Rewiring my brain

Before college, my life was extremely structured. I woke up early, walked (sometimes sprinted) down my street to school and once classes ended I had sports or musical practice. I’d usually eat dinner in the car because most days I had a second series of commitments to attend–youth group, acapella practice, guitar band practice, or standardized testing tutoring. I’d get home and finally start my homework and melt into my bed around 2 a.m.

I don’t think this schedule was different from many of my classmates in high school. We were all overachievers in our own right. And from my activities list it sounds like I was living out the Troy Bolton dilemma of not being able to choose between basketball and singing. The truth is I wasn’t the star in either arena. I just liked being busy.

I’ve never been someone who successfully kept a routine, because up until I was eighteen I was told where I had to be for most hours of my life. I loved college because I could wake up and choose my own adventure. Besides class and a few extracurriculars, there was nowhere I absolutely had to be. I had an abundance of free time and loved it.

But I never baked in any particularly healthy habits into all of the free time I had. My self care consisted of the occasional night in while my friends went out and waking up the next morning hangover free. I’d then pretend to enter a sober curious era until 12 p.m. when I’d need to start pregaming for a darty.

I’d remind myself that the gym in my building existed when I saw that our Vegas fall break trip was coming up or spring break required me to be in a bikini and look up “Abs in 2 weeks” on YouTube. I’d quickly admit defeat and cut my losses.

My friends once came to my apartment to find only shishito peppers and two rolls of film in my fridge. Girl dinner.

I grew up in an ingredients household. Going to a friend’s house where the pantry was stocked with oreos and goldfish was heaven on earth. Going to college felt like being in that friend’s pantry all the time.

I could eat every single sugary cereal from the dining hall like I was creating a “suicide” from a soda fountain. I could go out whenever I wanted as long as I was handing in my work and showing up to class in the morning. I could rot on a couch for hours and watch reruns of New Girl if that’s what I wanted to do.

In college, the goal of working out wasn’t strength. In the times where I would return to physical exercise, it was because I didn’t like the way I looked. I wanted to be smaller. That isn’t a motivation that appeared in college. It was there in high school, but varsity sports and my teenage metabolism took care of that interest pretty well.

I think anyone’s relationship with food and exercise gets complicated. Especially as women, we are inundated with images of the ideal body type every day. And the goalpost is constantly moving. Middle parts, side parts, thigh gaps, and bigger butts. The combination is impossible to attain and yet the internet is constantly reminding you that it’s just a few simple steps away if you decide to follow the right “plan” that someone is selling you.

The thought process of “in a few months I’ll be even better” is alluring. There’s infinite ways that you could change your look and your habits that it’s overwhelming to choose which one might bring the most success. What route will bring me the greatest satisfaction in the least amount of time? Is it cold plunging? Is it pilates? Is it intermittent fasting?

You can think in some distant magical future, I’ll like the way I look a lot more. If I cut out dairy, maybe my face will slim out and if I do 12-3-30 on the treadmill this guy will like me more.

These thoughts only come when I’m stressed or unhappy. When I don’t feel like I’m enough in other areas of my life, I begin to focus on what I look like in the mirror. It never happens when I’m feeling satisfied.

When I feel loved and supported, I care a lot less that my cheeks have grown in size because my smile has as well. (God, that’s cheesy.)

Luckily these thoughts never amounted to serious actions. But the thought process is still exhausting. I recently read an article titled, “We were never supposed to see our own faces this much” and in it a therapist says, “Occasional self-viewing is normal, but in excess it distorts self-perception. The brain can become habituated, altering how we see and judge ourselves.”

We were never meant to worry so much about how we were perceived in real life and on social media. I spent too much of Zoom University wondering how my face was mirrored back to my classmates. Luckily I gave up Snapchat flirting my freshman year of college, but trying to appear beautiful but completely nonchalant about it to your Snapchat streak crush was a sport in itself. In periods of low self-esteem, I can easily look through my photo album to find a time where I thought I looked better.

It’s all impossible. America Ferrara’s monologue in Barbie put it very well. I particularly like the quote, “I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us.” In times when I’m most unhappy, I’m chasing this unattainable version of myself instead of appreciating the one I have right now.

But there’s this other conflict. I do want to feel better. I want to feel stronger. I want to have energy. I want to be able to hike up a mountain and not feel winded with every step.

I can’t eat a combo of frosted flakes and fruit loops for breakfast every morning and expect to feel fantastic.

I chalked unhealthy habits up to being a college kid. I could get away with a lot with the excuse “I only have one more year to be this way.” I only had one more year to go out this much, to eat this poorly, and to not work out. I thought that that kind of living was what true freedom was.

I knew that once the high of graduation and a graduation trip wore off I’d be hit with reality. I saw how my older brothers lived and I knew at some point I’d need to get serious. I’d need to start paying rent and start training for a marathon like everyone does in their quarter life crisis. But I put this off for as long as possible.

In July, I noticed a pattern of going to bed really late, working from my laptop in bed, barely leaving the house, and feeling extremely negative and cranky. I was in one of the prettiest places on earth and I was in a pattern of feeling sorry for myself.

The post grad depression was creeping in and I needed to find a way to jump start my life again. I needed to find a way to build happiness into my every day.

So how do I build habits that help me do that? How do I build habits that are sustainable?

The drive has to come from a different place. The drive can’t be changing the way I look. The drive has to be changing the way I feel. Changing my emotional regulation and energy became the goal.

So I started a challenge that I promised to keep up for 30 days.

Here are the rules:

• Wake up—IMMEDIATELY morning walk

• Work out (at some point)

• No drinking on weekdays (unless it’s for a fun occasion)

• Three whole meals a day

• Turn off phone and read before bed every week night

• Daily journal (minimum one page)

• AT LEAST one fun plan a week

I knew the rules had to be lenient enough so that I actually followed them. The first to go was the daily journaling and there was a 50/50 chance I actually took a book out before bed. I consider that an all around success.

The step with the greatest impact was the morning walk. I’d wake up and quickly put on my sneakers and exit the front door before I could think twice about it.

It made every day better. I had 20 to 30 minutes where I looked around and thought about what I wanted my day to look like. There were some days where I spent the walk responding to Slack messages and others when I would listen to a podcast so I could mention news stories and appear smarter. The best days were the ones when I wasn't on my phone at all.

I’d come back from these walks ready to log on and get to work because I had a moment of peace before I had to begin all of my other tasks for the day.

Before I made this rule for myself, I’d spend an hour of my morning doom scrolling on TikTok and using the excuse that I was doing “trend research” for my internship. I’d spend the first moments of my day comparing myself to strangers on the internet and wondering if what I was doing was the right thing or in the right place. Maybe I should’ve moved into an apartment in New York or maybe I should be looking for jobs in Austin instead. Could’ve, should’ve, would’ve thoughts ran my life.

There’s science behind getting outside and in the sunlight as soon as you wake up. You can read up on it because I won’t be able to explain it well (something about cortisol levels), but I can tell you from personal experience that it made me feel accomplished every single day.

Not because the walk meant I was particularly athletic, but because it allowed me to slow down. And yes, it was nice to know that I had at least had a few hundred steps before I had to sit down for the rest of the day.

When work ended, it was difficult to find motivation to do anything else. The magnetic pull to the couch was often overwhelming, but I had to reach my second bullet: work out (at some point). The most difficult part of any workout is starting.

As someone who grew up playing team sports, I was always told what I needed to do in practices and games. There was always a goal in mind, a level of play we wanted to advance to. Then when the seasons ended, the goal became trying to look a different way.

Now the goal was to just do 30 minutes of something. I could take another walk. I could go for a run. I could look up a zumba workout. It didn’t matter how far I ran or how much I sweat as long as I did it.

My favorite activity was biking. A quick 7 miles down to the river and back. There wasn’t a single time where I felt worse afterwards. I’d leave annoyed or frustrated and return feeling elevated. And I didn’t care that I looked dorky with my helmet and backpack on. I was just concerned about getting out there and exploring.

I started to notice my leg muscles come back and my endurance growing. I began to feel like an athlete again. On a team I was always trying to hit the ball harder in field hockey or react to the ball faster in lacrosse. I had missed the feeling of pushing myself to be better at an athletic skill because exercising had become so intertwined with how I could make myself look a certain way.

30 days have come and gone and I’m still rewiring how I think about moving my body. (I’ll get into the food portion in another blog post.) My main takeaway is that I have to move in some way, whether that’s just a morning walk or the additional bike ride after work, to bake in happiness to my day.

I hate to say that the parental advice of “getting off your phone and going for a walk” unfortunately works.

I’m in no way now a wellness queen or should start writing books on self-confidence, but I have started to take a moment to pause and consider my motivations for my daily practices. And for now they are for my brain rather than my looks.

That was long and rambling. I started out just writing about how much I love biking but it turned into so much more. I hope you enjoyed it and please let me know if you can relate to any of it.

Best,

Claire

Weekly R.E.P.O.R.T.

Reading all about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift

Eating pad thai

Playing by hiking up to Delta Lake – the boulder fields are a big kids playground

Obsessing over our pizza stone’s ability to create the perfect flakey homemade pizza

Recommending PB&Js with bacon

Treating myself to a ticket to NYC for my birthday :)