’t actually taken a lot of action yet but actions are not the focus of Planuary anyway!
So, here are a few updates:
Journaling
Reflective journaling is going pretty well. I’m not getting to it daily yet but I am moving in that direction.
But if I don’t get to it in the morning, I need to find stronger ways to remind myself about it at other times of the day.
This photo of Khalee has nothing to do with my post but I thought it was funny because it looks like I interrupted her while she was reading. Image description: my dog, Khalee, is lying on her belly on my bed with her head raised. The room is dim and my ereader is glowing next to her, lighting the side of her face, and it kind of looks like she has turned from her book to look at the camera.
Yoga/Pushups
I did my yoga practice most days last week but my choices were hampered a bit by the fact that I woke up one day with a wonky knee.
So now I am working on my knee and my upper body and I am putting the ‘incorporate pushups’ part of the plan off for another week until my knee is less weird.
5 Extra Minutes of Movement
I have been doing pretty good with this one. I added 5 minutes of deliberate extra movement four out of seven days this week.
My knee is playing a role here but in two of those four days I chose extra seated movement so clearly it wasn’t the only factor on those other three days.
Maybe I need to say I will get 5 extra minutes of seated movement during the next week and see if that shift opens any mental doors to moving daily.
Next Steps
Since this is my last Tuesday post in January, this is technically my last Planuary post.
However, like the post title says, Planuary is a state of mind.
I want to keep this reflective, curious approach going throughout the year so I am figuring out what that practice might look like.
Last year, I decided that I didn’t really want to plan anything for the whole year, I just wanted to take it month by month and I’m sticking with that idea for 2025.
But I do want to keep checking in with myself and revisiting my ideas/plans/practices in a more structured but still Christine-friendly way.
So, I am starting with these questions:
How and when will I decided what is important for a given month?
How will I keep those things top of mind?
How will I record/reflect/track the details and feelings involved?
In my posts so far, I have mentioned two fitness/wellness related ideas that I want to develop throughout Planuary and I have had another one pop up over the weekend.
I really thought I was on to something with moving my journaling to the beginning of the day and creating a strategy for voice dictation and copying and pasting but then I had the most jumbled week in which ever single aspect of my schedule went right out the proverbial window.
Perhaps this photo illustrates how someone sabotaged my schedule last week? Image description – a woman is crouching on a desk while papers fly through the air around her
Honestly, if you had written my planned activities on pieces of paper, threw them in the air, and then turned on a fan, the resulting schedule could not have been more erratic than the one that last week generated all on its own.
I’m just glad that I am at a point in my life and in my medicated understanding of my ADHD brain that I didn’t end up blaming myself and going into a brain loop that would have also thrown this week into a jumble.
ANYWAY!
The issue here was that my plan hinged on taking time early in the day to do my journaling and then I didn’t have a single day in which I could follow my usual morning routine.
I did manage to journal on two days but that was only because I ended up with unexpectedly long waits in my car on a couple of occasions.
So, clearly I need a plan for relatively ordinary days and one for days when my morning has a different shape.
And perhaps I need to set a reminder for early afternoon asking if I have been able to journal yet.
I’ll circle back to this again next week.
Pushups?
And this is probably the part where you are wondering about the pushup plan.
That hasn’t happened either – and that’s ok because this is Planuary not Do-All-The-Things-uary (Instant forgiveness for the win!) but I am still moving slowly towards the plan.
A white index card with the word ‘Planuary’ written on it in capital letters and with golden yellow sparkles/dots surrounding it.
I have looked at a bunch of different pushup plans some of which I could immediately discount because I know what my brain is like. *
Theoretical depiction of my pushup plan greeting me. Image description: a black and white GIF of Frankenstein’s Monster moving his head upwards in greeting with text reading ‘Good Evening’ at the bottom.
And, of course, I had planned to start by picking a yoga practice to do daily and then add the pushup plan in afterwards.
I haven’t picked the yoga practice either but I have refined that plan instead.
I am going to do one of these four practices each day, depending on my time and inclination.
So, there are some steps forward on that Planuary plan, I’ll let you know how it goes.
Planuary Idea #3
I have fallen into a classic Christine/ADHD thinking trap, again.
I want and need to move more (because my body is feeling pretty cranky) but my brain keeps trying to figure out the ‘best’ thing to do instead of just doing something.
It keeps telling me I need to make a big plan before I start AND that I don’t really have the time or information to make that plan so I should start later.
And it also likes to toss in information about my various obligations during the week and how I will need to work around them (gee, do I really, brain? sigh!) and how I need to figure out the perfect time of day to workout so I don’t waste time or get my work plans derailed.
And it also reminds me that I walk the dog every day and that I do TKD twice a week so I am already doing *something* – which is true but doing those things is not addressing the body crankiness so I need another layer of activity, no matter what my brain is saying.
This is why I always say that my Go Team posts are just as much notes to myself as they are to anyone reading them.
I have literally been writing daily posts about how to avoid these kind of brainloops (among other things) and, yet, my subconscious was busy with all of this foolishness.
SO, I am shutting that down. I’m being kind to myself about it but I am still shutting it down.
I’m starting with 5 minutes of extra activity a day right now and I will add to that as I go on.
And, frankly, while 5 minutes is my low bar amount, I will probably often end up doing more because I know my obstacle is getting started, not keeping going.
The Current Plan
Yeah, that seems like a lot of things but they are all kind of small – 5-10 minutes of journaling aloud, 4-18 minutes of yoga, and 5 minutes of additional movement daily.
Even the longest version of that is only 35 minutes a day and it doesn’t even have to happen all at once.
And, of course, this is Planuary so the plans can (and probably will) change.
That’s just part of the process!
*For example, there is no way I will work up to 50 wall pushups before moving to the floor. I would end up spending more time fighting my brain to get started than I would actually doing the practice.
**The fact that I am neither Tall, nor Buff, nor a Dude means that the names of those sites/channels crack me up every time I look at them. I consider that a bonus, really.
So last week‘s Planuary post was very much about physical wellness- about how I’m going to add pushups and upper body yoga into my routine – and this week’s post is about mental wellness – how I am going to (re)implement a stress-reducing practice into my days.
Sidenote: I haven’t actually added the pushups and yoga into my day-to-day yet. Planuary is a deliberately slow process but I will let you know when and how I proceed with the pushup plan.
So my next part of Planuary is about reflection – reflective journaling to be precise.
This isn’t me, obviously. Their writing is tidy and their nail polish isn’t chipped. Image description: a person’s hands are shown writing in a coil-bound notebook. They are wearing a brown sweater and dark nail polish.
For over a year, I was doing long journal entries via voice dictation every day.
It was really useful for my brain and I found that processing everything aloud reduced my stress levels overall.
Then, I just kind of got out of the habit.
There were several reasons for that but the main one was tech-related.
I was using Google Docs for journaling but I use it for a lot of things and it got to be really annoying because it doesn’t have a good way to organize your files and my journal entries were popping up at times when I did not want to see them.
I tried switching to an app instead and while that was better for keeping my journal in one spot (and letting me choose when to see it instead of having it sprung on me), the app itself keeps crashing on my somewhat outdated phone. So, I would be chattering away to my journal and then discover that I hadn’t been recording for ages.
So I tried recording in Google Docs and then copying and pasting the entry into the other app but that made every journaling session a two-step process and my ADHD brain started protesting at the waste of time. (Yes, I know it was just a few seconds but sometimes my brain just won’t.)
Because of the ‘longer’ process, I started delaying my journaling time until later. (In this case, later is ‘the not now’ – a possibly fictional time in which the thing I am trying to do will be magically easier and hassle free. This is a common ADHD trap.)
And that turned into hardly journaling at all.
But I have been really missing the stress-reducing nature of the journaling process – especially when I can use voice dictation to process everything verbally.
So, I want to get back into the reflective journaling habit in a way that works with my brain instead of against it and here’s my plan for doing that:
Record into Google Docs every day for a week and then cut and paste into the app with good organization. Sure, there will temporarily be a single journaling document with up to a week’s worth of reflection in it but I think I can live with that. Also, my brain is fine with a ‘every Friday we cut and paste’ kind of task even though it objects to doing that daily.
Do my journaling as early in the day as possible. Journaling at night is never going to happen for me. I can do short entries but I don’t seem to get into the same rhythm at night and it doesn’t have the same stress-reducing effect. So, I’m going to turn on voice dictation for 10 minutes as soon as I can during the day.
Keep a list of questions to ask myself. I don’t often get stuck for a journaling topic but I want to be prepared, just in case.
Unlike the pushups, I can and will start this practice right away.
As I was considering why I feel drawn back to reflective journaling, I realized that, not only did it help me to reduce my stress levels overall, it also used to help get my brain into ‘time to start work’ mode and anything that helps me with work-related task initiation is good for my mental health and for my overall well-being.
Do I know how many parts there will be in Planuary? I do not.
I do, however, know that this is Part 1 so I am going to forge ahead from here.
By the way, Planuary extends far beyond my fitness/mindfulness/wellness plans but since this is not the “Christine talks endlessly about her life” blog, I’m going to stick to things related to our focus here at Fit is a Feminist Issue…mostly.
So, since I can’t seem to stop myself from overthinking at the moment, I decided to lean into it and just let my brain wander around until it settled on something that appealed to me as a possible new fitness practice to incorporate into my life this year.
And I settled on pushups.*
I really want to be able to do pushups easily and, more important than that, I want to *know* that I have the upper body strength to do pushups easily.
I don’t have a particular number of pushups in mind because the number doesn’t matter to me – I’m chasing a specific feeling.
This is the feeing I am looking for – it’s not that pushups are necessarily easy for her but she has put in the work and she knows she can do them. Image description – a woman in black exercise clothes lowering herself into a pushup. She is outside on a deck and the sun is shining.
And I think that seeking a specific feeling will be far more useful to me than trying to reach a certain number because seeking a sensation feels more like a meaningful practice than trying to reach an arbitrary target.
Of course, once I got that settled in my mind, I went into overthinking mode again. This time I churned up a bunch of thoughts about overdoing things, about how my shoulders and neck might not appreciate my pushup goal, and about how anxious I feel when my neck muscles are tight and and and…well, you all know how overthinking goes, right?
And that’s when I overthought my way into a possible solution (yes, this *does* seem to be a dangerous precedent, indeed.)
I’m going to pair my pushup work with some yoga for my upper body.
I know, not a groundbreaking solution, but hear me out.
I have trouble convincing my ADHD brain not to rush through stretching so even if I had great intentions of stretching after each pushup practice, I would soon be strolling along a road paved with those intentions and heading for a hell of my own making.**
BUT
I can definitely convince myself to do a 10 minute yoga sequence for my upper body every day for a month. My brain loves a month long challenge!
This seems like a helpful sort of twist, doesn’t it? Image description: a woman, seated on a yoga mat outside, is doing an upper body twist so her lower body is facing the camera but her upper body is twisted away. Her right hand is on her left knee and her upper torso and head are facing to the left.
So, when I put those two things together – a plan to get used to pushups over time and a plan to choose an enjoyable yoga practice that will ease tension in my upper body – I may just be on to something.
Now, I’m moving on to Part 1(b) – choosing and practicing an upper body yoga sequence that I enjoy and then adding Part 1 (c) – choosing and following a pushup plan that seems doable.
Further updates as Planuary warrants.
*Yes, I have tried a pushup goal before and, no, it didn’t stick at the time but I know more now than I did then so it’s worth giving it a try.
**Is a hell of your own making the worst kind of hell? There is a case to be made here but I think the philosophers on the Fit is a Feminist Issue team are better equipped to discuss that than I am.
