It’s the afternoon after. I haven’t yet told her that I’m not going to allow her to stay over on school nights. For my sake, really. On the bus to the PAC, I was nervously laughing to myself because: when do you deliver bad news? In the morning and mess with their whole day? In the evening and mess with their sleep? Clearly, I am overthinking this. I am currently sitting next to her in the practice room, doing homework. After she practices for a while, I’ll tell her. It feels weird to word it like, ‘I’m putting my foot down on this issue,’ because I don’t want to. But getting great rest last night makes me realize I do need to lock in and set the boundary that I will be prioritizing my sleep. She needs to too, so maybe I can lead by example. When I feel tired, I’m impatient, unproductive, sour, and lash out. It kills me to see myself act this way when I know the oh so easy solution.
I went into the Atomic Habits work wanting to bang out a bunch of it. Of course I know it’s not a cure-all fix to my problems, or a magic solution, but I wanted to get a lot done. Instead, it warned me of this very issue of expecting major change too fast, and forced me to slow down. It’s undoubtedly so that all my attempts to break or build a habit have been all or nothing hail-mary’s; many of which have not stuck, and the ones that have don’t have a safeguard for if I lose track of it. Currently, its having me track what I do in a week. When am I productive? When do I waste time? A great first step is to identify and name the behavior. You can only fix what you know.