Tag Archives: habits

Broken sleep cycle

I just had a long afternoon nap. Long enough that I’m going to struggle sleeping tonight. It’s a vicious cycle when my sleep patterns get messed up. It never starts intentionally, a late night where I can’t fall asleep is all it takes to start me off. Then suddenly everything goes out of whack.

This afternoon I set an alarm to stop me from sleeping too long, but I turned it off and didn’t get up. That’s not like me, and so it tells me that I needed it. But now what? What happens tonight when I try to get a decent night’s sleep?

I’m someone who used to do well on 5-6 hours a night, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve needed more. I fought it for a while, but realized I was less productive and so let myself sleep longer. Over the summer I was getting closer to 7 hours and very frequently waking up before my alarm. Now the alarm is essential, and my time in bed is much longer than my time actually sleeping.

It’s hard to battle because part of it is insomnia that I seem to have no control over, and part of it is the patterns I end up following that promotes rather than reduces my insomnia… so I don’t help myself.

Workouts help, routines help, and discipline helps. I’m sharing this because I’ve learned that if I want to change something, making it public is more effective than trying to quietly convince myself that I’ll change. I need to share that I’m going to work at building consistency into my schedule, and therefore help rather than hinder my sleep struggles.

Changing routines on weekends, (like writing this so late, and still not having had my workout), doesn’t help. Late night scrolling on my phone when I can’t sleep doesn’t help. Long naps do not help. Sharing this with you now does. Wish me luck fighting this recent bout of insomnia.

When is your next workout?

Even without dealing with a pandemic, this is a crazy time of year for educators. I will avoid sharing what time I’m writing this, but let’s just say it has been a long day! I bet 2/3rds or more educators can’t believe it’s only Thursday, and not the weekend yet!

So with all the craziness of September, who has time for a workout?

You do!

Until January 2019, my pattern was to stop working out during my busy times at school, like September and report card time. Then I realized that fair weather fitness wasn’t fitness. I decided that if I wanted to be healthy, I had to be consistent. So I stopped letting ‘busy’ stop me from working out.

The result: more energy, and more to give! More vibrancy, and a great feeling that I’m actually caring for both my current and future self.

Busy times aren’t times to push heavy weights, run longer, or ride faster. Its dedicating small windows of time to self care. It’s about raising the heartbeat, walking when you’re too tired to run, and maintaining a level of fitness at a time when it’s easy to forget to take care of yourself.

If fitness isn’t a priority when you are ‘too busy’ then it’s not a priority. Period.

You deserve to treat yourself better than that. So, when is your next workout?

Turning off to find balance

It’s that time of year again when the ‘To Do’ list at work is growing. The last two days I’ve left work and then just kept working. I know that’s the time of year, but I also know it can keep going and that there is always more to do.

I try to use exercise and meditation to help me turn off, and I’ve moved these activities from morning to evening, but I’m not sure I like this strategy?

What do people do to ‘turn off’ work? What strategies allow a separation between work and home? I don’t mind taking the extra time at the start of the year, but I’ve had about 3 years of imbalance that have left me feeling like I am not doing this well.

Writing helps, it’s my way of unpacking ideas. What else do people do?

Covid dreams

I woke up this morning from a dream in which the entire focus was on getting the proper face protection to do the task I wanted to do. I can’t remember the task, only the concern for not being safe.

I often have dreams where the preparation for the task takes over the dream. This goes all the way back to being a pizza delivery driver in university. I’d dream of getting in my car to go to work and my car would only go in reverse. The whole dream would be about trying to get to work driving backwards.

Obviously these are stressful dreams. I can control stress in my waking life, can’t do it in my sleep. It’s not surprising that months into this pandemic, I’d have dreams related to the challenges we face. Going back to work last week has added to this.

Dealing with Covid-19 isn’t something normal. It’s a unique challenge that adds stress to our daily experience. Being around other people used to be easier. Understanding how to give others their personal space used to be easier. Supporting one another used to be easier.

Stress responses are not designed to be triggered again and again over long periods of time. While I was bent on the idea that this isn’t the ‘new normal’ and we need to remember that things will get better… the timeline for change is too long to not call this normal. We need to normalize mask wearing, social distancing, covering up coughs and sneezes, and staying home when we don’t feel well. We need to make this normal enough that it isn’t a stress, but just what we do.

I look forward to dreams where I’m wearing a mask, but the concern of it isn’t the focus of the dream.

Slowly getting back to my routine

Morning meditations, writing, and workouts have started back for me as I head into the routines of school days. While I’ve enjoyed the time to sleep in, and move my schedule around, I also missed the consistency of starting my day in the same way. What I haven’t yet done is get through the routine in a timely way. Yesterday, I started working right when I got up. Today I spent a fair bit of time distracted.

I know I’ll get ‘dialled in’ soon, but it has been a slow start for me. It’s weird how this is totally something I want to do, yet it’s still taking me time to get to it. What is it about our nature that we like routines yet we take so much time to get into them? Is it just me, or do others find the same?

Back to time restricted eating

Other than about 6 weeks of Keto a couple years ago, and a few training diets more than half a life ago, I’ve never really dieted. That said, for over a year and a half now, I’ve tried to practice time restricted eating (also called Intermittent Fasting) five days a week – Sunday to Thursday night.

I have only been doing 14 hours fasting and much of that was sleeping. What it primarily does is restrict my unhealthy snacking after dinner, and delays breakfast, which I’ve never enjoyed preparing and eating.

Covid has messed up my schedule, summer made it worse. My good eating habits that I developed with restricting my eating window have all disappeared. So, along with my wife, we’ve decided to set a strict 5-hour window for eating for the next few weeks. We have only water, and a morning black coffee during our 19 hour no-eating restriction. When school starts I will move to 16-8, increasing my eating window to 8 hours.

It was weird to start this on a holiday to Kelowna. It limited our schedule of wine and cider tasting tours, but we filled our days with hikes and visits to the beach, and neither of us struggled with hunger after day 2. The only oddity was doing a long drive with no snacks.

There is a lot of research being done on the benefits of time restricted eating. I won’t go into it now, but I will say that it has three really positive affects for me:

1. It cuts out unhealthy snacking.

2. It stops me from getting ‘hangry’ – angry when I’m hungry. My sugar levels seem to stay in check and food (or lack of it) doesn’t come with mood swings.

3. It eliminates breakfast, which I don’t enjoy eating. (Breakfast is breaking the night’s fast, it’s not a morning meal time… technically I’m having breakfast whenever I choose to start eating after sleeping.)

I’m less than a week in, and I’m not sure this 5-hour eating window will be enough when I start pushing myself on my morning workouts again… but I’m really happy to have restarted my time restricted eating.

Making time for great conversations

In the last year and a half I’ve been making time for an almost daily workout, and daily writes (here) as well as daily meditations. (See: My healthy living goals year-end reflection, with 5 key tips.)

On Tuesday I recorded a podcast with Valerie Irvine on Zoom, which I finally posted today. This was my first podcast since sharing my conversation about learning at home during the pandemic, with Dave Sands in April. I would like to podcast weekly because I love the conversations and they help me think more, and more deeply, about education and learning. However, I’ve got to figure out a schedule that works and is consistent. I’m someone that needs my routines in order to make things work. I’m not a multitasker, and I know this about myself.

I watch things like this and think that maybe I have ADHD tendencies. 😉

@heygudeI forget what I was supposed to be doing when I decided to make this ##adhd ##attentiondeficitdisorder ##add ##attentiondeficienthyperactivitydisorder

♬ original sound – erikgude

My point is, (while I still remember it), that I have to create uninterrupted time to have these conversations, and also to produce and share the podcasts. I’m on holidays now and trying to produce the recording in 15-20 minute chunks made the process twice as long. It won’t get easier when school starts. But I love having these conversations and want to have the regularly. Here are three more of my favourites podcasts from the archives:

Remi Kalir on educator agency, Josh Abrams on Meridian Academy, and Shelly Sanchez Terrell on bringing passions into reality.

There aren’t any I’ve done so far that I haven’t listened to after the fact at least twice. I’m going to figure out a schedule, probably all done on the weekends, and make this as routine as I have my other goals that I track. I need to make regular time for more of these great conversations.

Going dark next week

Starting tomorrow I’m shutting down for a week. No Daily-Ink, no Twitter, no LinkedIn, no Facebook, no Snapchat, no Tik Tok, no social media or news.

I’m taking a full break, and plan on leaving my phone in a drawer when I’m home. I’m hoping to do some daily writing (though not sharing it online) and I think next Sunday I’ll report out on how much I did… public accountability works well as a motivating factor for me.

In some ways I’m very good at moderation, and in other ways I’m not. Locking my attention into news or an app can be something that undermines my attention for too long, and now that I’m off work for the holidays I’m allowing this to happen a bit too much.

So let’s see what a cold turkey experience does to these habits. Starting midnight tonight (Sunday morning) and ending midnight next week Saturday, I’m going dark.

Catch you on the flip side.

Reciprocal influence

After a discussion with my Uncle Joe (Truss) last night on the topic of free will, I’ve reread my posts:

The Bell Curve of Free Will

And:

What does in mean to be conscious?

Joe said a couple interesting things, “Freedom comes with restraints.” And, “We influence the world and the world influences us.”

I speak of restraints on freedom in my bell curve post, but I don’t say this explicitly. I think restrictions to our freedom of choice can be circumstantial, or based on how virtuous we live our lives, or by things like our physical and emotional health. These restraints to our freedom can make us feel like we have less choice.

The simple, yet profound statement that, “We influence the world and the world influences us,” is one that I’m interested in deconstructing. When we react to the environment or situation we are in, we ultimately change that environment or situation. There are many experiments that prove the observer changes the experiment. We don’t live in a vacuum, and our interactions with the world alter that world, which alters our future interactions.

An example I’m thinking of is a crisis situation where the person in charge is calm and thoughtfully responsive vs the same crisis situation with a panicked and frantic leader. The crisis can be well handled or escalated. In both cases the leaders work in feedback loops that can help them deal with the situation at hand appropriately or have the situation become unmanageable. The leader’s actions (or inaction) changes the situation, which in turn influences their next action or reaction.

How often do we get stuck in a feedback loop of reciprocal influences between what we feel we can do next and how the outside world reacts? We move through situation after situation feeling like we lack choice and freedom because the restraints on us limit our responses… which in turn limits what we believe can happen next, and what our next actions can or need to be.

There are times when we do what we need to do, or feel obligated to do, and don’t recognize that we are in a feedback loop that continually limits our choices and decision-making. This can be especially true in work and family situations where past relationships and patterns of interactions influence our likelihood of reacting similarly the next time.

“I better do it this way or Peter will be upset.”

“Amy is going to complain about this no matter how hard I try.”

“My brother won’t want to join us, I won’t bother asking.”

We get into pattern ruts, habitual grooves where we get stuck limiting our own choices and freedom to do things differently.

I realize now that my thinking is less about free will, and more about how our habits dictate our future thinking. Our habits influence our world, our world changes and we react by reinforcing the same habits that can ultimately limit our future choices. In some ways we construct a limited future based on our habits, which emboldens our choice to keep these limiting habits. (You can also replace the word ‘habits’ with ‘addictions’.)

“We influence the world and the world influences us.”

Is this a reciprocal relationship, or is it one where we can choose to have more influence? I think there are countless self-help books written to suggest that we have more influence than we believe we do… we just need to make conscious choices rather than letting our past actions and habits limit our ability to influence the world around us.

Maintenance mode

For the last couple weeks my fitness regimen has been about doing the bare minimum. I have at least 2 days of working out before taking a day off, and when I come back from a day off, I double my knee Physio exercises to make up for the lost day. I do an abdominal exercise between Physio sets. I do my cardio, but don’t push it with respect to effort, (I do this before my Physio). And then I pick just one body part and do three sets of a single exercise for those muscles, and I’m done.

Sometimes we need to just maintain the habit of doing something, without worrying about constantly getting better. Because the alternative is breaking the habit and going backwards. That was my old pattern. Rather than playing the long game of consistently staying healthy and keeping a good schedule, I’d go all-in and dedicate a month or two to ‘getting fit’, then I’d get busy. I’d stop the fitness habit, and ‘let things slide’ until the next health-kick of one to three months comes along… until the next busy schedule when I can’t find the time.

Maintainance mode is tough. It isn’t just going through the motions, it’s an effort that’s actually harder than when you are motivated and push your body hard. It is more difficult to do just one set of something like chin ups, when you are doing it just to get it done, rather than feeling inspired. It’s challenging to not waste time between sets, and to keep going when your heart rate is elevated but your enthusiasm isn’t.

Convincing yourself that you are doing something good for yourself when all you are really doing is maintaining the status quo is uninspiring. But so is doing nothing. So are excuses. So is the feeling of disappointment when you let things slide. Letting things slide is easier. It isn’t better. Sometimes the hard work is just showing up.

The trick is tracking the habit and not breaking it. The key is that you make the cost of breaking the habit feel more painful than not doing so. My motivation to write this is that it’s 6:20am, I’ve been up for over an hour and I haven’t done my workout yet. I am procrastinating and yet I know I’m going to work out. I know that I must… even if my energy level is low. Even if I’m just going through the motions.

Motivation isn’t hard when you are inspired. Motivation is tested when inspiration is lacking. Motivation is easy when you feel enthusiastic, but not when it is driven by a desire to just keep the habit going. That’s when the excuses creep in. What’s one more day off going to hurt? Turns out it’s easy to make that justification in the moment, but it ends up being a deal breaker; It changes a habit into an old habit; It undermines future goals and possibilities.

Maintainance mode sounds like you are just turning on the cruise control and letting things happen on their own… just going through the motions. In fact, maintainance mode is a slog, it’s work, it’s staying the course when you want to drift. It’s the hard work of being motivated when motivation is lacking. It’s the difference between keeping a habit and remembering the habit you wish you kept.

Now it’s time to work out.