My third and last HealthMonth rule is walking at least 10,000 steps six days a week.
This one is more difficult than I thought it would be. Optimally, I would like to take over 10,000 steps every day, but although I am enjoying my job and my classes, I am not managing my schedule very well. I really need to be in bed by 22:00 to wake up at 06:00, but instead I get to bed around 23:00 or midnight. A few things factor into this:
With these existing scheduling issues, my main exercise-related issues are:
Clearly, I need a schedule reboot, so here is my idea: go to bed at 22:00, wake up at 06:00, walk home, do homework for two hours, go for a brisk walk or run, do chores and/or make dinner, spend time with FunkyPlaid, do something fun by myself, and repeat the whole process. Goodness, that sounds boring and stifling all laid out like that, but it is what I will try to do.
In an upcoming HealthMonth post, I will write about adjusting caloric intake for an already-restricted diet without going completely insane.
Yesterday I felt pretty positive about my television-limiting rule for HealthMonth. Today I discovered that my next rule might crush my game entirely.
For months, I have been going to bed earlier than I ever have in the interest of getting enough sleep each night. My new job, which is rapidly becoming just “my job” in terms of referring to it, requires that I wake up by six-thirty every morning. I am a night-owl, so this has been a struggle for me, but I have been successful.
Until about two in the afternoon, when I get home and need to be wide-awake and starting in on my homework. Either I crash out for an hour or so, or I end up blearily stumbling through pages of reading, taking vague notes, and then re-reading frantically as the assignment looms.
My Fitbit was confusing me. It reported 94-97% sleep efficiency each night, with averages of seven hours per night. So I started going to bed earlier, figuring that the issue was not enough sleep instead of quality of sleep. Exhaustion persisted.
Yesterday, I decided to change the sensitivity on Fitbit’s sleep tracker from “normal” to “sensitive”. What resulted was this:
When I saw this, my heart sank. Even though I went to bed before midnight – which was especially difficult when I had barely seen FunkyPlaid all day and wanted to spend time with him – my longest block of sleep was just over an hour long. An hour! Not even a proper nap.
Granted, I had three things working against me last night:
One of the HealthMonth rules I chose for March is limiting my television consumption to seven hours per week, or roughly one hour per day. I pared down my Hulu subscription list to the following, in order of how much I enjoy them:
Honestly, the Hulu list could lose 6-9 without me noticing much. I also left an hour for Restaurant: Impossible, which is a show that FunkyPlaid and I enjoy watching together on live TV.
Technically, the hours are 45-ish minutes, and the half-hours are 22-ish minutes, but you get the idea. I am somewhat surprised that I watch this much television each week, since I used to be one of those anti-TV snobs, but I usually watch around the dinner hour, if I am eating alone, or the “I can’t look at my cataloging homework another moment” hour.
Glee and House did not make the cut. The latter has become laughably dull, while the former actively enrages me, so I read Glee Sucks instead.