this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Self Improvement
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A community which focusses on improving yourself. This can be in many different ways - from improving physical health or appearance, to improving mental health, creating better habits, overcoming addictions, etc.
While material circumstances beyond our control do govern much of our daily lives, people do have agency and choices to make, whether that is as "simple" as disciplining yourself to not doomscroll, to as complex as recreating yourself to have many different hobbies and habits.
This is not a place where all we do is talk about improving "productivity" (in a workplace context) and similar terms and harmful lifestyles like "grindset". Self-improvement here is intended to make you a generally better and happier person, as well as a better communist, and any other roles you may have in your life.
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I think it's important to talk about this stuff, because habit building/self improvement/recovery is usually more like an upward trend on a chart with lots of little dips and gains and not one continuous line upward. I honestly struggled a lot with my cannabis use that week, i used it a lot as a stress reliever and backslid on reducing. BUT it was an extremely stressful week, and i didn't backslide *that *far, and my plan was never to completely quit anyway, just be less reliant on it. Still, i was able to keep myself from smoking for long periods of the time the last few days when i've been feeling better mentally and can do stuff like go outside and have less general anxiety about my safety/home.
So during that time i was trapped inside, i couldn't garden. BUT i did actually read a gardening book every day or do seed research so i'm counting that. Yesterday was the first day in... 8 days? i could do anything outside. I just moved a bunch of sticks that fell from the windstorms into a border for one of my garden beds since the ground was still a bit snowy. I'm feeling a bit unwell today, but if i feel better i'm hoping to weed around some of the younger plants. Turns out dandelions are actually great for the soil and bringing up a lot deep nutrients up into the topsoil, and are good for pollinators, so i'm going to keep some around, but i need to make sure there is no other plants around the babies so they have room in the soil for their roots. I hope all the plants survived the 17F icestorm weather. I protected the sensitive ones, but i don't know if it'll be enough. Oh and i ordered some seeds for inside, microgreen radish seeds, mung beans, and cinnamon basil. When i feel better i'm going to mix up some veganic potting soil using a recipe a friend gave me and repot a plant that's been in a broken container for the last six months lol.
My "be active" plan also suffered. It dropped below freezing here and between stress and the cold i just felt like hibernating and had very little energy. The heating system in this place is honestly pretty bad lol. My fingers were going numb just sitting at my desk with the heat supposedly turned up to max. I did some half hearted stretching and called it good. But now i'm on day 3 streak of being active now that it's warmed up and i'm not snowed in.
So i didn't do well last week under stressful conditions but now that things are more normal, i'm doing a lot better and are back to making progress in areas i care about :)
100%. A "trick" I developed over time with this sort of thing was like... mentally "flipping" around my perspective of improving and being a better person.
As in, when I break a habit for a few days or even a few weeks, I used to be like "Oh no, I've regressed back into the person I was before I started this journey, and now I need to start again."
Whereas now, when I break a habit, I'm like "Oh, this is fine. I am still 'the person that does this habit', I haven't regressed, I'm still on the exact same journey that I've been on this whole time, and I'm not restarting because there's nothing to restart, I'm just getting back on track."
I personally find this mental framing to make it a lot less daunting when shit happens, as it tends to do. Imagining that you've fallen all the way back down the mountain, when in reality you just paused the climb for a little, makes resuming the positive habits seem exhausting and makes missing a few days intensely demoralizing.
yeah!!! good way of putting it :)