A new year often brings a sense of renewal. I’m not one to make resolutions in January. It is a good time to check in on goals and make adjustments. Steady as she goes!
I’m stacking the deck in my favour for a good 2026 by ensuring each day has movement in it. Daily dog walks, cycling commutes, strength and flexibility. I’m set up for success and have fully ditched “all or nothing” thinking.
Resilience
I’m bracing for bad stuff too. Experience has taught me along with all the great things comes a healthy dose of hard stuff, horrors even.
It’s the complicated gift of middle age, being pulled in many directions without falling apart.
Going through tough stuff has taught me I’m a good hugger. Olympic level hug giver right here. Happy to demonstrate at any moment.
I hold hands at hospital bedsides very well. I stay careful and kind now, even when I’m really upset.
I’m more resilient thanks to my fitness adventures.
So my wisdom to share on this year’s fitness goals is here for you if you need it.
It all counts
Watch didn’t record? Garmin dump your ride? It’s ok if it didn’t end up on Strava. Your body knows you did it. Data is only one measure. You were there. You did it. Go you!
Say it again, it all counts
Barely got to the workout? Had to wrap up early? Needed to lighten the resistance? Take a lighter weight?
AMAZING! You showed up for yourself and invested in your wellbeing. Well done!
You don’t have to like it
There will be days it sucks and you don’t enjoy the workout. You will always feel a sense of accomplishment regardless of how it went.
If a given activity is really chapping your ass switch it up. Ditch the weights and do a cardio dance class. Yoga pissing you off? Take up a martial art. You don’t always have to like it. Way to go!
Confidence comes from trusting yourself
You know when you are sick and need to rest.
You know when you need down time.
You know when you need help staying motivated.
You know who to go to for help.
You know a lot!
Trust yourself!
Plans rarely survive encounters with reality
The beautiful plan will fall apart. That’s ok because you knew it would happen and made flexibility part of the plan. Please, please, please break up with perfection.
My MVP (minimum viable plan) is 60 minutes of movement. Walking, cycling, stretching, dancing in my underwear. It’s adaptable.
Weather is sweet? I’m on my bike.
Back getting tight? Add another walk and do some yoga.
Bike out of commission? Grab some dumbbells.
You get the idea.
Messy is good
Challenge yourself to be a bit of a wreck. Not all moments are instagram moments.
Exploring the edges of your capacity is exciting and helps you grow. It’s not necessary every day but totally required to keep monotony at bay.
Team up to survive
It’s a fitness wasteland out here. Team up in person or virtually with workout partners. You will get more workouts in more often. Harness the power of positive peer pressure.
HAVE FUN
I’m serious. Play disc golf, beach volleyball, snorkel with manatees, whatever makes this year different than last year. Be silly and do stuff. That’s part of fitness too.
That’s it
Thank you for reading this far. I hope you gleaned some gems that you can keep for 2026.
Spoiler, this is the advice I need so I wrote it down. Hopefully I don’t forget!
LETS GO 2026!
Nat is cozy in winter clothes. Michel, forever photographed just behind her and off to the side is looking lovely. They are in front of a brick house with lots of snow on the ground.
A friend wrote recently about one of the few true aphorisms in her credo – that Nothing is Ever Wasted, Nothing is Thrown Away. She talked about methods of living, and her inability to commit, and how that generated the useless side effect of inertia/indecision in non-critical matters.
“Non-critical means not to do with work, family needs, food, groceries, or paying bills, but stuff like housework, hobbies, and overall the right use of personal time. It’s created a kind of motivational paralysis, trying to decide the next best thing I should do at any given moment while being painfully aware of opportunity costs.
But the aphorism reminds me that it doesn’t matter what I pick because the effort expended, the task I choose, will go to good. Because the things I do are worthy. Even if it’s just petting a cat for five minutes. Relentlessly applying logic/exercising triage on my personal choices isn’t necessary.”
I suffer from anxiety/executive function paralysis all the time, and thought this was a brilliant insight. I think I’ll go pet my cats.
I live with nagging anxiety that tells me I should be productive, because I tend to connect my self-worth to my productivity.
This can be great when I’m planning a huge family meal, or volunteering with a local organization. It’s not so great when I’m also trying to cook everything from scratch (at least some of which I grew myself), get in all the exercise I think I need, volunteer with too many organizations, sew and do other crafts, hold a part-time job, manage elder care, and maintain a house to the standards of a 1950s TV mom. Oh, and sleep!
I have always needed to keep busy, so this isn’t a totally new problem. However, it seems to have gotten worse since I retired. Is it because everyone (including me) assumes I have more time to volunteer because I no longer work full time? Is it because I am slowing down and more easily tired? Is it because I’m a bit of an idiot and don’t know enough to say no? I’m betting on the last one, though the first to are contributing factors.
Meme taken from a TikTok video. It appears to be an older woman moving around her living room.
I wonder how much pain contributes to lack of sleep, which means I spend way too much time at night thinking of things I haven’t finished, or adding to the list. Then trying to do those things, so I don’t do the stretching/strength training/sleeping I need to get better.
I also wonder how common this is. My social media is full of women who have been diagnosed with things like ADHD later in life. Or who are overwhelmed with family and other responsibilities.
A quick Google search of “older women responsibilities” turned up some really interesting research on the responsibilities part. Not so much on the ADHD side. That turns up mostly YouTube videos and sites I wouldn’t trust for solid peer-reviewed evidence.
Another meme, that appears to be from the same TikTok video. It shows a middle-aged woman in a white top and blue and white skirt or shorts in an immaculate living room.
A friend uses the “five things” technique to clean house when she is managing depression or feeling overwhelmed. She cleans or throws out five things, no matter how small. Some days, tossing a pencil stub counts as a thing. Other days deep cleaning an entire room is a thing. When you have done five things, you are under no obligation to do more.
I love this and occasionally use it to motivate myself for cleaning. More often, I use it as a way to limit what I take on for the day. Five things is enough. And I try to remember that if I stop at five things, I am enough.
I do love those big gains when I start something new. In August I told you about Making muscles with Michel
In the post I shared the results of the initial strength test. On September 15th Michel and I did the final test for Total Strength.
It took us a month to complete the scheduled workouts that should have happened in 3 weeks. Pftt. We did not care.
I didn’t really increase my weights much. I often used 5 lb weights because my left elbow tendons were causing me some grief.
My approach to the program is committed but not serious. I don’t push past my comfort. I modify movements. I swap out others.
The results?
My squats in 1 minute went from 22 with body weight to 33 holding 20lbs. Yay early gains!
Knee pushups saw similar results starting at 12 very wobbly ones to a set of 17 good form ones. Yippee!
Imperfect adherence and mediocre effort can still yield results, even over a relatively short period of time.
Go do the thing you said you’d do… most of the time. Half ass it or go through the motions. Even your minimum effort supports your fitness goals.
It all counts.
I’m thrilled to have left behind my “all or nothing” thinking when it comes to fitness, especially strength training.
I’m enjoying these moments with my beloved. We are finding joy in our sweaty basement workouts.
I hope your workouts are giving you what you need too.
Nat holds the camera to take a selfie with Michel. Her arms are looking burly and she is smiling. Michel is looking over her shoulder sporting a red t-shirt and a dapper salt and pepper beard.
As we get closer to the end of the month, we’re going to see all kinds of posts about how much everyone else accomplished.
If you find that inspiring, then go ahead and read or watch as many of those as you like.
But if you find them disheartening, then please consider this your official permission/encouragement to ignore every last one of those posts.
Why?
Because even aside from the fact all of that content is curated so people can show themselves in the very best light, their successes are irrelevant to you.
Why?
Because you are not competing with them for ‘best life.’
When it comes to your life-expanding, life-enhancing projects, there is no competition at all.
You are the only person in your division, your category, your bracket.
You aren’t even competing with your past self, you are just doing what you can with your current resources.
There is literally no one else with your specific combination of experience, plans, and life circumstances at this very moment so there is no real way to compare.
There is no way to judge yourself against someone else because there are too many different factors involved.
So while someone else may be able to run faster or do more pushups or stay calmer than you, they aren’t ’doing better’ because they aren’t doing those things while living *your* life.
I’m not suggesting that we can instantly and magically stop comparing ourselves to others but I am suggesting that it is worth noticing when we get into comparison mode.
And, once we notice, we can remind ourselves that we are the only person in our division and we are doing the best we can with the resources we have.
There is no point in feeling bad because we don’t ’measure up’ or because we *should* (blech! Hate that word!) be further ahead.
We are in our own division and other people’s practices and progresses are interesting information that may be useful in some way but don’t directly apply to us.
So, Team, today I invite you to consider the fact that you are the only person in your division and that your practice can’t be measured against other people’s activities.
And I invite you to celebrate how well you are doing – the practices you have done, the information you have gathered, any successes you have measured, and/or the plans you have made, the plans you have decided to implement, and the ones you rejected because they were not right for you.
And I offer these gold stars for your efforts, no matter what those efforts look like today.
Please be kind to yourself out there.
Go Team Us!
A drawing of three gold stars on strings that are hanging from the black frame at the top of the sketch. Each gold star has a small bow as if it was tied to the string. The background is composed of diagonal light black lines.
Personally, before I was diagnosed with ADHD, I thought I had a recurring situational depression. I was never medicated for it because it “wasn’t that kind of bad”* but I had some really low and difficult times.
Once I was diagnosed with ADHD (but not yet medicated) and did my research, I started to see how the issues I faced might have more to do with ADHD than with depression. (I mean, I was experiencing the same symptoms but ADHD made more sense as the root cause.)
Once I was medicated for ADHD, it was CLEAR that it had been the root cause. My underlying mental message of ‘you just aren’t trying hard enough’ practically went away and it got a lot easier to start working with my brain instead of against it. And I spent less and less time feeling depressed.
Medication didn’t/doesn’t cure my ADHD but it makes it a lot easier for me to live with it. It gives me a little space between my impulse and my actions more often. It helps me to follow through on plans more often. It helps me to observe my own processes more often.
A photo of the cover of a mini-Zine I wrote called ‘How my ADHD messes with the space time continuum* *as I understand it’. There’s a line with a star in the middle at the top of the cover and a line with a drawing of a digital clock reading 12:01.
It helps me to understand that my brain works differently but it isn’t broken.
I’m not one of those people who sees ADHD as a superpower overall but it does come with some useful features – I’m an excellent brainstormer, I’m able to see things from all kinds of different perspectives, I can make huge tangential leaps and connect very different ideas, I can find patterns in all kinds of unexpected things.
Sure, it also means that I struggle with life admin and with getting started on things and with breaking projects into tasks and with all kinds of other stuff but my medication can help with a lot of those things. And the fact that I have been diagnosed and medicated takes away a lot of the self-blame and shame that comes from struggling with things that other people find easy.
My diagnosis means that instead of feeling stupid for not being able to process information in some contexts, I can, for example, ask a trusted friend, “My brain just won’t process this, can you help me figure out what I am missing?”
Recently, I was trying to describe how ADHD feels and I came up with an analogy that seemed to click for a lot of people.
Have you ever tried to get something off a shelf that was a little bit too high for you to reach?
As in, you could *almost* reach the thing, perhaps even brush your fingers against it but you couldn’t actually take it down?
And perhaps, on a day when you were particularly limber or maybe felt athletic, you could stretch a little further or jump a little and fluke into reaching the thing but you can’t do it every time.
You might end up telling yourself that you *should* be able to reach it every time but that wouldn’t be true. Sometimes the conditions are perfect and you can reach it but mostly you are limited by your height and the length of your arm.
That’s what it’s like trying to do a lot of ordinary things while running the ADHD operating system in your brain.
A photo of the back cover of my Zine feature text that reads ‘ADHD makes it hard to choose where to focus my attention. And that means that my perception of time + space is linked to where my attention is at that exact moment (which is:) NOT MUCH FUN!’ At the top of the page is a line with an hour glass in the middle at the bottom is a line with a star in the middle.
Sometimes, under perfect conditions, you can do the thing. Mostly though, you have something preventing you from doing it and you don’t know what it is. You assume the problem is in your level of effort or in your lack of determination or that you are just not bright enough to figure out how to do it.
This is compounded by the fact that almost everyone else can easily reach that item. People who seem to be the same height as you, people with similar arm lengths, they can pluck that thing off the shelf and they are puzzled about why you *won’t.*
Learning that I have ADHD was like someone confirming that except under extraordinary circumstances, I actually could not reach that shelf. That there was a difference between me and the other people who were reaching for those items and that that difference had nothing to do with my efforts (or theirs!)
They weren’t working harder than me. In fact, with all my metaphorical jumping around and stretching, I might have been putting in way more effort without getting the proportional results.
Getting medicated for ADHD is like being given a stool that lets me reach the shelf more often. I still have to remember to bring the stool and I have to make sure other factors (like sleep, stress, etc) don’t affect my balance on the stool, but at least I have a way of improving my odds of reaching that item.
Some people still imply that people with ADHD weren’t trying hard enough in the first place, that we are somehow cheating or taking the ‘easy’ way by using a stool.**
They also complain that ADHD is overdiagnosed, or to continue my analogy ‘Everyone is asking for a stool these days!’ (Doesn’t it sound ridiculous when you think of it that way? Everyone is asking for the help they need! Oh no! We might end up supporting someone who needs it slightly less!)
I’ve also heard complaints that people with ADHD use it as an excuse for not doing things they are capable of…or to use the analogy, they use it as an excuse for not retrieving things on lower shelves, too. And, I’m sure some people do that but it’s probably in the same proportion as neurotypical people who make excuses not to do the things they are able to do.
Most of us just want to reach what we can and to use the stool to reach the next level of shelves without making a big fuss about it.
And, many of us are hoping that society can move away from the idea that the only way to succeed in life is to be able to reach the stuff on the top shelves with ease.
Even before I was medicated, before I could count on reaching that top shelf on a semi-regular basis, I was still felt (and was) successful in a variety of ways. Now that my meds give me a step-stool, I’m not using all my energy to reach the shelf. Instead, I can pour that energy into my tasks, which is a lot more satisfying.
I’ve written a fair bit about how having ADHD affects my work toward my fitness goals and how it affects my overall wellness and I will definitely be writing more about that in the future. The short version though, is that having ADHD is a thread that runs through all of my experiences. It affects how I see the world and how I experience it. I have to take my ADHD brain into account, in positive and negative ways, in everything I do.
And, let me tell ya, having to think about your thinking all the time is pretty damn tiring.
See you back here next week when I’ll be writing about the challenge of getting my ADHD brain to relax.
If you want to find out more about ADHD, here are few resources that I like:
*I don’t know now if that was my Doctor’s opinion or my opinion. I do know, however, that my internalized ADHD chorus of ‘You just aren’t trying hard enough.’ contributed to my acceptance of that opinion. I thought that if I just tried harder I would feel better. Sigh. **To them, I say, if sheer force of will could have overcome ADHD, I would have left it behind me long ago. Well, I would say that AFTER I say, “Don’t even START with me about that.”
I was organizing/running an arts festival for a community arts festival and, at the same time, every project I’m part of that had been on hiatus for the summer was suddenly revived.
(Seriously,. Last Tuesday, I had four different groups write me to try and set a meeting between Oct 3 & 5…a time when I already had several things scheduled.)
And this is all my volunteer work so it doesn’t include regular work nor does it include household or family-related stuff.
I was getting overwhelmed and frustrated and I kept feeling those annoying, pointless thoughts creeping up on me.
You know the ones, I mean? They gang up on you when things get stressful – even if that stress was impossible to prevent. They start with ‘You should have…’ and they go downhill from there.
I was trying to just ignore them but that seemed to make them fight harder to be heard.
So, I decided to take a few minutes to review.
Was there any truth in those annoying thoughts?
Maybe a little bit here and there (I wrote those things down to journal about later) but mostly no.
I think my brain was looking for a reason why I was so overwhelmed and figured that I must be the cause.
So, I decided to set some boundaries with those thoughts and try to keep them at bay.
I made the little card below – well, ok, it’s two little cards next to each other- and said it aloud every time I looked at it. And, obviously, the gold star was for my hard work – both my work on the festival and my work to stand up to those thoughts.
And it really helped.*
Since I had decided that I was doing the best I could with the resources I had, the only thing to do was keep at it.
I had to do today’s best, whatever that was, with the resources I had at that moment.
I tried not to think about how things could have gone differently with different preparation or different resources, I focused on what I could do right now.
So, I don’t know about your stress level right now.
I don’t know what you have ahead of you, behind you, or around you.
I don’t know what you are trying to deal with.
I don’t know what your brain is annoying you with.
But what I do know is that you are doing the best you can with the resources you have.
I wish you ease and I wish you self-kindness.
And I offer you this gold star for your hard work – your work on all of the things, your work to focus on today’s best (or today’s okayest!), and your work to find ease and to be kind to yourself.
Go Team!
Image description: a drawing of a gold star next to black text that reads ‘You are doing the best that you can with the resources you have.’
*I’m sure that having some clear exercise goals that I could see on my wrist-spy without having to choose to track them also helped with my stress levels. Without my wrist spy on the case, I probably would have subconsciously put my exercise aside for the week. However, having this little phrase reminder close at hand helped on a completely different level. I guess the exercise did the heavy lifting and the little card cleaned up whatever stress was left over.
Until I received this month’s email and calendar from Action for Happiness, I had never heard of social fitness but I just love the idea of making a conscious habit of strengthening our relationships for our own well-being (and the well-being of those around us.)
And you know I’m going to be all over any system that gives you clear steps for building a habit a little bit at a time while helping you to notice (and celebrate) your efforts.
So, if you want to give yourself a happiness boost by strengthening your relationships, give some (or all) of these tips a whirl.
Image description: a multicoloured calendar from Action for Happiness decorated with cartoon images of people. Each day lists a tip to enhance your social fitness during ‘Friendly February.’
Remember: you don’t have to take on everything at once and you don’t have to overwhelm yourself. (You don’t have to sacrifice self-kindness in order to reach out to other people!)
Just like with your physical fitness, or any other type of practice for your well-being, every effort to increase your social fitness counts.
Every tip you try is an opportunity to add a little bit of happiness, a little bit of fun, or a little more connection to your life.
Look at you, figuring out your own ways to reshape your habits and your days so they align with your intentions and your values. Not to mention facing obstacles and schedules and competing priorities while you do it.
You are bringing a unique set of experiences and perceptions to your plans and you are dealing with a unique set of challenges while you navigate them.
So, given that uniqueness, why do you end up comparing your efforts to the efforts of those around you?
I know, I know. Some comparison is a natural thing and that natural tendency gets reinforced by the social structures we live in.
We can’t blame ourselves for the tendency to compare ourselves to other people we perceive to be in the same situation but we can choose to be conscious about the meaning we ascribe to the differences.
We can notice the differences without using them to be mean to ourselves about our efforts.
Let’s put this firmly in a fitness context:
We all have bodies but each of those bodies is different. Many of the parts of our bodies work in roughly the same way but each person’s body has its own specific abilities and capacity. Even bodies that look similar or work in similar ways will each have their own unique specifications and abilities. And those abilities and specifications make vary from day to day.
One person will find easy to build muscle while another person’s strength isn’t visible at all. Another person might be able to easily touch their toes while their partner finds it painful to lean forward. Someone may learn new movements quickly while someone else struggles to grasp a few basic gestures. The person at the front of the yoga class might be able to move into Eagle Arms on their first try while the person on the next mat finds that their breasts are in their way or that their upper back doesn’t have the flexibility yet. Person A might be able to put in a very similar physical effort every day while Person B’s capacity varies depending on their pain level, their body’s reaction to medication, or the range of their chronic illness or disability. Your brain might crave meditation while your sister’s brain finds that meditation stirs her anxiety. Today, you might be able to walk the hallway easily but, tomorrow, you may need your cane.
We all have to work with the bodies (and brains) that we have. And we have to work with what they can do on any given day. And our ‘progress’ might be slow, fast, intermittent or non-existent.
And those are just the body-related and brain-based side of things.
On top of your body’s natural tendencies, you also have to factor in your schedule. And your obligations. And the weather. And the people who live with you/depend on you.
Each of those things are going to affect you in different ways on different days and someone else’s physical, mental, and life factors are going to affect them in different ways on different days.
When you consider all of that, doesn’t comparing your efforts to someone else’s just seem ridiculous?
Me, just now. I couldn’t figure out another way to make this important point stand out in a pretty way.
We have all learned how to compare ourselves with others and these days, a variety of factors encourage us to compare our messy day-to-day with the curated glimpses we get of other people’s lives.
This can lead to us wondering why our efforts in fitness, wellness, or anything else aren’t getting the same results as someone else is getting.
And THAT can lead to us feeling like we just aren’t trying hard enough or that our efforts are meaningless.
That is simply not true.
We have no idea what combination of privilege, genetics, free time, and effort is giving someone else the results they are getting. Comparing our efforts to all of those unknowns is not going to serve us.
Instead, I’d like to invite you consider yourself as a person beyond compare.
Your efforts are about you. About your wellbeing, your fitness, your peace of mind. Someone else’s efforts and results only matter if they are inspire you or give you useful information.
Your efforts matter, whether you are making a plan, holding ground, inching ahead, leaping forward, or taking a step back to reconsider, recover, rehabilitate, or to heal. Please be kind to yourself as you acknowledge where you are in the process.
And here’s your gold star to celebrate your incomparable efforts. I’m proud of you.
Another gold star decoration from my house. You can’t see it from the photo but this is the top of a small tree that’s formed from gold-coloured wire decorated with beads. Image description: a gold star made from a small wired frame that has overlapping curly wires extended from side to side in an irregular pattern. At the bottom of the star there are some more curls of wire and there there are coloured beads at various intervals on the star and the wires. A light green wall with a stripe of light and a stripe of shadow is visible behind the star.
For the second year in a row, I’ll be posting a Go Team! message every day in January to encourage us as we build new habits or maintain existing ones. It’s cumbersome to try to include every possibility in every sentence so please assume that I am offering you kindness, understanding, and encouragement for your efforts right now. You matter, your needs matter, and your efforts count, no matter where you are applying them. You are doing the best you can, with the resources you have, in all kinds of difficult situations and I wish you ease. ⭐💚 PS – Some of the posts for this year may be similar to posts from last year but I think we can roll with it.
Another day, another opportunity to make a little space for yourself in your schedule (and in your head.)
If you didn’t get a chance to try yesterday’s videos, it doesn’t matter a bit. Try a few minutes of the ones from today, or do a little movement on your own.
Just be kind to yourself about it, no matter what!
Here’s your gold star for your self-kindness efforts: ⭐️
I recently found this fun Nia energizer video and I just love it. There are only three people in the class and they are clearly having a great time so I had extra fun with the movement.
A Nia dance video from Bethama 37 showing three people dancing in a large room with a mirror at the front.
If meditation is more your style today, here’s one to try. Bonus: the video shows sheep grazing in a field!
A meditation video from the Calm YouTube channel that was apparently originally produced to be played during Uber rides. The image shows long haired sheep in a green hilly field.
