I never make New Year’s Resolutions until my friends share their excitement and motivation for self-development with me. I’ve grown to be a bit of a humbug regarding major holidays, and I attribute this to my parents and their single remaining Christmas decoration (an animatronic singing tree that my sister was terrified of as a child). Holidays are a time for me to bathe in stress hormones and worry that my gifts won’t be the perfect mix of thoughtful, useful, and fun. This year, I was somewhat isolated from the usual demands of hosting family gatherings and overcoming the mountain of housework involved in such festivities. I had a lot more time to stew; I was a slow cooker on simmer for weeks. In that time, I came up with several goals for 2025:
Stay Busy.
Read more books, specifically from my physical collection.
Spend more time in nature.
Embrace uncertainty.
Tell people how I’m feeling.
Reign in my spending and consumption habits.
Develop confidence in my research.
Work from work more often.
Publish more writing.
And that’s about it, at least from what I’ve synthesized from my four or five active journals.
Let’s review these goals one month in and expand on what they mean for me and my personal development.
Stay Busy.
I found in 2024 that I had some of my worst mental health days when I had the most free time. My theory is that my feelings of self-worth are entangled with being out of the house. This likely stems from my childhood when I was in every club and sport and, eventually, every basement smoking with burnouts and watching my friends play video games. This ideal has shifted somewhat in adulthood, as now being at home means spending time with my lovely partner in our nicely curated space and basking in the warmth and comfort we create for each other. However, there are limits to the amount of inactivity I can endure. Staying busy for me means spending time with friends, engaging with my community, working on my research, attending academic events, and staying active.
So far in 2025, excluding the week where I was sick, depressed, and morose, I have had absolutely JAM PACKED professional and personal calendars. I have engagements every weeknight and spend maybe a few hours at home each weekend. I’m feeling good about this right now, but I also see the warning signs that I need to dial it back a touch. I love being busy but I also love having the space and time for my friends whenever they need it. Being this busy has me booking appointments to chat with friends two weeks out. I’m also beginning to fall behind with work obligations. I think that these mixed results are evidence that I need to work on bettering my productivity during the workday, and better prioritize genuinely fulfilling social engagements. Maybe I shouldn’t be going to Medical Sciences events when I know I’m just going to make small talk with the two people I already know before leaving early, and should instead be spending time with the people who light up my life.
Read more books, specifically from my physical collection.
I’m certainly reading more, having completed 7 books this first month of 2025. However, all of these books have been loans from Libby!!! Try as I might, I cannot resist the allure of an externally imposed deadline. I’ve decided to take up a No Book Buy challenge until April so that I can hone in on my existing collection. I’m very excited about the books I own! I’m disappointed in myself for succumbing to the draw of Libby so repeatedly, but I’m also still reading so I can’t be too upset about this one.
Spend more time in nature.
I live in one of the most physically beautiful places in the world and have a reliable car with great fuel economy. Why don’t I spend every weekend walking through the woods with my partner and a thermos of hot chocolate? The easy answer is that I never think of it. In my adolescence, I spent half of every summer in the woods. I love camping, but very rarely get to do it. Currently, I go on about one hike per year. I have a deep desire to spend more time surrounded by the natural world. Last weekend, I was in Kananaskis, sitting on a rock in a river, and started tearing up at the feeling of this cold, smooth rock under me. I felt every ridge and crack along its surface, imagining the geographical and meteorological conditions that contributed to the rock being in this exact spot for me to sit on at this moment. Inspired by a friend of mine, I want to develop the habit of going on a hike at least once a month. I know that this will be a very grounding practice, and keep me out of the house and active.
Embrace uncertainty.
This is a very nebulous goal. In one sense, I would like to have faith in myself and step outside of my comfort zone, in another, I would like to be content knowing that I cannot know everything. I tend to unilaterally attribute feelings and intentions to people in my life when I’m not certain how they feel. This is an incredibly unproductive mindset to have when trying to develop personal relationships and often leaves me feeling insecure and depressed. However, this feeling is also entangled with my altruistic tendencies and a desire to make people feel respected and included. Ultimately, this may be a symptom of my hyperfixation on the idea of treating others how you want to be treated. Maybe how I want to be treated isn’t how others want to be treated, and this tension lies in my expectation of some return on my emotional efforts where no clear social contract lies.
I also think this goal applies to saying yes to things that I’m skeptical of. For example, I have a dear friend who is very activity-oriented. She loves going skating, doing escape rooms, and undertaking structured hangouts. I generally tend towards more unstructured socialization, like chatting at coffee shops or running errands together. This has resulted in tension between us, where we are each respectively unsatisfied with the composition of our time together. Over the past month, I have been putting myself out there in a significant way. I’ve stopped making excuses to myself about why I can’t attend university and community events, and I’ve been participating in activities that challenge me mentally and emotionally. I’m happy with my progress this month and see this as the starting point for building healthier habits toward personal and professional development.
Overall, I don’t know how to accomplish this goal, but I think it’s still an important intention for me to set for myself throughout this year.
Tell people how I’m feeling.
This is something that I discussed with my therapist last year. I tend to take on a very caring role in my friendships. I find this role to be very fulfilling and love supporting the people in my life in their times of need. However, in the past, I have felt as though it was out of place for me to share my negative feelings or seek comfort in these relationships. This is something I have struggled with for years but began actively working on late last year. I have been trying to tell the people in my life how I feel more often and reach out for support in times of need. This has been a difficult challenge for me, and there have been several instances where my feelings have been invalidated or rejected in a very painful way. Yet, I am being more honest with people in my life, and living more authentically. It seems to be coming at an emotional cost in my current friendships, but also seems to me like an overall healthier way to treat myself and others. Concealing my hurt and discomfort is not a habit I want to reinforce by editing my interactions with people I love and respect.
Something my partner has reminded me of many times is that it’s unfair for me to assume my friends wouldn’t care about my feelings without ever trying to reach out. Additionally, if my friends don’t want to engage with these feelings, then maybe the energy I’m contributing to that relationship would be better spent elsewhere.
I’m going to keep being forthcoming and honest with people because I think that’s what I would want from a friend.
Reign in my spending and consumption habits.
January has been a very successful month for this goal. In terms of my digital content consumption, I have made tremendous improvements this month.
I use a few different apps to regulate these habits, including:
ScreenZen - limit the number of times you can unlock an app per day, the duration of each unlock, time to wait before unlocking, times of the day and days of the week to be blocked, and cooldown period. My favorite feature is the ability to block specific app features and websites (goodbye YouTube shorts and online shopping).
Beeper - unified messaging app that allows me to keep up with communication across various platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Discord, etc. This app is the reason why I’ve successfully reduced my Instagram screen time to about 7 min/day. I no longer get caught in the trap of opening Instagram to check a group chat, only to be subsumed by the infernal pit that is Instagram Reels.
Before Launcher - minimalist phone launcher that de-gamifies the app use experience. My home screen is a list of the names of 8 apps: Beeper, Slack, Outlook, Libby, Spotify, Chrome, Phone, and Messages. That’s it. My other apps are located in an alphabetical list, introducing a slight barrier of intention when I’m using apps other than my core suite.
This combination has completely changed my digital media consumption and helped me improve my productivity.
Now let's talk about spending. I love buying things, and going to restaurants, and having fun. According to my bank app, I typically spend about $350/month on dining out (including drinks and bars) and $500/month on shopping (very non-specific terminology here). This month I spent about $250 on dining out and $250 on shopping. I’m quite happy with these numbers and am aiming to continue this downward trend, as I’m saving for a trip in April. Overall, I spent about $1600 more than I typically would, which is largely attributable to my tuition payment of ~$1600 this month. But I also booked an $800 Airbnb this month, so this metric suggests that I reigned in my overall spending by about ~$800. That’s a great way to start the year and excellent momentum toward my goal of mindfully minimal consumption.
Develop confidence in my research.
This month I have had a few setbacks in accomplishing this goal. I’m feeling incredibly proud of the amount of learning and growth I’ve been able to accomplish these last few months. I’m comfortable with the physics, organic chemistry, and neuroscientific theory that serves as the basis for my work, but I’m still a little bit uncomfortable running a clinical study. This comes as a surprise to me, as I have a fair amount of clinical research background and have worked with patient populations before. I’m confident that after a few weeks of running this study, I’ll be as comfortable as ever and working confidently with participants. I have the skillset and experience to be great but feel like I haven’t had the opportunity to prove that to my peers, and I think that’s where my anxiety stems from. I can’t be good enough for myself, I have to ensure that I’m good enough for everyone else too.
Yesterday was a huge confidence boost for me, as I was able to help several of my peers understand MRI physics, a field I only began studying in November. This was incredibly affirming and gave me a sense of being on the right path.
Work from work more often.
When working from home is an option, I find it very hard to push myself into the office bright and early, despite knowing that I will be exponentially more productive away from home. I don’t have a devoted workspace at home. I live with my partner in a basement suite with three rooms: the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen/living room. There’s only enough room for one desk, and up until recently my partner was writing his Master’s thesis and worked from home. This means that when I work from home, I’m working either from the kitchen table or the couch, neither of which is particularly conducive to an atmosphere of productivity.
I certainly spent more work time away from home this month than in December, but I still have significant room for improvement. An issue I am facing is the lack of consistency in my schedule. I work on two separate campuses and only have a real devoted desk space at one. On the other campus, I tend to work in common areas, or in the wet lab drop-down space for my cosupervisor’s group. However, as it is a wet lab, I am unable to eat or drink in the space, and as it is a drop-down, the desk space is not guaranteed to be available for me to work there. I also frequently have to move between campuses during the day, limiting the time available for me to actually sit down and work. Unfortunately, the study I will be running is taking place at the campus where I don’t have an office. Developing consistency for myself will likely be my greatest challenge in accomplishing my goal of working from work.
Publish more writing.
That’s this. I’m doing that. In addition to operating this Substack, I’m contributing to a friend’s website semi-frequently, and submitting abstracts for various conferences and poster symposia. I love writing and presenting, so I’m very eager to share my work with more regularity. I’ll be presenting at a conference next month, and may just be applying for another one after I finish this article (and some work I put off while writing this). I’m going to keep applying and presenting and writing so stay tuned!!!
This concludes my one-month check-in on my very nebulous and non-specific goals for 2025. I may do another check-in toward late spring/early summer, which will likely be a bit less formal than this one.
Thank you for your time, and I hope your January has been full of learning and growth. If you’re interested in subscribing to my Substack, please click below :)
