Tag: Routine

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1096 and Year Four

The persistence of my daily writing habit has helped anchor a sense of self that I have enjoyed cultivating. I am the sort of person who sticks with things.

I’ve been in the process of excavating and rebuilding my sense of self over the last few years. Many others have gone through similar journeys during the pandemic years. I feel lucky to have captured some of mine in writing. I like who I have become as a result of it.

I like seeing that I have reinforced positive and optimistic aspirations for myself year over year. I hope it shows who I am to other people through my revealed preferences. My actions speak louder than my words even if some of my actions are shown through words.

I do not have any New Year’s resolutions for 2024 that I didn’t already have for myself in 2023. I’d like to keep the good things in my life, pray for willingness to improve upon the bad things, and remain steadfast in the commitments I have.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 1090 and Winter Breaks

I would very much like to take an extended break to restore my mind and my body. I feel as if I could use a week or two offline.

The holy nights have held a place in my heart and mind as the season for introspection. I like doing fasts during this time, but it’s not been physically wise to take an extended fast recently.

I expect 2024 to be a big year. I had lots of little things to wrap in 2023 which is impacting my capacity to fully check out for the remainder of the year. Duty calls I suppose. I am keeping my obligations to others but I may need to find a way to keep obligations to myself.

On that note, I’ll keep this short. It’s better to get back to reading and resting when my capacity is diminished.

Categories
Chronicle Culture

Day 1087 and Christmas Weekend

I plan to work most of next week so I am particularly intent on resting throughout this weekend and Monday.

I was thrilled to wake up to a snowfall this morning as it’s been an unseasonably dry winter in Montana. My husband was up before me and started a fire in our wood stove.

I wandered into out into the living room sleepy and tired to find the coziest scene. Mountain living is wonderful if you’ve got the temperament for long cold nights.

I am tired which makes me more reactive. A soothing winter calm is a tonic for my nerves. I do not feel as if I am particularly reflective at the moment as that would require more control than I have the energy to muster.

I will watch some movies, enjoy a few meals, and otherwise let the season sooth me. I hope it’s enough as I am expecting 2024 to start with a bang.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1068 and Routine Versus Speed

I always find myself disappointed by how much time I put into health. Perhaps it’s a sign of how high expectations are for performance in the tools we use daily that it seems preposterous that it should require a third of your time in maintenance.

Perhaps this is an unfair intuition on my part. For every hour of flight the F-16 needs around 17 man-hours of maintenance. I’d prefer to not be quite so resource intensive as a fight jet but maybe fighting entropy does require 8-10 of my day.

As I try to do more with my days and push myself to do more in less time I still have to put in the effort to stay at my old baseline. I put my faith in the miracles of compounding. What was once a huge effort is now a habit.

I try to fight my tendency to optimize even as tracking my own data has its benefits. Most of my inputs are just a refinement on existing heuristics. Occasionally I’ll find someone who has a fix so might better than what I’ve been doing it fundamentally resets my understanding of my works model. It happens more than you’d think.

In accelerating I must apply more energy to my existing systems. Or course the old systems seem to call out depending more. As I push for performance my body demands its sleep, its fuel and any other number of needs. Sometimes it’s a want. It’s not always clear so I test.

Categories
Biohacking Internet Culture

Day 1054 and Extra Strain

This year has had a number of absolutely crazy weekends where it’s felt as if the entire world was having the rules written overnight. Seemingly unrelated bits of the world will flare into supernova attention grabbers.

Off the top of my head, I can recall weekends devoted to aliens, bank collapse, room temperature super conductors, war in Israel and fear we’ve summoned artificial intelligence.

The fact that we can participate in the narratives as they emerge on social media means that every type of influence actor does just that. And it’s exhausting even as it’s occasionally a fun interactive game.

Today I found myself with a poor Whoop recovery and more physiological strain that is ideal. You can see it in my awful heart rate variability. Nevertheless I tried to stick to good routines, possibly to my detriment.

My afternoon went from enjoyable walk to migraine to a low stability.

You can see my Welltory data after I went for a forty minute walk. My HRV tanked and I went into a migraine pattern. Thankfully Imitrax, meditation, and a short non sleep deep relaxation exercise got me stabilized in about two hours.

Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 1042 and Oh Dip

For the last three days I’ve been experiencing a significant dip in energy and function in the later afternoon around 4pm.

Not only am I fatigued, but I seem to have some sort of either allergic response or potentially common cold symptoms. It’s a little unclear as I don’t have consistent symptoms nor do I have a fever.

Some of it is probably jet lag as I returned home to Montana after a month in Europe over the weekend. I haven’t quite recovered my sleep deficit as I am pushing very hard on my workload as well.

I tried doing a bit of polyphasic sleeping today to see if it might help abate the intensity of the dip. The idea behind polyphasic sleep is to get your required 7-8 hours not in one monophasic chunk at night but across your own natural energetic ebbs and flows.

I did a packed morning of work and meetings and then slept between the hours of 3-5pm. I do feel better having been asleep during the dip but I could feel the symptoms rising while in the light sleep mode. I wasn’t able to fall into deep or REM sleep.

Whatever is happening I clearly need more rest. My attempts at diagnosis of any other symptoms and their proximal causes are unlikely to matter if I’m not getting adequate rest. In which case, I’ll try to sleep more at night and add in some naps till it passes.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1041 and Short Notice

I’m extremely frustrated right now. I didn’t get much sleep last night. I won’t get into the details, but it’s mostly because I was overstimulated by a very long workday after what was a very productive week.

I didn’t think it would matter if I was a little fucked up today from overexertion yesterday as I didn’t have any major obligations.

Except I got invited to mid-morning to something tonight. I wasn’t obligated to go but really wanted to do so as the guest of honor may end up having a significant impact on my life. And I’ve had an interest in it which I’d expressed months ago.

Now I had strong interest in attending as it won’t be a repeatable opportunity. So I wanted to push myself to go. I did my best through the afternoon to rest and prepare myself. But ultimately my body just couldn’t do it.

I cascaded into a migraine from the smell of my husband’s cologne. All my efforts to try to be restorative with the few hours of my afternoon were gone through a single small instance of environmental stressor. An obvious sign that I shouldn’t be going anywhere if something small could set off symptoms.

Now I’d like to say that I could have made it if I’d slept more. Maybe if I’d not worked so many hours yesterday. But I feel good about the things I prioritized yesterday.

But I am so fucking angry that I couldn’t have been given a little bit more notice as I would have found a way to make it. Literally even one day would have been enough so I could prioritize sleep.

It’s obviously no one’s fault. I’m simply furious that in an effort to budget my energy and physical capacity for what was my priority yesterday, I couldn’t find any remaining capacity today.

I guess the lesson is that if you want me to show up please let me know at least twenty four hours in advance. Or even just the night before.

Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 1034 and Green Light

When I travel I do my best to maintain a steady routine for my health. I find it much easier to manage stressors to my physical body, and my autonomic nervous system, if I get adequate sleep, nutrition, and restorative activities.

I’m the sort of person who travels with an organizer of supplements & vitamins, multiple biomarker trackers (my Apple Watch & Whoop) and helpful devices (Apollo Neuro Band, percussion massager, noise canceling headphones) to keep myself “in the green” no matter how much stress I throw at myself.

My Whoop strain tracking as I traversed 4 countries in 4 days. I traveled between Finland, Estonia, Denmark and the Netherlands.

And I put myself under some fairly significant strain over the last week as I traveled by boat and airplane through four countries in four days. As you can see from my Whoop data traveling induces more strain than rest days or work days.

I spent all day at a conference yesterday which involved a fair amount of time on my feet and socializing. But it doesn’t compare to the strain of taking a ferry to Helsinki and walking for five miles sightseeing in the cold.

I was careful today to rest after the conference so I’d be able to make use of the remainder of my time in Amsterdam. And my biomarkers seem to agree. My Welltory saw my heart rate variability fully in the green this afternoon.

Balanced stress, energy & health on Welltory say all systems are go for me.
Categories
Emotional Work Travel

Day 1026 and Failure Modes

I’m not sure my current traveling is yielding the success I’d hoped. A bumpy road of geopolitical chaos, physical stress and emotional work has made my time in Tallinn harder than anticipated.

I don’t want to call the trip a failure as I doubt anyone is paying enough attention but me to notice. I didn’t get to attend as many meetings and events as I’d hoped and I feel guilty about it.

But I am noticing the challenge of doing work as a digital nomad while also coping with emotional family obligations and responsibilities.

I’m trying to decide what constitutes a failure mode for me. Am I doing what’s best for the longer term goals I’ve set for myself? And do I know where must I set painful boundaries?

I struggle mightily to be separated from family and friends. But I am also coping with the new reality of closed borders, impossible visas, and challenges to uniting everyone in my extended chosen family unit. Many people can’t get to America anymore.

It’s on my mind as I am considering rearranging some of my time in Estonia to go to the Netherlands for the Network State conference next Monday. It’s exhausting to be on the road but I also firmly believe the network state will be an emerging organizer for populations that aren’t well served by their current geographical state.

That’s ironically why I’m in Estonia in the first place. It is the most progressive of the nation states with its e-residency program and I’m excited to do more business here as it’s welcoming to all who can make a contribution.

And yet I feel like I’m not doing all that I’d hoped while I’m here. There are too many directions to go in and no good choices. I long to be more specific about some of them but the salient point is that I have freedom of movement that many others do not. And that’s the failure mode that undermines us all.

Categories
Culture

Day 1022 and Decision Tree

How often do you rely on other people’s decision? I bet it’s more than you realize. It’s actually mind boggling to me how much we all rely on each other’s assumptions to function. Enough to make the concept of “operating from first principles” seem comical.

Every aspect of my daily routine relies on decisions made by others going back so far we’ve simply lost track. And I’m not even talking about the big shit.

Let me give you a example. I’m writing this post on my iPhone inside of a mobile application called Jetpack. It’s a mobile content management system that’s part of the wider the WordPress ecosystem.

I’ve blogged using WordPress for nearly two decades. I’ve been using Apple products for thirty years. MacOS and its successor mobile iOS have been the dominant operating system for my entire life.

Isn’t it astonishing to think that the software (and hardware) that I use to organize my thinking relies on engineering decisions made by PHP and C developers decades ago?

And those decisions rest on top of other decisions made by other engineers. I am in Europe so charging my ridiculously powerful pocket computer that is running WordPress software requires a power adapter as American appliances run on 110 volts, while European appliances are 220 volts.

Decisions, resting on top of decision, resting on top of other decisions rule my life. They run your life too. And it’s entirely possible somewhere in that decision tree someone made a decision for reasons that you wouldn’t make. So try to remember that your life relies entirely on the work of other people that are just as likely to be wrong as you.