Happy New Year To All Kind, Compassionate, Loving, Ethical & Moral People!
I’ve had a wonderful holiday season this year, starting off by taking a break from social media. While it’s certainly true that if you are building an audience you want to maintain it’s interest with a steady stream of interesting content, but taking regular breaks from social media is a wonderful, simple way to renew and reset your mind, body and spirit. Stop and think about what you look like when you have your nose glued to your phone or buried in your computer, you are most likely sitting, and completely sedentary. Beyond being bombarded with misinformation, inflammatory content, propaganda, and advertising in all it’s overt and covert forms, the minutes if not hours we waste on social media is having a negative effect on our bodies, which evolved to move and exert ourselves regularly. This new year is a perfect time to take a break from social media, start for 24 or 72 hours to start off with if you’re overwhelmed by the idea of a long-term break.
For me it was a series of power cuts after moving to the middle of nowhere over the course of a month, that made me realize the value of being fully present in the here and now and only using technology for the bare minimum of communication and business. At first I was miserable without the constant stream of dopamine rush inducing social media and internet content throughout the day, draining me of my focus and attention. We had some periods out here where we were losing internet service but not electricity, so that was much more pleasant by comparison, as I could still write, edit photos and videos, and immerse myself in the world I create and share from my laptop and phone. Without power, I would sometimes resort to leaning on my front gate, and closing my eyes and letting the wind from the mountains caress my face.
There was something about those times spent leaning on the gate, where the entire valley was silent, and the only sounds were created by the birds and the breeze coming down the San Ysidro mountain slopes. Every minute and second felt so full, and thick like honey, not like the thin, rapidly diminishing minutes that usual tech driven life feels like. I felt my mind and spirit just slowing down, and stopping to look closely at the hummingbirds dancing around me, the delicate, lacy leaves of the mesquite tree, which surprise, are concealing thorns, an excellent metaphor for life if there was one. By the end of that month when the power to our area was finally fixed, I found myself not even picking up my phone or laptop for anything not related to creating my content or otherwise strictly necessary. I was so much more engaged in the present and had realigned what was important to focus on and what could be done with all the time I wasn’t wasting on social media.
So along with avoiding social media, my main focus this holiday season has been decorating my home. I have always loved Christmas decorations, and getting a beautiful, stately, Fraser Fir and having the magical Christmas tree in the house, were some of my favorite memories from childhood on the East Coast. Back in Brooklyn, I decorated my apartment a little bit a few years, but only a little. My best year was when I brought two armloads of pine and holly boughs from the suburbs on the railroad and decorated the curtain valences and the gigantic mirror I had over my fireplace. Other years were more difficult and I was just getting by day by day and there were no decorations. The last year I lived in Brooklyn I had my very first Christmas decorations; a beautiful live tree, trimmed down to tabletop height and lit with the first generation of LED string lights that had the bluish ice cold light. I decorated that with the treasures of my sewing and jewelry making boxes, and fashioned my favorite oversized funky-fresh pendant as the topper. As frustrating and dangerous as it was, I loved that little apartment in the limestone faced townhouse, gracefully lifted up above the elevated rose garden in the front yard, and the gorgeous mature treeline of the park across the street. I was happy to have at least one happy Christmas memory from my years there before I departed for California.
Once I made my way to Palm Desert, my Christmas decorating dreams were unleashed and the first one was a colorful, tropical warm weather Christmas Tree, perfect for the warm sunny weather we were having that year at the peak of that drought. The next year however I started to feel nostalgic for the old-fashioned East Coast Christmas décor from childhood and reverted to that. It was a great lesson on never going backwards, because I missed the fun, colorful decorations, and the traditional scheme, with the pool and the stately palms in the background just looked sad and out of place. The next year, I visited Rancho Santa Fe in North County San Diego for the first time and went to the Inn at Rancho Santa Fe. Spanish Colonial architecture and design are my very favorite of all styles, and Rancho Santa Fe is a Spanish Colonial lover’s dream because the entire town is made up of equestrian ranches on large lots, and a small little village, all built in the most beautiful Mission style architecture. I fell in love with the Christmas decorations at the Inn at Rancho Santa Fe because I loved how rustic they were, and equally elegant and luxurious.
As someone who loves antiques and historic architecture, Rancho Santa Fe really hits all the right notes with it’s multiple facets of laid back North County horse country, but also a place where the fine art of living is practiced in spacious estates to the highest caliber. All of this no less, under the glorious Southern California sunshine just inland from the foggy and misty coastline with all the lush plant life that this mediterranean microclimate sustains. From that moment on, I was seeking to recreate that vintage, rustic, elegant Rancho Santa Fe Christmas décor scheme. Year after year I’ve built on that theme, and gone through almost 10 years of different iterations of it, and this year I feel as though I’ve finally realized my original vision back in the private library room at the Inn at Rancho Santa Fe. It’s been a wonderful feeling, and something I’ve enjoyed every single day, and particularly every evening.
If you have followed my writing, you probably already know that I’m a very private person, and still very much the stalwart East Coaster who eschews visibility and attention and thrives behind gates, high walls, and hedges. My home is my sanctuary and I’m very hesitant to share it with the world, it feels so invasive. Every year I think of how much I want to share my Christmas decorations with the world because they’re so beautiful (and time consuming) but I always hold back because as of now that sense of violation outweighs the sense of sharing, and that very well may change. I really believe that when it comes to Social Media and the internet you don’t need to share anything you don’t want to. Whatever you put out there that you feel comfortable enough with, will be enough for your intended audience, because that’s their only frame of reference, and in general people respect others who put firm boundaries on what they choose to share, and those that don’t are problematic anyway and the reason you don’t want to share beyond your comfort level.
In addition to pulling back from Social Media for the holiday season, I also realized that I needed to go back to using my favorite lifestyle enhancing tool of all time, and that is the routine. I first started using routines when I started Desert Mountain Apothecary and I needed organize my time so that I could get my work done and run my household. I’m one of those people that likes to work in a clean, organized, tidy space, and that can become a vicious cycle when you are working at home to inadvertently spend too much time getting everything clean and ready to work in vs. spending the long hours necessary to accomplish whatever task. Then the other trap you easily, almost automatically fall into is that you just start working from your first cup of coffee onwards and by the end of the day you realize that you were productive with work, but you and your home are messy and you’ll now need to spend all evening cleaning or another day in a messy space.
Routines helped me to spend just the right amount of time doing each task, based on how much time it took, and how much time I really had to allocate to it in relation to its importance. In addition to more efficiently rationing out your time throughout the day, routines also help take time consuming tasks and then distribute them evenly throughout whatever time duration they require. For example many things need to happen daily, some several times, but others need to be done bi-weekly, weekly, monthly, so having a set routine helps you get everything done in a radically more time-efficient and organized fashion. The most important routine of your day could be anytime, but for most people it’s the morning routine that gets you set up for the day, and frees you up to accomplish the important things, and just as important allows you to be much more spontaneous and react to anything the day may throw at you because you and your home (ideally) are ready. I’ve gone back to doing my routine since Christmas and it’s so enjoyable how much cleaner and organized my home is, and having done that, I’m so excited to get back to creating writing, photography and videos to share with you.
If you suffer from anxiety and/or depression (most times one manifests with the other), routines are an especially powerful tool for managing both of these ailments, because you are exerting control over yourself and your space. I always tell people when asked for life advice to exert as much control over their surroundings as possible, not control over people mind you, you can’t control nor should you want to control another person. But and however, any of the space, the media, whether people are in or out of your surroundings, the food you eat, what you do with your body, how you relate to other people, that is all in your locus of control. So when you follow a simple routine and you start to get some traction, it doesn’t take long, you start to feel like you’re stewarding your ship through the seas better, and it’s easier to then start exerting more control over things like your mental state (how it feels in your mind) and your thought paradigm (the lens through which you view your world).
Many people do have a routine or routines, but they are unconscious so they don’t even realize what they are doing can be applied to almost anything. When you hone your routine for getting ready and set up for the day, it’s easy to apply the method to other uses like work projects, fitness, or gardening. I always advise people to build on what is already working for them, so if you unconsciously have been using a routine to prepare for the day, don’t start from scratch, just add on what you need to do but have a hard time getting done or remembering to do every day. Tasks that you have resistance towards paradoxically become easier when they’re done every day, both because of the unconscious nature of repetition, but also because you will quickly find yourself doing any task on your routine list faster and more efficient over time. Soon your brain will be so used to doing this routine, that it will be automatic, and it actually becomes more work not to do your routine. Life throws everything at us and of course we all get knocked off course and overwhelmed, but the routines actually make it easier to recover and get back into it.
If this is a brand new concept to you and you are starting from scratch, I suggest taking a notepad and pen and writing down a list of things that you need to do every day or morning to be prepared for the day that you are not doing automatically. For example I never have to put make coffee on my morning routine because I’m never going to forget to do that. The reason I suggest using pen and paper is that there is a much stronger neurological link between writing manually and our thoughts vs typing on a computer. But I want to strongly advise you to use whatever method that appeals to you, on any device that you like, don’t get bogged down by the small details, just make sure you’re taking the time to critically think about what you need to do every day to simply be prepared for the day on a baseline level. So once you have made that list, I want you to also write down how many minutes/hours you have every morning before you need to be ready for the day in whatever form that takes. Only you know your own life and your own needs, so really take this time to self-assess what it would take to be prepared for the day every day.
Don’t Lose Sleep Over Personal Development:
Now that you have your list of tasks, and your time limit, ask yourself critically if each task is truly mission critical for getting ready for the day. For example if I create a 2 hour morning routine list for myself and I only have 45 minutes to get out the door in the morning, that’s never going to work. It’s an amazing thing to do, to wake up early and meditate, journal, work out, read personal development books, or bathe in an icy river, but I strongly disagree that this is something you need to do if it’s cutting into your necessary sleep time. So many of these so called personal development gurus minimize the importance of restful, deep, high quality sleep, in favor of other activities but I believe that being well rested is the bedrock to our baseline health, and until you are rested every day, there is no reason to branch out into other higher level personal development activities. An example of this is people who tell me that they don’t like to meditate because they always fall asleep, and I always tell them, they don’t need to meditate they need a nap!
Once you have written your list, allotted the designated time, and culled the herd of extraneous tasks, I suggest writing out your list on paper and then every day manually checking off each task. You can always edit your task list if you realize you missed something or something actually isn’t as important as you thought it was. Try this for the month of January particularly if you are fighting the double punch combo of seasonal depression and the after holiday blahs. All things being equal you will always be happier and better off when you, your space, is clean and your baseline tasks are completed. No matter what happens in life there’s still laundry that has to be done, meals that need to be prepared and cleaned up after, and a whole slew of tasks that only you know what they are. Give yourself the gift of cooling down that unfocused anxiety, and lifting some of that aimlessness and fatigue that comes with depression, with this tool that is as simple as it is powerfully transformational.
This year I hope you focus on yourself, making yourself happy, making sure you have what you need day to day in order to thrive or at least survive, and most importantly cutting out the people, habits, media, or anything else that no longer serves you. You can’t have a relationship with someone who has no morals or ethics whatsoever, and it’s far past time to pretend otherwise. My holiday season was so much more joyful and magical because of who was not included, and only spending time with kind-hearted, loving, and compassionate people has made it one of the best ever. You only have one life to live, and only you know how to live it, and who with. Saving my time and energy solely for people I have a baseline respect for has allowed me to to truly enjoy my social time. Don’t make any excuses or apologies, I hope you are more yourself this year, not less, and along with that believe in yourself, back yourself, and stand firm in your convictions. One of my favorite axioms from back on the East Coast is, “never complain, never explain”.
Don’t diminish your light to make others feel comfortable this year, let your light shine brighter than ever and get away from those that want you to suffer in darkness. Remember the old saying, “I’ve got to be free, so I’ve got to be me!” Don’t let anyone else’s thought paradigm define you, as we grow and evolve, especially when we get the courage to try and improve our lives, it triggers many people who aren’t doing that and are very comfortable with the way they view you in relation to themselves. That same person who loves seeing you as the sad little friend, may very well be extremely cruel and degrading when you take on your challenges and especially start to make noticeable progress. It’s a big wide world out there, and you won’t be lonely if you have to branch out and seek out new connections with like minded people.
My message for this year to you is; be yourself, back yourself, believe in yourself, and funnily enough using a daily routine/s and taking a break from social media make that so much easier and attainable. I believe in you and I love you for reading!
All the best in 2025,
William Z. Brennan – founder of Desert Mountain Apothecary & creator of Natural Lifestyle Optimization
Join Me On A Journey Of Discovery To The World Of Desert Mountain Apothecary!
Torrey Pines – La Jolla, California – San Diego Pacific Ocean Beach Adventure!
The sun is out and the surf is up, so let’s hit my favorite stretch of coastline under the towering cliffs of Torrey Pines in the gem of the San Diego coastline: La Jolla, California:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLyySza85jA
Please Enjoy Anza Borrego Desert Wildflower Superbloom – We had the most incredible wildflower superbloom in the California Desert this past year, join me from the beginning of the cold winter through the waves of dazzling blooms to the searing hot end of the season.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwYyoCODUeU&t=203s
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Desert Mountain Apothecary
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Natural Lifestyle Optimization
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Please Enjoy More Videos!
Supreme Superbloom! Anza Borrego Desert Spring Wildflowers! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGDPHEmN3v8
Grateful Desert Ocotillos - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bstybc3XcAk
Coyote Canyon Offroad Adventure! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQYPvqj2ouU
Julian & Santa Ysabel, CA Epic San Diego Backcountry Road Trip- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Z_o0S4Hpg
Bellport in Spring - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J9hzsFhS-k
Santa Ysabel Preserve – Backcountry Hiking - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLrSJMLXUw
Rusted & Rustic Adventure – Santa Ysabel, Wynola & Julian - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxoSZmpcUcM