Winter hit harder for me than expected. Coming from California and Texas, snow was extremely rare for me, and I arrived on campus excitedly anticipating my first snow sighting in a few years. However, my excitement was soon proven to be a fantasy. The cold days and longer nights took my energy away and made me feel more miserable than I should have. However, I have learned through this season that tiny, inconspicuous habits can quietly lift up my day — though I didn’t always believe this.
Prior to this winter, I had seen and heard about self-improvement habits and how little things can change your day. Initially, however, I was reluctant to build routines like cleaning my room or listening to music in the morning. It felt almost like a waste of time — what could a cleaner room or music possibly do to help me throughout my day? It would be much better to spend that extra time preparing for the upcoming major or get more hours of sleep and rest.
It was only a particularly difficult week that I realized the impact of positive habits. I had three majors over the course of three days, and my room was a chaotic jumble of textbooks, papers, and empty water bottles. Something about this disorganization frustrated me, as if the chaos on the desk was mocking the chaos in my head. Although nothing about my workload had changed, the mess in front of me made the week feel more overwhelming than it needed to be. Looking for some sense of control, I threw away the water bottles, plastic bags from last night’s DoorDash, and put my textbooks and notebooks in a neat stack. Seeing how my room felt cleaner and more open, my mind mirrored that state, and my work afterward felt more satisfying and rewarding. Despite all of these mental benefits, the cleaning had only taken fifteen minutes.
This theme of taking time to focus on myself reappeared in my recent conversation with my point person, Mr. DoBa. I was discussing my Mid-Year Reflection with him. Toward the end of our meeting, I told him about my struggle to fall asleep. It usually wasn’t that there was too much workload, but simply that my brain refused to rest. Mr. DoBa suggested a nighttime routine to let my brain cool down after doing work all day.
I decided to take his advice seriously, even though the routines felt negligible. Each night, I began to dim my lights ten minutes before sleep, put away my work, and spend the time doing quiet activities — listening to music, planning my tomorrow, or simply sitting in my room without my phone. At first, it was difficult; my brain would resist, insisting that there were still things to do or deadlines to worry about. But gradually, these few minutes of intentional calmness started to make a difference. The soothing piano music or the short reflection on my day eased me in and helped me fall asleep easily. Waking up no longer felt like lifting a heavy weight, but an exciting start to a new day.
This progress encouraged me to find other areas in my life to incorporate positive habits. To make up for the lack of physical activities I could do during the cold and short days of winter, I promised myself to hold a plank for three minutes every day. It wasn’t a lot, but the small sense of accomplishment I felt gave me motivation to do the next task and changed every day for the better.
These habits didn’t solve my problems or reduce my workload, but they did change my capacity to handle it and my energy throughout the day. I used to think that “self-care” required hours of free time and high commitment. Now, I see it as a series of short fifteen-minute investments that pay back in hours of clarity. Whether it’s a three-minute plank or a ten-minute digital fast before bed, these small “rituals” acted as an anchor in a season that otherwise could feel gloomy and demotivating. So for anyone else feeling under the winter melancholy, the solution might not be a grand change of lifestyle — it might just be cleaning up your desk.
