an apology letter

Let’s talk about what happened with all those New Year’s Resolutions

Okay, so last week’s email was boring. Let’s just name that. 

No one exactly said, “Tarzan, I’m dying of boredom reading about your new onboarding sequence,” but the evidence was clear. Our replies folder was painfully quiet.* One person even wrote in to say, “I‘m here to petition for more sex and drugs back in your newsletter.”

Okay, I hear you.

Sometimes this terrible compulsion comes over me to actually write about email marketing , I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s really embarrassing but I promise I’m working on it. #onedayatatime

Let’s bring the conversation back around to habits. 

The January crowd at my gym already disappeared to do whatever twenty-somethings do when they’re not prancing around in butt scrunch tights and pretending to exercise.**

If you read this email, then you know I took on an ambitious set of commitments to myself in January. I wanted to dramatically reduce my anxiety – which regularly costs me entire workdays, not to mention a lot of personal anguish – and also just see what might happen if I cleaned up some of my less savoury habits. 

I took on a lot: 

Coffee, drug and alcohol intake, online retail therapy, gaming, and falling asleep to bad television—a clean sweep.

In her book Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin calls this kind of change The Lightning Bolt, a spark of inspiration that causes a person to instantly adopt a new habit or quit an old one (or in my case, six), sometimes even with little effort or resistance.

That’s been my experience ⚡

The first time I turned down a fresh cup of coffee there was a bit of a wobble. Why deny pleasure? What’s one cup? Gretchen Rubin calls this The “Fake Self-Actualization” Loophole. Life’s short! Eat cake! Fortunately, I remembered two things: 

→ Even if my new habits turned out to be a bad idea, honouring my commitments is proof that I can trust myself. And I really love knowing I can trust myself.

→ This is just an experiment. It’s not forever. But in order to get proper data I needed to stick to my one-cup-a-day commitment. 

Once I got the hang of it, it got easier and easier. I could feel my self-control strengthening every evening that did not end in me falling down the rabbit hole of Patrón, Candy Crush and bad real estate shows. I read 7 books! I had incredible sex! My energy levels were superhuman. Most encouragingly, a fire hydrant of creativity started spraying out all over my life. 

✔️ I wrote a ridiculously good opening chapter for a business book I’m working on with Suzy Vadori (This book is going to slay—my enemies shall know their supreme ruler )

✔️ I designed THE BEST EVER PLANNER in Canva, plus figured out how to format and print it for $26 on Lulu, after Staples quoted $122 to print and bind the PDF!!!  

✔️ I played with my 6yo until he asked me, “Does your face ever hurt from smiling so much?”

✔️ For the first time in my life, I started journaling. Without even trying! It’s just what my brain wanted to do—pour ideas, feelings and memories onto the page. 

Everything in my life is pointing to keep doing what you’re doing, Tarzan. 

For this month, I’m carrying forward these habits:

One coffee per day
Zero gaming whatsoever (I never want to do this again)
No alcohol at home (I rarely go out)
Journalling when I wake up and before bed
Magnesium 2x per day, which helps me sleep
Skiing every Friday

All these things are tracked in my journal, which is another thing most habit experts recommend. Tracking makes it hard to trick yourself with loopholes, plus it fast-tracks that new groove in your brain that says, “This is who I am now.”

One thing I failed at was not shopping ️☹️ (or did I?)

It took two whole days – one of which was New Year’s Day – for me to find a shopping loophole: ski goggles. I was planning to do a lot of skiing and I convinced myself I couldn’t live without them.*** I rationalized that if I paid using existing cash in my wallet it didn’t count. Then I decided to make an exception for Facebook Marketplace items, and from there things kind of spiralled. 

I did all the online shopping I normally do, plus a bunch more on ski-related stuff—hotels, extra lift tickets for days my pass doesn’t cover, a new snowsuit, hooks to hang-dry my skis so they don’t rust, a leash for my gloves, I could go on.   

This was a spectacular fail! 

(Aren’t people with excellent habits so annoying? Please enjoy your schadenfreude at my expense. Reading this must be driving you to drink.)

The shopping thing wasn’t a total bust. I tracked every dollar in my journal and reviewed my investments and savings multiple times, including once with my financial planner. Putting my finances under the microscope led me to conclude that none of my spending was irresponsible, it was just old programming. Going through a divorce I was so scared to spend money because I didn’t know how much I’d be left with, what I’d have to continuously pay my ex-husband and co-parent, and if everyone would be okay. My brain just needed a software update, which it got. 

Some of my financial worries are more of a nervous system issue, I also learned. My one-coffee-a-day rule is helping with that. I even took a time-out from writing this email to book a flight to Banff to go skiing with Suzy! 

Sorry if I ruined your schadenfreude.

I can’t wait till my new planner comes, so I can track even more things and take more notes. It has lots of elements from Kate Northrup’s Do Less Planner, which I’ve used for years. But I love that I got to incorporate lots of Tarzan-isms into it

That’s it for my habits update! I’ve made a note to check in again next month so you know if I make it through the “fall off the wagon” window, which Holistic Nutritionist Lisa Kilgour says is due to willpower being a lot of fkcn work!

“It’s like a muscle,” she told me. “If you hold a weight above your head for a long time, you’ll drop it eventually. All muscles run out of steam. Willpower is the same thing, but we internalize it as our own ‘weakness.’”

Lisa recommends taking yourself into account when taking on new habits. “Don’t try to be someone new,” she told me. “Instead work around your own youness—likes, dislikes, responsibilities, and schedule. That always works because it’s not based on willpower.”

Hope this helps, or at least inspires. 

How are your new habits coming along? Did you forget what they are already? Did you add six new ones onto the pile like me? 

Hit “reply” and share!

~ T-Boss 

Tarzan Kalryzian [she/they]
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*There were several notable exceptions from subscribers who said, “This is exactly what I needed and here are some more ideas you could try.” If that was you, thanks

**I’m jealous of their twenty-something butts, can you tell??!

***I ended up skiing a ton this month and it would’ve been sooo annoying not to have goggles. The snow-making machines in Ontario are like skiing through a blizzard.