Note: it is almost impossible to get on the Ask Havi list. This person got in by a. being one of my clients or students, b. flattering the hell out of my duck, and c. making life easy on me by being clear about what the question was and what details I could use.
Here it is:
“Hullo Havi! I’m after some advice and inspiration on getting up earlier to have more time to do things I love in the morning — gots any?”
Oh boy. Do I have stuff to say about this.
Let’s do it. As is usual with the Ask Havi posts, expect a bunch of random points in no particular order, that — she types hopefully — might eventually come together to form some sort of cohesive whole. Or not.
A big (the biggest?) mistake when trying to change a habit.
Too much at once.
If you’re currently getting up at ten past seven and you want to be getting up at five, the worst way to do it is to say I’m getting up at five, dammit. Or else!
That way lies madness. And guilt. Lots and lots of guilt.
And shoulds. And self-thrown shoes.
That’s two hours and ten minutes to beat yourself up about each day. And beating up? Not the most effective thing in the world.
Incremental change is way less violent.
For example?
One day of getting up at 7:07
Two weeks of getting up at 6:55
Two weeks of getting up at 6:42
One week of getting up at 6:33
One week of getting up at 6:17
One week of getting up 6:08
And by that point, deciding to start your day eight minutes earlier is nothing.
It will probably take way less time than what I’ve outlined here, but this is the non-scary version.
Incremental change: note 1
Your monster might say that this is stupid because it takes five weeks and if you weren’t such a dumb-ass lazy good-for-nothing model of pathetic loserdom (okay, that might be my monsters), you could just get up at five tomorrow.
Here’s the thing to tell your monsters:
They are probably right that there are shorter ways to make this change happen. But those ways are not happening.
So you can keep doing the old, familiar thing of feeling horrible about yourself (which official studies of your life have shown totally doesn’t work) …
… or you can spend five weeks practicing in a more gentle way and actually get there.
Incremental change: note 2
Some people really, really resist the idea of incremental change (see the stuff people yelled in the comments section of my post about how I quit smoking), to which I say:
Rock on.
People vary. And that’s a given. So if you personally can’t make peace with incremental change, skip it.
We’re talking about the principle of you having conscious interactions with yourself, not about me pushing any specific technique — go ahead and ignore what doesn’t work for you.
Dissolving the guilt.
Guilt is the great stuckifier, and dissolving it is a big part of interacting with any pattern.
One of the best ways to start with that is just by noticing it’s there.
Whoops. There you are again.
Hello, guilt. You are not the essence of me. You are not the whole of me. You are a temporary part of my experience, and I am learning what I can about you and what you need.
A useful thing for the guilt (and any form of internal resistance, actually) is using even though sentences to sidestep the hard parts.
“Even though I really don’t want to get out of bed, I am allowed to be in resistance. It makes sense that part of me doesn’t want to get up earlier.
“Even though I am feeling hugely guilty (or annoyed or frustrated or anxious) about not being able to shift this yet, I am human. It might take me a while to shift this pattern, but at least I’m learning about it.
“Even though all of my internal thoughts are totally contradictory because one monster thinks I suck for not wanting to get up and the other monster insists that I can’t get up, I am allowed to have contradictory thoughts and desires.”
Morning begins at night.
This is something I took from my teacher, and it has helped me tremendously.
So at night you plant seeds and clues and reminders for your morning.
Maybe this means a sticky note on your alarm clock that says hello my sweet, remember that you wanted to spend fifteen minutes doing some yoga?
Maybe it means setting up the thing you wanted to do in the morning beforehand, so it’s all ready for you if/when you crawl out of bed.
Maybe it means figuring out what will make it easiest for you to get up (warm socks on your nightstand? a light in the bathroom?) and making sure it’s there for you.
Patience: not the most fun thing in the world.
And at the same time, it can be kind of useful to remember that change doesn’t need to happen right this second.
If this pattern has been around for years and years, it can take a while until you learn whatever needs to be learned for it to change form.
That’s normal. It’s not a sign that something is wrong with you.
The thing that Dance of Shiva (which is all about the science of patterns and how they work) has taught me about patterns is that they are their own cure.
Like homeopathy.
The thing that moves a stuck pattern is introducing another pattern into the mix. And when that one becomes automatic and ingrained (which it will), the whole thing starts again.*
* Except that now each time it’s a tiny bit easier because there’s less resistance to letting one thing become another thing.
Stopping here for now.
Holding back the idea flow, because I think this is enough information to assimilate right now.
The more time you spend with both the parts of you that want this new thing, and the parts of you that are grieving the loss of what is familiar and comfortable, the easier it gets to move things.
Because rewriting patterns always involves an element of loss. One thing goes so the new thing can come, and then that new thing will go so something else can come.
And loss is hard. What are you gonna do? Even when the thing you’re losing isn’t what you want, there’s still a hard.
And hard wants love.
So. Giving love to all the hard. And reminding you (okay, reminding myself) that being in this thing of interacting with ourselves is way more important than how we get somewhere or how long it takes to get there.
Comment zen for today.
We all have our stuff.
We’re all working on our stuff.
We’re practicing.
p.s. One more thing!
The once-or-twice-a-year no-cost class thing that my duck and I lead on rewriting patterns is coming up soon. If you have thoughts on stuff you’d like us to cover (or a theme?), you can drop a note in the comments.
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Thanks, Havi — this is good schtuff! I’ll be giving some thought to how I can keep applying it to some of my own stuck places.
Part of the challenge, for me, is learning to cheer myself on for the small changes — and, more importantly, how to let that be enough, rather than seeking validation from other people who may, being tangled up in their own stuff, think that getting up seven minutes earlier — or taking a slightly smaller serving of some fattening food, or spending fifteen minutes working on the big scary project, or whatever the incremental change might be — is not enough.
It’s another aspect of sovereignty, I suppose, to be able to say — quietly to myself, or gently to the other person, “It’s enough for me to be working on my own patterns and grappling with my own fears. I’ll let you deal with your own.” (Whoa — a little monster just popped up when I typed that, telling me how mean and selfish I am, to think of letting another person be upset without trying to fix it! But that’s a whole ‘nother issue, seems to me, so I’ll just take that monster someplace warm and quiet, and see if I can find out what it needs…)
.-= Kathleen Avins´s last post … Snow daze =-.
Oh Havi, thank you thank you thank you for this post. It could not have come at a better time – I have been having trouble with this very thing ever since I got over the jet lag a few months ago. I’ve been trying to get up earlier lately after several years of sleeping as late as possible, found I couldn’t break my habit in a week, and got frustrated. But this gradual change thing just might work! I think I’m going to give it a shot. With lots of Dance of Shiva. And maybe some pancakes.
Also, I have a question for your Habits Detective class, and I’m asking it here because I don’t know if I’ll make it to the class due to the time difference (it’ll be 6 AM on Wednesday in Japan, though depending on how the gradual change thing goes, I might just make it!). So here it is: I found a clue. A really big clue in the form of a shoe collection. I have all these shoes that people have thrown at me, and that I’ve thrown at myself, and it seems that one of my habits is keeping these shoes forever and ever. They’re not stored very well, so sometimes they all topple out of the closet and land on top of me. Which is nearly as painful as having had them thrown at me in the first place. So I guess my question is, what can I do with all these shoes? And how do I stop collecting them – that is, how can I rewrite this habit so that I’m not buried under ten-year-old shoes anymore? I guess I might have to talk to the shoes about this too. Or the closet that holds the shoes.
Thank you for writing about “grieving the loss of what is familiar and comfortable”. That was exactly the reassurance I didn’t know I was searching for.
mwah!
My problem is on the other end: going to bed on time. :/
It’s the same thing though, because going to bed on time makes it much easier to get up early. One thing I’ve noticed is that Getting Ready to Go To Bed is not something that takes only a minute. For me, at the moment, it can take about an hour, depending.
So, instead of trying to move the point where I’m actually in bed, I’m not trying to move the point where I say: OK, it’s not time to start getting ready to go to bed. And accept that I may not actually be in bed for an hour.
Susan T: I’m with you on the shoe collection (nice stretching of the metaphor, :D). I don’t have any answers, but I just wanted to say: I see your hard, that really sucks. *hug*
.-= Willie Hewes´s last post … Mascots for Life =-.
Wow, this post popped up exactly as I was struggling with this issue. Right now I have no set daytime schedule so I end up staying up until 2 am and then sleeping in until 11 or 12. Which would be fine except then I feel groggy and unfocused and kind of bad about myself.
And for MONTHS I’ve been trying to make myself get up at 9. It’s become a shining beacon of discipline, and there are so many ways to beat myself up when I can’t do it — “nine isn’t even early to most people, to most REAL ADULTS that’s sleeping in,” etc.
So this is really great for me to hear right now. To remember that (a) the issue I’m dealing with is not sleeping in late, but feeling bad about myself because of it, and (b) there are lots of ways to interact with this problem, and demanding in strident tones that I get up at 9:00 is not the way to do it.
Thanks so much!
Oh, I have a question/idea/complaint for the teleclass:
How do you get from recognising a pattern to being ready to let it go?
I found out some interesting stuff about myself, but this pattern is so old and so… tight, I feel like it’s completely hopeless to even try to pry it loose.
I try to say things like: “I’m ready to start letting go of this [stuck pattern of ultimate stuckness]” and before I even finish the sentence this little sarcastic voice says: “Like **** you are.”
So I try: “Even though I have this [stuck pattern of doom], I’m allowed to have it and I’m ready to learn more about it” and the voice says: “Why? Why do you want to learn about something that’s icky and horrible and ruins everything? No matter how much you learn, you can’t shift it, so just leave it alone.”
I realise it might be difficult to talk about this in the abstract, but, well, the pattern is about shame and sexuality and I don’t really want to go into too much detail for obvious reasons, so, I hope that’s enough.
Thanks for doing this Havi, you rock!
.-= Willie Hewes´s last post … Mascots for Life =-.
This post is a confirmation of something I am learning which is that no matter how many times I have heard you talk about the value of being able to say, “Even though I don’t want to ____ I am allowed to be in resistance.” It hasn’t sunk in.
As I deal with my own stuck around changing eating patterns where I have a ton of resistance, some sliver of light has entered my murky brain- I AM ALLOWED TO BE IN RESISTANCE.
Note to my habit czar: Please don’t beat me up with your rules and laws and punish me for not following them. I AM ALLOWED TO BE IN RESISTANCE. Also- czarushka (maybe an endearing name will placate him!) I will give you a new habit to replace the old one with. Patience my dear Czar.
This post is eerily in sync with me! I decided a few weeks ago that I needed a morning practice. The making-tea-and-drinking-it wasn’t enough. Plus I kept going to bed too late, and therefore waking up later than I wanted to.
Then I got your Dance of Shiva kit in the mail. And then I found a marvelous cure to my staying-up-later-than-I-want-to habit: two glasses of red wine with dinner. (Alas, wine is quite expensive in Thailand, so this cure can’t be a daily thing). So I went to bed early, woke up early, and popped in the Shiva Nata DVD. And it was perfect. It’s been two days, but I’m totally hooked. My new morning practice is based around it.
So all that blather is really just to thank you for the kit, and for your writing :).
.-= Zoe´s last post … Madness, Genius, and the Things We Don’t See =-.
“People vary. And that’s a given. So if you personally can’t make peace with incremental change, skip it.”
Here’s a link to Gretchen Rubin’s “Are you a Moderator or an Abstainer?” quiz.
Quick rundown: moderators say “I will eat three cookies today, two tomorrow, one on Thursday, and then on Friday I will have beaten the cookie habit.”
Abstainers say “I’m quittin’ cold turkey RIGHT NOW.”
I’m an abstainer, and so I don’t do well with shifting habits incrementally.
I usually get up super early for yoga classes, and when things get shifted around (like on family vacations) and my sleep schedule gets borked, I have to just set the alarm for my usual time as soon as I can and suffer through one day of tired to get back on my schedule.
YMMV. 🙂
.-= Blue´s last post … Reading Group: Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, Part 1: Chapters 1-4 =-.
First off, wow, Pearl has a habit czar.
Second, I’ve been away from Havi-ville for bloody weeks, doing a lot of typing, bit of teaching. It’s really really nice to come back and find everyone still here.
Thirdly, I found so many things jumping out at me in this post that I can only go:
~ ‘…dumb-ass lazy good-for-nothing model of pathetic loserdom.’ (Oh god, there is a part that really believes this).
~ ‘Even though…’ Even though… Even THOUGH… *boggles*
~ ‘Part of me…’ (I have parts – I knew that, just forgot).
~ ‘Change doesn’t need to happen right this second.’ *double-boggles*
Thanks Havi, you know, again, as ALWAYS.
x
.-= Andrew Lightheart´s last post … The One Freak-Out Rule =-.
@Blue: Thanks for sharing that! I think that’s my problem. I am a moderator at heart who tries to be an abstainer and then cannot sustain it. Eureka.
@Havi: Good timing. I’ve been trying to get up a little earlier myself. Will try this. I have tried to set my alarm for 15 minutes earlier and it’s not going very well .. clearly I need to start smaller.
.-= elizabeth´s last post … the ten thousand foot view =-.
Brava Miss Havi!
Obviously your monsters and mine are intimately acquainted. Mine just twittered something about coffee, motivation and lack thereof.
Thank you for reminding me and them that incremental change is okay, and EVEN THOUGH…@Andrew, double boggle too!
xxooxxoo
.-= chicsinger simone´s last post … royal eagle valentine bonbon brooch =-.
@Andrew I’m with you on the boggles. “Even though” has become my magic Havi-Pavlovian phrase. I usually don’t need to finish the thought. The “even though…” just brings me to that place where things are softer and more accepting.
@Havi thanks for this, my dear!
@willie, I’m with you: making the change on the night time end is the hard part.
I need my 8 hours no matter what, so 8 minutes earlier in the morning means 8 earlier to bed.
Night time is a big ol’ party! Not like I’m out boogieing at the deeescotheque, but there’s TV and Twitter and obsessive googling and, occasionally, reading, and all kinds of fun stuff. Plus the full half-hour it takes to get ready for bed.
What with the face cream, and the eye cream, and the peeing 11 times and all.
.-= Laura Belgray´s last post … How to be success on wheels. =-.
I am four weeks into a new habit of exercise after two and a half years of no exercise. Of the many big fear hurdles I am jumping, a new one is the most interesting –
my dear sweet love won’t do it with me, and my fear is that somehow doing it without him will lead to losing him in some way –
which is really a variation on an old pattern, that doing your own thing causes pain to the ones you love by making them feel like less. Ouuuuch.
So, what worked is – (well first I cried and got mad at him, and ate brownies, but then..) I negotiated with my fear: if this loss starts to happen, I will do something about it right then. Immediately. But if it doesn’t start to happen, I will keep doing my own thing and be incredibly grateful and happy.
My dear sweet love is helping too – after every workout he texts to ask how it was. This has been like a hand at the small of my back, gentle loving support. Connected.
Now if only stormageddon will let me get back to workouts that don’t involve shoveling snow.
The resistance to incremental change is a head-scratcher for me. In some areas, I totally get it. Yes, incremental. Running? Oh my, I would never expect myself to go out the door for the first time out running and run 15 miles. No, no, no. Incremental change is the name of the game here. I run 2 miles. I run 3 miles. I run 4 miles. And so on. Sometimes I take a two-week break before adding another mile to a long run. This is how training for a long race works. This is how to keep it feeling good. Important, that. Otherwise, why am I doing it?
I never thought of applying that same approach…elsewhere.
Hmmmm, noodling on this. This seems important right now.
.-= Emily´s last post … Looking Inward, What Are All These Snakes Doing in Here? =-.
Dear Havi,
This post showed up over my morning tea and hot cereal and I am soooo excited!
I have had SUCH a challenging time waking up or WANTING to wake up to my day. All I can come up with is that I REALLY like the dreamstate and I don’t really want to come back to my body and my day on the earth plane. Or something like this scenario. I receive LOTS of messages via dreams – all in color and so much happening including lots of traveling. Fun..fun..until wake up time.
So…that being said…I have dealt with not wanting to get out of bed for sooo long. (even tho I love being up and seeing the sun rise, hearing the birds, feeling the energy shifts) I have also been challenged with depression for many many years – some times being A LOT more challenging than now or other times. (the whole take the anger out on myself rather than outward at anyone/anything)
I have practiced doing my best at being kind to myself over all of this for a couple of years now and that has definitely shifted something. For 6 months I was getting up, dressing for the great outdoors and heading out for an hour+ hike with my dear pup 6 days/week. And WANTING to get up and move. Then…I broke my foot. I am 2 months into the healing of my foot – yay! – but still not able to hike like that. I miss it!
As I was reading your post I was thinking…wow…I REALLY want to order the Dance of Shiva package. Hhmmm…I wonder if this would work for this type of challenge. I was thinking…why wouldn’t it? I have been wanting to order the package for some time now…now there is another good reason to go ahead and order. THEN…I read the comments!
@Zoe – thank you so much for sharing! Yahoooooo! I am going to order The Dance of Shiva kit at the end of the week!
@Willie Hewes – I am with ya on the “One thing I’ve noticed is that Getting Ready to Go To Bed is not something that takes only a minute. For me, at the moment, it can take about an hour, depending.”
I have gotten better with the before bed rituals and giving myself more time. Now…I am asking for support for my morning time/ritual that I want to put into gentle place.
@Andrew Lightheart – there is a part of ME that actually believes the “dumb ass” comment as well and I know the meaning of “boggles” – right there with ya!
@Faith – I hear you on the “REAL ADULTS” comment/feeling. Really nice to know I am not alone.
Havi – thank you SO MUCH – big smiles to you and Selma!
Everyone else here – thank you so much for sharing and reaching out – so great to meet you all here!
.-= Maya´s last post … Change, transition and the act of hanging on with all your might =-.
Yes, yes, and yes?! I noticed that I try to do everything all at once too… why torture myself that way? It’s like running away from home and then realizing you’re broke… only to return home and say you’ll never try that new thing again. Instead you have to learn to make money, pay rent, etc gradually.
Ahh amazing!
.-= Nathalie Lussier´s last post … Mindful Monday: Live Event was a Success =-.
I’d like to hear you and Ms. Duck speak to issues of re-writing patterns that are learned in early childhood education.
1. “I’m in the front of the room, so I’m right.”
2. “The book says this, so don’t argue.”
3. “Color between the lines.”
4. “Everyone has the same goal.”
That would be Quack-Awesome!
.-= Dick Carlson´s last post … We Don’t Need Better Teachers =-.
Ah, the getting up earlier thing… One of the few Shiva Nata epiphanies I’ve had was actually related to that, and I’ve written about it on my blog several months ago. The epiphany went something like this: “I go to bed very late and sleep the whole morning away because that’s a way for me to ensure I won’t have a productive day” (because productively doing my thing = scary, of course).
There has been progress: these days, I’m getting up 1 to 2 hours earlier than I used to not that long ago – big yay! I’d eventually like to get up earlier than that, but I’m already quite happy with the progress made.
What I’d like now, though, is to re-establish a morning routine that includes Shiva Nata and journaling (maybe some dork dancing too!). That would be a good place to experiment with introducing a new pattern into the mix to help a stuck pattern move… And yes, it’s hard, and I guess I have to give some love to the hard.
.-= Josiane´s last post … Taking action instead of resolving to do so =-.
Small, incremental changes = Hiro sigh
All or nothing = psychotic scream
Thanks for the reminder!
For your Selma and Havi rewrite, how about something along the lines of taking the first step. Getting going when there’s no momentum yet. So I guess the pattern would be… procrastination! So nevermind, I’ll just read my dissolve-o-matic material.
xo
.-= Michelle Marlahan´s last post … Arrested =-.
Someone – I wish I remember who – talked about how, sometimes, if you’re trying to write, sometimes the goal is just to set your pen on top of your notebook. Then open the notebook. Then hold the pen with the notebook open. And people think it’s silly but sometimes this works.
I am stuck right now with not being able to go to bed early and not being able to get up early and the domino effect that happens with that. And yes! Getting up early means going to bed early which means everything shuts down early (and I am up now because of SNOWMAGEDDON which is supposed to hit us ANY SECOND NOW and if it does I will work from home tomorrow)
beating myself over the head with a stick to make me get up at 6 is not working. So I will start with 7:15.
p.s. here is a photo for Selma, of a distant cousin:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jukeboxgraduate/4345607960/
Long experience (good & oh-so-bad) has shown me that I can do anything if I want to badly enough. But that’s determined by WHY I want to do it. I went from getting up at almost 8AM to 5:30 am — easily — when I figured out WHY I wanted those extra hours. When I just wanted “more time” to “get more stuff done”, not so effective. When I homed in on the specifics — personal nurturing & care-taking through reading, yoga, free weights, journaling, sometimes just sitting with tea & a lapful of purring cats & watching dawn happen — the decision became pretty much effortless. Now I anticipate my early mornings before I even go to bed! Love ’em!.
And yes, now and again I do just grunt & burrow back under the covers for an hour or 2 of extra sleep (usually when I’m neglecting my caretaking at the other end of my day & going to bed too late!).
FWIW, I’m a “just effing do it or don’t do it” kind of chick. Easing my way into a new habit by changing my routine one 5 minute increment at a time would just irritate me so badly it wouldn’t work. So maybe the FIRST step is to figure out what kind of person you are in that respect. Be good to yourself–gift yourself with what you need to be whole & happy . . . .
I rise easily, but now that I have a long commute to work and an early start time (8am), I try to sleep in as late as I can to only get what I need done to go to work. That still means getting up as early as 5:45am. That’s no problem since I’m a morning person.
What’s difficult is the evening. I get home around 6:30, and if I want 8 hours of sleep (which I need), I would have to go to bed at 9:45pm! I just can’t do that because I feel like I’ve already lost so much of my day to begin with. The other day, I wrote out what I do and what I want to do from the time I get home from work till the time I *should* go to bed. There is technically enough time, but I find myself arriving home, basically pissed off and grumpy, because I *already* feel the loss of time.
So that’s my stuck. The other end of things. I can remedy this by maybe doing more things during my work day, on my lunch hour. Staying present in the evenings with my sweetie and my pets and worrying less about the kitchen being perfectly clean before I go to bed. I have a longer list, and that’s helped me feel less annoyed in the evenings. I’m still working through why I’m so stuck around “lack” of time in the evenings, but your blog and the wonderful responses are a good start!
@Dick [Art|Music|] is fine as a hobby, but you can never make a living at it.
Oh thanks so much for this, Havi. Dissolving guilt is something I want to practice more and more.
.-= Agnes Northstar´s last post … It would be nicer if I were omniscient after all =-.
I’ve also found that I have a “natural” time range to wake up – so experiment with 5:45 or 6:15 if 6:00 feels icky or off. It has something to do with sleep cycles methinks.
I think I tricked my resistance. It was a very strange thing that I only realized yesterday.
So I have this 10 minute yoga video and I though I would like to do this 10-minute energizing yoga before work. But getting out of bed to do it was really hard. So I got in the shower and said, in my loud, internal voice: “I give you permission not to do yoga this morning.” Because I’m just that good to myself, right? So somehow, it seems that I resisted giving myself permission. And while I’m taking the 30 seconds to get the mat out, I’m still telling myself I don’t have to do it. But then I’m resisting the permission and rationalizing that it’s only 10 minutes and I could just as easily putter around the house for 10 minutes, so I might as well do yoga.
And then I did the 10 minutes and felt great! And my resistance said, “What just happened here?”
And I tricked my resistance 3 days in a row!
[And now I just do the 10 minutes, because, well, it’s just 10 minutes.]
There’s a book about this incremental change stuff (cute small green book) called “One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way” by Robert Maurer.
Being a “Why are things this way?” kind of gal, this book really helped me understand the physiological components of resistance.
I got a ukulele for Christmas last year and wanted to learn how to play it, but couldn’t make myself sit down for the obligatory 30 minutes every day to practice. So I didn’t practice at all.
The book says to do what Havi said in the original post. Sneak up on it. So I started practicing One Minute a day. That’s all I had to do. Some days it’s still a minute, other days longer, but now I rarely resist doing it. I’m practicing for some amount of time every day now, even though when I first started, I thought practicing for one minute was the lamest thing ever. Turns out it isn’t.
.-= Christy´s last post … Marketing Examples (ones that work!) from a Real, Live Business =-.