Writing Marathon - Day 1
About 5 months ago I began taking a notepad with me to therapy. It's not the first time I've done that, but I am doing so more consistently now. The reason for this is that while I spend much of the week distracted with one thing or another, the travel to therapy is generally focused on what it is I want to talk about. It's consciously stepping out of the numbness I often live in to check in with myself, to feel. It's so I have something to say when I get there. I find many thoughts I have of emotional import or revelation to be fleeting. Even non-emotional stuff. The more important it is, the more likely I am to forget it within minutes. The notepad is to jot down the core ideas so I can recall them later. The habit actually started with creative ideas coming to me on the way to therapy, now it's always emotional stuff. I keep it as a checklist to make sure I cover certain topics in therapy. It's also so I know what to write about in my journal later in the week. Neither of these things has worked out as well in practice though and a backlog gets created. At this point the backlog is quite long. I had intended to start addressing these things more intentionally in journal entries, but that quickly failed. So I've been mulling over the idea of just chain writing entries for several days straight, instead of once a week, to get all this stuff out there.
I like a lot of routine in my life. Ideally, I want 5-6 days of routine with 1-2 days where nothing is planned and I can just relax or do something different. It's good for me. Too much routine and I forget to see or talk to people, time flies and nothing outside my routine gets done. Too little routine and my physical and mental health suffer. I started taking a more aimed approach to creating a routine several months ago when Daniel moved in. It wasn't until January that I really got serious and I've begun to iterate on it now. It started with this spreadsheet to track my daily diet. It's not a list of what I eat, but rather a database of nutrition, logging with reasonable accuracy the calories and nutrients I intake. It took me a few months to put together the initial database to draw upon, and after that, each meal is calculated. From there I needed to settle on what I wanted my nutrition to look like - how many calories, what percentage breakdown of fats, carbs and protein, researching vitamins and minerals to see what amounts I should be getting, tracking the different types of fats etc. I always thought that sort of fine control over diet was excessive and for athletes, but I decided it was worth the effort in the short term to help me get a better handle on my weight.
I started off with a model based on body-types: endomorph, ectomorph, mesomorph. That seemed ok at first, but it was an absurd level of protein it wanted me to eat and a crazy low level of carbs. Adjusting to a higher fat diet was weird at first but felt ok, it was just about getting the unsaturated fats. Most of that comes from eating avocadoes regularly, and that's felt more like a treat then a restriction. I started going to the gym while this was going on. I saw initial improvement in my weight but then things stayed static early on and stayed there. So I decided I'd try a different balance next time around. My roommate is trying his own ideas on getting weight off he accumulated after too many work trips and he was discussing intermitent fasting. I was passingly familiar with it but never thought much of it. But I figured I'd give it a shot for awhile and see how it went, maybe try experimenting with a few different ideas every several weeks to see which my body responded best to. If you're not familiar, it has to do with keeping the body in ketosis longer by only eating within an 8 hour window each day.
I wasn't sure this would work for me at all because I'm home all day and boredom eating is a big problem. Exercising within ketosis is supposed to be great for fat burning. I don't take that sort of thing seriously as I believe in the idea that weight loss comes from burning more calories then you consume. But then I also thought, this is how I used to work out in college, though not intentionally. I went to the gym as soon as I got up and didn't eat until afterwards. I stopped doing that shortly after because my lower blood pressure did not like this idea and I'd get too light-headed on the treadmill early in the workout. In hindsight, I've also learned that snacking on a danish as my only food for several hours after a workout is a really terrible idea - probably held me back a lot in college. And considering how far I did get, it makes me wonder sometimes if I wasn't sabotaging myself.
Anyway, the problem to tackle was how to avoid the boredom eating. I know I can comfortably go 4-5 hours in the evening without eating, especially if I have a big dinner. But that still leaves a 4 hour window in the morning where I need to avoid eating...and my body is usually starving in the first 90 minutes. Well, I know that long bouts of cooking suppresses my appetite, as does exercise and being distracted/engrossed in something. The only one of these that could be consistent was exercise, so I'd go out for a long walk first thing when I woke up, preferably 2 hours. Get home around the time of the daily Warcraft reset, shower, do any Warcraft things I'd normally do immediately after reset. And then I'd've hit my eating window, or close enough I could kill a few minutes or begin cooking breakfast.
It's difficult to eat 3 meals in an 8 hour window, so I began to plan for 2 large meals. But I can only eat so much at a single sitting, so it turns out this made it easier to stay within the lower range of my daily calories instead of inching my way towards the maximum of that window via snacking and rationalizing cheats. Extra bonus, slightly lower food bill and less meals to cook for reduces the burden to cook as much every week. Results were fast and noticeable, lbs practically melted off the first 2 weeks. I've kinda plateaued since, but that could be other factors. One of which was going to the gym, so there could be a fat/muscle inversion going on to keep my weight static in the short term. I had to stop going out for walks as much because I was aggravating the achilles tendon on my left leg. My left leg does not seem to be aging well as this is the knee that gives me trouble when running at the gym. I'm still trying to rehab the tendon as I'm continually inflaming it at the gym and occasional walks, but I can't stand sitting on my ass for 2 weeks waiting for it to heal proper.
One of the obstacles for long walks is the boredom. One of the highlights of college was these late night walks with friends after an evening of hanging out usually dinner and a movie with a larger group. But a few of us who lived in Brooklyn would walk downtown instead of catching the train. Many fond memories of nights walking from Times Square downtown and across the Brooklyn Bridge before catching a train the rest of the way home. It was about a 5-6 mile walk, and roughly half the way home. The conversations made it all worth it. When I first lived in this apartment, me and Daniel had many late night walks around the neighborhood as well. As we rekindled our friendship in the past few years, it was me who tried to keep us doing that, but it often took a bit of arm twisting to get him to agree. In the past several years, I'd pester Josh or Mariah for phone calls during these periods, and depending on their schedules sometimes it worked out, but not often enough for much I'd like it to...but my demands in that area are unreasonable. Still, I was always glad when they could indulge me. Since I'm doing these walks in the morning, phone calls aren't an option. Music isn't good enough, my music collection is too old and stale to distract me or be engaging for 1-2 hours almost daily. I finally caved in and tried podcasts.
Josh has been trying to turn me on to audiobooks for a few years now, it's what he uses at work. Up until now I've maintained a strong preference for only using youtube as background noise while playing Warcraft. None of that was readily translatable to outdoors use. But one of the channels I listen to started a podcast as an expansion of their normal videos. I decided to give that a try and it worked. But I quickly chewed through what little content they were turning out. I'm in the process of looking for new podcasts to fill in the amount of time I need them for regular walks. I figure this will be 3-4 podcasts in total. I'm super picky about podcasts and most of them are just filled with so much mindless chatter I grow bored. I have tried a few before. But I'm open to the idea now and experimenting by trying new ones, giving them an episode or two to try and catch my interest. Not so much luck so far, but I've got a few leads to check out still.
This whole discussion is becoming far longer then I expected. I will finish this in totality, but I want to pause here to make a few points. The ultimate topic here is discussing the ins and outs of my current routine, as it evolves. It also illustrates the very long-winded internal monologue of considerations I've been going through in establishing it over months. Further, that when I raise objections about why I don't do something, it's not a sub-conscious desire to avoid the activity, but a legitimate reason. I'm laying out all these considerations to show how prior lodged complaints are seredipitously finding solutions right now and so things are panning out. When I give a reason for not doing/liking something, the best response is to examine the reason and find a solution.
I also want to cut the conclusion a bit and say that this current routine is working pretty well for me and that it's evolving my perspective on how I approach my mental health. In the past I've written about how little exercise does for me. It helps to a point, but ultimately doesn't block depression or work as the solution people talk it up to be. And the same can be said for a number of solutions people try to suggest that I shoot down. I'm finding that my approach to this was too one-dimensional. I was looking for a single fix, when in reality I need to using multiple things in tandem to cover all my bases. No single activity or solution was addressing all the problems people said it would, and like I was demanding of them. So I'm looking at this more as a designer now, looking at moving parts, examining each thing as either a solution or problem to be tackled, but all part of a larger whole. In design, changing the game might solve one problem but create a new one, that doesn't mean you rule the idea out, it might mean you need another fix to address the new problem, or changing something else to make room for it. As I said, my thinking was too one-dimensional, not creative, looking for simple plug and play solutions. I need to apply the flexibility of design. More iimportantly, it's recognizing that it's not always one problem preventing something, but multiple problems that require multiple solutions.
Resuming... Intermitent fasting is a good dietary approach for the most part, but requires I go out for walks to manage hunger cravings during a specific point of the day, and walks required I integrate podcasts to keep from getting bored. I only follow this strategy on days when I don't go to the gym, so that'd be 4 days a week in theory. Still debating if I want a day of pure rest built in to the routine to avoid feeling too deprived. Gym days follow prior established rules, and on those days I'll eat a normal 3 meals spaced appropriately. All of this makes healthy eating pretty easy to do. Generally speaking, if I have the energy to go out for walks, I have the energy to cook and if I can cook, healthy meals are easy. The extra walks means I don't have to worry about too lazy to go food shopping on any given day, I'm already out and about every other day, so I just build the food shopping into that routine. The trick for me here is momentum, it takes a lot of energy to get started, but once in motion I can just keep going. So, the initial willpower is to get myself dressed to start walking, and then it's easy. Inertia is when I stop eating healthy.
I struggle with my sleep schedule a lot, the problem being that no single thing throws it off. There's so single fix, and as such I may be avoiding one reason and eventually another one catches up with me. This problem is still tentative, but I think I've gotten a better handle on it. The goal is to get into a routine for long enough that my body reflexively keep to it. Believe it or not, I've been trying to do that for several years now and have consistently failed. It's easy when you have a job, but I haven't been able to maintain one for so long. Sure, I can willpower myself to get out of bed in the morning and use an alarm, but being home alone, there isn't enough willpower to keep myself from napping and then throwing off my schedule. Anxiety is an issue, it keeps me up at night and then that moves the sleep schedule forward until it leads to a full cycle. Lack of discipline for even a single night or two can break what fragile routine I'd been cultivating. There are nights when I just don't sleep well - difficulty falling asleep or waking up early in the morning and being unable to fall back asleep.
Being disciplined about going to bed at a certain time, I can do that. Going to the gym makes it easier actually since I insist on a full 8 hours sleep on a night before going and going to the gym when it is overly crowded is not something i'm willing to do. So that gives enough motivation to keep a bedtime 3 nights a week. The rest is easy enough after that. Often it comes down to pulling myself away from Warcraft and not getting caught up in finishing some task immediately, delaying gratification. I still set an alarm in the morning to ensure I don't oversleep. Falling back asleep was a tricky one, and it shouldn't've been. It simply never occured to me to buy thicker/darker curtains. I always emphasized the benefit of natural light coming into my room, I wasn't thinking about how it affected my sleep. And could've been solved years earlier perhaps if I budged and let Andrea buy blackout curtains. Yes, natural light in my room boosts my moods during the day, makes the day feel longer. Having darker curtains made a huge difference the last time I sleep cycled, allowing me more restful and longer sleep, so I can cycle faster and without feeling exhausted through most of it. The eye mask I'd been using really wasn't doing enough. I also found that my sensitivity to dust was also affecting my sleep at times, and I estimate I need to dust and vacuum every 3-4 weeks before it starts to become an issue. I've never been responsible about cleaning often enough, but I have good motivation to now. And it's never as big a task as I make it out to be. Getting to sleep sometimes is tricky. One of the ways I always justified to myself staying up all night was not being tired. At some point I began to attribute this to anxiety, but it might be just my brain being overactive at times. I figured I'd rather be doing something entertaining instead of laying in bed for over an hour bored - but how much is the fun actvity also stimulating me and keeping me awake longer as well?
One of the healthy behaviors people have suggested to me over the years is meditation. I first began to explore meditation when I was around 10 or 11. I'm only somewhat ashamed to say this was inspired by the live-action Ninja Turtles movie. I focused on emptying my mind. It wasn't uncommon for this to end in a nap, but I always came out feeling very refreshed regardless. This probably also seeded the idea of afternoon power naps for me at a young age, a habit I kept alive for nearly 20 years. I tried to tell my parents about it once, but they scoffed at the idea I was doing meditation properly. I remember my father telling me meditation is supposed to be focusing on something. Turns out I was right and his view of it was too narrow. I probably stopped shortly thereafter though, discouraged. I tried picking up meditation again late in high school; borrowed a book from my the sci-fi club's moderator but found it too difficult to get into. I probably stayed away until a few years ago. I tried it once after discussing it in therapy. It felt good, but for the life of me I don't know I didn't keep doing it. I've certainly thought about it a number of times. And I think my therapist suggested it again a few months ago, but I gave a non-commital shrug of an answer.
In truth, I'd been mulling the idea for like 2 months. The trick was slotting a place for it in my routine where it'd be easy to continue doing it. One-off things or using discipline/willpower to do it wasn't not gonna work out long-term. The second issue was finding the most beneficial time of day to do it. Technically, after a good workout, meditation is redundant. After rigorous physical activity, I feel calm and clear-minded - I knew I'd be bored trying to meditate around then. The new walking routine as part of the fasting would likely run into the same issue. Meditate in the morning...seems unneccessary. Meditate in the afternoon - no way I'd be consistent about it and half the time would run into the gym issue. After dinner...maybe, but doesn't feel right somehow. Before bed...I'm too preoccupied keeping to a set bedtime to fit it in, especially since I'd need to cut short Warcraft time to fit this in and realistically I don't see that working. I keep running through this but couldn't find a place it felt right. The breakthrough came a week ago while sitting in my therapist's waiting room. I'd turned off my ipod early and decided to sit in silence for a minute. Trying to get comfortable I felt a momentary and very out of character sense of physically relaxing, some muscle untensed. It's the sort of total relaxation that I only dream about and haven't felt for years, but i latched on to that idea. I decided I would try meditating using that as a focus and do it before bed.
So, I have been doing that for the past week. I get ready for bed and turn off the lights, sit crossed legged with my back against the wall. I do breathing exercises and with each exhale focusing on physical relaxation, trying to consciously will any tension out of my body. I say physical relaxation, because I've lived with so much physical tension in my life, I don't even notice 90% of it. People used to comment how tense I was and I'd be in a calm state of mind. This seems to be working very well and I have been falling asleep much faster, something in the range of 5-10 minutes, as opposed to 30-60. This makes it easier to get a full night's sleep, making a stable sleep schedule easier.
So, quick recap on sleep. I need discipline to keep to a set bedtime and a morning alarm. I need to dust/vacuum somewhat regularly so dust doesn't affect my breathing in a subtle way and ruin my sleep. I switched to darker curtains so the morning light doesn't disturb my sleep - I still open the curtains during the day for the natural light. And I need to meditate, of sorts, for a few minutes before bed to be able to fall asleep. The only thing unaccounted for is anxiety. I don't have an answer to this. Maybe it'll be less an issue because of all the other things I'm doing, but I don't know yet if this has coincidentally been addressed.
Right now, these are all part of my routine. The purpose of this routine is to manage my depression and anxiety so I'm not subject to their seemingly random cycles. I've tried most of these tricks in the past and found the benefits to be only temporary. The change is to do all of them, but also simultaneously. So far it feels good, but it's also entirely possible this is just the upswing of a cycle and in another month or 3 I'll find the limitations of this. Assuming it is working, the biggest takeaway for me recently is that I HAVE to do ALL these things. It's not enough to sometimes do them or just some. I have to be disciplined and actively engaged with this stuff to keep my depression managable. One of the reasons I've stayed away from medication over the years is that it's not a cure, it's just something to manage symptoms, so why bother. I see this as the price I pay, that I can get the benefits of medication without the side effects, but the price to pay is vigilance. I could say the trial and error of finding what works is also a price to pay, but medication comes with the same price.
Right now the only part of this routine that bothers me is the level of physical activity I'm maintaining, and the time commitment. Currently I spend about 20 hours a week exercising, walking, in transit to the gym, cleaning up/eating after exercise in a timely fashion. This is impractical in respects to getting a job. At some point it will be an experiment to see how much I can trim those hours down by to free up time. I'm not doing that now because I want to test this routine fully to see how long I can maintain it and if it can hold up for a legnth of time. Moreover, I want the extra physical activity to lose weight and get back in shape. It's nice to look in the mirror and like what I see.
I like a lot of routine in my life. Ideally, I want 5-6 days of routine with 1-2 days where nothing is planned and I can just relax or do something different. It's good for me. Too much routine and I forget to see or talk to people, time flies and nothing outside my routine gets done. Too little routine and my physical and mental health suffer. I started taking a more aimed approach to creating a routine several months ago when Daniel moved in. It wasn't until January that I really got serious and I've begun to iterate on it now. It started with this spreadsheet to track my daily diet. It's not a list of what I eat, but rather a database of nutrition, logging with reasonable accuracy the calories and nutrients I intake. It took me a few months to put together the initial database to draw upon, and after that, each meal is calculated. From there I needed to settle on what I wanted my nutrition to look like - how many calories, what percentage breakdown of fats, carbs and protein, researching vitamins and minerals to see what amounts I should be getting, tracking the different types of fats etc. I always thought that sort of fine control over diet was excessive and for athletes, but I decided it was worth the effort in the short term to help me get a better handle on my weight.
I started off with a model based on body-types: endomorph, ectomorph, mesomorph. That seemed ok at first, but it was an absurd level of protein it wanted me to eat and a crazy low level of carbs. Adjusting to a higher fat diet was weird at first but felt ok, it was just about getting the unsaturated fats. Most of that comes from eating avocadoes regularly, and that's felt more like a treat then a restriction. I started going to the gym while this was going on. I saw initial improvement in my weight but then things stayed static early on and stayed there. So I decided I'd try a different balance next time around. My roommate is trying his own ideas on getting weight off he accumulated after too many work trips and he was discussing intermitent fasting. I was passingly familiar with it but never thought much of it. But I figured I'd give it a shot for awhile and see how it went, maybe try experimenting with a few different ideas every several weeks to see which my body responded best to. If you're not familiar, it has to do with keeping the body in ketosis longer by only eating within an 8 hour window each day.
I wasn't sure this would work for me at all because I'm home all day and boredom eating is a big problem. Exercising within ketosis is supposed to be great for fat burning. I don't take that sort of thing seriously as I believe in the idea that weight loss comes from burning more calories then you consume. But then I also thought, this is how I used to work out in college, though not intentionally. I went to the gym as soon as I got up and didn't eat until afterwards. I stopped doing that shortly after because my lower blood pressure did not like this idea and I'd get too light-headed on the treadmill early in the workout. In hindsight, I've also learned that snacking on a danish as my only food for several hours after a workout is a really terrible idea - probably held me back a lot in college. And considering how far I did get, it makes me wonder sometimes if I wasn't sabotaging myself.
Anyway, the problem to tackle was how to avoid the boredom eating. I know I can comfortably go 4-5 hours in the evening without eating, especially if I have a big dinner. But that still leaves a 4 hour window in the morning where I need to avoid eating...and my body is usually starving in the first 90 minutes. Well, I know that long bouts of cooking suppresses my appetite, as does exercise and being distracted/engrossed in something. The only one of these that could be consistent was exercise, so I'd go out for a long walk first thing when I woke up, preferably 2 hours. Get home around the time of the daily Warcraft reset, shower, do any Warcraft things I'd normally do immediately after reset. And then I'd've hit my eating window, or close enough I could kill a few minutes or begin cooking breakfast.
It's difficult to eat 3 meals in an 8 hour window, so I began to plan for 2 large meals. But I can only eat so much at a single sitting, so it turns out this made it easier to stay within the lower range of my daily calories instead of inching my way towards the maximum of that window via snacking and rationalizing cheats. Extra bonus, slightly lower food bill and less meals to cook for reduces the burden to cook as much every week. Results were fast and noticeable, lbs practically melted off the first 2 weeks. I've kinda plateaued since, but that could be other factors. One of which was going to the gym, so there could be a fat/muscle inversion going on to keep my weight static in the short term. I had to stop going out for walks as much because I was aggravating the achilles tendon on my left leg. My left leg does not seem to be aging well as this is the knee that gives me trouble when running at the gym. I'm still trying to rehab the tendon as I'm continually inflaming it at the gym and occasional walks, but I can't stand sitting on my ass for 2 weeks waiting for it to heal proper.
One of the obstacles for long walks is the boredom. One of the highlights of college was these late night walks with friends after an evening of hanging out usually dinner and a movie with a larger group. But a few of us who lived in Brooklyn would walk downtown instead of catching the train. Many fond memories of nights walking from Times Square downtown and across the Brooklyn Bridge before catching a train the rest of the way home. It was about a 5-6 mile walk, and roughly half the way home. The conversations made it all worth it. When I first lived in this apartment, me and Daniel had many late night walks around the neighborhood as well. As we rekindled our friendship in the past few years, it was me who tried to keep us doing that, but it often took a bit of arm twisting to get him to agree. In the past several years, I'd pester Josh or Mariah for phone calls during these periods, and depending on their schedules sometimes it worked out, but not often enough for much I'd like it to...but my demands in that area are unreasonable. Still, I was always glad when they could indulge me. Since I'm doing these walks in the morning, phone calls aren't an option. Music isn't good enough, my music collection is too old and stale to distract me or be engaging for 1-2 hours almost daily. I finally caved in and tried podcasts.
Josh has been trying to turn me on to audiobooks for a few years now, it's what he uses at work. Up until now I've maintained a strong preference for only using youtube as background noise while playing Warcraft. None of that was readily translatable to outdoors use. But one of the channels I listen to started a podcast as an expansion of their normal videos. I decided to give that a try and it worked. But I quickly chewed through what little content they were turning out. I'm in the process of looking for new podcasts to fill in the amount of time I need them for regular walks. I figure this will be 3-4 podcasts in total. I'm super picky about podcasts and most of them are just filled with so much mindless chatter I grow bored. I have tried a few before. But I'm open to the idea now and experimenting by trying new ones, giving them an episode or two to try and catch my interest. Not so much luck so far, but I've got a few leads to check out still.
This whole discussion is becoming far longer then I expected. I will finish this in totality, but I want to pause here to make a few points. The ultimate topic here is discussing the ins and outs of my current routine, as it evolves. It also illustrates the very long-winded internal monologue of considerations I've been going through in establishing it over months. Further, that when I raise objections about why I don't do something, it's not a sub-conscious desire to avoid the activity, but a legitimate reason. I'm laying out all these considerations to show how prior lodged complaints are seredipitously finding solutions right now and so things are panning out. When I give a reason for not doing/liking something, the best response is to examine the reason and find a solution.
I also want to cut the conclusion a bit and say that this current routine is working pretty well for me and that it's evolving my perspective on how I approach my mental health. In the past I've written about how little exercise does for me. It helps to a point, but ultimately doesn't block depression or work as the solution people talk it up to be. And the same can be said for a number of solutions people try to suggest that I shoot down. I'm finding that my approach to this was too one-dimensional. I was looking for a single fix, when in reality I need to using multiple things in tandem to cover all my bases. No single activity or solution was addressing all the problems people said it would, and like I was demanding of them. So I'm looking at this more as a designer now, looking at moving parts, examining each thing as either a solution or problem to be tackled, but all part of a larger whole. In design, changing the game might solve one problem but create a new one, that doesn't mean you rule the idea out, it might mean you need another fix to address the new problem, or changing something else to make room for it. As I said, my thinking was too one-dimensional, not creative, looking for simple plug and play solutions. I need to apply the flexibility of design. More iimportantly, it's recognizing that it's not always one problem preventing something, but multiple problems that require multiple solutions.
Resuming... Intermitent fasting is a good dietary approach for the most part, but requires I go out for walks to manage hunger cravings during a specific point of the day, and walks required I integrate podcasts to keep from getting bored. I only follow this strategy on days when I don't go to the gym, so that'd be 4 days a week in theory. Still debating if I want a day of pure rest built in to the routine to avoid feeling too deprived. Gym days follow prior established rules, and on those days I'll eat a normal 3 meals spaced appropriately. All of this makes healthy eating pretty easy to do. Generally speaking, if I have the energy to go out for walks, I have the energy to cook and if I can cook, healthy meals are easy. The extra walks means I don't have to worry about too lazy to go food shopping on any given day, I'm already out and about every other day, so I just build the food shopping into that routine. The trick for me here is momentum, it takes a lot of energy to get started, but once in motion I can just keep going. So, the initial willpower is to get myself dressed to start walking, and then it's easy. Inertia is when I stop eating healthy.
I struggle with my sleep schedule a lot, the problem being that no single thing throws it off. There's so single fix, and as such I may be avoiding one reason and eventually another one catches up with me. This problem is still tentative, but I think I've gotten a better handle on it. The goal is to get into a routine for long enough that my body reflexively keep to it. Believe it or not, I've been trying to do that for several years now and have consistently failed. It's easy when you have a job, but I haven't been able to maintain one for so long. Sure, I can willpower myself to get out of bed in the morning and use an alarm, but being home alone, there isn't enough willpower to keep myself from napping and then throwing off my schedule. Anxiety is an issue, it keeps me up at night and then that moves the sleep schedule forward until it leads to a full cycle. Lack of discipline for even a single night or two can break what fragile routine I'd been cultivating. There are nights when I just don't sleep well - difficulty falling asleep or waking up early in the morning and being unable to fall back asleep.
Being disciplined about going to bed at a certain time, I can do that. Going to the gym makes it easier actually since I insist on a full 8 hours sleep on a night before going and going to the gym when it is overly crowded is not something i'm willing to do. So that gives enough motivation to keep a bedtime 3 nights a week. The rest is easy enough after that. Often it comes down to pulling myself away from Warcraft and not getting caught up in finishing some task immediately, delaying gratification. I still set an alarm in the morning to ensure I don't oversleep. Falling back asleep was a tricky one, and it shouldn't've been. It simply never occured to me to buy thicker/darker curtains. I always emphasized the benefit of natural light coming into my room, I wasn't thinking about how it affected my sleep. And could've been solved years earlier perhaps if I budged and let Andrea buy blackout curtains. Yes, natural light in my room boosts my moods during the day, makes the day feel longer. Having darker curtains made a huge difference the last time I sleep cycled, allowing me more restful and longer sleep, so I can cycle faster and without feeling exhausted through most of it. The eye mask I'd been using really wasn't doing enough. I also found that my sensitivity to dust was also affecting my sleep at times, and I estimate I need to dust and vacuum every 3-4 weeks before it starts to become an issue. I've never been responsible about cleaning often enough, but I have good motivation to now. And it's never as big a task as I make it out to be. Getting to sleep sometimes is tricky. One of the ways I always justified to myself staying up all night was not being tired. At some point I began to attribute this to anxiety, but it might be just my brain being overactive at times. I figured I'd rather be doing something entertaining instead of laying in bed for over an hour bored - but how much is the fun actvity also stimulating me and keeping me awake longer as well?
One of the healthy behaviors people have suggested to me over the years is meditation. I first began to explore meditation when I was around 10 or 11. I'm only somewhat ashamed to say this was inspired by the live-action Ninja Turtles movie. I focused on emptying my mind. It wasn't uncommon for this to end in a nap, but I always came out feeling very refreshed regardless. This probably also seeded the idea of afternoon power naps for me at a young age, a habit I kept alive for nearly 20 years. I tried to tell my parents about it once, but they scoffed at the idea I was doing meditation properly. I remember my father telling me meditation is supposed to be focusing on something. Turns out I was right and his view of it was too narrow. I probably stopped shortly thereafter though, discouraged. I tried picking up meditation again late in high school; borrowed a book from my the sci-fi club's moderator but found it too difficult to get into. I probably stayed away until a few years ago. I tried it once after discussing it in therapy. It felt good, but for the life of me I don't know I didn't keep doing it. I've certainly thought about it a number of times. And I think my therapist suggested it again a few months ago, but I gave a non-commital shrug of an answer.
In truth, I'd been mulling the idea for like 2 months. The trick was slotting a place for it in my routine where it'd be easy to continue doing it. One-off things or using discipline/willpower to do it wasn't not gonna work out long-term. The second issue was finding the most beneficial time of day to do it. Technically, after a good workout, meditation is redundant. After rigorous physical activity, I feel calm and clear-minded - I knew I'd be bored trying to meditate around then. The new walking routine as part of the fasting would likely run into the same issue. Meditate in the morning...seems unneccessary. Meditate in the afternoon - no way I'd be consistent about it and half the time would run into the gym issue. After dinner...maybe, but doesn't feel right somehow. Before bed...I'm too preoccupied keeping to a set bedtime to fit it in, especially since I'd need to cut short Warcraft time to fit this in and realistically I don't see that working. I keep running through this but couldn't find a place it felt right. The breakthrough came a week ago while sitting in my therapist's waiting room. I'd turned off my ipod early and decided to sit in silence for a minute. Trying to get comfortable I felt a momentary and very out of character sense of physically relaxing, some muscle untensed. It's the sort of total relaxation that I only dream about and haven't felt for years, but i latched on to that idea. I decided I would try meditating using that as a focus and do it before bed.
So, I have been doing that for the past week. I get ready for bed and turn off the lights, sit crossed legged with my back against the wall. I do breathing exercises and with each exhale focusing on physical relaxation, trying to consciously will any tension out of my body. I say physical relaxation, because I've lived with so much physical tension in my life, I don't even notice 90% of it. People used to comment how tense I was and I'd be in a calm state of mind. This seems to be working very well and I have been falling asleep much faster, something in the range of 5-10 minutes, as opposed to 30-60. This makes it easier to get a full night's sleep, making a stable sleep schedule easier.
So, quick recap on sleep. I need discipline to keep to a set bedtime and a morning alarm. I need to dust/vacuum somewhat regularly so dust doesn't affect my breathing in a subtle way and ruin my sleep. I switched to darker curtains so the morning light doesn't disturb my sleep - I still open the curtains during the day for the natural light. And I need to meditate, of sorts, for a few minutes before bed to be able to fall asleep. The only thing unaccounted for is anxiety. I don't have an answer to this. Maybe it'll be less an issue because of all the other things I'm doing, but I don't know yet if this has coincidentally been addressed.
Right now, these are all part of my routine. The purpose of this routine is to manage my depression and anxiety so I'm not subject to their seemingly random cycles. I've tried most of these tricks in the past and found the benefits to be only temporary. The change is to do all of them, but also simultaneously. So far it feels good, but it's also entirely possible this is just the upswing of a cycle and in another month or 3 I'll find the limitations of this. Assuming it is working, the biggest takeaway for me recently is that I HAVE to do ALL these things. It's not enough to sometimes do them or just some. I have to be disciplined and actively engaged with this stuff to keep my depression managable. One of the reasons I've stayed away from medication over the years is that it's not a cure, it's just something to manage symptoms, so why bother. I see this as the price I pay, that I can get the benefits of medication without the side effects, but the price to pay is vigilance. I could say the trial and error of finding what works is also a price to pay, but medication comes with the same price.
Right now the only part of this routine that bothers me is the level of physical activity I'm maintaining, and the time commitment. Currently I spend about 20 hours a week exercising, walking, in transit to the gym, cleaning up/eating after exercise in a timely fashion. This is impractical in respects to getting a job. At some point it will be an experiment to see how much I can trim those hours down by to free up time. I'm not doing that now because I want to test this routine fully to see how long I can maintain it and if it can hold up for a legnth of time. Moreover, I want the extra physical activity to lose weight and get back in shape. It's nice to look in the mirror and like what I see.