Days 9 and 10
Check out this wallpaper I made a couple years ago:
http://home.comcast.net/~maxizzle/habit1.png
My efforts with early rising are very closely mirroring this graph so far. Will they mirror the downswing of difficulty?
I feel like I've been on this early riser transition for 2-3 weeks now. It's encouraging to see I've only been at it for 10 days, because I'm still far from full adjustment.
Waking Up
Today, day 10, I had the most difficult time getting up of this entire project. I actually hesitated as much as 3 seconds to get up when my hand hit off the alarm. It may not seem like much, but the pull to lie back down was very strong, and it felt like I hesitated for long time. Day 9 was like this too, except only a 1 second delay, and not as much of a pull to go back to sleep.
In some ways, Day 9 was the worst... my internal dialogue hit me very hard and loud as soon as the alarm went off, it quieted down more into the background after I ran, lifted, and showered, but still had some nasty flareups during the day. It took me about 30-80 minutes longer to go through the wake-up procedure because the inner dialogue was beckoning me to just stand there thinking about things.
Day 9
In some ways, Day 9 was the absolute worst day of this project. Along with the difficulty getting up and the crazy internal dialogue, there seemed to be this great profusion of negative energy and events around me, including external negative influences from another. I was incredibly paranoid that day.
Nonetheless, I was not tempted to give up the early riser program or the "no masturbation" 30 day program either. It shouldn't come as a surprise to me that when I save up my sexual energy, hidden inner negativities will become unlocked and swirl around for conscious viewing again.
Day 9 Sleep Quality
Since I'm aiming to get more rest with less sleep, I went to sleep around 10:40pm last night. A strong sleepiness actually hit me around 8:30-9pm, quite suddenly. Strangely enough, that entire night it seemed like I was sleepless, even though my aching body was craving lying down. I woke up atleast a few times, although I could not tell how much time passed between those wakings, nor was I really aware of how long I was awake. I never was compelled to get up, however, and I was mostly out of it. I know I got rest, because my energy has been completely stable since I ran and worked out this morning.
Waking hours
Despite the increasing difficulty of getting up at 4:55am, and being awake a lot during my set sleeping time, I cannot ignore that my 5:30am - 9pm waking hours are gaining a rock solid energy level stability. It seems I can go at it all day, working on whatever. It actually seems like I have to intentionally relaxify things and set the mood toward my bed time, or else I can just keep going. For instance, the sleepiness last night did not hit me until I decided to start on a pre-sleep procedure.
Yesterday, I did notice a slight slump when I let myself just sit there and not really accomplish anything. It wasn't a feeling of sleepiness, but of overall fatique and misery. It seems the more I pay attention to internal dialogue and just think about things, the more that happens. As soon as I picked up and started working on something or doing an engaging activity again, I was fully awake and energetic.
I'm not yet "feeling great" (those couple hours of high energy on days ~4-5 were a fluke, or alpha reflection) or experiencing any elevated mental clarity, but the day-long sustained energetic stability is definately unusual for me. I suppose most people already can work all day, but at this time, it is an accomplishment for me.
My mood isn't yet elevating per-se, in fact if anything, more misery is coming to the surface. I've noticed that whenever I engage in breaking my own destructive habits and working to replace them with constructive ones, all this latent, subconscious misery of mine comes out of the woodwork of my being and swirls around so that I feel it on a conscious level. This raises a point of decision:
A) Turn back so it will "go away" again.
B) Keep moving forward.
In many ways, I've been A with my life. I've noticed that whenever choosing option B and continuing to go forward, usually the misery gets worse until one day it peaks and then starts to fade away. This seems to be very much like the nature of toxin/waste removal in the body. First you have to upset the solidified toxins so they desolidify and float around in the bloodstream and lymph instead of clump in organs, then you've got to have the fortitude to tolerate the elevated level of pain and sickness that comes with having the stuff in the blood while doing that which is necessary to get it out of the body through the excratory channels, instead of taking the coward's way out and letting it settle in various areas of the body again. You may not feel it when it's in the organs as much as when its in the blood, but it's still there, killing you in subtle ways.
Pre-sleep procedure
I've worked out a rough two-phase pre-sleep procedure. It isn't as step-by-step as the wake-up procedure. This pre-sleep procedure begins when I feel like winding down, anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours before I go to sleep.
The first phase of the pre-sleep procedure consists of:
- Taking a final drink of water, based on my levels of hydration. I'll do this atleast 30 minutes prior to lying down, but ideally 1-2 hours prior.
- Turning down the lights as much as possible.
- Cutting off all communication with people, no phones, e-mail, instant messengers, forums, or whatever
- Changing into sleepwear (or nakedness, if applicable)
- Cleaning up my space, putting away any work I was doing
- Brushing my teeth
- Preparing my sleeping area
- Setting/verifying my wakeup alarm
As you can see, the initial phase takes maybe 5-15 minutes.
The second phase consists of reading until I start falling asleep while reading, or until i decide to lay down. It could also consist of doing nothing but going straight to sleep, or of other relaxing activities. For now it's pretty much reading.
Dietary parameters
I'm instituting these general dietary parameters:
1. No large meals after 2 pm.
2. No food/drink 4 hours prior to going to sleep, except water and small amounts of organic fruits/veggies (if available, i'm not yet making it a requirement to eat them)
3. Be careful not to indiscriminately over eat
I decided on these parameters after eating a large meal on Day 8 at 7pm and going to sleep 2.5 hours later. It interfered with going to sleep, and that whole day I had eaten a lot more than usual, as a strategy to be more awake. Good sleep isn't compatible with being stuffed senseless. Granted, in certain scenarios, one can have a large meal and go straight to sleep and be totally asleep. However, such a protocol is incompatible with this early riser program.
Negative Influences
My waking hours are further complicated by many negative influences, and sometimes it was almost tempting to just rage and wallow about how every time I try to get something done, people around me attack my attention. This sleep transition is really helping wake me up to this stuff at an accelerated rate. More and more I'm feeling what is called "energy vamping" and I'm also becoming very sensitive to energetic fighting, i.e. getting in ego/idea wars with people. I'm also becoming extremely sensitive to the energy vamp "wallowing in self-pity/hatred" behaviors. I'm not only more sensitive to others doing this, but also notice very quick if I'm doing it. I've found that in the past few days, I've had to be very vigilant and proactive about making sure my attention was focused on what I wanted to focus on, and this mostly involved thwarting the efforts of perceptual persuasion of others, as well as sprinklings of my own habitual (for almost two decades) leanings which are mostly fueled by the internal dialogue (not what it says, per se, but how it encourages analyzing, thinking, mental masturbation, dwelling).
This includes making sure I do not turn this public log of mine into a mental masturbation session. I feel that I'm already treading into mental masturbation territory, but the positive trade-off is that it's solidifying the early riser program for me.