More Ideas and Experiments.

Hello blog (or book) world! It has been four days since my last update, and I would like to retouch on some of the things that I wrote.

For starters, I explained how I was having a poor attitude and decided to go into the day positively and see how it turned out. Well, it went fairly decent. It started slow and I started to feel the day dragging. I'm sure many of you know what I mean by dragging, it just seems like every minute is an hour and every hour is a week. I was trying so hard to fight my tiredness which in turn was causing me to have a bad attitude. I remember I kept thinking, "I am really trying to feel happy, but it just isn't working!" Then something happened.

I can't really explain what that something was, because it's not like a bolt of lightning struck the ground or someone grabbed me and said "SNAP OUT OF IT!" However, I just felt a sudden change of perspective about how my current situation was going. I believe it was around 12:30 PM or so when this happened. I was becoming frustrating and just stopped working for a minute. I took a deep breath and looked around. I believe I have asked this question before, but it is a great question to ask; have you ever just looked at the beauty of the world? Instead of just worrying about getting something done (which I was while working) or getting to and from destinations, just stop and marvel at the world's magnificence. It is truly remarkable. Shortly thereafter I started reminding myself that I was lucky to be where I was at. Sure, I could think of many other circumstances or situations that I would prefer to be doing at that specific moment in time, but things usually are not as bad as we see them. I started to envision my dreams and goals, my family, my friends, and I started to become happy. I honestly don't know what I took a pause and started thinking about these things, but I am happy that I did.

Shortly after that break, everything totally turned around. I started to feel more energized, and I was happy to be alive. Whereas just 15 minutes ago I could not wait for the day to be over. I think back to when I was working as a carpenter and I would say to myself as I looked at the time, "wow I wish it was 6:00." It doesn't take much to determine that 6:00 was the time I got off work. After my experience last week, I wonder that if I had decided to see the bigger picture, rather than focusing on what was presently frustrating, if my whole outlook on my job would have changed? And to expand on that, with everything? I really feel for the people who go through their day wishing for it to be over. I use to be someone like that. I still go through days where I jokingly say, "I wish I could fast forward time until this was over," but I am going to refrain from that as much as possible. Can you imagine how short lived our lives would be if we could "fast forward" through it? If I truly had the power of this silly thought, my 21 years that I have lived so far would probably be closer to 15, or less. I have said that many times during school, work, events, etc.

I am still growing and am no where near being able to say I have a good attitude. Little things still frustrate me at times, but I can see myself becoming better. As of right now I can not tell you that if you change your attitude and focus on the good that it will change your outlook on life. I can only assume that. It also makes it easier to assume when every successful person I have read about has basically said they have applied the same principle. This is going to be an ongoing experiment that I will bring up from time and time and hopefully capture more examples of this working. Whenever I start to feel frustrated or mad, I am going to think of the good in the situation. If I can't find the good in that specific situation, I will look elsewhere.

This has actually made me think of an idea, which I will do right now. I am going to list 10 things that are good about my life and if you are reading this, I suggest you do the same. Anytime I start to feel upset, I will think of something on this list to try and turn my feeling around. This will be in no particular order other than just listing ideas as they pop into my head:

1) I have a great mutual loving relationship with my girlfriend.
2) I have many great friends who I enjoy being with.
3) Both of my parents care for me and supply me with shelter.
4) I am not starving and am able to supply myself with food and water.
5) There are many people in my life who love and care about me.
6) I feel that I am heading in the right direction.
7) I am alive, conscious, and able to think clearly.
8) I live in a free country which gives me the ability to become successful in a field of my choice.
9) I am of good health.
10) Overall, I am happy with my life.

Those items took about 13 minutes or so to compile, and I am happy with it as I re-read them. The first three items came to me rather quickly, then I sort of hit a block. I had to really clear my mind and think about some things that I take for granted. Once I began to think of the big picture, the ideas started flowing in. I think this is a great exercise that I just thought of from my experiment with attitude, and I hope you enjoyed doing it as well!

Well, since I updated on my attitude experiment, I might as well enlighten you on my sleep problem. In my last entry, I said I really did not have an idea of how to help myself. Well, I looked up articles on sleep, primarily focusing on how to become an early riser. I found many useful ideas and techniques which I am going to try to put into practice. I am not going to set the bar so high that I will fail, but I am going to try to wake up no later than 10:00 am everyday for the remainder of June. Also, I am going to rise as soon as my alarm goes off; no snooze! I live by hitting the snooze button and have read a few different ways to make this so. I am not going go into major detail, but here is the basic jist of everything:

I need to beat the idea into my subconscious, rather than my conscious. This idea mainly came from Steve Pavlina in one of his blog entry's titled How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off (which can be viewed here). He states that who you are when your alarm goes off is not the same person who said, "I am going to wake up at 8am, no question about it!" You think differently, and no matter how determined you are to wake up early when you fall asleep, you are not going have the same mindset when you wake up; he calls this fog of the brain. This makes a lot of sense to me because I would swear, promise, and sign in blood that I would wake up at x-time, only to turn off my alarm and keep sleeping in the morning. I would keep this process up, rarely waking up when I wanted to, then get very frustrated and mad at myself when I woke up hours past my alarm. The only thing I was doing was making a bad habit worse and was going about solving it the wrong way. Steve recommends something different.

He says that it does take discipline (I mean c'mon, what doesn't?!) but not as much as many people think. Instead, he recommends that you program your subconscious to wake up when your alarm goes off. Sounds interesting, but how? By practicing.

Yep, acting like you are waking up. He even says, "This is going to sound really stupid, but it works." And sense what I have been doing isn't working, I decided to give it a shot. So, starting tonight once it is dark, I am going to pretend that I am sleeping and waking up to my alarm. Yes, it sounds silly, but why not try?! I am going to create the environment as close as I can while I am sleeping, set my alarm for a few minutes, turn off my alarm immediately after it goes off, take a deep breath, stretch, then get up as if I would be waking up for the day. Then I will repeat it. And again. And again. I will probably try this about 10 times tonight, more tomorrow, and so on for the rest of the week. I am excited about this experiment because I haven't heard of anything like this before and I believe it could work. As with everything else, I will update my progress as I go along.

While we are on the topic of changing perspectives, I want to bring up another problem in my life that I have not been able to solve. I like to have things neat and organized, but I have a heck of a time keeping it that way. I spend most of my day on my computer (which I want to change as well, but that's for another entry!) and everything becomes cluttered around my desk. This drives me crazy, but due to laziness or something else, I just can never keep everything clean. Well, today I cleaned my room for the last time! Well, not technically, but it is the last time I am going to let it get as out of control as it was. I had dishes stacked up around my keyboard, clothes on the floor, an overflowing garbage, papers scattered everywhere; I looked like a pig! I don't want my room to look that disgusting ever again. I feel so much more secure and content when everything is clean and organized, and it is going to stay this way. How? Well, I put up a sign above my monitors that reads "KEEP YOUR ROOM CLEAN" Will this work? I think so! I also plan on placing notes like this in other places in my room and house in hopes to get it through to my thick skull that I have to pick up after myself! I was actually having a conversation with my girlfriend, Kristen, about this and asked her to help me keep my room clean. She responded with, "Well, it isn't that hard. Just pick up after yourself." Touche Kristen. It's really just common sense.

Moving onward! The website idea is starting to become more and more exciting everyday. Although we haven't done much more work on it, I keep thinking of new ideas. I can not wait until we start attracting a decent amount of viewers to come on our quest with us. It will up my motivation and dedication so much! What we have to do now is get a decent layout based on the skeleton which has been erected. We also need to develop a system so that everything is pretty much "one click." We don't want to have to update many html pages when just one thing has changed, and this is something we will have to learn to do. Once we have an idea for what we want to include and the process of everything, we can then start uploading content. I can not wait until everything is in place; this is going to be a huge step!

I feel I covered a lot today and am glad I started writing. I actually didn't really feel like writing when I started, but like always, when I forced myself to, I was happy with the result. I enjoy writing, working, and getting things accomplished; it's just starting them that is difficult!

Remember, write and return rich! (If you haven't noticed, I have been putting different silly little motto's at the end of my entries lately. I am trying to find one that fits me, so they will be different until I find one that I like!)