1– Do not Use Technology with Screens for 30-60 Minutes After Waking Up.
Nowadays, because we grew up in a technology society, we feel obliged to constantly use technology or technology is always at our fingertips.
I no longer use technology for half an hour to an hour after waking up. Even though it is very difficult to not use technology as soon as you wake up in the morning, because technology is addictive. It is designed in a way to addict you to it with all the applications within the frame of daily life.
I started paying attention to technology use after waking up in the morning. When you just wake up in the morning, you are quite sleepy. Your brain doesn't want to work, but you have to start the engine in your head somehow for the day. In other words, the reason we look at our phone or computer as soon as we wake up in the morning is not even to kill time or have fun. It is because, we turn the technology for a very defensible reason: to actually not do business, actually postpone the start of the engine. You can relate this to your car engine in an extreme cold winter mornings.
When I wake up in the morning, the first things I wanted to do are check my e-mails, looked at my calendar and remembered what I was supposed to do today. This was a trap cycle.
But as soon as I woke up in the morning and went about my daily routine, I started paying attention to how it made me feel. When I open my calendar in the morning and say, "I have to do this, then there's this, let's put this for tomorrow, let's move this for today, look, there's this and that," I get emotionally crushed. This whole thing is starting to seem like a huge mountain that I have to climb, and I'm emotionally crushed under the weight of it all. Because I am doing something wrong because as soon as I wake up in the morning, I am not mentally ready to work.
So what did I do as a result? , How did I manage this emotional burden?
As i said, I was opening applications... for example, I was opening Instagram and see what is happening in a live feed. And when I did this, I moved from a highly defensible work-related technology use to an emotionally numbing, dopaminergic use of technology. I got trapped in this cycle. At the beginning of a normal day, I have to use my willpower to counteract this kind of drugged screen use and drag myself into work.
And then after all realisation, when I postpone technology use until 30 minutes or an hour after waking up, I take a shower, drink a cup of tea, read something, and go outside for a bit. Then I'm in a better mental state when I get to work, and my willpower battery is still 100% charged because I don't have to struggle with addictive screen technologies. As a summary, do not waste your battery with screen drug when you wake up. It is the most humble state of your brain after a long sleep. Use your engine efficiently to start the day. If possible, cycle to your school, work or take a walk in the morning.
2– Reduce Caffeine Use or Cut it Out Completely.
I learned this lesson in a strange way.
While fasting during Ramadan, I could not drink coffee in the morning and I didn't need a coffee in the evening. Even though I didn't drink coffee regularly every day, after a few days I started to feel a little better than usual. I was also surprised at how mentally alert I was in the afternoon and evening.
The more I researched the reason for this, the more I realized it was because I had cut out caffeine. There are a few very important things you need to understand about caffeine. The first is that caffeine doesn't actually give you energy. The neurobiological mechanism of caffeine is to block adenosine receptors.
The main energy molecule in our cells is ATP (adenosine-tri-phospat). When we burn ATP, adenosine emerges. More adenosine signals to our brain that we are tired and have consumed too much energy. Then when you sleep, this adenosine build-up is cleared and all that adenosine is used to produce ATP.
Caffeine does not give you energy. All thing that caffeine does is numb your fatigue signals. It is important to know this because the more caffeine you consume, the more fatigue you accumulate in your body.
Now let's try to understand what happens when we use caffeine and why it is difficult to stop using caffeine.
There is a very simple principle about addiction in the brain. The faster the beneficial effect of something, the more addictive it is. As soon as we use caffeine, we experience an increase in our focus. Because we have important things to do every day, the cost of being unfocused is high, so we immediately turn to caffeine. We can actually work on a lot of things in the few hours after we've had caffeine.
As the effect of caffeine wears off, we start to become more lethargic and by the evening we are really tired. We start not being able to work and we panic. Then we drink more caffeine and become addicted to caffeine.
When you use caffeine, a period of high productivity is followed by a period of low productivity during the day. First, you experience an “energy rush” and think caffeine is great. But then you get a “energy crash,” and the bigger the crash, the more your brain learns, “I need more caffeine.” Then we get into this high “energy” – “energy crash” cycle, and this cycle negatively affects us in the long run.
So how do you reduce or cut out caffeine? First, postpone your caffeine intake. Most of us walk around like zombies until we get caffeine, but don't drink caffeine for the first 30 minutes after waking up. You can take your morning shower without caffeine.
The next thing you can do to cut down on caffeine is obvious: get better and adequate sleep. It's very difficult to cut out caffeine when you don't get enough rest.
And finally, knowing that your energy will collapse during the day, you can lie down for a while in the afternoon if it is possible. Most of the time I don't fall asleep, I just close my eyes, but even this is very useful for me.
Cutting out caffeine will be difficult for the first 3-4 days and know this in advance. The most important element of this is getting a good and sufficient sleep at night.
3- Pace Back and Forth
The habit I will share now has revolutionized my life and is also a very easy thing to do. I stand up several times a day and pace back and forth.
You may ask: How does this benefit you?
The answer to this question is why we pace and what pacing is replaces.
We get tired and distracted while working. So what do we do when we get tired and distracted? We turn on one of the screened devices such as a mobile phone or open another window on the computer screen. Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. We open it and are bombarded with information.
The first thing you need to know when using these apps is that they are designed to increase the intensity of your interaction with them. Even if you only watch one YouTube video, the videos recommended to you are listed right next to you, within the video or at the end. Just one distraction turns into two distractions, three distractions, and four distractions. In many cases, 5 minutes of distraction turns into an hour of distraction.
The second thing you need to know when using these apps is that they tend to tire your mind even more. For example, when you open Twitter, you see everything that is going wrong in the world. Do you think this helps you get back to work? Generally speaking, if you pay attention to the cycle, you will find that you become very tired after opening and using Twitter. When you finally get tired of Twitter and go back to work, you'll be mentally exhausted on some level to work.
Pacing is beneficial in two ways. It keeps me from running away into a distraction that would cost me an hour or mentally drain me. Second, pacing takes the heaviness out of your mental negative accumulation.
When you interact with infuriating content online, your emotions become heated and it becomes difficult to concentrate on work. When you pace, your mind somehow wanders from place to place. I'm having a hard time finding the most appropriate words to explain this, but while the internet increases the pressure in your mind, walking around reduces it. You are disturbed by the internet, you relax by pacing.
When you take a break from work or study, stay away from the computer screen or any screen. Improve your blood circulation and relax your muscles by walking back and forth.
Pacing is also a habit that is related to and enables the next habit.
4- Give Yourself Time to Think
This habit is quite interesting because we, as humanity, have forgotten to take time to think. 10 thousand years ago, people had plenty of time to think. Even if you were a farmer, doing monotonous work in the field or in the barn, you still had time to think.
The human brain has evolved to have what we call "processing" during low mental activity.
When we are constantly bombarded by so many stimuli, we don't have time to sit down and process them, and today as a society we don't have any time for that kind of processing by constantly doing something.
Instead, some people do what we might call concentrated decompression. They go to therapy, they go on meditation trips, and they try to cram all that mental processing into a small window of time. These are useful things.But maybe we are missing to hard stop in our daily life. We should give our brain a chance to process things and think.
You may have heard of the phenomenon called shower thoughts. Many people have good thoughts in the shower and they feel good. The reason why everyone feels in this way is that in the shower, you give yourself a time to think, and giving your mind time to think is a habit that will revolutionize your life. Those screens are not very adaptable in general to water setup. Trust me, if you implement the screen of social media in your shower, you won't be able to experience shower thoughts in your head.
5– Turn Consumption into Production.
This last habit is probably the most important habit.
We have now become much more consumers. Audiobooks, youtube videos, social media, video games, porn, etc. We spend a lot of time consuming. We continue to consume podcasts even while doing something. Many times, you miss the part of podcast or an audio book, but you still insist to have it in the background.
Many of us sanctify this type of consumption. Try reading a book a day, listening to 2 podcasts, etc. we see it as something very admirable. But while I was doing these, I realized that I was just consuming, consuming and consuming more. And if I want to be successful, what I need to do is not consume, but produce.
Do not get me wrong. Reading and learning can be really useful, but if I am going to give value to the world, if I am really going to gain value, it comes from production, not from consumption.
I started writing something to produce more and consume less. But there are a few problems with being a productive person. But the number one problem is producing a product. If you're not going to be a writer, there's no point in writing. If you're not going to be a musician, there's no point in producing music. That's why I combined the productive process with a product.
But once you combine the creative process with the product, things get very difficult. Because if I am writing to produce a book, I start to have problems with perfectionism from the moment I start writing. “This isn't good enough, this isn't good enough, …” I think. At the same time, you think about questions like should I find a publisher, will people like it? Then you hit writer's block. You say you should learn more, research more.
My advice is to be a producer instead of just consuming. I have published 2 book so far, but I have written a lot of books. The goal here is to stop being a passive consumer. Once you start messing around with the generative process, you will be free from many problems.
Why is it difficult to move from consumption to production by creating something? Because we associate production with finished products. We want to be successful. They say "There's no point in writing a book if no one will read it". I totally disagree with these. I'm not saying stop consumption completely. 10%-20% of the time you spend on consumption should be converted into production. You will give your engine in your head a space to work, space to create. You'll force the boundries of the possibilities in your brain. Imagine a car has 230 Km/h limit in their speed-o-meter. How many times did you try 230 with this car?
If you are someone who has difficulty forming habits, I recommend that you start developing these habits from the beginning. First, stay away from technology for 30-60 minutes after waking up. Then cut out caffeine. Then make it a habit to walk around. Pacing is both very easy and a habit that gives you time to think.
You can also check my books on how to get disciplined and make the habits easier on your daily life here -> LINK to MY BOOKS
As you give yourself time to think, put some of those thoughts into real life and start creating things.
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