Kickstart Your Year: A Joyful Cheat Sheet for a Fresh Start

The holidays are over. The scent of tangerines, the glow of lights, the laughter of friends, the cheerful tunes in stores, and the endless bowls of Olivier salad—it all felt like the carnival would last until March. But now it’s January. Whether or not Father Frost fulfilled all your wishes, the reality outside the window is a gray routine. The next holiday is at least a month away—a gray, gloomy, financially and physically challenging month. Where can we find the energy? We’ve decided to share our big cheat sheet, which we created for ourselves. Each of us in the editorial team has discovered our own little secret to inspiration and joy, accessible even in winter. We’re sure that every reader will find 5-10 inspiring ideas for each day.

Recovering After the Holidays

It might seem like there’s nothing to recover from after the holidays. But holidays are stressful for the entire body. The disruption of our daily routine, sleep patterns, excessive socializing, unusual food, impressions, and TV—all of these not only bring joy but also drain us. In stressful situations, it’s important to relax and recharge. Remember, the quality of your relaxation affects your attention span, activity level, and ability to concentrate.

Nourish Your Body!

Relaxation Ideas

Warm Bath

Taking a bath can become a true ritual. Warm water relaxes muscles and washes away negative impressions. Scrubbing with a washcloth is a kind of meditation that helps you focus on yourself. Our editorial team has about 10 bath recipes, each better than the last. Try them all. There’s a bath with sea salt, a bath with a book, a bath with a cup of tea or coffee, a bath with relaxing oils like pine or eucalyptus. A bath with orange, rose, or strawberry aroma can help boost serotonin levels in the blood. A great option is using a scrub with the scent of coffee or chocolate. Besides books, stock up on magazines. Ours, for example.

Time

A bath can help you recover in 30-50 minutes. But you can, of course, extend the pleasure to an hour or an hour and a half. Agree, a trip to the spa would take more than 2 hours with travel and the procedure, and the effect is almost the same.

Tips

Take a bath every day or every other day for a week or two. For us, this is still a budget-friendly home SPA option.
If you take a bath in the evening, an invigorating shower is available in the morning and during the day. Be sure to use aromatherapy oils.
To make the joy ritual real, set it up accordingly. Buy or simply prepare a beautiful towel, white terry socks for exiting the bath, and be sure to use a moisturizing cream. The main thing is to do everything without rushing. After the bath, drink tea, draw, sit by a lit candle, and dream while looking at the flame.

Master a Simple Energy Boosting Exercise Complex

An example is “Surya Namaskar”—a set of yoga exercises aimed at gently activating the body.

Tips

Choose several delicious scents for your apartment. Different rooms can have different smells.
Buy a cheerful little mat for exercises.

Light and Color

Scandinavian peoples suffer the most from the lack of light in winter. Therefore, they have learned to stimulate serotonin production using white in the interior, a large amount of light, lamps, and original lampshades in the room. If possible, update the lampshade by hanging a white one. Bright, juicy tones in the interior also play the same role. Elements of orange and light green will lift your mood and charge you for the day. The simplest option is to buy or print a reproduction or a regular picture depicting bright attractive colors. These can be oranges, limes, flowers, sunrise, sea, tropics, strawberries, berries.

The Energizing Orange and Its Friends

Food is the simplest way to restore energy. But since our goal is not just to throw wood into the furnace, but to get both relaxation and a supply of pleasure, we will eat with special… mmm… relish!

There are a number of products that provide a supply of energy and benefits. Especially in winter, we need vitamin C. So oranges on the table are a solution that will cheer up two birds at once. You will get a supply of antioxidants for the prevention of various diseases and at the same time provide an orange mood—joy, creativity, and creativity. And orange peels are so delicious to put in tea for brewing. Orange juice in the morning or during the day is a simple and quick way to restore energy. And what if you drink it not in the morning when you don’t want something sour on an empty stomach, but during the day when you want to sleep? You will be surprised how quickly your vigor is restored from a glass of juice. To avoid fussing with an electric juicer, buy a plastic juicer with which your children or you can squeeze juice in 5 minutes without noise and big cleanups.

Tangerines, persimmons, bananas will also visually and substantially give you vigor.

You probably feel some awkwardness before your inner critic because of the diet violated during the holidays. Thank you, dear critic, for not sleeping! Especially for you, as well as for our pleasure, we will make a menu under the code name “Ours and Yours.”

For this, we will reduce the number of hot meat dishes to 2-3 per week. First, this is a significant savings for the budget; second, it saves time (we need to find an hour for a bath!). Third, meat dishes usually come with all those heavy things for digestion (cheese, mayonnaise, sour cream) that land us on the couch in front of the TV without any benefit or mood. Our winter secret for fragrant and juicy meat dishes is spices and light sauces. Pepper, rosemary, thyme, orange sauce, sweet and sour sauce—these are what will come to the aid of our steak or baked breast and add a twist. A great option for winter is spicy sauces from cranberries, lingonberries. Useful, budget-friendly, authentic, and original—what else do we need?

What to Eat If Not Meat?

Definitely not sausage. Arrange a detox for yourself and your list of expenses, refuse sausage, sausages, smoked meats. Make familiar side dishes self-sufficient dishes with the help of mushrooms, onions, vegetables. For example, buckwheat or barley with mushrooms and onions is a hearty and light dish; rice with vegetables is pleasant to the eye. Grilled vegetables or stewed potatoes with vegetables and mushrooms are hearty and full of vitamins. Add salads with olive oil and wine vinegar to the side dishes. Increase the amount of fish, especially red fish. Yes, the price per kilogram is off the charts, but half a steak of salmon in terms of mood and benefits is more than a kilogram of pork.

What about strawberries? Even the aroma of strawberry compote itself increases stress resistance, and a little mashed strawberry as a sauce will create a special mood for you and your children.

Useful Household Joys

However, our days are not only filled with food and baths. We, of course, love to feel like good housewives and experience satisfaction from a job well done. According to our colleagues, the following small holidays and tasks will help us with this.

If the budget allows, buy yourself a new frying pan with a ceramic coating. White. You remember: white breeds positive. Quality things around us are a source of vigor.
Buy a new round (!) mop with a special bucket for it. Of course, no mop has yet started to collect and pour out water on its own, but there are some unique ones that know how to wring themselves out. A source of joy for two months. You don’t get your hands dirty at all—you collected water, wet the mop, wrung it out in a special recess, just by pressing on it.
Buy several hyacinths or daffodils of different varieties. They will bloom at different times, and you will have a month of continuous flowering and joy. If you have a garden, plant them there in the spring. If not, give them to someone who has a garden. And buy new ones for yourself.

For more tips on effective relaxation, you can visit this helpful resource.