About Schalk

I am a research scientist dedicated to the great 21st century sustainability challenge: how to quadruple the size of the global economy while bringing CO2 emissions below zero. My main occupation deals with technological solutions to this challenge in the form of novel clean energy conversion concepts. On the side, I also work on human solutions, i.e. sustainable living and deriving happiness from creation instead of consumption. I also have a mild obsession with healthy living to ensure that my research career lasts as long as possible and that I get to see how the story of the 21st century unfolds.

Posts by Schalk Cloete:

Sleep Blueprint
Schalk
, , ,
0

A 5-Part Blueprint for Sound Sleep

Let’s build the foundation of human health and performance.

What is the most foundational piece of advice you can think of? The single element that augments all other aspects of personal growth?

To me, it’s straightforward: get enough sleep.

It took more than a decade of active personal development before I finally understood this, and another couple of years to implement it properly. Today’s article will share the sleep blueprint that emerged after all this time:

  1. Build a deeply internalized understanding of the vital role of sleep in human health and performance.
  2. Construct an environment where you have no choice other than to wake up at a consistent hour (weekends included).
  3. Learn to thrive in that environment by designing your rhythm for natural awakening without an alarm clock.
  4. Accept that you cannot force your mind to sleep, but you can give it the perfect sleep opportunity.
  5. If at all possible, earn the freedom to take an afternoon nap whenever your body and mind desire it.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these five steps.

Understand the Importance of Sleep

As recently as 2014, I was still confidently heading in the wrong direction, experimenting with complex polyphasic sleep patterns designed to severely restrict my sleep duration in the name of increased productivity.

I kept this up for almost a year before finally caving to everyone telling me how tired I looked. Knowing what I now know, that was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.

Since then, I’ve learned much more about sleep. As my understanding grew, so did my respect. Initially, sleep was a waste of time that should be minimized by, in the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, sleeping faster. Then, it became a moderately important health priority after diet and exercise. Today, I view it as the very foundation of human health and performance.

Giving sleep the priority it deserves is tough in today’s world with all its early morning demands and late-night digital temptations. You’ll need plenty of motivation to master this challenge. And this motivation can only come from a deep intrinsic understanding of the importance of sleep.

There’s no better path to this understanding than Matthew Walker’s book pictured below. As stated on the cover, it’s “startling, vital, a life raft.”

For the short version, see my summary of all the serious problems caused by our global sleep deprivation epidemic.

Build an Environment for Sleep Consistency

Consistency is the number one recommendation for healthy sleep. But it’s also the hardest, particularly when it comes to weekends.

In today’s world, the norm is alarm-induced sleep deprivation in the week, followed by binge-sleeping to lunch over the weekend. This inconsistency is not only bad for sleep efficiency; it’s very unhealthy too. As the scientific studies in Prof. Walker’s book repeatedly found, catch-up sleep cannot repair the damage done by prior sleep deprivation.

Breaking this pattern requires a strong environmental trigger. And the best trigger I know is an accountability buddy — someone you care about who will be waiting for your call every day shortly after your chosen wake-up time.

My parents are my accountability buddies. For the past three years, we’ve talked for 15 minutes at 6:30 every morning. We’re yet to miss a single session! And best of all, our relationship has never been better, despite the 11000 km physical divide.

If you have someone in your life who you know you should be spending more time with (but never seem to get to), this is your chance.

Ditch That Alarm Clock

The purpose of an alarm clock is to yank your mind out of sleep before it is ready to wake up naturally. It’s the blaring symbol of our global sleep deprivation epidemic.

The path to an alarm-free life is paved with sleep opportunity. And sleep opportunity consists of sufficient time in bed and excellent sleep hygiene.

In my experience, the most important components of sleep opportunity are the following (in order of priority):

  1. Sufficient time in bed. This is the foundation.
  2. A dark, quiet, comfortable, and cool sleeping environment.
  3. Healthy eating habits.
  4. That tired-but-satisfied feeling after a productive day.
  5. Consistent sleep duration (weekends included).

In addition, you must condition your mind to wake up naturally at the right time. This requires a dedicated wake-up ritual for getting your circadian rhythm back in sync. For me, a funky dance routine stimulating all five senses does the trick 🙂

Learn to Fall Asleep Gracefully

Without the massive sleep pressure created by serious sleep deprivation, falling asleep can be difficult. If we’re not careful, this can turn into a major obstacle on the path to healthy sleep.

It sure is frustrating when you’ve given your mind every opportunity to sleep and it simply refuses to take it. For those times, you need a plan. Mine covers the following contingencies:

  1. A running mind full of unorganized thoughts. In this case, a journaling session is needed to unload and organize things before sleep can come.
  2. An inspired mind chasing a creative idea. I tend to let my mind run in these cases because it often comes up with something genuinely valuable. The aim is to condense the idea into a single phrase that can be written down so that my mind can relax in the knowledge that the idea is safe.
  3. A mind that is simply not ready to sleep. In this case, I just add some relaxing elements to my evening routine, most often a session in my massage chair or reading some silly comic books.

Whatever you do, don’t actively try falling asleep. Instead, create sleep opportunity, stick to your plan, and let sleep come on its own accord.

Also, if you consistently do everything right and still cannot get enough sleep, please consult a sleep specialist. Sleep disorders are all too common and need to be treated carefully.

Bring Back the Siesta

If you want to put the cherry on top of your sleep mastery, earn the freedom to nap during your natural afternoon energy dip. As described earlier, this is the way human biology wants to sleep. But sadly, our 9–5 work culture is totally incompatible with this natural sleep rhythm.

Enter asynchronous remote work. Asynchronous communication combined with remote work can restore this napping freedom to millions of office workers. If this opportunity pops up anywhere in your vicinity, grab it with both hands.

For those lucky enough to enjoy this freedom already, here’s the napping strategy that works for me:

  1. Only attempt the nap if you really feel that afternoon energy dip.
  2. Start with something ultra-relaxing like a massage or a warm shower.
  3. Find your natural nap length through open experimentation.
  4. If sleep doesn’t come, just enjoy this time of complete relaxation. If relaxation doesn’t come, get up to work on whatever kept it away.

The afternoon energy dip is not useful for much other than a natural siesta. Honor your biology. Use the dip as nature intended.

Build Your Foundation

To master sleep is to construct your foundation for long-term health and productivity. Our chronic sleep deprivation epidemic is the cause of far too many shaky foundations in our complex, modern world.

Please invest the time to build your foundation. You might be surprised at all the wonderful things you can construct on such a solid base 🙂

Images in this article were custom-made by Janet Cloete.

Sleep stats
Schalk
, , ,
0

My Data-Driven Review of Classic Sleep Advice

The causes and effects of a good night’s sleep

Image by Janet Cloete.

Sleep is the foundation of human health and performance. It keeps us healthy, emotionally stable, intelligent, creative, attractive, and accident-free.

As the world slowly catches on to this foundational truth, the internet is filling up with sleep advice. But there’s a problem: very little of this advice is backed by any quantified proof.

That’s why I decided to quantify the effects of various lifestyle choices on my sleep quality. My daily choices are recorded on my Graph of Life, and my sleep quality is quantified via Sleep Cycle.

Let’s see what the data has to say.

The Results

I performed an analysis of the statistical correlations between the wide range of lifestyle metrics I collect on a daily basis and my sleep quality. The five most important correlations are given below, together with two obvious requirements for high sleep quality: duration and consistency.

The correlation of sleep quality with different lifestyle metrics from the day before (causes) and the day after (effects), compared with the impact of sleep duration and consistency (dashed lines).

Let’s take a look at each of the factors in turn.

Time in bed

The dashed green line shows the high correlation of sleep quality with the amount of time spent in bed. This one is obvious: I only sleep when in bed, so enough time in bed is a prerequisite for high sleep quality.

Consistency

One of the first things you’ll see in any sleep hygiene article is the need to maintain a consistent sleep schedule (even on weekends). I quantified this metric by comparing the standard deviation of my sleep duration to my average sleep quality over each week.

As shown by the orange line, sleep consistency is about half as important as sleep duration. Interestingly, the correlation of sleep duration (0.40) with consistency is even higher than sleep quality (0.33). This means that poor consistency strongly reduces the time I spend in bed.

It makes good sense: With all the demands of modern life, consistency is the only way to make enough time for good quality sleep.

Eating habits

I’ve previously established that eating habits are the single biggest factor in the quality of my day. For this reason, I was not overly surprised when it again emerged as the winner in this case.

The graph shows that good eating habits are even more important than consistency when it comes to sleep quality. Delving a little deeper, I saw that this effect was split equally between two factors:

  1. Time in bed (correlation = 0.28). My eating habits are a good indication of my general level of discipline on any given day. Poorer discipline often means that I get in bed too late, giving me fewer hours to sleep.
  2. Sleep efficiency (correlation = 0.26). The ratio of sleep quality to time in bed also reduces substantially with poor eating habits, resulting in less restoration for every hour spent in bed.

We can also see that a good night’s sleep causes better eating habits the following day. It’s well-known that an underslept mind leads to more food cravings as well as cravings for the wrong kinds of food (see the “obesity and diabetes” section in this article).

Checklist

My checklist is a direct indication of the number of things I did right on a particular day. Many of my checklist items are recurring productive and healthy actions, keeping me firmly on the straight and narrow.

The graph shows that ticking many items off my checklist is both a cause and an effect of high sleep quality. It’s easy to imagine how a good night’s sleep would improve my ability to get things done the next day, but I was a little surprised that this was also such a significant cause of good sleep.

But there is a logical explanation, and it looks quite similar to the one given above for the effect of eating habits:

  1. Time in bed (correlation = 0.23). Like eating habits, my checklist is a good indicator of discipline, which affects my sleep duration.
  2. Sleep efficiency (correlation = 0.23). A productive day seems to make each hour of sleep more restorative. This must be related to that tired-but-satisfied feeling typical at the end of a successful day. It’s easy to imagine this pleasant feeling leading to better sleep.

Work

The effects of work on sleep can be interpreted similarly to the effects of my checklist discussed above. However, the correlations are considerably smaller. This is because my checklist is a more holistic indicator of whether I did the right things during the day than my work performance.

Even though the correlations are smaller, they clearly show that prioritizing sleep is good for productivity. This confirms that sleeping less in pursuit of greater productivity is a terrible idea.

Excercise

Regular exercise is sometimes recommended as a sleep aid, but the graph shows that this was not the case for me. In fact, this is the only statistically insignificant (p > 0.05) correlation in this analysis, implying that the little blue bar in the graph could just be random.

However, a good night’s sleep helps me exercise the following day. This is also no surprise given that physical performance improves significantly with sleep (see the “motor memory” section in the aforementioned article).

Energy

The relationships between my energy levels and sleep quality look similar to the correlations with exercise: High energy levels are an effect of good sleep quality rather than a cause.

It makes sense that a well-rested body and mind will feel more energetic. The correlations are stronger than those of exercise because my subjective energy score includes both mental and physical aspects.

Other important factors

Sleep quality also depends on several other factors that I could not quantify due to a lack of data. Let’s take a quick run-through:

  • Wind-down routine. This is something I’ve only started doing recently and I don’t yet have data for it. My feeling is that this does help a bit, but it doesn’t perform miracles. Next year, I’ll have the data to confirm.
  • Smoking and alcohol. Both of these are said to be bad for sleep. I don’t smoke and very rarely drink, so I lack the data to quantify this.
  • Coffee. No coffee after lunch is another commonly listed sleep hygiene guideline. I’m a (caffeine-free) tea-person, so no data here either.
  • Bed and pillow. Another obvious bit of advice is to maximize the comfort of your bed. Some years ago, I often woke too early with neck pain. Luckily, this was quickly fixed with a fancy memory foam pillow.
  • Light and temperature. A cool and dark room is another common piece of sleep advice. Over here in Norway, both light and temperature vary greatly over the seasons, but I see no clear drop in my sleep quality during summer months. I do use a sleep mask in summer, but I make no attempt to control the temperature in my room.
  • Noise. Sleeping in a noisy environment is tough. Luckily, I live in a quiet neighborhood with few disturbances. There is a bit of noise from neighbors on rare occasions, so I can still collect some data next year.
  • Scents. I have some lavender pillow mist I remember to use every once in a while, but I don’t collect data for it. I doubt that the effect is significant, but I still plan to investigate this properly next year.

The Takeaway

Start with the big two: duration and consistency. After that, my experience shows that good eating habits and a productive day are the next two best inducers of a good night’s sleep.

Otherwise, there is a range of additional factors whose influence I’m yet to calculate. Most of these are obvious, such as a cool, dark, and quiet room with a comfortable bed. Others, like a wind-down routine and aromatherapy, will be interesting to investigate further in the future.

Sweet dreams!

Siesta title image
Schalk
, , , , ,
0

Return of the Siesta: My Surprisingly Successful Afternoon Napping Experiment

How asynchronous remote work can revive the most natural of human sleep patterns

Do you often feel groggy in the early afternoon? Me too. In fact, this afternoon energy dip is clear evidence that we’re both human.

It’s true. And what’s more, your human biology would love for you to honor that dip with a nice afternoon nap. But how can you when our modern lives are so deeply incompatible with these siesta dreams?

Luckily, a new solution to this vexing problem recently emerged. It goes by the name of asynchronous remote work, and, to those who embrace it, it offers something remarkable: life through a well-rested body and mind.

The Natural Human Sleep Pattern

Chapter four in Matthew Walker’s vital book on the science of sleep explores the wide range of sleep patterns observed within the animal kingdom. One of the animals investigated is a hairless ape called Homo sapiens.

Walker notes that a biphasic pattern containing an afternoon nap is the natural way for humans to sleep. It’s not a cultural thing. In fact, it’s deeply biological. Societies untouched by technology still sleep this way.

He also cites a Harvard study of 23,000 Greek adults around the time when the modern 9–5 grind was displacing siesta culture. Results showed a 37% increase in death from heart disease over the next six years for those who abandoned their siesta, 60% for working men. Another striking statistic he cites is that men in isolated Greek communities where the siesta remains intact are 4x more likely to live to 90 than the average American.

Indeed, our genes miss their afternoon nap.

Home Offices and Siestas

The humble siesta was no match for the irrepressible spread of the 9–5 workday across the Western world. It got swept aside and forgotten, leaving many office workers about as useful around 3 p.m. as if they were taking the nap their biology requires.

Decades passed. And then, a virus rose from the East to upend the world and force billions of minds to think differently.

Remote work was one of the biggest winners in this new world. For me, this development was so deeply beneficial that I feel downright guilty about it. As a simulation scientist, I’ve been pushing for the right to work more from home for years. Covid-19 fulfilled this wish in its entirety.

Part of my positive lockdown experience was the opportunity to try out the regular afternoon naps I had read about in Matthew Walker’s book. Initially, I napped on days without afternoon virtual meetings. Naturally, this random schedule was not ideal, but it was enough to draw me in.

After a couple of months of erratic napping, I finally came out of the siesta closet, asking my closest colleagues not to book meetings after 2 p.m. I write this after only three months of more regular napping, but I’ve already accepted this as my natural way of life going forward.

Yes, I’m a believer. This is the way the human body is supposed to work.

Asynchronous Communication

I recently learned this fancy term from an excellent article on remote work. Teams that master the art of asynchronous communication can do something that almost seems impossible: work together seamlessly while almost never bothering each other.

Email is the classic form of asynchronous communication. Your colleague sends a message, and you respond when you’re good and ready. Unless, of course, you allow email notifications to dictate your life (if this is you, do yourself a big favor and turn them off now).

Aside from vastly improving your ability to focus, the combination of remote work and asynchronous communication (or asynchronous remote work) can give you complete napping freedom.

So, if you have a computer job and want to experience the way the human body and mind are supposed to function, convince your boss to let you try this out. There has never been a better opportunity to make this sale.

Two Days in One

My habit of tracking my daily performance revealed a pleasant surprise about napping: As shown in the graph below, days with a nap yield more than two extra productive hours relative to days without one.

The effect of napping on the average number of productive hours I got out of my days over the last three months. The data were automatically gathered using RescueTime.

From what I now know about sleep, my theory for explaining my brain’s natural willingness to do more work on nap days goes like this:

  • The human mind has temporary and permanent storage, and sleep frees up temporary storage by moving memories to permanent storage.
  • In addition, sleep offers a form of therapy to naturally reduce stress and anxiety via dreaming in a state free of noradrenaline.
  • Hence, an afternoon nap restores both our capacity to learn and our capacity to tackle emotionally challenging work.

The best way I can describe the siesta experience is that it almost feels like two days in one. After waking up from a siesta, there is a short period of sleep inertia, but soon, it feels like the start of a brand new day with a fully recharged brain.

Some Napping Pointers

Although I’m no siesta master yet, I can share five simple pointers that worked for me over the past 3 months:

  1. Nap only when you feel that afternoon energy dip. Sometimes, especially when working on something interesting, it never arrives. In those cases, it’s best to skip the nap and go to bed an hour earlier that night.
  2. Make sure there are at least six (preferably seven) hours between the end of your nap and your evening bedtime. You’ll have trouble falling asleep at night if you nap too late.
  3. Try to do something relaxing for 10-15 minutes before your nap. In my case, it’s a session in my massage chair. A warm shower also helps.
  4. Let your body decide how long it wants to nap (within reason). I set a timer for 90 minutes as insurance, but I almost always wake up naturally before it goes off.
  5. If sleep plays hard-to-get, focus instead on enjoying this time of complete relaxation during an otherwise unproductive part of your day. Often, letting go like this allows sleep to come. If you find yourself unable to relax completely, get up to work on whatever kept relaxation away.

Give It a Try (If Your Lifestyle Allows)

The afternoon energy dip is not much good for anything other than a nice nap. To be honest, I’m not only less productive during those hours but also more strongly drawn to unhealthy indulgences. That’s no good.

So, if asynchronous remote work is at all a possibility for you, why not honor your biology and earn the right to your siesta? This vital shift can allow us to get more life out of each day and more days out of each life.

If the Norwegian weather allowed, this would be my usual siesta spot (maybe adding a pillow or two and a sombrero over my face 🙂)

Images for this article were custom-made by Janet Cloete.

Morning mastery alarm clock
Schalk
, , ,
0

It’s Time to Ditch Your Alarm Clock

And rediscover the world through a well-rested body and mind

Image custom-designed by Janet Cloete.
Amazing breakthrough! Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested? — Matthew Walker — Why We Sleep, Chapter 6.

So, are you? Well, all you need to do to access this miracle cure-all is return to a natural sleep pattern.

I say “return to” because Americans have lost more than one hour of daily sleep since 1942, possibly more. If you understand all the serious problems created by chronic sleep deprivation, this is a terrifying statistic.

The ability to wake up naturally without an alarm clock every morning is the best and simplest indicator of natural sleep habits. It sounds simple, but sadly, most people need two whacks at the snooze button and a 24-minute battle of will to get out of bed in the morning.

Let’s see what we can do about that.

Acceptance

The first step to fixing any problem is to accept that it exists.

Most people are still yanked out of sleep by the wail of an alarm on a daily basis simply because that’s the norm. As was the case with cigarettes in the late 20th century, the public is only now starting to realize the dangers of chronic sleep deprivation. Luckily, the internet allows us to spread the word much more efficiently nowadays.

Many others consciously sleep too little in pursuit of higher productivity. But it’s now well known that this tactic has precisely the opposite effect. My main reference for all scientific evidence related to sleep is Matthew Walker’s book quoted earlier, but here’s another convenient read.

Indeed, the argument for chronically depriving your brain and body of sleep is about as sound as it is for chainsmoking. It needs to stop.

Awareness

Sleep health still ranks low on the average person’s list of priorities. This ignorance is costing developed nations about 2% of GDP. In other words, if we all just gave sleep the priority it deserves, we could literally double our growth rate.

Want to help curb this terrible waste? Start using a sleep tracker. These days, there are many smartwatches on the market offering this functionality, but I recommend a little mobile app called Sleep Cycle.

The benefit of Sleep Cycle is that you have to start it at night and stop it in the morning. Yes, this is a benefit — even in today’s automated world. Take away this manual touch, and you take away a sleep tracker’s most vital function: raising awareness. Sleep trackers that automatically track your sleep in the background are all too easy to ignore.

Download this app and start using it tonight. You won’t regret it.

Sleep Opportunity

Acceptance and awareness will bless you with a good dose of motivation to improve your sleep habits. And the best thing you can do with this newfound motivation is to give yourself more time to sleep.

But, like most things in life, it’s not as simple as it sounds. For most people, getting more sleep time means an earlier bedtime. And many who try this will struggle to fall asleep without the total exhaustion caused by chronic sleep deprivation. This leads to frustration. And enough frustration leads to relapse into the clutches of late-night digital temptations.

Getting past this obstacle requires a clear shift in mindset. You must accept that you only have direct control over the sleep opportunity you give your body and mind, not whether they will actually take it.

Note that sleep opportunity includes not only a healthy number of hours in bed but also good sleep hygiene. The three most important elements are:

  1. Keeping a consistent routine, even on the weekend.
  2. Ensuring you have an ultra-comfy bed in a dark, quiet, and cool room.
  3. Maintaining a relaxing wind-down routine that involves dimming the lights and avoiding screens for an hour before bedtime.

In summary, good sleep opportunity means at least 8 hours in bed every day, coupled with excellent sleep hygiene.

This much is under your direct control.

When Sleep Plays Hard-to-Get

Sometimes you give your mind every opportunity to sleep it could possibly desire, and it simply refuses to take it. This can be very frustrating, but frustration will only chase sleep further away.

To keep this sleep-disturbing frustration at bay, you need a solid plan. In my experience, there are three main circumstances this plan must cover:

  1. A running mind filled with chaotic, often stressful thoughts. When this happens, the best solution is to unload these thoughts into a journal you keep next to your bed. This is a very effective way to get your mind relaxed and ready for sleep.
  2. An inspired mind shaping a potentially valuable idea. Here, I prefer to go with it. In fact, some of my best energy technology ideas came to me while lying in bed. However, it’s important to maintain discipline and avoid getting stuck in thought loops. Try to condense the idea into a few words you can write down to securely store your newly formed concept. Once that’s done, your mind should be happy to let go.
  3. Nothing special, just not quite ready for sleep. In this case, you just need something relaxing to do. My preferences are reading some silly comic books or enjoying a session in the massage chair next to my bed.

Whatever you do, don’t lie there actively trying to fall sleep. Sleep is one of those things where the harder you try, the harder you fail.

The Reward

If you consistently give your mind every opportunity to sleep and stick to a good plan when sleep plays hard-to-get, it won’t be long before you get your just reward: waking up naturally before your alarm.

At first, it will only happen once every couple of days. Then, every other day. Then, one fine morning, you’ll wake up with a smile and realize you can’t remember what your alarm sounds like.

Once you reach this point, the experience of life changes. It’s unlikely that life will get any easier (you’ll simply level-up your challenges), but it will surely get more vibrant. And that’s awesome 🙂

Sunrise
Schalk
, , ,
0

The Morning Routine that Emerged After 5 Years of Experimentation

This could be the best investment I’ve ever made!

The morning routine may be an old favorite in the personal development community, but I still consider it underrated. As illustrated below, choices made in the first hour of the day tend to echo throughout the remaining 23 (and beyond). That’s why lives lived on the right and the left of that vertical line will turn out as different as night and day.

Since recognizing the disproportionate importance of the morning about five years ago, I’ve grown into quite the morning routine nerd. I tried many new ideas, failed with most, and tried again. And again. And again…

And then, toward the end of 2019, my morning routine just came together seamlessly. Finally! Since that beautiful day, the routine shared below has become so deeply ingrained that it’s hard to imagine life without it 🙂

Waking Up

Most days, I wake up naturally around 5:30. My first action is to start today’s morning playlist on my phone. Guided by these audio queues, I flow effortlessly from one element of my routine into the next.

First up: a 5-minute guided meditation from Headspace. This clears the fog. It centers me in the present. And most importantly, it makes getting up feel much more natural.

As I rise, my 2-minute gratitude track begins. This is basically just me playing some fingerstyle guitar and naming the three things I’m most grateful for in my life. Prosperity. Health. Freedom. Mindful of these privileges, I drink plenty of water, make my bed, and turn on the lights.

Then the third track kicks in to ramp up the energy. It’s hard to find a better candidate for this particular job than Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk:

The song is perfectly structured so I can do all the typical morning stuff like washing my face, swirling some mouthwash, and putting on deodorant in the verse, and get back to the dancefloor (a.k.a. the living room floor) for each of the three ultra-funky choruses.

Yes, this is silly. And, for the first couple of days, I sure felt silly. But trust me, your day is heading in the right direction when it starts out feeling like a well-choreographed music video 🙂

Mental Conditioning

The next three songs on my morning playlist are quite dramatic. The first of these is the perfect match for my Constitution — a set of statements describing how the ideal version of me will act. It works. After two years of daily Constitution recitals, I’ve certainly become a much better me.

The next (equally dramatic) song triggers me to record my previous day’s performance on my Graph of Life. This practice offers an instant graphical representation of my growth trajectory and has delivered several great insights into what really makes me tick.

Last in the dramatic song trilogy is my trigger to recap and prioritize my plan for the day. My habit of recording essential todos as they come up throughout the day makes this task brief and pain-free. Google Tasks is the perfect tool for this job.

Double-Time Yoga

Next up, my playlist automatically starts a sped-up version of a Rodney Yee morning yoga routine (a different one for each day of the week). I struggled for years to integrate yoga into my morning. And then, one fine day, I made an amazing discovery: the 2x playback speed button.

Since then, it’s been a breeze. The yoga routines now move at a very pleasant pace, take only half the time, and no longer put me back to sleep.

Try doubling the playback speed in the video above. At first, double-time Rodney sounds a little odd, but you’ll get used to him in no time 🙂

Reading

Next, I treat myself to 10 minutes of reading on some exciting topic, triggered by two quiet piano songs on my playlist. Since I established this habit at the start of 2019, I’ve read 15 valuable books, gaining several profound insights that drove me to make some major life changes.

There are plenty of habits I wish I started much earlier in life. This one tops the list.

Accountability Buddy

During the first two years of my morning routine experiments, I had real problems maintaining a consistent wake-up time. Like a complete amateur, I would sleep in and disrupt my pattern for days to come.

Then, one fine day, I booked a recurring 15-minute online chat with my parents, scheduled for 6:30. That was three years ago, and we’re yet to miss a single morning chat! That’s the power of an accountability buddy. The simple knowledge that someone I care about is waiting forced me to master my sleep-wake rhythm. And, as a bonus, this practice saved my relationship with my parents across an 11000 km divide.

Breakfast and Dumbells

The final element in my morning routine is a superfood breakfast composed mainly of nuts, seeds, and berries. This breakfast can be made in several variations, each of which offers a zero-compromise combo of health, taste, convenience, and price.

While enjoying a mouthful of this morning perfection, I rip through two minutes of vigorous weight training on my trusty gym chair. This simple practice keeps my upper body in great shape. No gym membership. Almost no time investment. Heck, it almost feels like cheating!

Is There Really Time for All This?

Let’s break down the time commitment involved:

In total, this routine takes a little over an hour, after which I’m charged and ready for the workday. Interestingly, this may be considerably less time than the average person spends between waking up and going to work.

So, in summary, this morning routine actually saves time while giving me a big daily boost in health, productivity, relationships, creativity, and energy.

If you don’t have one already, please take two hours to build yourself a solid morning routine. It could be the best time investment you ever make!

All images in this article were created by Janet Cloete.

Scared to sleep
Schalk
, , ,
0

Let Me Scare You to Sleep

The science behind the toxic effects of chronic sleep deprivation

Our modern world is laced with slow poisons — things like tobacco, empty-calorie foods, and binge-watching platforms — that patiently shorten and dilute our lives over years of habitual indulgence.

History shows that society’s interaction with these poisons follows a predictable 5-stage process: uninhibited indulgence, risk recognition, risk communication, public concern, and policy action. As the example of smoking shows, this process can take decades to play out despite overwhelming evidence that billions of healthy life years are being lost.

Chronic sleep deprivation is one of the most potent poisons ever to enter this frustratingly slow process. Currently, it’s transitioning between the risk recognition and risk communication stages. We need to speed things up.

Today’s article aims to do just that by summarizing the scary details about the effects of sleep deprivation contained in Matthew Walker’s landmark book pictured below.

This daunting collection of science-backed findings certainly scared me to sleep. I hope it does the same for you.

Denial and Diagnosis

Sleep deprivation has two particularly pernicious qualities that help it proliferate through society:

  1. Sleeping less for the sake of cramming more into each day is still seen as a sign of productivity and ambition that is viewed in a positive light.
  2. Chronically sleep-deprived individuals believe they are performing optimally, even though objective tests definitively prove otherwise.

Here is a simple test to help you determine whether you’re chronically sleep-deprived and at risk of all the scary things outlined in the remainder of this article. To be safe, you must be:

  1. Able to function optimally without the need for stimulants (e.g., coffee)
  2. Unable to fall asleep before lunch (even if you tried)

If you are dependent on stimulants to get you through the day or if you regularly feel drowsy before lunch, you’re likely severely handicapping yourself by willfully taking the slow poison of chronic sleep deprivation.

Also, know that binge-sleeping over the weekend after a sleep-deprived week is of little use. Most of the adverse effects of sleep-deprivation are locked in after one or two bad nights and cannot be reversed by catch-up sleep.

If any of this applies to you, I sincerely hope the serious issues discussed below will motivate you to give sleep the priority it deserves.

Degenerative Disease

Chronic sleep deprivation could be the most underrated driver behind the global non-communicable disease burden, with strong causal links to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia.

Heart Disease

Sleep deprivation traps our sympathetic nervous system in a constant fight-or-flight mode. More stress hormones are released, increasing blood pressure, and weakening our arteries over time. Simultaneously, growth hormone concentrations decrease, inhibiting the body’s ability to heal the damaged arteries.

These effects of sleep deprivation increase the risk of heart disease by 45%, jumping to 200% for middle-aged individuals. Given that heart disease is by far the biggest killer on the planet, these are truly terrifying numbers.

Immunity and Cancer

Lack of sleep also compromises the immune system, increasing our chances of catching a virus and lowering our chances of fighting off malignant tumors. In these Corona times, you should know that sleep deprivation increases rhinovirus (common cold) infection rates from 18% to 50%.

More worryingly, cancer rates increase by 40% in individuals sleeping 6 hours or less, mainly due to a large decline in the natural killer cells responsible for destroying malignant elements in the body. In fact, tumor growth is enhanced by sleep deprivation, strongly increasing cancer risk.

Obesity and Diabetes

Sleep deprivation disrupts the hormonal balance responsible for appetite control, leading to significant weight gain. Furthermore, these unnatural food cravings are strongly biased towards all the wrong kinds of foods, caused by suppression of the higher centers of the brain responsible for moderating primitive cravings. To make matters worse, if a sleep-deprived individual is put on a strict diet, weight loss occurs mainly from lean muscle mass.

In addition, sleep deprivation makes our cells unresponsive to the message of insulin to absorb dangerous levels of glucose, putting healthy individuals in a pre-diabetic state. All these effects increase the risk of diabetes and other serious illnesses associated with obesity.

Alzheimer’s Disease

The connection between sleep deprivation and dementia is particularly troubling. Alzheimer’s disease is caused by plaque build-up in the brain. Deep sleep can counteract this development, but the plaque inhibits our brain’s ability to generate deep sleep. This causes a vicious cycle where inadequate sleep causes plaque build-up, which again causes inadequate sleep.

Once this cycle is underway, complete mental invalidity is inevitable. On the flipside, preliminary results have shown that effective treatment of sleep disorders can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in high-risk patients by 5–10 years.

Genes and DNA

Sleep deprivation even distorts our genes. Researchers have identified 711 genes that are either abnormally revved up or suppressed by sleep deprivation. These effects are not yet well understood, but it is clear that chronic sleep deprivation is a potentially dangerous genetic engineering experiment being conducted on a global scale.

Furthermore, sleep deprivation causes telomere damage, resulting in faster aging and visibly older physical appearance.

Mental Health

As with physical health, the world’s major mental health problems are also closely linked with our chronic sleep deprivation epidemic.

Emotional Instability

In simple terms, a lack of sleep renders you bipolar. An underslept brain becomes emotionally unstable, swinging wildly between depression and euphoria. This effect is caused by a 60% amplification in the primitive fight-or-flight centers of the brain (amygdalae) combined with a suppression of the more evolved rational center (prefrontal cortex).

This causes all manner of problems, including violence, suicide, excessive risk-taking, and addiction. These emotionally unstable behaviors plague many sleep-deprived people in highly influential positions such as doctors, fund managers, politicians, and military personnel.

Sleep also enhances our ability to pick up on subtle emotional cues in waking life. Without it, we become unable to properly discern the emotional reactions of others, leading to serious miscommunication and conflict.

Stress and Anxiety

One of sleep’s most important functions in our highly-strung modern world is a soothing balm of free and effective overnight therapy. Specifically, sleep strips away the emotional edge from traumatic events, saving us tremendous amounts of unnecessary stress and anxiety.

This therapeutic effect originates from dreaming (REM) sleep where we process emotionally charged experiences in an environment devoid of noradrenaline (the brain’s version of adrenaline).

In fact, the potentially debilitating condition of PTSD is characterized by noradrenaline levels not receding during dream sleep, illustrating the terrible effects of forgoing this vital therapeutic benefit of sleep.

Cognitive Function

Scientific studies have proven that a lack of sleep degrades creativity, intelligence, motivation, effort, efficiency, effectiveness when working in groups, emotional stability, sociability, and honesty. It makes you wonder how many of society’s grave problems can be solved simply by all of us returning to natural sleeping patterns.

Memory

Sleep is essential for memory creation and retention. To use a computing analogy, it frees up the brain’s RAM by shifting memories to permanent storage so that there is space for new memories the next day. Thus, for effective memory function, we need good sleep the night before (to free up RAM) and after (to permanently store memories).

Sleep deprivation disrupts this memory processing, hampering our ability to recall distant memories and form new ones by 20–40%. After one night of insufficient sleep, the damage is done and that day’s memories are forever degraded. Students pulling all-nighters present a prominent example: Information is crammed into the brain’s RAM to pass the test, but the lack of sleep results in minimal longer-term retention, making the exam pointless.

Sleep also intelligently decides which memories to remember and which to forget. This avoids the buildup of useless memories that can interfere with the recall of useful memories. It also serves to soften painful memories.

Motor Memory

Memories related to physical coordination (e.g., playing a sport or musical instrument) are affected in a similar way. For example, musicians routinely report being able to play a piece much better after a good night of sleep.

Sports performance is also strongly improved by plentiful sleep. Most strikingly, the risk of sports injury declines from 73% to 18% when sleep is increased from 6 to 9 hours.

Creativity and Problem Solving

Sleep also plays an important role in the transition between learning and comprehension. It helps not only to store new information but also to connect it in novel ways (creativity). Dream sleep stimulates a kind of fuzzy-logic knowledge processing, leading to insights we could never achieve with wakeful rational thinking.

Experiments have shown a 15–35% increase in puzzle-solving ability after awakening from dream sleep. In addition, a set of strenuous tests with a hidden cheat code revealed that well-slept individuals found the cheat code 60% of the time versus only 20% of underslept individuals.

Creativity and problem solving are incredibly valuable in today’s world, making chronic sleep deprivation a severe handicap in the competitive job market. On a societal level, a universal lack of sleep significantly degrades our ability to solve our long list of global challenges.

Attractiveness and Reproduction

If you have dreams of attracting your soulmate and starting a family, you better make sure you get your beauty sleep.

Both sexes are clearly perceived as less attractive when in a sleep-deprived state. As mentioned earlier, a lack of sleep also promotes unhealthy eating habits that further detract from physical attractiveness. Furthermore, sleep deprivation dumbs you down and makes you emotionally volatile, clouding your personality. All these factors reduce your attractiveness as a mate.

For those planning to start a family, note that both men and women suffer lower fertility with sleep deprivation. If both partners are sleep-deprived, problems to conceive compound.

Accidents

Here’s something to think about: Driving your car after a night with only 4 hours of sleep is equally dangerous to driving when legally drunk, increasing your chances of causing an accident by 1150%.

Drowsy driving is therefore just as irresponsible as drunk driving. And the worst is that drowsy drivers believe they’re just fine.

There are two reasons why sleep deprivation makes us much more accident-prone: degraded cognitive performance and the occasional brief loss of consciousness, also known as a microsleep. It’s easy to imagine scenarios other than driving where reduced alertness or a brief bout of unconsciousness can endanger many lives.

Sleep Disorders

Even though the vast majority of sleep deprivation is the result of people simply giving themselves too little sleep opportunity, there can also be medical causes.

Insomnia is the most common of these. Often, people who think they have insomnia are just practicing poor sleep hygiene. However, if you are diligently following all the best sleep hygiene and sleep duration practices and still struggle to get enough sleep, insomnia may be the cause.

In these cases, it’s now well understood that sleeping pills should be the very last resort. They have a wide range of negative side effects and produce very poor quality sleep that fulfills little of sleep’s vital functionality. Cognitive-behavioral therapy for insomnia is a much better method.

Other sleep disorders include sleepwalking, narcolepsy, and fatal insomnia. Sleepwalking is mostly harmless, narcolepsy is a serious condition that requires dedicated management, and fatal insomnia is incurable, resulting in certain death. Fortunately, such serious sleep disorders are very rare.

Sweet Dreams!

There you have it. Sleep deprivation is bad for you in almost every way imaginable. Continuing to take this slow poison day after day will both shorten and dilute your life.

As stated earlier, the vast majority of sleep deprivation in our modern world is caused by people simply giving themselves insufficient sleep opportunity or practicing poor sleep hygiene. And the good news is that both these problems need little more than the right motivation to cure.

So please, buy Prof. Walker’s book. Read it with care. Then proceed to make the world a better place by spreading this vital sleep motivation far and wide!

The images in this article were custom-made by Janet Cloete.

morning-2243465_1280
Schalk
, , ,
0

The Complete Guide to Morning Mastery [Infographic Included]

Here’s an interesting question for you: What is the best possible investment we can make with two hours of the finite amount of time at our disposal?

My answer? Creating a morning routine that is so beautifully designed and choreographed that it will last a lifetime.

Yes, in two focussed hours, you can build a routine that will boost your health, productivity, creativity, relationships, and energy for the rest of your days. As far as investments go, this is as good as it gets.

Today, we’ll dive deeper into this brilliant investment, starting with the following infographic:

Why Bother Building a Morning Routine?

As illustrated below, the choices you make in the morning echo throughout your day. In addition, morning choices tend to be self-sustaining. Good choices make it easier to maintain a consistent sleep pattern that, in turn, makes it easier to make good choices the next morning. In contrast, bad choices lead to erratic sleep schedules and more bad morning choices.

Imagine the difference between a lifetime spent repeating the pattern on the left and a lifetime spent repeating the pattern on the right. Which one do you want in your own life and the lives of those you care about?

The left-hand option? Awesome 🙂 Let’s build it!

3 Steps to a Lifelong Morning Routine

Humans are not robots. We cannot simply decide to establish a good routine, download one from the internet, and live happily ever after.

Instead, we must ensure that executing our morning routine day after day remains a deeply rewarding experience. This requires three steps:

  1. Commit. You must desire the rewards promised by a lifelong morning routine enough to invest the effort needed to complete steps 2 & 3.
  2. Take the time needed to design a routine that is uniquely you. It should contain some of your favorite things and make it easy for you to get emotionally invested.
  3. Choreograph your routine to a morning playlist. This extra step creates an effortless flow between the different elements of your routine.

The first step is where it all begins. The second will make sure your routine doesn’t disintegrate with the first challenge that crosses your path. And the third is the secret ingredient that makes it last a lifetime.

The Foundation: Rediscover Your Rhythm

The first step in a good morning is to wake up refreshed at an hour that allows you to comfortably complete your routine. Such a consistent sleep-wake rhythm is embedded in our genes, but, unfortunately, it often gets disrupted by all the artificial stimuli in our modern environment.

You must rediscover this natural rhythm to build a solid foundation beneath your morning routine. This can be done in three steps:

  1. Make sure your latest allowable wake-up time is set in stone. It doesn’t need to be super-early, it only needs to be fixed (weekends included).
  2. Build a quickfire wake-up ritual that stimulates all five senses. Repetition of such a ritual at a similar time each morning is just what your Circadian rhythm needs.
  3. At night, allow yourself some time to wind down in a space with minimal sensory stimulation. Learn to time this wind-down just right to avoid going to bed when you know you won’t be able to sleep.

Our modern world presents many temptations that disrupt our natural Circadian rhythm. Follow these three steps to rediscover how it feels to be in sync with life, and these temptations will quickly lose their appeal.

The Morning Movement Fun Factor

Exercise is one of the most commonly recommended components of a good morning routine, with good reason. Not only is it good for your health; it’s also great for quickly getting you up to speed and energized for the day.

But none of this will matter if exercise devolves into a huge battle of will every morning. No, you must make sure that your morning movement is fun and convenient. Without these elements, your noble morning exercise ambitions won’t last a month, let alone a lifetime.

Finding such activities is easier than you might think, especially if you smartly integrate them into your choreographed morning playlist. I found five, including gems like bad dancing and double-time yoga. If you think about it, I’m sure you can find some of your own.

The Value of a Good Plan

It gets a lot easier to have a great day if you have a clear sense of where you’re going. That’s why a quick revision of your most important tasks deserves a slot in your morning routine.

But we must be wary here. Planning can easily turn into a tedious chore and, if it does, it threatens the permanence of your routine. That’s why I recommend doing your planning organically throughout the day and in the evening, only to add the final touches each morning.

This natural way of planning requires a system that allows you to easily note down tasks whenever they pop into your head and organize them with minimal effort. For me, this system is Google Tasks.

Accept the World’s Wisdom

Read. The wisdom of the world is at the disposal of anyone who does. And there’s no better time to fit some valuable non-fiction reading into your schedule than the morning.

A quick 10-minute session every morning will bestow upon you the wisdom of about ten great thinkers each year. For me, this turned out to be a lifechanging habit — one I wish I’d started many years ago.

The key to sustaining this precious habit is to read in areas that genuinely interest you. It pays to do your research beforehand to make sure you buy books that will grab your attention. Also, there’s no shame in not finishing a book that fails to live up to expectations.

Discover the Perfect Breakfast

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. A perfect morning meal will deliver you energized and craving-free to your lunch break, helping you stay healthy and get more done.

This is the morning routine element I’ve spent the most time perfecting. And after years of trial and error, I think I’ve finally found the best solution.

My ideal breakfast contains 16 healthy ingredients (mainly nuts, seeds, and berries) that can be combined into a delicious meal in 2 minutes flat.

This blend is a pure joy to eat and boasts the perfect breakfast nutritional profile. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Taking Things to the Next Level

The points outlined above deserve a place in any good morning routine. But, like most things in life, there’s another level available to enthusiasts.

First, try to incorporate a practice to gradually condition your mind towards a calm and positive space. Journalling and meditation are common candidates. My preference is an advanced form of affirmation training I like to call my Personal Constitution.

Second, I highly recommend taking one or two minutes out of your morning to score how you performed yesterday. This habit is great for keeping you securely on your growth path and helping you to really get to know yourself. I use a spreadsheet called a Graph of Life for this purpose.

Third, consider getting yourself an accountability buddy to maximize your consistency, while simultaneously improving an important relationship. An accountability buddy is someone who will be waiting for your call early in the morning and be disappointed if you don’t show up. If there is someone in your life you know you should be spending more time with but never seem to get to, this is your chance.

Start Simple, Keep Innovating

Try to be as pragmatic as possible when you embark on this journey. Avoid designing an overly complex and time-consuming routine. Start simple, including only the elements you think you’ll enjoy the most.

After your first dabble into morning routine choreography, you may well find it to be surprisingly interesting and engaging. Then, you can ride that natural motivation to experiment with new elements.

If you just go with the flow and keep innovating, it’s only a matter of time before you attain the coveted rank of MORNING MASTER 🙂

Image by Avi Chomotovski from Pixabay.

Unless otherwise stated, all images were created by Janet Cloete.

Man climbing graph
Schalk
,
0

How to Graph Your Way to Success

Image designed by Janet Cloete.

Microsoft Excel is used by almost a billion people, myself included. On average, I spend about one hour per day with this evergreen software, doing typical spreadsheet stuff. But the first minute of my daily Excel experience is dedicated to something else entirely: personal growth.

There may be an app for almost everything, but personal growth is just too complex and specific to the individual to capture in a simple mobile app.

That’s where Excel really shines. With a little bit of upfront tinkering, you can set up a customized spreadsheet that helps you get the most out of life in as little as one minute per day.

I like to call such a spreadsheet a “Graph of Life.” And I’ve been keeping mine for almost a decade.

The Benefits of Keeping a Graph of Life

Daily tracking of your personal growth in Excel brings five great benefits:

1. Awareness and consistency

The awareness created by regular measurement often leads to significant improvement all by itself. A Graph of Life measures your ability to consistently do the right things in life. You can probably imagine that improving this skill will bring you much joy in the years ahead.

2. Early warning system

A run of consecutive bad days can easily trap you in a destructive downward spiral. Your Graph of Life will help you spot such spirals early and motivate you to take corrective action before they gain serious momentum.

3. Motivation to keep growing

A prolonged streak of good days looks very pretty on your Graph of Life. The more it grows, the more motivated you’ll become to sustain it.

4. Insights into what makes you tick

The data from a year of daily growth tracking can tell you a lot about yourself. One of my first Medium articles shared an analysis of seven years’ worth of data that helped me become a much better version of myself.

5. See the real impact of major life changes

If you’ve read this far, it’s safe to say that you are interested in improving your life. Unfortunately, most of your attempts to build a better life will have little or no real impact. But sooner or later, you’ll find one that really works. Your Graph of Life can help you identify these gems much more clearly.

My 2019 Graph of Life showing the lasting positive effect from my decision to reduce my degree of employment to 60% and start blogging more seriously.

Getting Started

Start by downloading a basic template for your Graph of Life from this post. The linked post also has a 3-minute video tutorial explaining how to get started. For those without access to Excel, there is also a template and instructional video for Google Sheets (free software).

Here are the necessary steps:

  1. Define some important items you’d like to track. These might include things like Eating Habits, Exercise, Social Interactions, and Work.
  2. Define a range over which you’d like to score each item every day.
  3. Create a graph that automatically trends upwards if you have an above-average day and downwards if you have a below-average day. This feature is already implemented in the template in the aforementioned post.

Using Your Graph of Life

Once you have everything set up, it’s time to build the habit of logging your daily performance. And the best way to do this is to incorporate your Graph of Life into a beautifully choreographed morning routine.

It doesn’t take much to establish this habit. Even if you’ve never used a spreadsheet before, the simplicity and utility offered by the Graph of Life will keep you going. Soon enough, taking a minute each morning to score your yesterday will become as natural as brushing your teeth.

Be sure to note down any big events in your life in the “Comments” column of your Graph of Life. At the end of each year, you can invest some time to indicate these events on your graph (as shown above), so you get a clear picture of which events made a lasting difference.

I also recommend starting a new graph every year. A new year presents an opportunity to add new items or to stop tracking items that proved to have little or no influence after your annual data analysis (described below).

Analyzing your Data

A year of daily growth tracking can teach you a lot about yourself. Investing an hour or two at the end of the year to extract these insights can add great value to your life.

The simplest and most valuable way of doing this in Excel is an analysis of the correlations between the different elements you tracked.

To get started, make sure you have access to Excel’s analysis tools. Once you have activated this feature, you can click on the “Data Analysis” button on the far right of the “Data” ribbon and select the “Correlation” tool.

Here is a snapshot of the first month of my 2019 data and the Correlation tool dialogue box. I recommend copying your data into a new sheet so that the top row contains your data labels. Then you can simply select all the data in the “Input Range” and tick the “Labels in First Row” button.

Once this is done, click OK to view your correlations in a new sheet. Try playing around with some of the “Conditional Formatting” options you can find in the “Home” tab to add a splash of color to your correlation matrix.

A formatted correlation matrix created from my 2019 data.

Positive numbers (green cells) indicate a positive correlation. For example, Cell J11 in the matrix above shows that my Energy is generally high when my Motivation is high. Negative numbers (red cells) indicate a negative correlation. For example, cell D5 shows that the amount of Work (my research job) I do reduces on days I do lots of Extra Work (mostly blogging). Numbers close to zero (yellow cells) show that no clear correlation exists.

The simplest way to show what makes you tick is to plot a column chart of each tracked element’s correlation with your total score for the day (row 12 in the correlation matrix above). In my case, it looks like this:

It only needs one glance at this graph to establish that I should do all I can to maintain healthy eating habits, a high level of control over my daily schedule, and high energy and motivation levels. These actionable insights have greatly improved my life in recent years.

Give it a try!

Go on, take a few minutes to set up your Graph of Life, and give it a chance to become part of your life. If it doesn’t work for you, no worries.

But I’m confident that you’ll develop the intrinsic motivation needed to keep going after only a week or two. If you do, you’d have gained a lifelong ally to keep you on the right track and bless you with invaluable self-knowledge.

yoga-153436_1280
Schalk
, , ,
0

An Inflexible Guy’s Favorite Yoga Poses

Complete with photographs and detailed instructions

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

My inability to touch my ankles (let alone my toes) has always been a source of mild frustration. So, about eight years ago, I armed myself with some Rodney Yee yoga DVDs and embarked on a noble flexibility quest.

But my enthusiasm didn’t last very long. All that stretching felt like a chore and, while my flexibility did improve, the results were nowhere near as dramatic as I hoped.

In hindsight, doing yoga for the sake of becoming bendier was never a good idea. It was only when I properly integrated yoga into my life via a handcrafted morning routine that it became a daily staple.

Today, after two years of consistent yoga practice every morning and most evenings, I finally feel qualified to share some of my favorite yoga poses with others who are not blessed with the flexibility of a ragdoll.

Standing Forward Bend

Let’s start with the arch-nemesis of all of us “inflexibles” — that classic touch-your-toes pose.

If you have some annoyingly short hamstrings, the key to this pose is letting go of that innate need to reach your toes with straight legs. Instead, commit to just enough of a knee-bend to comfortably touch the floor.

While bending forward, focus on lengthening your lower back as much as possible. Ideally, your back would be straight, but that’s just not realistic for most of us. A mild bend in your back is fine, as long as it feels comfortable.

Once you have found the minimum knee bend required to comfortably touch the floor, slowly straighten the legs. Cross your arms and draw them into their sockets, giving yourself a little more play in your hamstrings.

Keep your focus on your lower back and hamstrings. The bend in your lower back should never feel uncomfortable, and you should feel the stretch along the entire length of your hamstrings. If you lose either of these feelings, add a little more bend to your knees.

When done correctly, this post is deeply relaxing. So, next time you feel a bit anxious or stressed, try it out! Start by standing straight with your arms above your head and then do a swan-dive over your (slightly bent) legs, while keeping as much length in your lower back as possible. Then just relax and observe what happens to your emotional state 🙂

Other Standing Poses

While we’re standing up, let’s go through three other deeply satisfying standing poses that require minimal flexibility and create a lovely flow.

Start with your feet wide apart and turn your front foot out by 90 degrees. The distance between your feet should be just right so that you can bend your front leg to almost 90 degrees by the time your knee arrives directly over your heel, creating the classic Warrior 2 pose:

While taking a deep breath, elongate your lower back, put a very slight backbend in your upper back, and open your chest. Then, on the out-breath, make sure the angle in your front leg is close enough to 90 degrees so that you feel a nice burn in your quadriceps.

When the burn starts getting uncomfortable, it’s time to transition into Standing Side Angle pose. To do this, bend your front arm to 90 degrees and rest your elbow on your front knee. Then bring your top arm parallel to your torso and look up to the ceiling.

This transition takes a lot of weight off your upper leg, creating a lovely relaxed sensation after the burn from Warrior 2. Elongate your lower back and stretch your torso towards your upper arm.

Next, we can transition into Triangle pose. Slowly straighten your front leg, keeping the contact with your bottom arm to support the weight of your torso. Your bottom hand should end up in a position on your shin that results in a good leg stretch without creating discomfort.

The key here is to tilt your hips further towards your back leg so that you feel a nice and even stretch throughout the entire length of your front leg. Again, elongate your lower back and keep your torso reasonably straight.

After a few seconds in this position, bring your torso to an upright position with your arms horizontal to the sides, turn your feet in the opposite direction, and repeat this 3-pose series to the other side.

This quick series of standing poses is great for when you have been sitting a little bit too long, and your legs are feeling stiff. It only needs 30 seconds to restore blood flow and full mobility to your legs.

Hip Openers

My favorite type of hip stretch is the Cross-Legged Forward Bend. In fact, this is my second-favorite yoga pose of all!

Start by sitting in a simple cross-legged position. Then press your fists into the floor so that your behind lifts slightly off the mat, allowing for a natural elongation of your lower back. Take a deep breath and look slightly upwards with a relaxed expression on your face.

While maintaining the length in your lower back, breathe out and slowly fold forward over your crossed legs. Rest your forearms on the floor in front of you and let your head relax downwards.

Don’t push. Only go to the point where you feel a satisfying opening in your hips and no strain in your lower back. Then just enjoy the deep relaxation.

After a while, use your arms to help you sit up again, cross your legs the other way, and repeat the process.

The Cross-Legged Forward Bend is an excellent pose for relaxation and winding down after a hectic day. As an inflexible person, you should also be able to bend forward further in this pose than most others, which is quite rewarding in itself.

Interestingly, you can also get a reasonable assessment of your general health by evaluating how much help you need from your arms to transition from standing to a cross-legged position and back to standing.

Groin Stretch

There’s no better way to get a good groin stretch than the classic Cobbler’s pose. Let’s start with the Lying Cobbler, using the floor for natural spine alignment.

While keeping your back straight, pull your feet gently towards your chest up to the point where you feel a satisfying stretch in your groin. Draw your arms into their sockets and breathe in deeply.

Then make the transition to the conventional Cobbler’s pose. Try rolling up to a sitting position, while keeping hold of your feet. This move is good fun, and you should be able to do it quite elegantly after a bit of practice 🙂

Once in a seated position, start by sitting up straight with a similar alignment as in the lying position above. Then breathe out while slowly bending forward. Don’t go too far. It’s better to establish the groin stretch by letting your knees fall open instead of bending forward too much.

Cobbler’s pose is great for winding down in the evening, especially the lying down variant. It also offers a great stretch before or after any vigorous exercise.

Core Workout

Want to get a solid six-pack without resorting to back-breaking sit-ups? Try making Boat pose a permanent feature of your daily morning routine.

Boat pose is pretty much a full-body workout, but the abdominal region works the hardest. Start with the Half-Boat variety where your torso and legs are lifted just a comfortable distance from the ground. Make sure you balance yourself on your sacrum and not your lower back while actively using your arms to maintain that balance.

After spending a while in this position, lift your legs and torso as far as they can comfortably go. This lift brings you into Full Boat pose, which offers a real abdominal workout. Maintain this position until you feel a good burn in your core.

I spend about one minute in Boat pose every morning. In each of my morning yoga routines, I drop my least favorite pose and replace it with the Boat, alternating between the Half and Full varieties at 10-second intervals. This minute is all I need to maintain a solid set of abs.

Back Stretches

If you have tight hamstrings, you’ve likely developed the bad habit of bending more in your lower back than your hips. In this case, it becomes even more crucial to look after your back. This little series can help.

We start with Cobra pose. Begin by lying flat on your stomach and placing your hands next to your chest so that your elbows approach a 90-degree angle. When you lift your torso into Cobra pose, your arms should be perpendicular to the floor.

This hand positioning is crucial. If your hands are too far forward, you can easily bend your back too much, doing more harm than good. Be very mindful of your lower back, and make sure you never bend to the point of discomfort.

If your hips lift a little bit off the floor, that’s fine. In fact, this creates a lovely natural elongation of your lower back. Take a big breath, lift your chest, lower your shoulders, and look mystically upwards.

After spending a few seconds in Cobra pose, we can transition into Child’s pose. Keep your hands and knees fixed in place, and slowly swing your body backward to end up in this position:

Elongate your back into the stretch of your arms, gently rest your head on the ground, and simply enjoy this deeply relaxing position. After a good Cobra, Child’s pose feels fantastic 🙂

You might find yourself spending quite a while in Child’s pose. But when you feel it’s time to move on, end off with a Thunderbolt pose (which is nowhere near as dramatic as it sounds). Simply push yourself up with your hands to sit on your heels.

The great thing about this pose is how it naturally creates the perfect back posture. Lift your chest with a big inhalation, and feel your spine align.

This series is perfect for when you’ve been sitting for a long time and feel a little discomfort in your back. I prefer to start in Thunderbolt, transition through Child to Cobra, and then reverse the sequence to return to Thunderbolt (as illustrated above).

The Child-to-Cobra transition is a fun one. Keep your head and chest close to the floor as you sweep your body forward, and only start lifting your chest when it passes between your hands. It’s a delightful motion 🙂

As an extra little fitness test, try transitioning from standing to Thunderbolt and back to standing without using your arms. I reckon this motion should be a similarly good predictor of general health as the sitting-rising-test mentioned earlier.

Twist

Last but not least, we get to my favorite yoga pose of all: Half Fish pose. Strange name aside, this delightful pose will improve your day whenever you need it.

Start building your Half Fish pose from a simple cross-legged position. Take hold of your bottom foot and pull it a little backward to the opposite sitting bone. Then lift your top foot over your bottom knee.

Twist your upper body slightly towards your bottom foot, while elongating your torso with the help of a big inhalation. Then complete the twist on your exhalation without compromising the length in your back. Only twist as far as you feel comfortable.

The position of your front elbow is a good twist adjustor. For a mild twist, simply wrap your arm around your knee so that your elbow is slightly on the inside of the knee. For the intermediate version shown above, place your elbow on the outside of your knee. Then there’s also the advanced version where you straighten your top arm to grab your front toe while keeping your elbow on the outside of your knee. That one’s a bit much for me, I must admit.

Being my favorite yoga pose, I employ the Half Fish pose whenever I get an irrational craving. Often a good Half Fish can convince my mind to drop its unreasonable demands for a Whole Chocolate 🙂

So, there you have it. These poses add great value to my life day after day. I hope they can do the same for you!

All photos were taken and processed by Janet Cloete.

029.4_Morning Movement
Schalk
, , ,
0

5 Fun Ways to Move Your Body in the Morning

Maximum value, minimum willpower

Modern Homo sapiens stagnate too much. That much we know. What we’re less sure about is how to get ourselves to move more, consistently. Where do we find time for regular exercise in our hectic lives?

The answer to that question is simple: the morning. After all,

  1. The early morning is the time of day when we have the most freedom to take care of ourselves.
  2. Morning movement has the benefit of waking us up faster and boosting energy, so it can help us get more out of each day.

That’s nice and all, but this logic is not going to get us moving all by itself. To guarantee daily bodily motion, we must make it fun and fully automatic.

Which brings us to today’s article. Here are the five types of movement that are now so deeply ingrained in my morning routine that I have little doubt they will last a (substantially longer) lifetime.

Movement 1: Dancing (Badly)

I bet you don’t exactly feel like tearing up the dancefloor (or living room floor) shortly after waking up. Neither do I. But it takes only a few bars of my morning dance song (below) to switch me on.

The key is to remove the choice of whether to dance or not to dance. Your morning dance song must start playing automatically at just the right moment to push you over that threshold. After that, you never look back!

That’s why a choreographed morning routine is so vital. Such a handcrafted routine takes time to set up, but it will boost your health, productivity, energy, relationships, and inspiration for the rest of your life. You’ll struggle to find an investment with a better rate of return.

My morning dance song is third on my playlist and ensures I’m up and running (and in a great mood) 10 minutes after opening my eyes. It’s also ideally structured so that I can do typical morning stuff like washing my face, swirling some mouthwash, and weighing myself in the verse, and be back on the dancefloor just in time for each of the three funky choruses.

Go on, dance like nobody’s watching! And if you live with family, try to get them to participate. You’ll all benefit from such a natural boost in morning mood and energy 🙂

Movement 2: Double-Time Yoga

Yoga is a great way to loosen up in the morning. The only problem is that most routines are so slow that they either put you back to sleep or bore you to the point where you drop this great habit. That was a genuine problem for me until I made a miraculous discovery: the 2x speedup button.

For example, I have seven different morning yoga routines (one for each day of the week), most of which come from Rodney Yee’s AM Yoga DVD. At normal speed, these routines take a little over 20 minutes and move way too slowly for my liking. But if I double the playback speed, I need only 10 minutes and really enjoy the pace of the routine.

Try it on the example given below! You’ll find the playback speed under the little gear icon on the bottom right.

It took a day or two to get used to rapidly-speaking-Rodney, but today, more than two years of daily yoga later, that’s just the way he talks.

Like dancing, the key to consistency is to remove the element of choice. Your yoga instructions should automatically start playing at precisely the right time, triggering you to start without a second thought.

Movement 3: Free Weights

Resistance training is great for health and equally great for self-image. Unfortunately, going to the gym is just so tedious, time-consuming, and expensive (and impossible with social distancing). But what else can we do?

That’s an easy one: We can buy a gym chair and a pair of compact weights and put them where we’ll see them every day. Below is a picture of the little home gym that has kept my upper body in a decent “Dorito” shape for the past eight years.

I do a combined two minutes of bicep curls, shoulder presses, and chest presses every morning. It’s not exactly fun, but it’s so short that it doesn’t matter. Besides, I do these exercises while chewing on a big mouthful of my delicious breakfast, which is a whole lot of fun!

After many years of this practice, I’m confident that two minutes of vigorous lifting daily is all that’s needed to keep me at the ideal muscle tone — not too little, not too much, but just right. No gym payment, no sweat, virtually no time investment. Heck, it almost feels like cheating 🙂

Movement 4: Constitution

My constitution is a brief description of how the ideal version of me would act, which I recite to the beat of some inspirational music each morning. It’s quite an active process, involving plenty of pacing around the living room, power poses, and sweeping gestures.

It may look downright ridiculous from the outside, but any ego-related concerns quickly fade next to the tremendous value of conditioning my mind toward its ideal state. The movement aspect is just a nice bonus.

Movement 5: Accountability Buddy

About 30 minutes of my typical morning is spent in standing Skype conversation with family, courtesy of my raise-and-lower desk. This habit played a significant role in transforming me into a consistently early riser.

Standing for these morning chats is just a bonus, given that any mechanism to cut sitting time on a daily basis adds great long-term value.

Time to get moving!

You might be surprised at how little movement we need to stay healthy. If you’re smart about it, you can incorporate the majority of that movement into your morning routine at virtually no cost while reaping tremendous benefits in terms of wakefulness, energy, and mood.

Again, I must stress the importance of choreographing this movement into your morning playlist so that you make it the default choice. Humans are lazy apes (especially just after waking up), and expecting ourselves to make the conscious choice to exercise every morning is bordering on self-delusion. Instead, we should place ourselves in a position where we must invest mental effort not to exercise. Then, good things happen 🙂

The images in this article were custom-made by Janet Cloete.

«‹ 4 5 6 7 8 ›»