goals, Health, Stress, Word Count

I have three of these essays planned. This one will be a retrospective for me of health, exercise & diet, writing & publishing. Then I have a connecting piece about changing my perspective, followed by a looking forward piece.

2024 was one of the hardest, most stressful years of my life.

2025 was very much a year of regrouping and rebuilding.

Though I made an effort, I didn’t lose any weight in 2025. There will be a lot more on that in the connecting piece. In terms of exercise, I think I’m slightly ahead at the end of this year compared to where I started.

At the beginning of the year, I rode the peddle machine for 20 minutes most days and tried to get in 7K steps per day.

That ride turned into occasionally walking along a path in town. Then I started walking up and down the hills out here. Come July, I started doing bodyweight workouts.

I figured out what works for me in terms of working out.

  • Right time
  • Right place
  • Variability
  • Results

All of this is what works for me. Your “right” things will probably be different.

The right time for me is first thing in the morning. I do some stretches and warm up then I do my workout. The right place is at home. Having to go somewhere means I won’t do it. There has to be great variation in my work outs. For the bodyweight workouts, I have thirty different exercises to choose from. Sometimes I follow the list I’ve already figured out. Sometimes I mix and match. As for results, yeah, I’m stronger than I was. This is good.

Unfortunately, a lot of that came to a screeching halt in August when I came down with a sinus infection. I’ve picked at workouts. Still do them sometimes. But I’ve lost the habit of them. I’m still in better shape than when I started, though, because I can still do a bodyweight workout. I couldn’t do the level I’m at now at the start of 2025.

In terms of general health, I do think things are better. I was finally accurately diagnosed in July with a rare autoimmune condition after fifteen months of mis-diagnosis. I’m still battling the infections that come as a result of that condition. I was on nine courses of antibiotics during 2025. I’m right now doing antibiotics long term—twice a week for the next six months. Fingers crossed that I stay infection free.

I sometimes feel ridiculous that it took me until I was 63 years old before I figured out my sleep. However, I finally did. Most nights, now, I get good sleep, and frequently, I get great sleep. People always tell you to prioritize sleep. I understand, now, just how important it is because of how I feel when I don’t get good sleep.

Figuring out what I needed was tricky, though. There are four parts I have to get right for me to get good sleep: the environment where I sleep, relaxing at night, supplements, and light consumption. The last one turned out to be the missing key. Lowering my lights at night and getting bright light first thing in the morning has made a tremendous difference in how well I sleep.

One of the things that I’m most proud of in terms of things I accomplished in 2025 was successfully lowering my baseline stress levels. I’ve talked about this before, a couple of times. I continue doing the things as recommended in “The Stress Prescription” by Dr. Elissa Eple. I occasionally notice things on the periphery that tell me that yes, my stress levels remain lower than they used to be. This, in turn, makes me healthier than I started the year.

As for writing, 2025 went differently than I’d planned. Like the exercise, there were times when I was very consistent, then I’d stop.

I finally decided I needed a break from the constant push for wordcount, which happened sometime in October. I’m crediting myself with 400K for the year, because that’s probably close to what I did, given where I was when I stopped and how much I wrote after that.

I also have been taking a much needed break from writing. I’m kind of picking at it. Writer brain is much more back, but I’m not pushing.

There are things that I want to write. There are things that I need to do. Will do my best to get to all of it.

I feel I made the most progress in terms of publishing.

I moved us from a WooCommerce site to a Shopify store. That has turned out to be a very good thing for us in terms of sales.

I’ve been uploading our backlist of books to IngramSpark. Come January, I’ll have finished that and the majority of our novels will be up there.

I also uploaded the majority of our books to BookVault, and then connected them, so that we can sell paper on the store.

There are some corners that still need cleaning up. For example, all the business books aren’t in paper on the store. Many of the collections. Etc.

In addition, I started doing live sales events. These take up a good part of my brain. I like doing the live sales events and I feel as though that’s moved the needle as it were, in terms of my sales overall. Plus I’ve added a lot more people to my newsletter, with the hopes of being able to sell to them in the future.

So that’s kind of my year. There’s been some good parts and some bad parts, as there is in any year. As I said earlier, this year has been all about regrouping, getting healed up, so that I can move forward in 2026.

So what about you? What did your year look like?

Next up—A Change in Perspective.