The Missing Piece In Your New Year's Resolutions

A quick heads-up: we've just wrapped up A Mug of Insights' rebrand (go check out the home page!) and launched our SESSIONS workshop series. Every session will distil my last 8 years of reading advice into actionable frameworks and worksheets, and the first session is all about creating a personal curriculum in the new year. Go check it out!

(1) The Idea: The Quality Everyone Wants but Struggles to Develop

Since the start of this year, I’ve been planning, researching and writing a book with Bloomsbury Academic. I gave it everything I had, and after submitting the completed typescript to my publisher this Tuesday, I crashed into a 3-day-long slumber where I slept for 15 hours a day.

The post-project crash is very real for a lot of people. My friend, Hano, also had a crash after he finished editing his forthcoming short film. And as the new year is upon us, everyone around me seems to be struggling with the same conundrum: their projects & resolutions all seem to soar and crash, leaving them exhausted around the end of the year.

There’s no denying that feeling tired after a year of work is justified, but sometimes I wonder if these deep pockets of exhaustion are necessary. This brings me to a quality that we in the West proclaim to want, but in reality, we’re terrible at implementing it into our lives:

Balance.

It’s subtle, but most of us (including me) come to appreciate it way too late. For most of my early-twenties, I thought of balance as a corporate cop-out and a consolation prize for doing soulless spreadsheet-shuffling. So, I placed my bets in my creative work completely. I slept late, held friendships at arm’s length and paid no attention to my health. I’m good as long as the work is excellent.

But then, it all started catching up to me. I felt physically weak, mentally drained and bitter against the world. Worst of all, the work that I thought was going to save me stopped feeling satisfying, and all the repeated stress left me with persistent insomnia coupled with a chronic migraine. So, in 2023, I started working with a therapist to get to the bottom of this mess. And yes, she took me down a rabbit hole I’ve avoided for years.

The key insight that shook my world was that, on some level, I loved being an imbalanced person even though it was hurting me. Like it or not, lopsided traits (a workaholic, a bookworm or a jock) are easier to spot. In fact, most of the posts we see on social media and TV are people with extreme expressions of narrow traits. While it looks glamorous and enticing from the screen, living it is another story.

In my experience, the main contributors to my happiness come from 5 areas:

1: Meaningful work

2: Feeling physically fit

3: Getting my finances in order

4: Investing in relationships

5: Finding relaxing leisure activities

And my normal pattern is to go all-in on one of these areas at the expense of another. I’ll sacrifice leisure for meaningful and put aside relationships for finances. But over time, these extreme attempts all left me feeling drained and miserable. So, one of the first assignments my therapist gave me was to address the leisure-career imbalance. “You have to set up the right environment to relax," she said.  

So, I got to work. I rewired the lights in my room, bought a white-noise machine and started listening to more music on vinyl. After a month, though my migraine had disappeared and I felt happier, a fear that I’ve never felt before gripped me: I could no longer clearly define myself. The extreme motivation I used to feel disappeared, and for a while, I couldn’t work at my usual capacity.

In a way, this is the price of balance. You’ll start to wonder: if I’m not this extreme (workaholic, friend, jock, etc.), who the hell am I? Also, as you address areas of your life that are out of balance, the old, neurotic drive will stop working. You’ll also see projects and resolutions that used to light a fire under your ass as just a series of boring steps that’ll guarantee success. In other words, the more balance we have in our lives, the more mundane our lives will become. We’ll stop living in a picture book full of wild stories and start living our actual lives.

Also, mundane here doesn’t mean feeling resigned. In fact, when we set our goals right, it becomes a quiet confidence in knowing that we’re steadily moving towards what we want instead of feeling tortured by glamorous visions that are out-of-reach. Instead, all of them become definable goals that aren't that sexy.

“Building a great podcast” becomes “produce one good episode every Wednesday” and “write for a living” becomes “publish a newsletter every Monday & Saturday”. More than that, these concrete steps are self-contained and allow space for a balanced life full of friendships, martial arts, learning how to cook and travelling.

And in the grand scheme of things, letting go of an extreme self-image is a small price to pay.

(2) The Prompts

1: Complete the stem: I am an extremely ___ person. Chances are, what you need to work on is on the opposite end of this self-definition. Identify that area of your life.

2: Find 5 concrete activities that start to bring balance to that area of your life. I’ve always struggled with cooking, so my steps might be: shopping on Mondays for groceries, learn 1 new recipe per-month, etc. They are not supposed to be dramatic, just simple enough for you to ease your way into bringing more balance. Experiment with these steps in the new year.