I honestly don’t really know what I want to say about this challenge.
I know I wanted to learn jiu jitsu but it was for a number of reasons.
Firstly, I could feel myself falling apart and I couldn’t bring myself to work out. I’ve always loved martial arts and jiu jitsu was always something that I wanted to learn as a martial artist because of its practicality and strengthening an area of fighting that I am particularly weak in – which is grappling.
Secondly, I wanted to see more people in real life and make more friends. My girlfriend joined a running class and it helped her get into exercising more and also just interact with more people. I wanted to do the same with something that I love, which is fighting.
So I signed up to a jiu jitsu gym, one that I was really excited about because it specializes in no gi grappling (10th planet), but now that I’m rolling a few times a week, I kind of don’t know where to go.
I worry about my knee a lot, and that actually has given me more motivation to continue working out.
I feel much happier and have more energy after going to class. I feel myself getting stronger and having better posture.
But I still don’t know what to challenge myself with.
Ever since I left my house and went off to college, it has been increasingly hard to go to bed on time.
It’s killing me. I don’t recover from workouts, my mind is foggy, and my memory mists away. My moods feel erratic and neurotic. Energy during the day is a thing of the past.
And yet I cannot stop.
2 am, 3 am, 4 am, 5 am. I keep going to bed late. And sometimes later and later.
I tried so many times to go to be at a reasonable time. I try for a few days, and then I relapse. But we aren’t giving up. We are trying it one more time.
And I didn’t do it alone. My good friend Edgar gave me this kick in the butt:
So what is my gameplan this time? How am I going to succeed when I failed so many times before?
A couple of things:
I will not try to control how much sleep I get
I will not try to control my screen habits
I will not control anything but one single factor, which is my bedtime
At the same time, I will figure out what needs I am meeting by going to bed late and how to meet those needs earlier in the day
I will commit to this bedtime long enough to form a habit
I made a list of reasons why I love staying up late at night:
Completely alone
Lots of time – no rush
Sense of accomplishment (if I feel I haven’t accomplished anything yet it gives me more time to get things done)
Consume art
Nighttime magical vibes
Dread of the next day
More time to eat and digest
I realized that not sleeping is incredibly compelling to me. It is far more challenging for me to go to sleep on time than most people. So as a result, I need to keep it simple. Bedtime at 11 PM for the next 66 days, no exceptions. The challenge will end on December 12th. I am two days into this challenge already.
What does this mean?
I can eat right before bed
I can watch videos in my bed after 11
I can get back up, stretch if I cannot fall asleep, then go back to bed
I can toss and turn at 11
I can get up at 6 am if I have work that needs to be done but I don’t have the time to finish it
In the meantime, in an attempt to meet all my needs before bed:
I will silence notifications and try to find some alone time every day
I will work to identify a task that is feasible to do and will give me a strong sense of accomplishment every day
I will try to get this done early so that I will have larger open times during the day where I don’t feel rushed
I will pursue more art and magical vibes
I will try to leave gifts for myself the next day so I have positive anticipation(ex: a clean empty sink, plans for something fun)
I will try to eat at 8 pm at the latest so I have time to digest before 11
In terms of how to structure the next 66 days, I have not decided yet, but perhaps I will try to focus on each of the needs and strategies every week.
Some additional strategies/thoughts:
Turning off all the lights
Melatonin gummies
So far, finding a way to feel accomplished/ready for the next day has been a game-changer in wanting to go to sleep. Also, it is easier to go to sleep when bedtime is a hard boundary that is very strict and everything else is quite relaxed (I can still get less sleep and wake up super earlier if I feel I’m not prepared for the next day, I don’t have to go to sleep as long as I’m in bed). Nothing is tempting as a valid excuse/difficult decision anymore.
So tentatively I feel this time will be different. My hope is that after 66 days, I will no longer have to try to go to bed at 11, it will just be automatic, and I will start to cherish my sleep and life in general!
I’ve been thinking about focus for some time now. I think about focus when I procrastinate. I think about focus when I mindlessly watch youtube videos while feeling anxious about upcoming work or projects. I’ve come up with theories about focus being about limiting the number of input (sensory deprivation and tidiness being great focus techniques) and how focus is different from concentration (when you use willpower to keep your mind constrained to one goal).
My thoughts on focus have recently coalesced on a different approach to focus. I first experienced this feeling with working out in my knee challenge. I realized that when I was feeling uncomfortable with exercise or just simply bored, I would start feeling really antsy and found it difficult to focus on the workout.
The solution was to tell myself that I would be doing this workout not for 10, 20 minutes. Not for 60 minutes. I told myself, I would be working on this workout forever. This mindset shift changed my outlook completely. Instead of rushing or feeling anxious and annoyed, I felt suddenly calm, and totally focused on what I was doing and what I was feeling.
I tested this mindset out recently when I was meditating and it seemed to be a shortcut to the meditative mindset. Instead of trying to escape painful or uncomfortable feelings, I assumed that these feelings would last forever. I would find myself slipping into a deep meditative state much much faster.
Paired with the taoist emptiness technique or mindset, I think this could be very useful in addressing the challenges I face a lot of these days with being overwhelmed and stressed.
I wonder if this is a big difference between kids and adults and why when we get older, we also seem to be less in the moment. When we are counting the minutes and seconds, constantly looking over our shoulder for the next task, instead of focusing on the one in front of us, we can lose the focus we are looking for in our lives.
I didn’t really know how to copy the apas style, but I noticed that he wide peeked a lot.
I also used the ideas earlier about hyping myself up and it seemed to work.
We didn’t win this game but I was incredibly aggressive and confident in my peeks. I entried with the classic and was not afraid to push very aggressively, buying my team space.
In this game I started feeling frustrated with my team and that I was starting to overheat and not aim as properly.
After running a deathmatch and focusing on taking a second to aim, and to fully face the enemy, looking for the kill, I had this game.
I felt this was by far the most successful, with aggressive peeking but also utilizing util and gamesense to the fullest.
My sense is that hyping myself up is probably the biggest strategy for me, with some additional adjustments afterwards for aim technique.
So something that I’ve been sort of obsessed with recently is how to face your problems head-on. In so many areas of my life, I struggle to do that. In my professional career, tasks that stress me out send me to my couch with my phone. When I don’t know what to say to my mom and my dad, I immediately turn on my audiobook, eager to dull the pain in my chest. When I am feeling stressed about a fight in Valorant, I rush and try to ignore the mounting feelings of anxiety.
I would really like to find a way to flip the script because it is so rewarding. When I do a task that I worry about, I feel energized, and not tired from work. When I focus on my feelings of anxiety in Valorant, I become much more aware of what my intuition is telling me, that I need to slow down and play the situation very carefully.
I think this is a really interesting concept. I want to make a bit of an amendment. In the video they talk about trying to get better problems, that being able to have money problems when you are rich vs money problems when you are poor is much better (where you invest, vs how to survive). But I kind of disagree. The problem of survival is ultimately a much more rewarding problem for me than where to invest.
I do think that this is a powerful idea, and a way to reframe problems. My thoughts are as follows:
Avoiding problems comes from the fear of failure
We can address this by embracing failure
But we don’t want to just fail at anything…this is where choosing your problems come in
Instead of failing at a random problem, embrace failing and learning from a meaningful problem
Ex: I am afraid I don’t know how to respond to my parents
The meaningful problem here is to learn to create a bond with my parents while standing strong in my own life and boundaries
Accept failure and believe in my ability to learn from a failure at this problem
Essentially, turn every problem into a challenge
Another example: I don’t know what to do next in my demo build and it’s overwhelming and a lot of work
The meaningful problem here is finding how to be efficient at my job, and to work as a team without people pleasing to my own detriment (creating boundaries)
Accept failure at this and my ability to learn from that failure
UNIT TWO: Dynamic Figure Drawing | Day 1 – Explore figure sketching techniques/simplification
I’ve been actively avoiding working on this challenge all day. I feel like it is because it is so damn overwhelming. It took so much for me to even just sit down and start working on this.
But now that I have sat down and am working on this, I want to create a mini lesson plan for today.
Since today is about exploring figure sketching techniques and simplification, I shall design a lesson plan to make it impossible not to get good at those things. As I’ve said before, lesson plans let me connect to the present moment, on one task at a time. This in turn helps me work through the feeling of being overwhelmed.
Mini syllabus for: explore figure sketching techniques/simplification
Total time: 90 minutes (est 30 min per unit, 10 min per part)
Circle head, half for nose line, half of that for mouth line
line for neck
line for spine
line for hips perpendicular to spine
line for shoulders perpendicular to spine
Head shapes
circle with lopped side for skull
cut cube for face
Sketchy woodwork for finding pose
Keep scratching until a form emerges
Erase or lighten then refine
Advanced shapes
triangle tricep
triangle forearm
teardrop thighs
diamond calf
box pecs
triangle delts
pen tip torso
Mini unit 2: Experiment
Part 1: School of thought 1
I practiced basic armature and it looked pretty bad. I think I started to improve when I moved the hips a little higher.
Part 2: School of thought 2
Things started to improve a little here. I really like the method of simple shapes for the head. I felt like I understood the geometry much better.
Part 3: School of thought 3
This is when I used the sketchy woodwork carving out a pose and when I refined it, I used the advanced shaped coupled with everything else I learned. I really really like this method. Gives me dynamic poses without losing the anatomy.
I didn’t get to Unit 3 because I feel complete and it is 2AM and I want to go to bed.
Very happy with today’s progress. I feel like I killed it at the figure drawings and I feel much more confident drawing figures.
