Fifteen minutes a day keeps the divorce away – pt II.
Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay
A month ago I wrote a piece about our newfound morning routine; A coffee between 06:20 and 06:30 with my wife. By now, we should be around two months into the habit. It’s not like I would consider our marriage problematic – not even close – but the general improvements in life quality I have seen in this very short time is mind-boggling. I read many years ago that some Buddhist monk or something said that the last thing you do before you go to bed determines the quality of your sleep. And the first thing you do after waking up determines the quality of your day. This quote has stuck with me and pops up in my mind from time to time. The morning coffee must be a perfect example of the latter part of the quote.
I am an early morning person. Getting up between 04:30 and 05:00 is wonderful. You get a head start on everyone else. I have been a fan of these early mornings for many years now. If you want to re-calibrate your circadian rhythm, I firmly believe that the only way to do it is to set the alarm clock for the desired time and unconditionally get up when it goes off. Even if you got to bed at midnight and you only managed to clock in 4 hours of sleep. Keep this up for a couple of days, and I guarantee that you will be so tired in the evening that going to bed “early” around 22:00 will feel fantastic. I often hear people say that they need to go to bed sooner, but I prefer to start at the other end of the problem. I cannot get tired earlier than I am used to. If I usually go to bed at midnight, it would probably be pointless to go to bed two hours earlier and expect to fall asleep. Solving the problem with the alarm clock instead is my recommendation from years of personal trial and error.
Getting out of bed early is only the first step. Your following morning routine is even more important. As the supposed monk said, begin your day with activities that make you feel great and the probability that the rest of the day will feel great too increases by a large margin. That’s why you should always tidy your bed, for example. If the first thing you do is bring order into chaos, you will perceive less friction with the next task, and the next, and so on… I have plenty of activities in my morning routine that make me feel good. Writing my dream journal, making the bed, playing the drums for 15 minutes, practicing French for 5 minutes, walking my dogs, preparing my work environment by prioritizing the tasks I must accomplish before the end of the day. Sometimes I replace drum playing and language learning with critical work tasks. One hour between 05:00 and 06:00 is easily worth more than two hours after lunch. The mind is a blank slate, and the risk of interruptions is zero, which amounts to perfect conditions for productivity. However, all the aforementioned morning activities pale in comparison to the morning coffee. That is a cup of pure dopamine and oxytocin.
It´s all about quality over quantity. Sometimes we won’t get our ten minutes alone, because I have noted in the past week or two that our older (4yo) son seems to have caught on to the pleasant atmosphere in the mornings. Nowadays, he often crawls out of bed to join us during coffee. And he is in a blissful state of mind. He brings a table game or a book or something similar, and we play together for a couple of minutes before heading off for kindergarten. Our mornings are now significantly less stressful. I don’t need to rush anything, and the school run has become almost as timely as a Japanese Shinkansen. Maybe the younger guy who turns two soon, will join in on the routine eventually, we will see. Anyway, I am hard pressed to come up with a single better suggestion on how to start off your day than with a 10–15-minute slot of quality time with the most important people in your life. It feels like calibrating your compass every single morning, and that helps me so much to stay on course during the rest of the day.
And now the obvious thing strikes me. I wonder what kind of micro-routine we can come up with to end each day. If that can potentially have the same effect on my sleep, I might have stumbled on the best “life-hack” of them all in that quote from the Buddhist monk. Currently, the evenings are a lot more ad-hoc than the mornings. There is certainly some room for improvement here. We only need to carve out 5-10 minutes of unnecessary evening activities, of which there probably are several. But just as with recalibrating your circadian rhythm, I believe it is better to improve your mornings first. If the principle holds, I suppose it is easier to optimize the mornings than to optimize the evenings? If you have already had a good day, it will be somewhat lower friction to execute the pleasant evening habit.