How to get out of a January slump

0:10What is up? I'm Grace Beverly and welcome back to Working Hard. the podcast-shaped guidebook on how to improve your own life and achieve what you actually dreamed of doing, because life's too short for boring podcasts and bad advice.

0:24What is up, guys, and welcome back to Working Hard, and a very happy new year to you. I, well, I'll be honest, it's not 2026 as I'm recording this, but at the time that you'll be listening to this, I'm sure that I will also be saying that I cannot believe it is 2026, so I'm happy to put that out into the ether. I hope you've had an amazing Christmas and new year and whatever you celebrate and really being able to enjoy yourself and hopefully have some time off and hopefully not have too much family trauma lol rop sending help to those of us who you know christmas is big for that but i want to really talk about january because we have big plans for january at the podcast and generally with everything we plan like we've spent a huge amount of time trying to make sure that january for working hard is exactly what you need from it and not too much in one direction not too much in another direction but also like we're a self-improvement podcast were all about helping people get to where they want to get to so also being able to help you lean in to really understand what you can get from this next year of your life and I feel like I know a lot of you are probably in two minds like on the one hand feeling ready to start the year properly or on the other hand feeling a little bit exhausted like the year doesn't just stop you don't actually get a huge break and trying to pretend that you know this slow start is kind of all part of the plan which it absolutely can be and I feel like there is so much noise and pressure in January generally like obviously it's marketed as a kind of transformation reset moment which I think is really helpful to lean into but at the same time if you're not necessarily in that headspace or if you you don't kind of jump into that immediately by week one it can feel like you're a little bit behind or like you're not necessarily doing the right thing and there's nothing wrong with taking some of that slower moment from the time when people have spent time off over the holidays and not like on January 1st leaping to your feet and trying to achieve everything you want to achieve in this year and I feel like for me the new year reset has never been about performing a kind of overnight transformation but I do also take it seriously I like knowing that I'm making choices on purpose rather than waking up in June and realizing that like I drifted straight back into autopilot I really enjoy almost like I want to say road markings but I don't think it's road markings just like things that help you realize like where you are, recalibrate, work out where you want to get to and not necessarily redefine everything.

2:37But like, I do think it's very important to check back in with yourself and to understand what you're aiming for. What does your week look like it's aiming for? Like if someone followed you for a week, would they know exactly what your goals are? So anyway, I'm going to get into the episode, but just an FYI, I really took preparing for this January very seriously for what I wanted for this podcast. And I wanted to make sure that by the time you were out of January, every single thing that you have from this podcast in this month really makes you feel prepared for the year ahead and not just prepared in terms of like the cliche things but genuinely prepared on how do I make 2026 exactly what I want from it and I don't mean like how do I make 2026 your year because I do think we all have this concept of like oh this is going to be my year and a year is so many days that actually it's always going to have these ups and downs so we're always going to feel a little bit like I don't know you'd have to have a huge breakthrough to really feel like something was your year and I think that really we should be aiming to have a year where yes a huge breakthrough would obviously be welcome but realistically it's taking the right steps in the right directions and by the end of the year you are going to feel markedly different in terms of the work that you have done towards the goals that you want to reach.

3:43So all that to say the entirety of January is going to be taken over by this new year reset mini series. It covers a number of different areas, it's got incredible experts and I wanted it to really cover like every area and every element of your life rather than just goal setting. So I hope you really enjoy it. If you've already listened to Monday's episode with Sade Zari, you will have a sense of what you're in for. But what I really wanted to talk about for this episode was really how to get out of that new year slump and how to start your year without forcing yourself into a routine that like only three people on TikTok stick to.

4:13So setting the scene of January, which none of us really need help with because we're probably looking outside and seeing how dark it is or like trying to get your steps in, but it's raining. But I do think it's really important to remember the fact that January particularly where I am in the UK is defined by a number of different things. Number one the daylight is low so that's disrupting your rhythm it's not necessarily the most like motivational time of year in terms of actually what's happening outside like most places in the northern hemisphere it is cold and it is dreary and everyone feels like they're trying to get their shit together but it's a little bit demoralizing and like demotivating because everything is trying to tell you to like get back into bed and a few weeks ago you were being encouraged to get back into bed and be cozy and now you need to change your whole life with exactly the same environment tough.

4:58I also think it's important to remember how overstimulating December is. I think that for a lot of people it's their favorite time of year. For a lot of people it brings up a lot of shit. For a lot of people it's like oh yeah this is fun but I also have other things to do and I just think that sometimes when you come out of that I at least feel a little bit like I've gone through a blender. It's one of those quote-unquote holidays where you feel like you need a break after it and I think we need to bear that in mind and all of this is combined with the fact that people expect you to kind of level up instantly or less about people expecting you to level up instantly I think we expect ourselves to level up instantly and I think that that doesn't help so when we're looking at the scientific side of like a January slump you've got lower daylight which is disrupting your circadian rhythm it's throwing off the balance between melatonin and cortisol which means you feel tired at the wrong times and wired at the wrong times and I feel like the sudden drop in stimulation after December also leaves your nervous system in a confused state while it's still processing the overload whilst also trying to stabilize itself.

5:56So when you add to that this social pressure to upgrade your life overnight, it kind of creates this physiological mismatch that makes everything feel heavier. Even though nothing is wrong with you, you are just simply reacting in a way that lines up with how the brain responds to seasonal change and like reduced light and abrupt shifts in routine. So I think And all this means that if you throw yourself into January at like an insane pace that's encouraged with the kind of TikTok winter arc type content and you just think, I'm going to go to the gym five days a week. I'm going to be getting up at 5am.

6:25I'm going to be doing all of these different things. I think most of the time you end up blaming yourself for not keeping up with the standard that was actually never realistic. And the space between that kind of expectation and reality makes the month feel much heavier than it needs to be. So I think the first rule of getting out of a new year slump is not allowing yourself to take new year too literally. And that's saying a lot coming from someone who literally has like a self-improvement podcast and loves setting goals and has an entire company based around productivity and planners and it's not about working every hour of every day and like not having a social life.

7:00it cannot be those things because that is never going to work long term so I think the first rule about getting out of a new year slump is like you have to not allow yourself to be so taken with this new year idea that you are going to be slumped by like the third week of January and then also you're going to have this huge expectation on yourself that you've already fallen short of and then you're going to be like right well 2026 is in the bin which we're not going to do so how do we actually get out of a new year slump or avoid a new year slump because my mission this year is to make sure every single person who listens to this podcast does not have a new year slump because they go into their new year prepared and also knowing that this is going to be a fucking great year for them but as i said in the plan with me episode i think the best thing you can do is start to break everything down like you shouldn't be focusing on i'm going to change my entire life i think you need to focus on key areas of your life one by one and then break down exactly what you want to do in each area so we've already done this in the plan with me episode and you know what the focuses are and you know where they are and you know how you're going to approach them.

8:00But I think this type of thinking is really important. And if you haven't gone through that episode yet, I would really recommend you do that. Because it's not about a full life change in five minutes or three weeks or whatever it might be. It's not about feeling like a whole different person by the time you get to February. Because if we are all real with ourselves, you know you won't feel that way. But you might feel a hell of a lot better if you double down on your goals, if you know exactly what you're doing each day, each week to get closer. You will feel so good about this year and about what you're going to get done in 2026 and you just have to remember that you cannot do everything all at once so what I really wanted from this series was to focus on one thing each week and then be able to really build on that and be able to get clear with what we want from each area of our lives so that we can slowly build as well on our plan with me episode I think we always think about goal setting as needing to be like one and done in that day and realistically it's going to be an accumulation of thoughts and like you may well develop a really strong baseline for exactly what you want your goals to be.

8:56But the whole idea of this series is that every single week, you'll get closer and closer to realizing, oh, actually, I want this from my mindset, or I want this from my health and diet, or whatever it might be. And that's exactly how I've set up January. So week one of the mini series is about mindset. And if you've listened to the Sade is the Right episode, you will know that that is the theme, because the best place to start is your own head. And so many of us get in our own way. So I really wanted to make sure that mindset was kind of week one and we were talking about things like self-doubt and how to actually show up one percent better every single day, how to break goals into habits, how to stop getting in your own way so that when we're going into the next few weeks we're actually positioned in the best place possible to reach all of our goals.

9:37And then now you've got your head in the right space after listening to that episode with mindset. In week two we are going to be talking all about finances. So I've got Abigail Foster joining for a big finance audit session which sounds very boring but it's like an audit of your own life and this episode was one of my favorites we've recorded in a very very long time so a lot of what we focused on here was like just the nitty gritty like stuff you should be focusing on if you're thinking about how to change your life when it comes to your finances so how to properly track your expenses for the month to build real data on what your future can look like and how it's going to look like that and then things like the reality of taxes, budgeting, investing and debt and kind of credit cards and everything you really need to make sure that you are in the best possible place next year.

10:22And that by the time we go into 2027, you're thinking, oh my God, my finances are in so much better place this year. Then week three, we are going into health and diet because I feel like a lot of us get caught up in fads from January 1st. And then by week three, I feel like we all need a bit of a dose of reality when it comes to our health. So we've got a nutritionist in for that episode. And a lot of that is focused on talking about the underlying things you can do to hugely increase your health and how well your diet is working for you without changing your whole life so not demonizing the fact that you don't have home-cooked meals every day and a lot of the time you're having meal deals and whatever and how we can eat healthier and get our bodies to a place where we want them to be in terms of like how it's functioning and how it's feeling without changing all of those massive things like if the only way to be healthy was to eat home-cooked meals for every meal and not have ultra-processed foods I will never be healthy like I am too busy for that I am running around too much for that and I wanted to really make an episode that had like a qualified expert to give us new year diet realism whilst also allowing us to set goals like I as you know I'm not against January I'm not against setting goals I'm not against being like I want to do this this and this or I want to change my diet or whatever it might be.

11:36I'm not against that. I'm very pro that but I'm pro doing it properly and therefore doing it effectively because otherwise you just dishearten yourself over and over and over by setting unrealistic goals and not making your goals align with what your life actually looks like. Then in week four I really wanted to talk about this for the longest time but I couldn't necessarily find the right person to talk to about and obviously I'm podcasting so this is audio so it's harder to sometimes talk about visual things but when we were kind of brainstorming for this series a lot of us in the office were kind of thinking about how maybe the type of person we want to become or the type of person we want to lean more into also incorporates visual things like finding your style or like having a uniform that you show up in every single day that means that you're not spending half an hour every morning trying to pick out an outfit when you could have had an extra half an hour asleep like that is me every day and I just feel like where I've tried to make that easier like I want to be able to dress nicely most days and I want that like that's a fun part of my day but at the same time it needs to work for me so I just remember when I was speaking to Roxie Nifusi way back in 2024 she said that deciding your sense of style can have a huge impact on the person you want to become and the most confident woman in the room isn't the one in the like trendiest or coolest outfit she's the one that's at ease in her outfit and feels most comfortable in her own skin and I feel like there's no better time to have a wardrobe clear out and work on your style than in January but also this is something I really want to concentrate on this year because I feel like I have a really strong sense of personal style but I feel like that's often impeded by the fact that I'm always in a rush and I want to kind of balance those things out because it is one of my goals for this year so I thought you guys could come on along with me so that is what our January is looking like and that is how we're going to make it a slump free zone and I know myself well enough to admit that my early year motivation has the lifespan of like a house plant that's in my home okay not very long so I didn't want the series to be like a one and done episode that you listen to agree with and then forget the moment real life starts happening again I really want it to be something that was actionable and that included all different areas of our lives because as we know when we were going through the plan with me episode there were so many different areas of your life where goals can be set in they don't just need to be finances they don't just need to be career building your life your dream life if you only build it around finances in your career but then you realize that relationships are really what mean a lot to you or friendships or your health or whatever it might be you're going to have something completely unbalanced so i wanted this series to encompass all of those different areas that all of us are trying to balance so well but that is all for today's episode and if the january blues feels strong right now i hope this helps you move through them with less pressure whilst also knowing that january is such a good opportunity to really hone in on what you want to achieve when you want to achieve it how you want to achieve it and work that into your next year like you have goals you deserve to reach them you need to steer the ship like you're not going to get there by just floating and that is important and that doesn't need to look unrealistic but it is a very good opportunity where you can change your own life and that is what I will be trying to do so I hope you enjoy that too

14:47Thank you.