The Two Bedrocks
the habits that make everything else possible
Reminder: as discussed in this post, I am starting a fantastic new job this week. Consequently, my comment section will be closed by default for everyone, and only occasionally open, beginning with this post. I still receive and read all emails, but am rarely able to reply to them, at hollymathnerd at gmail dot com. I will no longer be participating on Substack Notes, but I left the restack and restack-with-note options available when I re-configured my settings, so those of you on Notes who want to comment that way can still do so. As when I left Twitter, I won’t be responding anymore but will read from time to time.
When I’ve fully acclimated to my new job, I might change these things. But for now I want all my energy, cognitive and physical, available to get myself off to a great, distraction-free start there. Thanks for understanding.
October Glory Is Almost Here
It’s finally turning into autumn!
The leaves are changing in earnest, the tempreature is starting to drop, and the energy of beautiful change is in the air.
Next weekend, I’ll be doing my annual weekend road trip throughout Vermont to get foliage pictures, and will publish a photo essay for paid subs.
Yes, I’m that girl. I am an autumn-loving, pumpkin-spice-candle-burning, pull-over-and-take-foliage-pictures, of-course-October-is-my-favorite-month white girl.
A very, very basic white girl.
Or, as a clever commenter on Substack Notes said…I’m heavily in touch with my ancestors. 😂😂😂
Seasonal Changes Promote Other Changes
I don’t understand how or why this works, but I’ve read many people, in many different circumstances, talking about the change of seasons helping them change their habits and other aspects of their lives.
As I’ve prepared my home—my new job will be remote—and life for this change of job, I’ve realized much more clearly how core two habits are to my life.
They’re not for everyone, and I do understand that. But they’ve been wonderful for me, and I know that they’re two of the habits that frequently make survey lists of habits that people want to inculcate in themselves. So I thought I’d write a bit about them to offer whatever insight or motivation might be helpful to readers.
I also have some suggestions for making changes in these areas that I think may be helpful.
The Two Linchpins
My name is Holly MathNerd, and I am both a neat freak and an early riser.
My apartment is what my friend
calls “hotel neat and clean.”It embodies the old adage of “a place for everything and everything in its place.”
If the apocalypse comes and the only surviving doctor in the area needs a sterile operating room, my home could probably serve with about half an hour’s notice.
Even more annoyingly, I’m also a morning person.
I get up no later than 5am, usually a little earlier. It is rare for my alarm to wake me up. That typically happens no more than twice a month. Generally, I wake up naturally between 4:40 and 4:55am.
I really like living this way.
Why? It’s a combination of several things.
One is a simple appreciation for order. (I am a mathematics nerd for a reason, after all.) I like things to make sense, and to have recognizable patterns, especially patterns that promote efficiency.
Getting up early was something I stumbled across in college, something that started out of sheer practicality. Prior to this accidental revelation, I was the typical night owl, going to bed between 2 and 3am.
Majoring in mathematics was an enormous challenge for me, intellectually and emotionally. My classmates all, to the best of my knowledge, went to good high schools where they had real teachers. Most also had parents with college degrees.
I had to study much harder than my classmates, or at least it seemed so to me. I had a major anxiety disorder in addition to a weak educational background, so I memorized everything. Memorization let me circumvent the part of my brain that second, third, fourth, and fifth guessed everything.
When I knew the inverse trigonometric derivatives so well that I could write them down, from memory and without thought, I was able to take quizzes and tests with significantly less anxiety. But there’s a metric ton of such things in college-level math, so I needed to spend the majority of my waking hours with flashcards, nearly every semester.
I also spent a lot of time in the tutoring office and on YouTube, watching lectures on the topics of my courses. The overlap between hearing the same thing explained several different ways was always my best spot for understanding. I went into the learning styles and teaching techniques that help people understand mathematics in great detail in this post, a review of MATH-ish, the new book by Jo Boaler. She’s the woman who rewrote the California (biggest customer of the textbook industry) curriculum standards and thus screwed over the whole country.
How I Discovered The Power of Early Rising
In college, I got disability accommodations for my hearing, which mostly amounted to peer notes in every class. (I wrote about disability accommodations and what is, and isn’t, reasonable here.)
Peer note-taking is a system whereby good students get special training in note-taking. They then get community service credit for taking excellent notes, which they upload to a portal within a few hours after every class. Mathematics is the subject that is nearly always taught with the professor’s back to the class, writing on the board, and thus the worst situation for a student with limited hearing.
I frequently agonized over the peer notes, as they often seemed to me to reiterate a class that was very different from the one I thought I remembered attending. Was it that my memory was poor? Was it that my understanding of mathematics was meandering and convoluted, compared to peers who had taken AP courses in high school? I knew I could trust them to accurately differentiate between 50 and 15, between secant and cosecant, and other details related to my hearing. But something always seemed a bit off, and I didn’t know why.
I was sick for a couple of weeks during my first year, but not the unambiguous kind of sick. No high fever. No puking my guts out. Nothing so simple as that, where I’d go to the doctor and get some kind of treatment.
Rather, I was about 75% sick. Just okay enough to make myself go to class, but not nearly okay enough to function well.
I had two quizzes in the same day, one in Calculus and one in Fundamentals of Mathematical Thinking — the class where you learn basic set theory and the building blocks of both logic and proof-writing. The night before, I just could not stay awake. So I grudgingly set an alarm for 4am and went to bed.
I got up, accessed the peer notes, and found that they made much more sense than they ever had before.
To my utter shock, my brain worked better than it ever had before at 4am, and I did well on both quizzes.
I experimented for the next couple of weeks, and the results were undeniable. I had better results—academically, yes, but also with managing my anxiety disorder and my overall well-being—and my study time was far more efficient.
So I decided to become a morning person. And it wasn’t that hard. It took less than two weeks to fully acclimate after deciding to commit.
Organized Home, Orderly Mind
Another aspect of my neat freakness—which is more or less significant depending on what kind of day I’m having—is that it’s part of how I live with my own dark backstory.
I grew up in the kind of house that would’ve had me removed by CPS, if they’d known. Keeping my home in a manner that is pristinely clean, neat, and at all times orderly provides me with constant evidence that the past is over.
Some days, weeks, or even months, I don’t think about that aspect of it at all. But I am certain that it still benefits me in that way. It is evidence of my own adulthood, of conscious choices I’ve been able to make because I’m not a helpless little kid anymore.
Benefits of These Habits: Early Rising
Because the first three to four hours of every day are mine and mine alone—nothing is open, no business is answering their phones, nobody is texting, etc.—I am able to make significant progress on many things. When I want to get a drawing done or work on a writing project, I just re-allocate part of those hours.
When I need to really think about something, usually something my therapist and I are talking about, I schedule some time to think and write about whatever it is, usually in between breakfast and the workday starting.
It’s also a great time for meditation, reflection, and gratitude, which is probably my atheist version of prayer.
Benefits of These Habits: Neatness
I can have visitors at any time. I love it when
comes over, which is usually but not always planned in advance. He can drop by any time and all I need to do is adjust the thermostat. (We have the typical male/female dichotomy where he prefers meat locker temperatures and I don’t.) It’s been years since I did the mad-dash-get-the-place-looking-presentable, and I love that freedom.I also know where everything is, can find whatever I need quickly, and can see at a glance when I’m running low on something important. Thus I never run out of things, and can make sure to always shop sales.
I know that “neat” and “organized” mean different things to different people. I’ve had friends who were organized to the point that their random tech-related cords were organized, instead of just all in one place, like me.
Before I get to my suggestions for changing habits in these areas, here are a few closet pics, so you know I’m not referring to OCD (at least, I don’t think so), just a high level of neatness.
By the way, the clear container with the open lid in the picture just above is a time locking box. I got it on Amazon. I have found it to be a very helpful tool for changing habits. Locking up something that you want to delay access to — your phone, your kid’s phone, a snack, etc., can provide a helpful external discipline that will make establishing habits easier.
I bought it when I was occasionally using psilocybin to help me treat my PTSD symptoms and depression, to make sure that I wouldn’t get in my car and drive while impaired. But it has many broader applications for a variety of lifestyle changes.
Suggestions for Change: Early Rising
Getting up earlier will be very context-dependent, of course. But if you possibly can, one of the best ways to do it is this: ideally on a morning when you will be waking up alone, go to bed at your usual late hour. Then set an alarm and put it somewhere that you have to get out of bed to turn off. Leave yourself a note and a change of clothes including shoes. As soon as you turn the alarm off, immediately change and go outside. Outside time is very enlivening. If you do this and manage to discipline yourself not to nap—one of the few things that’s a perk of non-remote work and leaving the house—you will have a lot easier time falling asleep early the following night. That can help promote a reset at the price of just one sleepy day.
Use a concentration/focus helper. As I have written about (and many people have commented to me about in both email and on Notes), the brain.fm app is extraordinarily powerful and helpful. Use that to help you do whatever you want to do. This link will get you a month free, so there’s no risk in trying. If it helps you even a fraction as much as it’s helped me, you’ll get more done in the morning than you imagined possible, which will help create a pattern of success and some nice momentum.
Have your favorite food in the house and let yourself eat it as soon as you get up, ideally after going to bed hungry. If you’re a coffee person, get some fancy coffee that you really like but usually don’t have at home.
Get a treat related to something you enjoy but rarely indulge. Did you know that your favorite childhood TV show is probably available for purchase on Amazon Prime? Buy season 1 and commit to yourself that you’ll only watch it between 5 and 6am. Do you enjoy knitting but never do it anymore? Get your supplies out and ready, in a comfortable spot, the night before. Was there a book that meant a lot to you when you were a kid? Amazon again — they may even have a Kindle version that you could read on your phone.
Suggestions for Change: Neatness and Order
The most important thing here is to start small. Change one thing. Clean off your desk, or organize one shelf of one closet. Maintain the change for a day or two.
Habit-stacking is very powerful. What’s something you do every day without fail? Especially if the one thing you clean or organize first is small, like a desktop, then make a point of maintaining it in conjunction with that thing. I’ve known people to organize a particular shelf with one hand while brushing their teeth—a habit they never fail to maintain—with the other, and that works well to get the habit established. Other possibilities are a daily medication or locking the door before retiring.
Think about the times that disorganization have caused you difficulty, and make your first attempt something that addresses the specifics. Did you run out of the shampoo you like and forget to buy more? Organize a shelf in the bathroom closet and then order two bottles of it on Amazon. When they arrive, make a point of pausing a few times over the next couple of days and reminding yourself that they’re there, and your new commitment to organization will help you never run out again.
After you’ve made a few small changes, make a day of cleaning out and organizing your closets. Don’t be afraid to get rid of things you don’t use anymore. The heuristic I tend to use is that if I haven’t used something in a year or two—one or two full cycles of all four seasons—I don’t need it.
The Salvation Army, as well as other charities, run thrift stores that accept donations. You will get a tax receipt that will help you in April, and the satisfaction of knowing that your stuff is going to good use.
Bedrock Habits to Build On
Of the two, early rising is the more powerful, I think. A regular habit of taking the first couple of hours of every day to maintain conscious priorities—things that are important to you, that you’ve decided in advance will be yours to get done before the rest of the world is around to interrupt you—is a tool of empowerment, self-respect, and gaining strength.
Autumn is one of the best times of year to create positive change. Most people maintained Autumn, Winter, Spring school schedules as kids, and it may be that there are ingrained patterns that help promote change in the autumn as a result. We are used to changing things—our schedules, our sleeping habits, etc.—in autumn.
If you’ve ever wished you got up earlier or were more organized, I encourage you to try, and I hope these tips have helped.
Coming Soon
Next weekend, I’ll publish the photos from my annual road trip to get foliage pictures, for paid subs.
I’m also working on an essay that I think will surprise many people. Having recently left a Fortune 500 (my old job) I have quite a few thoughts about what’s really going on in the business world in the US, the reality of offshore hiring, and related topics. No matter how bad you think it is, I promise you—it’s worse.
I’m “enjoying” working on that one (the catharsis is nice, but the picture is very dark) and will publish it soon!