This year I learned to stop allowing conditions to matter so much.
It started with some terrible nights of sleep.
I almost always sleep well. I usually get my eight hours. When something is really throwing my nervous system off, I feel it at night. It’s unconscious. I wake up in the middle of the night and have a hard time going back to sleep. I try to distract myself. I take melatonin. I take ibuprofen. I start negotiating with myself.
Earlier this year I had a string of bad nights like this, mostly from stresses that had gotten blown out of proportion. When this happens, it is easy to beat yourself up. It is easy to wake up and decide the day is already damaged.
But I started noticing something strange.
As soon as the sun came up, my day would start as normal. My bedsheets would be twisted up from the night before, but the day itself was still there.
I started treating it like an experiment. Could I have a great day regardless of a poor night of sleep?
I found that it was totally possible.
I had a string of bad nights of sleep with a string of really great days. Mostly because I stopped allowing the story of a poor night’s sleep to color the entire day.
The sleep still mattered. But it mattered less than the story I was tempted to build around it.It turns out there is some research behind this.
In one exploratory study connected to Ellen Langer’s work, participants slept either eight hours or five hours. Then researchers used altered clocks to change what the participants believed about how much they had slept. People who believed they had slept eight hours tended to perform better on a reaction-time task than people who believed they had slept five.
The story we wake up with matters.
I also learned a small practice from BJ Fogg, the Stanford behavior scientist who wrote Tiny Habits. He calls it the Maui Habit.
The habit is almost comically small. When your feet hit the floor in the morning, you say something like, “It’s going to be a great day.”
If that feels too fake, Fogg suggests softening it: “It’s going to be a great day somehow.”
Somehow leaves room for the fact that you slept badly. It does not require you to pretend. It just keeps the day open.
Before bed at the end of the day, I would also scan my day and look for the things that still went well.
And often, regardless of the sleep I had gotten, there was plenty there. This has become empowering beyond sleep.
Any time the conditions outside are not exactly what I would want them to be, I can remember the same idea.
The condition is real.
But any condition does not get to decide the whole day.
Even after a bad night, the day is still available…
xx David
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