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I still struggle with this, but have found a couple things I've discovered about myself: 1) Wake up earlier. I'm a self-described night-owl. Its counter-intuitive for sure, but I've found that the earlier I wake up, the more energy I maintain throughout the day. WFH makes this a lot harder for me (which is one of the big reasons why I dislike WFH, personally); it requires more discipline, which is a limited resource. 2) Morning workouts. I've found that just trying to do something in my house helps a lot; oftentimes, forcing myself out the door in the early, early morning is too much and I wouldn't stick with it. 3) Two biggest things that have improved my probability of doing workouts: VR and watch tracking. Now, this combination is "lying" to a degree; VR involves a lot of hand movement, which is where your watch is detecting "burned calories" or whatever. But; who cares? So, it says I burned 300 calories in that last 30 minute workout; the raw number is less important to me than just "closing the ring" (on Apple Watch) and moving the goal higher each month. I've found that being able to look at my watch and see the rings nearly closed already by 8am is almost a sigh of relief; the day's barely started and I don't have to worry about rushing to get them closed at 9pm. The Quest 2 is great for this (though, I also have a Valve Index, and comparatively... better to just not know how much better VR can be lol); Supernatural, Beat Saber, Pistol Whip, really anything that's "arcady" and gets your heart rate up. 4) Food; some people say sugar is bad, or carbs are bad, or whatever. I really don't notice any difference in myself. Its more-so just the amount and timing. I don't like eating breakfast, because it inevitably makes me feel like I'm literally dying of starvation at lunch, and then its all I think about, finding food, overeating. I also don't like eating anything after, say, 10pm; it reduces the probability that I'll be in bed at a reasonable time. 5) Coffee. I'm not gonna say "quit it"; I love it; the taste, variety, jolt of alertness, the ritual of making it. More-so, first, I reclassified my relationship with it from "just something I drink" to "I need to think about this"; its a drug that can impact my body and mind to the same magnitude as alcohol, so treat it as such. Then I really started thinking about how my body reacts to it; how it really is "trading" energy from a baseline level throughout the day, to bias more toward when you drink it with a dip hours later. So, prepare for the dip, which always comes; have a feeling for when its going to come, don't counter-act it with more coffee, pre-empt it with, for example, a walk outside. Have a caffeine cutoff in the early afternoon, and stick to it. 6) Finding long-range projects & hobbies that excite me. The key word there is "Find"; as I get older, they don't just appear ambiently, I need to hunt them out. It used to be work; maybe it still is for some people, but not for me. If I find something, and the next morning its the first thing I think about when I wake up; that's it. If I wake up and don't feel excited to get out of bed, that's my goal for the day; find something that excites me for tomorrow; and that's exciting! A whole daily goal just to find something else to excite me. Stick with it for a bit. Eventually it'll fade, then find another. Maybe its: learning a new piece on the piano; a new VR game; some coding project idea that I'll never complete; finishing a drawing then listing it as an NFT that will never make any money but at least it was interesting. 7) Drop "consumption" social media entirely. Its not really the nature of the app that matters; its my relationship with it. If I much consume more on it than I produce, its bad. For me, Snapchat isn't so bad; I use it as a form of communication with friends. For others, maybe you doomscroll Snapchat stories and the Discover feed; that's not great. |