Health Challenge: Day 12

Boy does the time fly. It’s 12th day already.

The good thing is that I’m already getting into a habit of exercising and eating ‘good’ food and I finally stopped eating after 7 PM, which results in a better night sleep and waking up easier in the morning. The bad thing is that I still can’t get into the habit of getting up and going to sleep earlier, which results in a chaotic daily work schedule.

So the next thing is to create a daily ritual, that is easy to implement and follow daily.

Now, this is not something that I pulled out of my hat, I actually spent a couple of hours going through my journals, that I keep and write to on a regular basis, and found some interesting things. It seems that few times a year I hit this “Ideal” schedule, that let’s me accomplish enormous amounts of work and still feel pretty energized and happy.

Of course, after a while it all vanishes as unexpected as it appeared, but since today I never been able to understand or at least to notice the pattern that puts me into this working state or what happens to make it all stop immediately.

I’ve been reading “The Power Of Full Engagement” by T. Schwartz and it’s probably the book that you want to read before getting started anything.

According to Tony S., our life is not a beeline. We are more likely oscillatory than linear beings in an oscillatory universe. Rhythmicity is our inheritance. So in order to function at our full capacity and still feel fully engaged at what we are doing, we have to find a balance between spending/using your physical and emotional energy, and relaxing in order to regain it.

But the problem with most of us is that we can’t totally disconnect from work, even when we are relaxing.

For example, do you when you take your dog for a walk, keep making phone calls? Do you keep thinking about things that need to be done when you are spending time with your kids or friends?

That puts us neither on the “working” side of the scale, nor on the “relaxation.” You are more likely in this “Grey Zone” where your work and relaxation productivity is almost equal to zero.

The interesting thing is that this “Grey zone” leads to the most amazing phenomenon that Japanese call karoshi – death from work.

To stress the importance of relaxation time, here’s some interesting fact — according to the National Academy of Sciences, medical errors, many of them at least partly caused by fatigue among doctors, account for nearly 100,000 deaths a year, more than from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer and AIDS combined.

Why do I tell you all this? It’s because I noticed that the thing that got me off my ideal working states, was that I couldn’t disconnect from all the work and tasks, and to-do lists, and goals, and missions, and notes, and other BS.

For me it was impossible to just spend time with my girl, without thinking that there’s still 4 tasks on my “to-do” list. And this, of course, always led to over-burn.

So all this theory about balance between work and play was a huge “A-Ha!” moment for me, around which I’m now building my all daily schedules.

But let’s get back to the topic. Like I said, the biggest problem for me is getting to bed and waking up early.

I’ve been trying to get into the habit to start my day at at least 6 AM for as long as I can remember and ironically I never managed to do that.

So this time I’ve decided to set my alarm at 7 o’clock. Still, the main problem is that I usually get to bet at 2-3 AM and wake up at 9-10 AM which is a habit that is pretty hard to break.

Still it needs to be break and in order to do that, I’ve decided to sleep only 3 hours today, the reason being that when I go to be at 11 PM I would be dead asleep, once my head touches the pillow. If I manage to do that AND wake up at 7 AM tomorrow, everything else would probably take care of itself.

That brings as to our daily ideal schedule.

Like you see the whole day is build around work-relax idea. Every 90 minutes of work I am making a break, where I get some snack, drink water and do some physical activity. By the way, building physical activity into my schedule appears to be the most amazing thing. I’ve been doing it for a week now and it helps to improve concentration massively.

Also, I’m adding a little half-hour walk into my daily schedule mainly to wake up my body and prepare it for physical HIIT activity, which will follow the brisk walk.

I’m still thinking about how, where and when would it be reasonable to relax.

But I’ll leave that for tomorrow.

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