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It Starts With Sleep
Dear Conscience,When I try to get back to life after such a big slump as recently, I have to start at the beginning. And the beginning is to get enough sleep. Among the many bad old habits I re-adopted recently, was delaying going to sleep in the evening. Given that I have to wake up Continue reading
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The Night Formula
Dear Conscience, My 2nd core habit, after writing to you, is that I should stay away from a phone screen at night. Might not seem like a big deal, but I spent many a night awake, scrolling on my phone, feeding my biggest fears: serial killer Wikipedia bios, FOMO-tracking of crypto markets, cases of child Continue reading
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Pockets of Time
Dear Conscience, Today was a little better, having started respecting my basic rules again, even while traveling. And I hope to keep it up during the rest of my trip. Here’s what I need to keep in mind, so that my mind doesn’t play a trick on me: If I can’t seize these pockets of Continue reading
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Phone as a Tool, Not a Passtime
Dear Conscience. It’s so easy to fall back into old habits. A disruption like a trip or a disease, seems like a justified temporary excuse to leave all effort and consistency aside. The problem is, once the “excuse” is gone, the old habits are back. Like they never left. Annoying that it doesn’t take 66 Continue reading
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Back to Basics
Dear Conscience, the big deadline is behind me. With the relief from the deadline came turn for all the high hopes of this post-deadline period, when I “finally have the thing behind me, and the time and mindspace for everything else”. Disappointingly, and yet unsurprisingly, I went off track immediately. I spent the night mostly Continue reading
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Transitions
Dear Conscience, I spend too much time on transitions. I think this is where my delaying tendencies have accumulated now. After lunch, I decide to solve a crossword puzzle in my dad’s news paper. Or I decide I have to walk the dog. Or I play with my daughter. I must say, all of these Continue reading
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3 Rules
Dear Conscience, So I’m refreshing a new rule every day. It’s a bit rushed, but since it’s just a refresher, I think it’s ok. 1. Check in with you every day (today is day 7 in a row, yay) 2. Sleep without phone in the bed. So, last night I found a compromise solution between Continue reading
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Day Three of New Me
Dear Conscience, I’m checking in. This is day three, we might call it a streak 🙂 In practice, it’s semi-successful. I’ve implemented the phone rules to an extent enough that I did some bear minimum to-do’s which could absolutely not be postponed anymore. Did I make a dent in my backlog? Probably not. I also Continue reading
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Curiosity Must Be Selective
As part of the Yale course on the science of happiness, provided for free online through Coursera, I did some sort of test of my strengths. The dominant strengths for me revolved around curiosity. Now, as with many a strength, if misdeployed, it can turn to a weakness. I remember a quote from a book Continue reading
About Me
I got my first nickname when I was 4 years old. It was “bakitza”, which means ‘an old lady’. I’ve always been an old lady on the inside. And as I progress towards being an old lady on the outside too, I want to take control of this journey. To reach the full fledged bakitza level with a peace of mind I always associated with that life stage. I thought it would come on it’s own with age. But now I realize that I have to take control over the mess that my life currently is in order to be a thoroughly satisfied bakitza one day.
Becoming Bakitza 