I wasn’t the one who brought it up. It’s true that I’m on a sleep quest this year, but it’s my own private thing. The topic of human hibernation came up in the context of weight loss. Someone was talking about how nice it would be to just go into a coma for six months and wake up at your goal weight. Then everyone got excited about the idea of sleeping for a year.
I mentioned Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and of course everyone wanted to read it, because for women the idea of sleeping for a year is the ultimate fantasy. We were laughing pretty hard when a latecomer arrived, and we explained that we were talking about sleeping for a year. “Oh!” she said, “there’s a novel about that,” and we laughed even harder. “See? I didn’t make it up.” We figured out the details: Go to sleep for a year. While you’re knocked out, have all your dental work done, get waxed, schedule a three-hour balayage session, design a full-body tattoo, whatever other boring or painful treatments you might want. Time it to miss all the election cycle news. (Maybe wake up just in time to vote). Seriously, though. Assuming it were possible, what would it be like to sleep the year away? Note that everyone in the discussion was a single woman, except for me, and, like everyone else, I don’t have kids. My stepdaughter is turning 25 and she’s been living on her own for years. I can easily understand why any parent with kids at home would be tired enough to want to sleep for a year, but it would be really hard to miss a year of their lives! Being able to sleep for a year indicates that there are no four-alarm fires that you personally need to handle. Presumably even a surgeon or an EMT has days off when other people are on duty. Most of us aren’t literally responsible for life-or-death situations, we just cultivate our stress levels as if we are. Does that feel true? Are our exhaustion, stress, and burnout levels really so chronically high that we might even be more tired than emergency room people? First we have to imagine ourselves in a context in which none of our stress is helpful to society or to ourselves. We have to imagine that, yes, the world can go on without us if we roll over and fluff our pillows. Then we have to imagine that waking up fully rested and restored would in fact deliver a better version of ourselves. That we could handle our daily routine again in good cheer, knowing we finally did not feel tired. I know what I would do, if I did it. Assuming my husband was called away on some special mission to Mars and we couldn’t even communicate while he was gone, that I could sleep for a year and not hurt anyone’s feelings, I think I know what I would do. I’d spend a day getting ready, cleaning out my fridge and putting all my bills on auto-pay. (Maybe I’d see if someone would stow my slumbering body on a little cot in their garage so I didn’t have to pay rent). Sleep for a year, no household chores or errands or cooking or laundry, right? I’d get rid of all my clothes, assuming they wouldn’t fit the same when I woke up, and who would want that? Maybe keep one baggy sundress to wear to the store when I woke up to replenish my wardrobe. I’d get rid of all my books, assuming that I’d be no more likely to read them a year from now than I have been so far. It’s not like there aren’t plenty more books out there for when I wake up. I’d chuck any unread mail, knowing it wouldn’t be my problem a year from now. I don’t owe anyone any money. As long as someone else is taking my pets to the vet, and I’ve got my coma-appointments scheduled for dental work, et cetera, what is possibly coming in through snail mail that will concern me? What the heck is actually on my to-do list? Does any of it truly need to get done? By me? Hmm, what else is there? I guess I’d have to tell people I wasn’t taking calls. Put a disclaimer in an auto-respond email message and change my voicemail. Hi, I’m sleeping until 2021, please don’t leave a message, try me again after I come out of hibernation. What if this were a natural human biological process, like it is for bears and other animals? What if we all did it at different times? Nobody would be surprised or care that someone was busy pupating or whatever. “I can’t come to the phone right now. I’m emerging from my chrysalis.” Imagine waking up. Imagine having simply gone to bed for a year, no loose ends and nothing to worry about. What would happen next? This is a serious question. What would you do tomorrow if you felt fully rested, you had no incomplete tasks, and you understood that you had a clean slate and you could do whatever you wanted? The truth is that we can basically do this for real any time we like. We are not indentured servants. We can always change jobs, move, consolidate our debts, and/or transform our bodies. We can cut off toxic, draining relationships and go on without them. We can do it all, and we don’t actually need to put ourselves in a coma to do it. The funniest thing about the idea of sleeping for a year is that, partway into it, you’d start feeling rested enough to no longer feel an urgent need to sleep for a year. How long would that take? Eleven months? One month? Three nights? It’s a good experiment. Set a bedtime alarm and go to bed at 9:00 pm for a few days. Try it out and see how it feels. Clear your schedule and nap all weekend. Maybe you won’t be tired any more, or maybe you’ll want to keep going for the gold medal and sleep for a year after all. No one will stop you, most of the time. This is one of life’s biggest secrets. No matter what you are doing, whether good, bad, or ugly, nobody will stop you. You’re free, like it or not.
Sure, people might sometimes try to interfere with you. Usually they only do it when you’re doing something positive and constructive, though. It helps to keep that in mind. It also helps to know that their ways of being your obstacle are pretty predictable. Tantrums. Usually that’s the method of choice. Someone will bawl you out or get angry and start shouting or slamming things around. Maybe they’ll give you the silent treatment or be passive-aggressive instead. So what? When someone behaves in such an immature and loud way, it’s never going to be for a good reason. Nobody throws a tantrum to convince someone to donate blood or get an early start on filing their taxes. Nobody throws a tantrum to convince someone to eat a taco or help themselves to another slice of pie. They throw tantrums to Get Their Way. That’s telling. Why does someone care whether you do or don’t do something? Either because they think it will prevent them from getting something they want, or because they simply don’t like the thought of you doing it. What are these things, these things you might want to do that someone else might not want you to do? Change jobs Have a successful friendship Get married Move away Go back to school Go on a trip somewhere These are things I’ve found that other people will try to talk me out of. I’ve also found that I was able to do all of them, often more than once, and nothing bad happened. The tantrum-thrower eventually gets over it. Don’t expect them to ever admit that they were wrong, because it won’t happen, but do take note that you got away with it. As much as people love to insert their opinions, there are other areas where they won’t. I’ve found myself in a couple of situations (going on a date, taking a roommate, moving into an apartment complex with a reputation, eating at Chipotle) where I would have appreciated knowing what my friends already knew. They only admit afterward that they didn't think what you were doing was such a wise idea. This basically depends on whether you are talking to a group of people who freely share their opinion, or a group who generally choose to “stay out of it.” There may also be something in there about whether you thought to solicit their specific individual opinion before or after the fact. Some will seek to punish you for your supposed lack of deference. Yes, yes, you must run all your choices by me in advance. I am the arbiter of all decisions, group or individual. What I’ve found is that if you simply don’t tell anyone your plans, you can pretty much do what you want all the time. Often you can also avoid telling them after the fact. There are two things I chose to do that seemed to arouse the ire and wrath of many of my friends and family like nothing else. Nobody had an opinion (with one exception) when I married my ex-husband. Everyone had an opinion when I 1. Chose to deliberately lose weight and 2. Took up distance running. I was baffled by this at first. Then I found out that the furor only comes up when you're in the contemplation and beginning phases of something new. After you’re up and running on your own, they lose interest and find some other scandal to occupy themselves. The next phase of realization set in when I discovered that I could do the exact same things, privately, and if I didn't tell anyone, then nobody had a comment. Rearrange my furniture? Try a new recipe? Color my hair? Go to Morocco? Read a banned book? Fortunately, because we are a free people in a free country, I did it all. I did it all and nobody said a word because nobody knew. Another secret to doing what you want and having nobody stop you is to move to a new area. If you have no track record there, nobody knows your backstory. If nobody knows your backstory, then nobody knows whether what you are doing is out of character or entirely consistent with your past behavior. There is a dark side to this, of course. Pretty much nobody will stop you if you develop an addiction or embezzle money or engage in any other sort of risky behavior. You’ll only be stopped by the natural consequences of your actions, whether legal or merely predictably unfortunate. You can go out and get a bad haircut or wear unflattering pants or start a project you’ll never finish. You can buy a ticket to a boring movie with a weak ending. You can hoard up your house or go three years without cleaning your bathroom. You can do a lot of stuff that isn’t really all that great an idea, and no one will stop you. What this all means is that it’s up to you. Whether you love your life or shuffle through it in boredom and resentment is up to you. Whether you live out your dreams or cringe in avoidance of someone else’s disapproval is up to you. Whether you transform your body or go back to school or change careers is up to you. You have choices and you have the power to take action on them. No one will stop you. Let your path be dictated by your own insights, not your naysayers. Boxes are everywhere and my neck is all gimped up. We’ve been packing for almost a week, quota five boxes a day, and I’m feeling it. All I can do right now is fantasize about doing yoga in our new living room.
There isn’t a huge difference between a 612-square-foot studio and a 650-square-foot one-bedroom apartment. It’s just enough, though, that there might be enough room to do a workout in the living room when there wasn’t before. I’ve tried. I’ve tried P90X. I’ve tried yoga. I’ve tried burpees. I’ve tried hula hooping. The only thing I can effectively do in my studio apartment, even when I move furniture out of the way, is to jog in place. I often do. At the end of the day, if I haven’t quite done enough to impress my activity tracker, I jog in place until the green loop is closed. I would go outside but then I’d have to put my shoes back on. I’d go to our apartment gym, but there lies madness. I love working out late at night, see, and once I started using the elliptical at 10:00 pm I’d be out there every night. This doesn’t work when you have upstairs neighbors who get up between 4:30 and 5:30 every morning. The first law of the workout is to understand your constraints. Know your first sixty-five layers of obstacles, reasons, complaints, and excuses so you can plan something that is actually possible in your routine life, every day. I’ve got grievances that have affected my workouts.
I also have a history of thyroid problems, and when I quit working out for an extended period, I descend rapidly into a netherworld of chronic pain, fatigue, migraines and tension headaches, low mood, and general crabbiness. I can feel it happening. I can feel the difference between the lower range of thyroid function and the middle range. It’s like quicksand. The more tired I get, the less I want to do, and the more I sit around, the farther I fall. My life is easier when I work out at least a little every day. That’s why I wear the fitness tracker, it’s why I walk everywhere, it’s why I always take the stairs even when I’m carrying a suitcase, and it’s why I’m so invested in whether I can do a floor workout in my living room. This is part of the connection between clutter and physical health. My people do not like the feel of a reasonably arranged room. They will continue to pile up boxes and bags to prevent having extra space or blank walls. Alas, the effort involved to carry in shopping bags and pile them around is not enough to keep one’s energy levels up. Living in a tiny, crowded room means sitting still most of the time. Thus the nest. My people usually have a nest that is easily identified from across the room. There will be a spot, for instance in front of the computer keyboard, that will be surrounded by small important items like a tea cup or the TV remote. Other popular areas are the bed, a spot on the couch, a favorite chair, or the driver’s seat of the car. While there are seated workouts that can be found to accommodate physical therapy situations, my people aren’t doing them. It’s not a problem, of course not. It’s not a problem when 40% of Americans have zero workout. It’s not a problem for extended phone stroking, gaming, binge-watching, or other seated activities. It only starts to become a problem when it’s time to pack and move, or in an emergency situation when sitting still is no longer an option. Eh, but that’s not gonna happen, right? *wink* Here I am, packing our stuff, working on Box 28 and maybe ten to go. I’ve walked home balancing stacks of folded cardboard on my head, causing a man in a convertible to pull over and ask if I needed a ride. (Nice). I’ve folded and taped, lifted and hauled and stacked. Not currently being a weightlifter, I am feeling this unfamiliar effort in my neck and shoulder. That’s a place where I carry a lot of tension because my real workout, my true default mode, is hunched over a keyboard. That’s my reason for walking so much, walking when there are tons of other outdoor workouts available to me. Walking causes thousands of micro-movements when I swing my arms. I would never do that much physical therapy in any other situation. Walking, though, is fun. It’s something I can ignore, too. I walk to do my errands because we sold our car over two years ago. I walk when it would take twenty minutes longer to wait for the bus. I walk to go to the movies, the library, the grocery store. I walk a minimum of four miles a day, usually six, sometimes eight to ten. When I’m not doing as much walking, like when I’m home packing boxes, I start to feel it right away. I feel it in the middle-aged places. Habit research shows that people tend to have the easiest time switching habits after a major change like a move or a new job. I know this is true because I’ve moved so many times in my adult life. My husband and I are both planning around this blip in our schedule, thinking about what we want to be different. One difference in our new place is that we’ll be on the fifth floor instead of the ground floor. We have the option to take the stairs when we walk our dog and do the laundry. Our building is also on the same block as our martial arts gym. Mainly, though, we won’t have upstairs neighbors anymore. I’m trying to remember what it was like when I could sleep as much as I wanted, back when we were newlyweds, back when I started running for the first time. I’m trying to hold a vision of something I want. I’m trying to imagine what I will do differently when I have room to move. It’s one of my coaching clients, and she has a little secret. It’s not much of a secret as far as I’m concerned, because so many people do the same thing. What makes a secret a secret, though, is the shame. That’s why they call it a ‘secret’ and not a ‘surprise.’
Guess what I’m doing?? When you find out you’re going to be SO EXCITED!!! Nope, not that kind. The guilty kind. She wakes up in the middle of the night, gets out of bed, and binge-eats. Okay, not everyone does that, but I can tell you why it’s so similar to what so many people do. She, like many people, often skips breakfast. If she does eat anything in the morning, it’s usually a coffee and pastry or, like, an energy bar. A snack instead of a proper lunch. Nothing until dinnertime, 6-8 hours after the last time she ate. Any of this starting to sound familiar? It’s incredibly common for people to eat some kind of snack, usually dessert, very late at night. Usually right before bed. I personally cannot do this because it triggers my night terrors. No amount or flavor of ice cream is worth screaming in my sleep. Other people, though, are understandably going to be hungry again 3-4 hours after dinner, and they’re going to eat. Most people also crave sweets after a meal. So yeah. Night eating. *shrug* Most people do it. Why be ashamed about it? I get the shame thing, I really do. When I have night terrors, I always start crying as soon as I snap awake. I can’t imagine anything more embarrassing than running around the house in my underwear, screaming, because I had some stupid dream about a spider on the ceiling. It makes me feel like a child, like I can’t control myself. Hate it. It’s the body telling the brain what to do. Exactly like the craving to eat late at night. My client wants to stop, she says. She feels ashamed and guilty and she’s not enjoying the effects on her health. (Diabetes, sleep apnea, a 100-pound weight gain). I suggest that she might change her mealtimes and come up with things to do that will keep her in bed when she wakes up at night. Like her favorite playlist, a bottle of aromatherapy fragrance, maybe a podcast episode. I wake up in the middle of the night a lot, too, and it’s pretty boring to just lie there for 90 minutes. My plan, of course, doesn’t work. The problem with persistent problems is that they’re always the result of a complex web of issues. Changing only one thing usually isn’t enough to disrupt the pattern. It can be very tricky to figure out what is the root cause. There’s another problem with persistent problems. That is that we’re in love with them. There’s always some part of the web of issues that is our very most favorite, adorable thing. It’s usually part of our very identity, or the one thing we’d want to hold onto if we ever had to give up everything else. Our heart’s desire and our true delight. The thing about night eating is that it’s done ALONE. It’s a favored refuge of people who feel that they serve others all day. Workaholics and people pleasers. There is nothing that feels as good as TOTAL PRIVACY while indulging in something for yourself alone. Hey, I agree with that, and I do it too! Showering, writing in my journal, birdwatching... The difference between me and my troubled clients is that I have no shame in indulging myself. I do plenty for other people, but I don’t owe anyone anything, and I have no problem setting boundaries and making sure I have time to myself. Otherwise, I could never deal with the emotional demands that I do. I also don’t have body image issues, for my own complicated reasons, and I eat whatever I want. If I want cake for breakfast then I’ll eat it, and I’d actually enjoy it much more if I felt like someone was glaring at me and judging me. Ha, this is for you, *big bite*. The simplest way for my client to deal with her night eating really would be to change her eating schedule. Start with a big hot breakfast. Take an hour off every day and eat a proper sit-down lunch, no errands, no “catching up” on work. Have a satisfying afternoon snack sometime between 3-5, or at least eat something during the commute home. Eat a good dinner. The goal here is to eat 70-75% of your energy requirements for the day BEFORE DINNER, so that the nice dinner is a chance to put a cap on the day. As opposed to being incredibly hungry almost all day long, rushing around, “no time” to take real breaks, and feeling starved after twelve busy waking hours. But doing that would interfere with [everyone’s] image of the diligent, hardworking and ultra-responsible professional busy person. How do I know how valuable I am unless I feel like I’m sacrificing for my work (my staff, my clients, my customers) all day every day? Being hungry all day, as a pattern, is a form of self-punishment. It’s a job for a trained therapist to figure out why someone would feel that way, would want to do that. We’d never treat others as badly as we treat ourselves, and there’s something deep under that, but I sure don’t know what it is. There are other ways for my client to set herself up to quit night eating. She could sign up for a meal delivery plan and eat only what gets delivered. She could ask her assistant to make sure she eats breakfast, lunch, and a snack, and even have her order it for her each day. It could be scheduled as part of their check-in meetings. She could put locks on her fridge, freezer, and cupboards, and give her husband the key. More positively, they could quit stocking food in their home, and they could dine out together at a salad buffet or whatever. She could tell her doctor about it and ask for help. A change in medication, maybe? A doctor would see this as a straightforward health issue, not a shameful secret. As a practical matter, eating at night is a way of annoying yourself. Crumbs in the bed: uncomfortable! Not sleeping the whole night through: exhausting! Being hungry all day long at work, every week of the year: predictable, boring, and unproductive! Exploding at other people when you’re hangry: mean, rude, and unfair to them! There are no “wins” here except for the pure hedonism of eating alone, late at night. As an emotional matter, what’s the deal with night eating? If you want to indulge, just do it in public and, in the unlikely event that anyone hassles you, wink at them and take a nice big grinning bite. The real issue here is probably working out why you care what other people think, rather than what you yourself think. As a news junkie, I’ve noticed that news consumption increases to fill the time available. I would find myself reading the news over breakfast, over lunch, or even while brushing my teeth. The more I read, the more important it felt to read yet more. No matter how many sources I followed or how many versions of a story I read, I never felt like I knew enough about whatever it was. It never stopped, it never even slowed down. It took a week of vacation to step back and realize that this wasn’t a positive habit. What I needed was a news upgrade.
There are lots of approaches to upgrading a news habit. One is to replace it with something entirely different, like a cooking class or an extra hour of sleep. Another is to switch to books. Often reading a non-fiction book about a topic can bring clarity to a subject in a way that a dozen news articles never could. (A biography, the history of a particular country or region, an explanation of the stock market or self-driving cars, any number of topics could be an improvement over a news habit). One of the easiest ways is to upgrade the news itself. What I did was to rearrange my news sources. I did this in several ways. I have a side project, a tech newsletter that I put out on weekdays. This requires me to stay current in a few fields that are outside my area of expertise. The advantage of my layman’s perspective is that I bring in a broader range of material in adjacent subjects. I’m stronger in trend analysis than I am in STEM. Working in this field reminds me that ‘trend analysis’ is valuable and interesting in its own right, and it helps me to reinterpret what is meant by ‘current events.’ What do I cover? Robotics, astronomy, biomimicry, technology, and science news are my working categories. All of these fields are booming. Usually it feels like I can barely keep up, that there’s too much happening to fit within my remit. As with everything else, the more I know, the more I want to know, and the more I get out of what I read. Often, I’m reading about things that were pure science fiction in my childhood. I’ll think, “Wasn’t this a movie back in the Eighties, but now it’s real?” Admittedly, science news is often over my head. That’s why I married an aerospace engineer, so he can interpret this stuff for me. (Joke). I can only handle so much in a day. That’s where the news aggregators come in. A news aggregator pulls news on various topics from multiple sources. I simply made sure that mine included more non-current-events, non-political topics and more neutral sources. Some of my topics? Dinosaurs, archaeology, ornithology, longevity, tiny houses, and Alzheimer’s research, among other things, fill out my news feed. For some reason, I also get quite a lot of articles about snakes and alligators. Pulling news from international sources can be intriguing, especially when it’s health news. I’ve found that the British or Australian take on health research can be really punchy compared to the mainstream American perspective. I read plenty of political news, and I certainly follow the headlines, but I’ve found that it isn’t productive to let this dominate my news consumption. I utterly refuse to discuss modern US politics. The reason is that it tends to destroy friendships. We have this absurd idea in our culture that “a debate” is the only appropriate format for a political conversation, and I can’t seem to dispel this notion. I don’t owe anyone a debate on any topic, from whether I have the right type of phone to whether tights qualify as pants. If I talk about politics with people who agree with me, it reinforces what I (and they) already think. If I talk about politics with people on “the other side” (as if there were only two sides, which is too silly for words), they always want to argue. I say, fine, I’ll talk pre-Industrial politics with you. Which do you prefer, antiquity, the Dark Ages, the Reformation? When someone asks which way I’m voting, I say I’m voting for myself as a write-in candidate. When in doubt, go with theater of the absurd. What we do well to remember is that passive news consumption isn’t actually doing anything about anything. Arguing with our friends, relatives, neighbors, and colleagues doesn’t move the needle. Getting worked up about a topic and ranting about it all around the house doesn’t even qualify as a good workout. Staying informed is only useful if we do something with that information. It also helps to remember that everything humans are doing, in every sphere of activity, qualifies as ‘current events.’ An invention that helps people with paralysis to walk, or congenitally deaf children to hear, is relevant. These advances are more likely to change the course of history than most election results. Every day I see news about archaeology or paleontology that claims to be one of the most important finds of the last hundred years, and that’s relevant too. I see news about space exploration and technological innovations that about blasts me out of my chair. The world is going to be nearly unrecognizable in twenty years once all these trends combine along their current arc. It’s relevant, it’s newsworthy, but are we noticing it? Or are the settings on our news feed causing us so much stress and distraction that we develop a misleading picture of the world? Upgrade your news habit and find out. Make Anything Happen. Isn’t that the best name for a book? Carrie Lindsey has made the perfect introduction to vision boards. It’s so approachable and attractive that it’s inspiring even to people like me who are not visual artists.
Vision boards are more than just a fun craft. First comes the vision, and that includes goal-setting. One of the strengths of Make Anything Happen is the clarity it brings to choosing goals, planning, and scheduling. My own annual goal-setting process takes a month and results in something like a six-page document. Carrie Lindsey’s approach is so simple, yet exuberant in comparison! This is as much of a lifestyle book as it is an art book. It’s very personal and approachable, and gives the sense of how Lindsey fits her home-based business into her buzzing family life. She has advice for everything from how to deal with distraction and feeling stuck, to how to work around kids and their chaos. Note: don’t fold your kids’ socks for them when you could be making art! Make Anything Happen includes some well-designed planner pages, like Goal Trackers and Vision Board templates. It teaches how to make art journals with multiple vision boards. There are plenty of examples for inspiration. I’ve already made my first vision board. Let’s imagine lots more! Favorite quotes: “Whenever I don’t know where to start, I start with cleaning my desk.” “...there’s nothing magic about hard work.” It’s about that time, the time when average people sigh and give up on themselves because they think they’ve screwed up their New Year’s Resolutions again. That’s because people seem to think that a first draft is somehow typeset, bound, printed, and archived. We think if we made a typo, it’s carved into the base of a statue somewhere. We think if we misspoke, it’s recorded and played back before Saint Peter at the pearly gates. Or whatever.
Look, if you want to win at this game, make your own rules. The point of this whole “resolution” thing is for you to decide, for yourself, that you want to upgrade your experience of this life. You choose your values and your standards and you choose your behaviors to match. You set up your own environment to support your choices. That’s where revision comes in! This is perfect. You came up with a really good idea for something you want to do. Now you’ve tried to put it into practice in your daily life, and you have more information on how that’s working out. As an example, I made a resolution to work on hip openers, which means various kinds of leg stretches. I want to do it because when I do, it feels good, and when I don’t, I get plantar fasciitis, I’m asymmetrical, and I suck at roundhouse kicks, which embarrasses me in the gym because everyone is constantly trying to give me advice. Right now, we’re two weeks into the year and I haven’t done a single stretch. Not one. Does that mean I’m a stinking failure loser and that I should quit making goals? Well, maybe. Too dumb and stubborn for that, though, so I’ll keep trying. What I learn from my own experience is that I set out to make a bunch of changes to my schedule all at once this year, and some of them I’m already doing and some of them I’m not. Everyone who reads this should take away the message that the more stuff you try to change at the same time, the harder it is to get any of it right. By “right” I mean, “done in a way that will easily work for you, year in and year out, and feel like an improvement.” The other thing I learn from my own experience is that I don’t do fitness-related activities when I am ill. This is a GOOD THING! I made the mistake, when I set the goal of running a marathon, of pushing myself and overtraining. I made my goal, sure, and this is why goals are not as good as resolutions. I injured my ankle and couldn’t run for three years. If instead I had framed the resolution as “run four days a week, aiming to increase my endurance,” I might have been able to keep running all three of those years (and maybe run a marathon the following year). Instead I got a marathon medal and an ankle brace. One of my toughest resolutions has become, “respect my physical vessel and aim for the long term.” My main fitness goal is longevity. The bigger and more long-term the goal, the more challenging it is, which is excellent. I mean literally excellent. If you want to excel, it doesn’t happen by doing ordinary or average things, by definition! Doing anything out of the ordinary means doing something different, and that means you don’t already know how to do it, and probably nobody else you know does, either. (Though that won’t stop them from turning into total naysayers). Knowing how to instantly make new stuff fit into your regular routine is exactly the kind of thing nobody knows how to do. Say your resolution is to finally organize your photos. Have you decided what you mean by “organize”? What does ‘done’ look like? How long is it going to take you? When are you going to do it? My guess is, it would take a couple of hours a week for a couple months. That doesn’t come out of a wormhole from space. You don’t suddenly get extra pages in your calendar. It has to come from rearranging your schedule, or cutting out something else you normally do. What thing that might be, it’s not obvious to me (since I don’t know your life) and if it were obvious to you, I’m guessing you already would have done it! Looking at my resolution to do these special stretches, I have a few entirely separate issues. One is physical space. We live in a studio apartment, and there is only one space big enough for a person to get down on the floor and stretch. Issue two, my hubby is also doing a floor thing, using a foam roller to work on his neck. In a different home, we could be accountability partners and do our exercises side by side, but here, it’s a zero-sum game. Issue three, our dog loves to participate in floor stuff. Issue four, I get bored quite easily and I know I need to give myself something distracting to do while I stretch, especially when it hurts! Issue five, I’m constantly rushing around doing other things, and right now it doesn’t feel like I “have time” to do this. The whole entire POINT of taking time to stretch is that I feel so rushed and busy. I’m REQUIRING myself to recast this attitude and change how I think, not just how I act. I must keep at it. What I resolve to do is to keep reframing and adjusting until I’m satisfied. What will probably happen is that I’ll test out a way to anchor something I like (reading the news) with this new thing that “doesn’t come naturally” yet. Then I’ll find myself down there, stretching away for 40 minutes at a... stretch. What are your stretch goals? What is it that you’ve been resolving to do? Remind yourself why you wanted it. Now revise your approach and see if you can fit it in at some point this year. So you insisted on joining that gym. You know what everyone says about New Year’s Resolutions and habits, and you believe that none of it applies to you. You signed up for a bargain membership at a commodity gym.
Congratulations! It just might work! If you really and truly love gaming, TV and movies, music, shopping, fried foods, or any of the other cute and charming habits that people try to shed at resolution time, you can use that! You get to keep all that stuff. Well, actually you get to keep it either way. You can keep it with a fitness level that steadily deteriorates from year to year, or you can keep it while using it as fuel for your body upgrades. Simply choose a form of exercise that allows you to indulge in your favorite activities at the same time. Anchor the time in your schedule, the location, and the habits. Make gym time your indulgent time, time to get away with all the naughty things that are so fun to do. Personally I like spying on people and eavesdropping on their conversations. I like checking out other people’s butts and wondering what workout they do. I like looking at their shoes and their workout clothes and mentally shopping. Would that combo work on me? I also use my elliptical time to watch video clips, read articles, play Words With Friends, look at recipes, and dink around doing all the stuff online that I normally don’t have time to do. Sometimes I’ll read a potboiler that I only allow myself to read while I do cardio. It makes me move faster at the scary parts. I’ve tried watching movies or hour-long TV episodes, but it makes one minute feel like ten. That’s why I like the fragmented articles and short videos. Sometimes the elliptical machines are taken. No surprise, since there are only two at our apartment gym and they’re often full of married couples. My husband will shrug and lift weights while listening to all the music I don’t let him play aloud in the house. I’ll usually hop on a treadmill and use it as a walking desk with my tablet keyboard. Sometimes I buy dog food online or make appointments. Sometimes I just write out a bunch of lists. If I bring a cable then my device will be fully charged, too. It’s not really all that naughty, but when I’ve caught up on email with a full battery, I feel like I just summoned an extra hour out of the ether. That’s one of the main secrets behind getting your money’s worth out of a commodity gym. You have to be equally as willing to do one workout as another, because often your favorite equipment will already be in use. When I was in college, there was a strict 20-minute time limit on all the cardio equipment, and each machine had a sign-up sheet. A bouncer would come over and make you climb down if you tried to stay on longer. I’d take three slots and move between different machines and read my homework. Not having a hundred pages of assigned reading makes anything else feel like playtime. There are all sorts of treats and indulgences and cute habits that fit people associate with their workouts, even their most boring workouts. Cardio and entertainment! The elliptical and TV. The recumbent bike and cooking shows or video games. The treadmill and a podcast. Any fitness class that plays your type of music (although beware: I had to quit one gym that kept playing the same Top 40 pop hit every time I was there. That was before AirPods). Mega calories and endurance sports! Do it indoors long enough when the weather is bad, and suddenly you’ll find yourself doing the same routine outdoors when it’s gorgeous out. You’ll find yourself doing it with a bagel in your hand. Everyone I know who bikes or runs does it for the beer. Every race day I have willing buddies who will hang around for me, even when I’m half their speed, because I hate beer and I’ll give them the voucher off my race bib. A friend of mine used to measure his weight loss against a little poster he had made of all his favorite See’s Candies, and now he’s a century rider. Shopping and physical transformation! It wasn’t until I finally reached my goal weight that I realized how much less uncomfortable high heels are at 120 than at 160. It has to do with the laws of physics and pounds per square inch, which is why stilettos hurt more to wear than a stacked heel or a platform shoe. I also discovered that almost all clothes in my size will fit and look attractive on me, which definitely was not true when I wore a size fourteen. One night I tried on thirty-eight pairs of pants and not a single one fit right. That just doesn’t happen anymore. If fashion or revenge are strong interests of yours, why not? Make your shopping life easier. It is absolutely fair game to base your transformation goals around your boyfriend’s ex or an online photo of the queen bee who tormented you in sixth grade. One of my clients made her goal with days to spare because she knew her ex would be at the same party with his new girlfriend on New Year’s Eve. Chances are, there’s an innocent bystander at your commodity gym who resembles this rival, at least a little. When you see her, you can use her silhouette to rev you up. It’s also fun to outdo the young bro at the next station. Especially if you lift. A commodity gym can be a fantastic source of material for an artist. Caricatures, cartoons, comedy, sculpture, music, whatever it is that you do, if you go to the gym you’ll expand your net for capturing new ideas and fresh inspiration. Same with entrepreneurs and trend analysis. It’s a part of the world that is worthy of exploration. A new gym can be a weird and uncomfortable place for someone who feels self-conscious and insecure. It can be a smelly and boring and loud place, too. Isn’t that also true of anywhere, but especially any shopping mall, hair salon, grocery store, workplace, restaurant, gas station, or anywhere else in public? Just think of your new commodity gym as a place to get your money’s worth, a place to catch up on your to-do list and your must-watch list and the games in your queue. Soon it will be just as familiar as your car, only it will take you farther. Two weeks into the New Year, and how is it going? Personally, I think all of January should be dedicated to hanging around the house, catching up on sleep and maybe reading a few articles about your resolution for the year. In my life, the first couple of weeks of the New Year always seem to include a bunch of dramatic change, and this year has been no exception.
We came home from our New Year’s in Las Vegas, carrying a stack of index cards with our carefully wrought Resolutions and plans for the year. Then I got sick (AGAINNNNN) and lost seven pounds in a week. The hard way. On the other hand, that sure was a quick way to deal with the excess I accumulated over vacation and the holidays... Despite this pretty annoying setback, having plans has helped both of us stick to our vision. We remind ourselves that we have a 52-week year every year, and that even a rough month is only 12% of the allotted time. While it doesn’t show up in our Resolutions, we have some tentative ideas for camping, travel, and bicycle outings. We decided that given my hubby’s travel schedule for work, we need a new strategy if we’re going to be able to plan trips together. How is 2019 going so far? My personal Resolution is to submit a book proposal this year. I bought a course, downloaded some software, and started going through my notes for the book. It turns out I have 183 pages JUST SITTING THERE. This is starting to sound much more straightforward than I had thought. (Famous last words). I’m framing it as a “book report for school” that has to be done before the end of the academic year. My career Resolution is to finish the work for my Distinguished Toastmaster. So far this year, I have won two Best Table Topics ribbons and one for Best Speaker, and I’ve completed another speech toward my ACG. I also won an award for Area Director Excellence and they made me a special custom travel mug. We also got a new member in the club I’m coaching. Considering that we’re only two weeks into the year, this is bananas! I may be able to pull this off after all. My physical Resolution is to work on hip openers. I can honestly say that I have made zero effort toward this. My home Resolution was to set up an outdoor writing area. My hubby ordered me a folding screen, and the weather was nice enough the first week back that I was actually able to sit out on the porch and work! It was magnificent, and then the rains came. But the screen definitely does the job and my bird loves it. Our couples Resolution was to start doing meal prep. This is going better than expected. Marry an engineer and show him an Instant Pot and your troubles are over. Our freezer is already fully loaded with soups and stews, a nice activity when it’s rainy and cold, and we’re both remembering how much we love our home cooking. Definitely a keeper. (The resolution, and also him of course) My Stop Goal is to stop being sick and tired. Really not making much progress here yet, at least on the illness front. If I could just go a month without coming down with something, that would be great. My lifestyle upgrade was to get a new desktop computer. I should have done this last year but I always procrastinate on spending on myself. I went out and got it, despite my eyelid twitching, and was stunned to find out that it cost only half what I had thought it would. Well in that case! My Do the Obvious is to schedule time blocks. This is indeed working, as I’ve been steadily chipping away at a backlog of random dumb tasks. It actually looks like I may get through everything by spring. I’m tracking metrics, and I added a few more to see what would happen. The first thing was that I got really embarrassed about tracking how many news articles I read every day, and that’s dropped to about half. We ordered a handheld body fat measuring device, which has been motivational for my husband and a wakeup call for me, since I am nowhere near the range I was in during marathon training. I also got an older-model Fitbit to track my sleep. My Quest is a sleep project I’m going to call SleepQuest 2019. This is going better than expected already. I quit taking melatonin after 8 years *gasp* with very surprising results. It seems that I’m getting close to managing 8 hours of sleep a night! My Wish is to be signed by a literary agent. I keep reminding myself of this as I work on my book proposal. That’s it for me so far. I didn’t have a great start to the New Year, in one way, but in another I did. That’s because I laid the foundation by doing so much planning throughout December. It’s also because I keep myself accountable by reading my goals over and over, and publishing my progress (or lack thereof). There are still fifty weeks left of 2019. How are we going to use them? Goals are for quitters because a goal implies an endpoint. A goal implies something that is checked off a list. Achieving a goal has quitting baked in.
This can be demonstrated by how many people run a 5k or a marathon and then never run again. Not just never run a footrace again, but never run again as an activity. The fact that goals are for quitters can also be demonstrated by how many people finally reach their goal weight and then promptly put the weight back on. (Raises hand). Fewer than ten percent of people who take an online course actually complete it. Picture a messy garage, and that’s another example. We’ll decide to Clean Out the Garage and then gradually fill it back up. Goals are great when they’re a small part of an overall system, a plan and a strong visualization. Goals suck when they feel like something big, a final answer of some kind. That’s because they don’t work. A goal is like the crest of a wave in the sea, something temporary that exists and then, suddenly, no longer exists. Think of the sea, not the wave. There are quite a lot of ways to go about life transformation that work better than goal-setting. The concept of life transformation itself is one of them. The thing about goals is that we picture ourselves as the same as ever, “myself” as a fixed entity and “the goal” as something external. That implies that our default is working great and that what we’re doing right now is what we’ll be doing every day for the rest of our lives. This goal is going to be a little prize, a thing that can be obtained. A goal is a little sticker, a gold star or a smiley face. It’ll peel off by the end of the day. One approach that works better is to consider the goal in the context of identity. How is this particular goal consistent with my sense of self? How does it reflect my values? How would attaining this change me fundamentally, change my perspective, make me a better person? Parenthood is the first and most obvious example of this. Many people find that they are instantly able to change when they first find out a baby is on the way. My child, my daughter, my little son. They quit smoking or start saving money or take on the mantle of adult responsibility. Everything is different now because it’s not just me, I’m having a kid and now I’m the grownup. That happened for me when I remarried, moved to the suburbs, and realized I had a home and a family. I was not a bachelorette in an apartment with a temp assignment. I was a wife and a stepmom. I stepped up and learned to cook nutritious meals. That concept of “woman” as “hostess, matriarch, cook, mother, and homemaker” came from somewhere out of the dark swamp of my subconscious, a primal and weird instinct. That throwback energy manifested itself in a lot of pot pies, hot bread from the oven, and steaming soups, which was quite nice. My husband already knew how to cook. He had been a dad for a long time already. We took turns cooking, let me make that clear. It was right around that time that my stepdaughter, still in grade school, started cooking dinner now and then. It made her feel like a grownup too. Changing my identity made me feel capable, warm and needed and useful in a new way. Caring for others is a solid excuse for self-care, a good reason to do something that many of us will not prioritize in any other way. I did it for us, and us includes me. This is a sneaky little side approach to many goals, because anything I do to make my life better also makes other people’s lives better. If I’m happier, I’m easier to be around. If I get a better job, my mood is better and I bring home more money. If I get fitter, my energy level goes up and I’m in the mood to participate in more stuff, more often. It’s when I think that caring for others leaves zero for me, it’s then that I get burned out. Burnout is selfish because it makes us too tired and crabby for a fun life. Fun? Since when did ‘fun’ find its way onto my to-do list? My endless, endless to-do list? A to-do list is a pernicious killer of goals and destroyer of dreams. We put stupid things on there like ‘buy groceries’ because checking off a list feels like accomplishing something. Like we wouldn’t buy groceries anyway at some point, because we got hungry and we know how to make it happen. We make the same to-do lists over and over and over and over and over and over again because it keeps us from wondering restlessly, could there be more? When do we elevate with these endless lists? When do we write ‘wow myself with a gourmet dinner because I like it and it sounds awesome’? This is where curiosity comes in, and through the same transom window comes hedonism. Out of hedonism I resolve to sleep more, to buy another set of thousand-threadcount sheets, because I in fact am the Queen of Sheba and nice sheets are not against the law. I’ll wallow if I want and when I get up, I’ll eat blueberry pancakes, crawl right back into bed, and sleep some more. So there. Out of hedonism I resolve to stay hydrated and well-rested, because migraines are from Satan. Out of curiosity I track my health metrics, because I want to know if another life is possible. Is there a recognizable me without this problem, this problem that my doctor has no idea how to solve? That my doctor doesn’t entirely believe is even real? Out of curiosity I sign up for classes, I attend them, I make new friends. I rearrange my schedule and finally delegate chores so I can find the time to get to my class. There is nothing I do that someone else could not help me do, up to and including a more interesting, more fun and better life. It’s easy to change your life when you do it out of desire, curiosity, and a feeling of entitlement. Why should anyone try to stop you from taking a class or changing an hour or so out of your schedule every day? Why should they even care? You don’t need permission to make a resolution or transform something about yourself. (If you do, here, I give you permission. You are allowed to do whatever you want. So say I, the actual, factual Queen of Sheba). Don’t quit on yourself. Don’t quit on yourself because it’s quitting on life and because it sets a bad example. People are counting on you to prove that it can be done, that you can get more fun into your life without hardly trying. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
Categories
All
|