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What’s the rush? The power of a slow morning

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Re: What’s the rush? The power of a slow morning

#161

I've been waking up at 5am for the past 5 months so I can head to the gym (my first telecom meeting starts at 7am). Because no one is ever going to bother me between 5am and 7am, I've been able to consistently got to the gym at least 3x per week (trying to bump it up to 5x per week for the new year). I started doing this because it was very difficult for me to consistently go to the gym after work. Things come up, I…

what kind of gym opens 5am.

Many are open 24 hours or provide self-entry outside core hours.

Re: What’s the rush? The power of a slow morning

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great if you sleep on your back but side-sleepers aren't going to be happy on a hard mattress, the shoulder becomes a single point of contact with the bed. I'm not convinced that people accustomed to sleeping in one orientation can easily change to the other. Although I would be curious if anyone has anecdotes about that.

Well I’m a near 50 overweight guy (yeah, I know...) and sleeping on the side (if I sleep on my back I snore like hell). If I sleep on a too firm mattress, I confirm my shoulder starts to hurt during the night. When I’m sleeping, I can rest for several hours, even the whole night, without moving or changing side. But on firm mattress I wake up several time during the night to change side. About the orientation, it’s r…

Side sleeper here, i have very firm mattress. Shoulder pain is probably not because of the mattress, but because of weak muscles. Training your upper back/shoulder muscles just a bit will help a lot. I had a shoulder injury (bar/pub accident, yup.) which caused me to avoid using certain muscles. Got pain in my shoulder as well. Fysiotherapist recommended some excercises and it disappeared.

I have a firm mattress because i had a sore back, which in turn caused me to wake up tired.

A sitting non physical profession is the cause of all this. Sometimes i do have a sore back, but going to the (climbing) gym fixes it for weeks.

Re: What’s the rush? The power of a slow morning

#163

I've been waking up at 5am for the past 5 months so I can head to the gym (my first telecom meeting starts at 7am). Because no one is ever going to bother me between 5am and 7am, I've been able to consistently got to the gym at least 3x per week (trying to bump it up to 5x per week for the new year). I started doing this because it was very difficult for me to consistently go to the gym after work. Things come up, I…

When bumping training from 3 to 5 days/week, a common mistake is to increase total load to 5/3=170%. The trick is to lower the load on each day to 60-70% and advance from there.

Re: What’s the rush? The power of a slow morning

#164
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I'm a 9 hour+ sleeper, so I need those sleep hours. Most people need at least 8-8.5 hours (as in 99.999%). He does too, just doesn't realize it.

Source for this? I personally need 9+ hours as well but am constantly told I sleep for too long.

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, it's the most mentioned book on sleep recently. According to this book there is no such thing as sleeping "too much". Sleeping a lot is correlated with higher mortality, but that is because sick people tend to sleep longer in order for the body to recover, not because sleep in any way causes ill health.

Re: What’s the rush? The power of a slow morning

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I'm a 9 hour+ sleeper, so I need those sleep hours. Most people need at least 8-8.5 hours (as in 99.999%). He does too, just doesn't realize it.

I do ok with 7. I’d sleep longer but my back starts to hurt if I’m in bed too long. I get up at 5am to avoid traffic.

Sleep deprived people can't tell how impaired they are. Sleeping only 7 hours a night has serious long term mental and physical health consequences, and is affecting your productivity short term. If you don't believe me, read Why We Sleep, it's a great investment in your future health.

Re: What’s the rush? The power of a slow morning

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay so hear me out here. You can change. It’s not hard. I am the owliest of owls. All my life, I’ve been up till 2am and struggled to get out of bed, snooze the alarm, last minute, dash through the shower, hurry to work, no time to think, sit down guiltily at 9:01am. I hated that morning rush but whatever, “that’s just who I am”. Now, I’m 42, so maybe age makes this easier. But my girlfriend is an early riser, and s…

Had to check this wasn't an alt account I didn't remember creating. This is me. Everyone complains I turn up to standup at 10am eating. For me I've been awake for 5.5 hours and had breakfast 5 hours ago, I'm hungry alright. It took me a long time to get in the rhythm for this, the first few weeks I slept in more than I like to admit, and mostly it was because I couldn't admit I needed to go to bed closer to 9pm than…

Yeah we have two breakfasts. One when we wake up, then “second breakfast” somewhere around 10am.

Re: What’s the rush? The power of a slow morning

#167
post #78
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confident you could work in the morning if you readjusted your sleeping habits. And there are a ton of jobs out there that start later in the day or have flexible work hours.

> I'm confident you could work in the morning if you readjusted your sleeping habits. This subthread is about the possible/probable genetic reasons why some people have more trouble adjusting their sleeping habits to that of everyone else. Saying that he just needs to adjust his sleeping habits is not really helpful.

I absolutely don't believe in the genetic reasons because for me it tends to shift every few years. Let's take out childhood and puberty and only see my adult life. I can go years on 6h of sleep and everything's perfect (usually sleep 9h on the weekends) and then there's years where I absolutely need my 8h to function. Sometimes it's easy to get up at 6 sometimes I could sleep in to 9 every day. It has nothing to do with summer or winter, that much I can tell. I am not a morning person, but compared to other people it's fine.

So yeah, maybe there is some reason I've never discovered why it shifts so much (eating habits, weight, general mood) - but I can only say it shifts every few months or years and hasn't significantly changed since I am an "adult".

Re: What’s the rush? The power of a slow morning

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The work will be there either way. So I can choose to work first and come home worn out from that and then try to do things I care about, or instead to do things I care about first, that don't wear me out, and carry a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment with me to work. And, I mean, I'm not trying to finish a story before work - not from scratch, certainly. My current story is around 20k words right now, and it'…

I'd like to put my hobbies and fun things first, but, I'm a little afraid that my performance at work would suffer, because I'd have less energy when showing up to work, especially at the end of the day. I already often find it hard to remain productive after 3-4PM. I'm worried that if I got up earlier and worked on hobbies before going to work, I'd have even less productive energy to dedicate to my job, and my perfo…

I’ve overperformed throughout my entire career. That’s almost two decades now, and it’s already driven me into burnout once; I came back from that, but that was a long time ago, and I’m neither confident I can do so again nor willing to suffer through it again.

At this point I am absolutely ready to give less than all of myself to the job, and more to the things that bring me joy and give my life meaning. If that means overperforming less at work, and closer to par with what’s actually expected of me - if that means no longer giving 150% effort to my day job, and “merely” 100% instead - then I’m okay with that, and so, per relevant discussions, is my reporting chain.

If that changes - if it proves in practice that the company is unwilling to support a transition from the heading-for-burnout precedent I’ve set to a sustainable level of effort - then that’ll be a clear indication that this company is not worth keeping on as a customer of my labor, and I’ll replace it with a customer which is.

The tradeoffs are going to be different for everyone, of course, but I’m convinced the same model generally applies, at least for those of us who have a worthwhile product to sell in our labor. Given the enormous prevalence of impostor syndrome in our industry, I wouldn’t be surprised if the product you’re selling is more valuable than you’re in the habit of thinking.

And it’s also worth keeping in mind that every employer, with the best will in the world, still has a strong economic incentive to convince you to undervalue the product they’re buying from you. That incentive exists because they’re buying it from you, and want to do so as cheaply as possible. No judgment; it’s a business, that’s the game. But you’d be wise not to take their word for what your work is worth, and learn to play the other side of the game - because the better you are at the other side of the game, the closer you get to being paid what your work is worth.

Re: What’s the rush? The power of a slow morning

#169
I find that how much sleep I need depends on how present and moral I feel in my life in general at that time.

At one extreme, I once attended a week and a half meditation retreat in which you're up at 4, meditating for about 11 hours every day and the whole thing is silent. I felt such heightened moral and mental clarity by the fifth and sixth days that I began sleeping less, sometimes lying awake until 2 or 3am (and up at 4), but felt full of energy each day.

At the other extreme, carrying on in a big city, I indulge in vices, deviate from my notion of perfect morality, exaggerate in conversations, eat meat, engage in reactive behavior with others, fail to keep up a meditation routine etc., and I end up sleeping 7-8 hours like clockwork.

I have a twofold theory 1. Internal monologue creates excess pathways in the brain that need to be pruned, creating the need to sleep. Decreasing the amount and degree of our internal monologue (sometimes called 'being present') decreases the amount of these pathways and thus the sleep we need. 2. Failure to act rightly/morally/virtuously creates the need to sleep. The more our daily actions are in line with our sense of right action, right morality, the less sleep we will need. The deeper theory here is that immoral acts cause neurological agitation that creates toxins in the brain that sleep flushes away.

My theory is supported by my understanding of sleep as having the function of 'flushing toxins' from the brain and 'pruning' neurological pathways that the brain determines not useful, such as a thought you had that day in your internal monologue. Immoral acts tend to nag at us, even if only a little act and a little bit, creating anxious internal monologue, compounding the need for sleep.

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