2021 - Year of Health Check-in

In case you missed it at the beginning of the year, for me, this is the year of health. As usual, this is my mid year check-in to see how I am progressing.

What did we want to see again?

In case you don’t want to go back and read the article, there were a few things that I wanted to see improved. The great thing about a theme is you are not necessarily locked into improving certain metrics by making a certain number. Its all about a state of mind more than anything else. However, you still want to see some progress around your theme. The main two areas where I was hoping to make progress were not the typical, let’s lose some weight, but sleep and mental health.

Sleep

While this is the area where I thought it would be the easiest to improve, it has not. Not by a long shot. If anything it has stayed about the same or gotten slightly worse. What has been good is that the role that I’m in no longer has 8AM meetings 3 days a week and when I was going on site meant getting up a LOT earlier. My going to sleep time has actually gotten worse. I used to be in bed around 11:30 or midnight. Now its easily 12:30 - 1AM. This is not a good trend and one that needs better self discipline to turn around. Something I hope that I can do small tweaks to fix in the next several months.

Hopefully before too long, I’ll be back in the office which will put a little more rigor to the wake up times and thus force some better discipline at night.

Mental Health

This is where I feel I’ve had the biggest improvement. Mainly due to the new role. I’m no longer trying to juggle two jobs. I’m no longer working late nights every night. I have time in my daily calendar to actually do work AT work. This change in role has made a change in the work/life balance that has made things better all around. I was definitely feeling burnt out last half of 2020 and this has marked a big improvement.

Another aspect in the mental health is finding a new hobby. The wood working definitely went smaller scale over the winter by doing a lot more wood turning and messing around making pens and growing my skills on the lathe. I’ve taken on a few other projects for people but mainly its been something to play around with and see what I can make. This helped get me through the isolation of the winter and give my mind something else to think about for a while. A good distraction when I needed to not be in front of a screen. If you want to see some of my work, check out my Instagram. I have some future ideas of what I want to do here that could turn into something interesting.

Overall Grade: Meh

I’m not where I want to be, but I’m making progress and that’s part of the theme as well. There are some health issues that I need to take care of still this year that will involve taking care of a few nagging issues that I’ve put off over the years. I’m doing my best to not let the old man in, but there are days when he tries to show up. I’ve got littles still so there are many more trips around the sun I need to make to see them grow up. My parents gave us some good scares earlier this year which did not help any of the stress levels this first half of the year. But we’re all on the mend and moving forward.

Its not easy getting older.