The Garmin Vivosmart 4 stopped me drinking.
I love it as a fitness tracker, as it tracks heart rate, pulse ox for part of the night when sleeping, and has a function called “body battery” that tracks your activity against your rest using heart rate variability. You can track many fitness activities and even sync it to your phone as a GPS tracker for dryland training.
Y’all knew I was a nerd and love crap like that, right?
It’s the body battery that was the major push away from booze. If I had a drink the night before, my body battery didn’t charge — as my heart rate never dropped down into the fifties for that “good sleep” slowdown.
Now, I’ll still have a drink about once a quarter, don’t get me wrong! I’m not entirely a teetotaler. However, if I think about wanting a drink, I think about how deep I want to sleep that night. Being extremely protective of my sleep, the answer’s usually “no.”
It’s the logic of, “What will this do to Future Me?”
Will I be sorry I had a glass of wine at a celebration?
No. Pleasures and enjoyment at celebrations are an important part of enjoying life.
Will I be sorry I got bad sleep after a tough day?
Yes. Most of the time, it’s the restorative sleep I need after a challenge. Challenges are a part of life, too, and doing what you can to recover from them is also important. Yeah, I would have thought that booze knocked you out so you’re all good. Turns out that’s not quite so. You’re adding something else for your body to recover from as well as the emotional hangover. I wouldn’t have believed it, either.
So…
Yes, direct feedback does have an effect on my behavior.
I also swim. But I will be quite honest, it’s hard for me to get in the pool. It’s a lot of rigamaole — getting the gym bag packed, making sure I have everything, plotting out how to get through the damn locker room with a bunch of old ladies who don’t seem to believe Covid is real, making sure my hands and face are dry with putting the mask on and off, making sure I packed my underwear…
It’s a damn production that, frankly, I sometimes don’t really want to face.
It’s not that I don’t love swimming, I do. I’ve never been grumpy more than 100 yards into a swim. I love the fact that I’m off the hook for thinking, planning, considering other people’s feelings, or solving problems for an hour. I have a lane to myself and all I have to do is swim. I can’t meditate sitting still, but woah, can I send my brain into that Mushin (no-mind) state pretty well staring at that black line. I even have a watch that counts laps for me and I swim some long sets.
So yes, a bit of moderate exercise and letting yourself off the hook for anything but what you’re doing in the moment usually does leave you feeling better, right? Well, it does for me, anyway.
I need to apply the same logic to not-drinking to swimming. How do I usually feel at the end of a swim? At worst, high end of neutral, low end of good.
Today, I was singing Uptown Funk at the top of my lungs on the drive home, and I’m sure my town thanks me for doing so with the windows closed!
Still, getting over that hump of getting myself out the door and into the pool is real.
I’m trying to think of things to engineer the hump away. You know, like people who have a hard time throwing their clothes in the dirty clothes hamper if there’s a top on it, but for some reason will toss those suckers right IN if there’s no top? (Yes, this is a real thing, especially with people with attention deficit problems)
Do y’all have things that were blocks, humps, or choke points? If you did, have you tried to engineer them away, and did that help?