The last few trials have all been focused on trying to add things to my life. Unfortunately, they’ve had the side effect of throwing the habits I had in turmoil. I’ve been sleeping, eating, and managing my days poorly. Over the next few weeks, I hope to address those problems.
Fixing My Diet
Starting with the place I’ve made the most progress, my diet has already gotten better. Since most of my diet consists of what I bring in the house, it relies on what I buy at the grocery store. After a few weeks of delay, I’ve shifted back to what normal meals looked like prior to moving.
For breakfast, I have a small bowl of mixed nuts and a piece of dark chocolate. Still practicing intermittent fasting, I don’t eat breakfast until sometime between eleven and noon. With a lunch break to follow, I’ve switched back to a clean lunch of a few handfuls of mixed greens and tomatoes for a salad.
Getting these two meals under control helps me reign in on dinner, because why throw out what I just sacrificed for a bunk of junk food.
Lastly, when it comes to eating out, I tend to give myself more leeway with what I order. The goal in these cases is to limit how often I order from restaurants. Once or twice a week is more than enough.
The Core Five Habits
For a few years (past year maybe) now, I’ve held myself to five daily habits: reading a page from The Daily Stoic, a morning stretch routine, reading, creating, and meditating. Unfortunately, over the last few weeks, I’ve had a hard time keeping up with even one of these.
I’ve found this set of habits covers the majority of what I want to accomplish in a given day. Not all of them represent a perfect day, but doing at least a little bit in each helps to keep the wheels spinning.
This week, a major focus of mine has been to hit the minimum of these habits. If that means reading only a single page or writing a line, that’s progress.
Building these habits to compound on one another helped me a lot in the past, and so I’ve been focused on getting those routines back. Reading my Daily Stoic page right after waking up, and stretching while my coffee brews are just two easy habits I can tie to activities I do every day already.
The other three have more often than not become things to do right before bed, which has begun a problematic cycle.
A Root Problem – Sleep
One of the cruxes of my issues has been poor sleep. Time gets away from me, and I find myself staying up far too late, getting poor sleep, and struggling the next day. I then find myself too tired to make progress on various goals or habits after work, and thus put things off until late in the night. This leads to late nights catching up to where I want to be and continuing the cycle.
To remedy my issue, I plan to get myself into bed earlier. Easier said than done, but it’s an objective marker that I can keep track of.
Lately, my sleep schedule has been to go to bed between midnight and one. Ultimately, I’d like to find myself back to an 11 PM bedtime, but trying to dial things back too quickly isn’t likely to see success. For the next week, I want to shoot for being in bed before midnight. While it’s not a monumental change, it’s a start.
While my week has been focused on getting the above in order, there are still pieces I need to improve on. Getting my sleep schedule to a manageable level, something like eleven to seven will definitely help across the board. My workout schedule has been hit or miss the past few weeks and I’d like to get that in order.
Trying Out Before Buying In 