Greetings and Salutations, Blog Readers!

Today we are updating our progress on changing our habits, but also acknowledging that life isn’t all about being productive all the time.

As you may recall, I had been taking some time for me on the later half of the week, and I was pretty well dead tired by Friday evening. I slept hard, even snoring, a rarity for me, and slept for nearly ten hours, working hard to end my sleep debt. Saturday morning, after making breakfast, I sat on the bed for a second, and the next thing I know, Travis was waking me up. I had fallen asleep, cuddled up under a blanket, and was deep asleep again.

I was exhausted. Travis insisted I take the day to take care of me, not him or anyone else. It is worth noting that at therapy on Friday, Yolanda (my therapist) and I discussed how and why I tend to put others first, and why I need to end this cycle, so it was wonderful to have Travis really insist I take time for me.

So I stayed in PJs. I went upstairs, and I played Minecraft for hours. I should have drank more water, admittedly, that was a fault, but I played Minecraft for most of the day, and then took a nice bath.

Sunday, I did very little, other than making some food, and I watched some shows, and went to bed early.

A lazy weekend. I didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t do anything other than a single load of laundry that still needs to be put away, and I woke up this morning at 4:45, rested enough to tackle some yoga and a workout, finishing off with 6 miles on the stationary bike.

A good, healthy, wonderful workout, I filled out my high-performance planner pages for the week, and then made a healthy (and tasty!) breakfast, and dove into work, crushing my assignments, handling all the Monday morning drama one sees, and now, I am working on my next blog post, reviewing my notes for my writing project, and am sustainably hitting all my goals for the day.

I tend to want to get a lot done every day, but I think I forgot that sometimes you need to do a great lot of nothing, before diving back into doing everything.

I think I had forgotten how good it is to do nothing. I get so self-critical of myself, and my upbringing tells me that I am unworthy and lazy if I spend a day doing nothing, but in actuality, if I am fighting against what I was taught when I was being raised, if I am changing things like, getting up early, prioritizing working out, etc, why not change the idea that if I spend a day or two doing nothing I suck? Mentally, playing the video games and chilling helped me clear my mind a bit, and physically I was able to not only shed hours from my total sleep debt, but I was able to have the energy to crush it Monday morning, and launch into another week with momentum and optimism.

When we don’t rest enough, we make choices that don’t serve us. We overeat, we under hydrate, we don’t work out, we don’t have the brain power for work, for writing, for making blogs…we are more prone to lazy when we don’t rest. Too often we are told that an object in motion stays in motion, and object not in motion, stays not in motion…but while that may be well and good for laws of physics, it can and will contribute to burn out if we think we must always be moving.

Another way to look at it is this…

Not moving? Sitting around, playing video games, letting our bodies rest, occasionally, IS still in motion, since we are building momentum, we are creating the energy needed to stay in motion. I am not sure the mathematical equation one would use for that, but we do need to have energy to be in motion, and we can’t be expected to stay in motion. We aren’t a rock falling from the sky. We are humans, we create our energy, we spend our energy, and we need to be mindful of how we create and how we spend.

So, even if you think it makes you lazy, consider that maybe the reason things are so hard to do, maybe the reason habits are so hard to change, is because maybe you didn’t have the energy to do them. The small bit of rest helped, and now I am better able to tackle my goals. I woke up at 4:45 today, and I feel great for my efforts. My goal is to try getting up a little earlier every day until I have time for 30 minutes or more of yoga/workout, before hitting an hour of cardio.

This, to go hand in hand with my other personal enrichment habits and goals, and of course, to make me better suited for my more ambitious goals like hiking more, traveling more, etc.

Take time when you need it, and get up early, hit those goals, with the energy you need to sustainably make your new habits a permanent change in your life.

Thanks for reading,

Abbi