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The New Year is often a time of reflection and meditation for me. For the last 10 years, I’ve spent time in December and January thinking about where I am and where I want to be. I imagine what it would be like if I knew that the new year was my last on Earth. What would I want to do differently, and what would I keep the same?

This year, however, I felt resistant to such self-reflection. Maybe I was tired of thinking about myself. Maybe I was bored with the practice. Maybe it’s because I had the worst flu I’ve ever had, which started on December 20^th, and I’m still coughing.

Regardless, I didn’t want to do it.

And, yet. I did it anyway. Is this discipline? Tradition? Insanity? Who knows.

All I can say is that the one thing I really want in 2026 (that is under my control) is not to feel so stressed during the school year. The contributing factors to this stress are: 1) fatigue; 2) lack of focus; 3) procrastination; and 4) disorganization.

I’m hoping that the fatigue and lack of focus will improve as the iron infusion I received on December 18^th continues to build in my body. It turns out that a lot of the symptoms I had that I associated with narcolepsy, such as fatigue, brain fog, and lack of focus, are more likely associated with an iron deficiency that I have had for several years that doctors didn’t fully address, than my chronic sleep disorder. Once my PCP here had me get tested and retested, and I also began to pay attention, I realized that there is a BIG difference between sleepiness (narcolepsy) and fatigue (iron deficiency).

This information is important for helping me manage all my symptoms, and I’m glad to finally understand why nothing was working with the narcolepsy treatments I was trying, but come on! I’ve been struggling for years. This is one of the reasons I hate healthcare and the insurance industry in the United States.

Another reason is that it took me from July to December to see the right doctor for iron deficiency and then get insurance to approve for the infusion. Now that I’ve been infused, I should start to see more improvement over the next several weeks.

If that happens, then I’ll re-focus on improving my sleep again. But as I told my sleep doctor, there’s no point trying to sort out the sleepiness while my ferritin levels make daily living nearly impossible.

In the meantime, I have some strategies to work on the procrastination and disorganization issues that created stress at my job over the last three semesters. Most importantly, because I often regularly forget what I have to do and when I have to do it, I will spend 15 to 30 minutes at the end of every teaching day writing and updating a to-do list of what needs to be done and when. I’ll also write some notes on how each class went and what, if anything, I could do differently and/or improve for the next class or the next semester.

I’ve used to-do lists in the past to some success, but I’ve never kept one consistently. So I’m hoping by having a to-do list and reflection as a daily task that I can track, I’ll keep on top of my tasks better.

I’ve also identified how this strategy could go wrong, and I suspect the biggest impediment will be that I get very hungry by the end of my teaching day (which will end at 4:45pm, Monday-Thursday this semester), and I take the bus home, so there’s often a significant delay between finishing teaching and getting home to decent food. I often want to get home ASAP so I can start making dinner.

These issues mean that I’ll need to bring something substantial and high quality for me to eat Monday-Thursday, so I’m not thinking about dinner after class and when I can get home, but instead I’ll have the time I want to reflect on my classes and organize myself with the to-do list.

I can’t say I enjoy eating dinner at work; at the same time, I also don’t enjoy the stress of not feeling prepared and feeling like I’m falling behind, either. And, because I’m not willing to change my teaching schedule, dinner at work is the option I’m willing to work with this semester.

However, going back a step further, what this really means is I’ll have to prepare dinner in advance of leaving for school in the morning or early afternoon, so I can bring it with me.

What will be most important is to mindfully evaluate my progress in real time because I really don’t want all that stress this year. Reducing this stress is my number one priority because it’s taking away a lot of the joy I have in my return to teaching

I think I can do it! Time will tell, and, of course, I’ll share my progress here. In fact, I am so committed to reducing my work stress this year, that I made “reflection and direction” my 2026 theme.

Happy New Year!