The importance of The atomic habit in chronic illness

I’m writing this blog post at 4:18 in the morning halfway down my block in a key turn out of my driveway. This week I wanted to try to plug coast every day for the first time in eight years. It is a lofty goal, but something that I think I can do. My problem is that there aren’t enough hours in the day. It only seems like I get my early morning to myself and when I come home around 7:30, it’s mom on duty for the rest of the day.

I am super lucky to have my mom living here with us, and for my son to have his grandma in his life as I did growing up. So I can’t say that mom on duty for the entire day, but pretty much is mom on duty when I’m with Sean and then running errands when I’m not with him. So it never seems like I have enough time in my day to get the thoughts out of my head that I want to keep forever. I also want to use them to be of service to others like myself who feel like they may not be able to go on another day.

I was diagnosed with MS 15 years ago in 2007, and getting a diagnosis like that seems like the end of the world. It was just the beginning of my journey. And every day seems like another day and experimentation of time efficiency. I just needed to see how I could keep the function that I had for as long as I could without wasting any second. And it’s only been over the past couple of weeks and I’ve really started to invest in my mind like I invest in my body at the gym.

One of the first self-development books that I started reading, or listening to because I certainly don’t have the time to read a book, I have to be doing something else to make sure that I’m using my time efficiently. What I found is working on the hand bike after my strength training and weight-bearing cardio are done, so it’s at about 6:45 AM that I get to really invest in my brain. Or my mind.

The first book that I read was atomic habits, on New York Times best seller by James clear. It was clear to me that I needed to get back into self development, because having a chronic illness bike MS it’s just a time suck everything that you do. Whether it’s dropping things for my hands or taking a super long time to get somewhere by foot, I need to make sure that the stuff I carry with me or drop kick down the hall because I have two crutches in case Gary is most efficient as possible. I hope that my son doesn’t grow up in life thinking that we just kick things down the hall to get them now. But for this I just have to hope that he sees it’s just that I carry a lot of stuff with me.

My latest experiment in time efficiency down to the atomic habits has been me getting up in the morning taking a shower getting dressed and then going down the hall to my kitchen to get all the stuff that I’ve made the night before for my gym workout, including pre-workout drink with C4 powder, energy bites that I had made previously during the week, and a bottle of water to pour in and mix it all up with. The only thing I forgot as I said here is the Apple because I didn’t write it on the Post-it note that I had left on the counter for me.

I think back to cheaper by the dozen, which I read when I was younger about a couple who had 12 children and wartime efficiency experts. I think it was in the 1940s, but they would constantly do experiments to see how much stuff they could get done during the day. It was primarily for the work environment, time is money, and even though I’m not concerned about my money output right now, I am concerned about my energy output and saving my brain. Which includes saving my mind my brain is just a shell. I am in here.

I won’t say that every day I wake up with the same kind of energy, because MS is such an unpredictable disease. A lot of it has to do with how hydrated you are from the day before how well fuel you are with the food that you eat and the types of food that you eat, which I’ve also been experimenting with over the past year. So when I’m in the right frame of mind I need to make sure that I can get my thoughts down because I think things over test that way. Not running to and from a machine at the gym or on a car ride with my son and my mom to an errand, but I need to sit and think.

And getting it down it’s just the way that I need to do it. Right now I am in Google Drive in my blog post folder, voice texting this to myself so that I can see if I can transcribe my words at the time that I’m putting it down. I have been using Rev. com for the past two days because it was what I knew worked for me when I wrote my book years ago. I would just come up with the title of a chapter and then ask myself 20 questions and record my answers. That was the framework of the book. So it’s good for me too know that I can’t just type as quickly with my fat thumbs on my iPhone, but I also can’t afford the money that it would cost me to get a transcribed by someone else.

Experimentation seems to be really working for me, I hope that when I get this finished I can drive down the block know that my blog post was posted. I’ve been driving it down to the atomic habit, and we will see tomorrow if I can use this new process to just easily think things out and clear the clutter in my mind.

For chronic illness, I would say this is one of the most important things that I need to do, to realize that I have a brain and it can frame how I feel for the rest of my day, he can get me set up with my processes, and make gliding through my day hopefully very efficient. This takes a lot of stress out of the mix, and I hope we can do the same for you. Until tomorrow.