5 Powerful Life Lessons from 2024: A Year of Growth, Resilience, and Self-Discovery
Taking time to reflect on where we’ve been is not easy in our forward-focused culture. I was recently prompted by my sister for my takeaways this past year, and if she hadn’t asked me to stop moving and write I may have rolled into 2025 at the same go-get-‘em speed that I move at.
So thank you, Maggie, for encouraging me to write.
And here I go!
The top 5 things I learned in 2024.
1. Life is about making consistent – but imperfect – choices. I didn’t realize how much consistency is built into my existence until I went on several girls’ trips this fall and was with treasured friends who have very different schedules than me. I’ve trained my body to wake up hungry in the morning because I observe a roughly 12-hour overnight fast, and because I’m stimulating my metabolism with exercise generally within the first hour or two or getting up. I go to bed roughly the same time each night (around 9pm!), and I awaken without an alarm most mornings (around 5am!). I eat three meals a day and a small afternoon snack balanced with fat, fiber + protein. While each day is not perfect, it is consistent. And my body knows how I’m going to fuel it, move it, and restore it. This consistency provides an anchoring that makes everything else in my life easier, including my mood management, my energy for seeing patients, and my patience for my pre-teen sons and their shenanigans.
2. Streamline habits into unconsciousness. There are so many things that we have to think about in a day. Coordinating who needs to get picked up and when, don’t forget to place this order, get the ground turkey out of the freezer for dinner tonight, remember to take the trash cans out….the list goes on and on. Going on autopilot with ingrained habits is so helpful. Batch cooking on Sunday used to be something I had to actively think about, and now it’s a part of the way I just live my life. Planning my workouts for the week and what I’m going to do used to be something I had to gear myself up for, and now it’s just a matter of showing up. Finding time for meditation used to feel like “one more thing”, and now I wake up in the morning ready for the 10-20 minute treat of taking a mind-vacation before I get out of bed. Habits that slip into the background make our bandwidth for other things bigger.
3. Social jet lag is okay every once in a while (and stop looking at your biometric data). Back to those treasured friends and our girls’ weekends: my friends like to stay up late and sleep late. Do I want to miss out on all the fun at night? Of course not. So I stayed up later than I usually do, and as a consequence didn’t get as much sleep the weekend we were away. Surprisingly, despite my Oura ring giving me a low readiness and poor sleep scores (alcohol! not enough hours!), I actually felt totally fine, no more less ready or less rested than normal. So I stopped checking my tracker and just had a good time.
4. Make space for creativity to reduce anxiety. The left brain is in constant motion – logically planning and navigating us through the day. The left brain is also our anxious brain, sometimes making us fear the unknowns of our lives. How does one get out of the anxious brain? By engaging the right creative brain. How does that happen? With careful time allotted to creative pursuits: cooking without a recipe, taking a walk with no particular route, sitting on a random bench for 5 minutes and looking in awe at the grass, playing the piano that usually sits in the living room untouched, challenging yourself to make a mini-golf game with your kid using just the materials present in your parents’ summer lake house. Creativity involves play. I am far too serious most of the time!
5. We are more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. I started becoming much more serious about my physical fitness in 2024. My goal: do one unassisted pull-up, and I’m uber close to making it a reality. One of my favorite things to notice while lifting weights was choosing a weight that looked big and heavy and noticing that it actually felt light to me. Our muscles accommodate to what we need, so we have to challenge them. And another great thing I’ve noticed? The more muscle I build, the less chronic pain I have in my hip, low back and pelvis. My baseline pain has improved by at least 75%! Consistent movement allows the muscles to work out their tensions, reduce lactic acid buildup, and teaches us how to build resilience to varying allostatic loads. I am strong. You are strong, too.
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