What's on Your Bookshelf?
“What’s On Your Bookshelf” is a personal and professional growth podcast exploring the intersections of passion, potential, and purpose - featuring multi-certified coach and leadership development consultant Denise R. Russo alongside Andy Hughes, Scott Miller, and Samantha Powell.
What's on Your Bookshelf?
79 - The Happiness Project - January
Ever wondered how small changes can revolutionize your happiness and energy levels? Join us as we unpack Gretchen Rubin's "The Happiness Project" and its transformative January theme focused on boosting energy and vitality. From practical tips like going to sleep earlier and exercising better, to tossing, restoring, and organizing your space, we share personal anecdotes of both challenges and triumphs in our quest for a more energized life. Whether you're struggling to tackle nagging tasks or simply want to act more energetically, this episode promises actionable insights to set you on the path to sustained happiness.
Have you ever considered the profound impact of sleep on your overall well-being? In this episode, we delve into the nuances of improving sleep quality, from experimenting with sound frequencies and classical music to tracking sleep patterns with innovative tools like the Oura Ring and Fitbits. Sharing our unexpected discovery of using TV for sleep sounds, we discuss how cutting down on screen time before bed can significantly enhance your sleep quality. Drawing from "Atomic Habits," we emphasize the importance of establishing effective routines and highlight the intersection of sleep, energy, and overall wellness.
Clutter dragging you down? Discover the liberating power of decluttering as we dive into the emotional and psychological complexities of household clutter. Inspired by "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up," we share stories about generational hoarding tendencies and the emotional attachments we form with objects. Learn strategies for categorizing and overcoming different types of clutter, from nostalgic to freebie clutter, and how these small steps can lead to a more peaceful and energized living space. Tune in to uncover how intentional living and small, manageable changes can make a world of difference in your daily life.
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Welcome to what's on your Bookshelf, with your hosts Denise Russo and Samantha Powell.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone, welcome back. It's another episode of what's on your Bookshelf. This is a life and leadership podcast where we are living out loud the pages of the books that are on our shelves. We are halfway through the year. I can't even believe it and we're in our third book. This is the first chapter of the third book, although we did an intro last week. The book that we're in is called the Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. My name is Denise Russo. I'm here today with my friend, sam Powell, and I'm looking forward to these next several episodes where we're going to walk through how you can take practical, actionable steps to have happiness in your life at a more elevated level. So, sam, how are you doing today?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great. I'm happy to be here, as always, and I'm really excited to get into this first one. When I read this chapter I read it a couple weeks ago it really inspired me to get some things done and, I don't know, make a couple of energetic changes to my days in my life, which has been good. So, yeah, this is so the way this book is set up, just so that everybody knows. She has like a month by month. So she did an entire year of. She wanted to get herself happier. She was already happy she was actually average on average, more happy than the average person but she realized that she could bring more happiness into her life by being purposeful which is really what our year's all about with these books.
Speaker 1:And so how this book is broken down is each chapter is a month, and in that month she picks a theme, like one she thinks she's going to focus on overall, and then she's got about five resolutions for that that fit that theme right. So how is she going to pull this off? So January, for example, her goal is to boost energy. Right, it's vitality, you know, bring some vitality into her life. And so, in order to do that, she has five things she's focusing on. One is go to sleep earlier. Two is exercise better.
Speaker 1:Three is toss, restore and organize, and I know you and I are definitely going to talk about that one. Four is tackle a nagging task, and five is act more energetic. So her goal for the month of January was to boost her energy right, get into vitality, and to do that. These are the five things she was going to do, and so this is her story about how she did those, those five things, and really what the results were for her. What did you think as you read through this chapter and read through these five things that she's tackling?
Speaker 2:When I first read the book. So I'm the type of person if you're watching this on video you'll be able to see I have all kinds of like post-it notes and highlighter marks and pages turned. So when I read a book, I first kind of glance through the chapter, take a couple notes and then I go back and I deep dive read it. That was actually what prompted us to start this podcast was that we wanted to then go even deeper, and so what I first found in this chapter, Sam, was when I first read this book, which was actually a couple years ago. So it's funny, almost like a time capsule, to look back at how I was feeling when I first read this book, which was actually a couple years ago. So it's funny, almost like a time capsule, to look back at how I was feeling when I first wrote it. I should have written a date. I think that's what I'm going to do going forward is, as I'm writing notes, write the date. But this is what I wrote.
Speaker 2:In the first page she says go to sleep earlier, and in the margin I put I have an app to remind me to do this, but yet I don't go to sleep earlier. The next one said exercise better. And I put I have a machine that's going unused. In fact, I have my clothes hanging on the handles. The next one said toss, restore and organize.
Speaker 2:I wrote I try, but I just have too much stuff. Tackle a nagging task. I put fatigue sets in and, acting more energetically, I said act maybe is the key word here. So when I, when I reread this chapter to do this episode with you, it was more than I don't know a year, since I had read the book, and I had actually read the book deep, dove into it and lived it out loud. So all those things actually changed a little bit for me. Now, are they all perfect? No, and I think that's what we're going to talk about today, that this is a process. This isn't a magic pill. Happiness isn't something you just turn on and you turn off. You learn how to make it more conscious in your life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. The coach in me wants to just pull all of those you know blockers apart and deep dive. We could spend a whole episode of me just asking you about those five notes you wrote. Yeah, mine's all right, but I loved, you know, I loved how she started, like I love that she started January with boost energy right, and she did this on purpose, because it's like if she can boost her energy, then she'll have more space and more energy for all of the things that follows, because her goal is a cumulative effect of these goals.
Speaker 1:It's not that January comes and goes and so she stops doing these five things. It's that she does these five things and then adds on February's things and then adds on March's things. So I think starting with boosting energy is such a smart way to do this and I was thinking, oh, all right, this is probably where I need. I need to start in a few areas about how do I really, I think, protect my energy and you know, and and boost it and find ways to do that. But I love, you know, the two things she starts with or go to, you know, is sleep and exercise, which is, you know, there's all the research there, and do we do? Still do it? Well, not often right, no, no.
Speaker 2:So here's a question. So my question is does happiness make you more energetic, or does energy and being energetic make you more happy? Or is it a chicken or the egg?
Speaker 1:I think it's. I think it's a cycle, I think they both feed each other. Right, it's like, um, both things are true, and so they boost each other up. But you've just got to start with one, and usually you have to start with getting like finding the more energy right, like you can't control necessarily that, like I feel happy today, you can do, like we know, right through our exploration, you can do a lot of things to push you in that direction.
Speaker 1:But how you feel waxes and wanes, right, it's just like motivation waxes and wanes, yeah, and so I think you kind of need both sides of it is you need happiness and to ride the energy wave that comes along with that, right, naturally. But you also need the systems to put in the work to get you back on the energy bus and back in, you know, back into happiness. So I think I don't think it's an either, or I don't think it's that one is, one is the like, one's the cause and one's the result. I think that it's. They're both causes and results of each other, and it's like it just to me, it's like the cycle that just gets like a tornado that just gets bigger and bigger and bigger the more that you feed into it, the more that happiness feeds into it, and I think that's that's my experience, at least with it.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about sleep. This is something that often evades me, but the book says that, although people may be able to adjust to feeling sleepy, that sleep deprivation, it impairs your memory, weakens the immune system, slows your metabolism and might, some studies suggest, foster weight gain. And so I put a note there and I put in ink that's my life you know every area.
Speaker 2:And so I don't know when I first started to have problems staying asleep, like I can fall asleep but I don't stay asleep. And when I wake up, I wake up at these weird hours, but I wake up as if it's time to be wide awake. So like, for example, this morning I woke up it was probably 3am. I went to bed, I think around I don't know 10 ish around, so I had a decent amount of sleep, I guess you could say. But 3am is far too early to get up and do anything normal. And so, as I was sitting there, I was thinking to myself okay, I could get up, I could get something to drink. I definitely should just go to the bathroom, try to shake it off, get some thoughts out of my head. Did I have a bad dream? But I have ADHD brain, so now I'm thinking about maybe I should throw in a load of laundry. I wonder what time my first meeting is. Do I meet with Sam? Today Is today the podcast.
Speaker 2:So all these things were going on in my mind and eventually. So when I go to sleep, I listen to either some certain frequencies of sound, or I listen to ocean sounds. Or I listen to ocean sounds, or I listen to classical music to fall asleep, and so I turned it back on and instead of using my app, I use the television. Wrong idea, because if you do these things on YouTube, there's commercials. So in the middle of this peaceful music and I thought I was almost asleep this commercial came on super loud. So then I was awake again.
Speaker 1:So by then I was just like well, forget it, I'll just get up, but here's was awake again.
Speaker 2:So by then I was just like, well, forget it, I'll just get up. But here's what's funny, because even though I was super sleepy, I actually did what the next parts say to do. So I actually decided, well, I'm up anyway, let me do a little bit of exercise, and I cleared out a box of some random stuff that I'd been wanting for a couple of days to get rid of. So it's sort of actually was okay that I woke up early. But I would say, if you're not getting quality sleep consistently, to look at that. So I'll say one last thing and then pass it over to you, which is, if you're not measuring your bad quality of sleep, then there are tools that can help you, and so I will give Scott a code to put in the chat for this aura ring.
Speaker 2:If you're looking on the video, you'll be able to see it, and maybe you've heard of it before. It's O-U-R-A. This is a sort of like a Fitbit for your finger, and so this, for me, has been really helpful because it tracks my sleep over time. It even tells me what time I went to sleep, when I was in my deepest sleep, if I had light sleep throughout the night, and I can look at it over time over like a week or a month or whatever and then it also gives me alerts that says you're in a danger zone. Here are some things like meditations, some different activities that you can do to improve. So I highly recommend and encourage you, if you're trying to have an intentional way or a helper to help you sleep better, that this could be a way that that could help you, and I think that we probably can get some coupons for people as well.
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah, I have a like Fitbit that does the same. You know, does the sleep tracking and stuff too, and yeah, it's, it's interesting to collect that data and see kind of where you're at with sleep. But I think that, you know, we also inherently can feel, if you don't have a tracker, that you can feel when you got a good night's rest or when you don't. But it was interesting, the thing she said she focused on was, you know, just turning off the light. That was her big thing. Right, she used to fall asleep with the TV. She would, you know, look at emails, do whatever. Like I mean, I think we do, we all do that so much now. Right, like when you know just the fact that we've all got a phone in our pocket and we're reading and we're doom scrolling late at night and things like that, but all the research tells you that is so, so bad for your brain. Right, like what you know listening to sounds on YouTube versus you know whatever, just that extra light really messes us up. Like it messes with the regular cycle of life, with the sun rising and, you know, sun setting and it being dark and light and things like that. Like we've unnaturally put a lot more light in our lives and so it's really messing with our sleep cycle.
Speaker 1:But that was the one thing she focused on was, you know, was that? And she had this line in here where she said why does it often seem more tiring to go to bed than to stay up? And I was like, oh man, I've had that, like I do that at least twice a week, where it's like I'm sitting on the couch reading a book and it's like it's so much work just to get up to go to bed, and so I end up staying up, wait like an, you know, an hour plus later than I wanted to, because I just didn't want to get up. Put the dog outside, brush my teeth, wash my face like I don't have that many things I do at night, but still it was like to do these five things from my stasis of sitting was just so much work.
Speaker 1:But I think finding it in you to make those things a priority to, like you know, turn the lights off, stop looking at your phone, right, a lot of phones have settings Like I know mine will go into like a black and white mode at a certain, whatever time I set, like it goes into sleep mode, all the notifications I had saving all day that I've been stressed out and not doing those all go away for the period of time, right, just kind of moves you into the state of rest so you can, like you said, you know you can get things like the ring or watch or whatever, but you can also utilize tools that you've got in your phone to help you kind of push you in that direction of okay, hey, it's time to shut it down, it's time to move in that direction, because it does make such a huge difference and I know, know, when I do it right, when I get to bed on time, do whatever, when I get into a good cycle of that makes a huge difference in my energy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree. So phones, Fitbits these things are actually were originally used, maybe for people that were doing exercising, and so I'd love for you to take the reins on this next part, Sam, because it will hearken back to some episodes that I think our friends should listen to from Atomic Habits, where you were talking about creating new habits around how to make sure that exercise was a priority for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I like that. She focused on exercise better, like she already was someone who exercised regularly, but she wanted to do it in a more purposeful way. You know, for her it was like doing a little more weight training. She was doing lots of cardio but not weight training and she wanted to feel a little bit stronger, and there's some good research around that. But, yeah, I was. I loved this is exercise better, just if you don't exercise at all, right, exercise in general. But it did it.
Speaker 1:All I could think about was the atomic habits piece of it, whereas, like that was one of the things I wanted to do was to just become more active. I wanted to be an active person, and so that started with putting on workout clothes. Like that's all I did for a habit for weeks was the first thing I did is I had workout clothes ready to go the night before, so I got up and I put those on. I would have to purposefully take them off to change into my regular clothes every morning, it you know. And eventually that turned into Okay, well, I'm in the habit of putting on the clothes, so might as well do at least a little bit of workout. And that started with like a five minute workout, which was like equated to some push ups, some sit ups, like some squats, like nothing bad, like nothing major at all, right, and then that turned into something a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. And so, you know, I think, as we're thinking about adding in physical activity, we're thinking about, you know, getting to a good sleep schedule. It's back it all the way up to the littlest thing that you can do to start you in that direction.
Speaker 1:And I, like, all I can think about, too, was identity based habits, from atomic habits where you know it's really who do you want to become? Why, right, why are you doing this? What's your why, what's your identity that you're working towards and then really focusing on that. So what does a person who is well rested Do, right? What do they, how do they act, how do they behave? What things are happening? What does someone who exercises well exercises at all Do right? What does somebody who's active Look like right, like they take the stairs instead of the elevator, right, like they get up and they take the walk around the neighborhood a couple of times a week? You know they do those types of things.
Speaker 1:And so it's what can you do to step into that slowly? You know you don't have to go like from zero to a hundred and all right, I don't do, I don't work out at all, and now I'm going to go run a 10 K, it's no, I, I don't work out at all. So maybe it should figure out where, set up an area to work out, put clothes on, put you know like, get myself ready for that, and once those things become a habit, once those are things I'm doing unconsciously, add in the next thing. Right, then you know you're ready to add in the next piece of it. And so I think we have learned a lot along this journey about just this podcast and it was pre the happiness part of it but just how to step into things like getting better exercise and getting better sleep yeah, it's truly about intentional living.
Speaker 2:It's putting intention behind what we're doing. In fact, that's going to be a book that we'll talk about in the future as well. But what I liked here in this, in this part of the chapter too, is it said that people who exercise are healthier. Well, we assume that's true. Then it says they think more clearly. So exercise helps you to think more clearly. It also says it helps you to sleep better. So this is why this came after sleep. And then it says it can help you to have delayed onset of dementia.
Speaker 2:Now, for me, my parents are getting older and I'm noticing every so often there's little things that they'll say or do that make me concerned about their brains. And my mom used to be a person who moved around a lot and exercised a lot. A couple of years ago she broke her back twice because she has osteoporosis. So the doctor literally said your mom can break her back making the bed, so anything she does now she's super careful about. Plus, it's painful. So even though her back has been, let's say, repaired by the doctors, she has cement in her spine. Then a couple of weeks ago you know that she broke her hip and I'm noticing just in the last month of this occurrence with my mom's hip is that she's not exercising, she won't even get out of the chair half of the time. She's not the person she was literally just three months ago, and it's been a rapid decline.
Speaker 2:And when I say decline like there's days where if I take her out of the house or take her for lunch or take her shopping, that boom, she's back to totally normal, happy, vibrant, energetic, loosened, clear. But as soon as she slips back into like this dark place of not moving, not exercising, she's sleeping way more than she ever did, like. My mom used to be the person maybe only sleep seven, six hours a night and was was energetic all day long. Now she's sleeping oh my gosh like a dog sleeps all day long, and so I'm super concerned for her, and so when I was reading this chapter, it was really reminding me about how important it is, especially if you have elderly parents or grandparents, to keep them moving. So one of the things I'm going to do this afternoon with Vincent is go over to my mom's house, and if it's not burning up hot, we're going to just try to take her somewhere, even if it's a grocery store, just to get her legs moving.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, just that changing that inertia right, changing that from a sedentary state to movement, just helps your whole being right, your body, your mind, just you know how you're feeling, your you know just sort of in general mental state. And so, yeah, sometimes it's just about doing the thing right getting out of the house, making the move even if it's small, it doesn't matter, it just is something to kind of check that box, get in that movement and yeah, it does.
Speaker 1:I mean that boosts your energy right overall, yeah and um, get out of it. That's, I think, such an important thing, but we have to remember that, like we're not gonna feel like it right, like motivation waxes and wanes, you've gotta have a system in place. That's where all the atomic habits come in right like. You've gotta have a system in place that helps you push yourself, get into the like, change, the inertia of sitting, staying right, staying up too late, doing all those things and moving into something else. And I think this next thing that she focused on the toss, restore and organize is one of the things that can help you do that like and I know this, I, when I was reading this, I was just giggling to myself because I'm like, oh, I bet you have 500 notes in the pages of this section.
Speaker 2:I do, I do. I will say that this one is such a toughie for me because I think I've said this on at least one or many episodes that I get these funny videos, of course, that pop up on my Instagram or Facebook that are about people cleaning their house, and I don't know why they're popping up, because I hate cleaning my house, I despise it. It's one of the things that the very first sentence I circled it in the book it says household disorder was a constant drain on my energy. Like that spoke so loudly to me because, especially with having kids who are very active so my kids now are both in college, but during high school, middle school, they're super active. I was super active, am still, but there wasn't ever a focus on making sure that our house was the priority. Now my mom is like Betty Crocker, susie Homemaker, southern Living at Home. You could see my mom's house in a magazine and it would be like the model home. That's not my house and so for me it takes me a lot of energy to make sure that the house is the way where I have peace, because I do get peace from no clutter and from feng shui and from minimalism, and yet it seems like anywhere I turn around, somebody put something down that I have to pick up, because if I wait for them to do it, then it won't get done, and so this is why I recommend all the time, scott, let's put it in the chat again the life-changing magic of tidying up. I promise you, friends, we will do that book one day, because it really was a life-changing book for me about how to get a handle on something that's really hard to do. Because she goes in and talks about in this book that there are different kinds of clutter, and I thought maybe we would just talk about that just briefly, because for me it wasn't just that I had random clutter in my home.
Speaker 2:I had a really beautiful home in Atlanta and I lived there for years and the house was destroyed in a massive flood. Our whole entire neighborhood, 1800 homes were destroyed, and when I say destroyed, we had to rip everything out of our house down to the studs of the wall. So everything was destroyed and it took six dumpsters, sam, to get rid of things that were my belongings and I don't mean just clutter, I mean things that I cared about and so when we moved from that home we were living for a while in a hotel, waiting for FEMA to fix our house. They never did. Then we lived in an apartment for a while because we were still trying to figure out where can we even live.
Speaker 2:So when we finally got settled, we moved to a completely different place and so we slowly, over time, started accumulating things, and I don't know if it was subconscious, because we had lost everything that now it was like hard to let go of things.
Speaker 2:I don't know about you, but like sometimes, if I'm getting things ready to go to donation like to the church or Salvation Army or wherever you donate your clothes and that I'll look at something and think, oh that I'll look at something and think, oh well, I want to donate that, but I'll just wear it one more time, and somehow then it finds itself back into my closet. So I went through this exercise the other day with Vincent, because he's super tall now and so he has clothes in his room that are like wearing capris because he's just too tall. So we had to go through the whole thing and we did this declutter, and that was the type of clutter that I would just say is getting yourself free of stuff that you know you're never going to use again. But it's hard to do that when it's stuff that you have some sort of a feeling towards.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and you're right, I love she. She broke all. She broke clutter down into what is it? Seven, six, eight, eight different types of clutter. But, yeah, you're, you're right, it's like we get, I don't know. We just get stuck on holding on to things and I think, especially when you've been through something like a loss, like you have or you know, or if it's, it's you know, a personal loss or things like that, right, like sometimes that makes it even harder, like my.
Speaker 1:My grandmother was such a uh, high, like hoarder isn't the right word, because I think that evokes, like you know, you're just hanging on to like literally every single thing hers was more about. Like her mother grew up in the great depression and so my grandmother always had like an entirely stocked basement of food. It's like she was subconsciously so worried about running out and not having enough because of this, you know, basically generational trauma at that point of not having food to eat that I mean she she never did, and when I was in college she would bring me random food, anything she knew I loved, like I always. I had all four years of college the ingredients to make s'mores at any point. I lived in a dorm all four years and I had the things to make s'mores all the time, which was a great thing. At like one o'clock in the morning with your friends, somebody's like I need a snack. I was like, how about a microwave spore? But you know, like there are things that happen to us, there are things that happen in our lives.
Speaker 1:I do think getting rid of stuff is really hard. But I think when we release those things and when we simplify down, there is, like you said, like you get to the point of your peacefulness in it. Like we recently had a leak on our first floor and had to have all of the floors retouched so we had to pull everything up. Every single little piece of everything had to come up off the floors for our entire. Like you know the spaces we live in the most right our kitchen, our living room, you know our dining room, which is actually just a playroom of toys right, like all this stuff. But as it all came up and as you, my husband and I are piecing it back together, we realized that we wanted to simplify, we wanted to get rid of stuff. We're like this looks, I feel, so much better. This looks so much better. It's just less in it.
Speaker 1:And so it was like let's purge, let's get rid of stuff, right, and that energy from that, from that kind of clearing out of stuff, took me to my closet that I hadn't cleared out in years, like pre-COVID, right. So there were things in there that I'm like why on earth do I still have this? Or things that I found. I joked with my mom. I was like I threw away a pair of shorts from high school. Why on earth did I still own a pair of shorts from high school? Why on earth that I still own a pair of shorts from high school, one like I would never wear them, not even around the house. Should I, being a respectable person, wear these shorts like at all? But like they were taking up space and what like it was some type of clutter that I was just hanging on to. That it was. You know it was time for those things to go.
Speaker 1:But that clearing away, that simplifying out, really does like I know we probably all experience this. Right, you clean a room, you clean out a closet, you you know you get rid of stuff, or when you're moving in and out, like you move out of a place, you're like man, this place looks great, looks better than when I ever lived here, right, like what. You know that there is something to that and it does kind of give you this boost of of energy and, like I said, she's got these different types of clutter. She talks about nostalgic clutter, right, the things that we clung to, you know, because of, just you know, nostalgias or memories, things like that. There's conservation clutter, so things that we keep because they're useful, even though they're useless to you. It's like, oh, maybe one day I'll use this or, you know, someone could use this at some point.
Speaker 1:I have a little garage full of that stuff, right, bargain clutter, which is like things are on sale, they seem like a good deal, and then you buy them and then you hang on to them because it's like, oh, I didn't want to get rid of it. That was all the food my grandmother's basement right, she would stock up when things were on sale. Uh, freebie clutter. Related to bargain clutter, like things the t-shirts you get for free for participating in something that for some reason, you just can't get rid of. Yeah, um, she talks about crunch clutter. So those are things she used but knew she shouldn't, so her example was her horrible green sweatshirt. For me it was those shorts. Right, like I shouldn't use them, but did every once in a while I throw them on because I needed a pair of shorts. Yep, shouldn't do it, though. Aspirational clutter. I have at least three totes of aspirational clutter. It's all crafting stuff, things I'm going to do. You know, my husband makes fun of me every time. I'm like, oh, I could fix this.
Speaker 2:He goes you're not going to fix that Like you need to let it, like he's like let it go.
Speaker 1:I'm like, no, I'm going to do it just to prove you wrong now, um, outgrown clutter, so things that you know you use them before and now you've outgrown it and you know you really should probably just let them go. And then I loved her buyer's remorse clutter, right, the things I. It made me think of this one sweater I bought, like I paid too much for it. I think I wore it one time. I really didn't like it in the end and you know, but I hung on to it for years. I it was one of the things I literally just got rid of like a week and a half ago, and I think I bought it 10 years ago at this point, right.
Speaker 1:You, just you're hanging on to it because you're like, oh, I probably shouldn't have bought it, but I did. But yeah, I love those different types of clutter. I don't know, was there any in that list that stood out to you or the hardest for?
Speaker 2:you All of them. So it goes into the next part of the book, which says tackling a nagging task. It's a nagging task always in my space, I think I talked about last week, and I know we're short on time so I'll just say it fast. But last week I rearranged my living room, and it was a good reason to declutter things in the living room like old video games the kids don't play with anymore, or movies that are on DVD, which I don't even know if people have DVD players anymore. So once I got rid of all of it was so freeing though, Sam, because I lit the candles.
Speaker 2:The furniture was rearranged in like a more feng shui-ish kind of a way.
Speaker 2:The weather outside was beautiful, so I had the blinds open and it was just like, oh so peaceful and good.
Speaker 2:I think I had a cup of coffee, and it was just like, oh so peaceful and good.
Speaker 2:I think I had a cup of coffee and it was just nice, and so that really helped me because I didn't have to just act energetic. I actually was energetic because when I did it I was excited to get it done, because I had a reason to do it, and there's other times where I don't wanna do it, and so I think the last part of the book, which talks about acting more energetically that was the hardest part for me in the book is to act versus actually doing so. If you've ever heard the saying like act as if you're already this or act as if you already have that, that's hard for me because because I'm in the continuous state of, I think, thinking about how can I get to where I want to be, not act as if I'm already there. So to act more energetic versus being more energetic got me a little bit stuck. So that was probably the one part in this chapter that I would say was the piece that was the most challenging.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think this is the fake it till you make it thing, but like there's research, there's jet, there's actually research around it, right.
Speaker 1:And you know, she says that, although we presume that we act because of the way we feel, in fact we often feel because of the way we act.
Speaker 1:And so, if any, if you know, if anybody out there no, I've done this, but like where you're just like I'm going to do this anyways, right, and then you feel differently because you've just taken the action and so, like, her big thing right here was just act as if I have more energy, even if I don't feel like I have more energy, it's just act like I do here and there and that will give me, like that act in itself will actually give me back the energy that I'm faking and we'll get into it.
Speaker 1:And I think that that, that it like that, is a hard thing because you're getting over those feelings like I just don't feel like getting off the couch, I just don't feel like doing this, oh, I don't do whatever, and it's, we'll just go do it. Just do one thing, just go make that happen. I had a therapist friend tell me, you know, one time that you just find one thing to do right. So it's like, oh, I don't feel like doing the dishes right, like they're piled up in the sink, and it's like, well, just go, do one dish.
Speaker 2:Just do one, yeah, and then you might do one dish.
Speaker 1:Right. And then it's like, well, I'm here already, so I might as well do it. And then, the next thing you know, you've cleared the whole sink right, your dishwasher's running and you're all of a sudden feel energetic. It's like, well, what's the next thing? I can go do and so sometimes it's just that little.
Speaker 1:What's one thing you can do and I think that harkens back to the you know, the tackle, the nagging task, and that section is really small, but like that sort of that is what's that thing that's taking up mental energy for you. That's just kind of like, oh crap, I need to do that, oh, I need to do that, oh, I need to do that. And it's like, well, just go do one thing with it, take one minute and do it. And you did this with tidying up, right, didn't you like set a timer or something? If I don't spend 30 seconds just doing it, but then, like you kind of continue to do it. So I think it's like these two go hand in hand really well of like, fake it and go do, take one minute. Right, take a minute, do one thing and you'll, you'll kind of cause yourself to feel more energetic. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think, in closing, I would say that chapter one for me, january, boosting energy is all about self love. It's about loving yourself enough to getting more sleep, exercising, tossing things out, getting rid of those nagging tasks that are bringing your energy down, and acting and being more energetic. All of those things are important to go into next month, which is actually next week, which will be when we talk about February, which takes away from self love, about love that you give away to others. So I'm looking forward to that with you next time, which is about remembering love. So anything else to close us out for today, sam, no, I love that.
Speaker 1:I love that thought process about doing this for yourself, like giving yourself more energy is an act of love for you and you have to start with yourself to really get out there and get in the world and, you know, help other people. Right, it's that you can't pour from an empty cup type of thought process. I really like that perspective on you know, boosting energy, like that's. I like that.
Speaker 2:Awesome, all right. Well, friends, thanks for listening. We hope, if you're getting value from this, that you'll get the book Dive Deep with us, and what we're going to probably do is, in January, give you an opportunity to have your own deep dive. So this is going to take us through the rest of this part of the year to really just give you the heads up on what these months activities and happiness projects are about, and then go do that for yourself. So for this week, though, my name is Denise Russo. I've been here with my friend, sam Powell, and this has been another episode of what's on your Bookshelf.