This year I want to develop better mindset habits. The high school cycle has ingrained a routine in myself that has made me feel stressed many times, including very recently. But, there's nothing I can do to change that. My school obviously won't change the way it's been running for the past three years that I've been here, so the only thing I can change is myself. More specifically, I can change my mindset. Better late than never, right?
With everything coming right at me right now, it's important to stay healthy while grounding myself in what I need to do right now. Right now, I'm too focused on the latter. In fact, I'm so grounded, I might have well reached Earth's core… Anyways, my point is that I'm just blindly doing stuff like assignments and studying without any sort of concern for my own health, mentally and physically.
To help dig me up back to the surface of Earth, here's some things that I'll try to start doing.
Take after-school naps.
Many days, I find myself battling the urge to doze off in my english class in the afternoon. It's really not that I don't get enough sleep, it's just that I easily get drained after half a day of school. However, usually once I get home, I get straight to working on assignments. I think this is slowly killing me. Maybe about 30 minutes to an hour in my bed before working would benefit me, since it'll refresh my brain. Plus, it fulfills the desires of sleepy fifth period Q.
Thinking more positively.
It's really tempting to let out a big sigh when something like fifty problems of math homework gets assigned on top of the monstrous workload I already have from other classes. But I can see it as an opportunity to practice the new lesson. Fifty questions may be a lot, but perhaps they're all very short? It's also likely that they repeat the same concepts over and over, so I'd get a good training session for that topic. That was just an example. If I approached other things in this way, I would definitely feel more motivated to get stuff done.
Being more grateful.
It's easy to focus on the negative parts of life. If I get a 99% score on a hundred-question quiz, I'm not focusing on the ninety-nine questions I got right, I'm looking for the one question I got wrong. While it's crucial that you acknowledge that life isn't perfect and there's lots of bad things, there's lots of beautiful things in life that I often take for granted. I'm grateful for the people in my life. My relationships all took a long time to build, and I am constantly building old and new ones every day. Even today's date, 9/9/2025 is special. There are two 9s in a row, but if you take the digital root of 2025, 2 + 0 + 2 + 5 = 9, you get 9/9/9! Isn't that so cool?
That's it. I would love it if more people became more open-minded and positive. I hope reading this encourages you to make a change in your own life. Little things can really go a long way being stacked over time, so don't think any small improvement is too insignificant to pursue.