Tag: routine

Daily Life, Motivation

It Really Is A Drug

This is going to be a little embarrassing. But I suppose, like any good twelve step program, the first step is admitting you are powerless over your addiction. My morning routine every morning, day in and day out, 365 days a year is as follows; Up at 4:30-6, make coffee, surf news sites and X/Twitter until 8-9:30am. At that point I start my day. Why is this embarrassing? That routine means that I average 1,095 hours a year mindlessly scrolling through news sites. I give up six and a half weeks of my life every year to an algorithm designed to keep me scrolling.

But it’s worse than that. I’ve noticed lately that I can’t stop checking in on my phone. Sit down for a few minutes and I compulsively find myself quickly scrolling through X/Twitter to see if anything new happened. During commercial breaks or pausing a TV show to let the dog out, I’m instantly on the phone flipping through stupid Instagram reels of funny animals, car crashes, and people doing stupid shit. Waiting in line at the grocery store, boom, out comes the phone. It truly is a drug.

What a waste. I suppose on the other hand, it’s not like I was going to invent an amazing new chemical compound that solves the problem of plastics in our landfills during that extra six weeks a year. But still, there must be something more productive I could be doing with that time. Watching cat videos and reading three sentence “news” blurbs is not exactly making me more informed. Sure, I can chat casually with someone at a cocktail party about current events (if I was to actually go to a cocktail party) but that doesn’t mean I actually know anything about the subject. X/Twitter has given me the back of the milk carton condensed version of the news. Which is usually just enough to make me angry and/or to start a fight at the holiday dinner table.

I believe it’s time for a detox. We’ll start with the phone. First step, put it away. I’m going to keep it on my dresser in the bedroom all day. Sure I’ll make a point of glancing at it occasionally to see if there was a missed call or text message, but I don’t need to obsessively carry it around with me in the house. I’m not a doctor on call 24×7 who needs instant access. There is literally nothing so important that it couldn’t wait the 45 minutes I was in the backyard working on the garden. Sure I might miss out on that hilarious meme I came across during a commercial break while watching Seinfeld reruns, but I’m sure I’ll survive.

Now for the harder one – the morning computer screen time. I’m not changing my wake up time or the time I start my day. I’m a slug, I admit it. I need several hours before I can get moving. The question is, what to do with those hours? I’m not going to give up the news entirely. I am a news junkie after all. I think the recovery approach will be twofold. First, limit the amount of scrolling through X/Twitter. Anything major or newsworthy that’s happened will show up in the feed within about five minutes. So let give ourselves a thirty minute budget to flip through some news sites and scroll through tweets. Done, I know now roughly what’s happening in the world. Now what?

I think the remaining time will be spent on reading long-form essays. Probably going to have to be subscription based. In reality anything worth reading takes a writer days to weeks to compose. A banger tweet, or paragraph posted on CNN.com, probably didn’t have a whole lot of thought put behind it. I’m at the age where I’m better off reading quality over quantity.

I’d also be much better served by spending my morning time working on creative pursuits than reading speculation about the latest celebrity gossip. Writing, maybe editing a photo or video. Anything to get the brain juices flowing. At my age I don’t have many brain cells left so I may as well exercise them.

So there you go. The confession of a news/phone/Twitter junkie. The first step is to admit you have a problem. Now let’s make a change. If you see more frequent posts here, you know it’s working. If I’m radio silent, you’ll know that I’m still mired in the addictive world of Russian dash-cam crash videos and reading pithy one-liners about how evil the other political party is.

Wish me luck. The algorithms are powerful, fueled by AI, and designed to prevent you from breaking out of the matrix. It’s time to take that red pill.

Daily Life, Health

Death To Coffee

I was asked last night by someone who does not drink coffee – what does coffee do for you in the morning? Despite the urge to say, “uhm everything”, it did make me think. But first, some context. Starting about a month ago I began to make some changes. No, we won’t call them changes but experiments. One of them was to start drinking non-caffeinated tea at night before bed. I’m trying to avoid reaching for a snack, desert, or nightcap in the evening. Turns out a hot cup of tea fills the belly and keeps me from foraging in the kitchen.

Next, I started reading about Dr Huberman’s morning routine. Of the things he suggests doing, one of them was to delay caffeine intake for 90-120 minutes upon waking to let the residual adenosine clear from your system. At that point his caffeine choice is a strong tea.

It got me thinking. I’ve lost the taste for coffee lately. It’s very acidic and not helped by the fact that I make crappy Keurig coffee because I’m too lazy to do the pour-over or French press thing. Although I’ve never in my life been a tea drinker, I was already drinking it at night so why not try it in the morning?

So a few weeks ago I substituted some old caffeinated tea I found in the pantry for my morning coffee. Shockingly, I didn’t die or lapse into convulsions. I won’t say I was in love with the taste, but it was certainly more mellow on my stomach than the coffee.

So here we are. I’m keeping up with the tea instead of coffee thing. I ordered some fancy loose leaf tea and a proper tea strainer thingy.

Let me be clear about how momentous a change this is. Way back in the day when I was a software developer, I drank an absolute frightening amount of coffee. As in, multiple full pots a day. In later years as an RN, the only way to survive 12-13 hour shifts was large amounts of caffeine. Nowadays I’m back to a normal 2-3 cups a day, but the ingrained habit is strong. It’s a big thing that I’m not drinking coffee.

Is it going to be a continuing habit? That brings me back to the original question I was asked – what does coffee do for me in the morning? I honestly didn’t have an answer. In reality I’m probably not getting a decent nights sleep and therefore I’m super groggy in the morning. It feels like coffee/caffeine is the only way to “wake up”. A logical person would conclude that the right answer is to work on getting a better nights sleep, rather than caffeinate to compensate. I’ve never been accused of being the sharpest crayon in the box.

The routine I’d like to work towards is two-fold. First, work on getting a better nights sleep. Second, continue to incorporate Dr. Hubermans ideas. Wake up, sunlight, two large glasses of water with salt, and delay the caffeine for 90 minutes. For extra bonus points, use that 90 minutes to get my workout in.

At that point, take my time and make a proper cup of tea or a decent cup of coffee. Probably alternate. Maybe 70/30 tea/coffee.

Once I’ve reached that level of superhuman performance, I shall be in a perfect state of zen.

So that’s more than you wanted to know about one of my 2024 resolutions. We’ll cover the conquest and take over of some foreign country and running a 100 mile ultramarathon in another post. How about you? Are you a coffee or tea drinker? Pour-over or French press? Best high caffeine morning tea? Inquiring minds want to know.

Daily Life, Health

Things Will Calm Down

Every once in a while, you stumble across something that just makes you feel seen. As in, oh crap that’s me. This morning it was this:

“Adult life is saying to yourself ‘after this week, things will calm down a little’ over and over again until you die.”

This completely sums up my diet and fitness journey.

There are contractors coming to the house this morning. I have a long drive tomorrow. We still need to find a gift for that birthday party. It’s going to rain hard on Thursday. We have that dinner thing on Friday. I need to get the yard done. I can’t put off the oil change any longer. We leave on Monday for two days.

Once I get back, things will calm down and I’ll dive back into the diet and workout.

This is me most weeks. I’ll go two-three days of being consistent, and then something always seems to come up that throws things off.

Unless you live on a deserted island, completely unplugged… life will never “calm down”. I need to stop feeding myself that lie. The problem is that diet and fitness was never a routine in my life. It’s never been a priority.

It needs to be a rule that doesn’t get broken. It needs to be just part of who you are. I wake up, have coffee, and go for a run. Period. I go to the gym on my lunch break. No matter what. It’s just what I do. I play at some sort of sport every weekend. It’s the rule.

Paying attention to what I eat doesn’t feel natural. It’s always something that’s a change. “Starting Monday, I’m eating clean”. It feels forced because it’s not part of what I normally do. Same thing with exercise. Since it’s not part of my normal routine, it’s easy to abandon it when life gets busy.

Like brushing your teeth, it just needs to be a normal part of your daily routine. I wish this had been drilled into me as a kid. Changing your daily routine after twenty years is not easy. It’s no different than if you suddenly had to switch to working the night shift. Nothing about that change would feel normal. But eventually, it would.

The interesting thing about that analogy is that you’d find a way to do it because it was your job. You’d have to. The secret sauce to diet and exercise success is finding a way to tell yourself that this is your new job. Because without it, your long-term prognosis is poor.

It’s part of my new rules. I brush my teeth. I don’t leave dishes in the sink. The dog gets a run. I pay attention to what I eat. I get eight hours of sleep. I exercise. Life will just have to work around that.

Daily Life

Do You Have Rhythm?

Rhythm noun
a strong, regular, repeated pattern of movement or sound
a regularly recurring sequence of events, actions, or processes

I’ve lost my rhythm. And no, I don’t mean the shake your booty and get funky on the dance floor kind of rhythm. Although to Mrs. Troutdog’s great disappointment, I’ve never had that kind of rhythm. What I’m talking about is a flow, a sense of order, a comfortable pattern to your days. Rhythm is different than a routine. A routine is simply repeated behavior. Waking up at the same time every day, eating oatmeal, and drinking exactly one cup of coffee is a routine. That’s a micro-view of your day. Rhythm is a macro-view of your time.

Rhythm is planning out workouts for the week. Rhythm is looking forward to and participating in an activity you enjoy on weekends. It’s a sense of order to your time. It doesn’t have to mean you eat pasta every Tuesday and meatloaf on Thursday. Instead, it’s a feeling of being intentional about your meal planning. It’s sense of enjoyment from exploring a new restaurant every Friday night. Rhythm is the collective whole of your day-to-day time. It’s having a sense of purpose to your weeks and months.

Up until this last year I feel like I had a comfortable rhythm. Work was a known entity. I made a point to get a run or a bike ride in most days. Mrs Troutdog and I had our individual activities, and we were good about making time for shared activities. Winter was a busy time full of skiing, wood chopping, and evenings by the fire. It was a good rhythm.

And then some pretty big disruptions happened. Nothing horrible, just life throwing a few curveballs. The end result was that we’ve been in random mode for quite some time. We went months without a kitchen, eating pizza and burger patties off paper plates in our laps while sitting in the backyard. Constantly changing plans to wait for contractors that never show up. Strange weather that went from rain and mud to 100 degrees seemingly overnight, straining my motivation to do outside activities. I missed much of the ski season due to construction woes. I had an odd back injury that slowed me down for a while.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s all first world problems so I can’t really complain. We’ve just about sorted through most of the things going on and life is slowly getting back to something more normal. But as we were going through this, I found myself more and more out of sorts. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why my mood was so off, so often. I finally realized it was that loss of rhythm. I’d lost that comfortable pattern to my days.

Everyone experiences randomness from time to time. Random can be exciting. Vacations and travel are random, that’s part of the fun. But it’s also exhausting after a while. Thats why you have that deep sigh of contentment when you get home. It’s that comfortable sliding back into your rhythm.

I now find myself in an interesting position. I get to create a brand-new rhythm. Sure, some of the old familiar patterns will return. But it’s time to move on to a new flow, a different set of patterns. All of us do it from time to time. Moving to a different city. Kids going off to college. Retiring. It’s part of life.

I need my rhythm back. But it doesn’t need to be the old rhythm. Finding a new rhythm is a good thing. It’s growth. It’s preventing stagnation. I’m not sure what it’s going to look like yet. There will be more exercise. More cooking. More music. More reading. More creativity. And nachos. Definitely more nachos.

Are you happy with your rhythm? Maybe it’s time for a change?