Morning all.
Day 6 rolls on:
Got a new little mini-goal now.
Want to get to the hotel and be working by 5am tomorrow.
Let’s see if I can post the watch for it tomorrow!
It’s a bit of a struggle at the moment to get out of the door without waking my girlfriend up.
So I want to walk you through exactly what’s happening with the night and morning routines:
Our bedroom is pretty small and when you set your alarm for 4.28am it’ll wake you both up.
I’m slowly evolving my mornings in light of this to become a silent ‘waker’ if you will.
But let’s go back to the night routine:
Last night I had a cup of chamomile tea before bed (and was knackered anyway) and managed to get into bed at 920pm which was a big victory for me.
I also (@Daren if you’re reading this) had 25% of the recommended intake for some magnesium tablets I took at around 4pm.
It tells me to take two tablets a day but I still get weirded out with tablets, so hopefully half of one tablet is enough.
I suppose at some stage I should google it and look into it more.
The idea is to cycle between (or have them all daily) magnesium tabs, a kiwi, almonds and chamomile tea before bed. I just need to buy the kiwis, I’ve got the other bits now.
Let’s see how it preps me for bed over the coming weeks.
Going to bed at 9.20 meant I was met with some resistance from my girlfriend. We were watching reruns (for me) of episodes of House M.D – because of her studies in medicine she’s enjoying it.
I cut it short because the bed was calling which sucks as I would love us to spend that time together. But that’s why I’m sharing this with you – to motivate myself to sort my sh*t out but also in the hopes you can crack 430am with me!
So – I was actually aiming for 830pm but took me 50 minutes to get into bed.
My girlfriend was annoyed I was going to bed and at first, I didn’t understand it – as it’s nothing new – but then as I listened more carefully (i.e actively) I realised it’s actually that I’m waking her up at 430am:
This was yesterday at 5pm she told me this – which is disappointing for me.
Sucks that she is waking up – but it’s also huge motivation to get my game face on.
How can I do my 430’s without ruining her mornings?
Furthermore – I’m still trying to figure out how to not be knackered by the time 6pm comes around and I can ‘deflate’ and still be engaged when we spend time together.
By 6pm when the workday is done I become brain-dead after a 13-hour-ish day.
But that’s my problem to solve (which we’re working on now!)
And so – back to the mornings and not waking Strawberry up –
Let’s talk about my evolving routine:
First, I kept my ‘daytime’ clothes outside the front door – but our flat is small and the front door is basically next to our bedroom – I now moved it into the bathroom.
Keeping it outside the front door where I can’t turn the light on anyway is bloody useless. Not sure why I put it there in the first place.
Now you’ll have to know we have a cat (Jenny) and keep our bedroom door slightly open to allow her to wander in and out during the night.
This means that the corridor outside our bedroom (leading to the studio on the right, then front door left, then bathroom left then living room and kitchen straight ahead) needs to have the light kept off.
Furthermore, Jenny tends to sleep at the bottom of our bed.
When I wake up Jenny tends to wake up with me and want to eat and then play, and she’ll meow her arse off sporadically.
Some mornings I manage to leave without her leaving the bedroom – other mornings she’ll follow me around the house.
The challenge with this also comes from feeding her in the morning. I swing open a cupboard and grab her food which lives in a super noisy plastic bag.
So it all starts getting loud pretty quickly.
Then she’ll sit by the front door and meow as she wants to be let out, which defeats my whole ‘don’t change next to the front door scenario’.
Which means I go back to being screwed and waking Strawberry up …
Clearly this problem is simply too advanced for me at the moment to figure out what to do.
I’ve not yet cracked my own noise trail!
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Let’s move onto another problem –
I’ve also been keeping my phone on charge and aeroplane mode next to the bed and headphones on the floor.
Sometimes I’ll watch something in bed with my headphones.
I’m realising that causes several issues.
It confuses my body/brain with understanding what the hell the bedroom is for.
So before passing out yesterday, I asked Strawberry to help with a new little routine; helping me help myself not look at my phone after 9pm.
(This starts literally this evening)
I ideally want to just not look at my phone at all until the morning after.
She supports that idea, all in my quest to get better sleep and to develop more discipline.
What that also means – and here is the interesting part – is that I don’t need headphones in the bedroom.
And it’s in the morning that the headphones are a problem.
The alarm itself is a huge problem, but the headphones basically rattle on our wooden floor as I search around in the dark to lift them up and take them with me.
Dispensing with my phone post 9pm means I can dispense with my headphones in the bedroom – and this morning it certainly made a difference.
Especially when your whole flat has wooden flooring so it’s a beacon for noise basically.
And when you’re Deepak Shukla, you’re basically a noisy b*stard.
Last night then – today’s clothes got stacked into the bathroom along with my sneakers, so I could put them all on together.
That definitely was a step in the right direction.
However, I then managed to put my phone down when I was changing – on the 2nd shelf in a stand in the bathroom – and promptly forgot it was there.
I was going crazy at around 4.45 am trying to find it and I’m pretty confident I woke Strawberry up.
Especially as I opened and closed the bathroom light like three times (not to mention the creaky door) which is pretty damn loud (it’s a pull string type setup) searching for it.
I eventually found it, of course, in the bathroom.
So I need to make sure I don’t do that again.
I did find it and went to leave the flat – but not before I let Jenny out as she impatiently waited at the front door for me to let her out.
What letting her out does do is create further issues, as light pours in from our overlit hallway as well as having to ‘shoo’ Jenny gently back in.
And then I WAS putting my jacket on inside our flat before I entered the landing and descending the stairs (we live on the third floor in a block of flats).
But even putting my jacket on creates too much noise.
Good lord all of this (@Scott Henderson) reminds me what a terrible soldier I’d be lol.
I’m the opposite of a silent squirrel.
Today I walked my jacket and bag outside the door (my bag is another issue which needs resolving) and zipped my backpack up outside the door as well as put my jacket on.
Really I need to go down the stairs and then do all of this.
The biggest obstacle at the moment, by far, that disturbs Strawberry is the dreaded alarm clock.
I was in deep sleep and in my fright of being awoken by my alarm today I managed to drop the phone on the floor and hit snooze (whilst waking Strawberry up) before the alarm went off AGAIN 10 minutes later as I didn’t realise I hit snooze in the bathroom
(That’s how I found it).
Pretty embarrassing lol.
I’m going to wrap this up now because it’s so evident what a shit-show this still is.
But here’s today’s new effort (outside of writing this blog):
I trawled Amazon in search of a vibrating alarm clock and here’s what I purchased:
Nothing on Amazon seems to have 4-star reviews but having read the reviews in a little detail this one actually seems ok (apart from setting it up – apparently you need a PhD).
Wish me luck – and at some point in the future, I’ll let you know how we’re getting on.
And this is the time I finished (inc this Amazon search):
Until tomorrow!
