Thank God I’m not still where I was when I was 30. I didn’t even have my kid until age 37, and sometimes I just ask myself what the hell I did with all the time I used to have. If you’re in a good place, though, more power to you! No sense messing with a good thing!
Is that nearly a minute without putting the other foot down at all? You’re doing way better than me. I can’t go 10 seconds without having to put the other foot down.
However, I have an intermediary exercise of just barely touching the ground with the other foot and working to make surethat I am keeping my weight all on the one foot. I did that tonight for 45 seconds each side before I gave up. (I tend to give up on the other faster because I’m frustrated rather than tired)
I had PT earlier this year for balance problems and this was one of the exercises that they used to measure progress
My mother would have had a lot more mobility and independence the last 15-20 years of her life if she had gotten balance PT and kept her leg strength up so she could get off the floor by herself.
Sorry for the digression!
Not at all, it’s heartening to know I’m doing something so meaningful that even physical therapists would approve.
I also tried the “raising the head of the bed 6’'” idea in the article. Very easy for me to do as I have an adjustable bed. I’m not sure what effects are to be had, though I did wake up in a great mood today. I’ll report back later.
Walking! I hate all form of exercise but about 17 years ago I started walking for two reasons - One: the dog we had at the time really needed more exercise and Two: I wanted to lose some weight. I started with a 2 mile walk every day, then I went to two 2 mile walks then I went to three. One of them I did during my lunch hour in a skywalk system. The other two were with the dog - morning and evening. I walked no matter the weather (unless it’s extremely cold). The dog became better behaved and I lost 25#. Now I’m down to two walks - I’m in a different office and really have no where to walk during lunch. But I could no more miss my walks than I could miss brushing my teeth. If I do miss a walk because of 30 below temps, I feel unbalanced all day. It is a habit that I don’t want to break.
Love this idea! I’m going to start doing it.
I do a 5 minute tidy once a day. You can get a lot done in 5 minutes.
I’m an inveterate insomniac. I take several daily meds for it, and also have two PRNs. I still don’t sleep especially well. If I didn’t take the meds, I literally would not sleep for three or four days, when I would finally pass out (not exactly the same thing as sleeping, but it would segue into sleep) from exhaustion. You’d think I sleep for 16 hours after that, but nope. I’d sleep maybe 3 or 4 hours.
One of the cruelest tricks it has is that I would go to bed worrying about whether or not I’d get to sleep, and how much sleep I’d get. And the worry would keep me awake. I’d lie there, worrying about whether or not I was going to fall asleep. Night after night.
I dreaded going to bed-- I hated the sight of my bed. I didn’t change the sheets for months at a time, because I was so angry with it.
One day, I just made a decision-- I decided it didn’t matter-- it was out of my hands anyway. How much sleep I got was how much I got, and caffeine pills were cheap, besides which, I had sick days-- I could call in if I had to.
I didn’t get a solid 8 hours that night, but I did sleep well for me. I fell asleep pretty soon after lying down, stayed asleep for about four hours, took another melatonin, and slept another hour and a half.
I felt great all day, and people kept telling me I looked great or that I looked like I’d just gotten good news.
Anyway, that’s been my attitude since-- what I sleep is what I sleep. If I genuinely feel shaky, or like I could fall asleep behind the wheel, I call in sick, but that happens maybe once a year, and I have one of the best attendance records at work the give a bonus every year to the three people with the best attendance, and of the last ten years, I’ve placed, in second or third. I placed first once, in 2020, because I was the only one who never got Covid.
I still have insomnia, I still take medication, but I don’t stress over it-- I don’t think of it as some “thing” I’m battling against.
I sleep a lot better. I never have a night when I don’t sleep at all, and I don’t walk up every hour, and cry myself back to sleep, of medicate myself back. Usually, I wake up once. I don’t know why, I just do
In fact, I have to admit I never made a “small” change.
I kicked around a lot since Uni (to paraphrase Steely Dan).
Worked as a builder in North Wales for a while. Then spent quite a few years scratching a living as a sort of professional musician in London. Supplemented by occasional contracts as an electronic engineer (I’ve always had that as a safety net, since I have a BsEE).
Was always a sort of cowboy, no commitments.
But at 37, I just thought I would go to the USA and have a look around.
And perhaps I was starting to think: am I going to do this for the rest of my life?
So, a second phase, got married to a US woman, had a couple of kids who are doing fine.
Became a respected engineer; principle scientist at a couple of startups (though none of them got to the Billion startup level)…
So I guess I did make one big change…
Writing lists - in particular, lists of things to do that I know I will never complete. Having ideas is great, but if I try to remember them, it just creates a sense of cluttered unproductivity where a load of incomplete thoughts are competing for processing resources.
If I have an idea, I write it down; I don’t have to think about it any more, or worry that I might forget it. When I have time to spare, I skim over my lists and see if there’s something in there worth pursuing or just spending some thinking time developing a bit more. I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades now and it was transformative in terms of personal productivity, and in the whole of that time, I have only ever experienced boredom when some external constraint such as illness makes it impossible to do what I want to do.
The lists grow faster than I can cross items off them and this is fine; they are not lists of things I must complete - they are lists of things I could do if I want to; their purpose is not to get done, but to let me get things done.
I used my phone’s digital well-being tools to set limits on my social media scrolling, which was getting to be too much. Once my allotted time for the day is expired, the app closes.
Of course, I could go in and change the setting and scroll more, but for some reason, I don’t. So it works.
I was taught how to play chess when I was 9yo. Never forgot how to play.
My Wife wanted to learn. I taught her.
We now play ~10 games of chess together a week. And that led to Cribbage. When we are apart (family stuff), we play computer chess and talk on the phone while doing so.
This is great for communication, and also for our brains. Much better than commenting on a TV show.
Chess IMHO, is a great was to release your mind from the day to day stuff.
I have had 3 or 4 things in my life that wee major life changers but none as dramatic as the one I am going to mention. I was listening to a talk radio show while driving down the street a couple of months after my divorce. I was at an all-time emotional low in my life. I only heard one statement, The speaker said… " When we fall in love, we actually fall in love with the way we feel about ourselves when we are with that special person". From that point on I made sure that in every interaction I had if there was any way possible the other person would walk away feeling better about themselves. I would become a source of source of a successful social interaction. I applied it to all my relationships, professional as well as family social and romantic. There was a dramatic change in my life from that point on.
Sounds good - is there a good general-purpose app for Android that does this?
In my early 40’s I incorporated resistance training/weightlifting into my exercise routine a minimum of twice weekly. I’m now in my late 60’s and (so far) continue to see the benefits during my annual blood work for things such as A1c, blood lipids, markers of kidney function, and markers of overall heart health. Also my diet has never been and still isn’t always the healthiest so around that time, I began to incorporate specific nutritional supplements to try to compensate for defciencies and to mitigate some of the potential damage from the “bad” stuff.
Both sides of my family have a history of diabetes, high blood pressure, and premature death related to chronic but preventable health issues so I believe these things have been really beneficial to me.
The day I had a heart attack at age 28, I stopped smoking cold turkey. This was long before there were nicotine patches, or gum, or any other aids. Still going strong 58 years later.
I’ve read many tales of radical transformation after 30 and I sure hope I’m not for the rest of my life what I was at 30, because it was quite lousy at 30.
That is another small change I made in my life. I took up Tai chi in January. I can now sit cross-legged in the middle of the floor and get up without even losing my breath. I still have to use my hands to push up off the floor, but I haven’t been able to get up from the floor unaided for many years.
That’s really beautiful.
I have a young friend who is really into Tai Chi and it appears to be one of those things that doesn’t look like it requires a lot of effort, but really, really does.
You are so right! It looks like a bunch of slowly waving of arms around, but it is a serious workout. The great thing about it that it is more of a slow meditative exercise that is focused on balance.
One of the most hated part of the class is The Lift. You hold one knee high with the same arm held up, turned at the elbow. Hold. Controlled release. Other side. Change it up with opposite arms from legs.
Another one is to stand on tip toes and hold arms straight up in the air and hold for at least 10 seconds. That’s really hard at first.
I will tell her about your standing on one foot to brush teeth change and she will probably assign it to us as homework.
On my Android I just opened Settings and searched “Digital Wellbeing”.
This is an excellent suggestion! I did it this morning and alternated feet each time my brush indicated 30 seconds had gone by (I brush for 2 minutes). I used to pace back and forth in the bathroom thinking about the day and this will be a much better use of that time (it is typically nervous thinking about the upcoming shit-show)!