Habits Archives

230821 – Morning Pages

A quick post about food, habits and clothes. And then some gyaan.

9:31. At the Starbucks. Even though I woke up at 7, I puttered around the house. I had bought shoes and some other things yesterday from a Decathlon and I just wanted to sort of unpacking. And torture myself with the thoughts of wearing those when I am on my way to EBC.

Oh, I am wearing better clothes since yesterday. I mean not old, fata hua tees. But better shirts and all that. I wore a Kurta (or the closest garment I had to one) for Rakhi at M&m. And today, I am wearing a shirt that I would otherwise reserve for an office, in-person meeting.

No, it’s not cool. Neither it offers any comfort. But I have decided to mould myself to the ways of the world. Enough of gareebi. I just need to learn fake smiles and social conversations and some humor and I would be on my way to becoming a Steve Jobs. Lol. Wishful thinking.

The other good thing that happened was that I managed a 46-hour fast. On a whim. I have realised that the age-old adage is correct – that you eat food only when you are in a societal construct (meeting people, friends, family etc). Or when you are bored. Or you are habituated. You know, you want a chai as soon as you wake up.

So, Saturday and Sunday, I kept myself very very busy. And that helped. I need to now fill my calendar with things. The flip side is that I won’t get to work out. But I know I would be able to avoid eating.

The tough part was to say no to all the awesome things that VG’s place had. And then I had to meet some colleagues. I was tempted to pick from their plates but I did not. I did have a tiny morsel of Coconut from M. And then another tiny piece of cake from the colleague whose birthday we were celebrating. So I can say that I could avoid the societal constructs easy.

The habit is the thing that I need to work on. I mean I have to do a couple of video calls today and I will do those from SJ2’s place. And that means I will probably go buy kachra. And that’s because I am habituated. Need to break this chain.

So that.

Oh, I was to move houses on the weekend but I didn’t. I just did not feel like it. Not that I did a lot but I just did not feel like it. The move is now moved to the next weekend. And that is a time that I dont have an option to shift indiscriminately. I mean I need to vacate the house by the 2nd. So, I know what am doing the next weekend! And I hate hate hate this shifting and all that. It’s way too soul-sucking. But then, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Of course, I will add another post to the series of posts that I write when I move.

I think this is it for the day. Need to get going. Here’s streaks.

OMAD – 2. Ate after a 46-hour fast. Let’s see if I can manage OMAD today as well.
#book2 – 0
#noCoke – 165
#noCoffee – 8
#aPicADay – 0
Money spent – 10403
Killer Boogie – 0
10K steps a day – 0
Surya Namaskar – 0
10 mins of meditation – 0
Minimaslism Counter – -2
Morning Pages / Meditations – 255

290621 – Morning Pages

Note on PD (and her birthday), attempt at removing caffeine from my system and ideas on what ails my eating (habits).

2906.
PD day.
Nothing else matters.

For someone that I’ve met just once in my life, she holds a very special place in my life. She’s this constant friend that I’ve had since I was I don’t know how old young. It was somewhere between 1999-2003 when I made her acquaintance first. Since then we must have exchanged hundreds of words over scores of emails. Some short, some long. Mostly irregular. Of course, she was in the US (and still is) all this while. I was shuttling across cities in India for education / work. Since she was so far away and there was little overlap in who both of us knew (except a couple of people), I felt safe in sharing the fuckeries of life with her. Mostly it was about love, work, and regular things you expect me to rant on. She had a very very patient ear (or eyes, may be) and she would always come with a word or two of consolation. To be honest, I don’t recall if her words helped me back then but I do know that I would eagerly await her emails.

I think I’ve met her all of once, somewhere in the LA, way back in 2010. And that too wasnt for too long. Maybe an hour or so. But i distinctly remember that while I was out of place and awkward, she was good and easy to talk to in IRL as she was when I sent her emails.

With time, she got busy, got married, raised a family. I got busier than her. But we have remained in touch. Very intermittently now. Far less frequency than what I would ideally like.

But I do think that this distant friend that is seeing you from an objective, unemotional, once-in-a-while manner is an important person to have in life. The friend obviously cares for you. And yet she is so far away that in case you need a shoulder to cry on, you can’t access it. You know she’s out there, somewhere and around in case you need. And you know that for all practical purposes she’s not there. I think this is what God is. Right? You have faith that there is this thing called God that is looking over you from a distance and will open doors when all is lost.

PD is like that to me.
No, not God. God doesnt exist.
She does.

Ok, moving on.

Yesterday was mad. I had so much coffee and even a Red Bull (yeah) that I couldn’t sleep. As I write this, I am groggy. Eyes won’t open up. In fact, this sleep thing has become a recurring problem and I need to solve it. I don’t know how but I need to.

Starting today, I am going back to a low-carb diet. I will also stop having coffee. No more caffeine in any form. Even at Starbucks, I will get back to green tea. The thing is when I make such promises to myself (eat less, no coffee, etc), the first two or three days are the most critical. If I can not have coffee today, if I can avoid eating carbs today, I would have won a big big battle. And if I do it successfully, I need to merely repeat it tomorrow. Once I hit the third day, I know that I have set a streak and I merely need to not break it.

So let’s see how today goes.

On the work front, I have a lot happening and there’s no time to even, you know, die! To a point that I am getting more and more people on board and yet there seems to be a lot to be done. This to be honest is a great thing. I need to find a way to scale the business. Maybe this is what they say when they talk about spotting opportunity in the times of adversity? Let’s see.

I am sure there is more that I want to talk about but the mind is so blank and so distracted that I dont know what to write. Damn the caffeine and sleep depravity. Wait something dawned onto me. I think I am one of those people that have this scarcity mindset.

Lemme explain.

Case 1.
Imagine you are stuck in the Sahara for 10 days. You are rescued and you are now in a comfortable hospital with an unlimited buffet to eat. What do you think you would do when you saw that buffet?

You would attack is right? Your body was deprived of food for so long that you want to stack it with all you have. You want to nourish it. You want to ensure that should there be another famine, you have some energy stored in your body.

Case 2.
You know you are going to a distant island that you know is inhabited. You know that you won’t have a Starbucks there. You know that you won’t have a Swiggy or a Zomato. You know that you can’t order a meal even if you have all the money in the world to order. What would you pack?

I don’t know about you but I would pack a million things that would last me as long as possible.

Case 3.
You have a big ass presentation to make. It’s going to be a long night. While some cloud kitchens operate throughout the night, you may want to munch on snacks et al. Those would be a pain to find at that hour. Plus, no coffee shops. No places to order a Red Bull from. What would you do?

At least I would order in snacks worth a thousand bucks and get ready for a long night of work.

Club all three cases. If your first instinct is to order in and save yourself from scarcity, you are like me. You want to stack. And no, stacking is not the problem. The problem starts after that. Once you know that you have a Red Bull in your refrigerator or a packet of Kurkure within your arm’s reach, you can’t help but pull open the tab, tear the crimp and eat like there’s no tomorrow.

So that.

I suffer from this. And I need to fix it. Even if I have to stay hungry for a few hours, I will try and resist the temptation to stack things in. If I am unable to deliver at work, so be it!

This. And then other issues that you typically have when you eat.

A. You know, I am the kinds who HAS to finish whatever is on my plate. If I get served 10 slices of Pizza, I will have to finish all 10. I can’t save them for later. So I need to start eating only as much as I must. Not polish the serving plate.

B. Then I am the kinds to see something on YouTube while I am eating. Which is good – multitasking. But there are two issues. You don’t really get to enjoy what you are eating. You feed only the stomach but not the soul. You are merely going thru the motions of eating. Second, you train your Pavlovian brain that food means TV. And TV means food. So every time you see something, even if you are full, you reach out to a pack of snacks. In fact, this is one of the reasons why I do not have a kitchen or stock food things at home.

So these three issues. Scarcity mindset, eat all that’s on plate, eat while engaged in other activities. I am sure there are more. Lemme discover those as we go along. Now that I am firming up a trip to the EBC, I better start working towards it. I dont want to die yet. You know.

Wah, what pep-talk! Mr. Garg!

Ok. Over and out. Long day. Here’s streaks…

Morning Pages / Meditations – 198
#aPicADay – 0
10K steps a day – 0
OMAD – 0
#noCoffee – 0
#noCoke – 110
10 mins of meditation – 0
#book2 – 0
Killer Boogie – 0
Surya Namaskar – 0

Coming of Age

Back after 2 days. I read somewhere that when you are trying to build a habit, it’s cool to miss things for a day once in a while. The odds of you coming back are about 70%. If you however miss what you are doing two days in a row, the odds of you picking it up again drops down to low double digits. And if you miss three days in a row, the odds are less than 5% that you would pick the habit again. So, here I am. Not missing the third day.

When I say “Coming of Age”, I do not mean Bildungsroman (the German word that doesn’t really have an equivalent in other languages, but is applied to a young adult and means something like growing up). The word merits an entire book to be honest. May be at some other time. Today I want to talk about some other coming of age.

The coming of old age.

A rant about how age is creeping up on me and rendering me useless to function in the society that I need to be young and fast to operate in.

Once upon a time…

I remember there was a time when I could pull all-nighters for like 3 ~~days~~ nights on the trot. Without any fancy coffee, tea. May be I’d have a Red Bull but I don’t think I had the money those days to buy Red Bull. That’s not the point. The point is that I could stay awake for more than 3 days and yet no bat an eyelid. And function at more than my optimal. I was like Popeye with Spinach running through his veins, a car on Nitro boost, Bradley Cooper on NZT-48 in Limitless.

To a point that people would ask me if I was ODing and abusing substances.

However…

With time, I have seen this ability to stay up gradually diminish.

From uncountable streaks of these three-day don’t-sleep and crank-out-things fests to now a time when I cant get by even if I stay up beyond 8 PM. Take yesterday for an example. It sucks that age is creeping up on me like that.

Mind you, this ability did not go poof like that one fine day. It crept away from me. Like you know you have this house (imagine Carl and Ellie’s house in Up) tied to a million Helium air balloons. And as it goes up, the balloons start popping out and the house can no longer continue going up. In fact, the weight in the house starts to drag it back.

That is how I feel!

With each passing day the body seems to be weathering more and more and the ability to recover seems to be reducing more and more.

In the end…

As I write this, it’s 4:06 PM. I have just woken after an afternoon siesta. I did not really want to sleep in the afternoon. I just could not continue to stay up because I had to pull an all-nighter for a project that I was working on.

I need to go stretch my rickety old back and lie down on a hard surface till I feel like a human again.

That’s about it. That’s the post.

Oh, and, FUCK YOU, OLD AGE!

This is part of 30 minutes of writing everyday challenge. Others in the series are at 3010, 3110, 0111, 0211, 0311, 0411, 0511, 0611, 0911, 1011, 1211, 1311, 1411, 1511, 1611, 1711, 1811, 1911, 2011, 2311.