Rebooting your routine: How to press the reset button

Reclaiming your energy and joy, one reset at a time

Do you ever just wish you had a reset button somewhere? A little red button that you could press, hold, and reboot?

If you’ve ever felt that need to hit the reset button, you’re not alone. We all have those moments when life piles up, and everything starts feeling a little... off. Especially in January when we discover that some of our resolutions weren’t as sustainable as we thought.

Over the last few days, I’ve had this little squirmy, nagging need to reset somehow. There were things I’d slowly let slip over the last months. I had that familiar low-grade, white noise of guilt in the background, the soft buzzing kind that you can mainly ignore. However, the buzz suddenly became louder and less of background noise. These ‘things’ had suddenly been brought into sharper focus. And as a result, I just felt a bit (a lot) ‘eugh’.

I remember being hit with a hefty library fine during my psych training. I had a textbook shoved under my bed somewhere, littered with scrawled post-it notes. I knew it was late, but I kept forgetting it, and then after a while, I forgot about it altogether. Months later, the grumpy librarian told me about my unpaid fine. It hit me like a thunderbolt. It had escalated into something so costly without me even being aware.

I think that was the feeling I had last week. This thunderbolt feeling that the things I had let slide—namely nourishing my body with good food and water—had a cost. For months and months, I have been grabbing sugary convenience foods and snacking on kids' leftovers. Breakfast used to be my most enjoyed meal of the day, yet now I shove half a banana down my throat along with two supersized latte chasers. Food had become perfunctory fuel to shut my body up from nagging hunger—an inconvenience. As for water, I only had to look at my fluorescent wee (sorry) to be reminded that I wasn’t even meeting my very basic needs

.For you, it might be exercise, or investing in healthy friendships. It might be opening up about things or getting outside. Sometimes, it’s just the little things that we KNOW make the big difference, that get nudged down the list of priorities over time until they don’t exist at all. We think they are little; we think they seem insignificant, but the debt they build up when we let them slide can affect so many facets of our lives.

I started to eat poorly, and my standards shifted. You think that’s all that happened? No. My actions were giving me the message that I wasn’t worth the time to eat well, that I wasn’t worth a full meal but just scraps, leftovers, and gobbled-down sugar highs. I was telling myself that my body’s basic needs were a hindrance. And as a result, my level of self-respect lessened, and this just perpetuated the cycle.

We think the little things are the little things, but little by little, they have big effects.

So, I pressed the reset button.

Too often we wait to make change. We wait until we feel sick with self-loathing, burdened with guilt, or can’t do up our favorite jeans. We wait for Mondays, or summer holidays, or Lent, or for when the New Year clock chimes 12. We delay making tweaks and changes until we are motivated by some sort of time landmark or find ourselves in a messy heap on the floor wondering how we took it this far.

DON’T WAIT. Press the reset button now. Whether it’s 2 a.m. or 7 p.m. Don’t wait for tomorrow. Press the reset button now because you are worth not beating yourself up with guilt or self-irritation. You are worth living without the droning buzz of the ‘I should be doing...’, the dragging guilt, the cycle of neglect and self-disrespect that drains your ability to be attentive to your own needs.