Steps I’ve Taken for a Better Me

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Going in to grade 11 has been quite the wakeup call for me personally. Halfway through the summer I only just realized that I needed to change my lifestyle and kick certain habits out of my life to be successful.

Non-productivity

After a bit of mental pain to be honest, I’ve decided to gradually start kicking the bucket on video games and other time-wasting habits. Before, I would scroll endlessly on Reels or Shorts for hours while nothing was getting done.

Phone Screen Time

1. Installing a widget that monitors and blocks apps if I surpass a set screen time limit.
2. Installing a launcher that makes everything very minimalistic — all black and white and no icons to stop me from getting distracted as easily.

3. Leaving my phone downstairs overnight so I do not get tempted to check while I’m in bed — research shows that it’s harder to sleep if your brain builds an association with other behaviors other than sleeping when you’re in bed (an example being scrolling or texting).

Video Games

For kicking video games, it would be much more difficult. I’ve been gaming regularly for the past 6–7 years, so this is an incredibly hard habit to kick. My current focus is the reduce the amount I play and to eliminate my admittedly, somewhat mental dependence on them. This involves:

1. Uninstalling Steam, which harbored my most addictive games on my computer.
2. Not allowing myself to play in the mornings.
3. Gradually getting to limiting myself to playing on weekends only throughout the school year, and a limit of 3 hours on weekends.
4. Replacing video games with much more healthy or productive sources of dopamine, mainly exercise and interacting with friends in person. This mainly aims to desensitize my brain to wanting to play video games.
5. Bringing in new hobbies to replace the time vacuum kicking video games would leave, such as managing a school club, podcasting and writing.

Physical Health

Physical health encompasses many things, such as exercise, diet and sleep.

Sleep

1. Establishing a much more consistent bedtime routine. I used to go to bed between the hours of 9:30pm to as late as 12am or 1. My new goal is to be consistent with a bedtime of 10:15–10:30pm
2. As mentioned before, removing my phone from my bedtime environment
3. Aiming to have consistent hours of sleep. Currently, my sleeping time fluctuates between 4 to 7.5 hours, depending on how tired I was the previous day. My wakeup time would range from 4:00am to 6:30am. My goal is to establish a consistent wakeup time of 5:15–5:45am.

After reading this many of you may be fairly concerned with how little I am sleeping — averaging just 6 hours flat in August 2023 for a 16 year-old. It is worth noting that the 8–10 hours of sleep recommendation for teens is simply a range that satisfy the needs of most people. One’s sleeping habits in general is highly individual and varies from person-to-person. Some thrive on 4 hours, while others feel drowsy even after 11 hours. The way of testing how much sleep your body needs and how I’ve learned about my sleeping habits is to remove most external influences on sleep before bed and to sleep until your body naturally wakes up without an alarm. I personally do not think I’m chronically sleep deprived as I’ve always historically gotten less sleep than normal even as a kid — I remember already running on 8 hours as a 6 year-old, and this was without any phones or blue light prior to bedtime. As long as you’re not feeling very drowsy on a day-to-day basis all the time and don’t overly rely on caffeine, you’re likely getting enough sleep.

Exercise

1. Working out at the gym 3–4 times a week after school.
2. Aiming to run to school each day to train cardio. On weekends, this is replaced by running at 6am in the mornings.
3. Being conscious and listening to how my body feels — any pain in this body part? Am I more sore than usual?

Diet

1. Gradually incorporating cooking my own meals. Although my parents’ cooking is great, a lot of the time it’s usually not what I have in mind from the perspective of meeting my daily nutrition goals — 0.7–1g of protein per pound of bodyweight and a good amount of carbs. Not only is this learning a good life skill, but it will also help with my physical health and recovering from exercise.
2. Trying to include a more diverse selection of food in my meals. I’m kind of a picky eater when it comes to fruits and vegetables and I currently only eat a select few. The only way that I’ve found foods like asparagus or broccoli tolerable is to mask the taste with lots of seasoning or meat.

All of these new habits and the removal of old ones will ensure that I have more time for what really matters — school, friends, health and extracurriculars.