Precariously Poised

Reflecting on quarter 2 sleep goals and achievements – What worked? What didn’t?

July 8th, 2021
I might say this every month for the rest of the year, but how is it already the middle of July? Perhaps it’s because the pandemic restrictions are being lifted and everyone’s calendars are filling up with social events again, or maybe I blacked out through the last month and a half to escape the deafening drone of the 17-year cicadas in our area. Still, I feel like time has been speeding!

In any case, it’s not only a new month, but a new quarter of the year! It’s time for me to look back on my quarter 2 goals and accomplishments, recognize my successes and opportunities for improvement (I once had a coworker who would insist on calling “problems” and “issues” as “opportunities for improvement” and I’ve adopted this because I believe reframing can be so impactful).

As a reminder, here were my goals for the last three months:
1. Limit caffeine intake after noon
2. Be in bed, ready to sleep by 10:30pm
3. Get 15 minutes of daily sun exposure
4. Stop using screens after 10pm
How did I do?

To be honest, I probably had more misses than hits in all areas except for limiting caffeine intake after noon (where a lot of my success came from just not going out to buy a coffee that day). However, even if I was successful only 1/4 of the time, that’s still more effort that I’ve put into my quality of sleep than I have previously and I say that’s still something to celebrate. Practicing progress over perfection!

What got in my way?

For limiting caffeine intake after noon, my biggest challenge was getting a coffee early enough in the day (usually I don’t have enough time between dropping my son off at daycare and my first work meetings of the day to get a coffee so I’ll go out and get one later). I could make a coffee at home (I have a coffee maker) but I’ll be honest, my weakness is those $5 lattes sweetened with sugary syrup and I haven’t tried to figure out how to duplicate at home. I also tend to drink my coffees really slowly so even if I got my coffee at say 10:30am, I might still technically be taking my final sips after noon.

For being ready to sleep by 10:30pm, sometimes it was wanting to spend more time with my husband after my son went to sleep at 9pm. Sometimes my son was having a rough night and would need help resettling to sleep. Sometimes I felt like I needed some extra time to unwind.

For getting 15 minutes of daily sun exposure, sometimes it was raining, or by the time I had a break in my work meetings, it was unreasonably hot. Sometimes I had work meetings throughout the day. Sometimes I could not get my toddler to walk with me. Sometimes I just didn’t feel like it.

To stop using screens after 10pm, mostly it was just a tough habit for me to break. I mentioned before that I had the most success having screen time out of the bedroom beforehand, but even so, I often ended up watching something until 10:30pm. With my son going to bed at 9pm, and many shows lasting an hour, unless I started watching a show immediately after my son went to bed, I’d be pushing that 10pm boundary.

What will I do moving forward?

For limiting caffeine intake after noon, I’ll look up some make-at-home latte recipes and try some out. Bonus: all the time and money saved by not going out to get some coffee! If it gets to be too late during the day, I’ll consider a replacement like making myself tea or a chocolate milk instead.

For being ready to sleep by 10:30pm, honestly I felt like this was the most impactful change to my habits so I really want to acknowledge that for myself. I just plain feel better the more often I get to bed by 10:30pm. That said, I’m also ok with all the reasons I listed for not making it to that 10:30pm bedtime because my relationship with my family is so so important to me. So maybe 10:30pm is a 5-days a week goal or a soft goal where it’s ok if I’m ready for bed at 10:45pm instead (still better than after midnight!).

For getting 15 minutes of daily sun exposure, I think this one requires a deeper dive of curiosity. My personal motivation gets in the way a lot of the time, but pre-pandemic and pre-working from home all the time, I went outside for walks a lot, all summer long, despite the heat and in work clothes for an overly air-conditioned office. So there’s something else different about being at home that’s getting in my way and I’d like to take the time to explore that some more.

To stop using screens after 10pm, honestly I’m going to drop and forgive myself for this one. I have three other great sleep goals, I’m adding hydration goals for this quarter, and I think it’s ok to just let go of this one for now. When the other things are more established habits, I can try again to make this a priority.
Setting rewards to build new habits is not working and this is why

June 25th, 2021

It’s commonly said that a key component of building a new habit is getting a (timely) reward for doing the habit. Since it’s almost July, I’ve been taking a look at my goals for the month, the new habits I want to build, and have run into a roadblock when it comes to determining a “reward” for these new habits.

Here’s my hang-up: Sure, it sounds nice to say that after I do XYZ, I eat a piece of chocolate or buy myself a new shirt or watch a movie or take a nap, BUT if these are meant to be rewards, then that means I should be restricting myself from engaging in those until I make the habit. Restriction is its own new habit, and I’m not big on it, personally, because it leads to that thing I want having increasing power over myself and my thoughts. If I want to eat a piece of chocolate, I’ll do it. If I want a new shirt (and generally, I’m good at sticking to a budget, so I rarely buy new clothes or things unless I really like them or need them), I’ll buy it. Really, what’s to stop me from rewarding myself without accomplishing the goal, except for the same willpower that is insufficient to get me to achieve the goal without a carrot dangling in front of it? Frankly, I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that I’m rewarding myself for completing a new habit but rather punishing myself for not doing it.

As a mom of a toddler who follows numerous young child behavior specialists on social media, one message seems common — encourage intrinsic rewards. And yet, if I look up “habit rewards” the list of examples is almost always limited to extrinsic rewards (treats, things, escapes).

So, how do you identify intrinsic rewards for habits that don’t provide an immediate result? Or, for example, with my physical therapy exercises to strengthen my abdominal muscles while I’m pregnant and actively pushing the boundaries of those abdominal muscles, how do I continue to motivate myself to do the exercises when even after I’ve been doing them religiously, at my check-up I find out that my condition has worsened?

I think this ties back into my mental exploration of why saying “I should” do this isn’t helpful in that it all comes down to reminding yourself of why you’re trying to make this a habit in the first place. If you can’t see immediate results (or as with my previous example, are seeing what looks like the opposite result) then you need to constantly remind yourself why you wanted to do this in the first place. What are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to avoid? I may have taken one step back in my progress with my exercises but I may have saved myself from taking nine additional steps backwards if I do nothing.
Sleep wins bringing me more energy, better focus, and improved mood

June 12th, 2021

I have been feeling SO much better rested lately. I’m hardly using the scientific method here, so I couldn’t say what has had the most significant impact on my newfound energy. My most recent change has been adding walks in the sunshine to my morning routine. My early-to-bedtime routine may also finally be having an effect. But it could also be my toddler sleeping an hour later or my pregnancy hormones stabilizing now that I’m a few weeks into my second trimester.

So I could not tell you what the magic sauce has been, but I have been feeling amazing. I no longer feel like I could nap by 10 am. I’m not fighting the urge to go to bed at 8:30 pm. I’m better able to focus on my work. I feel less stressed, for sure. It’s amazing.

The one thing I can say is that I use a sleep tracker at night, and while it does count some of my just-lying-still-in-my-bed as “sleep,” it’s an excellent ballpark, and it’s been tracking over 8 hours of sleep each night for the past few days. Before that, despite all my best efforts, I seemed to get between 5 and 7 hours of sleep.

So in sloppy, completely unscientific conclusion: Every little change helps achieve better quality and quantity of sleep. Getting more sleep feels amazing.
What if we all treated each other like fellow human beings?

June 7th, 2021

Keeping it short today with some random shower thoughts.

What if whenever we encounter people with an opposing viewpoint, we view it as an opportunity for us to learn something new instead of assuming they are coming from a place of ignorance or malice?

What if that anger we take out on a stranger (a complaint, an insult, cutting them off on the road, etc.) is the last straw for whatever is happening in their life?

What if a spontaneous kind word or action toward a complete stranger (a compliment, a smile, holding the elevator door, etc) could make their terrible day not feel so heavy?

What if we allowed ourselves to love ourselves completely and unconditionally without the voice of society telling us it’s narcissistic to do so?

What if we praised ourselves and others for practicing and trying instead of passing judgment and criticisms for the mistakes and missed targets?

What if we all believed that every person is just doing the best they can given their circumstances, given their experiences, given what others have taught them?
Finding motivation when hiding from your problems is not sending them away

April 23rd, 2021

Hello, motivation? I’m not feeling it today. The problem is, I’ve been procrastinating work off and on all week, and the result has been a much more limited output than what I promised—Womp womp. Enter embarrassment, shame, guilt, and a desire to continue to hide from my responsibilities rather than power through them and turn this whole mess around.

Sometimes I feel like a perfectionist imposter. Perfectionists are often described as people who have an immaculate house, are always punctual, and give 110% effort to their work. This. Is. Not. Me. I’m the type of perfectionist who tells myself I should have a clean and tidy house, looks at the mess around me, and cannot begin to get my house to an acceptable level of clean and tidy (especially since there are four other mess-contributing members of the household, two of which are constantly shedding fur), feels overwhelmed, binges Netflix and judges myself harshly for having an embarrassingly unkempt home. I set high expectations for myself, don’t try to meet them, and then berate myself for not meeting them. And then I also feel bad that I’m not even a good perfectionist (whatever that means).

Look at me; I digress. I’m working toward setting more realistic expectations of myself, defining these expectations more clearly (so I don’t move the goalpost on myself), recognizing my accomplishments, putting pride in my work, and not adding to my anxiety and stress.

Why am I procrastinating on my work right now? Maybe I’m embarrassed that I fell short of expectations with my first go around. Maybe I feel extra pressure to KILL it to make up for the previous disappointments. Maybe I feel like an imposter in my work.

Ok, brain, I hear you. You’re scared of feeling like you disappointed yourself and others. Let’s pause. Reframe. Why should I do my work right now? Because the sooner I have it done, the sooner I can get feedback on it so that if I need to change my direction, I can get there. Because it will feel so amazing not to have this looming over me anymore. Because the more time and effort I put into it, the better the result will be. Because I can and have done amazing work when I’ve put in the effort.

You’ve got this. I’ve got this. Let’s do this!
How I realized my perfectionism was holding me back and am channeling it into something productive

December 27th, 2020

Hi. My name is Kay, and I am a recovering perfectionist. For most of my life, I have held myself to unrealistic standards of flawlessness and then been hard on myself when I failed to meet them. Sounds like fun, right?

…being a perfectionist was once a quality I was proud of…

Being a perfectionist was once a quality I was proud of, and in fact, it served me well while I was growing up. As a student, achieving perfection was well-defined, measurable, and achievable: go to school, and get ‘good’ grades. Then I graduated from college and was hoisted into the adult world: a sea of open possibilities with no generally accepted scale for measuring success. I felt lost, uncertain, and completely out of my realm. So… now what do I do?

In some zombie movies, when the survivors inevitably find themselves surrounded by the undead, they try to get out by blending in, limping awkwardly along with the zombie current, and desperately hoping to go unnoticed. This is how I approached the first ten years of my adulthood. I got a job, moved out of my parents’ house, lost my job, moved back into my parents’ house, got temporary work through my dad’s job, moved out of my parents’ house without any steady income to support it, got a job, got a house, got married, had a child. I was grappling onto the adult-iest goals I could think of and flubbing my way in life toward them.

That last one was a doozy: having a child. Have you ever tried to be a perfectionist modern-day mom of a newborn? Failure, failure, everywhere. And I started my new mom journey pregnant with the ideals of a beautiful unmedicated, minimal intervention birth. This dream spiraled terrifically over 26 hours into several medications and a surgical delivery. As I lay on the operating table, having lost all sense of control, my brain dived into the depths of the worst-case scenario—losing my baby—and latched onto that idea so firmly that even after my baby was born safely and without complications, I struggled for months—arguably years—to cope with this experience. As I said, perfectionists’ brains are super fun.

Failure, failure everywhere.

Thus I entered motherhood—where the zombie apocalypse metaphor is ever more appropriate. Trying to recover from my “failed” labor and delivery, I buried myself in the overabundance of contradicting parenting advice and obsessed over whether my baby was eating or sleeping enough. Thank goodness my mom stayed with our family in the early weeks, or I may have starved. I don’t know that any of this is related specifically to my perfectionist mindset, but this experience was a catalyst to my nights of online research of how the human brain works, lots of introspection, and practicing letting go of so many of my expectations. Over time, I realized how immobilizing my perfectionist habits have been and how they’ve prevented me from trying or starting so many things because I was afraid of disappointing myself.

One of these things I had always had difficulty starting was a blog. There was never a topic that was perfect enough, a blog title that was perfect enough, or a purpose that was perfect enough for me to move out of brainstorming and into the doing phase. But this time, when I wondered if the topic could continue to inspire me, I reminded myself of other blogs that evolved, changed direction, or rebranded. I don’t have to get it “right” at the start. Maybe it’ll lack clear direction or have a shaky “voice,” and maybe that doesn’t matter because, over time, I’ll figure it out. With any luck, sharing my journey will invite others to learn with me.