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I'm not a huge fan of New Year's resolutions.  It's because they so typically (in my hands, at least) are "inspired" by a calendar schedule and thus often rushed notions without any particular plan of execution.  A recipe which essentially dooms the resolution to failure within very short order.  I always felt like the beginning of September was a better time for resolutions, which I'd guess is notion shared by most people who were schooled outside the home.  New school year, new classes, new notebooks and pens, and if not a new attitude, at least a refreshment of the old.

That all being said, I also find that as much as part of me resists the beginning of a year as a time for change, the late December holidays invariably disrupt normal life and routines to an extent that it's difficult not to align the termination of the holiday season that comes with January 1st with the attempt to resume or initiate good habits and better routines.

This year brought a total disruption to my normal mode of living and working.  First a time course, then a ridiculously heavy work week (still trying to squeeze some useful information out of that experiment, incidentally), then... what?  disruption of normal climbing and lifting days thanks to gym closures, fatigue, inclement weather, pet-sitting, and now a cold.  I'm frustrated, but too tired to really give a crap.  I keep telling myself that I'm going to clean up my life and get back on schedule and I'll do something like go to the climbing gym, but of course absence begets weakness, which begets frustration and kills motivation, which begets absence.  So I tell myself that still the holidays are disrupting everything and maybe once this is all over I can get back on schedule.  We'll see how next week looks, yeah?

One thing that I am determined to do is to get more sleep.  I was running through all the crap that one should do to get a little leaner and a little stronger and trying to figure out where I was failing.  Diet: not stunning, but pretty decent: no processed food, fairly low on carbs, almost completely free of blood glucose spiking carbs, not ridiculous amounts of calories...  I should probably increase the vegetable content, and maybe double-check the fat.  Exercise, again not very impressive lately, but not horrendous:  need to be more consistent, maybe get some cardio in there (or stab myself in the eye because that's almost as fun), push myself a little harder, especially when climbing.  Sleep.... oh.  whoops.

I used to typically get 6 hours a night.  It never felt like enough, but I was totally functional on it.  Then I started to get treatment for the Graves disease and while I still was getting 6 hours or so a night, it felt hellish, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to get up and get going in the morning.  I was starting to sleep through alarms.  More recently, I might be getting somewhere around 7 hours on an average weeknight these days, but that drops precipitously on the weekends where I feel like I can stay up later because I can sleep in, but then I completely fail to sleep in.  It's still a struggle to get up and get going the morning.  I'm always tired, but that's not really different than any other phase of my life since I stopped being a slack-assed teenager.  We all know that getting insufficient sleep increased stress and cortisol and all sorts of other nasty things, so I'm not going to explain it all and link to good articles (although feel free to share some of your favourites, if they're from or informed by solid peer-reviewed research).  Suffice it to say that sleep is an obvious weak link for me and a little effort is probably going to go a lot further than my weighing my morning yogurt.

So.  I'm going to try to get more sleep.  No more late-night web surfing or Netflix, even if I'm trying to settle after getting in from climbing, that fluorescent-light emitting screen has got to be off by 11! ... er... midnight?  at the latest?  ..you know, after New Years...