Pondering (yet again) the seemingly eternal question of how to get myself to go to bed earlier. The fact is that I recently made a commitment to be in bed, with lights out, by midnight. The commitment is to myself, but the decision was made together with a health professional as part of figuring out a healing protocol for me to follow.
The truth of the matter is that for decades now I’ve been sabotaging my health by not allowing my body the downtime it needs to rest, repair, and rejuvenate.
The evidence is clear: consistent lack of sleep screws up your hormones, results in weight gain, and contributes to a whole slew of other health issues. Of course, it doesn’t help that the resultant tiredness and lack of vitality also undermines your willpower, making it harder to stick to your good intentions to eat better and exercise and so on.
Then I got to thinking about another commitment I made not so long ago — the commitment to write a daily blog — and the fact that, in five months, I haven’t missed a day. That’s great and I feel good about it. But unfortunately, these two commitments have been conflicting with one another. Because if I don’t get the blog written early enough in the day and end up on the computer late in the evening, it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll get to bed really late as well.
So here’s the new deal. If I don’t have the blog written by 9:30 at night, all I get to write is an acknowledgement of the fact that I don’t have time to write because I have to get ready for bed! That way I’ll be honoring both my commitment to write the daily blog and my commitment to giving my body a chance to heal.
Of course, there’s a part of me that objects to this plan on the basis that I won’t be writing something “interesting” or “insightful” or “inspiring”. But my daily blog commitment isn’t to always be “interesting”, “insightful”, or “inspiring”! It’s simply to write something every day. Now to see if this works!