Hey!
Hope you are having a good Sunday morning. I am having a decent weekend so far. I spent a lot of time yesterday reading a few books that I’ve been wanting to read. I broke my rule of not buying books until I finished my pending list. But I kinda always knew I would do that. So, 10 new books added to the pile. But I’ve made some progress in my approach to reading and I am trying to understand that a bit better. Once that’s clearer in my head, you can be sure that I’ll be talking about it here with you.
Over the past year, mental wellness has been on my head and I’ve been exploring multiple methods to understand it better, and to work on it for myself. For a few things, I reached out to an expert. And a few things require me to stumble around on my own. One thing I realise is they all eventually need to lead to action.
We had a session from an expert yesterday as part of The Quad’s webinar series, and we hope that it is the start of our push into mental wellness for the community.
On to the 3 things for today.
why you should not hit snooze, and how solving this can solve a much larger issue.
on trash cans and sunk costs.
can we buy more money? A moronic and weird question but if we can buy time and time is money, why can we not buy more money?!
on hitting the snooze button on our alarms
This is not one of those "it might work for you but won't work for me" kinda things. If one or more of the below is you, I can assure you that there's a better way for you to feel once you wake up in the morning. Does any of the following apply (more often than not)
constantly hit the snooze button
struggle to wake up at a fixed time daily
not feel as refreshed as you'd like when you wake up
Or maybe you sleep at all odd hours? Or you ‘catch up’ on sleep over the weekends? The last one is my dad’s standard reasoning.
Well, there’s no catching up. A sleep deficit is a real thing and it leads to issues. Let’s start with the general guideline - you need to get about 7 hours of sleep. Obviously, it varies from person to person. And as much as possible, you want to get this reasonably evenly i.e. not 4 hours for 4 nights of the week and 10 hours for the other 3 nights. Yes, life will get in the way and so it is important not to get flustered when we do not get it.
Now, on the actual snooze bit.
I got bad news for you. Those 5-10 minutes of sleep, the best sleep you get once you hit that snooze button - well, it does not really refresh you. It is a few minutes of interrupted sleep and you are probably going to have another disrupted sleep cycle. So, while you might still persist in your thought process saying "But I feel so good", physiologically it affects you for the worse.
And here’s the long-term fix i.e. fix the issue and not just the last bits.
But I just went about it the other way i.e. bottom-up and it led me to solve the larger issues. I just stopped hitting the snooze button and sucked it up for a few weeks.
Keep your alarm clock on full volume, and keep it much further away from you.
Keep a backup alarm that's 1 minute after your main alarm. Keep this on another device, and this one's on the opposite side of the room as the first alarm.
As soon as you are on two feet and turn the alarm off, the next task is to step into the shower!
In a few months, you will
be more alert mentally
be less tired physically
be more productive during the day
be able to fall asleep faster
be more motivated
I talk about this in a bit more detail on the audio format, and here’s a blog post if you’d like to share with someone on this topic.
on trash cans and sunk costs
Growing up, like most kids were advised to, we were told never to waste food. Think of all the kids who don't have food to eat, our parents said. And I am sure every parent tried to guilt their kids this way. While the sentiment is valid, it is terrible advice, especially for health.
In a recent conversation with a student, I was asked about a pseudo-health food that they had stocked up on. I was asked about how often and how much of it can be consumed and my answer was that it was useless junk. My recommendation to them was to not consume it. But unfortunately, they could not bring it in them to throw it.
Sigh, the guilt.
Just because we've spent time/money buying something and it turns out to be a bad decision does not mean we need to compound that bad decision. The amount of time it might take to undo eating that useless garbage cannot be quantified. But since there's no price tag to it (well, there is - the cost of our doctor visits, lost time due to sickness etc) we cannot relate the two.
The answer is simple. One, we need to learn to ignore sunk costs. Two, we don't need to feel guilty about throwing it into the trash can - you can donate it somewhere. While you can afford to make a better health decision, it is still a valuable commodity to someone else of lesser means.
Win-win!
Remember, the trash can makes a much better trash can than your stomach does!
can we buy more money?
Can we put in money to make more money? Obviously. That’s what investing is. That’s what advertising is. In fact, that’s how most things work.
The question is can we put in money into our health and nutrition so that it will result in an outlandish value and return? Yes, it can. And if we are patient, we can learn to look for the short-term results (<1 year) and we also tend to not look at the long-term (>10/20/30 years).
You are more productive in your day. Things that take you an hour to do will probably take 30 minutes. Because you are mentally sharper as well as physically more energetic and vibrant. This does not mean you take the 30 minutes you saved and do more work, but you obviously can. But that's the slippery slope that most of us are stuck on - work overload. What I mean by you being more productive is that you won't be sleepwalking through your task, no more 6/10 kinda stuff. You will produce higher quality work - the kind that you know you always can. You will hit your potential. So, previously, we might have done average work that took us 60 minutes but now you are doing above-average (and exceptional) work in lesser time.
This time you can invest in bettering yourself. By going above and beyond what you need to do for that particular task. Or buying a book that will help you get better, as an example.
By being mentally sharper, you are more resilient. You can handle hardships and bounce back faster. Glitches do not impact you or stop you on your tracks. You know that just chipping away at the problem will lead to things. This resiliency will mean lesser failures, or better lessons learned from failures. Previously, it might have been looked at as a roadblock or a waste of time and energy. Not anymore.
Your increased confidence levels will show. Your improved productivity - not in quantity of work done but the quality of it will show. You will see that promotions at work and improved job roles come by. Rather than waiting for your turn, you will forge your own path. Your career trajectory is under your control! We've heard from many of our students about promotions at work and pay raises after making the commitment to health and fitness, and that's not a coincidence.
You directly save money via a bunch of methods - lesser doctor visits is an obvious outcome. Imagine, if you had to go see your doctor just once a year for your regular check-up and never about anything else?
By leading a long, healthy life with no lifestyle diseases that are a bane of our lifetime and society - like diabetes, hypertension etc - you save enormous money on treatment, on the time lost due to the actual amounts of time spent with the doctors and scans and all that, as well as the crazy amount of mental stress that you do not have to go through.
The mental stressors make everything worse. You spend more time being awake because you are anxious. You find yourself eating junk foods because of stress, and not because you enjoy them. This compounds the poor health, and it leads to you spending even more money to try and resolve them.
You do not have to spend time worrying about every slick fad or scam that comes by. You are already in control of your life. You've taken the right decisions about who to trust, what to do, and are measuring the right things. No more FOMO. No more wasted time or money in buying/paying for silly nonsense.
You can instead choose to invest the money in wiser choices - like a good coach, like a good nutrition programme. on better groceries.
I am not going to bore you with compound interest. You know what it is. You know how awesome it is. Why are we unable to apply that logic here?
Even if we look at things as a simple return-on-investment, of time and money, the long-term return on your health and fitness is mind-boggling. We listen to how smart Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger are all the time. Well, a key part of their investment strategy is not about selling an acquisition once it is going to make a profit for them i.e. if they bought it for 100, the goal is to not sell it for >100. But they sit on their investments for years and years. We need to learn that similar mindset - we are looking at an amazing compound interest on our time and money many years in the future. And if we aren't rushing, we will see that there are immediate ROIs, in our day-to-day life as well as the compounded effect many years from now.
If you don't have the mindset or intent, that's when we leap from fad to fad and miss the point.
Photo courtesy: AZ Quotes
Meaning - make great decisions about your life and reap the rewards. Don’t have to worry about “what am I getting out of it today/tomorrow?”.
Have a great weekend! And do share thoughts and feedback - I’d love to hear from you. Just hit reply to the email.
And I’d love it if you can share one of the posts with ONE person you think who might benefit from it.
