Day 18
May 8th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
Email this article to a friend
It’s now day 18 after the official start date of the 30-Day Challenge. I’ve certainly had some tough days so far, but I haven’t missed a single day yet on any of my three challenges: 1) get up at 5am every morning, 2) write for at least 4 hours per day, and 3) exercise aerobically at least 25 minutes every day.
If you’ve gotten this far, you’re likely to make it to day 30 without quitting. What you may have noticed is that if you have a hard day somewhere beyond day 15, your self-discipline has grown to the point where it doesn’t seem so hard.
An old high school friend of mine is celebrating his 35th birthday in Vegas, so we had dinner last night with some of his family and Harvard buddies on the Strip, and then I taught some of them to play a few casino games. (I tend to only play blackjack and poker, since those are the ones where I can gain an edge. I was kicked out of the Barbary Coast once for card counting.) My friend and I played blackjack together — just like old times, since we used to make a lot of L.A. to Vegas trips in our 20s — and we both won. It’s always a lot more fun when you’re winning.
But I knew I still had to exercise that day, so I ended up going running around midnight, went to bed at 1am, and then got up at 5am and polished off 4 hours of writing by 10:30am the next morning. It was hard, but my capacity for handling “hard” has increased, so I knew that no matter how late I got home, there was zero chance of me not keeping my commitment.
That’s the great thing about self-discipline — when you take the time to develop it, it leads to greater self-trust.
May 8th, 2005 at 6:37 pm
You say you’ve been doing 4 hours of writing per day. Seeing as its been a day or two since your last blog post, I’m guessing you’ve got another article in the works? Or did this post take 8 hours to write?
May 8th, 2005 at 6:41 pm
No… this writing isn’t for the web site. It’s a book.
May 8th, 2005 at 8:21 pm
still going strong on not smoking and trying out vegetarianism. thanks!
May 9th, 2005 at 2:26 am
i can’t wait to read your book!
i think i failed at my challenge, since i got this very bad flue i gave everything up, and spend like 4 days just nursing myself, drinking tea, and resting. but i tend to go on with it tomorrow. I wont be a winner in this callenge, but i won’t be a total loser also, i think.
May 9th, 2005 at 6:14 am
I think Suzy brings up a good point. If you’ve convinced yourself your going to succeed no matter what, and then you slip, it may be hard to get back on the horse, seeing as you already have felt you have lost. What do you do to regain yourself and continue your motivation and drive if you hit a bump? Do you start back to day 1?
May 9th, 2005 at 7:07 am
Yes, you generally start back at day 1 if you miss a day. If it’s day 20 or so though, you may simply forgive yourself and continue. Some things are outside of our control, so even when you commit yourself, the universe doesn’t always cooperate. You have to decide whether the slip was caused by something outside your control or not. Were you the one who dropped the banana peel you slipped on?
May 9th, 2005 at 7:32 am
I’m doing great so far with the excercise, I just had to stop for 4 days due a terrible fire that had the whole city covered in pollution and it was recommended not to excercise, not even indoors, and since I was not risking my health I was forced to take a small break, but everything is back to normal now…
May 9th, 2005 at 8:19 am
I’m really inspired by your 30 days challenge. How do you handle a 4 hours sleep during the day (jogged till 1 am, woke up at 5 am)?
Thing with me is that I’m nocturnal & insomiac which is very inconvenient for my normal day work. Been trying (for years) trying to sleep before 1am and getting up before 6 am. Never lasted a week. How do you beat the fatigue and lack of focus (do u suffer them)?
May 9th, 2005 at 8:51 am
lol. that’s a bit mean guillermo!
ok, i admit, maybe the flue wasn’t that bad, still i admited that i failed. can i still continue , please?
May 9th, 2005 at 10:10 am
No one needs anyone’s permission to continue. This challenge is personal. You need only answer to yourself.
May 9th, 2005 at 10:17 am
As for sleeping 4 hours, I’m fine the first several hours after I get up, but it catches up to me in the early afternoon when I turn zombie-like. So I just take a nap. If I’m too sleepy to concentrate, I sleep. My goal for getting up at 5am every day is to condition myself to get an early start on my day, not to practice sleep deprivation.
Last night I went to bed at 11:00, so I got a good six hours of sleep. That’s slightly on the low side for me, but I can function well enough. I find that sleeping too much is usually worse for me than sleeping too little in terms of my ability to concentrate on my work.
May 9th, 2005 at 10:27 am
Delayed….
I intend on 30 days of running (instead of the 2 or 3 times per week) and I started a couple of days later than the most of you.
Yesterday I had to pause my running effort as a sinus infection, flu symptoms, and a nasty pink-eye infection got the better of me. The last 5 runs (the runs, not the decision to run; that was easy) had been a challenge with the sinus infection; I guess I simply knocked down my immune system. (Never run or excercise strenuously when you have flu-like symptoms)
I substituted stretching and walking (when I felt better) for the run as I will do today. I will pick up when my health cooperates.
May 9th, 2005 at 11:57 am
Hi.
I’ve always been too skinny so my 30 day challenge was to hit the weights every day.
I did miss 2 days because I feared damaging my body so I did yoga on those days instead to give my muslces a much needed stretch without pulling something. Technically I don’t really count this as failing as I was still doing an exercise that helps me reach my goal.
I started a couple days before most of you (when Steve first wrote about the 30 day challenge) so I’ve only got 7 days to go and quite honestly I can’t see myself not making it at this point. It’s more or less a habit right now and I’ve started to see some positive results which has me pumped.
It was also a tremondous help to find someone at work with similar goals. It was much harder to talk myself out of going to the gym on those first shaky weeks by having someone else help motivate me to go.
May 9th, 2005 at 4:32 pm
I have a question for all those who took picked up exercise as their 30 day challenge. Did you find you started needing less sleep when you exersised more?
I am someone who tends to need 8-9 hours of sleep a day, but if I choose to get up early (5:30-6am) every day to do some exercise before leaving to work, then I will often only get 6 hours sleep some night. I’m hoping the exercise will offset the tiredness or something.
May 9th, 2005 at 9:15 pm
Yynatago: The first couple of days I think I even needed more than sleep than before but now that it’s been a couple of weeks I do find my energy output has increased.
I’m getting by on about 7 hours a night lately where before I needed a solid 8 or 9 to make it through the day.
May 10th, 2005 at 6:13 am
Hi, Steve,
Thanks for the interesting article!
May I ask you a question? If you get up at 5 o’clock, what time you go to sleep?
I’m asking without any sarcasm. As for me, I should sleep at least 8 hours to be in good spirit. Otherwise I feel myself bad: I’m yawning and wanting to sleep the whole day.
For example to get up at 5, I should go to bed at 21. But here in Russia (where we live in big apartment houses) it is impossible because upper neighbor’s daughter is playing piano, right neighbor is permanently under repair and using his hammer drill, the lower neighbors are students and they love to listen pop music… And the quiet comes only at 23:00.
Of course, I am exaggerating a bit, but as the Russian proverb say: “every joke contains a part of joke”…
May 10th, 2005 at 6:46 am
I usually go to bed between 10-11pm. Last night I went to bed at 10:30.
May 14th, 2005 at 2:02 pm
Hi Steve. I’m a latter guy in the 30 days challenge. I did start running in the 6th., 3.3km (a course in a park near my house), every day. In the first days the only bad thing was the slight pain in my legs.
Today was the 9th day of run and every day I’m felling better. I did 2 times the course, instead of one. My average time doing one course was 16 minutes; when I did two courses today I marked 17 minutes each time and felt really well.
Thanks very much for your article. It’s very good to know that I’m working very hard every day and that all of you are doing the same, around the world! That’s a community!
May 18th, 2005 at 6:51 pm
I missed two Sundays of running. I guess that means I’m out of the official challenge, but I already know I’m going to keep running at least 6 days a week (Mon-Sat) from here on out. Running is actually enjoyable now and it wakes me up in the morning. And it’s also the only time of day that I know I can listen to my audiobooks without any interruptions. So thanks Steve for hosting this 30-day challenge.
July 10th, 2005 at 1:09 am
Seen the recent entries, I’ve got the feeling the 5 AM day start is becoming more of a challenge at itself. I thought the purpose was to reduce time sleeping and become more productive.
Now, if you go to sleep at 10PM and start at 5 AM [7 hours of sleep], the night owls could sleep from let’s say 12:00 and start at 7 AM to obtain the same level of productivity? Implying that the starting point would be determined by someones biological clock.