You can listen to the full episode here: Listen to Ep 22: The Urge to Reinvent Yourself in Spring

Spring often brings the urge to reinvent yourself and change everything.

You might suddenly want a new routine, a new look, new projects, or a completely different life rhythm. As daylight increases and energy begins returning after winter, the possibilities can feel exciting and overwhelming at the same time.

In this episode of Anchored & Alive, Blaze explores why spring naturally activates the impulse to reinvent ourselves — and how pacing your changes can help you build new habits without burning out.

Instead of tearing up your entire life at once, this conversation invites you to experiment with small adjustments and let new rhythms develop gradually.

Hello friends, welcome back. This week we're going to talk about all of that urge to reinvent ourselves energy that may be manifesting for you in this season.

So I know in the springtime leading into April, I get really excited about like the switch of wardrobe, and there's something kind of heady and exciting about just changing up my look.

And it makes me feel really good and I tend to want to be like, "Oh, it's time for like fancier hair or maybe I'll try wearing my hair differently and I maybe will try makeup even though it never works out for me and I don't actually want to do that but I feel like the urge to just try and see if maybe I'm a makeup person for the first time in my life every year." It's a fun season.

I think there's a lot of playful energy and it doesn't necessarily have to result in changing everything.

So here's something that comes up is I will think right around now, "Guess what? I have so much energy. It's time to change my entire diet and start walking like twice a day, not just once a day, every day."

And I think maybe I should take my daughter out to Supercharged and we'll go like bounce in the bounce house every week and it's gonna be amazing. I just keep adding all of these things to do and I start thinking about

What if I was the person that had that life and that energy?

And I enjoy the fantasy of it, but I do tend to try to enact it a little bit at this phase and then it'll end up burning me out.

And I don't know if you've experienced this as well, the like the surge that happens, like right around now where you're like, "Woo hoo! I'm going to sign up. I'm going to do the things. I'm starting a class. And I'm going to read this book and I'm going to have all of these things that are going on simultaneously."

What I think happens here is that when that energy is available, we want to just tear up everything from the past that doesn't align with what we think we would rather be like right now.

And I think that can be unhealthy. I've learned not to do it. So in the summer, there's gonna be a lot more, I don't know, available energy to maintain things. Right now is a starting up time, but it doesn't have to be a complete destruction time.

I guess that's what I'm saying. It's not the time to throw away all of the clothes that I rotated out of my closet. It might be the time to put them away in storage.

It's probably not the time to just say, like, let's remodel the whole house unless that was something that I already had as a project that was designed.

But maybe you, too, have felt this. Everything feels like a great suggestion right now.

And it's kind of like, "Oh my god, I don't want to miss out. I think everybody has great ideas and I want to do that too."

So now is a time where I try to remind myself of what I've already cleared space for and all of the things that I've already kind of dreamed and planned back in the winter.

And it's so helpful that I did that because now I can kind of compare against what my true feelings might have been when I had very little energy so that I can say like, "Okay, I will return to very little energy again. So what do I actually want or think that I have space or time for?"

That to me is so much healthier than committing to 5,000 things and making myself really burnt out and sad.

I want to do a lot of things and there's lots of things that I can do but I am a huge advocate of pacing and trying things out one at a time. Even though I'm deeply tempted, deeply tempted, again, to like, now I'm gonna go out for like five hikes a week and all of this other stuff.

If that hasn't been the person that I've been - and it hasn't, what makes me think that I'm going to be able to stick to that and have the energy for all the other projects that are actually happening that need to happen in life?

What I need to do is really pay attention to who I am. Who am I really?

Not in a way of beating myself up about it or feeling bad about it, because I like who I am.

But to be honest with myself and go, "Okay, I do like going outside. I do like hiking. I do like exercise. I like eating nice foods."

And I'm not someone who always goes on a weekend camping trip and hike. And I don't generally have the stamina for that. So what fits right now that stretches me a little bit?

So I like to add that part in too because there is a lot of energy for stretching right now.

I can stretch myself, but I don't have to become a completely new human that isn't me.

I want to be me enjoying new things or me enjoying an expanded version of myself, not me even in 10 years.

So it's cool to have goals that you look at and go, "Okay, this is where I'd like to be and who I'd like to be in a decade from now."

But recognize that that future you that you're thinking of is 10 years from now. It's not 10 weeks from now or even 10 days from now.

So it's okay to take a small step and know that you're getting there.

This is a time where comparing yourself against other people isn't going to help you out.

So particularly in this season, in this energy, with all of the light of Spring and all of the people and all of the socialization and all of, like, I'm going to say, like, the sexual energy of spring, where we're just like, we want to be hot.

We want to be seen, we want to be wanted by our partners or find someone out in the world.

All of that energy is there and it's ripe and it's available and we start comparing ourselves to other people and you go on social media and you'll see people that you think are doing it better than you.

And how does it make you feel? Usually not that great. So there's like the combination of inspiration of, oh, I can try that.

And that's exciting, and we all want to look to other people because we're human. Of course, we're going to look to other people and go, "What are they doing? And how can I copy it and do it better and make it mine?"

That's fine. But at a certain point, like the shadow energy of this is to get so caught up in comparing yourself to how other people are doing things or thinking that they're doing it better that you try to become someone other than you are.

And how you notice this is when it stops feeling good and it stops feeling fun. If you find that you've been comparing yourself to other people and other situations and you're starting to be down on yourself or you're changing so many things that you're just always uncomfortable in your own life and in your own rhythm.

That's a sign that it's okay to back off from that and that maybe it's not as helpful as it once seemed.

I am a huge fan of assessing occasionally what patterns I have going on in my life and if they're still feeling supportive or if they're feeling constrictive.

If they're feeling good and that I'm enjoying them, or if they're feeling like bad or like sickly to me in a certain way.

So I find I go through these phases of creativity and bursts of producing lots of stuff and then I back off and I know that for me, that's my normal rhythm is to (have) like surge of doing a lot.

And then to come down that slope and back off of whatever energy that was, and I usually replace it with something else. So I have times of like big production in my business.

And then that'll slope down, and then when it's sloping down, I'm ramping up production of like sewing or knitting or learning some other skill. And then I'll kind of get overwhelmed with it or it starts feeling restrictive or not as good or I'm comparing myself again to other people and it's just not working for me.

Then I back off of that slope, so I'm thinking of these as like these waves coming through my life and then I find, "Oh, now I'm into...reading a lot or writing or going out into nature and taking these hikes." But all of these things have an ebb and a flow to them.

And I find if I get towards the peak, it starts to get a little obsessive. I'm more likely to start comparing myself to other people and that's about when it's time for me to kind of release that wave and come down the other side and relax.

So it's okay to notice all of these tendencies in ourselves and to ride these waves because there's a lot of energy available and there's a lot of exciting things going on and it does feel so good to switch things up and try on new aspects of ourselves.

It's fun to think like, well, who is Spring Me? Who Summer Me is going to be like? What would I like to be like? I want to be a Cool Mom this summer. Like, I've definitely had that thought.

I also have the panic thought of like, what if I'm actually not a Cool Mom this summer and I'm really stressed out and I don't enjoy doing all these fun things that I think I want to sign myself up for?

So if you're also having that kind of panic in your life about things that you're planning now that you're like not sure you'll be a hundred percent on board for later,

Maybe now is the time to start writing in some wiggle room figure self.

And I can share that I'm doing that. I have been thinking ahead for a while now going, "Okay, there's lots of fun things that I really do want to do, and that I think I will have the energy for."

And harkening back to last week and talking about boundary energy, I'm also thinking, what are my limits and how can I enforce them and just set that expectation before it even happens so that nobody's disappointed.

So I'm like, well, how many sleepovers am I going to be comfortable doing? Who are the players that I'm going to be able to handle? And in what capacity for how long and where? What's my responsibility?

Actually, here's something. I think that this time of year is excellent for logistics.

I have my logical brain on pretty well right now and I know that it won't last forever. So I want to harness it.

Now is the time where I'm pretty good at figuring out the logistics and statistics of what week has who doing what where and who needs to be available for how long to bring people to this destination and how much is that budget and what's the timing and when does everybody's doctor's appointments need to happen over the summer?

Like I'm already that many months ahead in my mind, thinking like, "Okay, where do we get the allergy meds and who gets tested for what before we have to go back to school?" and all of those things.

This is great. Because it feels good to have an outlet for all of that energy, I'm really channeling it there right now, you guys. And if you're feeling that kind of energy, I would highly advise you, like, harness it, man, like, use it.

Put it in your calendar now. I email myself to the future all the time when I have a great idea about when something needs to happen. If I can't do it yet, I'll email myself and be like, "Oh, okay." In the first week of June, I'm going to send myself an email saying, "Hey, that was the time to check on camp blah, blah, blah, and are they available?" Sign it up. And that I can just let my mind forget it and it's so wonderful.

I cannot tell you how nice it is to feel like I can harness the energy of planning all of these things and kind of send a little ping out to the future for myself that will tell me to do it then so that I can then not use that part of my brain for like so much of the rest of the year and I can just trust that it's going to get done because I've already set it up to get done.

So plan for yourself the space that you need. And actually that could be fun too. Like who are you as an organized person if you manage to get ahead of even one or two things this year that you sent a message to yourself and you had it done?

That's gonna feel so good. I am such a fan of just tiny improvements that I celebrate the heck out of and feel like, man, when we're able to improve even one small aspect of our lives, even one thing, and it goes well.

That's fantastic, and I find when it goes well I do it again so that I'm like, "Wow, forever I have improved this aspect of my life."

And I'm not above patting myself on the back and thinking, that's fricking badass and I'm happy about it.

And you should be too, so I'm cheering for you. Whatever it is that you want to do this week, what if we practice trying things on without blowing up our entire lives and trying to keep ourselves on a nice even keel so that we're not disrupting everything and making it so that we have to recover from all of our changes,

but rather that whatever change we're trying on is kind of built in, that it's a small enough change tried for like a short enough amount of time or long enough amount of time.

That if you decide that it's like a failed experiment, it's easy to let go of, but if it's something that's going really well, it's just great. Now it's part of your life and you can add something else to it.

I struggle with this. I like to do four or five things at once, but I do find that it's a whole lot easier if I just tackle one thing, and just do that for a while and see how it's going and if it resolves or not before I add an extra aspect.

This is something that I think my husband's very good at, where he can just pick one thing and do one thing and then see if the experiment while or not and then move on. Whereas I'm like, let's do 15 things and then see if we feel good about it, but then you have no idea.

What part of the 15 things was actually helping you and which part of the 15 things was making you upset?

I don't know if I'm gonna struggle with that for the rest of my life or if I've gotten better at it. I think I've gotten better at it, that now I'm down to like three things at once. We'll try the hikes, we'll try changing morning breakfasts, and we're going to schedule a day of the week to figure out all of the appointments.

I try to do so many things because I frequently will fantasize about having this much smoother running life.

And I'll have ideas about how I could do all of that. And then I'll get really excited and try all of them in one week and then get too tired ansend up never doing it again.

And then I want to start the same experiment again the next week. I can tell you, and I don't expect that you're actually going to follow the advice because I don't. It would be so much better if I just did one thing for the one week and decided whether it was good or not, and if I was keeping it up again, and then maybe added a second thing.

And when I've done that, it has been a lot clearer to me. Like the feedback is clearer to me about what's working well and what isn't working well and what I find hard and what I don't find hard.

It allows me to finesse new routines and new ideas.

As it's happening, I guess a little bit better with like really clear feedback because I'm not changing everything.

It's like when you change all of your hair products at once, then you can't tell what went well and what didn't.

I definitely have done that trying to figure out how to do wavy hair. I'm like, I'll try these 15 different products and then you have one really great hair day, but you can't remember what it was that you did because there was too many things.

So it just takes a while to narrow it down and I find like the less factors the better. So here we are.

It's spring. We've got all of that excitement and all of that energy and all of that hope. I think maybe that's what's happening is that it's turning into hopeful energy.

If we're harnessing all of the boundary energy and frustration energy well, we then have space for hope and dreaming again and enough energy to actually start the experiment and start doing things.

So I would urge you to maybe attempt to do it one small moment at a time.

But if not, honestly, enjoy yourself. Have fun. It's spring. I'm happy for you.

And next week we're going to come back and talk about how do we do things where we're accomplishing stuff and activating all of that energy but without accelerating so fast that we blow past all of the enjoyment of the season and enjoying the things that we're doing.

Have a wonderful week and weekend and I will see you there.

🌿 Related Episodes

Spring Anger: Why Irritation and Frustration Are Signals for Better Boundaries
Understanding how anger and frustration reveal the boundaries that need attention.

Spring Equinox Energy: Why You Feel Restless, Irritated, and Full of Ideas
Why rising spring energy creates restlessness before clarity arrives.

Restlessness Is Not a Crisis — Navigating Early Spring Energy Without Blowing Up Your Life
How to handle early spring activation without making impulsive life decisions.

Motivation vs Capacity — Why You’re Not Lazy
Understanding the difference between low motivation and depleted capacity.

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