Spring Break Isn’t Just for Kids: Create Your Own Reset—No Time Off Required

Spring break looks a little different as an adult.

No time off, no escape—just real life, still happening.

In this episode, I’m sharing what a real reset looks like when life is messy, emotional, and full—not when everything is calm and perfectly aligned.

From physical health and small habit shifts… to emotional overwhelm, changing friendships, and those moments when you just feel a little off, I’m walking you through what this season has looked like for me—and how I’ve been finding my way back to myself in the middle of it.

We’ll talk about:

• Why a reset doesn’t mean everything is fixed
• How small, consistent changes actually move the needle
• What the cold plunge taught me about staying instead of escaping
• How adult friendships evolve (and why that can feel lonely)
• What it really means to “date yourself” and reconnect with your own life

This isn’t about starting over.

It’s about coming back to yourself—right where you are.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Hey there. Welcome back to Peace of Word. I'm Danielle Tantone, and today is actually the last day of spring break around here. It varies by school district, but for my kids, today was the last day of spring break. It's Sunday. And I'm sitting here just kind of reflecting. We celebrated my youngest daughter's 10th birthday this weekend. And that is just crazy. Everybody who sees her and remembers when she was born is like, wow, I can't believe you're 10. And my oldest daughter is about to be 20, which is even crazier. So it's just, it's been kind of fun with the numbers. You know, she's half her age now. And we spent some time with family who was here. My oldest daughter's in college, so she called and wished her a happy birthday. And it was just a nice low-key weekend. She's celebrating with friends next weekend. So this weekend was more just about family. And like I said, I'm just sitting here kind of reflecting. You know, spring break when you're younger is a little different than spring break when you're older. First of all, most of us don't get a spring break from our work. So we're still trying to get it all done. And the kids are off school. So we're trying to entertain them while also trying to do our work. It's not like college when I went to Mazat Lawn with a few friends, and the only thing I had to worry about was the fact that I stepped on a stingray the first day of the trip. Although that was a pretty painful start to the trip. It was probably the most pain I've ever felt, quite honestly. Like a knife going through my foot and then poison spreading upward. It really hurt. But I put some aloe on it. My friends helped me. And a hotel doctor came and looked at it. And I don't know, maybe he gave me some kind of medicine or something. Who knows? And I put a sock on it and I drank some margaritas and I had a great trip. So it's been a little different of a spring break this time. And honestly, I was like hoping to do this big spring reset, and I was hoping to talk about joy and some lighter stuff because frankly, these last several episodes have been pretty heavy. We've been talking about addiction and loss and grief, and that's a lot, you know? And I have been thinking as I'm completing my manuscript, I actually think I can say that I have my draft like done. I'm ready to send it to the editor. So I'm super excited. But as I've been doing that, I've been wanting to make sure that I share the idea that resilience isn't just about bouncing back from the hard things or enduring tragedy and trauma and loss and grief. It's also just about finding joy, enjoying life, being excited about what comes next. So as I've tried to grow as a life coach and explore ways that I want to grow my business, I've thought about this too. I don't, I don't only want to work with people who are dealing with something really hard. I mean, yes, you think of when you're when you're going through something hard, you think, oh, I need a life coach to help me work through this. But I also can really help with somebody who's reaching for the next thing and trying to start something new and excited about the future, but needs a little direction. That's a thought that's been with me is that I wanted to talk about joy. I wanted to talk have a spring break reset for adults for the rest of us. And it hasn't quite worked out that way. This week has been a little heavy. I've been dealing with some things that weren't light and easy and fun, like I was thinking. So anyway, some of it's just real life. I'm looking at my notes. But the theme, I guess, that I've settled on is a reset doesn't mean perfect. And I think that's what I want to talk about today. This idea of a reset as a reframing. It's not a clean slate where everything just clicks into place. And it doesn't usually happen when life is calm and perfect. It usually happens in the middle of messy, emotional, and complicated life. You know, we think new year, new week, spring break, fresh start, and everything's just gonna fall into place, but it doesn't really happen that way. But here are some ways that I have been resetting in my life over the last few weeks. I've been doing a physical reset. I've talked a lot about health and fitness, and I had my coach from F-45, Stacey, on here a couple weeks ago, and I've talked about how physical fitness is a part of my life. I eat healthy, I work out regularly and consistently, even if it's not the exact same days every week. Being active and moving my body and nourishing it with good food has been an important part of my life for my entire adult life since I was probably 17. And it's shifted and evolved. And I've tried many of the different diets that have been popular over the years, first low calorie, then low carb, then intermittent fasting and keto. And what I've settled on is that for me, an intuitive style of eating works best. I actually have gone away completely from tracking food or even macros. I should say I had gone away completely from that because I found a new way. So even, you know, even in your old age, you can be taught new tricks. So they're doing this challenge at the gym at F-45. And it started with this in-body scan. And frankly, I didn't love the results. It was like, it told me I was practically bordering on obese. And I'm like, seriously, okay, five feet tall, 130 pounds. It told me I had like 30 some percent body fat. I was like, that can't even be accurate. I mean, really, like I work out regularly, like I've got muscles, and like, I mean, I do have fat. I'm I'm a curvy person, but I'm I don't have roles. I mean, I'm I'm pretty lean. So I was I sort of fought against it for a little bit. And Stacy was like, stop that, stop that. Trust the numbers and just go with it and just work from that. And I sort of at first, like I said, my reaction was to be a little bit flustered and frustrated and like, gosh, I'm doing everything right, and nothing ever really makes a difference, nothing ever really moves the the numbers for me. And I then I brought this, I brought up, well, it's probably because of my breast implants from breast cancer, and um, it's probably this and it's probably that. And she's like, stop it. She said, first of all, if my six-pound chihuahua gained a pound, that would be huge for that chihuahua. So so you're you don't your your little changes are gonna be pretty major. Like it doesn't take five pounds for you, is a huge deal. So I I remembered that that was true. Um so I was like, okay, fair. When you're small, small shifts matter. And that really hit me because it's not about extremes, it's about small, consistent adjustments. And the truth is, even though I eat healthy, even though I do focus on protein and I do try to, I do generally get a lot of steps, especially when I'm working, I get more than 10,000 steps without even doing a workout. But on the days when I'm working from home, sitting here at my desk, I may not actually do that many steps if I'm not intentional about it. So what she asked me to focus on was for the for like a six-week period, I think it is. She asked me to focus on protein, 120 to 130 grams of protein steps, at least 10,000 steps a day, which sounds like a lot, but like I said, I get that pretty regularly at work. And if I just add in a mile or two walk on the days I'm not working, pretty easy. And then um, so protein steps and then workouts and just tracking them and sharing my tracking with her. And then I said, well, okay, as long as I'm gonna be tracking my protein, what if I wanted to lose a little bit of weight, if I wanted to, I'm gonna be tracking what I'm eating, let's let's try to shoot for something. And so we've kind of figured out the the calories roughly that I should be having based on my Apple Watch, based on what I what the numbers on the in-body scan and um, you know, what I what I would metabolize naturally versus what you know cutting back a little bit so that I can actually lose a few pounds. And we came up with a number that felt really doable. And she told me that she tracks, she doesn't use any of the fancy apps, she uses literally a chat GPT conversation, and she just talk, tells it what she eats, and it just tracks it. And I use Chat GPT all the time. I use it to synthesize my thoughts, I use it to write outlines for podcast episodes, I use it to write outlines for my book and my, you know, all the all these things I'm working on. And so I thought, why not? I'll use Chat GPT. And so I so I created a a separate conversation about my protein tracking. And it's been actually kind of fun because it's like it's not only a tracking device, but it's a coach built in. Chat GPT, we all know, can be a dubious coach. I mean, sometimes they tell you, I say they, because I kind of think of mine as a girl sometimes and a boy sometimes. But anyway, sometimes she tells you what you want to hear. But usually you can train her a little bit. And most of my Chat GPT conversations actually know me really well because I do input a lot of my writing and voice. They talk to me appropriately usually. But anyway, so I've been using this Chat GPT app and uh actually tracking my my stuff, and it hasn't felt as uh cumbersome as usual, as time consuming as usual, as um triggering as usual. Because like like I've worked really hard to come to a place where I don't get obsessive about what I eat, where I don't, you know, go make one bad move and then and then you know spiral. I was talking with my daughter about that, how you know she's like, I'll have a cannoli, and then I end up having three because I already ruined my diet for the day. And I I've really come a long way to not be like that because that's that's how we all kind of default. But anyway, so that's a tip. If you uh if you want to track protein or macros or calories, something new to try. Chat GPT. Or Claude, which I guess I need to look into because who knows which is best. But I'm really comfortable with ChatGPT right now, so we'll see. I'm definitely not married to it if things change. All right, so I'm just looking at my notes. When else I wanted to talk about, so I'm also doing kind of there's the physical reset, which is that challenge that I'm doing, and it's going really well. It's been really fun, and like I said, I'm having fun with it instead of thinking of it as this big thing. And I know I'm not actually obese, and I know I know that I do make healthy choices, even naturally, but it's been nice to kind of tweak it a little bit and like I said, make those small changes and be a little bit more intentional than I have been over the last few years. And I wouldn't mind losing a few pounds. So then there's the emotional piece. So that's been my bigger reset, I think. Uh you know, I've been navigating some heavier stuff in my relationships and my friendships, things that just don't feel light and easy. And I found myself in that place where your brain is spinning, you're replaying conversations, you're trying to make sense of things, feeling everything at once, and you just feel off. So as I've edited my book and kind of gone back through and added some more examples, I've been thinking a lot about the cold plunge that I've I've mentioned before. We've been going to this place called Reconnect, and um they have multiple therapies there. They have sauna and red light therapy and compression, and then they have this cold plunge. And honestly, the cold plunge was the part I resisted the most. I only did it because I signed up with my daughter as something that we could do together to ground us. And um, you know, it's part of the part of the therapy, so I I've done it, but it I've done it very begrudgingly at first. If you've ever done a cold plunge, maybe you know, or maybe it's not that way for you because it's not as horrible for everyone. I was sitting next to a lady the other night and she said, Yeah, for me, the cold plunge feels like nice cool sheets. And I was like, it does not feel like that to me. For me, you get in, your body's like, nope, get out, abort the mission. It's a terrible idea. You know, my breathing gets shallow, my body tenses, and everything in me wants to escape. And I even tell myself, this can't possibly be good for me. But I have noticed that if I stay and I focus on my breath, something starts to shift. My heart rate slows down, my body adjusts. And it's not that the water got warmer, it's that I stopped fighting it. And that's kind of what this week has looked like in a lot of ways. Not really fixing anything, but just staying long enough to regulate. So part of what I've been thinking about is friendships, how they change, how they evolve, how sometimes people we love see things completely differently than we do. And I think when we're younger, friendship feels easier. You're just in it together. But as we get older, people grow in different directions, different beliefs, different experiences, different ways of processing life. And sometimes that creates tension, and sometimes it creates distance, and sometimes it just feels hard. And I've talked to a lot of other people whose friendships are shifting as well. It's not just me. But it's hard, and it can feel lonely. What I keep coming back to is this idea that life is not either or, it's both and. You can love someone and feel hurt by them, you can feel grateful and completely exhausted, you can be hopeful and overwhelmed all at the same time. And I think for a long time I thought resilience meant choosing the better feeling. Stay positive, find the silver lining, move on. But real life doesn't work like that. Real life asks us to hold both. And sometimes resilience is staying in the heartache, staying in the negative emotions, sitting with it for a little bit and breathing through it and not trying to escape it right away. And the other thing I've noticed is that meaning shows up in these really small random moments. Like I'll be driving completely in my head, and suddenly the radio comes on and it's like I have the tiger or forever young or something ridiculously on the nose. And I'm like, okay, I hear you. Or I'll look up and they see a hummingbird or a rainbow. And I know there are people who would say that's coincidence, but for me it's not. I call it connection, I call it magic, I call it little reminders that life is speaking, if we're willing to notice. And I think part of this reset for me has also been just reflecting on who I am right now because I've been so many different versions of myself, different beliefs, different relationships, different seasons. And what I'm realizing is I'm not one fixed identity. I'm the sum of all of it. All the experiences, all the mistakes, all the growth. And so are you. So my joy reset is not about getting everything perfect. It's not about the beach in Mazat Lawn. It's about coming back to yourself. And sometimes that looks really simple. Taking a breath, going for a walk, eating something that actually fuels you, putting your phone down, texting someone you trust, or just sitting in the discomfort without trying to fix it right away. Because life isn't going to suddenly become light and easy just because it's spring break. But we can still create moments of reset inside of it. Not by controlling everything, but by coming back to ourselves. So wherever you are right now, whether things feel light or heavy or somewhere in between, you're not behind. You're just in it. And you've got what you need to move through it. One more thing. Date yourself. And I don't mean date yourself like you're old. I mean go on dates with yourself. That's one thing I've done this week that has been very different. I've done it really intentionally. Uh I have stayed in and watched some chick flicks and shows that that other people in my life might not enjoy. And I have gone out by myself. I on St. Patrick's Day, I went up to the local bar and sat at the bar and had corned beef and cabbage. And then a couple nights later, I went to the movies and saw the new Colleen Hoover movie that again, most of the people in my life would think was cheesy, but it was so good. Um went out to dinner, and it's kind of nice. I think that one of the things that I I do talk about this in my book, and I talk about it almost every day at work, is that loving yourself, you know, if we're always told to love ourselves, and that seems like such an awkward, weird thing to do. Like, how do I love myself? Oh, I'm so great. Or I mean, what what does that mean? Maybe a year ago I read Matthew Hussey's book, Love Life, and he talks about loving yourself as in nurturing yourself, nourishing yourself, caring for your own body, your own self as the first creature you were given to to nourish and care for. And I tell that to the new moms as they as they you know learn to feed their babies and all of that, that um, you know, put on your own oxygen mask first. Say it in the airplane. It's true, wherever we are, whoever we are. So that's what I've been trying to do intentionally, is just like spend time with myself, you know. Friendships don't always go as you wish they would. So I've been intentional about being my own best friend. Not to say that I don't also want to spend time with other people. I am a very social creature, but I've been really playing into that chart of the of the 5R method that I've been talking about. And again, the 5R resilience method is refresh, renew, release, reconnect, and rise. And so reconnect is kind of the the part that I've been really focused on in the in this week, I guess. Well, thanks for listening. And I'll see you next time.