Lifesaving habits
Image by beauty_of_nature from Pixabay
It’s been a couple of weeks now with late work-nights. A temporary reduction in sleep hours is usually no problem, but it is annoyingly easy to get stuck in a loop where you are active later in the evening or night, which both makes it harder to fall asleep and reduces the quality of the hours you get. Consequentially, it will be increasingly harder to get up in the morning and/or you will lose focus during the day, which will reduce productivity. And then you will need to work even longer hours to compensate, which only adds yet more gravel in the delicate machinery. It is a dark spiral. How do you break it?
In times like these, I have a couple of life saving habits. Dog walks are one of them. If it weren’t for the dogs, the probability of me taking daily walks in stressful periods is less than zero percent. But curtesy of the two Labradors, it is physically impossible to walk less than three times a day. And the difference breathing some fresh air for a couple of minutes makes, cannot be overstated. This is easily the most important factor that sustains me, and it is what has gotten me through the roughest times in the past decade. To sign up for a new job where dogs are not allowed in the office feels extremely far-fetched to me. We are talking massive health benefits here, that would have to be replaced with stress i.e. managing a kindergarten for the dogs as well, and not just the kids. What kind of salary would make that replacement worthwhile? I don’t know, but somewhere in the vicinity of 5000 EUR/month on top of the base salary could be a reasonable start. That’s how valuable it is.
Another lifesaving habit of mine is playing musical instruments for 15 min/day for the past ten years. And since 2019 it has been the drums. The best thing about the drums is that it is a very physical activity. I play a very technical and fast song, and after a session, my heart is up to speed and the T-shirt is wet. A couple of weeks ago, I even increased my daily dose to 2x15 minutes. I simply could not resist the urge to increase. And now I can really feel the physical benefits. I constantly feel that pleasurable pain in the arms and legs that usually correlate with gym visits. And the cardio aspect of playing the drums is obviously 2X nowadays. Without a doubt, the best time to practice drums is first thing in the morning. It gets your blood pumping and warms up your mind. It is also powerful to start your day with an activity that is a bullet proof way to grow. Whatever happens, no matter how bad your practice session goes, you will still be 15 minutes better than your past self before you started. This implies that drum playing is a net positive activity in my life, no matter how or from where I look at it. It is obviously good to have a couple of these habits in your daily schedule, that you perform with religious consistency. No matter how many fires you have to put out or how many urgent calls you have, you just soldier on and keep building that house as a background process, brick by brick.
When writing this, I start to wonder whether the drum playing is the canary in the coal mine? Dog walks are important, but they are also unconditional. You cannot choose to skip them. The only thing that happens then is that you get pee all over the floor, and that takes much longer to clean up than to just do the dog walk. So that is easy. But nobody will pee on my floor if I miss a drum session. And that is actually a very bad thing. You must do the practice sessions on will power alone, and that is hard. Really hard. I do realize that not many people can manage to do that. I do not claim to be perfect. Far from it. I have many things in a day which are harmful. Where attention goes, energy flows. To control your attention is the most important and most difficult task there is. I could be 10X better at controlling my attention, that is for sure. But daily drum practice has become something that I am very proud of. I have managed to put that quarter in my daily habit alongside the dog walks. During these 15 minutes per day, my life is perfect. If I could figure out how to channel this discipline to other areas of my life, it would be like gaining superpowers. That’s why it’s a canary in the coalmine. If stress level becomes so high, that I start to miss drum practice, then I am on very thin ice and must back off immediately. Thus, it is the best early warning I know of with regards to stress management. You simply cannot afford to prioritize away such a precious habit. As long as I keep practicing, I will consider myself sustainable.
A final word of advice from my ten years of daily practice. Should you decide to incorporate some similar daily 15-minute routine in your life, I strongly recommend to do it first thing in the morning. Because then you maximize the probability that you will execute. The later in the day you postpone, the higher the probability that you will encounter something that will make you miss a session. And then it is game over, the habit is dead.