Comments on: Ask Havi #29: Getting up earlier?

By: Christy

Christy — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:05:11 +0000

There’s a book about this incremental change stuff (cute small green book) called “One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way” by Robert Maurer.

Being a “Why are things this way?” kind of gal, this book really helped me understand the physiological components of resistance.

I got a ukulele for Christmas last year and wanted to learn how to play it, but couldn’t make myself sit down for the obligatory 30 minutes every day to practice. So I didn’t practice at all.

The book says to do what Havi said in the original post. Sneak up on it. So I started practicing One Minute a day. That’s all I had to do. Some days it’s still a minute, other days longer, but now I rarely resist doing it. I’m practicing for some amount of time every day now, even though when I first started, I thought practicing for one minute was the lamest thing ever. Turns out it isn’t.
.-= Christy´s last post … Marketing Examples (ones that work!) from a Real, Live Business =-.

By: Ilana

Ilana — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:41:05 +0000

I think I tricked my resistance. It was a very strange thing that I only realized yesterday.
So I have this 10 minute yoga video and I though I would like to do this 10-minute energizing yoga before work. But getting out of bed to do it was really hard. So I got in the shower and said, in my loud, internal voice: “I give you permission not to do yoga this morning.” Because I’m just that good to myself, right? So somehow, it seems that I resisted giving myself permission. And while I’m taking the 30 seconds to get the mat out, I’m still telling myself I don’t have to do it. But then I’m resisting the permission and rationalizing that it’s only 10 minutes and I could just as easily putter around the house for 10 minutes, so I might as well do yoga.
And then I did the 10 minutes and felt great! And my resistance said, “What just happened here?”
And I tricked my resistance 3 days in a row!
[And now I just do the 10 minutes, because, well, it's just 10 minutes.]

By: brooklynchick

brooklynchick — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:43:46 +0000

I’ve also found that I have a “natural” time range to wake up – so experiment with 5:45 or 6:15 if 6:00 feels icky or off. It has something to do with sleep cycles methinks.

By: Agnes Northstar

Agnes Northstar — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:55:56 +0000

Oh thanks so much for this, Havi. Dissolving guilt is something I want to practice more and more. .-= Agnes Northstar´s last post ... It would be nicer if I were omniscient after all =-.

By: Kel

Kel — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:21:25 +0000

@Dick [Art|Music|] is fine as a hobby, but you can never make a living at it.

By: Dawn

Dawn — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:09:40 +0000

I rise easily, but now that I have a long commute to work and an early start time (8am), I try to sleep in as late as I can to only get what I need done to go to work. That still means getting up as early as 5:45am. That’s no problem since I’m a morning person.

What’s difficult is the evening. I get home around 6:30, and if I want 8 hours of sleep (which I need), I would have to go to bed at 9:45pm! I just can’t do that because I feel like I’ve already lost so much of my day to begin with. The other day, I wrote out what I do and what I want to do from the time I get home from work till the time I *should* go to bed. There is technically enough time, but I find myself arriving home, basically pissed off and grumpy, because I *already* feel the loss of time.

So that’s my stuck. The other end of things. I can remedy this by maybe doing more things during my work day, on my lunch hour. Staying present in the evenings with my sweetie and my pets and worrying less about the kitchen being perfectly clean before I go to bed. I have a longer list, and that’s helped me feel less annoyed in the evenings. I’m still working through why I’m so stuck around “lack” of time in the evenings, but your blog and the wonderful responses are a good start!

By: Suzie

Suzie — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 06:53:25 +0000

Long experience (good & oh-so-bad) has shown me that I can do anything if I want to badly enough. But that’s determined by WHY I want to do it. I went from getting up at almost 8AM to 5:30 am — easily — when I figured out WHY I wanted those extra hours. When I just wanted “more time” to “get more stuff done”, not so effective. When I homed in on the specifics — personal nurturing & care-taking through reading, yoga, free weights, journaling, sometimes just sitting with tea & a lapful of purring cats & watching dawn happen — the decision became pretty much effortless. Now I anticipate my early mornings before I even go to bed! Love ‘em!.

And yes, now and again I do just grunt & burrow back under the covers for an hour or 2 of extra sleep (usually when I’m neglecting my caretaking at the other end of my day & going to bed too late!).

FWIW, I’m a “just effing do it or don’t do it” kind of chick. Easing my way into a new habit by changing my routine one 5 minute increment at a time would just irritate me so badly it wouldn’t work. So maybe the FIRST step is to figure out what kind of person you are in that respect. Be good to yourself–gift yourself with what you need to be whole & happy . . . .

By: Caryn

Caryn — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:38:25 +0000

Someone – I wish I remember who – talked about how, sometimes, if you’re trying to write, sometimes the goal is just to set your pen on top of your notebook. Then open the notebook. Then hold the pen with the notebook open. And people think it’s silly but sometimes this works.

I am stuck right now with not being able to go to bed early and not being able to get up early and the domino effect that happens with that. And yes! Getting up early means going to bed early which means everything shuts down early (and I am up now because of SNOWMAGEDDON which is supposed to hit us ANY SECOND NOW and if it does I will work from home tomorrow)

beating myself over the head with a stick to make me get up at 6 is not working. So I will start with 7:15.

p.s. here is a photo for Selma, of a distant cousin:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jukeboxgraduate/4345607960/

By: Michelle Marlahan

Michelle Marlahan — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:50:49 +0000

Small, incremental changes = Hiro sigh
All or nothing = psychotic scream

Thanks for the reminder!

For your Selma and Havi rewrite, how about something along the lines of taking the first step. Getting going when there’s no momentum yet. So I guess the pattern would be… procrastination! So nevermind, I’ll just read my dissolve-o-matic material.

xo
.-= Michelle Marlahan´s last post … Arrested =-.

By: Josiane

Josiane — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:36:48 +0000

Ah, the getting up earlier thing… One of the few Shiva Nata epiphanies I’ve had was actually related to that, and I’ve written about it on my blog several months ago. The epiphany went something like this: “I go to bed very late and sleep the whole morning away because that’s a way for me to ensure I won’t have a productive day” (because productively doing my thing = scary, of course).
There has been progress: these days, I’m getting up 1 to 2 hours earlier than I used to not that long ago – big yay! I’d eventually like to get up earlier than that, but I’m already quite happy with the progress made.
What I’d like now, though, is to re-establish a morning routine that includes Shiva Nata and journaling (maybe some dork dancing too!). That would be a good place to experiment with introducing a new pattern into the mix to help a stuck pattern move… And yes, it’s hard, and I guess I have to give some love to the hard.
.-= Josiane´s last post … Taking action instead of resolving to do so =-.