Embodying your Best Self – Chapter 1: Get out of a slump!

Posted on January 4, 2026 by Bhanu Misra Marya

Happy New Year! I had a restful and refreshing few days and now I’m stoked to get back to routine. I definitely love being able to enjoy the holidays with friends and family, doing festive activities and enjoying all the food and drink. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t crave my regular schedule! So, to get me get back on the right trajectory and help set me up for 2026 (aka making my big dreams happen) – I’m starting a new series on my blog called “Embodying my BEST SELF” a quick no fuss guide to help me (or anyone actually) get back to good habits, productivity and taking action towards on my goals. So let’s get into it!

Chasing your dreams, embodying the energy of your future self or just down right being productive can cause the best of us to get into a slump.

The first steps in getting out of a slump is realizing that you are in a slump. But a close second is realizing that the slump is usually based on your emotions/feelings based on your surroundings.

Your surroundings can be inclusive of your actual physical surroundings (think your house, your office space) but also your mental surroundings (like the type of people you are around, the content your are consuming or even how you are spending your time).

In any case, I like to think of a slump as the “valley” of our journey to our best self. And learning how to bounce back is just an opportunity to practice resiliency! Here are my top ways to bounce back from a slump.

Journal: I have been and will aways be a champion of journaling. Kidlin’s Law states: If you can write down a problem clearly, you’ve already solved half of it. So writing your thoughts, emotions and feelings down when you feel like you are in a slump, can help you further identify the slump inducing activities or factors. (The preference here being actually using a pen and paper as a oppose to typing it on a computer or your phone). Some ways that I love to journal: Brain dump (which is really just writing EVERY THOUGHT in your head on paper), create a list of things I want to do/a list of things I want to accomplish, things you are thankful for in spite of being in a slump, write all the ideas you have or even a dear diary on the last couple of days/weeks/months.

Fix your environment: As mentioned above – the environment you are in can really have an effect on our feelings. So tidying up, organizing and clearing space is the first way to boost your mood and will also give you a sense of control. (Which is important when you feel like everything is spiralling). For me a deep clean up and organizing of my desk helps to make me to feel less out of sorts. But if you are short on time, may be consider setting a timer and picking up your room or a particular room in your house. And where possible, I would even extend this to tiding your digital spaces. For me that looks like cleaning up my following list on socials, archiving boards on Pinterest or organizing and deleting pictures on my phone.
Sort your task list: Hopefully, with #1, you have a list of things you want to do (but if not thats in place… you should definitely start there). The important part is to prioritize that list: It’s either “must do now, should do soon, schedule for later” or my personal favourite “things I can do” vs “things I can’t”. Then take the highest priority items (such as: what must be done now or things I can do) and decide what can be done in a short time frame, preferably a 5-15 min time block. Then get it done! The whole point is to take action on the list in a meaningful way. To illustrate this with an example, say you want to practice writing more, a 5 min time blocked activity to take action on this is write a list of milestones you want to work towards (e.g. create content online, start blogging or do restaurant reviews).
Create an updated routine: You must have heard the saying “a goal without a plan is just a wish” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery! I mean I love wishing, but I also love the dopamine effect of getting stuff done! It could be small wins or big calendar switches in your routine. So continuing with the goal of “writing more content online”. That’s a great start, but adding a little more thought behind it can really move it from a wish to an actionable plan. Something I’ve started doing is being ruthless with my calendar. I am getting to the point where if something isn’t in my calendar – it’s not getting done!! (Well within reason, I’m not a robot). But here is an easy to follow example on how to use this process:
So think of 3-5 activities that you can schedule into your calendar this week or month that can help you achieve it. So with the goal of writing content online you could plan in your calendar: open a substack or medium account, create a back list of content ideas for the month, publish an article once a week. Then you would add time blocks in your calendar to help you stay on track.

Monday could include a 45 min time block to open an account and set up your profile.
Tuesday you could spend 1 hour writing
Wednesday you could block some time to finish writing and then edit
Thursday you could create imagery (or use some Pinterest) to add visuals to your written content
Friday you could publish!
Saturday you could create a backlog of 3-4 more posts
Sunday you could plan your week again

And there you have it! 4 actionable steps to help you get out of a slump! Hoping this resonates! Do you have any tried and true ways to get out of a slump! I would love to hear it :)

Book Review: Station Eleven

Posted on February 26, 2025 by Bhanu Misra Marya

I first heart about this book in 2018 or 2019, but I don’t think I was ready for it back then.

Firstly I was re-finding my footing as an artist. I was definitely more into sci-fi tech than dystopian. And I was also much younger (…with age comes wisdom!)

But this book is spectacular. And the themes of this book (namely: pandemic and dismantling of society) are right on point of the 2020-2022 years.

This book (for me) was a beautiful intertwining of some important ideas in my life right now: art, family, human interaction, humanity and even how the brain works.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is a hauntingly poetic view of humanity’s resilience in the face of collapse. The novel captures the lives of several characters before and after the world as we know it ends. At its heart, the story is a meditation on what it means to survive—not just physically, but emotionally and culturally. Station Eleven is focused on the power of art and the fragility of life and socio-economic norms while urging us to reflect on what truly matters.

As always (and because I’m a girl who loves a good quote) sharing some of the quotes that I dogeared in the paperback:

and these collection of petty jealousies, neuroses, undiagnosed PTSD cases, and simmering resentments lived together, travelled together, performed together 365 days of the year. But what made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn’t matter who’d used the last of the rosing in their bow or anyone slept with.
There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stopped going to work, the entire operation ground to a halt. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except witlessly, except for the handful of people who happened to have a generator and a collection of DVDs. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light. No more internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.
What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone but there is still such beauty.
“What do you plan to do with it once it’s done?” “Surely you’ll try to publish it?” [the beautiful response] “it’s the work itself that is important to me” [in agreement] “I think that is so great, its like the point is that exists in the world” [in retaliation] “what’s the point of doing all that work” [in response] “It makes me happy, it’s peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesnt really matter to me if anyone sees it”
What do you live for? Truth and beauty.
Hell is the absence of people you long for
He getting trapped by iPhone zombies. People half his age, who wandered in a dream with their eyes fixed on their screen. He jostled into them on purpose.
You probably encounter people like him all the time – high functioning sleepwalkers. …People like him think work is supposed to drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happienss, but when I say happiness I mostly mean distractions. …He realized now that he too had bee half-sleep throught hte motions of his life, not specifically unhappy but when was the last time he found joy in his work. He wish he could go back to the iphone people he had jostled and appolgoize to them. I’m as minimally present in this world as you are.
FIrst we want to be seen, but once we’re seen that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.
Why did we always say we were going to shoot emails? I used to write THX, would it have taken too much time and effort to punch in an extra three letters and just say thanks!
In Shakespeare time, the wonders of technology were still ahead, not behind & far less had been lost.

Book Review: Upgraded

Posted on November 17, 2024 by Bhanu Misra Marya

I’ve been a reading slump for a few months now mainly because I felt like I’ve been reading too many non fiction books.

I usually set a reading goal for myself every year. I definitely aim high. But this year I’m not confident in getting to that goal. I’m about 40% there with only about 20% of the year left. That means I’d have to finish a book every 1.5 weeks. Seems daunting.

I know I could reach that goal reading a whole bunch of fluff that are easy to get through, but for me – reading is a way to knowledge. So even my fiction books have to teach and inspire me in some way.

So, atlas …I persist.

I do want to share this amazing fiction book I recently read. (I borrowed my book from Vaughan Public Library system because I love libraries (and sustainability).
*needs a totebag with that phrase on it*)

Upgrade by Blake Crouch is about a near dystopian future where science has taken on a twisted yet believable turn “DNA editing”. The story weaves between a son (who works for a FBI like agency looking to prevent corrupted gene editing), his sister and his mother (a science genius pushing the boundaries with hopes of saving the earth). There is a lot of scientific jargon (naming of genes etc) with enough depth to help me understand the characters knowledge but also confusing at times (I glossed over that). Blake Crouch is an author that can create drama, intrigue and action to capture the reader’s attention and also help the reader read faster (lol if that makes sense). Since I don’t want to give away any spoilers, I’ll end off here with saying I give this a 5/5 ⭐️

And if you need any further inclination, here are some of the quotes I annotated! Enjoy!

We were on the outskirts of the city doing 120mph. The dual electric motors were almost silent.

Parts of New York City and most of Miami were underwater, and an island of plastic the size of Iceland was floating in the Indian Ocean.

But it wasn’t just humans who’d been affected. There were no more northern white rhinos or South China tigers. The red wolves were gone, along with countless other species. There were no more glaciers in Glacier National Park.
We had gotten so much right. And too much wrong. The future was here, and it was a fucking mess.

I had extraordinary dreams and an ordinary mind.

I wanted to actually do something, you know? It’s the difference between designing a house and building the thing.

Memories were coming back to me, and not just of every book I’d ever read. Random moments of insignificance. Pivotal events that had shaped my life. From a month ago. From a decade ago. From my childhood. It was an eerie sensation. As if someone were brooming out the dark corners of my mind. Wiping off the cobwebs. Repairing frayed connections.

“So you’re saying people are too stupid?” “Not just that,” Miriam said. “It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.”

I’d felt it that night and I felt it on this one-being with Kara quenched some evolutionary thirst. A primal, genetic need to belong to a tribe.

We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxically-tragically-our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it.

While I waited for my food, I pulled out a small, leather-bound journal I always carried with me, flipped to the next blank page, and started a new letter.

You’re working off a flawed assumption. Higher intelligence doesn’t make you less greedy or self-centered or evil. It doesn’t necessarily make you a good person.

Right and wrong are constructs born of human sentiment.

Nothing but stories we’ve made up and assigned meaning to. They don’t correspond to any objective reality. The only thing real is survival.

Maybe compassion and empathy are just squishy emotions. Illusions created by our mirror neuons. But does it really matter where they come from? They make us human. They might even be what make us worth saving.
And I was struck, again, as an outside observer, by how much the members of our species needed one another. All these people out in the cold rain. To laugh and drink. To talk about nothing. It was almost as if that need for connection and touch was our … their … lifeblood.

“Consider this. For a time, Kara and I were the only upgraded humans on this planet. And what did we do? Immediately tried to kill each other over differences in belief. You got the upgrade and decided to help Kara release a virus that will lead to mass suffering and death. Doesn’t feel like intelligence itself is the answer. It terrifies me to think of a world where we have all the same problems, a billion less friends, and everyone thinks they’re smart enough to be infallible.”

“So you’d rather have no world at all?” “That’s a false binary. We are in trouble, but that doesn’t mean this is the only solution. Rejecting something that involves killing a billion people isn’t the same thing as sticking my head in the sand while the world burns.”

“You can’t kill humanity to save humanity. Human beings are not a means to an end.”

The temptation to swim over was strong. Barter for break-fast. See about getting a boat. But the commotion at 140 Broadway last night must’ve sounded like Armageddon. Anyone in the vicinity would have heard it, and me stumbling into their midst would only raise an alarm. So I settled for watching them from a distance-this forgotten fragment of humanity making a life together in the most inhospitable of places.

They seemed truly happy, and it made me happy to watch them—a thousand small kindnesses among people who had nothing to give.

We were a monstrous, thoughtful, selfish, sensitive, fearful, ambitious, loving, hateful, hopeful species. We contained within us the potential for great evil, but also for great good. And we were capable of so much more than this.

Outperform your 2023 self

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Bhanu Misra Marya

I have a few priorities and activities in the next few weeks so I’m not yet cramming in trying to create a vision board or create a word of the year. (And hey if you are, that’s cool too – read more about My Vision Board process here) But true to myself and my interest of the art of leisure and mental fitness, I wanted to share a few ways we can all out perform our 2023 selves!

Of course these techniques are not reserved for Jan 1, you can do them any time so I wanted to share as they are very useful.

Develop these Mindsets:

If 1000 people win, I AM ONE OF THEM.
If 100 people WIN, I AM ONE OF THEM.
If 10 people WIN, I AM ONE OF THEM.
If 1 person WINS, I AM THAT ONE.
If NOBODY wins, I DIED TRYING.

Develop New Healthy Habits:

It’s very important to have productive habits because they will turn into routines. Motivation can fade, and that is when discipline prevails.

Here are example of healthy habits:

write specific goals down for the following day before bed.
Journal & evaluate your day before bed.
Sleep early or get a good night’s sleep.
You are aware of your bad habits, change to the opposite.

Get 1% Better Daily:

This is MY FAV technique! Prioritize incremental progress over perfection. Don’t get lured into the fantasy or “fast result”

Knowing this will keep you consistent.

Some high valued 1% skills include:

Read for 10 pages daily
Learn for skill a least 10 min a day
Meditate for 5 minutes
Exercise for 1 hour
Create art daily (photography, doodling counts)
Reflect on your day
Practice gratitude

Prioritize Physical & Mental Health:

Add activities that makes you feel good physically and mentally to your routine.

Get some outdoor time daily
Journal everyday
Eat clean & drink 2-3L of water
Go on solo & friendship dates
Hang out with family/loved ones.
Read a self-dev article
Use diffusers or scented candles in your home
Clean your space (do a quick tidy)

Diversify your income streams:

Making money and more specifically women making more money is good for society and thr planet. In 2024 consider upskilling, changing jobs, seeking high-paying clients or even a side project that your are passionate about. Start small but stay consistent. Not only will there be a dollar amount change but also you’ll be developing your always learning attitude.

Get a new certificate your career field
Digital Marketing
Content Creation
Sell your art on Etsy
Influencer marketing
Audience building
UI/UX Design
Data Analysis Skills
Master No-Code

All images c/o Pinterest

6 ways to maintain your sanity while achieving your goals

Posted on August 13, 2023 by Bhanu Misra Marya

The internet has been a buzz for several years with words like #BossBabe and #She-EO – all of which sound incredibly hazardous because as of recently they are also followed by themes of burnout and mental wellness.

I love being ambitious and setting goals that I work towards. But I also strive for balance and grace. And I think being both a mom (at home) and a mentor (in my corporate career) I feel compelled to underline the truth: give yourself grace because you can have it all…but not at the same time! Sharing my suggestions below, with a mini recap of some outfits I wore on vacation recently (you know me, all about the inspiration & motivation!)

Plan ahead and prioritize: Whether it’s on a Sunday for the week ahead, in the morning before things get going or a Friday afternoon brain dump. Take time to think about what you need to focus on and figure out what needs to get done when. You plan to fail when you fail to plan – check out my digital planner page on Etsy if you are looking for a great planning tool.
Time Block your schedule: whether its timeblocking your day or your week, figure out what you want to work on when instead of trying to multi task. Even better, try and fully complete the work you planned on before starting something new. You’ll get a natural dopamine kick and you also won’t feel scattered from having too many unfinished tasks on your to-do list at the end of the day.
Let the Pomodoro timer be your best friend: I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again. When you feel stressed or anxious about doing something – set a time for 20 minutes and do as much of that task in time alotted.
Take breaks (both physical and mental): This is something I learned from running but it applies to everything! Literally schedule it into your gCal or planner. I always block my workouts and my lunch, but now I need to add a morning and afternoon walk.
Give yourself grace: Sometimes we all need a reminder. Ambitious people tend to be perfectionists, but it’s okay because you can’t overwhelm yourself and do your best work – it just doesn’t work that way.
Release limiting beliefs: Sometimes we feel guilty for doing less, not doing things fast enough or not doing it right the first time. It’s important to work through that (everyone’s journey is different) – but it all cases, those ideals need to be demolished! Knowledge is power, and these book recommendations can help :)

Chichen Itza, Mayan Ruins, Mexico travel, Tulum Travel, Outfit ideas, Ambitious woman, successful, life is rigged in my favour

Review, Refocus & Readjust – Mid year goal review

Posted on July 25, 2023 by Bhanu Misra Marya

As we round out the first half of the year and slide into the second half, I thought it would be a great idea to provide some inspiration to reset, readjust, restart and refocus.

Review your goals and determine priority
Before blindly continuing to do something that may no longer be serving you, take some time to review your goals. Maybe you’ve plateaued in some areas, or maybe you haven’t given enough time to one area of your life. Even better, maybe you’ve accomplished a goal and it no longer requires your attention. Creating self awareness is really important and it’s also a good idea to get organized in a way that makes sense to you. Maybe writing the goals that you will continue to work on on a sticky or using a Moleskin to help refocus an area where you’ve been lacking.
Disrupt and edit your routine
Once you’ve figure out what you want to focus on, redesign your daily habits to meet those goals. It’s true what they say…success is a series of small wins. Use your day planner, Gcal or Notion to structure your day and include activities that help you work towards ticking off those goals by end of year
Level up, track your progress & give yourself grace
As you continue your goal achievement journey, do you best to stay accountable (whether that is through a private IG account, blog or good ol’ pen & paper). I’m a big believer in documenting your life and it’s always nice to see how far you’ve come. But what’s even more important is giving yourself grace. Working towards your personal and professional goals are not meant to be invigorating and inspiring so remember to take breaks/rest, celebrate your wins and smile!