Uppercase Life

Having trouble being consistent? Feel like you are constantly doing things the hard but you don't know how to streamline your day? Maybe you are reinventing the wheel. Maybe you just need a reliable system. 

What happens when stress begins to get the better of you and you feel like you just need a quick break? Here are 7 ways to cope with stress which are better than binging social media or getting hopped up on sugar.

There are so many things you'd love to do if you could only get the chance. But what if your big break never comes? What if life never provides you with the chance you are hoping for? Is it really healthy to be waiting on a chance?

What if the things you want to do have already been done? What if someone already had your idea and is doing it better than you? How can you be original in a world with soooo much content?

You're listening to The Uppercase Life, where we're all about being good at doing good. I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. The world keeps turning. And for those of us who have big ideas and burning ambition, sometimes it feels like there just aren't enough hours in the day to do all those things we desire, much less all those other things that we're obligated to do, whether we would like to do them or not.
And with a smart phone in hand, we venture out into the world. We're busily darting from one task to the next, and often we're filling those spare moments with furtive glances at messages or mindlessly browsing social media. It's like we are looking up. Less and less. We feel driven to do more and more. And due to our always connected culture and this burgeoning work from home movement that's come up over the last decade.
The average worker today experiences less what I would call separation between work and personal time than ever before. Our demanding lifestyles turn us into demanding people with lower tolerances for things like long wait times, whether we're at a restaurant or whether we're ordering an item shipped to us from the other side of the world. And I feel this all the time.
I order things off of Amazon and I want them now, if possible. Tomorrow at the latest. Two days is a long wait. I mean, but really, what's wrong with that? The times are changing. We can move faster. We can do more. We can spend our free time indulging in this wealth of information and entertainment that's available at our fingertips.
We're living life to the fullest, right? Well, sure, we could do that. Maybe you find the exhaustion of modern life a fair trade for the incredible amount of information and opportunity that we have today. And honestly, a lot of times I feel that way. Maybe you'd argue that the speed of life today isn't really doing you any harm.
And maybe you're right. Maybe it isn't. But what if it eroded away your values? What if you realized that it was beginning to corrode your ethics? What if your character began to suffer as a result of your high intensity routine? Sound a little dramatic or unlikely? What if the speed of your life made being ethical more like a luxury that you just couldn't afford?
Well, actually, that was the conclusion of John Darley and Daniel Batson. In the 1970s, Darley and Batson began thinking about a biblical parable called the Good Samaritan. And in this parable, a man is in need on a highly trafficked road between Jerusalem and Jericho, and he's waylaid by thieves and badly injured. Several devout religious figures pass by the man, but they don't end up stopping to help him.
They have appointments to keep and they presumably don't want to get involved. They don't know what happened to this guy or why he's there. But then a traveling Samaritan notices the man and helps him to safety, paying for his food and paying for his lodging before he continues on his own journey. And although the story of the Good Samaritan is upheld as a heroic tale in a kind of an ethical act, Darley and Batson wondered how our level of hardness might affect our willingness to be that generous and that kind.
And what better place to test some theory like this than a theological seminary, a place where people would be highly aware of this parable and would hopefully be inspired ing to such ethical standards. And so they set up the experiment at a seminary. They picked 40 volunteers, and they gave these volunteers different levels of information. They had them travel from one area on the campus to another, and in their path, they placed a person, an actor, who appeared to be someone slumped in an alleyway, possibly injured.
Unknown. They would see this person as they went on their way, and they would have the option to do something or not. Now, they gave these participants different goals. So for some of them, they told them, you have to go to the other side of the campus and perform this task and you have this amount of time to get there.
For others, they told them, You are already running behind, you're late and you need to hurry on your way. And there were various levels of control for the different groups that they had. But the short end of this experiment was, as you might expect, the people who were told that they were already late or that time was critical walked past this person in need and didn't stop to help them.
Whereas the people who felt like they had some additional time or were not in as big of a hurry, had a much, much higher percentage of likelihood to either personally help the man or to find help for the man by calling for the aid of others. And the conclusion for Darley and Batson was this As the speed of daily life increases, ethics become a luxury.
Maybe your hurry doesn't seem to hurt you. But what if you had the unique opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others and your inability to look up and your pressure to keep moving is creating unethical and calloused habits in your daily life. Maybe it is time to slow down. Maybe it's time to take the headphones out to look around when you're at the red light, to put your phone away for a little bit and ask yourself, is there a need here that I could meet?
Is there someone on my road today waiting for me to be their Good Samaritan? Don't trade your ethics for efficiency. Remember what's important and always be willing to prioritize people over productivity.

You're listening to The Uppercase Life, where the next choice you make might be the best choice you've made all day. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. Imagine your friend invites you to a social function. You walk into a crowded room and the entire experience is far more formal than you realize. People seem to be dressed nice, and they also appear to be maybe more wealthy and important than you.
And suddenly, you're very aware of the outfit that you chose for that occasion. And you just start feeling nervous. Maybe you weren't dressed well enough. Maybe you aren't in the right social class to be at this event. Any time we're acting under the watchful eye of the public, we have a heightened level of awareness of our own activities.
And, you know, we are highly social beings, so our brains understand intuitively the advantages of belonging to a tribe. It's important to fit into a social situation and to make good connections with others. These things are going to help us in the future on our journey. So it's natural to want to impress people and want to put our best foot forward.
We certainly don't want to damage our possibility at making good connections, maybe even finding love, or just generally garnering respect. This, though, can cause some unintended side effects, and depending on your personality type, this might range from being a minor inconvenience to a major problem for you in your life. You see, when we start thinking so hard about what everyone else is thinking about us, a few things tend to happen.
We tend to be more risk averse, which means we don't want to try things that we think will make us fail. We also are less likely to experiment for some of the same reasons. We don't want to try something new, something no one ever has seen before, because maybe they will like it. Who knows? But one of the most important things is we become more aware of our own perceived flaws.
Just overall, we become more self-conscious. And there's a line that our brain tells us. And it's important for us to identify this lie because it's a very natural one for our brain to tell us. But it also can be really crippling for our endeavors on a daily basis. And that lie is this if people see me fail, they're going to lose respect for me.
They're going to hate me, and things will not go well. But, you know, the truth is and surveys and data show this to be a fact that we generally respect people who we consider are genuine, who are vulnerable, and who are willing to admit their flaws. But there's something that comes into play when it's us in the spotlight.
It's called the spotlight effect. This idea that what people see when they look at us is more negative and more scrutinizing than it actually is. The truth is, we look at ourselves in the mirror and we can see every flaw. All of those aspects of ourself, whether they are physical, whether they are personality driven or mental. These are things that we think, you know, I wish I could change that or improve it.
And when we know that people are looking at us, those things bubbled to the top of our mind. And we start thinking, everyone sees in me what I see in me. But the truth is, they don't. For the same reason that you do not see them as being is flawed as they see themselves. Because we all have this bent for being a little self centric in that we are really concerned about us, how we appear, what people think of us.
And while we are thinking so much about ourselves, we're not actually paying as much attention to those other people and their flaws. The fact that people are thinking of us as hard and as deep as we're thinking of ourself in this particular instance is actually a positive thing because it means that if you do fail, even if we're talking a small public blooper, if you trip and you fall in an event, or if you fail on a larger scale, let's say you've started a business, you've had an idea, you've tried a thing, and it didn't really work out.
And you feel a sense of guilt or embarrassment thinking that isn't the way that I intended things to go. And I feel like I look a little bit stupid. You feel that way. But on the whole, most of the people around you are not taking your failure nearly as personally as you're taking it, which means that you have the freedom to get back up and try again and people aren't going to hold it against you as much as you think they're going to hold it against you.
In fact, if you can be humble, if you can be honest and vulnerable about your flaws and about the failures you've experienced, it actually builds respect in those people. They look at you and they think, What a relatable person. Because after all, it's very difficult to relate to somebody who has no flaws. I mean, it's not something I can relate very well to.
And you probably couldn't either. And this is where you can set yourself apart from most of the rest of the world. Understand this truth. Don't allow the gaze of others to paralyze you on the whole. Just remember, they don't care as much as you do. And this is actually to your advantage. You can fail. You can make mistakes and more than you think, without severely damaging your reputation and your failures.
And how you choose to respond to those failures may actually build their respect for you rather than destroy it. So if you find yourself in a situation where you can identify that you becoming very self-conscious and that spotlight effect is taking over, check your attitude, go ahead and have a little confidence, have some good humor, connect with other people.
And imagine that the most important thing in their mind is how you are perceiving them. Give them a little grace and give yourself a little grace along the way as well. And I think you'll find that you'll be more willing to try new things, cool things, and you'll find that you can get more done. If you can stop thinking so hard about what other people might be thinking about you.
Thank you for joining me on the show today. I hope you are living your life all caps bowls. But if you're struggling with something or have questions, please reach out to me at [email protected]. And if this content is helpful for you, consider leaving us a good rating or sharing it with a friend, which helps other people find it as well.
And until next time. Live like it matters.

You're listening to The Uppercase Life where we are recapturing the joy of being alive. I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. I like to do things. And over the years, I've learned to use calendaring to supercharge my ability to get those things done. Things that I really care about. And I can do more now in a day than the 20 year old version of me could have even imagined.
But there is a crucial part of my routine now that I didn't know how to do very well when I first began this journey of trying to optimize my time. When you look at a calendar, it's usually laid out in chunks, whether that's months or weeks or days or hours. These chunks are theoretically about equal in length. So that one hour today is roughly the equivalent of one hour tomorrow.
Therefore, if I schedule a one hour meeting today at 1:00 and then a 30 minute meeting today at 3:00, I have an hour in between to do whatever I want, right? Like more meetings or run to the grocery store. But that's not how life actually works. Back to back obligations and filling every available time slot will not actually make you better at all those things you're trying to get done.
It might just do the opposite. And that's because an important part of why is time usage and an often overlooked part of it is margin. Margin is the amount by which one thing is separated from another. Think of it as the space in between. In publishing, the margin is the blank part of the page between the text and where the book is going to be cut.
If you don't have the proper amount of margin, the page cut begins to intersect with the text. So a narrow margin sometimes leads to this problem of what we call cutting it too close. We use this terminology in our daily life as well. We say that we were always late for something or we almost miss our bus. We were cutting it close.
If we often choose to be cutting it close. This can produce some unintended side effects, the most obvious of which is eventually you're going to miss that bus, or you're actually going to be late for a meeting. But even beyond that, there is a psychological and a mental strain related to an overly full schedule. The margin, it's this really blessed realm of grace where we can breathe, where we can go to the bathroom, where we can maybe read for a few minutes, talk to a friend or some other low impact endeavor that doesn't involve hard work or focused attention.
Sometimes margin protects us from unintended delays like traffic, for example, allowing us to sit back and relax in a traffic jam. Because we know that we had a little extra time to spare. So the next time that you're looking at that block of time, whether it's a day or an hour, make sure to imagine the margin there. Build it into the plans that you make because it's up to you to properly regulate your movements and your commitments throughout your day.
If you try to cram every good opportunity or even every urgent work request in your life, you may find yourself feeling frustrated and bitter. You may find yourself blaming your boss, your family, or maybe even just the world in general for your feelings of fatigue and stress. But the truth is, you get to choose those things, and you got to make sure that you're setting your boundaries and creating your margin, because that's your responsible party and not theirs.
So I'm asking you, are you creating appropriate margin in your life? If not, find ways to create that margin. And when you do, I think it's going to be time well spent. Thank you for joining me on the show today. I'd love to hear how you choose to use your margin and you can send me an email at [email protected] with your thoughts, comments, ideas and if this has been helpful for you, consider sharing it with a friend or if you're feeling extra generous, leave a rating on the podcast store.
And until next time. Live like it matters.

You're listening to The Uppercase Life where we make hard things look easy. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. Every child is told to eat their vegetables before their dessert. At least I was growing up. And we're not always told why at first. But as you get older, we're told something like, Well, it's healthy. And partly it's because if you eat your dessert before your vegetables, you're likely not going to be hungry for your vegetables.
So we consider eating our vegetables as a discipline and eating our dessert as a pleasure. And that tiny lesson in life, I think, is really valuable. And I think cultivating a habit of disciplining ourself so that we can also enjoy some really pleasurable things later should spill over into other areas of our life. But adults are really just grown up kids, and even though we're older now and we should know better, sometimes we're not as disciplined as we ought to be.
And when our brains are contemplating what we want to do throughout the day, some things feel more like vegetables, and some things feel more like dessert. Oftentimes, we have real difficulty resisting that dessert and eating the vegetables and what that looks like is us constantly giving in to distractions or moving away from work that feels strenuous or overly taxing to our brains or even to our bodies.
And this is often where we experience what we would call procrastination, distraction or other sorts of things that basically just result in delays or us not doing the work at all because it's hard. But there's some really compelling reasons why we should be doing some of the harder things in our day. And first of all, a lot of the harder things have a higher return on investment than the easy things do.
Also, those things tend to enhance your relaxation later because rest and chill time is more enjoyable when you've had strain and stress. But one of the most compelling reasons to me is that most people don't. Most people don't discipline themselves and do the hard things. So if you can be in that tiny percentage of people who are good at doing that, then you're going to be ahead of the crowd.
In many regards. So what are some ways that we can do the hard thing first and make it easier? Yeah, I know it sounds hypocritical to say we want to do the hard thing, but we want to make it easier. However, I do want to push back against this notion that a hard thing will just always be hard, and there's nothing you can do about that.
Well, it's true that the thing that you're trying to do might be difficult, challenging, boring, maybe. Or maybe really stressful. But there are ways of making it easier and getting it done. So I want to give you three quick tips for getting the hard thing done first and maybe making it slightly less hard. There's a book by Greg McEwan called Effortless.
And in this book, he talks about combine things that you don't want to do with, things that you actually enjoy. And I love this concept. So, for example, if you're going to work on a difficult task and it's something you don't have to do often, but when you do, it's really stressful. Combine it with something you find pleasurable.
For example, when I'm looking over the financials from my business, which is something that I need to do on a periodic basis as someone who owns a company, but it's not something I'm particularly good at or enjoy when I do this, I tend to go out to a restaurant where I can sit and get some type of a treat that I wouldn't normally get.
So I might go and get a milkshake and sit and drink a milkshake while I look at the financials. And you might think a milkshake doesn't help you make better decisions about your finances, but actually it kind of makes me feel good and it puts me in a better mood. And so overall, that does improve my ability to process information and make decisions about my finances.
But you can't have a milkshake with everything you do, or that will have some negative impact on your health. Another way to look at it is associate your finishing with a reward at the end of every marathon. Should be a finish line and you should be able to be really proud of that and enjoy that and be able to look forward to the finalization of this difficult thing.
So associate the finishing of the thing with the reward, which means if this is something pleasurable, you don't get it until you're done in this case. And I find that also to be somewhat compelling for me, sometimes the reward is just I want to go outside because it's a pretty day and I'm tired of sitting at this computer and my reward will be I get to go outside, but I don't allow myself to go outside until I finished the task.
And this is the last thing and maybe it's not as big of a deal for you, but it is for my personality. And that is think less and do more. Most tasks require a certain amount of thinking, but I tend to be an overthinker and especially when the task is hard, I find myself sitting and thinking more than I'm actually doing the task.
And so it's important to engage in the activity and in the process of completing the task instead of constantly thinking through the task over and over again, that can be really mentally fatiguing. And to go back to the eating your vegetables example, if you sit and stare at those vegetables or think about how they're going to taste or maybe even touch them to your tongue before engaging in swallowing them, it's really not going to help.
You want to eat them. The best thing to do is just put them in and send them down the hatch, in my opinion, rather than over thinking the flavor in the texture. And I mean, what does it matter? You're going to have to eat it one way or the other. Just eat it for goodness sake, and go on to something else in your day.
And you can do this. I believe you can do this. There are going to be a lot of hard things in your life that you will have to get through, but you can get through them. And there are ways to associate some things you really love with the things that you don't like so much. And sometimes you're just going to have to stop overthinking it and finish your task.
But in any case, make sure to do the hard thing first, not just because it needs to be done, but because the pleasure you get later is going to be all that much better. Thank you for joining me today on the show. I'd love to hear your questions, your comments and if you enjoyed this, I'd love it if you shared this with somebody else who might enjoy it as well.
And if you're feeling especially generous, leave us a review that makes this content more likely to be seen by more people who might benefit from it. And until next time, live like it matters.

You're listening to The Uppercase Life where it's always quality over quantity. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. Sometimes work can feel like boxing. We weave from task to task. We duck, we jab. And just when we're feeling confident, we get hit with an email or a call and we stagger back into our corner and we reevaluate our strategy for the day.
And at the end of that day, we feel like we might have done a lot of things, and we definitely feel worn out. But we don't always necessarily feel victorious. Quality work requires a deeper focus. And this is true in any field. Important things demand a different kind of attention. And even though we can't give that attention to everything all the time, it's worth noting that many of us don't give that attention to anything any of the time.
But think about this. Therapists don't spend their sessions checking their Instagram. Heart surgeons don't book their Airbnbs between stitching up their patient Fighter pilots don't check the stock market between evasive maneuvers. You would hope that none of these things happen. Of course. Why? Because what they're doing is important and they really need to focus. Otherwise, things could go terribly wrong.
The thing is, we should consider the things that we do in life important also. Maybe you're not a heart surgeon and maybe you're not a fighter pilot, but you do have things you need to get done. And one technique that I think is especially useful for doing that is called time locking. There's a book called Rework by Jason Freed and David Hanson.
And in the book, they talk about time locking as a fixed period of time for work with no interruptions. Now, that might sound like nothing groundbreaking, but they're not talking about 30 minute increments. They're talking about blocks usually of 4 hours. Imagine that for a second. Ask yourself, when was the last time you had a completely uninterrupted block of 4 hours for working on any given project?
Now time locking isn't something you're going to do every single day of the week. That's just not feasible, but it's something that they recommend. You take one day of your week and lock that time a four hour span of time, and really do nothing but work on a project. That means that even important people and other important things do not have the ability to interrupt you during this locked period of time.
But what you can do during this locked period of time is engage in a level of focus that you won't be able to do other times of the week. And this is going to create productivity that just isn't possible if you're doing surface work and constantly switching from one task to the next. I'll give you a personal example of time locking that I utilized recently.
I was working on a personal project and part of it required me having a website up for this thing that I was going to do, and I'd had this on my list for quite some time. However, it wasn't critical and it wasn't time sensitive, and I found that I was constantly allowing other things to usurp the time that I thought I was going to spend working on this one project.
So I would get into the project and then I would see an email or get a call from somebody else with something that seemed more urgent or pressing. And I would just stop working on this thing I was going to do for myself because it didn't seem to be as pressing. And yet I knew that this task was taking me a lot longer than it realistically should if I really were to focus on it.
So I decided one day it was time to take this task off my to do list. So I blocked a segment of time. I got myself a tall drink of iced tea, and I didn't leave the room until I finished the project. I spent between three and 4 hours and I didn't take any emails, any calls, and I didn't talk to anyone.
I just invested the time in doing it. And what was amazing to me was that I was able to get done in that 4 hours. What I wasn't able to get done in two months prior to that, where I would work on and off on this project and really not get very far on it. Those 4 hours allowed me to clear that off my to do list.
I was very happy to have it done. And honestly, I could have had it done way before that if I had disciplined myself and locked that time. So time locking, being a fixed period of time has a couple of purposes. One, of course, you probably already noticed is to banish interruptions. Interruptions cost us a lot of focus. It can be up to 20 minutes for your brain to completely reengage with a task that you've been interrupted from.
So when you time lock, you're preventing people from being able to interrupt you, which means you might have to put your phone or your watch on to airplane mode to make sure that no notifications come through. But besides just banishing interruptions, locking time allows you to create momentum because we're constantly doing one thing and then the next, even if we aren't interrupted, we often don't get momentum on one single project.
And when you create that momentum, you'll find that over time, in that four hour block, you start getting more and more productive because you're more and more engaged and things are coming more naturally. And what you'll probably find at the end of that time is that you will feel tired because it will be like running a race. And a lot of times the way that we do projects would be like if we tried running a race and then every 50 feet or so we stopped to talk to a friend or we stopped to check our phone or something like that.
So this is taking the time to really run the race and finish it. And at the end of that 4 hours, you're going to be fatigued. You're going to be tired. But you will probably find that you've accomplished a lot more, maybe more than you could have done in days otherwise. And that is one of the other main goals of time.
Locking it is to get a thing finished. So often we have all these unfinished things sitting on our to do list, and if we were to really look at those things and ask how long would they take? It's maybe not that they would take so long. It's just that we haven't given that amount of time to it. And if we gave that amount of time to it uninterrupted, we could probably knock that thing off the to do list for good.
And it really benefits us mentally, emotionally to be done. You know that feeling, right? That feeling of being done. You didn't just do work. You finished the work. That is a really good feeling and we need that experience more often. But so many times, those distractions and our lack of momentum prevent us from actually finishing the thing. So you should have dedicated time every week for the things that you're doing, but I suggest you go a step beyond and have locked time.
A long block of multiple hours do not allow interruptions and really focus on getting your work finished. It will change the way you work, I guarantee it, and you will see an increase in your productivity. But it's going to be difficult at first, especially if you're not used to doing that. Your brain will want to interrupt itself, so it will be something that you'll have to practice and try.
And don't be surprised if that first hour is really hard. But I'd love to hear your feedback and comments on your experience with time locking when you try it. So shoot me an email at [email protected] and let me know how you like your time and what you were able to accomplish when you did. And until next time, live like it matters.

You're listening to The Uppercase Life now. I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. Life is full of cycles. We can see them all around us. We can look outside. We see the seasons changing. Unless you're in California, of course, we can see plants growing, blooming, dying and growing again. And we talk about things like the circle of life, because we know that life is full of cycles and you also are full of cycles.
In fact, there's one in particular I want to talk to you about called the circadian rhythm. And you may have heard this term, it's been around for a very long time. Circadian as a concept has been around at least since the fourth century B.C. and people use it to talk about the circles of events in a day. It comes from the root circa Deum, which means around a day, and it refers to like a daily cycle of your body.
A lot of times you'll hear people talking about circadian rhythms in relation to sleep and wake cycles, and that is part of what circadian rhythms are. But I think it's really important for us to know and be aware of how our body operates in a normal day and how that operation, whether it's going well or maybe not so well, is going to impact the other activities that we do throughout the day, because if our bodies aren't functioning well, that's going to affect a whole host of other things.
And one of the first big steps is just to recognize and acknowledge that we do have a daily cycle and not every person has the same daily cycle. But there is some similarities for pretty much every human on the planet when it comes to the circadian rhythm. Often we are not aware of that rhythm and we don't think of it very much until it's disrupted.
Say, for example, you travel overseas. It's very likely that your sense of meal time and your sense of sleep time is going to be thrown off by the different time zones and probably by the long trip getting there. And you're going to start noticing the effects of that in your body. We talk about jetlag, and part of that has to do with your circadian rhythm.
Your circadian rhythm also influences your melatonin, which is how you get ready for sleep. It affects your hormones, your digestive system and other body activities that are linked to that rhythm. And being mindful of this is really important. If you want to be alert and energetic and engaged in your daily life. And I'm just going to go out on a limb and assume that you probably do want these things.
But if you want the benefits of having a healthy circadian rhythm, you need to be aware of what might be causing you problems in that rhythm. Because if things aren't going well, you're going to feel off. And sometimes you don't even know how to articulate that. But it's true. You are just out of sync, out of rhythm, if you will.
So here are a few factors to consider when it comes to maintaining a healthy circadian rhythm. One of the more undervalue food aspects of a good rhythm is light and the primary source of light in all the rhythms of life, not just for us, but also for the animals and the trees is obviously the sun. Sunshine is a really important factor in your circadian rhythm.
And a lot of times we work jobs that keep us out of the sunshine to a certain extent. So it's really important to expose yourself to some sunshine throughout your days. This really helps your body know when to produce certain chemicals, and the sunlight enlivens you, tells your body it's time to be awake and move. If your environment is too dark during certain parts of the day, your brain really is thinking about sleep and rest, and it's not being conditioned to feel like it should be active or awake.
So it is important to get a good amount of sunshine, not just light from a screen. However, light from a screen is also a light source and it needs to be taken into consideration. And if you are taking in light from electronics, particularly mobile devices that you have around you near times when you should be resting and going to sleep, this is also going to disrupt your circadian rhythm.
So it's best to be using your devices and your screens during an active time of the day. If you're trying to wind down and go to sleep, you should not be on your phone. You may think of it as a method for unwinding at the end of the day, but it is a light source that's very close to your face and it can cause your brain to think that it should still be awake.
So while you may be thinking that you're doing it to help you fall asleep, you may inadvertently be creating some very poor quality sleep patterns in your circadian rhythm. Another thing to consider is physical motion. Being active produces physical fatigue, which is really important to getting sound sleep and that sleep wake cycle is a big part of the circadian rhythm.
So if you're not tired by the time you should be going to sleep and be tired. I mean full body physically tired, then you probably won't sleep very well. Being mentally exhausted can be a type of tired, but sometimes that actually keeps us awake more than it helps us sleep. So it's really important to be getting some physical motion in your day, whether that's running in the morning, going to the gym, playing a sport, or even just doing some basic stretching and free body weights at home is a great way to get your heart rate up and to get your body moving something else.
And you're going to hate me for this. I know, but I have to bring it up because it's very important is caffeine. Caffeine is a huge factor in your circadian rhythm and a lot of people simply take it whenever they want it or feel like they need it without thinking of how it's actually impacting their sleep wake cycle.
So caffeine is something that a lot of times experts will recommend that you avoid, particularly during the later times of the day. Research has shown it's not just if you're going to drink a coffee or some caffeinated beverage before bed. It's actually any time after noon. When you are taking in a lot of caffeine, you are risking your ability to sleep better later on.
And I know that's difficult and I know sometimes we feel like I can't get through my work day without that caffeine, but actually that dependance on the caffeine may be causing you problems in your circadian rhythm. So be careful with that and don't be sending the wrong signals to your brain through caffeine. And lastly, one of the most important factors of the circadian rhythm is consistency.
And depending on your lifestyle, that might be really difficult for you to achieve. But just like the name implies circadian rhythm, it's a rhythm. So if you are not sleeping and waking with some regularity, your rhythm is going to sound wrong. Your body is a beautiful machine and it can do marvelous things, but if you're not caring for it properly, it's not going to be able to function well.
So when you're circadian rhythm is suffering, your concentration in your awareness, your energy levels and even your overall happiness is going to suffer as well. And conversely, when you have developed a really good circadian rhythm, you're going to find that you can concentrate better, you're more aware, you retain more information, you have more energy to do the things you want to do, and you just feel better.
Overall, as a person, I don't know about you, but I'm trying to do some difficult things in life and I want to accomplish some hard goals. And if I'm going to do that, I'm going to have to make sure I'm taking care of the body that's going to help me accomplish them. And you can't ask your body to do hard work and accomplish big things if you're not giving it proper sleep and proper activity.
So what are some things that have worked well for you in building a healthy circadian rhythm? I'd love to hear your feedback, your thoughts and your experiences, and you can email me at [email protected]. Until next time, live like it matters in.