I Tried to Prioritise Rest & Leisure in this Capitalist Hellscape

Did I manage it?

Already framing my attempt at prioritising rest and leisure as something that I could either succeed or fail at is a bit capitalist, but that aside, I wanted to check in on one of my main goals for this year. After taking a substantial amount of work off my plate at the end of last year by quitting my YouTube channel and podcast, I was determined to use this as an opportunity at the beginning of 2024 to REST and HAVE FUN. I had (and still have) dreams and plans for what my next career moves are but I didn’t want to fall into the trap of immediately filling this beautiful, gorgeous, sexy, luscious extra time I had given myself with more work. I wanted to take things slow and just chill out a bit because who knows when I would get another chance to.

So how’s it going? In general, let me tell you, it’s going bloody great. I can physically feel in my body my stress levels reduced and I can feel a drive, a motivation and desire to create content and connect with you (readers, followers, hello!) that honestly I’ve struggled to find in the last couple years.

But with me being me, this rest would not have been possible without some structure. It is just not in my nature to wake up in the morning and have no idea what I want to do, have nothing on the schedule and then figure it out. Absolutely not, that fills me with dread. And that’s not what we want! We want calm vibes, not omg my heart is beating so fast I’m going to die vibes. At the beginning of this year I started The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (affiliate link) which is a 12 week guided creativity course thing (I’m making a whole video about the experience) and at first I thought ‘oh dear god Hannah what have you done? You’ve started a new project!’ But actually it’s the best thing I could have done.

One of the two key practices of The Artist’s Way is “Artist Dates”. These are dedicated solo time for you to take your inner artist on a date - anything from a walk in the park, to a museum or gallery, to doing some drawing in a coffee shop. And I’ve basically taken the structure of the Artist Date to hold myself accountable for taking time to MYSELF and doing something fun, nourishing, or creative. I’ve gone to museums and galleries, the cinema in the middle of the day (which was something I desperately wanted to do again!), I’ve done jigsaw puzzles, played the guitar, and gone to the theatre. It’s been glorious.

I honestly don’t think I would have actually followed through with my rest/leisure time if I didn’t have this structure and accountability. But I know what you might be thinking - that doesn’t sound like REST, Hannah?! Well yes you’re right. Rest and leisure are a bit different but still with lots of overlap. I can tell you, I feel rested from these excursions. And when I am working, I’m not packing my schedule as much as I was and so there is more breathing room in my days (I’ve actually made a solid dent in my YouTube watch later playlist which since Rowan was born has been constantly around 300+ videos but is now only 60!!!)

I want you to take this as a sign, or at least encourage you, in whatever way is accessible to you, to take yourself on an artist date - do that fun and/or chill thing for yourself. Carve out the time, commit to it and do it. We often don’t realise how much we needed it until we’ve actually done it. And oh my goodness have I needed it.

Hannah xx

👩🏼‍💼 I gave a talk at LSE - I was invited to guest lecture at LSE for a group of masters students for a module about strategic communications. The session was about personal branding and I was there as someone with ~ experience ~ to talk about it. It was interesting hearing what the academic literature says about this job and personal branding and then comparing it to what I know from doing it. It can be easy to get in your head as a content creator/influencer thinking “what do I know about anything????” but when I was stood in that room and answering students’ questions turns out I have a lot of knowledge and a lot to say about how personal branding works for creators, about “authenticity”, vulnerability, the relationship with your audience, and relationships with brands etc. And that was a bit of a confidence boost for me!

🌺 LEGO Flowers! For my birthday Dan got me some grown up LEGO and I had such a lovely time building them and they are so pretty! Is this the start of an unhealthy and expensive habit? Luckily there is no room in the flat for more LEGO creations so I’ll have to put this new found passion on pause. The one I did was the Flower Bouquet from the Botanical Collection.

I’m actually posting on TikTok (about time!) and apparently I need 10k followers to start earning from videos there. Would be nice lol. As I’m writing this I have 5,363 followers so a bit of a way to go yet but you don’t ask, you don’t get!

---

We are currently reading Come Together by Emily Nagoski (affiliate link) for the Doing It Book Club over on my Patreon. Our community meeting to discuss the book in Discord is Tuesday 19th March at 8pm, GMT, please join us to chat all about the book and what you thought of it!

---