The Sales Conference Health Challenge

Byjack

I’m headed to Orlando, Florida today for a big sales event and I have created a challenge for myself.

I want to not only stay well (and avoid sickness) but also feel better after the conference.

Right now I’m suffering from the following symptoms:

  • Fatigue
  • Dry eyes
  • Low energy
  • Sore back
  • Tight and sore shoulders

In order to avoid sickness (which will be the hardest part of this challenge). I am planning on focusing on the following challenges:

  • Social
    • Keeping a distance from people
    • Avoiding contact
    • Using eye contact and projection to still connect with people
  • Physical
    • Mask up at close events
    • Distance when eating food
    • Hand sanitize at intervals
    • Reduce facial touching

The biggest part of this challenge is keeping in touch with my emotions and my body as well as being able to set boundaries. It’s a sales event so it is a very externally orientated event meaning that it is hard to maintain boundaries while connecting with people and easy to eat mindlessly, push past exhausting instead of sleeping, etc.

In order to boost my health, I am focusing on the following areas:

  • Emotional
    • Feel the feelings
    • Take risks
    • Slow down
  • Physical
    • Exercise
    • Sleep
    • Mindful eating

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Workpost 14: Tired

Byjack

I am worrying about a couple of things. First of all, I went to bed at 2AM again. This is becoming a pattern that I need to address ASAP.

Thinking about what I need via connection theory here is what I came up with:

  1. I need to be able to let go of not being productive during the day. It is hard, but I need to be able to say, I accept where I got to today.
  2. I need some way to process that pain and any anxiety from the day. Connection theory is telling me to yell and scream or hyperventilate.
  3. I need to get into bed at the proper time but again, like last time, I can intice myself with being able to use my phone while in bed.

Also, I feel linked to this is my anxiety around work.

My initial thought is to stop “trying” and pushing harder against a problem, rather everytime I hit an issue, write down all of the questions I have, then work out those problems outside my apartment, walking or going to the gym.

Connection theory is telling me drawing might help as well.

Overall, I feel like total shit and I feel the lack of sleep is taking a toll on my digestion. I hope to relax enough to take a nap and get back into working order.

Health Checkup 10/25/2021

Byjack

I feel worried about posting about this topic since it can be kind of gross.

However, I feel that physical health is one of the most important things to understand in life as it controls your energy levels, affects your mental strength, and dramatically affects your physical attractiveness or beauty.

Tracking and problem solving my health issues will not only help me but may provide inspiration for others.

Digestion

Symptoms: bloating, gas, diarrhea, distended belly, sensitivity to cold, stress, and exhaustion

Brainstorm:

  • Raw ginger – seems to add an overall boost to blood flow (yang qi) and stomach circulation
  • Farmhouse Culture Gut Shots – tastes absolutely disgusting, feels like it may actually help
  • Unlocking/moving/stretching hips – ever since my knee injury, my hips are tight and contribute to the blockage in my stomach
  • Stomach massage – helps smooth out the knots and blockage points
  • Increase overall circulation – qi gong, running and cardio all help increase overall circulation and remove blockages overall
  • Activate digestion while eating – eat slower and smell food more
  • Eat less – to 70% fullness

Current Focus:

I need to improve my baseline before going after a specific treatment plan. The baseline will focus on two basic areas: overall circulation, reducing strain. The goals need to be very small so they are easy to maintain.

  • Circulation – eat ginger every morning, run around the block once every morning (minimum 5 min)
  • Reducing strain – focus on eating as little as possible, meditate once in the morning and night (minimum 5 min)
Hair

Symptoms: thin hair (but seems to be thickening), itchy scalp, hair falling out, dandruff

Very strange that my hair is thickening but falling out at the same time. Pretty sure my massage is working but the new hair growing in is so thin it falls out easily.

Brainstorm:

  • Vigorous scalp massage – increase blood flow and already thicken hair a great deal
  • Wash hair – more often, with cold water and apple cider vinegar if possible to reduce inflammation and increase circulation
  • Oil/fatty acids – use huge amounts of conditioner and castor oil to thicken hair and prevent breaking and falling out

Current Focus:

I need to cleanse and increase circulation

  • Wash hair every day with cold water and apple cider vinegar, need to use lots of conditioner to counter the stripping effect of washing your hair too much
Knee (injury)

Symptoms: afraid to put pressure or impact, no feeling at surgery area, pain

Brainstorm:

  • More movement – motion is lotion to the joints
  • Increased muscle mass around the joint – muscle is needed to support the joint
  • Gua sha – need to tear up the scar tissue around the area and increase blood flow
  • Warmup/loosen hips – hips are too tight reducing range of motion

Current focus:

I need more circulation

  • Gua sha (or graston) for at least 5 min per day
Posture and Alignment

Symptoms: jutting forward head, misaligned hips, shoulders rounded forward

Brainstorm:

  • Cobra yoga pose – let the hips relax into better balance
  • Wall posture exercises – strengthen back muscles
  • Foam roller stretch – stretch chest muscles
  • Practice standing/walking – try to establish perfect alignment
  • Move joints more – joints are where everything attaches, moving the joints mean more relaxed and fluid movement

Current focus:

I need to see a chiropractor and also just slightly improve posture while doing things bad for posture (computer, phone):

  • Find a chiropractor within my health insurance
  • Focus on finding a comfortable way to look at the phone with head back (put your phone on your knees)
Vision

Symptoms: dry eyes, headaches (happens not very often), worsening vision

Brainstorm:

  • Relax into looking farther – stretches eye muscles
  • Move vision more – gets the eye muscles to work a little more
  • Do more active sports – forces your eyes to focus on things moving and far away
  • Blink more – resets the eyes

Current Focus:

I want to just relax my eyes more when looking at far away things, rather than trying to move closer.

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Workpost 42: Loneliness

Byjack

I felt very lonely today, so I watched two videos. I figured that whenever my knee feels bad I do research, but I don’t do a lot of research when I feel lonely.

Major ideas that might help me from this post:

  1. Think about how to help others to feel less lonely. It’s weird that I always think about who can make me feel less lonely, but I actually don’t need other people for that. Helping others will help me feel less lonely.
  2. Emotional perfectionism definately sounds like me. Thinking about how it might be possible for me to connect with people even if they aren’t perfect friends and fill all my needs makes it a lot easier to connect with people.

This one really really really helped me because it answered one of my questions, why am I distracting myself all the time and going on YouTube videos and playing games. The simple thing is, I’m not a good friend to myself.

Main takeaways:

  1. A good friend is honest in a loving gentle way. Be honest with yourself in a compassionate way.
  2. A good friend is encouraging and pushes you to be a better version of yourself. Remind yourself what you are capable of, believe in yourself. Encourage yourself to be a good man, a strong man, despite what others want you to do.

For some reason, the idea of being a good man makes me feel really really calm for some reason. I know I have been fighting myself and that’s why I’m on my phone all the time.

I wanted to spend some time thinking more about my ideal friend:

  1. Someone who is accepting of me, a good listener, empathetic
  2. Someone who wants to go on adventures with me
  3. Someone who encourages me to dream big, believe in myself

Knee Mobility Challenge 2: Redirection

Byjack

Today in looking into how to increase strength and mobility into the tendons and ligaments, I made an exciting discovery and change in direction.

I’ve heard of the Knees Over Toes Guy ever since I went to Thai Massage and the massage therapist told me that he helped a lot with his knee injuries from doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

I know this challenge was to make my knee stronger just for going to Zion National Park, but this changes things completely.

The Knees Over Toes Guy has a program that costs about $50 per month. I decided to try it out as part of this challenge…but also as part of a bigger effort to regain my life. For the longest time, I have been searching for something that would let me be active again in life. Specifically, I want to get back into martial arts and work on Jiu Jitsu, wrestling and striking. I know that is completely impossible right now since I can’t even sleep on my side without pain in my knee.

This guy has renewed hope in me because apparently he was struggling with knee pain for 10 years and has had 6 surgeries and now is able to play basketball with zero pain even though he is pushing his body farther than ever (now dunks the ball).

This of course, changes my approach to the challenge and I need to rewrite my syllabus. I didn’t want to get rid of the syllabus because that is what has created such happiness and progress in all my challenges, but this is an excellent opportunity to improve the process. I have always felt that rigidly following something even when it isn’t the best path anymore is inefficient and wastes time. Being able to adapt the syllabus when you feel a major shift (not just all the time for no reason) makes a lot of sense.

There is a major shift that needs to happen because I realized that the current syllabus is not perfect due to the fact that even day 1 I realized that all exercises involve muscles, fascia and ligaments and tendons, yet they are all spread out over days in the syllabus and that makes no sense.

So here is my revised syllabus:

Days until Zion: 8

UNIT 2: Testing Knees Over Toes

Day 1 – Surface Tissues

UNIT 2: Testing Knees Over Toes

Day 1 – Day 5 – ATG workouts (Zero Program)

UNIT 3: Recovery

Day 1 – Cooling and antioxidation
Day 2 – Cleansing and Fasting
Day 3 – Fortifying and Nutrition

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Valorant 4: Thoughts While I’m On Break

Byjack

I’ve been traveling for the past two weeks and haven’t been able to play any Valorant, but today I was thinking about some  of the things I wanna try.

I saw this amazing video by scream (a professional EU valorant player known for his aim).

Some major takeaways:

  • Warm up wrists
  • Practice jett knives in practice range
  • Practice not only one tapping but also burst spraying
  • Should take longer with Vandal, spray burst with phantom
  • Crosshair placement is key for getting kills, be ready for a wide swing or a small jiggle depending on the situation
  • Always look to play off of your team, solo carrying is VERY hard even for pros, Valorant is a combo game

Other things I’ve been thinking to try:

  • I need to get used to all sorts of movement, play around with it like I do with dance
  • I should aim with movement a lot more

In general, I feel like I need to apply what I learned from dance – keep feeling out the things that feel uncomfortable. Try different ways to do the same thing. Look for something that feels good. Understand my body as well as just the ingame mechanics.

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Workpost 11: Mentalities for Happiness

Byjack

Today I woke up feeling pretty awful from going to bed at 4AM last night.

I was feeling super overwhelmed with many many things in my life.

Today, I chose to wake up slowly, get to work slowly, and here are some of the mentalities that helped me:

  1. Cleaning is incredibly healing. Any time of cleaning, cleaning your workspace, your body, your clothes, it all is very therapeutic.
  2. What can I do for future Jack. This is the Matthew McConnehey’s idea of leaving breadcrumbs. Instead of the common idea of letting your future self deal with a problem (let future Jack deal with the dishes, let future Jack deal with talking to this person) think about what you can do now to make your future self happier. This can look like everything from cleaning, to setting up a super nice workspace, cooking yourself a really good meal.
  3. Focus on challenge and growth. I think oftentimes I get overwhelmed because I think about how hard things are. What helps me is thinking about everything in terms of challenge and growth. How can I challenge myself? What can I do to grow?
  4. Live in the hierarchy of being true to oneself. I was talking to a friend the other day about hierarchies and choosing the right one (don’t compete in a hierarchy you don’t believe in such as money). I want to compete and live in a hierarchy of being honest and true to myself.

I still feel a quite a bit of stress of the difficult conversations I’m anticipating, and the difficult tasks I have in front of me.

Unwelcome World

I feel sometimes

I am living in a world

Where every step is heavy

But the gravity only pulls on my heart

And the future feels unknown

Scary and not comfy