The routine is fifteen minutes of stretching and ten minutes of writing before work. After a good night it happens easily. After a bad one, which is three or four times a week, I skip both entirely and feel behind all day. Building a routine that only survives good days seems pointless but I don't know what the low-energy version looks like.
Move the writing to after work on bad days rather than dropping it. The stretching is time-of-day dependent, the writing probably isn't, and you've been treating them as one block when they're two habits with different constraints.
Do it before you're properly awake rather than after. My stretching only survives because it happens between getting out of bed and doing anything else. No decisions have been made yet, so there's nothing to lose an argument with.
Same, and putting the mat on the floor the night before is the highest-leverage thing I've ever done for a morning habit.
Check what a bad night actually costs you. For me it isn't energy, it's that I wake up forty minutes later and the slot is gone. If that's your version, protect the slot rather than the energy, and a later alarm you keep beats an earlier one you snooze.
@bedtime_bargain · last mo. · 3 replies
Design the bad-day version explicitly and give it a name, so it's a thing you do rather than a failure you settle for.
Mine is two tiers: full version and minimum version, decided in the first thirty seconds after getting up based on how I feel, not renegotiated later. Your minimum might be three minutes of stretching and one written sentence. The point is that the minimum still counts as having done it, which preserves the identity and the cue, and that's what carries a habit through a bad month.
The thing that ruins this is treating the minimum as cheating. It isn't. On bad-sleep days the minimum is the whole win.
Separately, three or four bad nights a week over a long stretch is worth mentioning to a doctor at some point. Not because it's necessarily anything, but because people put up with it for years and it's more often fixable than not.
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@hip_opener_hana · last mo.
Two tiers with the decision made immediately, rather than talking myself out of it at minute five. That's the fix.
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@negativesplitz · last mo.
Naming them matters more than it sounds. Short version and skipped are completely different things psychologically even when the difference is two minutes of stretching.
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