Four more months until 2025…
What will you be working on to make the rest of this year great?
Today in 3 minutes or less, you’ll learn:
✔️ The real pain of giving up your streak
✔️ My top music therapy interventions for boosting mental health
✔️ Recognising signs of stress and burnout
Doable ideas 💭
In my humble opinion, maintaining habits is easier than relearning a skill.
After plenty of experiences in relearning a classical piece on piano and certain languages, I concluded that spending just 5 minutes every day to refresh your memory (including muscle memory) is good enough.
Or once a week, depending on your schedule.
The pain of relearning something – knowing that you used to be able to do something – isn’t enjoyable.
The same goes for exercising.
Ongoing maintenance > burst of practice hours.
It’s more manageable, not to mention preventing exhaustion or injury.
Reflections 🪞
List 3 achievements for August.
What are you looking forward to in September?
What are the 3 things you can do today that will make the rest of the month great?
Mindfulness 🧘🏻♀️
Despite preaching the importance of self-care all the time, I got sick this week.
While trigger was unknown, my doctor hinted stress or a weak immune system.
It was awakening.
For so long, I tied my identity (and ego) to my productivity.
There are a lot of “should”s in my head.
Always more work to be done, regardless of whether they are effective or not.
Last month when I got a flu, I was still doing cold showers and working out. Not very sensible.
If you’re like me, this is a sign for you to check in with yourself:
- How do you talk to yourself?
- How did you feel physically in general this week on a scale of 1 to 10?
- What can you do today for yourself that would make the day better?
- When’s the last time you talked to friends and family?
- Who can you check in with now?
Here are 3 lessons I learnt, so you don’t need to learn it the hard way:
- Not everything can be explained by data. Stop over-analysing, deal with what you can control in the situation
- Recognising the early signals of stress and burnout is crucial, physically and emotionally
- Rest is part of the productivity equation
You’re a human being, not human doing.
Ideas Worth Pondering 🧠
As a mental exercise, adopt the ability to simply question your own beliefs and find alternative possibilities. Challenge yourself to imagine a world where your assumption is incorrect. What would that look like? What would it take?
– Mark Manson
Video This Week 🎥
Take a sneak peek into the music therapy interventions I use with my clients to improve mental health 👇
If you enjoyed that, please share with others 🙂