personal development

Schalk
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Cavemen Stuck in the Future

Yesterday’s post introduced the idea that each of us consists of two entities: 

  • A body and mind that evolved over the first 99.9% of human history (the caveman). 
  • An evolved consciousness capable of reasoning beyond these primitive caveman instincts. 

Over the next two months, we’ll be focusing on a simple problem: How can the evolved consciousness be used to train the caveman for effective living in the modern world?

The first step was discussed yesterday: give your caveman a name. 

The second step is to really understand this philosophy. This is the topic of today and tomorrow. 

A brief human history

The first modern humans emerged around 200 millennia ago. Back then, times were tough. There was no electricity, cars, or internet. There wasn’t even a supermarket to get food. 

Nope, back then, every day was a struggle to stay alive. All efforts had to be devoted to getting enough food for survival and protecting ourselves against predators and rival tribes. 

As the millennia ticked by, very little changed. Some more sophisticated civilizations slowly rose and fell, but still only kings and emperors had access to the material wealth we take for granted today. 

It was only about 200 years ago that the exploitation of fossil fuels really ignited human progress. As shown below, we used this abundant new energy source to fuel a tremendous population explosion.

The period before this population boom represents about 99.9% of human history. Over these 200 millennia, we evolved all the instincts and emotions required to ensure survival in our harsh environment. 

Then, in an evolutionary blink of an eye, our environment changed beyond all recognition. Material abundance is now all around us and the daily problems we’re dealing with are totally different. 

And that’s the problem: Many of our instincts and emotions are useless for building a good life in this new environment of great abundance and great complexity. 

Accepting your caveman

The most immediate benefit from this understanding is a sense of self-acceptance. From this viewpoint, it’s clear that your inability to consistently do the right things does not make you a bad person. You, like the rest of us, are simply a caveman (or cavewoman 🙂 ) stuck in the future. 

Accepting this truth on a deep level can be quite liberating. It will also make it a lot easier to train your caveman for effective living in our rapidly changing society. 

Try to remember this the next time you’re drawn to do something you know is bad for you. You can even strike up a little conversation with your caveman. Explain that you understand where he’s coming from, but that his instinctive response is no longer valid today. See what happens…

Then join me again tomorrow when we dig into the five outdated emotions causing most of the misery in today’s world.

Schalk
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Let Me Introduce You to Yourself

The second chapter of Supermorning will delve pretty deep into the human psyche. In particular, we’ll be focusing on the this age-old question:

Why is it so damn hard to do the right things? 

We all want a happy, healthy, wealthy, and productive life. Some even strive for sustainability. And yet, far too many people are over-stressed, overweight, broke, depressed and environmentally destructive. 

Why is this? How do so many people end up so far from where they want to be in this world of great material affluence? It really is rather bizarre if you think about it.  

The reason

Well, this part is actually pretty simple: our world has changed so dramatically over the past 0.1% of human history that many of our instinctive emotional responses are now totally outdated. You’ll hear plenty more about this in the next couple of posts. 

But understanding this is one thing. Translating this understanding into a real day-to-day practical benefit is something totally different. 

An actionable analogy

That’s why I want to start this new Supermorning chapter with an analogy that really helps to put this knowledge into action: the caveman with an evolved consciousness. 

It sounds weird, I know, but it really is very simple. Each of us consists of two entities:

  • A body and mind that evolved over the first 99.9% of human history (the caveman). 
  • An evolved consciousness capable of reasoning beyond these primitive caveman instincts. 

So, let’s try an interesting psychological experiment: 

Monday 1-minute action Give your caveman a name

 

This seems silly at first, but trust me, it’s very powerful.

My caveman’s name is “Homer”, short for Homo erectus (primitive humans that lived a long time ago). The image of the rather primitive Homer Simpson also comes to mind 🙂

Homer is the vessel through which I (the evolved consciousness) interact with the world. Without Homer, I can’t do anything. But if I just give Homer free reigns in today’s affluent society, he’ll destroy himself (and me) in no time. 

This idea may take a while before it really sinks in. But just keep an open mind and start by giving your caveman a name. Then recall this analogy whenever you’re drawn to something you know is bad for you and observe what happens in your mind.

But I’ll leave it there for now. Tune in again tomorrow when we’ll take a brief trip through human history to understand the caveman in each of us. 

Schalk
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Week 12 of Getting 1% Better

This week’s weather was terrible, even by Norwegian standards. But luckily, that did not stop me from having a great week 🙂 You can see the healthy upwards trend in the little red bit at the end of my Graph of Life below. 

Thanks to my data obsession, I’ve been logging a subjective score of the weather on my Graph of Life for about nine months now. From these 270 data points, I can now confidently say that the quality of my day is completely immune to changes in the weather.

Weather is probably the most complained about thing in Norway, so I was very happy to see this. It’s certainly useful to be unaffected by things we have no control over, such as bad weather, stupid politicians, or the bad performance of your favorite sports team. 

All you need to know about this graph is that it heads upwards if I have a great day and downwards if the day is just good. I've not had a bad or even just an average day for the past 11 months :-)
All you need to know about this graph is that it heads upwards if I have a great day and downwards if the day is just good. I’ve not had a bad or even just an average day for the past 11 months 🙂

 

So, how was your week? Did you manage to look after your health, make some good personal and professional progress, and nurture your relationships? If so, you probably made your 1% gain this week 🙂

If not, what can you improve? Could it help to spend less mental energy on things like the weather that are totally outside your control?  

Finally, this month’s experiment of bringing back weekend posts did not make much difference. So, hopefully for the last time, weekend posts will now be removed again. 

How well did you look after yourself this week?
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Do you feel that you made progress this week?
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How do you feel about your relationships and general human interactions?
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Schalk
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Recap: Morning Routine

After nearly 50 posts about morning routines, we’ve reached the finishing line! Next week, we’ll move on to the interesting psychology involved in getting genuine control over your mind and body. 

But first, let’s formally wrap up the critical topic of maintaining a proper daily morning routine. 

Before we get to the checklist, I just want to reemphasize that a morning routine is much more liberating than restrictive. Being disciplined in the first and last hours of the day gives you much greater freedom and control over all the hours in between.

Please keep this in mind if you still have doubts about committing to a proper morning routine. 

But now, let’s move on to…

The checklist

Here’s the 1-2-3 of of implementing and maintaining a good morning routine:

  1. Commit! Any halfhearted attempts at building a morning routine will fail. 
  2. Decide which elements you want to include. The recaps of the different options covered on this blog are linked below:
  3. Experiment. Everyone’s situation is unique, so you’ll need some trial and error to find your ideal routine. 
    • Have a plan for those inevitable difficult mornings.
    • Make sure you give yourself a fair chance at making this work by prioritizing sleep. 
    • Try to incorporate a lovely flow into your routine. Mine is detailed here as an example.  

So, that’s it. The topic of morning routines is officially done and dusted!

If you have any feedback or suggestions that can help me improve these morning routine guidelines, please use the form below.

Your message will not be publicly visible, so please don’t hold back. Having gone through the scientific peer-review publication process about 100 times, I’m used to critical feedback 🙂

The Supermorning blog will run on an annually repeating basis, so this time next year I will present an improved version of these morning routine guidelines. Your feedback is important to make sure that next year’s version really offers a clear improvement.

Thanks in advance!

Schalk
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My Evening Routine

The idea of an evening routine is to calm the mind to facilitate a night of longer and better quality sleep. This makes it so much easier to master the next morning (and the next day). 

My evening routine has five relaxing (but still useful) steps.

It all starts with turning on my evening playlist and reading something technical for 5-10 minutes. I try to time it so that I’m done roughly at the end of the first song on my playlist (below). 

Candidates for this reading session fall into the category of “boring but important.” For example, this habit helped me read all 600 pages of the 2018 World Energy Outlook – not exactly riveting reading material, but vital for my research. 

Then I do a final check over my to-do list. This just takes a minute and usually gives me a lovely sense of completion, putting my mind at ease for the night. After that, I put my PC to sleep and turn off the lights as an official gesture that all productive activities for the day are now done. 

Then comes a relatively new addition to my evening routine: 10 minutes of guided meditation using Headspace. Despite some initial skepticism, I was quite impressed with the product and had no problems maintaining this habit for almost 50 days now. 

I end with a 5-minute Rodney Yee PM yoga session (which I do from memory), followed by a 15 minute session in my luxurious massage chair. During this 20 minutes, I do something interesting with my mind called an “emotion safari”. We’ll get to that in a couple of weeks. 

In total, this whole routine takes just a little over 30 minutes. I’ve been doing most elements of this routine for a long time, but only properly formalized the whole package a little over a month ago. Since then, I’ve actually seen a clear increase in my sleep quality from about 70% to about 80% (see the jump from the blue dots to the red dots in the graph below).

So, I hope you can get around to building a nice evening routine of your own. It’s proven to be quite valuable in my case. 

See you tomorrow for the final morning routine post!

Schalk
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My Morning Routine

The routine outlined below has done the impossible: turn me into a true morning person. After almost a year of daily practice, it’s now so ingrained in my life that it requires no willpower whatsoever. 

So, here we go…

Normally, I wake up naturally somewhere between 4 and 5 am. After getting out of bed, the first thing I do is to put on the bright living room light and fire up my wake-up song (below).

During these three minutes, I do the morning bathroom run, wash my face with cold water, swirl some strong-tasting mouth-wash, make my bed, put on some deodorant and weigh myself. This 3-minute sensory assault always leaves me wide awake 🙂

I time it so I’m done just as the next song on my morning playlist starts. This is my cue to smoothly glide into my constitution. 

Two minutes later, I’m totally psyched for the day. The next inspirational song on my playlist then automatically queues me to fill in my Graph of Life. Seeing my streak of good days grow offers another little psychological boost every morning 🙂 

Then it’s time for some morning exercise: one of seven different Rodney Yee Yoga routines (one for each day of the week). I do the sacrilegious thing of taking it double speed. Otherwise it takes too long and gets a little boring for my taste.

Following this, I put on my favorite blended rain and fireplace noise courtesy of Noisli and settle in to read a couple of interesting or inspirational pages (currently, I’m reading The Art of Happiness). 

Next, it’s time to set up my to-do list for the day. Given its importance, this task is strategically positioned for when my brain is totally awake and inspired. 

After this, I work on my first to-do until 6:15. The length of this session is flexible and depends on when I woke up that particular day. 

At 6:15, I have a highly nutritious, tasty and convenient breakfast combined with two sets of light weights and some more inspirational music. In the summer this happens on my east-facing balcony, but I move inside for the cold, dark winter. 

Breakfast is done just in time for two back-to-back Skype sessions with my accountability buddies. 

Following some fun and positive exchanges, I dive into the next item on my to-do list, already with a huge head start on the rest of the world 😎

Time commitment

My rather spartan lifestyle gives me the ability to maintain this pretty extensive routine with near-perfect regularity. Most people will prefer something simpler (which is totally OK). But just to illustrate how efficiently this can be done, here’s a breakdown of the time commitment: 

  1. Wake-up song: a little over 3 minutes
  2. Constitution: a little over 2 minutes
  3. Graph of Life: about 2 minutes
  4. Yoga: about 10 minutes (short version: less than one minute)
  5. Reading: about 10 minutes (short version: about one minute)
  6. To-do list: 5-10 minutes
  7. Breakfast: 15 minutes
  8. Accountability buddies: 30 minutes

Items 1-6 take a little over half an hour (or less than 15 minutes if I must revert to the short versions). I’d venture to say that almost everyone could find 15 minutes in the morning for something this valuable. 

Breakfast is something most folks do anyway. It can be intelligently designed for maximum convenience to focus nearly all your breakfast time on enjoyment rather than preparation. 

Half an hour of accountability buddy time is something of a luxury. You can certainly get most of the benefits with far less than 30 minutes. 5-10 minutes will do just fine.

So, there you have it. Please put in some time to design something like this for yourself. This routine has been a life changer for me and I cannot recommend it strongly enough! 

Tomorrow, I’ll share my (much simpler) evening routine. See you then!

Schalk
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Making Morning Routines Work

Yesterday, we put together a clean list of morning routine items. Do this and you can experience many hours of freedom and control facilitated by one hour of intelligent morning structure.

But a perfect morning routine does not happen overnight. Start with the list you made yesterday, but keep your mind open to any possible improvements along the way. 

Also remember last week’s discussions about those days when life just gets in the way. Make sure you have an embarrassingly easy short version of any item that takes more than a minute or two and commit to always doing at least that. 

But the short version should really be the exception, not the rule. Things like morning exercise, inspirational reading, and having a super breakfast should get the full treatment whenever possible. 

To make this happen, it’s important to make these activities as fun as possible. Pick a morning exercise you enjoy, invest some time to select a fascinating morning read, and design a great-tasting breakfast. 

Another crucial aspect of a successful routine is to incorporate a clear sense of flow. Each item should smoothly and naturally blend into the next. Doing your morning routine to a fixed music playlist is a great way to create this flow. 

As a practical example, I’ll share my tried and tested morning routine tomorrow. See you then!

Schalk
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Morning Routine: Putting It All Together

The time has finally come: after 11 grueling weeks of morning routine theory, the finishing line is in sight!

This week, our job is simply to put everything together into a system that will stand the test of time. 

But first a little bit of a pep talk… It’s natural to experience some resistance towards the idea of routine because it sounds restrictive and boring. But if you do it right, just the opposite happens. 

The whole idea behind a good morning routine is to gain increased freedom and excitement during the rest of the day. Master the first hour of your day and you’re ahead and in control from the start. Screw it up and you’ll probably be rushed, reactive, constrained and inefficient all day long. 

It’s critical to keep this in mind while you’re building your routine. 

So, from this mindset, let’s get to today’s… 

Monday 5-minute action Clearly list the items in your morning and evening routines

 

In my experience, the best way to implement this is as recurring to-do’s in Google Tasks. But if you want to put it as your desktop background or frame it on your wall, go right ahead 🙂

The important thing is to create a real, tangible list that will automatically be in front of you every morning. 

Tomorrow, we’ll take a closer look at the practicalities. See you then!

Schalk
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Week 11 of Getting 1% Better

Another week, another 1% improvement 🙂 It wasn’t all plain sailing, but after after a little dip last weekend, my week once again finished strong (see the little red bit at the end of my Graph of Life below). 

All you need to know about this graph is that it heads upwards if I have a great day and downwards if the day is just good. I've not had a bad or even just an average day for the past 11 months :-)
All you need to know about this graph is that it heads upwards if I have a great day and downwards if the day is just good. I’ve not had a bad or even just an average day for the past 11 months 🙂

 

So, how was your week? Answer the three simple questions below for a quick check. 

If you ticked any of the top two boxes in all three questions, I’m pretty sure you made your 1% gain this week 🙂

If not, have a little think about possible areas of improvement? Resolve to take at least one action to help you make your 1% gain next week. Every 1% counts!

How well did you look after yourself this week?
Vote

Do you feel that you made progress this week?
Vote

How do you feel about your relationships and general human interactions?
Vote
Schalk
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Recap: Morning Routines in the Real World

Win the morning, win the day. 

Actually, it should be: build a bulletproof morning routine, win the morning, win the day. 

The bulletproofing part is very important. The bullets can come flying from any direction. Maybe your child cries the whole night, maybe your best friend had a bachelor’s party, maybe your company booked you into a crappy hotel. 

All of these obstacles can easily derail a budding morning routine. Your job is to nurse it through this trying time until it truly takes root. If you reach that point, you’re home and dry 🙂 

The checklist

So, let’s summarize how to make this happen:

  1. Make sure you have a short version for the elements of your routine that take more than a minute or two.
    • Short versions should be so easy that it would be downright embarrassing to skip them. 
    • Make sure to do at least the short version every morning to form a strong habit. 
  2. Anticipate when your budding morning routine could come under attack.
  3. Ensure that you have a clear reason for maintaining a world-class morning routine. 

These simple tips will give you a strong and loyal morning routine that will serve you faithfully until the day you die. Get yourself one of those! They are a man’s (or woman’s) best friend 🙂

See you tomorrow!

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