明けましておめでとうございます！Happy New Year!
今日のエピソードで、私の個人的な新年の抱負（ストレスが溜まりがちですから、ストレス解消を頑張る）と、その具体的な行動計画について話させていただきます！
In today’s episode I’m going to talk about my personal New Year’s Resolutions (basically: improve my stress), and my concrete plan for actually doing them.
My New Year’s Resolution this year is to:
– take some action to reduce my stress.
I basically have two problems that are causing me stress:
1. I think too much about the state of the world
2. I then try to do something about the state of the world, which makes me too busy, I get stressed and frustrated, and my sleep gets bad.
So I’m going to take the following concrete actions:
To stop me thinking too much:
1. I’m going to take at least one full day off a week from reading news or checking SNS.
2. I’m also not going to read any after 5 o’clock (a chime rings in my neighbourhood so it’ll be easy to know when to stop).
3. Instead of news or SNS I’m going to read books – mostly in Japanese!😁
4. I’m going to do a short meditation (nearly) every day – just sit quietly and concentrate on breathing slowly for about 20 minutes.
To stop me doing too much:
1. I’m going to give up trying to “go viral” on YouTube or tiktok etc) → I’m going to give up any hope of having any direct effect on the direction of Okinawan / Japanese society.
2. Instead I’m going to concentrate on this podcast, and not try to make anything else.
3. I’m going to try to bring my online activity (this podcast) and my job (teaching English conversation and discussion classes at university) closer together: I hope my podcast will improve my students learning.
4. And I hope that by making it available on the internet I will maybe be able to build a small community of listeners.
5. And finally I’m going to try to prioritize surfing more, and go at least once a week (on average)