What's saving my life - January 2026
You can listen to this blog post below! Scroll down to see links to other posts.
One of the things that always happens when I get into the habit of regular writing is that I get more ideas. This is something I discovered early on after I started sharing my work. One of my biggest fears prior to that was that I would run out of ideas and end up quitting very quickly. Instead, the opposite was true (something to consider if you also have that fear!).
So of course as soon as I started writing and publishing weekly, I also started keeping lists of ideas in my “one book” (which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago). For some of the ideas I wanted to dive deep and expand on. For others, I don’t, but they still feel worth writing about - even if only a little bit. So I decided that ever so often, I’d compile some of the smaller lessons and practices that have been saving my life recently. I got the “what is saving your life right now” question from a podcast I enjoy - The Lazy Genius - and the host Kendra Adachie got it from someone else whose name is not coming to me right now. However she has an episode with this title every quarter. Go and listen to her latest one and she will say! Some of them are small in nature, and others are huge and impactful, but I am just not ready to unpack them yet. So today - here are a few of the lessons and practices that have been saving my life recently.
Writing it down.
As I just mentioned, I recently wrote about my “one book” and that is something that has been saving my life so significantly that it required its own blog post. But the other type of writing-it-down that has been saving my life is list writing. And even more impactful - having the lists somewhere I can actually see them!
Some time ago, I ordered a couple of magnetic “whiteboards” to go on my fridge. One is for weekly planning and one is for lists. These two have kept me organised for the past year. The weekly planner is used for meal planning, and it helps with meal prep. I have also recently been using it to keep track of the prep I do at night (more on that shortly) as well as to track the meals that I make ahead and freeze. The list “board” is for groceries, and tasks I don’t want to forget to do, and it’s directly opposite where I sit a the table to do most of my tasks.
To be honest - it’s one of the most impactful, simple decisions I made - to write things down in a place that I can see them when I need them. It means I can jot down ingredients when I open a cupboard and realise I am down to the last one (I’m looking at you teabags), or when there is something I don’t want to forget, and even to reduce thinking time in the morning when I am packing my bag for work.
My evening routine.
This is something that I started some time ago, and have expanded recently. Over the years, I have read and heard a lot about morning routines, and while I have tried quite a few, none of them ever worked for me - for various reasons. When I moved back to the UK in my mid forties, I began to wonder if I’d had a personality change. All my life I had been a morning person, and suddenly I was struggling to get out of bed. It didn’t make me late for work, but it meant that mornings often felt like a struggle, and getting any writing done in the morning for example just didn’t feel possible. After a few years, I was able to get myself out of bed twice a week for a new workout routine I started, and I make my early morning train the one day in the week that I have any type of commute, but I wanted to feel better about my mornings and in turn my days.
Since the morning routines didn’t work, I decided to see if getting more things ready in the evening would help and this was just the game changer I needed. I started getting things ready in the evening - first it was packing my lunch and any snacks I wanted to take. Recently I have also included prepping breakfast, and putting out the clothes I will wear (and sometimes take) for the next day, as well as anything else that I wanted to remember - scrubs for work, the artichokes I bought for all of my office mates (don’t ask). I would write these things on my whiteboard, and then tick them off when I did them in the evening.
This sounds so simple that I almost feel silly that I didn’t do it sooner. But what was happening is - I looked at many of the tasks I was doing in the morning and since they were all almost 5 minutes or less, I should have more than enough time to get them done. But what I didn’t account for was the time between the tasks. I would spend too much time trying to decide what to do next, or trying to convince myself that it was time to get off the couch. The combination of the lists and the evening routine have smoothed out my mornings - especially when I work late the evening before, and in the dark winter mornings. The evening routine has been just the game changer that my morning needed.
Personalised poetry.
I am definitely not a poet. However sometimes the mood strikes me to write a poem, and so I do! Over the years, I have become familiar with the tiny pop of excitement that happens when I think - I am going to write a poem, the little buzz I feel around an idea. Most recently I wrote one for a teacher I had when I was 10 years old who is finally retiring. But in the past few months, I have written some poems for Christmas and new year cards and it has been so much fun!! My poems are cheesy, and quite frankly work best when read out loud. They are often for an audience of one (or two) and may not be meaningful to anyone outside of the audience for whom they are written. But it has been so much fun to write them, and I can’t wait for the next pop that signifies another poem is ready to be written.
Other things that have been saving my life:
Discovering new podcasts such as Catching up to Fi.
Re-reading books that I enjoyed in the past.
Deciding that the fairy lights I put up before Christmas are never coming down, and putting them on in the evenings.
Finding (or reverse engineering) recipes for two so that I can make 2 cupcakes, or one giant cookie.
Afternoon naps on the weekend.
Using a wall calendar - at home and at work.
And more. I’ll probably do another one of these in a couple of months, but it is always fun to think about the big and small things that have been lighting up my days recently.
What are a few things saving your life recently? Let me know in the comments!
I send you big love.
PS I checked. Apparently Kendra got the question from Barbara Brown Taylor! Thanks to both of them.