021. turns out waking up at 7 was better than 5
self-imposed routine tasks, discipline and the negative consequences of failure
I’ve always struggled with self-imposed routine tasks. I struggle to do certain things at certain times of the day, every day. Things like doing skincare, having lunch at the right time, doing this every Tuesday, that every Saturday. With time freedom and flexibility, you also need a lot of discipline.
Not discipline as in forcing myself to follow an impossible schedule, that I myself planned in a temporary boost of motivation. Also, not as in cold showers and painful workouts. I’m more referring to forcing myself to do things that I enjoy and things that are good for me, or future me, that greedy gal.
When you have external obligations, like school, you need some discipline to wake up early and get there on time. But you need it to an extent. Since you’re pulled by something else other than you, there’s some amount of motivation there.
It’s the same when you go meet with someone, you don’t need discipline to get ready, buy the tram ticket, get on the tram and walk to the meeting point (replace tram with your most used means of transportation). It’s motivation.
These two situations have two things in common:
They both are something other than yourself, maybe even greater than yourself.
If you fail at them, the negative consequences are pretty apparent: you don’t pass your subjects; you leave someone stood up, possibly making them get mad at you.
I remember back in my last year of high school, my sister and I, for some reason that was definitely related to motivation, decided to start waking up earlier to have a couple of hours to be productive before school. I think we wanted to work out and such. We normally woke up at 7 to start class at 8. The first day we woke up at 5. It was difficult, but we had a productive morning and felt proud of ourselves.
The second day we woke up at 7 again, as well as the third and fourth days and all the coming days until graduation. There were no negative consequences to us failing, we just didn’t get the couple of benefits we thought waking up hours before sunrise would have.
Journaling is one of those things that I want to do but don’t have lasting motivation for. Every time I’ve started to journal, something similar to the 5 in the morning routine happened. It lasted one to two days. But I’m happy to say that I’ve now journaled for 8 days straight. What has changed? I created negative consequences of failure.
I created a challenge for myself. Every day, I have to tick off 8 tasks, or habits, for 30 days. They aren’t the most difficult things to do, but their addition is challenging enough to make failing an easy possibility. If I fail to complete all tasks, I have to restart the challenge back to day 1. Because of this, I now journal, read, workout, drink more water, do my skincare… every day.
I’m starting to enjoy it, so hopefully the risk of having to restart it is still scary enough.
What makes the challenge more difficult is the restrictions. I can only spend up to 30 minutes on social media (TikTok and Instagram combined, Twitter and Reddit too, just in case). I also cannot eat processed high sugar food, like chocolate bars and such, which is not too difficult, but still is a restriction.
The failing consequence of having to restart is keeping me going. But I also have what I think of as a bare minimum practice. For example, if I can’t get myself to do the full skincare routine, I put on just one cream. The idea is to create the habit, not to optimize it. So the important thing is to do it, and since perfection every day is impossible, bare minimum is an option.
My sister and I built the perfect early morning routine back in 2018 or 2019, but it was impossible to keep up with, and a good enough morning routine was what stuck.
If I can’t get myself to jump rope or lift weights, I’ll walk, do yoga or stretch.
If I can’t get myself to read a book, I’ll spend 30 min reading on Substack.
And so on.
On top of that, I only need to journal for 10 minutes, which is very doable, and if I want to keep going, I do, which has happened almost everyday till now.
I was inspired to create this challenge after I found out about “75hard” on TikTok. I created my own because I found the “75hard” very toxic, with excessive restrictive eating, 45 minute-workouts twice a day and unhealthy amounts of water, which are not habits I want to create for myself. I only took the “if you fail, you restart” concept.
Writing about negative consequences of failing reminded me of a video (more like a doco) by Struthless, in which he forced himself to run a marathon to stop a video that would for sure cancel him from publishing. The video starts with the hypothetical question of “could you run a marathon right now?” and “what if someone pointed a gun at you and pulled the trigger if you didn’t?”. I think you get the point. I recommend the watch.
