I’ve been sleeping badly lately.
But I’ve had 2-3 good nights in a row now, and this makes me feel like sharing a few thoughts:
The reason why I was lacking sleep was either because I was sleeping well but going to bed a bit later AND waking up super early, which would result in little hours of sleep… or my brain would stay overactive, which would trouble my sleep.
Unfortunately, as much as the archetype I have has many good traits, this pattern is one of its negative parts:
My brain tends to get overstimulated with projects and ideas, and the more I indulge in them, the more I want to do. It’s a positive loop that starts turning, but if it spins too much, I can start losing control to a point where my health gets taxed. I can clearly say that I’ve made significant progress in the past years in that regard, but I still have room for improvement.
That said, in an ideal world, I’d be quicker to regulate the loop so that it never crosses the tipping point. Also, I’d be able to accomplish 10X more than what I’m accomplishing now while ALSO being able to chill from the inside and switching my brain off at will.
It’s one of my life goals to see and live it one day.
But for the time being, this isn’t the case.
So, the solution to that is that I need to develop systems to account for my incapacity to self-regulate on my own.
I need to develop systems that will give me some feedback if I start crossing the line.
Therefore, there are many little hacks here and there that I use on a daily basis, such as using blueblocking glasses, making my room dark, restricting my eating window, etc…
But perhaps, of all the stuff I’ve been doing for years, the one hack that has had the most impact on my health, life, and business is:
Priority-oriented schedule planning.
Simply put, I break down micro-projects or goals into micro-tasks or things to be completed, and then I strategically plan them in my week based on my daily and weekly energy fluctuations. This allows me to streamline everything I need to do without burning myself up.
It’s something boringly simple, but for some reason, I’ve stopped doing it for the past 2-3 months. I would go through my weeks and days by winging it, and don’t get me wrong, it kind of worked…
Only until it didn’t.
And now that I started to do it in a strict way again— Magic.
My brain calms down because I know that at the end of the day, I can afford to switch off because everything is planned and everything will get done.
As I’m writing this, I can’t help but smile a bit because even if it helps me, I DO find this to be a bit ridiculous. I tell myself, “Common, Sam! You really need to write those things on paper to be able to chill?”
Well… yes.
As I said, it’s my goal to eventually be able to take on a bigger workload and still stay in “monk mode,” even while going through crises.
But for now, this isn’t my reality, so I need to account for it.
Now, this was my little story of the day, but there’s a reason why I was sharing this:
We all have our archetype.
Our archetype has positive traits and negative traits.
The positives can help us if used wisely, but the negatives can destroy us if kept untamed.
Most often, the negative ones are essentially the same or similar to the positive ones, but they’re applied in bad contexts or in bad proportions.
For instance, in my case, productivity and creativity are good traits…. But not so much when it starts taxing your sleep.
Now, if you ever wish to be healthy and feel well for as long as possible while you’re alive, it is IMPERATIVE that you understand what you’re archetype is and account for the pros and cons of it.
Ideally, you would be able to change or modify the bad traits (or apply them in better contexts).
That said, sometimes, this kind of transformation takes place in the longer term, throughout many years.
Therefore, if you can’t change things fast enough, you've got to come up with a system that will account for those negative traits while you’re working on changing them.
(And Ideally, the system you come up with would be as sustainable as possible.)
This is easier said than done, and it might seem very simple the way I’m phrasing it, but it isn’t. It is a hard process because this requires you to get past your biases and look at yourself objectively all the time.
But it’s not because it’s hard that it’s not worth it 👌🏼