hatching is hard work

it’s really hard to hatch out of an egg.

i mean, i’m not a bird. so i don’t know that for certain in an “embodied i did this way” but i do in a metaphorical way.

imagine you’re in an egg. you’re cramped, and you know you have to get out but….how??? everywhere you feel, it’s hard hard shell, and also you’re still a baby bird and you’re not that strong yet!!! how do you get from inside to outside?

scientifically speaking - many birds have an “egg tooth” on their beak that they use to create weak spots in the shell, and then they slowly, chaotically, enlarge that weak spot. but, mostly, as you can see - it’s a chaotic, instinctual process.

we spend a lot of time valorizing efficiency, planning, and effectiveness - and i get it! being all of those things are great. and i’m certainly not saying don’t plan! but it’s really hard how to plan exactly how to get out of an egg when you’re inside of it.

and as a graduate student, it’s really hard to plan exactly how you will write a dissertation chapter without starting it. you can read all the books about how to write a chapter, how to structure your time, how to organize your sources, but all of that information stays in the theoretical realm. some of it might end up to be useful, some of it could be irrelevant, but if you keep reading until you feel ready to do, it’s hard to know what is what.

but you DO have an egg tooth - you are a smart person! you’ve gotten this far! you’ve got skills and knowledge and you do know things! maybe not these exact things, but you’re not starting from zero. so my best advice is:

thrash around. move in whatever way makes the most sense for where you are right now - there’s no perfect way to hatch! but you will break through eventually - and then you can work on enlarging the way out from there. trashing feels erratic and chaotic, but it’s movement.

and the best news about movement? it, by its very nature, makes you stronger. a chick gains muscle tone as it presses up against the shell - the growth is painful and i’m sure scary for that little buddy, but what a way to change and grow in a rapid way. no one says to that chick “well, you could have saved some time if you had hatched in this way” - they say “good job hatching little buddy!!!”.

obviously you can always learn through reading, through research, through observation. but you can also learn through doing, trying, thrashing, failing, messing up, redirecting, tweaking, and starting again. it’s hard to imagine the world outside the egg when you’re still in it. it’s hard to imagine how you’ll be at the next level of your scholarship, your human life, when you’re learning how to do it. and it’s natural in the face of the unknown to try and learn as much as you can before you get there, but sometimes, it’s faster, and maybe even a little more fun, to follow your instincts, thrash a bit, and get out of the shell.

you might never be a morning person

Depending on your perspective, I am about to drop some terrible news. 

You might never be a morning person. 

[Or insert the habit you've desperately been trying to start for the last five years: running, reading fiction before bed, meditating, writing for an hour before coffee, cleaning for 15 minutes a day...] 

But here's the really good news: there's a big difference between the habit and the intention. Just because you might be struggling to establish a habit DOESN'T mean you won't be able to honor and incorporate that intention into your day. 

When do you give up on a habit?

Clients come to me often with a set of habits or routines that they have decided (normally through careful research!) will revolutionize their lives. They want my help in supporting those habits - and to be clear, great!! Sometimes a new habit is just the lightning bolt you need to get other things in your life in order. Yoga was that way for me in grad school - the more I went to class, the better the rest of my life functioned, and if it was a habit to go to yoga, it became easier to hit the benchmarks in the rest of my life.

But more often than not, if the habit was a good fit for someone, they wouldn't need my help to get it started. My classic example of this is the "morning person" habit - I hear so often that clients want to start getting up earlier, and become morning people. If only they could get up at 5 am (or 8 am, depending on where they're starting from!) they would be productive academic writers and they would workout before dawn and everyone in their household would eat a delicious and nutritious breakfast prepared after 20 minutes of soul-filling meditation. 

But something always stops them. Kids don't get to bed on time, so the alarm rings after three or four hours of sleep, and gets shut off. Inspiration hits at 7 or 8 pm, and writing goes late into the night. A few days of sleeping in after being sick and the sleep cycle is all off. Everything is great when alone, but when you add a partner who does not feel compelled to get up at 5 am, together time at home is cut down to only an hour or two because of the mismatched bedtimes. Being a morning person works and is great, but it just can't be sustained without huge sacrifices.

At a moment like that, you can go one of two ways: decide that the sacrifices are worth it, and keep the habit up in spite of those challenges. Or you do what I suggest next: stop looking at the habit as the cure-all, and look at the intention. 

Break your habit into the intention parts

Habits are powerful; they take the choice out of activities that we know will serve us in the long run. Instead of deciding twice a day whether it is worth it to brush your teeth, if there's enough of a reason to brush your teeth, you just do it. Those two minutes, twice a day, are long term investments in your dental and overall health and you don't have to waste brain energy on making that investment - it just happens. 

But if you're struggling to make a habit stick, sometimes the distress of stopping and starting that habit (and the guilt and shame spiral that can come with that) is enough to make the whole process unpleasant and unhelpful. So instead of forcing yourself to "be a morning person", or whatever the habit is, be clear about what the intention of that habit is. 

For example, if you really, really want to be a morning person, is it that you:

• Want some time alone before others wake up to center yourself before taking on the day?

• Want writing time that is unlikely to be scheduled over or come into conflict with other duties?

• A regular workout time in order to start the day?

• Time to meditate or journal?

• Regular nutritious breakfasts?

It might be that you want all of those things - but I would encourage you to narrow your list down to the one or two most important things that you want to call in or start. 

Maybe you really want time to center yourself before you start the day, but don't have time for a full 45 minute journaling routine in the morning, no matter how hard you try. Why not shift the bulk of that journaling to the end of your work day, and then only do five or ten minutes in the morning? Still time to center, but broken up and much easier to squeeze in to a hectic morning routine.

Struggling to find a time to make working out a consistent part of your schedule? Maybe you broaden what you mean by start of the day! If you can't get to it before dawn, maybe you get to it before the start of your writing day - you tackle a few hours of chores/appointments/administrative things, and then make a lunchtime yoga class, or go for a 10:30 am run before you sit down to write. 

But breaking the habit down into the intended effects, and focusing on how to make THOSE work, can be a total game-changer. Despite what others may tell you, not every habit or routine works for every person, and even if it worked for you before, it might not work now! But by identifying the intention behind the habit you're working so hard to start, you can open up a few pathways to succeeding, rather than pinning everything on an all or nothing habit. 

You can always start to stack your habits - get your 10 minutes of meditation in every morning, and once that feels stable, add breakfast! Put a workout afterwards! Add five minutes of planning and schedule maintenance! But always remember that it isn't the routine that's the miracle - it's the commitment that you show every time you show up and put the work in. Commitment isn't time bound - only habits are. If you're committed to the change, and the habit is standing in the way, let the habit go and focus on making the most of your commitment to change. 

maybe you don't need a restart

new month new energy!

new semester reset!

restart everything - it’s a new season and it’s time for a clean start.

this kind of thinking is a siren call. it beckons us from the rocks - it seems like a way out of the fog! a way through what feels hard and ineffective and challenging into something clearer, more in control.

but think about the language. if you start over, if you restart, if you reset, you go back to the beginning. you start from square one. you reconsider everything. nothing is off the table. you’re trying something new, you’re a beginner, you’re rebuilding because what you were doing wasn’t working.

we often want a reset so we don’t have to do too much digging into what wasn’t working. if you just say “start over”, you don’t have to really sit with what happened before, you just have to focus on what is coming next. you get to put all your energy into the new system that you’re trying, you flipped the page, and now it’s fresh and new and hopeful.

of course we want that! of course that feels good! who wouldn’t sacrifice some feeling of mastery, who wouldn’t retell the story to have all that fresh, new year new person energy.

but if we constantly reset, if we restart frequently, we end up repeating a lot. if you throw out all your progress because you have a better plan, the last plan, now - then you never give yourself credit for what you’ve tried. you don’t recognize what has worked before, the skills you built along the way. even if you don’t literally throw work away, you do tell yourself that you have to start over in order to move forward. you have to do something drastic in order to unblock.

what if you thought about it as a recommitting instead?

you’re not restarting your writing practice, you’re recommitting to it. you’re not resetting your meditation habit, you’re recommitting to it. you’re not starting from ground zero with your scheduling, you’re recommitting to rules, like a hard off time, or weekends with family.

give yourself some credit - you’re making a change, you might be making some changes or trying something new, but it’s part of the life cycle. you don’t have to restart because you failed, but you’re recommitting because things have changed, you have changed, and you need to try something different, or new.

so if you’re feeling that itch to make some big moves, start some new routines, try something you haven’t tried, or haven’t tried in a while - try talking about it to yourself as a recommitment. you’re recommitting to your goal of finishing, to your routines that worked in times like this, you’re recommitting to the scholar and human that shows up, focused and ready, as well as rested and grounded.

it might look exactly the same, but if you call it a restart, you send yourself backwards in order to move forward.

it you call it a recommitment, you get to make a change, get that fresh energy, but you don’t have to go backward to do it. you can keep moving forward.

self care week: evolution

for a long time, the foundation of my self care practice was yoga. if i was going to yoga regularly, there was a strong chance that most other things were working well.

and then i moved, and struggled to find a studio that fit well with me (ie, wasn’t racist and appropriative!). i tried a few different video yoga things, and could never found one that totally resonated for a sustained practice. nothing seemed to work and all along the way, i was moving less and feeling worse and worse about it.

and then it dawned on me that i didn’t have to practice yoga in order to move my body. i could try something else.

so now, i go and do exercise classes in a space where i feel comfortable and welcome (well, right now i take those classes in my office as they’re live streamed from the studio because i’m still not ready to be in an enclosed room with people i don’t know without masks!) i stretch really consciously to make sure i don’t get too tight. i run sometimes, slowly. sometimes i go for a long walk, and i really like to hike. it looks different, but the foundation - the part where i move my body - is the same.

there might be things that need to evolve in your self care. you might have been able to get up every morning and write from 8 to 10, but that was before your house was full of your entire family, all the time, and that’s exactly when they need support to get settled into their days. you might have been really good at stopping at the gym on your way home from the lab, but now that you lab at home, or lab during a late shift, it’s harder to do that.

it can be really hard to build a new routine and set of skills up - there’s a reason that we don’t always jump for joy at the idea of having to make huge changes in any part of our lives. it can feel really, really frustrating to have something that really WORKS for you only to have your life change, and then that thing needs to change and you’re back at the drawing board.

but our lives change all the time. so it makes sense that what we need to support ourselves changes all the time. if we let go of the idea (in stages! it’s a tough one!) that we fix problems once, and then we carry out the solutions perfectly until the end of time, then it can feel a little easier to be in a state of flux. some things are stable. some things are morphing. we’re always moving. we’re always taking care.

Additive adjustments - shifting your routine

I spoke on a panel last week about self-care as a self-employed person as part of my own accountability/networking/community group at Self Employed PhD. The conversation, with the brilliant Rebecca of Enderby Yoga was wide-ranging and thought-provoking, and we touched on how to start building a routine and practice of self-care. Many clients I speak to feel overwhelmed by the idea of self care; they would like to eat better, sleep better, be more balanced, etc, but do not know where to start, or feel intimidated by the Instagram ideal of a "healthy" life. I offered my theory of "additive adjustments" to the group, a theory born out of years of monitoring my own self-care. 

Everyone is busy. Many of us look at our schedules and think - I do not have time for that extra hour of x, y, or z. I could never squeeze in that new activity three times a week. I do not have time to [cook, clean, organize] anything, I only have time for what I'm doing right now. So the first instinct is to "clear the decks": eliminate parts of your routine that aren't working, drop all non-essential obligations so you can "focus" on the new routine. 

For example, when my clients commit to "writing more", I often see them try to arrange their schedules so that they can have eight (or 10 or 12) uninterrupted hours of writing. They will cancel social functions, drop gym memberships, stop coming to campus just so that they can sit and write. And more often than not, those eight hours are not productive. They're marked with the anxiety and expectation of what eight "perfect" hours can produce, and how far the actual output was from the ideal. Subtracting everything so that you can focus, in my experience, never works.

Instead, I encourage my clients to keep their schedules the way they are, and start adding things. Add in a 15 minute meditation session before your writing block. Add in two hours of planning out and preparing meals so that you can eat healthier all week. Start the morning with an hour of yoga, and then start your day of academic tasks. Add in the pieces of self care that you feel are lacking, and see how it effects the rest of your day, rather than taking away activities, habits, or tools. 

Taking care of yourself, even in small ways, often has a ripple effect. But it is hard to see those changes, and get the data, if you have cleared all the other obligations from your schedule. So adding in small, manageable self-care practices can be a low-stakes way to move towards a more balanced daily routine without making drastic changes. Small changes let you experiment with different self-care practices without building up unrealistic expectations. Like our professional lives, self-care is a process of experimentation, adjustment, and refinement; approaching all of it from a viewpoint of "this can only add to my life" will help it to feel playful and supportive.