Over the last few years I have felt like my potential has stagnated. I have constantly trying to improve myself or some aspect of myself but ultimately giving in to idleness. My first year of university started off well. I was getting good grades and generally maintaining a somewhat healthy lifestyle. However as time went on my grades started to fall, I worked out and groomed myself less, and my mood decreased. I tried many things to improve myself so this wouldn’t continue. I would go to seminars teaching good study habits and would start to apply what I learned only to drop those habits. For example one thing I was told a lot was to keep a planner to organize my time. When I tried to do this I would write things down but forget to check my planner consistently and follow it. This made me frustrated with myself. Over time the frustration from failing to keep following the things I wrote in my planner outweighed any temporary benefit I got and I stopped trying at all. This process became typical for me. I would try to develop a good or productive habit and not be consistent with it leading to failure and frustration with myself which would make me lose all motivation for even trying to develop that habit. I had resigned myself to believing that I was incapable of developing any new good habits because if I was capable I would have already chosen to develop them. This kept me from putting effort into fixing any issues I had. The worst issue I had that I tried to fix was my insomnia.
I can’t remember a time I ever didn’t have insomnia. Since I was young I would spend 1 to 2 hours in bed before I would finally fall asleep. I had thought that this was just normal and everyone was awake a long time in bed before falling asleep. Eventually I learned that the average time for a person to fall asleep was 15 minutes. I was really surprised by this because it meant I was losing about 2 days worth of time every month just laying in bed doing nothing. I tried to solve insomnia just by searching the internet for solutions. I tried a lot of the general advice such as not looking at a computer screen an hour before bed and getting up at the same time each day. I didn’t notice any difference in the time it took for me to fall asleep and had a lot of trouble keeping these habits so I gave up. Eventually my insomnia interfered with my academics. I would sleep through my alarm and miss class. I decided to get an appointment with a sleep specialist. I was expecting to just end up with a prescription to something like Ambien. Instead I got advice most of which I had already heard from looking online so I was pretty disappointed. However the specialist also gave me a recommendation for a book if I wanted more information about dealing with insomnia. I decided to get the book and read through it. The book was much more technical than any of the advice I had read online and included tables to fill out involving sleep scheduling and cognitive behavioral therapy. Like before I didn’t see any improvement with my sleep. I decided to keep trying anyway until I had filled out all the tables in the book. By the time I had filled out all the tables I noticed real improvement in my sleep. This inspired me to continue by remaking the tables on a spreadsheet and continue following the advice in the book. In about a month I had gone from taking 1.5 hours on average to about 45 minutes on average to fall asleep.
This was the first time I saw an observable, long lasting improvement in my life. So I’ve decided to be more proactive and start trying to improve my life and develop good habits again. This blog is one thing I am going to do in order to motivate myself to keep going. I am going to track my attempts at self improvement and as a record for things I develop to help me.
