Starting A New Year With Chronic Health Conditions

Starting a new year is an event filled with joy, anticipation, fear, dread, or nonchalance. We’re starting this new year with the ever-present cloud of the covid pandemic hanging over our heads. We all hoped it would be history by now. I hate this pandemic! As we enter the second year of it, I think I need to just accept the fact that it is a part of my everyday life. Are you struggling with this, too?

New Year Resolutions Or What?

Picking A Word

Since a new year always brings out the question, “What goals or resolutions do you have for the new year?”, this post discusses my thoughts on this topic. I discovered the idea of picking a word for each year several years back. Last year’s word was hope or hopeful. This year I’ve picked the word joy or joyful. I’m tired of living in stress and fear. I intend to look for things that bring me joy this year. As part of finding joy, I’ve decided that my life lacks fun. I need to look for things I can do that cause laughter and joy.

If you want to learn more about picking a word for the new year, you can read my earlier post here.

Picking Intentions For Yourself

Liz at Despite Pain wrote a post about using intentions instead of resolutions for the new year. They are all very practical ones for those of us with chronic ailments. I’m combining her first intention of learn coping mechanisms and her last one of love yourself. I haven’t been coping well with stress at all and then I get mad at myself for not coping well. As a result, I’ve gained back almost all the weight I lost on the Bright-Line Eating Plan due to stress eating. So, I intend to take better care of myself by doing meditation and breathing exercises every day to help me manage stress. I also need to journal again.

I’ve realized that until I get my stress under control, I will continue to struggle with emotional eating. I have to be honest and admit that I had little hope that I’d succeed at managing stress better. Until I watched this video.

Morgan’s main point is that we need to celebrate what we accomplished in the old year, instead of letting the things we didn’t get to drag us down. After watching it, I realized I have survived covid! That’s a success for me! If you’re reading this, you survived, too. Other successes I had in 2021 were:

• I successfully helped my family with their 2021 health challenges.
• I managed my health pretty well, because I only needed antibiotics once. This is a tremendous accomplishment for someone with an immune deficiency during a pandemic!
• I paid all my bills.
• I’m still blogging despite challenges.
• I finished the rough draft of my book.

What have you accomplished in 2021? Write it down if you can to encourage yourself. 2021 wasn’t a complete failure. And if you don’t have monumental accomplishments, you still got out of bed when you could. You encouraged a family member or friend when they needed it. You took care of yourself the best you knew how. Those are worth celebrating, too.

Some New Year Resources

Below are a couple of resources that might be useful to you as you think about your new year’s goals, plans, or intentions.

First, the Disabled Diva shared her 10 Realistic Goals for 2022 in this post: https://thedisableddivablog.com/2021/12/25/realistic-goals-chronic-illness/?fbclid=IwAR3-KAPjfrsaNB6Rm-7e0gap1pKARcd2w5tLWMONceWAmY0PTBYqYuVDG9w

I love her Mental Health goals of Stop Blaming Yourself, Forgive Yourself, and Stop Comparing Yourself! These are so important to all of us.

Next, Nikki at the Brainless Blogger wrote a post about reflecting a bit on the last year. Something that we can all relate to is asking ourselves how well we’re doing at being compassionate with ourselves. Nikki has a gentle no-stress approach to reflecting on our lives. You can read her post here: https://brainlessblogger.net/2021/12/31/year-2022-when-youre-thinking-about-resolutions/

Last, for those of you who love to reflect on your past year, here’s a list of 20 Questions to get you started: https://www.theartofsimple.net/new-years-eve-reflection-questions/

Personally, I’d need way more time than New Year’s Eve to go through these questions. Perhaps they’d be good journal prompts for January.

Wrap-Up Of New Year’s Thoughts

Yes, the last two years have been immensely challenging, but don’t quit showing up in your life. 2022 just might be better. Pick whatever works for you as we enter 2022. I’m hoping and praying that you have a good year. Till next time, Kathy

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