*ironically this post was written before Connor Franta's video. Maybe I am psychic. I am not sure*
Happy Monday everyone! This is the first in a new series I am working on. This series is actually fitting with the changes in my life. I have had a lot of amazing career opportunities come up recently and I have realized that before I can truly appreciate and work on those, I need to work on myself.
I spent a sleepless night last night trying to think how I could best do this. As some of you may know I have many health problems that as much as I hate to admit it and try to ignore, limit me. Recently this has become much harder to deal with for me. I just got back from a 10 day trip to LA for VidCon and some meetings which was absolutely amazing. The parts that weren't amazing were times such as being at Disney and needing a wheelchair. Now, this is not me saying that there is anything wrong with disabilities, it is just hard for me right now.
Career wise I have a ton going on right now most of which I can't publicly announce yet but this became slightly stressful. My health has gotten worse and with the added work stress, I realized that I needed to take a step back and reevaluate. I took a quick inventory of what was the most important to me and started to prioritize. My number one thing is my health, as it should be. I am a very hard headed, career driven person and have recently taken the stance that I am going to be in pain and feel awful anyway, so I am just going to push myself too hard. I realize now that as much as that is needed at times, that is not the best way to live my life.
I graduated high school about a month ago and because of my health I am not starting college right away. Once again, as some of you may know, I work part time from home. I also do my YouTube videos, blog posts and play music out. I love all of these things immensely.I don't plan on stopping any of these, I am just going to set some guidelines for myself.
For example, I am not letting myself work more than 6 hours in a day. The rest of my day is going to be dedicated to mental and physical healing. I am also going to be going back to my Paleo eating plan. It really does help me with my overall well being and helps with some of my medical conditions. Plus, there is a huge sense of accomplishment for me in sticking to that.
Because of physical limitations and pain, exercise is slightly harder for me. There used to be nothing I loved more than going to the gym and specifically working on the elliptical, but I can't do that anymore. I have always loved yoga. I love the mind body connection that yoga provides. I started doing yoga when I was in kindergarten and was in the adult class in 1st grade. I loved it. I haven't done it in quite a while. I am going to start doing at least 20 minutes of yoga a day gradually building my pain tolerance up to hopefully being able to handle full hour sessions or more.
One new thing that I want to introduce is meditation. I have read amazing studies about the benefits of meditation and know people that swear by it. I plan on starting with guided meditation and working myself up to being able to reach a meditative state on my own.
The final thing has to do with sleep. Because of pain, and my own issues with insomnia and anxiety, I have a very hard time getting any regular sleep. I have had to adapt to the "sleep when I can" sort of mindset and that often results in the only sleep I get being between 3pm and 7pm which is not healthy. I am going to try my hardest to be in bed ready to sleep by midnight. I have an app on my phone which has been the only thing that has ever helped me. It is a voice guided relaxation app and it has done wonders for me. I believe it was $1.99. There is also a free version that is great to start. I have since purchased a few extension. In all I have spent less than $10 on this app and it has changed my life. I haven't been using it as much recently and I plan to use it to get to sleep every night from now on. It is also amazing if you suffer from anxiety attacks like I do. I recently used it on a plane ride and it stopped my anxiety attack.
I hope you guys like more of this sort of post because this is the stage that I am at in my life right now and this is more of what Mondays are going to be about. But don't worry, I will still be blogging about beauty, music and everything else.
I have a challenge for everyone today. Make a list of things that you want to work on to make yourself a better you, and then under it, make a list of small things you can do to work to achieve them. If you do this I would love to see them, so please tweet them to me! Hope you are all having a great day. See you tomorrow.
