Waking up and sun exposure

For the past few months, I've been struggling to wake up early. Of course, the main reason is that I go to bed late. I fixed it by trying to go to bed at around 1 a.m. This allowed me to get a solid 7 hours of sleep and then wake up at around 8 a.m.

Even though I had 7 hours of sleep, I got the feeling that I could be less tired if I slept for maybe 1 hour, but I forced myself to get up. After waking up, I'd immediately go to the balcony and get some sunlight. Since I live in a community with few towers, I might not get direct sunlight because other towers might block the sun. In this case, I'd take a stroll around the place, ensuring I take the path that gives me the most sun exposure.

I noticed that sunlight exposure significantly improves my mood for the day and makes me mentally and physically fresh.

Podcasts

Dr. Adam Grant: How to Unlock Your Potential, Motivation & Unique Abilities - Andrew Huberman

One major takeaway I got from this podcast is Task Sequencing.

How you sequence tasks is important. For example, if you try to do intense, focused work after watching a 15-minute brain rot YouTube video, then you are set for failure. Because the brain just got some dopamine, and trying to do a hard task following that is super hard. Instead, you should reset by doing something mundane; make the bed, clean your table, organize stuff or something that is really mundane and dry. Then, coming back to the hard task, you will feel much at ease and focussed

I've experienced this over the years, but I didn't know how to explain it properly. Adam Grant gave a beautiful explanation of what was happening.

Are Insulin Spikes Secretly Sabotaging Your Health? - Samantha

This podcast gave a lot of insight into insulin spikes. Plus this is much shorter than most podcasts.

Monitor backlighting

This was a personal project that I wanted to do for a long time. I saw all these cool lighting setups of other people on YouTube, so I did a little research and figured that there is a reason to have a good lighting setup. In the case of backlighting, it reduces eye strain by leveling the contrast between your screen and its environment.

Focusing on 3 weeks goal system rather than a 12 week one

From having a 1 year goal system, I turned to a 12 week one. But even the 12 week goals system seems to be too much. There is far too much time for me to slack off, that I don't even get started.

This month I tried setting a 3 week goals system. I set 3 goals that I need to accomplish by the end of the 3 week period. And it has had more success rate than any other system I've followed.

I think the reasoning is that I don't have much time to slack off because 3 weeks is not too far away.

Meeting new people

I need to figure out ways to meet new people. The joy and lessons you learn by meeting new people can't be substituted by any other means.

Great content that I've consumed this past month

Glucose Goddess

Gokul Bijuraj

Vxs

Samantha

Learned more about glucose spiking

I always get the slump after lunch. I get sleepy and it gets hard to do focussed work. So I decided to learn more about why this was happening.

Basically what I was experiencing was glucose spiking. I'm not gonna get into the nitty gritty of this but a few protocols that have helped me curb the spike are as follows:

• apple cinder vinegar 30 mins before meal
• order of macros during a meal: vegetables first followed by proteins and fats
• if I'm having some sort of sweet, then have it at the end of the meal in a really small quantity.

I learned the information from basically watch content of Glucose Goddess and a podcast episode by Samantha. Obviously, I'm not a food expert or medical expert. I'm also experimenting stuff and trying to figure out what works for me. Don't blindly follow such things, do your own research.

Weekends are not just for chilling

I've never got over my childish notion that weekends are for chilling only. Everytime I have to some chore during the weekends, I get angry. I get pissed off and just become miserable.

But over the past few months, I've been observing adults. I noticed that everyone of them have some chore on the weekends. I realized that weekends are not for chilling. You have to figure out how to chill while completing chores that you can't avoid.

Goal of this blog post

From now on I'll be writing similar posts, i.e "Life during X month". The goal is to not just write stuff, but to get into the habit of publishing what I write. I have been writing since 2021, it has given me so much benefits. But I alway refrain from publishing my writings. So basically these posts are for me to write stuff and to publish them without thinking too much about it. Right now if I pass this to grammarly, it would give me a lot of swiggly red lines. But that is fine, because the goal is to set motion to a new habit; publishing stuff.