Don’t Listen to your Body, It Lies!

I’ve learned that how productive I am in a day is in large part a function of how early I put on my pants. This is true of weekdays and weekends. If you work for yourself or at home then this is especially true.

I am not a morning person. I wish I was. I find that when I wake up in the morning, my body screams at me: “Go back to sleep! There’s no point in getting up now because I won’t be able to function properly anyway. Trust me, I know myself. You might as well get some more sleep so you won’t suffer through the whole day.”

Doctors always say listen to your body. I’m telling you that as it relates to staying in bed, your body lies to you. If you get up and get going you might feel like crap for the first half hour while you recover from your grogginess but after that you’re ultimately fine. Your body isn’t telling you how you are going to feel but just how awful you feel right now.

This is especially true for naps. I love naps. One, I just enjoy them. Two, I’ve been reading that they are a very efficient form of sleep. There’s a theory that the rapid eye movement (or R.E.M.) portion of sleep is the critical, recharging portion of sleep. When you sleep eight hours in a night you can expect to have 2 hours of solid R.E.M. time. This should leave you feeling well rested. If you incorporate a fairly consistent nap into your routine, your body learns that it has less time to work with during the nap, so you shift into R.E.M. a lot faster. As such, napping can provide much more concentrated sleep. So if you incorporate napping into your life, you can get away with sleeping fewer hours for every 24 hour cycle while feeling equally rested. This can be an important trick for sleep deprived parents. (Research the veracity of this paragraph for yourself. I don’t know it to be true)  

I’ve spoken with many people that say that they can’t nap because they just feel so awful afterwards. Again, I ask do you feel awful for the rest of the day/evening or do you just feel awful for the next 20-30 minutes while you’re “degrogging”. I suspect it’s the latter.

Back to the issue of putting on pants. You can start taking care of things in your underwear. You can fire up your laptop and address some emails. You can clean up a few things around the house. But are you really being that productive or effective when you’re still in this half started mode?

I find that staying in bed is a form of procrastination like anything else. You can be procrastinating from doing your morning routine or getting on with your day in general. The key thing to breaking procrastination is inertia. When you’re doing nothing, you like to keep doing nothing. When you get going on a task you like to keep going. So it can make a huge difference to your day if you choose to pop out of bed and jump in the shower right away. I find that I’m infinitely more effective and more committed to making good use of my time once I’m wearing pants.

This same notion of getting going in the morning can be applied to any task that you’ve been procrastinating on. The trick is “cracking the egg” or taking the first step towards accomplishing what you want. Momentum is very important and I find that once you take just the very first step your natural inclination will be to keep going. Avoid the excuse of thinking that you need a bigger window of time to make meaningful progress so you’ll wait till you have more time to get started. Shenanigans! Take even the most basic of first steps right away and it can help tremendously. Also once you start to tackle a task you start to know everything that’s involved. Once you know what’s involved, even if it’s a lot it seems far less daunting than the unknown.

In Sum, Don’t trust your body when it tells you to stay in bed. Put on pants early. Embrace napping. And crack the egg on tasks you been procrastinating on.

I started writing this blog in hopes that it might help improve people’s lives. In that spirit it would make me very happy if after reading this post, you take 20 minutes to get started on something, anything that you’ve been putting off for a while. Give it a shot! I think that it’ll make you happy. If you actually follow through I encourage you to let me know about it in the comments.