New habits

New habits. They say it can take anywhere from three weeks to even two months to form them and just a few days or bad choices to break that new habit. I had picked up some habits that weren’t necessarily bad but just inconsistent with how I feel most comfortable living my life, and had been wanting to change them. But it’s hard. So hard.

To start, I’m a morning person at heart and really, really wanted to reset my body clock to get up early and begin my day with a run. While working at home, the bet I was always able to do was like 8.00am or 9.00am, but it wasn’t early enough for me. I would get home and feel like half my day was wasted, and would wind up working later and being on the computer later, and was just in a vicious cycle.

Then I started a new job and one of the perks is a flexible start time, which was comfortable for my body clock. I just couldn’t get myself up at 6.00am no matter how hard I tried. Then came Game of Thrones. It airs concurrently with 9.00pmEST on Sunday evenings so therefore it airs here in Italy at 3.00am on Monday on SkyItalia. It’s in English with Italian sub-titles, then it airs again Monday evenings with the dubbing option. Now, I don’t get up at 3.00am to watch it, but I record it and got up at 6.30 the Monday after the first episode. I wanted to fall asleep standing up all day, but pushed through and tried to go to sleep earlier that first Monday night to make up for the lack of sleep the previous one. However, the first few weeks of this were brutal. In order for it to work, I had to upkeep my early rising during the weekends as well. Once I was comfortable, I started moving my runs to the morning rather than the evenings for a few reasons. Firstly, there’s nothing like starting the day with a run and arriving at work to see I’ve surpassed more than 10,000 steps and it’s only 9.30am. Secondly, it’s hot in the evening and as the weather gets warmer, there are more people on the sidewalks and trying to run with pedestrians is a nightmare. More on that some other time.

I’m also trying to un-digitalize myself a bit. To start, I got an alarm clock and don’t sleep with the phone near me and I try to stop looking at all screens (TV, phone, iPad, computer) by 10.30pm with the hope of making it 10.00pm.