Ysiad

todo::
* 30 minutes on the programming tutorial
* Day Four of journaling about Apathy/Helplessness/Hopeless
* Pause Gym Membership – I just saw that my membership renewed yesterday. So I should do this on February 13th. Putting it on my calendar.

habits::
* Meditation – Day 677
* Journaling – Day 20
* Yoga – Day 19

Reflections:: 8:40am Woke up and did my morning routine. Noticed that I was thinking about different things than previous meditations. Which is awesome, because it means that my actions from yesterday effectively unstuck me in areas where I was apathetic, yet unaware. Now I’m wondering if a reason for getting stuck at the apathy level sometimes could be a fear of mourning/ going through the grief process. I’m imagining that by creating a positive feedback loop around grieving, I’ll feel more confident in my ability to deal with what comes next, which would get me unstuck faster, which would make me more comfortable feeling the hopelessness and exploring it. Currently I feel an aversion to helplessness and hopelessness. If I were to describe the feeling, it’s how I would imagine I would react if I found myself teleported into a room with a bunch of decaying corpses. I’d hold my breath, run towards the door, open it, slam it shut, and then take a bunch of deep breaths. Now that I’m older and seek to understand, I would like to have a different relationship with that room. Perhaps I could wear a a protective suit or an N95 mask and feel more comfortable exploring this room. Something that popped in my head while I was meditating, is that I might benefit from better understanding what causes us to wake up from sleep. I’d never really asked myself that question before and always taken it for granted. But why do we wake up at all? Is there some hormone or chemical that causes us to regain consciousness after a certain amount of sleep? Are there experiments where researchers are able to get humans to sleep for days on end? 9:07am. After diving into this question a bit, I found myself learning about sleep extension studies and how athletic and cognitive performance improves when people spend more time in bed. And I read about how daylight prompts us to wake up. As well as how there’s a group of nerves just above the spinal cord that decide what impulses make it to our brain, but no clear explanation of what wakes us up in the mornings. It’s not like if we slept in a dark room with an IV attached to us that kept us perfectly fed and we didn’t need to use the bathroom that we would sleep forever. So again, I continue to wonder what the mechanisms are. But even as I think about that, there are so many things that could trigger us to wake up. For example, at some point our muscles will get sore from not being used, or our brain will be done processing the events of the previous day and want new things to process. So same thing with apathy or any emotional state – it’s challenging to get stuck because there will be prompts that get us unstuck. 9:17am. I’m noticing I’m not particularly curious about exploring apathy more at the moment after following that intellectual path. So I’ll pause here. Excited to see what comes up for me today and I end up journaling about tomorrow.