My exercising plan

hello my dear, how are you? I miss you 🤍

Sorry that I didn’t write here yesterday, I was feeling really tired last night for some reason and I fell asleep early.

I went to my chinese doctor appointment yesterday, and when he was doing my treatment, he said to me again that I need to do some exercise. He said he can continue to give me treatment and medicine, but it will be more effective if I exercise too.

It reminds me that I got a long message from my mom last Sunday too reminding me to exercise. In fact, that was one of the last few things she said to me when I sent them off to the airport.

I actually agree with all the things that she and my chinese doctor said. I also know that if I exercise, I will probably feel better from all the random physical sickness I have, like my nausea, poor digestion, or my shoulder and back pain. But what my mom wouldn’t know is that these physical symptoms I have is mostly caused by my mental health, and for some of them she won’t even notice, like difficulty in breathing and poor sleeping quality.

I shared this with my chinese doctor over messages too, that I don’t think most people understand, the low depressed mood I experience is not really circumstantial or related to any sad incident that happened, but more like a constant lost of motivation on generally everything. So to me, since exercising was never something I was into, it’s even harder for me to convince myself to do it.

But health is actually one of the things that I wrote down in my journal notebook the other day when I went through that reflect and reset process I wrote about. And before these “reminders” from my chinese doctor and mom, I already decided to set some exercising plans for myself to start with :)

Firstly, I decided to make good use of the advantage that I work from home most of the time, and everyday during daytime or in between meetings, I can spare 15 minutes to do some stretching exercise for my back and neck. Then, because I know it’ll be hard to ask myself to go out and exercise, my second part of the plan is to reserve 20-30 minutes before dinner to do some lower body workouts at home, 2-3 times a week. Lastly, the only “exercise” I used to enjoy is hiking, but it’s also hard to find time to do that often, especially I already have weekend routines these days of going for brunch then grocery shopping with my brother on Saturday and also church on Sunday. So I only ask myself to consider going to hiking on one of the Saturdays each month.

I call the above a plan instead of my exercising goals, because I don’t want this to become an additional stress for myself. I know that sometimes when my mental state is quite unwell, having myself to get through the day is already hard enough, and at those moments, I want to make sure I don’t feel bad for letting myself have some breaks.

But so far, I have followed this for 2 days in a row :) I did my lower body workouts earlier this evening, and I am definitely feeling the sore muscles now, haha.

Miss you, dear Andy. I hope you enjoy hearing out my exercising “plan”, and I hope my physical body will eventually get better too. Will you cheer for me too? 😊

Outfit selfie from yesterday when I went to my chinese doctor appointment:

Long message from mom, haha: