My early wakeup practice went bankrupt today, after 4 days.

I wrote Jet Lag Builds Early Raiser before:

Jet lag is good thing for me. Whenever in US, or back to Shanghai, jet lag drives me wake up earlier and then I became an early raiser for some days. Thus I have enough time to write more blogs (helping me to get clearer idea about my world, and comprehend the message I got). It is just like an effective “Raise Early” medicine. But the problem is, the effect gets less significant along the day, and I will fade into normal life.

Is there any way to simulate jet lag?

I also wrote other entries on this topic: Early Wake Up, Blogging and Early Wake-up, Trip Progress: Wake up Early in the Morning.

This is the fifth morning after I got back. 5:08 is too early for me (the sun rise time), and I felt sleepy in the afternoon. I waked up at 5:08, stand up, walked out of bed room, and felt asleep at the sofa in living room. When I wake up again, it was 8:00 AM.

What it Tells When Something is Hard to Do?

I started to wonder, if something is so hard to do, like waking up early, like losing weight, or get rid of procrastination, is there a reason behind it? Is it because it is not the nature way, or there is some hard boundary there (like you can not lose weight lower than a certain number, because that is what a living person’s boundary)? If we fail, is it because of we are fighting against a law?

Taking procrastination as example, Richard Hamming mentioned that don’t fight against all type of procrastination. Great scientist are those who procrastinate to shave, or to pay bills, because they put effort into more important things that requires a big chunk of time. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Analysis of Wake up Early

I believe the boundary is the daily sleeping time the body needs in long term (you can twist it by few days, like before an exam, but not long). Let’s say, it is 8 hours per day. There must be another boundary that pulled me back – the go to bed time.

The social activities and family, and eating time all affects that. For example, if we really can eat dinner at 5:00 PM instead of 7:00 PM, and there is a way we follow the society to really shutdown at 9:00 PM (by shutdown, I mean there is no Weibo activities, or no emails), we definitely can shift to the 9:00 PM to 5:00 PM schedule. This has been proved by travelers. When we were in Hangzhou, we really went to bed at 9:00 PM – actually we were bored at 7:00 PM already. Among all the social interactions, Wendy is the biggest portion that impact my schedule. I just cannot fell asleep everyday.

If the social environment does not change, especially if I cannot get agreement with Wendy to change together, I am actually running against head wind, and the effort accumulation is big enough for me to give up.

Other Things? Like Losing Weight?

How much is enough? Whether we should eat three meals or two? When to have meals? What to eat? All of this is actually much more influenced by our society than we can imagine. We don’t decide by ourself, the social environment does.

I never said we cannot change, or we should not fight, but to realize that we are heading against head wind makes us smarter to choose how to react.

One of the best way is to move. To find an environment that we feel suite our needs better, and shape ourselves, by the environment we choose. If not, choose a micro-environment, or build one.

So, the next step is not to fight harder – it is to change the social interaction.