The Knock-On Effect
How tracking my habits has improved my life and the lives of those around me.
You Are The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With
In yesterday’s Sobering Thoughts blog I wrote a little bit about how being selfish can be the best thing for the people you spend the most time with.
I spoke a little bit about Jim Rohn’s quote where he says “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”. The below is the best, relatively short video I could find to help explain what Rohn meant.
The other day I saw fitness industry guru Travis Jones talking about this on Instagram stories. Travis flipped it around and asked, “what are you doing to the people who happen to have you in their top five?” Are you dragging the average of the group down, or are you lifting the average up?
I asked myself the same. What work am I doing to improve myself and in turn, uplift the people around me?
In my almost eight months of sobriety, I have found it’s the small, consistent efforts, that bring about the most growth. I’m far from an expert, but I want to share what I have found beneficial.
Reverse Engineer It
First I needed to identify and implement the keystone habits that I felt had the most influence on me and how I feel.
Wake Up Early
Waking up early sucks, but, I found that getting up before the sun and doing something positive for myself before anything for anyone else, it sets me up for a good day.
I exercise, but it doesn’t have to be exercise. Walking your dog, meditation, crosswords, sitting in the dark and silence having a cup of tea. It just has to be something positive and healthy that you enjoy. You start your day in positive head space.
I like to wake up half an hour earlier than I have to. If it takes me two hours from the time I get up to get my exercise in, get to work, have a shower and be at my desk, I’ll wake up 2.5 hours earlier than the time I expect to be at my desk. It prevents me from feeling like I am in a rush. Being in a rush is stressful and induces overwhelm which in turn affects my productivity.
Getting up early kicks my day off the right way. I get to work in a good mood, with that 30 minutes time buffer which reduces my stress and helped me feel like I am in control of my day.
Be In A Calorie Deficit
I use the Alfred App to track my calories. It’s quick and easy. It’s amazing for helping me be mindful of what I eat. It helps me to not overeat. Overeating makes me feel like crap. It makes me feel sluggish, heavy, and tired. I don’t go crazy. I just like to be in a small deficit every day.
It does two things for me. It helps me avoid that shitty feeling overeating gives me. It makes me feel like I’m not a big, fat, hopeless, binge-eating, piece of shit.
Since tracking my calories I have been pleasantly surprised by how much I can eat and remain in a deficit. I don’t demonise myself if I happen to finish a day in a surplus. Life can be a prick. Not all days are good and no one day is the same.
There will be days when I am in a surplus, but that’s okay. So long as I am mindful of it and I know that I am in a deficit more days than I am not, I can be at peace with that.
Prioritise Sleep
Sleep is tricky. I’ve struggled with sleep my entire life. I would guess as a child I averaged around seven hours a night. Nowhere near the 9-12 hours, children are supposed to get through various stages of development.
It used to take me hours and hours to sleep. I felt like if days were 28 hours long, not 24 I would be fine. Like I was wired to stay awake for 20 hours and then sleep for eight, but 28 doesn’t fit into 24.
Nowadays I fall asleep quicker than I ever and I love it. Routine is essential to managing ADHD if you want to function as best you can. Because I was struggling to sleep, I would fall asleep at different times each night, which made it difficult to get up at the same time each day.
I decided to “hard reset” myself. I forced myself to wake up at the exact same time every day. No matter what. After about a fortnight of doing this, I found I was organically getting tired at roughly the same time each night.
We can’t control what time we fall asleep. We can control what time we wake up. So I figured that I would just control what I could control and hope the rest worked out. It did.
We don’t live in a perfect world. I had fucking schoolies letting off fireworks in my street the other night. I had a bad sleep. But having habituated this sleep routine made it easy for me to slip straight back into it the next day.
The more consistent my sleep is, the better quality it is, the better I feel.
Nutrition
I used to be fat, a few times. I fuckin’ love treats. I have had, and still do have trouble with binge/comfort eating. Comfort food more often than not is junk. Junk makes you feel like… junk.
So I try to make sure that my daily, staple foods are nutritious and healthy. Every Monday morning I bring a week worth of fruit and mixed nuts to work. I have a smoothie for breakfast. I make three at a time, twice a week, and put them in my car fridge to have when I’m driving from the gym to work.
I couple that with a relatively healthy dinner and then allow myself some snacks after dinner if it fits within my calorie range.
Being prepared puts friction between me and buying takeaways/junk throughout the day. It’s less effort for me to eat what I already have than it is for me to leave work to go and get something else. It also saves me the time it would take to go out and get something.
This isn’t groundbreaking. Eating good food makes us feel good. Eating shitty food makes us feel shitty.
Create Accountability
I need something to hold me to account. Even with the Alfred App, there are days where I struggle to be honest about the food I have eaten because I know I’m not going to like the numbers it spits out.
Slowly, I’m getting better at being honest. Being honest gives me the most accurate snapshot of my habits. When I’m not feeling the best physically or mentally, I can look at the trends in my spreadsheet, and more often than not it’s clear what I need to adjust to feel good again.
It took a few hours to build and it’s far from perfect but it works.
Now that it’s built, each morning when I get to work I spend a minute or two entering the data from my Garmin and it tells me everything I need to know.
I’ve set it so that whenever I enter something that is below my target the font changes to red. If I meet or exceed my target, it turns is in green. So when I’m not feeling the best, I look at the spreadsheet, find the red sections and easily identify which of my habits I’ve let slip.
I use line graphs because I like to see the trajectory. The Trajectory can give us peace of mind after a bad day. It can show us that even though we didn’t exercise or had a bad day of eating or sleep, we are still heading in the right direction.
It’s also helped me to make better choices when I’m out and about. It sounds ridiculous, but knowing that I have to be accountable to the spreadsheet each morning and wanting to see green numbers instead of red numbers has influenced the decisions I have made. I’m more mindful of the habits that matter to me.
You don’t need to go to this much effort, but it’s helped me a lot.
and I have started for anyone who wants some help to track their keystone habits
The Knock-On Effect
I know that by checking off my keystone habits each day I am working towards becoming a better version of myself each day.
I wake up early after prioritising my sleep the night before. Trying to ensure I get the hours of sleep I have targeted. I know that by doing this I will have the energy I need to start my day the right way.
Exercising early in the morning brings me so much peace and restores a sense of calm in me. For someone with ADHD, that’s massive. I head off to work feeling good both in terms of mood and self-esteem.
I get to work early, I still have that 30 minutes up my sleeve so I’m less susceptible to stress and overwhelm. This helps me to focus on the task at hand, which in turn helps me have a more productive day.
I have my healthy staple foods here at work. I don’t need to waste 30-60 minutes heading out to get any other food and I can trust that they are going to give me all the nutrition I need for the day.
I draw physical energy from prioritising my sleep. I draw mental energy from getting up early and exercising first thing in the morning. Then I draw physical energy again from eating well. There is a knock-on effect here. Investing the energy we have into things that give us more energy just makes life easier.
The Benefactors
I benefit from feeling good, but it’s deeper than that.
Each weekday I get four to five hours at home with my family. 21% of my day. It’s not a lot.
I know what it’s like to feel shit. I’ve been heavily overweight, three times. I’ve had addiction issues with alcohol, drugs, and food all of which correlate directly with periods of poor mental health.
I don’t want to be that person. For myself, but more importantly for the people, I care about the most. I want to be a person my son, my partner, my family, and my friends respect. I want them to want to be around me. I want to inspire or motivate them to grow.
More so, I want to be present for them. I want to have the mental and physical energy to squeeze everything I can out of what limited time I have with them. I truly believe that implementing and tracking these daily habits has been essential to the progress I have made so far and will continue to be essential moving forward. Focusing on these habits makes me a better father, partner, son, brother, uncle, and friend. It pushed me to be the best possible version of myself.
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If anyone is struggling in any way, make someone aware of it. Speak to a friend, family, loved one, stranger, postman, uber eats driver, or me, just talk to someone.
Lifeline Ph: 13 11 14
Alcoholics Anonymous Ph: 1300 222 222
NSW Mental Health Line Ph: 1800 011 511
Suicide Call Back Service Ph: 1300 659 467
Mensline Australia Ph: 1300 78 99 78
Kids Helpline Ph: 1800 55 1800
A lot of green in the self-assessment ratings!