Morning all!
Here’s the old countdown timer today.
Didn’t quite start at 5.50am today – because I had an unproductive morning being on Whatsapp!
I want to make a renewed commitment to myself to NOT be on Whatsapp until 7am every day.
There’s no need for me to be on before that time – and I’m building a bad connection between myself and Whatsapp.
So for today, I’m not going to jump onto Whatsapp now until 8 am because it feels like it’s a sensible way to go in terms of planting a stake for at least this morning!
Yesterday – I met up with my friend Zuka and we worked together from the Wimbledon Joe & The Juice (spent £7.10 on their signature juice – what an absolute rip-off) and he discussed the negative effects of drinking caffeine after midday.
This was ironic because I had a latte and coke with him between the hours of 530 – 7pm!
Anyway, it served as another reminder that I need a caffeine detox.
Unfortunately, as I discovered per my morning walk to Mcdonalds (classy) – that somehow they don’t serve decaf.
And so, I ended up getting a cup of tea instead of coffee so from now on my morning latte will be replaced by coffee.
The next part in this cycle will be not having any caffeine after midday.
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I wanted to share this stream of consciousness with you – because these are all things that I’ve attempted/done with different degrees of success over the years.
You’ll find plenty of evidence of it in some of my past blogs in which there are references to coming off whatsapp as well as quitting caffeine.
It’s interesting to see how some things come back in again and you find yourself somehow in a place where you’re erring a little too much towards excess again and need to reel yourself back in.
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Maybe that’s the truth of habit formation – that it is indeed cyclical – and that you cycle on and cycle off. Much like using a drug and then going through a detox period before you slowly introduce yourself back to the drug again in small quantities.
And soon enough – over the months and perhaps it’s even over the years – you find yourself at 5.30pm having a latte and not really minding – whereas before I went maybe 18 months without drinking coffee or tea!
I’m not sure I’m ready for such extreme measures again – but switching the morning cup of coffee to a cup of tea is a happy enough start for me – alongside no more caffeine (unless it’s coke) after midday.
It means I also need to alter my post-lunch beverage choices which I’ll attempt to do today.
So the other thing that’s damaging about coffee/caffeine (and I think I’ll aim to ONLY allow myself anything with caffeine that isn’t tea/coffee with lunch) – besides it can become an addiction and the more you drink the less impact it has…so the more you need….
Is how much it can damage your deep sleep.
Coffee has a half-life of something like 6-7 hours. So that means 6 hours after drinking anything caffeinated – 50% of the caffeine is still present/active in your system.
This can impact your sleep – and I don’t get enough sleep it is!
All of these insights (which Zuka happily reminded me of yesterday) come from reading.
What an incredible opportunity that self-education offers us all in general. There’s a world of education accessible at our fingertips and I feel something akin to Neo in The Matrix when he ‘downloads’ how to fight Kung Fu directly into his brain. He then wakes up and there’s that epic moment that’s been replayed by myself many times over the years where he says ‘I know Kung fu’.
So as much as I look at activities I engage in – and their impact over a day, a week, a month, a year….and then over the years – it’s interesting to anaylse the change this drives in my life.
It was just in May 2021 that I really began to accelerate my learning and education.
So it’s been 15 months since I began to raise up the level of my learning.
I’m excited then to see what happens over my next 15 months and what actions and decisions I repeat – as well as all of the new one’s that will follow from the audiobooks I have yet to listen to.
