Burpees. Boxing. Biking. And... journaling?
My psychiatrist taught me that one of the best ways to get consistently get good sleep is to follow some practice like the following:
- Set a timer at the same time every night. (For me, that's 11pm.) No more screens after this, and try to avoid any bright lights, especially shining into your eyes.
- Clean up anything you need to clean around the house. I do the dishes, put away kids' toys, and usually clean up the living and dining rooms so they don't look too messy.
- Sit down, not in your bedroom if possible, and journal. I'm not a journaler so I balked at this, but here's how he made it work for me: I open up a physical journal, and write down two sets of bullet points: What happened today, and what am I planning to do tomorrow. That's it. Close the journal.
- Get ready for bed. Shower, brush your teeth, etc.
- Go to bed. If you have trouble sleeping, after ten minutes you can get up, stay in your bedroom, and read a physical book or something similar. The reflected light off a book doesn't trigger your brain the same way a screen does. Once you start getting sleepy, go back to bed.
I've been following this same pattern since he told me a few weeks ago, and
I've gotten the best, longest, and most consistent sleep of the last two decades. Try it out!
I mentioned last time I'm doing FightCamp. A lot of people wrote back and asked me about it. I'll give one heavy caveat: I got it instead of Peloton, and I've been pretty unhappy with one key thing: the reason I was attracted to Peloton was the communal aspect. I miss gym classes! Peloton is very social, with robust friend networking tooling and live classes. FightCamp.. has a single global leaderboard for each pre-recorded lesson. The lessons are great! But I'm still having the same trouble with motivation and community.
Thankfully, this month at least, there's #burpril, where Vitor Caneco, a member of the Laravel community, is encouraging everyone who can to do 100 burpees
or modified burpees every day for the month of April. This is great! It's nice to have a community of people encouraging each other on. This is what I wanted!
As a result, I'm actually going to sell my FightCamp trackers, move the boxing bag into the carport (where I'll still use it, because that's where my weights are), and get a bike and try Peloton's classes and its social network. I'll report back. :)