Tag: Routine

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 891 and All Alright

I am trying to practice detachment and still enjoy the present moment. A set of secondary side effects from an antibiotic are unpleasant in the extreme. But as the theme of throwback 90s hit “That 70’s Show” so effectively proclaims, “we’re all alright, we’re all alright!”

While it is true that what is in our body will show in our emotions, it’s perhaps more accurate to say that our emotions are showing up in body. A bio-emotive framework gives you more freedom to experience the full range of life without judgement.

I have done my nervous system exercises, I have treated the side effects as best I can with pharmaceutical intervention, I’ve rested quietly in a dark room, I’ve been outside to facilitate circadian rhythm return, I’ve eaten protein and I’ve stretched.

I’ve run the processes and routines that set me up for a good day because you don’t let one bad thing turn into a hundred bad things. Even as I’m experiencing unpleasant moments, I know I have to bear these smaller costs as an investment on a better tomorrow. It’s hard to hear that everything has a cost, sometimes too much of a cost, but being detached about the calculations helps. If something must be done it’s all alright. I promise.

Categories
Chronic Disease Travel

Day 889 and Soul Delay

A girlfriend asked me if it felt good to be home in Montana. I said I wasn’t sure as my soul hasn’t landed home yet. I think it might be somewhere over the Arctic at the moment.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

William Gibson – Pattern Recognition

I don’t feel like I’ve really landed yet even though I’ve been home for a full day. My body is going through various forms of blowback and regression as I resorted to Prednisone while in Europe.

I’m itchy and in pain and simply going about my routines despite it all. Rhythms and processes run my life because I’m a traditionalist. What you do every day is what you become.

Everything physical I do has a cost and nothing is higher cost than travel. I am bearing those costs at the moment. Blessedly the costs feel removed and remote as I am a perhaps disassociated as my soul may or may not be somewhere over Greenland.

So if you’ve not heard from me it’s because I’ve got a bit of soul delay with my jet lag. Or a bit of jet lag with my soul delay. You can expect reintegration soon.

Categories
Travel

Day 886 and Breaking Camp

When I travel I prefer to set up a base camp. I do things from one place regionally for a month. I have a lot of accoutrements that come with me and I travel. Having a disability like a chronic spinal autoimmune condition is a huge pain in the ass.

After I have my set up I try to run with a regular daily routine when I am abroad. Additional stresses like jet lag, heat, new allergies, a suppressed immune system that easily picks up a stray infection (skin is my most common vector not lung these days), and other more quotidian travel stresses all hit me hard.

I do my best to take care of myself when I travel as any hitch in my routine can mean lost productivity. I plan my trips meticulously.

Today I am breaking down those routines. Packing them back up into my three bag cascade crisis management packing solution. Because what can go wrong will go wrong so plan for every scenario you can envision. Then you pray the unknown unknowns don’t get you.

Travel is an elaborate cost benefit analysis for me. If you do what you love you will never work a day in your life. And I do love calculating my inputs and seeing if my outputs breaks as predicated.

If not then I learned something new about what to model for next time. Breaking camp is where I see what I can improve. And what I did well. Everything has its cost. And I take responsibility for it.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 885 and Grieving Your Many Deaths

The most soothing statistic I’ve ever hoped was true is that your body turns over all of its cells every seven years. It seems to be functionally close to true. Every cell, except those in our brain, our heart and our eyes, does indeed participate in some form of cellular renewal.

Our bodies replace many of their nearly 30 trillion human cells regularly. About 330 billion of those cells are replaced every day — that’s about 1 percent of all our body’s cells. Other cells, like the tiny ones in our gut, renew within a week.

How Stuff Works

I’m not much for dreams of eternal life. Chronic disease tends to give you a bit of appreciation for Sisyphus and the torture of daily physical embodied indignities. But give me the hope for constant change and you’ve got my attention. And yes I moved a lot as a kid who do you ask?

Doesn’t 1% renewal day seem both manageable and swift at the same time? It’s one of the recommendations I give to folks who are interested in biohacking. Change one variable by a small percentage every single day. Big changes come from compounding over time.

It does make me wonder if I’ve taken adequate time to grieve the many versions of myself that have died. The ghosts of old versions of Julie haunt me. Every time Scotty beamed you up, imagine the last version of you that was killed on the transporter pad. Ghost stories right?

I’m not the same person I was yesterday. I’m not the same person I was a month ago. If I look at how much change I’ve undergone in just the last year it feels dizzying. If I consider how different June of 2023 Julie is from June 2022, I’m barely the same person.

I take solace in the 1% renewal. That even if this version of myself is suffering, I am building a future version of myself that compounds into better versions. Seems like we should be grieving a little every day doesn’t it?

Categories
Biohacking

Day 881 and Set a Timer

I’ve always been the type of thinker who enjoy playing with differences and similarities. I find it pleasing to see common attributes of humanity. I’m soothed seeing we are more alike than not even across vast genetic & cultural distances.

I equally enjoy spotting games of “one thing is not like the other” as part of the general pattern recognition that evolutionary Darwinism implies. The freaks and mutants are who push us forward. Recognizing the value of positive differentiation is the basis for every job I’ve ever loved from fashion to finance.

This might be why I enjoy tools like timers, trackers, spreadsheets and other measurements of inputs and outputs. I like inferred knowledge and probability. Those goofy old standard test questions “this is to that: as that is to this” were my favorite.

I understand how totalizing using these tools can be. I’m currently experiencing the intense urge to smash my Apple Watch as I am asking it to “set a timer for 45” minutes several times a day. I’m setting shorter timers too.

I am spreading out a biohacking regimen while my body goes through an ugly symptom flare that suggests both allergy issues and a general immune response to what I believe is an infection from some scratching that opened my dermatitis. Fun huh?

The expectation that one’s body is unique and an N of 1 pairs poorly with averages, reversion to the mean, and the persistent beeping tinging ringing reminders of a timer going off telling you to follow the routine. So here I am wishing to some spreadsheet brained hope that my inputs and outputs will balance and I will be fine if we got the dosing right.

Which is the prayer of everyone who has ever experienced a medical malady. Set a timer, wait, and pray to an actual God as the ones in our phones aren’t up to the task of being deities just yet. More like having a troublesome djinn that promises the pain will go away if you do exactly ask it asks.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 873 and Commitments

I have two conflicting commitments at the moment. Both are with people who I’d consider intimate relationships with as much access to my inner life as my closest confidants.

I made the decision to show up for both parties last week and this week. And while I don’t regret my decision at all, the choice has had consequences. I am accepting them right now. I’m in bed and in a fun spiral of inflammation. I’m in pain, and even more annoying, I’m fucking itchy as hell. My biometrics are screaming red across every dashboard from Whoop to Welltory.

The irony, of course, is that in being so committed to showing up for others I failed to show up for myself. I didn’t know what I wanted so I did everything I’d obligated myself to do.

I can’t blame it on anyone even though it’s so easy to consider the ways I can rationalize my choices. I’m committed to good and useful things that improve my emotional fluidity and contribute to my personal growth.

Being committed to others means being committed to yourself first. The better I maintain my boundaries, the more I can show up for someone else. Knowing what we want, asking for it clearly, and being accountable for the actions you took is the whole ball game. Everything else is details. And I bet you can manage that.

I am committed to myself as I’ve got to rest and get myself under control or else I’m not being accountable. And I’m not a victim to my circumstances. I chose this.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 870 and Keep on Slipping

They say time flies when you are having fun. Some internal sick sadness combined with external geopolitical confusion, during what I’ve come to call “my sick years,” were in hindsight timeless years.

I am now past the worst of it. Time had no meaning when I was struggling to get diagnosed and treated during those years. Then we collectively ran headlong into the pandemic. Time had been a flat circle for a while and I wasn’t coming or going. My time was out of reach.

But those days of sad, static immobile time have given way to vim, vigor, verve (and fuck it, why not) even vivaciousness. I must be having fun again, as now time is absolutely flying.

I still carry my health challenges with me (ankylosis spondylitis like all inflammatory conditions comes and goes with the reliability of the fey), and the world is just as fucked up as ever.

And yet on the other side of many hard fights, I am happy again. The miseries are my choices and worth the fight. It’s many pleasures are fleeting, often, and luxurious beyond what my former self thought I deserved.

I hope time keeps on slipping like this for a while. The joy of my struggles now makes me eager to take care of myself. I take every day as slow as I can and still they go by so quickly.

Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 867 and Sleep

I didn’t get a good night sleep last night. Or the night before. Or the night before. I guess I must be jet lagged.

I am always convinced I’ve managed to avoid jet lag and it’s never actually true. I love to lie to myself about my capacity for recovery in the face of travel but I know deep down that once the adrenaline wears off, it’s all about establishing a consistent sleep routine.

I’d rather maintain East Coast Time while I’m in Europe but my body has a tendency to sync to the circadian rhythms of the sun rise and sun set even when I do my best to stay awake till midnight I’ll rise with the sun. I was awake at 6am in Frankfurt as even with an eye mask on I knew it was finally morning.

I wanted to be settled and in a good routine as tomorrow afternoon it will have been a full week since I arrived in Germany. But it’s always harder than you expect to transplant your rhythms and routines. It’s boring to write about and I’m sure boring to read but not all posts can be about corporate cosmopolitanism and the abstraction layer of task applications as anonymous servant class rootless yuppies. That’s a fun read.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 866 and Sensory Overload

I was up very late last night as I had an evening commitment on Eastern Standard Time while I myself am on European Central Time. I finished at 6pm in New York but it was 2am for me. It was stimulating I was unable to fall asleep till well past 3am.

I didn’t successfully sleep in as much as I would have liked, so I found myself running on a bit less sleep than I would have preferred even though my Whoop suggested I was in the green with a reasonably high HRV score. When my biometrics are all in the green, even if I’ve had perceptually poor sleep, I try to let my data guide me.

I thought I was doing ok as I went about my routines and workload. I showered, meditated, did some work and even got a power nap in.

Still I found myself getting overwhelmed by basic sensory inputs. The sound of the cars on the road felt loud. I took a walk and found myself ordering an Uber to get home as I was tired and has gone too far. Alas, in the car, I found myself covering my ears and closing my eyes as the pop music and car incense overwhelmed two senses at once.

I felt as if I was an autistic cliche. I literally had my fingers in my ears humming to myself to calm myself down. After my nervous system mastery Bootcamp course, I knew my vagus nerve had gone into overstimulation.

I had gone into sympathetic shutdown without even realizing it. I couldn’t even think to ask the driver to turn down the music. I did what I could to breath.

It was a quick reminder that my daily life in the countryside of Montana is a lot easier on the body than a bustling city like Frankfurt.

Categories
Community Culture Travel

Day 864 and Parks and Recreation

All the shops are closed in Germany on Sunday. This is a basic fact I somehow always forget despite regularly being in Europe. They are serious about their day of rest.

Without the ability to go grocery shopping or otherwise pay for goods or services, Sunday becomes a day for getting your life in order. As long as you planned ahead for it. Which I definitely didn’t. But I made a go of it anyway.

I made myself coffee and did a mobility routine. I took a long bath with epsom salts. I did a load of laundry and set it outside to dry in the sun. I cleaned the bathroom so I could enjoy another bath later in the week. I washed the dishes and tidied the kitchen.

Then I found myself wandering the busy streets past closed shops and bustling parks. While the grocery shops were closed, the playhouses and calisthenics parks were open and absolutely packed.

Frankfurt has public spielhaus or playhouses in the parks for children with activities and equipment. When I walked by I saw teenagers playing basketball and elementary school children painting.

For the adults there are calisthenics stations on the river where you can workout in public any time of the day or night. I’m not much for pull ups I did end up playing around with a thirty minute body weight workout of squats, mountain climbers, pikes, bridges, leg raises, dips, planks and push ups. It just felt like a fun thing to do.

And isn’t that a pleasant thought? That on a sunny spring day it just seems nice to be outside playing. The dream of parks and recreation is alive in Frankfurt.