Tag: Health

Morning Productivity

I had an interesting morning last Tuesday.  As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve been getting up early with my fiancee.  She typically leaves for work around 7am, and I don’t need to leave for work until around 9am, which leaves me with almost 2-hours to fill with how I wish.

I could go back to sleep and work on hitting my 7-hours of sleep per day goal (as of writing, I’m still failing on this goal, but only narrowly).

Or, I could try to use this quiet time to do some things distraction-free.

*If my fiancee is reading this, I mean distraction from technology and daily pressures.  Love you!*

I’ve been steadily adopting the latter option, and last Tuesday I had an amazingly productive morning.

First, I read for around 30 minutes.  I’ve been working my way through Tim Ferriss’s new book “Tools of Titans” which is hefty 700 pages.

Then, I opened up the Coursera app on my phone and did a few lecture videos on an introductory calculus course I’m working on, including practice problems on functions.  That was around 15-20 minutes.

Then I went upstairs to row for 10 minutes.  I started rowing two weeks ago in the mornings and I’ve already noticed an improvement – I’m less winded after the workout and my hips are not nearly so tight afterwards.  I’ll probably write a post about rowing soon, but for now it’s a small habit I’m trying to instill during the work week.

After rowing, I recorded two vlogs.  I recorded a short vlog for Art Press, my podcasting partner’s side-channel that features vlogs from artists who also exercise.  Then, I recorded my daily vlog that I upload privately to my channel as my version of a diary.  The two vlogs took me 5-7 minutes to record.

Then, I finally showered and got ready for work.

Reflection

I know that starting your day on the right foot is a key to success.  It sets you up with a positive mindset that you are accomplishing your goals and using you time well.  I certainly don’t want to do things for the sake of being busy.

I suppose I’m being a little arrogant by sharing this information within my social media feeds – I’ve been tweeting my progress on rowing, and sharing my small productivity wins as they happen.  Am I just looking for approval from others?  Does sharing this really keep me motivated and accountable?  Would I enjoy the process less if I didn’t share (boast) about it?  Am I looking to inspire others?  Lead by example?  Make them jealous?  I don’t have good answers for this.

I also don’t know whether I can keep this up regularly.  This system (I’m calling it a system for the sake of the argument) is fragilely held afloat because of my fiancee’s schedule.  If that were to change, I’m fairly confident I wouldn’t be able to wake up at 6am on my own – I have about of decade of anecdotal evidence to support this.  Also, will I be able to keep this pace?  Exercise, reading, studies, and vlogging takes up a lot of time; will I be able to guarantee that I’ll have enough time and mental focus everyday to continue this process.  Again, I don’t have an answer to this.

Time will tell.  After all, as of writing, I only have one data point to draw an inference from.  It’s important to not get too far ahead of myself and focus on hitting my targets tomorrow.

 

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

I Really Need to Sleep More

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

We shall see where things go from here.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Quitting and Simplifying

A theme is emerging for January for me, so let’s continue our exploration of simplifying and cutting back.  My last two posts discussed how I’m shelving my goal to be a paramedic.  Getting engaged and reflecting on 2016 didn’t just lead me to the conclusion that I need to orientate my future towards stability for my fiancé and I.  I also reflected on how I felt at the end of the year about my life.

I concluded that I felt tired.

The Cult of Busy

I hate that I’m so busy.  I fully admit that I sometimes use my busyness as a humblebrag to signal my “hustle,” but truthfully, I rationally know that being busy isn’t a good thing.  When you are busy, the things that you prioritize begin to slip.  When you are busy, you sacrifice sleep.  When you are busy, you half-ass things.  When you are busy, you miss deadlines.  And on, and on.

By the end of December, I was a walking zombie just marking time until business wound down for all of my projects.  I was average around 5.5 hours of sleep per night and felt perpetually in a daze.

Mid-last year, I received an offer to be the Vice Chair of a grants committee I was on.  It was a potential huge step forward for me – it would be an important role for a prestigious community organization, it would groom me to Chair the committee, and it would give me access to important community movers and shakers.  Getting that kind of network exposure is like gold for the young professional.

I replied honestly that I was interested but unsure if I could commit more than one year, on the assumption that I would apply to a paramedic program in February 2017, which could lead me to leaving the region for school.  We set the conversation aside in the interim until I had a better idea of what my future looked like.

In December, the conversation came back up.  Having just proposed to my fiancé, I hadn’t yet had a chance to consider how the proposal will concretely change the next few years of my life.  I asked for the rest of the month to think things over and I’d get back to the Chair.

Being Strangled by Busy Creep

In reflecting on 2016, especially the last 4-months, I realized that my calendar suffered from busy creep.  I had over-committed myself and said yes to too many things.  Keep in mind, I love novelty and experiencing new projects.  I jump at the opportunity to learn something new and help friends out.  But in my quest to learn, I had lost sight of any sense of vision for what I wanted to accomplish, and through a death-by-thousand calendar entries, I had stretched myself too thin.  Working full time at the College, teaching, and working some nights at the bar was enough to keep me occupied, but I am also the Treasurer of a Board, regularly podcasting, blogging, maintaining a long-distance relationship, etc.  I was building a huge sleep deficit, gaining weight, and consistently making bad decisions (YouTube being my drug of choice late at night).

I tried simple hacks to help me, such as installing a light timer on my wifi router to force myself offline.  Truthfully, the only thing I needed to hack was my calendar.  After thinking it through, I realized that after having completed a full term as a grants committee member, now was a good time to bow out gracefully and resign my post.  I drafted a letter to the Chair, explaining my situation, and resigned from the committee.

A Time For Reflection

The Chair, being a wonderful person, accepted my resignation without question and offered to keep the door open if I wished to return in the future.  I valued my experience on the committee, but I realized that it didn’t fit with my ultimate and immediate priorities – my health and my relationships.

I still feel bad about the resignation.  I had hoped that my anxiety and reservations about sending the email was the result of actually sending a resignation.  However, after sending the email, I’m still feeling down about the decision.  It was a great opportunity and could have lead to some amazing future possibilities.  Worse yet, I feel like I’m quitting or letting others down.  I know rationally that this is not true, but I can’t shake the feeling nonetheless.  I suppose this is the equivalent of a busyness detox – the feeling will fade over time as I start to feel more in control of my time and life.

The grants committee was only a tiny portion of my calendar.  It amounted to about a month and a half of moderate work per year.  Cutting this from my plate will not be the magic solution to my problems.  I see this as the first step to getting my house in order.  Truthfully, I don’t really have a lot of direction at the moment.  Once I decided to shelve paramedicine, I lost my direction and momentum.  I need to find something else to aim at and work towards professionally.  That is one area that will require some reflection.

But more basic that that, I need to reflect on my values.  I don’t have a good answer yet as to what I feel my core values are at the moment.  Without that level of self-awareness, I’m likely to allow unfocused busyness to creep back into the picture.  Without values to act as a filter, I’m likely to accept whatever opportunities come my way irrespective of whether they add value to my life or further my goals (or if they are time sinks that steal time away from more important things).  Because something sounds cool, or because a friend asked me shouldn’t be the only reason why I say “yes.”

Once again, I don’t have a pithy way to wrap this up; this will be a work in progress for me.  In the meantime, it’s probably time I get back to work.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Reflection – The Cost of a Lack of Routine

I’ve posted a few times recently 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.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Blog – Breathing Room

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.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Drones and Improving CPR Time

A friend of mine wrote a great piece last week on recent developments in making response times faster and more efficient through technology.  Drones can be outfitted with portable AED units and can be flown to the scene of a cardiac arrest to save precious minutes while advanced medical assistance is en route.   Check out Blair’s article here.

I also highly recommend visiting his blog for musings on medicine, journalism and anything else he’s got on his mind.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

 

 

Blog – Off and On the Wagon (Of Fitness)

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.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Fitness Update (Small Milestones)

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.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Blog – “You Look Tired”

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.