January Languishing and How To Combat It

It’s mid-January. Holidays have passed, and a new year has begun, but suddenly the hope of the New Year seems to have abandoned you.

Feel familiar?

If so, you’re not alone. Many therapists argue that the holidays are not always the hardest part of the year. It’s the second week of January. 

Why Now?

The holidays themselves can be stressful, even in non-pandemic years. Maybe it’s the travel, maybe the destination, or maybe the feeling that the end of the year passes too quickly. Coming down from this stress takes a toll on the body and mind. 

The first week back may feel like recovery or hope, or simply getting back into the routine of weekly schedules, but then the second week arrives. What was an adjustment now feels settled, and in front of us is a sprawling array of similar weeks. 

To put the cherry on top, this is the week we face a new challenge in the goals we established with the New Year. Perhaps our resolutions have not started yet, and the guilt and pressure are building, or our resolutions are no longer beginning - they are continuing. Olympic athletes often echo the sentiment that getting to the top is difficult, but staying on top is even harder. We start to lose the excitement and newness of the goal, while the outcome seems just as far away.

These pressures can create fatigue under the best of circumstances, but add in the stress, the cold, our everyday life pressures, the ever-shifting landscape of the pandemic, and you have key ingredients for burnout, abandoning goals, and occasionally even bouts of hopelessness.

What to do next?

Know you aren’t alone

As unique as the stresses and pressures of your life are to you, feeling stress and anxiety is universal. It’s ok to take a breathe, and important to know you are not alone in needing one. Maybe it’s helpful simply to know others are feeling the same, or perhaps it’s worth reaching out to close friends to see if they could use a break. Finding company can mute the voices saying, Why can’t I just get it together? Why am I so tired right after a “break?” Why can everyone else jump back in just fine? What’s wrong with me?

In fact, nothing is wrong with you, and if you reach out, you may provide the very relief you desire for someone else as well as yourself. Stress is difficult; isolation is crushing.

Even if you are not feeling up to leaving the house, there are virtual MeetUps to join or start for yourself. There are thousands of books to read and provide an escape and a widened perspective. There are games to master, foods to make, and daily calm to enjoy.

Reflect

When momentum feels like it has abandoned you and life stagnates, we can help ourselves by reflecting on our past. 

This may be free-form or more structured. Looking back allows us to see patterns and growth, even if it felt too small to notice at the time. One structured exercise that is particularly helpful is to write yourself a love letter. It may sound particularly mushy, but writing a letter to yourself at this time last year, explaining the trials you will face and the victories you will have, is a powerful way to connect the dots of your own life and desires. This not only grounds us in ourselves but sneakily lays a framework to understand where we might want to head in the future.

Invest in Yourself

With physical exhaustion, we need rest and relaxation to recover. With mental fatigue, however, we have to fill our tanks with meaningful action.

If we already know what activities will fill us with joy (which is different than productivity, though not necessarily exclusive), we may simply need the push to carve out the time to invest in these. 

If we do not know, we can start a list of things we’d like to do, big and small, from understanding how to make puff pastry to making an oil painting (even if you’ve never picked up a brush) or going to that art exhibit you’d noticed but never scheduled a time to see. The act of writing the list provides a breath of fresh air, mentally speaking, allowing us to see our desires in a physical list and initiating the habit of looking for the things that spark joy in us. 

Extend your break

It can feel silly to want a break when there was so much “break” time over the holidays, but everyone needs to focus. Without it, how do we intend to accomplish the things that mean the most to us? 

The New Year has only begun; we do not have to hit the ground running to get the most out of it - particularly if running in January means collapsing in February. 

Our goals will still be there. And speaking of goals…

Evaluate your goals

This is purposefully last on the list. The idea of “goals” at all can be challenging and unhelpful, which means we should be particularly careful in setting and holding ourselves to them.

Goals can help us feel momentum and mark milestones as we improve our lives, but they can also be an opportunity to punish ourselves if they are not structured well.

What if your goal is as seemingly trivial as “I want to floss more”? 

Is your goal to floss one more day than last year? To floss every day? If you break your streak, is it still worth flossing the next day? Obviously yes.

Our goals can drive us, and they can also scare us into staying in one place, so be careful about how you structure yours. 

In the meantime, hang in there, and don’t forget to enjoy yourself.