Call Me Dua Lipa, 'Cause I Got Some New Rules

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Unlike Dua Lipa, however, my rules aren't a fun and sexy mantra I can repeat to myself so I can get over him. (There is no him.) (I'm gay.) I've just made a list of rules for my life to try to abide by so I can be a little healthier and a little more positive. You can't just wake up one day and be a workout-nut vegan who wakes up and does yoga at 6 am every day, you gotta start small, and this is my start.

Rule #1: No eating after 10 pm.I don't have issues with my weight, but eating at night messes up your digestive schedule. Moreover, it makes my tummy feel funny in the morning, so no more midnight snacking for me.

Rule #2: Go to bed by midnight.No matter what work I have or what I'm doing, I have to stop and go to bed at midnight, otherwise I lose any semblance of a healthy schedule. This also helps with #1, because when I stay up too late I get hungry, and when I'm hungry I can't sleep.

Rule #3: Rise by 10 am.I know 10:00 in the morning is pretty late for most humans, but when the majority of my responsibilities occur in the afternoon and evening, it can be hard for me to find motivation to wake up in the mornings. But when I do, I feel so much better and end up having a much more productive day.

Rule #4: No caffeine after 4 pm.Honestly, the time for this one is a bit superfluous. I know nothing about how long it takes for the body to process caffeine, but 4 pm sounded good. Hopefully, if I cut my caffeine intake (mostly coming from black and green tea) I can have an easier time sleeping at my new midnight-bedtime.

Rule #5: You must eat one (1) healthy meal per day.Like #3, this one isn't much, but as a student, even this can be a lot. Someday soon I would love for this rule to become "you are only allowed one (1) cheat meal per day", but for now that's just not practical. I need to ease myself into this whole healthy-living thing, and that means baby steps. If I try all at once to be 100% healthy 100% of the time, I'm not gonna have a good time. Most likely I'd become overwhelmed by my inability to do it and give up completely.

Rule #6: No use of the following phrases:-I hate myself-I want to die-I'm going to kill myself. These are all things I say, always joking, in response to kind of anything and everything. It's a popular form of self-deprecating humor amongst the kids these days, and there's nothing wrong with that, but for me it had a similar effect on me that the "not a real whatever" language has, which you can read all about in my article "I Think I'm Becoming Positive" from two weeks ago. I don't mean any of it, but saying it has an effect on my perspective nonetheless. And if there's one thing I learned from 1984, it's that the language we use determines the thoughts we have.

Rule #7: Just because you screw up once doesn't mean you should give up.I have this bad habit where, once I fall out of a routine that I'm trying to make a habit, I declare the whole thing a failure and I give up completely. Gotta stop that. I'm gonna break these rules, I've come to terms with that. #2 will probably be the first to go, to be honest. I get wrapped up in doing stuff and end up awake until 3 am. I know that and that's fine, so long as I keep trying to keep in with my rules. If I can make midnight my usual and 3 am a special occasion, I'll call it a success.So am I going to become a workout-nut vegan who gets up at 6 am everyday to do yoga? Probably not. That's ridiculous. But if I start getting up at 10, then I can bump it to 9, and what the heck maybe one day I'll get up at 7:30. Baby steps to building a routine that's good for my brain and good for my body, so that I can be in peak physical and mental health in order to enact my plot to overthrow the government and tear down the white-supremacist patriarchal power structure of the world.EDIT: In the day it's been since I first drafted this, I got home late, was starving and ate after 10 pm. BUT IT'S OKAY.