Sleep -vs- Calm
I tried a “schedule” experiment a few weeks ago. I read Hal Elrod’s The Miracle Morning: The Not So Obvious Secret Guarenteed to Transform Your Life and decided to try his 30-day challenge. Here is Elrod’s basic message: how we START our day basically sets the course for how our day goes. Start our day by scrambling out of bed late and panic-stricken (because we hit the snooze button too many times) and we tend to continue on a scrambling, chaotic-feeling course for the whole day. Start our day with a short series of activities that brings us to a calm, focused, grateful mental state and we move through the rest of our day feeling and acting in a calm, focused and emotionally stable manner. And our lives are the sum of all of our days. Hence, how we start our day has a significant impact on the course of our lives. This is a pretty loft claim (not unlike the title.) But, Elrod’s idea is not without a kernel of truth. The author encourages us to set our alarm clock one hour earlier. (Yes, you read that correctly, one hour – 60 full minutes – earlier than usual) and to start our day with calm, quiet intention. The plan is that we do each of the following six things – each day – for 10 minutes each (in whatever order makes sense for your specific needs.) He calls this collection of activities “Life S.A.V.E.R.S.”
S – Silence – sit quietly and meditate or pray – the point is to quiet our minds.
A – Affirmations – repeat our positive, uplifting affirmations to ourselves. These can be focused on large, life mission statements (“I am grateful for the love of my children”) or on smaller, day-to-day things (like practicing in my mind the presentation that I will give at the 8:00 am meeting.)
V – Visualization – visualize in our minds us doing our daily activities (or whatever we are concerned about) in a way that brings out the best version of ourselves. (A good example would be to visualize handling that difficult co-worker or family member in a calm, detached manner.)
E – Exercise – ten minutes of exercise, whatever we choose (pushups, sit-ups, walk around the block).
R – Read – read something related to self-improvement. (Popular Culture magazines and internet surfing are specifically excluded.)
S – scribe (write) – keep a journal – use ten minutes to jot down a journal entry. (It shouldn’t be War & Peace, just put a few words down on paper.)
Elrod eloquently describes the individual benefits to each activity as well as how the combination of the actions make a giant, positive difference on the course of our day.
Here is what I experienced from two weeks of this plan. (Brief prelude: unlike some example stories in the book, I do not live a large, high-powered, crazy-paced, action-packed life. I do not run my own business, rule nations or head up a large, extended family. No world leader or Fortune 500 CEO has ever called me to ask my opinion on anything. I live (and vastly prefer) a pretty low-key life that includes an easy-going husband, two typical elementary school-aged children and a low-pressure, enjoyable part-time job. If you choose to read this book, be prepared: the author is a very high-energy individual!)
Over-all Finding: Pros outweighed the Cons. I choose to continue this practice with a few adjustments.
Cons – what it cost:
Waking up an hour earlier than usual is hard. I was extra sleepy in the evenings. (Action: I moved my bedtime about 45-60 minutes earlier.)
Pros – what I gained:
1. An internal sense of calm & focus that lasted the whole day.
2. I noticed that I handled stressful situations (especially the ones that I had “practiced” by visualizing) better than I had in the past. And I did this even while sleep-deprived (note: usually, I tend to be cranky when short on sleep.)
3. I never got to the “Scribe” (writing) part – my “Exercise” part took a little longer than its planned ten minutes.
4. I still had a couple of days when my entire to-do list was derailed by unexpected events. (Real life continues to happen even in the midst of a “schedule” experiment.) I found that I was both much calmer internally and better able to shift & keep my focus to and on the unexpected events.
Future Notes:
1. Maybe I sold myself short by thinking that 5 minutes of journaling was too short to write anything worthwhile (read: over-arching concepts versus small, in-the-trenches type thoughts.) It is likely that I would experience that ANY journaling at all is better than NO journaling.
2. I have incorporated a type of Elrod’s LIFE S.A.V.E.R.S concept into my morning. I set my alarm (and get up!) about 30 minutes earlier. I do my Silent meditation, Affirmations & Visualization while walking (I really enjoy starting my morning with a 2-mile brisk walk and have done it for years.) The Reading part I do almost every day as a wind-down to turning out the lights for sleep. I have found that I enjoy reading non-fiction at this time (fiction – especially rally good fiction books – lure me into staying up later & later.)
3. Scribe/Writing – One possible way for me to incorporate this activity is to set aside 5-10 minutes at lunch-time. I tend to do a “set aside, sit-down” lunch without looking at work or a computer. I could (I think) pretty easily keep a small journal and pencil right beside my lunch spot and jot down a few thoughts (it might also help me tune-in to a short meditation-like quiet-time process at the mid-point of my day – yea! more calm! less chaos!)