- Physical exercise
- Meditation
- Journaling
- Fasting
- Sleeping hygiene
- Breathing exercise
The list might seem overwhelming but having many routine items equals more triggers for improvement, more present moments and chances for practice integration.
When new routine is introduced in order to make it permanent the key thing is to remove the friction until you start to gain the real benefits.
Physical exercise
The year 2002, winter, it was cold....
Yeah, around that year I started with strength training exercises on regular basis. The training was organized around muscle groups, usually I would leave bigger muscle groups like legs and back alone and combined smaller groups. In average I would train 5x/week which usually led to fatigue and injuries.
For the last two years I'm training with a group 3x/week, it's a 1h functional training. We start with 10-15min warmup and finish with 10min of stretching. The main training is essentially bodyweight exercises with various intervals and intensity.
On no-training-days, weekends especially, I tend to brisk-walk for ~30min immediately after lunch. Apart from many healthy benefits by activating big muscle groups the muscles absorb glucose independently of insulin which would reduce overall insulin secretion.
Usually I supplement with whey protein and magnesium. Omega-3 and other vitamins only when I'm sure that I'm not going to get it that day from the regular food. I've dropped creatine temporary due to reduced strength exercises as we switch fully to online trainings without weights.
Check out my jewlery:
Meditation
2015 I started mindfulness meditation with headspace. With great introductory videos it was a great segue to mindfulness. The animation called "Expectation" the busy road with cars representing the thoughts and person in the middle of the road trying to avoid, stop or follow the cars is the one that I always recall when trying to explain to someone what mind training is.
I've used headspace or better yet misused it for at least a year. I can't pinpoint now the actual problem I had, maybe I had less patience and big expectations. For one period I was focused so much on the streak which was absurd. For example, one period when I was exhausted from the huge jet-leg I've started the session to play out and went to sleep.
As they are started adding a whole slew of specialized packs I started to feel overwhelmed and getting the feeling that I'm not utilizing the app fully and decided to unsubscribe and switch to free alternative, Oak. I've picked Oak as I'm following Kevin Rose activities since Diggnation, and for Oak he decided to make the development process fully transparent. From market analysis, costs, feature planing through launch. It was a great in detail insight through app development process.
I've used Oak maybe for a year until Sam launched Waking Up. With Waking Up my mindfulness practice really started to be meaningful and really nature of the mind exploration. The structure of the program is very well organized in two main categories which are Theory and Practice. Starting with 28day introductory course, which is mandatory to unlock daily meditations. The essence of the app is really great content with variety of topics related to mind exploration. The Stoic Path by William B. Irvine series are the great example of how stoic philosophy is correlated to mindfulness and many other stoic approaches to life.
As I've mention in the beginning of this post that is good to have many triggers which would help bridge the practice and real life Moment in Waking Up is great example of such. It's the only allowed notification on my phone which I always find effective. Moment is short audio (~1min) with aim to experience clarity and freedom of meditation in everyday life.
Waking Up made me realise that anything can be object of meditation to which you bring full attention, it could be the breath, thoughts, walking, making espresso really anything.
🎁 Here's a link to redeem one free month of Waking Up. (Redeem code is probably consumable so if it's not working and you'd still like to try, hit me up)
Journaling
I've always been better in nonverbal expressions of my thoughts. I guess mostly because I have more time to formulate what I want to say.
Prior to some important discussions I tend to write down the outline of what I would like to cover or share. Initially I had struggle making regular journaling part of my routine, I felt like robot repeating the same cliché things over and over without really feeling that way. At that time I needed some guidance on how to approach daily journaling which was exactly what YoYuu supposed to solve.
YoYuu was the project I started with two of my friends and the idea behind YoYuu app was to guide you through journaling process with dynamic conversational UI. Unfortunately as this was side-project for all of us we just passively stopped the development due to other commitments.
Last few years I'm using DayOne in very infrequent and informal way in which I write down my thoughts and observations as I'm writing to my future self. I've adjusted the approach to be little more descriptive after I did retrospection of entries from the previous year. Jornaling makes my thoughts more tangible.
Fasting
As getting older it became clear to me that not only what I eat but when I eat arises as the key aspect of how feel and perform. On top of that, I think my digestion process is pretty slow, I need roughly 3-4 hours to process some regular size meal which attributes my hunger tolerance. Basically to be at my best, physically or mentally I need to be in fasted state.
Back in 2016, I've heard of something called circadian rhythm which totally resonated with me and I started with time restricted feeding. Later that year Zero was launched helping me to track my fasts. I've broaden my fasting knowledge with Dr. Valter Longo's book Longevity Diet.
Initially I played with various fasting regimens but now I've settled with the classic 16:8. My longest fast was 72h and I regret that one as I failed to properly break the fast, I started to eat normal lunch few hours after a break with pretty sugary beetroot juice. 🤦
Now I regularly fast during a workweek scheduled such that my physical exercise activity is during fasted state.
Sleep hygiene
Naturaly, next step to focus on was sleeping. As most, I was convinced that I'm totally fine with 6h of sleep until I tried 8+. Realization of importance of sleep was also correlated to age and especially emphasised after I became a dad.
Getting to bed at the same time, winding down at least one hour before going to bed which means no screen time, blue/bright lights, no late night snacks and especially no alcohol or coffee. Although alcohol reduces the sleep latency it also might increase the deep sleep but it reduces the REM sleep, the phase in which brain consolidate the memories amongs other things. Room temperature is also important, it should be around 18°C. Sleep tracking also serves as the trigger to be more mindful about the sleep and it gives me load-capacity for a day.
I highly recommend Why We Sleep by Mathew Walker which transformed my relation to sleep.
Breathing exercise
I've started breathing exercises with Oak but I never managed to have such a powerful impact until I tried Wim Hof Breathing Excercises. It was in the middle of Covid-19 first lockdown and on top of that Zagreb was hit by pretty severe earthquake so I was craving for a tool to help me deal with a stress that was mounting. The whole family started practicing with me back then.
When doing it by instructions with full attention and commitment I believe that no living person could deny the energizing effect on completion, among other things like clarity, it's a state of bliss.
As it's recommended to do it on empty stomach I usually did it before the training but since I'm still kind of sleepy when laying on the ground I keep yawning and stretching which breaks the rhythm so I moved it post training.
Along with breathing I do cold exposure with ice showers and occasional ice baths. Every shower I finish up with cold water for ~2min which also has strong energizing aftereffect, reduces inflammation, muscle sourness, it speeds up blood circulation and metabolism. It's like a controlled stress exposure, a flu shot for stress.
This is the way.
Stay strong and healthy.
