2021 – natgoodlad.com

Evening all. Like the last few times I’ve been on here, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Just a quick one tonight, I promise. You’ll want to save all of your reading energy for the 2021 review in the works!

My first year of blogging, evidently, hasn’t quite gone how I planned it to. All of the ideas I had at the beginning never came to fruition for one reason or another. One of those I want to address.

My mental health has been shot to pieces this year. I’ve spoken about it on here before and it’s been fluctuating massively pretty much all the way through 2021.

Just over a month ago, it hit the lowest low I’ve ever experienced, so after six or seven years of just ‘plugging away’ and ‘getting on by’, with a little push from some people, I decided it was time to actually do something about it.

For the last month, I’ve been ‘seeing’ a therapist. That comes with added inverted commas because I haven’t actually met the person as she works in the US. But through a site called BetterHelp, they can help people all over the world using either chat rooms, video calls or voice calls.

Even though it’s only been a month, I’m already feeling a lot better. A lot of that will be because the wave naturally came to an end. But given how big a wave it was, I know there’s a chance I could experience one like that again, and that’s where this is helpful.

Yes, it’s helped me in the moment, but I’m also going to be way more prepared in the future when this happens again. And I know it’ll happen again. Of course it will. It’s all ups and downs. But going into those downs with a better knowledge of how to cope is going to make them much more manageable – properly manageable, not hoping that a two-hour walk will magically clear the fog in your head.

Everyone suffers from these days. I’m no different to anyone else in that regard. But not a lot of people seek the help they need. I now know how beneficial getting help is. It’s hard to admit – I went years without doing it and even needed a push while I was at my lowest moment.

But if you are struggling, please do it. It might be a slow process, you might feel better in a couple of weeks. It doesn’t matter. It takes as long as it takes.

The world is becoming a fucking weird place once again. And that can be scary for a lot of people for a mass of different reasons. Be nice to each other, be there for each other and look after yourselves too.

That was all a bit of a train wreck, wasn’t it? The year from hell is finally over, and we can finally start to look forw… oh, another lockdown is imminent? FIVE tiers? In a three-tier system? How does that even…?

Okay, so 2021 isn’t getting off to the best start either. Personally, that’s not what I really need. Like almost everyone, my last year was literally hand-crafted by the Devil himself and I’m sure he was there giggling in the corner as I had to live through five months of furlough, redundancy from a job I loved, temporary jobs, countless applications and cover letters, all while not being able to see my mates.

Sounds like a carbon copy of a lot of people’s 2020, I know. Therefore, I’m going to shut up about it now and look forward to… putting myself through absolute hell again for the sake of personal challenge. Great.

Dry Dry January

One thing that did make 2020 considerably less terrible was that I got back into running. When I combined that with going to the gym once it re-opened, I found that all of my lockdown weight quickly receded – funny that.

The last temp job I had, though, was 12 hour shifts for five days a week, which isn’t really conducive to wanting to exercise five days a week too. Therefore, I had to sack it off for a while.

That was a shame because, for once, it had actually got to the point where I was enjoying it. I loved the feeling of achieving a goal I had set myself, like running 5km for the first time in over two years, or running for an hour straight. I want to get back to that, but this time I’m setting a more difficult challenge.

Dry January is probably something you’re familiar with – it’s a charity thing where people give up alcohol for one month and it generally sees them save money and feel healthier come the end of it.

I personally don’t drink too much alcohol anyway, particularly not at home (although many months trapped inside did its best to test that). So, I thought I’d make my already most dreaded month even more torturous by adding in some additional rules – and adding an extra ‘Dry’ into the name of it to emphasise that it’s more than just the alcohol, and so I could use the ‘Dry Dry Desert’ logo from Mario Kart as the main picture.

The rules

EXERCISE

Originally I’d planned to put the gym back into this, but seeing as that’s now not allowed, I’ll have to make do with stealing the medicine ball my dad got for Christmas. I’ve already tried a 15 minute session once and it nearly killed me, so that can go in on Tuesdays and Thursdays to break up the monotony of running.

Three runs a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) doing whatever the 10k training app tells me to do. I finished all the sessions on that before my last job but seeing as I haven’t done any running since then, I’ll start about halfway through and see how it goes.

DIET

This is the bigger issue for me. Exercise has never been much of a problem but the stuff I consume between that has always ruined it.

As well as no alcohol, I’ll be banning fizzy drinks and anything that isn’t water (apart from one coffee in the morning so that I can actually do the rest of the day).

Five a day+ is also an obvious one, and effectively just making sure I don’t eat anything I don’t need to.

SLEEP

Even though I hate doing it, I always find I’m more productive when I wake up early. So, 6.30am every day for a month – let’s see how that goes.

What do I want from it?

Mostly just to feel healthier. I find that when I start to feel healthier, I’m more motivated to keep it going, so maybe the things that I practice in January can be extended further into the year when things like daylight will also make them easier.

The obvious one, too, is to lose weight. I lost a bit in summer and autumn 2020, but I’m still not mad on how I look so I need to carry on working on that as well.

I won’t update on here every day about how it’s going because that’s painfully boring for you all (as I’m sure this whole article detailing it has been), but I’ll draw something up every week or so with what’s been happening, how many apples I’ve eaten, how many times I’ve fallen in the canal on a run, etc.

Hopefully 2021 is better for everyone. It certainly can’t be much worse than the last one. Not until Tier 15 becomes a reality, anyway.

I don’t know what I’ll be posting next. As with before, I haven’t really thought about it. We’ll see if anything interesting happens.