Cultivating Contentment

For the new year and beyond

Dec 31, 2025

With the new year upon us and thus the onslaught of strategies for self-optimization looming around the corner, it’s a time where we can toe the lines of both reflection and ambition. It’s exciting to feel the rush of a fresh start, but new beginnings can also feel intimidating. I hope this post offers both solidarity and encouragement.

person walking surrounded by trees — Photo by trail on Unsplash

At the start of the year, instead of setting resolutions, I prefer to set intentions. Honestly, I don’t feel the need to “resolve” anything. The reframe of an intention helps me to kindly set my sights on what I hope to change, not what I need to change. Don’t get me wrong. Proper goal setting can be quite helpful for measurable change. However, I don’t feel that all change should be measured, even if it can be.

Share some intention with a friend.

When people think of contentment, their brain likely defaults to “being happy with what you have”. I’m good there. In fact, I’d be equally as content with far fewer things. What I’m referring to is deep soul contentment that is the foundation for personal and professional identity.

Am I content with who I am and what I am doing in this world?

Getting to the Source

Ready for some real talk? Cool.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve felt discontentment within my professional endeavors. I love what I do, yet find myself constantly feeling like I’m not doing enough. The “never enough” tends to zap the joy that comes with fulfilling work.

Much of this is a result of working in a field (fitness) where everyone is seemingly an expert, and has an opinion, whether it is fact-based or not. In a sea of voices, I’ve often felt like I needed to prove more, know more, or show more to validate my place in a social media and appearance dominated industry. I’m fit, but I’m not super strong or super fast; I’m a nerdy, ultra-pale, mom of 3.

Recognizing the discontentment has allowed me to see these patterns before they take root and take appropriate action to curtail them. Social media breaks, reducing the consumption of self-help content (even the evidence-based stuff), and appreciating my body for the fitness it possesses, instead of how it looks, are a few ways I’ve combatted this.

Academia can foster similar concerns. It’s a realm where everyone is an expert, so it’s easy to feel small when you’re not a researcher, published author, or someone with a handful of teaching awards. I intentionally took a teaching position to pursue the aspect of higher education that I loved most, and yet I still occasionally struggle with feeling inadequate. If it makes you feel any better, I spent nearly a combined twelve years in higher education pursuing my degrees and still feel this way. Which makes the fact that there are people on TikTok with zero credentials believing they’re the patron saints of fitness even more ridiculous.

Relinquishing Control

Much, if not all of this, stems from a desire for order and to control what can feel chaotic in my life. People pleasing and performance-based validation still surface from time to time. If that’s you too, we both need to understand:

You’ll never make 100% of the people happy 100% of the time.
People are going to do, think, and say what they want to, regardless of how it makes you feel.
You’re not responsible for others’ feelings or actions. Full stop.

We’d all most likely affirm these statements, yet believing and applying them can feel impossible.

Pursuing an Authentic Identity

I do know myself well enough to understand that if I’m feeling inadequate, it’s likely because I’ve placed too much stock in a certain area of my life (i.e. taken on too much of that identity).

What feels like a personal failure is usually me internalizing some non-existent crisis that I’ve perceived to be true, but isn’t actually so. My brain is always going the extra mile in the least helpful way, telling me all kinds of things that may or may not be so. (Thanks, inner voice.) That feeling of inadequacy, though is right on par with unrealistic academic expectations that were placed on me as a kid, but this isn’t therapy, so I digress…

Having our worth as a human in this wild world determined by what we do is not ideal, but there’s a reason it’s one of the first questions we ask when meeting someone new. Society has cultivated this absurd hierarchy of worthiness based on how much you know and how much you make and nowhere along the way have enough people pushed back against the status quo. I feel like we’re starting to round the corner on this, but have done so at the expense of burnout and mental health. It’s certainly not sustainable.

Oddly, I felt this deeply after becoming a parent. I kept wondering how I had been reduced to a part time chef, nurse, and maid while working my full time job under full time exhaustion, as if being a working mom of twins wasn’t good enough.

When I’m mentioning what we’ve done or accomplished, please know I’m not solely referring to corporate production. Raising children, caregiving, volunteering - anything where we have taken of our time and resources to allocate elsewhere, all fits here.

Our inability to accept sufficiency directly undermines our ability to be content with what we’re putting into the world.

Doesn’t it seem ironic that our desire to do more keeps us from being content with what we have already done? Sure, hustle culture is partly to blame, but if we took a step back and evaluated our accomplishments through the lens of a supportive friend, would we find contentment there?

Who are we trying to appease? And for what reason? A brilliant friend and I were chatting about this and she said, “We must pursue [whatever it is we’re doing] from a sense of security - not for security.” It’s so true. If we measure our worthiness on outcomes, we’ll crumble at even the most inconsequential failure. It’s the reason why certain critiques sting more than others.

Using the character of who we are instead of what we have done is a far healthier way to begin disassociating ourselves from the identities which may have taken over too many corners of our lives. Separating the outcomes from the process allows us to experience contentment along the journey because contentment certainly isn’t synonymous with comfort. Without the discomfort, I know I wouldn’t adequately appreciate the lessons learned along the way.

Contentment, for type A, reformed perfectionists like myself, can be challenging. And, I think it’s important to share that things are never as they seem from the outside looking in. Being okay with being good enough, resisting the urge to do more, and actually taking time to truly rest, takes practice. So, regardless of what your intentions are for 2026, here’s to pursuing the good kind of discomfort and finding deep, soul contentment and joy along the way.

Thanks for reading along this year!

It’s useless to rise early and go to bed late,
and work your worried fingers to the bone.
Don’t you know he enjoys
giving rest to those he loves?

Psalm 127:2 (The Message)

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?