Operation Achieve Anything: Day Three-Hundred-Seventeen, Dateline 11-13-2018
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“You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.”
Good afternoon crickets. Welcome to day number three-hundred-seventeen of Operation Achieve Anything. Here we go with another late start to my day. Granted, I’ve already finished my SNL review for the day, and this post is the last task to fulfill my daily obligations, but I still started late nonetheless. Typically, I’d beat myself up for starting so late, for not living up to my own self-imposed pressures to be as productive as I can in an effort to justify my existence, especially during times like this when I am in between jobs.
This morning, I woke up at five o’clock in the AM and looked at my Fitbit stats to find that I only got four hours of sleep after staying up a little later than usual because I was really enjoying my end of the day wind down process. Usually, I would have just forced my self to get up and get to work, but today my mind and my body just weren’t having it. I’m guessing this is because, ever since I started to focus on my health, I’ve gone from averaging four to five hours of sleep a day to where I now, mostly, hit my seven hours a day target, even if that often requires help getting there through mid-afternoon naps.
In general, other than when I go on my boxed-wine-benders, a couple of times a month, this consistency in my sleep has worked wonders in balancing my bipolar head. I always knew that just the right amount of sleep really helps to regulate my mood, but I’ve never been good at establishing that balance. I either end up sleeping too much when I’m depressed and want to kill twelve plus hours a day living in dreams or get barely any sleep while manically trying to bring all of my big ideas to fruition. Finding and committing to a Goldilocks zone of sleep, always seemed impossible to me because it seems like every aspect of my life draws me to the extremes of available outcomes.
I felt so exhausted when I first woke this morning that I decided, rather than force myself out of bed to fire up a pot of coffee to provide the fuel to keep me awake and working until nap time, I decided instead to force myself back to sleep until I got seven straight hours of slumber. I recently noticed a difference in how I feel when I hit my target of seven hours of sleep consecutively versus making up any missed hours through these naps that I love. So, I’m now going to try to give up naps as a sleep safety net for the next month and see if I notice any benefit.
I’ve already noticed how consistently hitting the seven hours a day sleep target, whether through naps or not, seems to have improved heart health as well as my mood, at least according to my Fitbit. At first, through increased walking alone, I noticed that my heart health scores moved but very slowly. Since I started to get more consistent sleep, I’ve noticed that my heart health score has been moving at twice the speed. This active effort to improve my health and not just bring down my weight is an example of how I am growing as a person and not just waiting for change, and therefore, fulfills the task of yesterday’s assignment that I’m here to report on.
Aside from this sleep issue that’s been the bane of my existence since I was a little child, as usual, the segment of my blog alone is another example of my active efforts to grow and not just wait and watch while life passes me by. I have close to five years of my attempts to grow documented throughout all of my Daily Breaker updates, and I’m not just talking about my effort to grow as a writer. This site unintentionally follows my fall from the peek of my enthusiasm toward my life and my efforts to write, all the way down to my rock bottom where I contemplated giving up on it all, as well as my current efforts to climb back out of this hole.
If you go back to 2016, before I started my SNL challenge, I was so deep in the above-mentioned hole, that I was no longer sure if there still was a sky let alone any light to provide any guidance. Though I still feel like I’m down in a rut, I also feel like I’m so close to getting out that it’s hard to believe how recent it was that I was so close to the bottom. Now, I just need to learn how to celebrate my attempts to escape instead of constantly justifying the fact that I’m climbing and just need a little more time, keeping in mind, I’m the one who actually is the most impatient.
That’s all that I’ve got for today on this subject, but thankfully, the book is once again being super repetitive, and tomorrow, I’m once again tasked to share more details about my current attempt to grow. Usually, I’m very annoyed by this type of repetitive content, but this time I actually have a lot more to say about the subject, but, of course, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update to read more about these thoughts. Until then, it’s now that time for me to sign off by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.
Talk to you soon.
Sincerely,
The Wicker Breaker
P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.
