Brutally honest time: I’m not exercising regularly (yet again).
I will grant that I’ve been noticeably busier in the last week or so, however the last trip I logged at the gym was Tuesday, May 9th. I don’t even know off-hand the last time I rowed (and there’s no point in looking it up, since it probably won’t be good).
This latest round of trying to build a better habit of exercising has, so far, not taken root as I had hoped. This is not to say that I’m abandoning the effort. I don’t see a need to give up because I’ve failed to implement the system.
The important thing is to reaffirm that I want to commit to it, then get back on the horse to try again.
Last week, I was passed over on a job opportunity for a more qualified candidate. Such is life, and I don’t bear any ill-thoughts for the results of the job search. I’m disappointed, but not soured by the experience. It’s an opportunity to learn and grow, and I find that more important to focus on than to give in to a fixed mindset of self-pity.
After the feelings of sadness ebbed, I found myself experiencing a different feeling – motivation. This has happened a few times in my life, and it was strange to be reaquainted with it. There have been a few critical moments in my life where I failed at something important, and that failure created a fire within that motivated me.
It happened when I climbed Mount Kenya in 2007 after I failed my summit in the summer of 2003 of a mountain in Alberta whose name I’ve forgotten.
It happened when I joined the Campus Response Team and became a Coordinator after I failed twice to be a residence don.
And it happened again last week when I wasn’t selected for the job. The self-critical sadness was overtaken by a motivation to go to the gym.
As I’ve written previously, It’s been a while since I’ve visited the gym. According to my fitness journal, the last time I was in the gym was around Hallowe’en. I’ve been rowing this last month a few times a week in the mornings, but I haven’t lifted iron in around five months.
Initially, I stopped going to the gym after my routine was disrupted by travelling to Scotland. Then I didn’t go out of laziness, and then I didn’t go because I didn’t feel like I could justify going to the gym when I was supposed to be marking assignments and prepping my lectures. By the time December rolled around I had regained my weight, but I also proposed to my fiancee, and started the planning process for moving out of my apartment. Along the way, I was tired from a lack of sleep and dissatisfied with what I saw in the mirror. Yet, it was never enough to overcome my inertia.
Failing to get the job was the final push I needed to hit the gym. Maybe I needed a physical outlet to vent some frustration. Maybe it was a form of punishment. I’d like to think it was something more constructive – I accepted that I failed but I also saw that I could do better next time. It is within my power to learn from the experience and grow. The failures seemed to stack until it hit a critical mass; a line was crossed that set off the warning bells that I was heading in a direction I didn’t want to go.
It was time to make the first step and correct my course.
I vlog occasionally for my buddy’s YouTube channel, Artpress, and posted this immediately after I got out of the gym.
So, I hit the gym and pumped some iron. I was nervous to go back as a beginner again, and overcoming inertia was incredibly uncomfortable, but I did it.
Now the trick is to keep it up. That’s, perhaps, the greater challenge I face.
As the title says, I need more sleep. It should surprise no one that sleep is good for you and you generally feel better getting more of it.
And yet, I’m terrible at it. I’ve known for a while I’m terrible at managing sleep, but wearing a Fitbit over the last year really helped quantify how terrible I am.
Here is a typical week for me back in mid-October, 2016. As you can see, I was averaging less than 6-hours a week, and I would occasionally punctuate my sleepiness with a crash that would waste half a day by recuperating. By the end of the academic term, I was turning into a zombie. Things were starting to slide, I felt irritable, my weight had gone up; basically everything bad about not getting sleep was happening. The only thing that thankfully did not happen was falling asleep behind the wheel.
A small part of me wore my fatigue like a badge of honour. It was the natural consequence of hustling and being busy. The problem with this is it was impressing no one, it was wearing me out, and it was pissing people off who I was failing to deliver to on my promises.
Something needed to change.
… And the Clock Strikes Twelve – New Year, New Rules
While I’m not a big new year’s resolutions guy, I saw the start of January as a good time to try and reclaim my sleeping habits. I had wound down a bunch of my obligations, finished teaching, and was going to spend less time commuting for a long-distance relationship (the fiancee was moving back to my city), so January made sense to focus on cultivating a better sleeping habit.
Step one in any major change is to identify and isolate the variables you want to modify, and track the delta from your baseline. After all, you can’t change what you don’t measure.
I set 7-hours as a good goal to strive towards as it was more sleep than I was used to but not an unreasonable jump that would set me up for failure. I decided to track each day’s worth of sleep as a binary yes-no check in my notebook. The Fitbit would auto-track my sleep, and I would manually log my sleep to ensure I was consciously paying attention to sleep. I modified the Bullet Journal method and tracked the days I got less than 7-hours of sleep (alongside the days I read, and the days I exercised).
After one month, I look back at my progress.
For privacy reasons, I’ve blocked out my calendar notes.
Yikes.
Needless to say, if January is my baseline, then at least I have nowhere to go but up. I hit my target four times all month. My reading habit was fairly strong, and my exercise is still abysmal.
Light on the Horizon
There is one thing that has changed in February so far that has given me hope: my fiancee has started a new job.
As of writing, she’s in her first week at her new job, and I have only now given notice to my apartment managers that I will be moving in with her, so I’m spending a few nights a week at her place to help support her as she starts the job. This includes groceries, errands, and taking care of our dog.
Her new job is a few cities over, so she needs to commute about an hour each way, meaning she needs to get up before me and hit the road before I normal would wake up. As a consequence, she needs to follow a fairly strict bed time while she adjusts to the new schedule.
At one point, I would have let her go to bed, then I would have gone to bed whenever I felt like it, and set my own alarm. But, in the spirit of supporting her (and wanting to spend quality time with her), I’ve been going to bed at the same time as her, and getting up with her to tend to the dog’s morning needs.
The days where I’ve gotten 7+ hours of sleep have been the greatest I’ve felt in a long time.
Wednesday would have been 7-hours if I hadn’t had restless sleep. The Fitbit subtracts your restless period from the total duration of sleep.
Obviously, it’s too early to suggest that I’ve got my habit down, but subjectively I can report feeling better overall. I have wanted to wake up early for some time now, and getting up with my partner has felt great. I have time to enjoy my morning coffee while I read or listen to the news, and not feeling rushed out the door has lifted my spirits. Ideally, I want to keep this going, so it’ll be interesting to see how the system adapts to other obligations in my life (working at the bar being the harshest pressure on my sleep schedule).
I know that rationally, sleeping is good. It’s good for mental clarity, it’s good for decision-making, it’s good for general health as well as weightloss. But knowing the facts has so far proven to be a challenge for me. Perhaps focusing on my relationship and supporting my partner’s success is just the motivation I’ve needed to force me to take better care of myself.
I’ve posted a fewtimesrecently about how I’ve been incredibly slack on keeping up my (lack of) fitness habit. The addition of teaching was enough for me to abandon fitness as a priority. There are obvious costs associated with this, such as poorer health and eating habits, but there is also the financial cost that most people are aware of, and I don’t think I’ve really appreciated the magnitude of until now.
Since July, I’ve been paying for my membership to the gym without going. This cost shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. At various points since July, I’ve been aware that the fees were being applied to my credit card each month. On reflection, I realized how much of a “death by 1,000 cuts” scenario this is. During each month’s charge, I rationalized that the cost is fairly low. Because it wasn’t breaking the bank, it was easier to excuse the bad habit.
Yet, it all adds up:
August – monthly fee
$11.30
September – monthly fee
$11.30
September – bi-annual equipment fee
$20
October – monthly fee
$11.30
November – monthly fee
$11.30
December – monthly fee
$11.30
Total (CAD):
$76.50
If you don’t include any interest accrued, I’ve spent a little over $75 to not go to the gym. There are two ways of looking at it. Either, $75 has been the cost of inaction (not going, or not cancelling my membership), or $75 has been what I spent to sit at home and do other things (opportunity cost). Regardless of how I frame it, I’m out $75 with little to show or account for it.
I suppose the obvious next step is to create a solution to this problem. With the new year and my birthday rapidly approaching, it makes sense to use this as an excuse to erase the bad history and start fresh. I want to, however, learn from this experience. It’s important that I reflect intentionally because otherwise I’ll be doomed to repeat the behaviour.
I don’t have a nifty solution to this at present. I merely wish to make this observation public to hold myself accountable and get myself thinking about what I can do about it.
This term has been killer for me. I say “term” as a reflection of my added teaching load I’ve had since September. I’ve been musing recently that I think I finally hit my stretch/break point. Balancing all of my separate obligations is finally starting to test my ability to keep all the balls in the air. In sum, these are the priorities I can think of off the top of my head:
Full time job at the college
Part time job at the bar
Part time job teaching
Treasurer of the ethics board I sit on
Podcasting
Maintaining this blog
Daily art project
Monthly mutual-improvement group meetings
Maintaining a long distance relationship
2016 reading challenge (42 book finished as of last night)
These are just the things I’m managing to keep in the air. Of course, to make space for these things, I’ve had to slack on some other priorities, namely:
Sleep (I’m averaging about 5.5 hours per night)
Nutrition (scaled back for budget reasons)
Gym (I’ve had a hard time justifying going for myself when I should be working)
Video game time (yes, this is a weird one, but I want more guilt-free downtime)
Other social time with friends (I rarely see friends outside of work or meetings)
These aren’t meant to be humble-brags. I’m not one that thinks of “busy” as a badge of honour. I know that busy people are notoriously unreliable in my circles. There is a saying that if you want something done, give it to a busy person. This is perhaps true in some cases, but in my experience the vast number of busy people tend to be chronically flakey on showing up and late on deadlines for deliverables.
Thankfully, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. As of writing, I will be delivering my last lecture this week, and by December 21st I will be done with all course work grading. Shortly after that, I’ll be on holidays from the College until the new year. I’ll still have shifts at the bar, but those are select evenings.
Other aspects will change as well. Podcasting will go on a holiday hiatus; the daily art project ends at the end of December; and the long distance relationship will move back to a local distance relationship. I will finally have some breathing room. I plan to use that time to reflect on my obligations and regroup. My birthday is coming up, and I always take that time to reflect on the past year as well as my current state of affairs with an eye towards my future. This will be a well-deserved holiday break, when I finally get some breathing room.
Welp! That streak didn’t last very long. Last week I wrote how I proudly went to the gym the previous week, and how I was looking forward to trying to maintain that pace. I’m sad to report that I did not go to the gym last week. And it’s important that I stay transparent about this. It’s been hard trying to find a balance these last few months. When I wasn’t working three jobs, I found it relatively easy to go to the gym at least twice per week. Now, I can’t manage going once.
I can’t blame the job fully on this. Part of the reason for my poor performance is the lack of sleep. I have poor discipline to go to bed at a reasonable time, so things tend to compound from there. Poor sleep leads to decision fatigue, and then it becomes easy to excuse all sorts of bad habits – further bad sleep, poor nutrition, procrastination, etc.
These failures of mine have been harsh but incredibly instructive. I’ve learned two important things about myself: I’ve learned where my limit is for how much I can juggle at any one time, and I learned a bit more about my priorities. I learned that I need structures and rules in place if I have any chance of sticking to a plan for progress. Present-Me is very bad at self-regulation and is prone to making all sorts of bad decisions. Present-Me is short-sighted, lazy, and pleasure-seeking. I want to prioritize health and fitness, but when it’s time to deliver, my priority tends to favour pleasurable activities (I’m looking at you, YouTube!).
A tired cliche is that the first step is to admit you have a problem. In this case, I have a problem when it comes to managing myself. Not sure where to turn from there, but at least we’ve drilled down to the bedrock. Let’s see where I can take this.
I finally returned to some non-zero fitness activity last week! It’s not exactly awe-inspiring, but it’s better than what I’ve done in the past two months. My last log entry for the gym was August 25th. In August, I had two trips to the gym, and then nothing prior to that since before my trip to Scotland in July. It’s a gross understatement to say that I fell off the wagon.
Last week, I forced myself to hit the gym for a light workout on Monday. “Light” in this case means limiting myself to 60-80% of my previous set weights, and only committing to 3 sets of each exercise. I knew I was going to have muscle soreness this week, so I went easy on myself in order to re-acclimate myself to lifting. While I’ve lost some momentum compared to July, it was good to return to the gym.
My second round of exercise this week was a home-based round on the rowing machine at my girlfriend’s place. I did a fairly leisurally row of a little over 5 kilometres in 30 minutes. Again, I wasn’t looking to impress anyone, but merely to dip my toe back into the game and see what happened.
The real test will be whether I continue my progress into next week. The hard part about overcoming weakness of the will is shrugging off the guilt you feel when you know you mess up. The best remedy I’ve come up with is to forgive myself for my past mistakes (not going to the gym) and moving on to do better next time. The only thing you can do is to reset the counter and start from scratch.
I’ve finally hit week 8 for the course I’m teaching! At the college I work at, many of the schools have adopted a 7:1:7 model of course delivery, including the School of Liberal Studies. This means that the 15-week term is broken down into two seven week blocks and a break week in the middle. It’s like a traditional reading week, except it’s a free pass for students. They get a week to recharge, catch up, or enjoy a lull in their workload. While this usually elicits a “kids these days” shake of the fist from people, I fully support the break week. Many students are first-generation college kids, meaning they are coming from families that may or may not have had the academic support to help them through school. The transition to college is a big leap, so a break week helps ensure the students have the support they need to succeed. I prefer to set my students up for success, than to wear them down through a war of attrition.
This also means that I don’t teach this week, and *I* get a break, too! As you’ve been reading the last few weeks, a break is exactly what I need. This will give me a chance to prep, mark and feel slightly less pressure during the week. This also means that I might *gasp* actually get out to the gym this week. No promises, though. But, here’s hoping…
This post is “late,” and there is really no excuse for it. There are reasons of course: when I created a backlog of posts, I didn’t feel the pressure to write weekly, so things slipped in my mind. But that’s not a good excuse for this being written about an hour after it should have gone live.
A colleague of mine just commented to me “You look tired!” Which is true – I am tired. I’ve been tracking my sleep since about November of last year thanks to my trusty Fitbit, and in that year I found I get an average of five and a half hours of sleep per night. That’s well below the recommended eight hours. Until now, I’ve managed things fairly well, but with the addition of the third job (teaching) and maintaining a long distance relationship, things are really starting to strain for me. I’ve noticed it for a few weeks now, but this weekend things are starting pile up.
I napped more this weekend than I have in probably the last two years. I almost never nap. I hate napping, in fact. It feels like a waste of time, when I could be using that time (daylight) to do something more desirable than tending to my body’s needs. And yet, this weekend I found myself napping for at least an hour each day in the afternoon. I also elected to cut time short with my girlfriend to tend to some much needed cleaning at my apartment. The alternative would have been more social engagements and an early morning commute back home to go to work. She understood that I needed the time away and supported my decision. It’s why she’s a great gal!
My focus has been off lately, too. I keep talking about how I want to go back to the gym, but I haven’t acted on it. Call it failure to plan, call it failure to action on an item, but I suspect the real culprit is depleted will power. No, I don’t mean that I’m not willing myself to the gym. I mean I think have decision fatigue. It’s a long accumulation of factors that have finally hit a tipping point: poor sleep, poor nutrition, too many demands on my cognitive workload, stress from things in life, added stress from social media, etc. It creates a feedback loop that further breaks me down. Because I don’t sleep well and still try to contend with normal daily activities, my will power and motivation wane; this leads to poor choices and procrastination through my favourite habit (watching YouTube videos), which keeps me awake, which makes it harder for me to do the things I need to do, which weakens my ability to force myself to go to bed at a reasonable time, which leads to lesser amounts of sleep, and the cycle continues.
I don’t have an obvious solution to this problem. What I need to do is to critically evaluate my obligations, priorities and goals to find a better fit with my habits. That will take longer than one blog post to figure out, but for the meantime, the best I can do is monitor my health and situation to guard against large scale system crashes.
A Paramedic's Notebook 