Recently purchased a cube timer on Amazon. Did I need a cube timer? No. Could I set an alarm on my phone instead? Yes. But I love the idea of a lil buddy sitting on my desk counting down the time I have allotted for writing, exercising, etc. If you find a hack that you’re excited about, then that’s the hack you need to exploit. Whatever works. I love the quote if you want to change your life then add or subtract a habit. What we do = the life we enjoy or are missing out on.
My ROE as far as mornings go were pretty solid until I had hand surgery 2 weeks ago. I must confess that it threw me into a total funk not to be able to do things like feed my horses, use a pepper grinder, or tie my own shoes. (Fortunately, my daughter and husband take care of those things for me). But this article made me realize that I can still meditate and journal -both of which help me unpack things a bit. Instead, I just waved the white flag… Time to reconnoiter...Once more unto the breach
I try to never schedule anything before 11 am so I get most of my morning routine in.
By fiercely protecting my morning time, I get most of my routine in, which sets me up to have an emotionally balanced day.
I’m pretty productive during the day, usually accomplishing at least something I can feel good about; probably hitting about the 70-80% mark on what needs to be done.
Night time is the nightmare. Every day it’s a massive struggle to get OFF Facebook to wind down. Damn you Reels!!
My Rules of Engagement (ROE) for the morning are solid, but a total disaster for the evening.
In IFS (Internal Family Systems) terms, manager parts (executive functioning) are strongest in the morning, but decrease as the day goes on. Meanwhile, firefighter (relaxation/addiction) parts steadily rise as the day unfolds, until for me, by around 6 pm they’ve gained control.
Intellectually, I know the solution is to give in to the firefighters’ desire to relax in a generative way: let go of executive control, stop trying to get things done when I no longer have the energy, and chill out. I also know it would be wise to truncate my evenings — to limit my awake hours at night so I don’t spend four hours on Facebook.
Unfortunately, every night my managers go to war with my firefighters, trying to get “one more thing” done on the computer. The firefighters retaliate, by going right over to Facebook and scrolling mindlessly.
I would be so much happier if I did something more fun at night — reading, watching a movie, taking a walk, you name it — but by not giving up the day to the firefighters, all the managers do is end up creating so much conflict that I get low quality relaxation which is so unsatisfying that I get looped into it for hours and hours.
ROE - Rules of Engagement — can only work if you have the executive functioning to actually put them into practice.
To solve this extreme war that’s been going on in me for years, I did something extreme: I spent thousands of dollars to buy a sauna. It arrived two days ago!
If there’s one thing managers listen to, it’s money. They are well aware of how many thousands of dollars I spent on the sauna, so my hope is that it will break through this stalemate and get them to put the keyboard down and walk into the sauna every night at 6:20 PM. That’s my new Rule of Engagement.
What else can I do to support this?
—set my phone to “do not disturb” at 6 pm.
—set a timer on my phone to remind me to turn the sauna on “delayed start” as early as possible in the day (earlier = more executive control)
—track my sauna usage on an app so I turn it into a game I want to win (gamification)
If anyone has any advice on how else to make this 6:20 pm “get in sauna” rule stick, let me know!!
I’m extremely capable as a human being up until about 6 pm at night and do great with time boundaries, then everything goes straight to hell.
Just posting this is a commitment to working even harder/smarter at solving this decades-long struggle. It’s a war, but one way or another, I will win it!!!!! The military metaphor of Rules of Engagement is spot-on for me here.
Thanks for this very timely post, Chris! Here’s to getting in the sauna tonight & every night at 6:20 pm!!! One small ROE to win the war!!
I've also struggled in the past with having an amazing morning routine but then struggling at night to let go of work or not scroll for hours. Some research supports the idea that discipline is a muscle so if you use it all day, it weakens at night, making your nighttime activities harder to stick to. One option might be to find a way to 'save' discipline for the evening.
But since you asked for advice, my honest opinion is that you're really regimented and strict with yourself, even doing inner work during yoga and Pilates, which are supposed to be times to connect with your body. I wonder if there's a part of you who doesn't want to relax and be with yourself. It sounds like you might be in a nervous system freeze response. All the intellectualizing different parts of yourself sounds in my humble opinion like it's exacerbating the war within.
“My honest opinion is that you're really regimented and strict with yourself, even doing inner work during yoga and Pilates, which are supposed to be times to connect with your body.”
In the ideal world, perhaps we would all have the time to just focus on our body when we work out. But I see a lot of people at the gym on their phone, answering email, texting, listening to podcasts, or doing other things, because we only have so many hours in the day. I am not going to judge them, because, quite frankly, whatever it takes for people to get their workout in – good for them! Getting a workout in is better than not getting it in at all.
In order to process through all of the internal issues I need to process through in a day, it works really well for me to do IFS while I do Pilates and yoga. I would actually be overriding my own natural desire to use my exercise time to do inner work if I tried to follow the strict and regimented ideal that this MUST be a time “to connect with your body.” Sounds good on paper, but I’m going to do what I want to do, and NOT doing IFS in the morning when I work out would actually be a way of being overly strict and regimented with myself.
I understand trying to work backwards and look at my entire day in relationship to what happens at night, but I do not have any problems whatsoever with my morning routine.
“I wonder if there's a part of you who doesn't want to relax and be with yourself.”
No matter what anyone does, someone else can always criticize them for somehow not doing it right. If it’s your belief that the only way to “be with yourself” is to be quiet, focusing on your body, meditating and doing yoga and Pilates in silence, great! I talk to my parts and enjoy “being with myself“ that way. We have different approaches to being with ourselves! My parts personally would feel very ignored and upset if I didn’t take this time to be with them, so that’s how I honor them. To each their own!
“It sounds like you might be in a nervous system freeze response.”
I do think I face this issue at night, but I don’t think it’s relevant in the morning. It’s pretty intense to have my delicious, delightful morning routine mischaracterized as potentially a “freeze response” simply because I do inner work while stretching, but again, to each their own.
“All the intellectualizing different parts of yourself sounds in my humble opinion like it's exacerbating the war within.”
A translation of this sentence is: “You are exacerbating your inner war by doing IFS.” This is a common mischaracterization of the practice of Internal Family Systems: the idea that going within one’s personality, and interacting with our different parts, is somehow “intellectualizing different parts,” as opposed to lovingly relating to the parts that are ALREADY THERE. IFS is about working with the younger parts of ourselves that we discover, not parts we intellectualize or somehow use our minds to “make up.” It is absolutely not an intellectual process, it’s a practice of opening our hearts to elements of our personality that have been covered up by our minds!
Before I started practicing IFS, I was certainly at war with myself in uncountable ways. The more IFS I do, the less at war I am with myself. So I know for sure that, for me, IFS is a path of tremendous inner peace and integration, the exact opposite of creating further division.
Woah. Solid. I’m all in favour of discipline, but in recent times I’ve discovered ‘but at what cost?’ We’re not machines, we’re animals. And animals operate pretty much on how they feel, not what time it is.
There’s a counterproductive point we can reach, for example rushing to a yoga class, that takes away from the enjoyment of the discipline or the ability to do it again tomorrow. And some non-functional activity is essential too. Why are we unable to just… be?
I really like this framing of ROE as pre-decision guidance rather than rigid boundaries. To me that feels like the right balance - I enjoy having my daily routine and keeping space for the things that are important to me, but at the same time I need the flexibility to flow with the moment and do what feels right for my body and mind right then.
My ROE I guess includes daily meditation (usually after breakfast, but I often flip this at weekends to the afternoon), exercise (I love group classes - yoga, Zumba, Body Pump; but I’ve had a nagging shoulder injury for a couple of months and an urge to be outdoors, so lately I’ve been doing lots of forest walks and not beating myself up about missing classes) and evening wind-downs (DND on my phone, putting away tech and reading in bed before doing a sleep meditation).
I also recently started being more assertive with my boundaries at work - I put a 30 minute lunch slot on my calendar to stop people asking for back to back meetings over lunchtime, and I now keep certain evenings for myself for evening classes and politely (but firmly) decline work events on those evenings. Really interesting to see what ROEs you all have (I gotta check out cube timers!!) Now that I have the ROE framing in mind, I’ll do some reflecting on any more ROEs that would help me. 🙃
Love it. One of my rules of engagement is that every evening at 9.30pm my phone turns off all apps and goes into sleep mode. It helps me reduce the mindless scrolling before bed.
I love this concept and it seems way more tangible than the slightly glib 'just set boundaries '. It recognises that all our circumstances are different, and indeed that they might vary from week to week or month to month. I'm really struggling with focus right now as we are in a big transition period (eldest son just back from Uni and youngest son just finished A levels). My morning routines will now look v different (no school run etc) and I'm currently navigating how that might look.
When I was doing teacher training in England I realized even if I wanted to set boundaries with work, it would never be possible because the culture in education in England was rotten to the core. Working until 9/10pm and getting up at 5am to start again, dedicating half your weekend to work, “having your little cries” in the bathroom, holding your pee for 4 hours, this was and still is baseline expectations and people 10/15 years in were doing this and not even unions seemed genuinely interested in changing that. Sometimes you can’t set boundaries but you can always LEAVE.
I think these work great as long as folks don't have aggressive high-conflict folks in those folks family who take an apparent delight in sabotaging other folks' plans ...
I think I'm also surprised as many literal millions of folks who appear to have those kinds of concerns as well as an exponentially expanding list of experts purportedly to help us all deal, that the situation continues to be framed as some sort of aberrant anomaly as opposed to a steadily growing minority of folks who could use support
I am in a hotel in Reno, Nevada typing this and it is 3:43 AM. I have always used the early morning hours for taking care of myself, even and maybe especially when I lived alone. I do not live alone and I can hear the soft breaths of my little ones in the background as I type this. One of the best ways I have found to set boundaries is to make certain that I am making time for the ones that I love. That way, when I am working, they are not on my mind but rather in my heart. On days when I don't give them my best, I am bothered by this and it is difficult to focus.
Recently purchased a cube timer on Amazon. Did I need a cube timer? No. Could I set an alarm on my phone instead? Yes. But I love the idea of a lil buddy sitting on my desk counting down the time I have allotted for writing, exercising, etc. If you find a hack that you’re excited about, then that’s the hack you need to exploit. Whatever works. I love the quote if you want to change your life then add or subtract a habit. What we do = the life we enjoy or are missing out on.
I recently bought an old fashioned ding timer that looks like a chicken. It’s so much more fun to use than my phone!
Now I'm googling cube timers 🤣
I did this same thing!! I love mine!
I LOVE cube timers!! So cute. Ridiculously expensive but worth every cute penny!
$13.98. Affordable. Rechargeable. Only comes in white tho. Name brand: CreaViva.
My ROE as far as mornings go were pretty solid until I had hand surgery 2 weeks ago. I must confess that it threw me into a total funk not to be able to do things like feed my horses, use a pepper grinder, or tie my own shoes. (Fortunately, my daughter and husband take care of those things for me). But this article made me realize that I can still meditate and journal -both of which help me unpack things a bit. Instead, I just waved the white flag… Time to reconnoiter...Once more unto the breach
I have a baked-in morning routine:
Podcast listening as I prep breakfast & tea
—morning sun / stretching on back porch if time
—Buteyko breathing walk if I’m really on point
IFS inner work as I do Pilates and yoga
I try to never schedule anything before 11 am so I get most of my morning routine in.
By fiercely protecting my morning time, I get most of my routine in, which sets me up to have an emotionally balanced day.
I’m pretty productive during the day, usually accomplishing at least something I can feel good about; probably hitting about the 70-80% mark on what needs to be done.
Night time is the nightmare. Every day it’s a massive struggle to get OFF Facebook to wind down. Damn you Reels!!
My Rules of Engagement (ROE) for the morning are solid, but a total disaster for the evening.
In IFS (Internal Family Systems) terms, manager parts (executive functioning) are strongest in the morning, but decrease as the day goes on. Meanwhile, firefighter (relaxation/addiction) parts steadily rise as the day unfolds, until for me, by around 6 pm they’ve gained control.
Intellectually, I know the solution is to give in to the firefighters’ desire to relax in a generative way: let go of executive control, stop trying to get things done when I no longer have the energy, and chill out. I also know it would be wise to truncate my evenings — to limit my awake hours at night so I don’t spend four hours on Facebook.
Unfortunately, every night my managers go to war with my firefighters, trying to get “one more thing” done on the computer. The firefighters retaliate, by going right over to Facebook and scrolling mindlessly.
I would be so much happier if I did something more fun at night — reading, watching a movie, taking a walk, you name it — but by not giving up the day to the firefighters, all the managers do is end up creating so much conflict that I get low quality relaxation which is so unsatisfying that I get looped into it for hours and hours.
ROE - Rules of Engagement — can only work if you have the executive functioning to actually put them into practice.
To solve this extreme war that’s been going on in me for years, I did something extreme: I spent thousands of dollars to buy a sauna. It arrived two days ago!
If there’s one thing managers listen to, it’s money. They are well aware of how many thousands of dollars I spent on the sauna, so my hope is that it will break through this stalemate and get them to put the keyboard down and walk into the sauna every night at 6:20 PM. That’s my new Rule of Engagement.
What else can I do to support this?
—set my phone to “do not disturb” at 6 pm.
—set a timer on my phone to remind me to turn the sauna on “delayed start” as early as possible in the day (earlier = more executive control)
—track my sauna usage on an app so I turn it into a game I want to win (gamification)
If anyone has any advice on how else to make this 6:20 pm “get in sauna” rule stick, let me know!!
I’m extremely capable as a human being up until about 6 pm at night and do great with time boundaries, then everything goes straight to hell.
Just posting this is a commitment to working even harder/smarter at solving this decades-long struggle. It’s a war, but one way or another, I will win it!!!!! The military metaphor of Rules of Engagement is spot-on for me here.
Thanks for this very timely post, Chris! Here’s to getting in the sauna tonight & every night at 6:20 pm!!! One small ROE to win the war!!
Don’t be so harsh with yourself. Everyone needs wind down time. Your morning routine is envy worthy. You deserve your break time.
I've also struggled in the past with having an amazing morning routine but then struggling at night to let go of work or not scroll for hours. Some research supports the idea that discipline is a muscle so if you use it all day, it weakens at night, making your nighttime activities harder to stick to. One option might be to find a way to 'save' discipline for the evening.
But since you asked for advice, my honest opinion is that you're really regimented and strict with yourself, even doing inner work during yoga and Pilates, which are supposed to be times to connect with your body. I wonder if there's a part of you who doesn't want to relax and be with yourself. It sounds like you might be in a nervous system freeze response. All the intellectualizing different parts of yourself sounds in my humble opinion like it's exacerbating the war within.
“My honest opinion is that you're really regimented and strict with yourself, even doing inner work during yoga and Pilates, which are supposed to be times to connect with your body.”
In the ideal world, perhaps we would all have the time to just focus on our body when we work out. But I see a lot of people at the gym on their phone, answering email, texting, listening to podcasts, or doing other things, because we only have so many hours in the day. I am not going to judge them, because, quite frankly, whatever it takes for people to get their workout in – good for them! Getting a workout in is better than not getting it in at all.
In order to process through all of the internal issues I need to process through in a day, it works really well for me to do IFS while I do Pilates and yoga. I would actually be overriding my own natural desire to use my exercise time to do inner work if I tried to follow the strict and regimented ideal that this MUST be a time “to connect with your body.” Sounds good on paper, but I’m going to do what I want to do, and NOT doing IFS in the morning when I work out would actually be a way of being overly strict and regimented with myself.
I understand trying to work backwards and look at my entire day in relationship to what happens at night, but I do not have any problems whatsoever with my morning routine.
“I wonder if there's a part of you who doesn't want to relax and be with yourself.”
No matter what anyone does, someone else can always criticize them for somehow not doing it right. If it’s your belief that the only way to “be with yourself” is to be quiet, focusing on your body, meditating and doing yoga and Pilates in silence, great! I talk to my parts and enjoy “being with myself“ that way. We have different approaches to being with ourselves! My parts personally would feel very ignored and upset if I didn’t take this time to be with them, so that’s how I honor them. To each their own!
“It sounds like you might be in a nervous system freeze response.”
I do think I face this issue at night, but I don’t think it’s relevant in the morning. It’s pretty intense to have my delicious, delightful morning routine mischaracterized as potentially a “freeze response” simply because I do inner work while stretching, but again, to each their own.
“All the intellectualizing different parts of yourself sounds in my humble opinion like it's exacerbating the war within.”
A translation of this sentence is: “You are exacerbating your inner war by doing IFS.” This is a common mischaracterization of the practice of Internal Family Systems: the idea that going within one’s personality, and interacting with our different parts, is somehow “intellectualizing different parts,” as opposed to lovingly relating to the parts that are ALREADY THERE. IFS is about working with the younger parts of ourselves that we discover, not parts we intellectualize or somehow use our minds to “make up.” It is absolutely not an intellectual process, it’s a practice of opening our hearts to elements of our personality that have been covered up by our minds!
Before I started practicing IFS, I was certainly at war with myself in uncountable ways. The more IFS I do, the less at war I am with myself. So I know for sure that, for me, IFS is a path of tremendous inner peace and integration, the exact opposite of creating further division.
Woah. Solid. I’m all in favour of discipline, but in recent times I’ve discovered ‘but at what cost?’ We’re not machines, we’re animals. And animals operate pretty much on how they feel, not what time it is.
There’s a counterproductive point we can reach, for example rushing to a yoga class, that takes away from the enjoyment of the discipline or the ability to do it again tomorrow. And some non-functional activity is essential too. Why are we unable to just… be?
I really like this framing of ROE as pre-decision guidance rather than rigid boundaries. To me that feels like the right balance - I enjoy having my daily routine and keeping space for the things that are important to me, but at the same time I need the flexibility to flow with the moment and do what feels right for my body and mind right then.
My ROE I guess includes daily meditation (usually after breakfast, but I often flip this at weekends to the afternoon), exercise (I love group classes - yoga, Zumba, Body Pump; but I’ve had a nagging shoulder injury for a couple of months and an urge to be outdoors, so lately I’ve been doing lots of forest walks and not beating myself up about missing classes) and evening wind-downs (DND on my phone, putting away tech and reading in bed before doing a sleep meditation).
I also recently started being more assertive with my boundaries at work - I put a 30 minute lunch slot on my calendar to stop people asking for back to back meetings over lunchtime, and I now keep certain evenings for myself for evening classes and politely (but firmly) decline work events on those evenings. Really interesting to see what ROEs you all have (I gotta check out cube timers!!) Now that I have the ROE framing in mind, I’ll do some reflecting on any more ROEs that would help me. 🙃
‘Rules of Engagement’ certainly carries more weight behind it than ‘setting boundaries’, and perhaps sets a clearer description too.
I love the notion of pre-decisions. This is a very handy and actionable piece with some great examples. Thank you for your insights.
Me too. Pre-decisions to help reduce resistance seem like a fabulous idea. I'm definitely going to try this out
Love it. One of my rules of engagement is that every evening at 9.30pm my phone turns off all apps and goes into sleep mode. It helps me reduce the mindless scrolling before bed.
I love this concept and it seems way more tangible than the slightly glib 'just set boundaries '. It recognises that all our circumstances are different, and indeed that they might vary from week to week or month to month. I'm really struggling with focus right now as we are in a big transition period (eldest son just back from Uni and youngest son just finished A levels). My morning routines will now look v different (no school run etc) and I'm currently navigating how that might look.
When I was doing teacher training in England I realized even if I wanted to set boundaries with work, it would never be possible because the culture in education in England was rotten to the core. Working until 9/10pm and getting up at 5am to start again, dedicating half your weekend to work, “having your little cries” in the bathroom, holding your pee for 4 hours, this was and still is baseline expectations and people 10/15 years in were doing this and not even unions seemed genuinely interested in changing that. Sometimes you can’t set boundaries but you can always LEAVE.
Check the related post on giving attention away by Rethink with Rachel. Great minds think a like...
Howdy, all --
I think these work great as long as folks don't have aggressive high-conflict folks in those folks family who take an apparent delight in sabotaging other folks' plans ...
I think I'm also surprised as many literal millions of folks who appear to have those kinds of concerns as well as an exponentially expanding list of experts purportedly to help us all deal, that the situation continues to be framed as some sort of aberrant anomaly as opposed to a steadily growing minority of folks who could use support
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcDJ7vUFiuQ&list=PLPTO3ayPM78fHb2GbVoWL-Xq-n8PCb9Vn&index=1
I am in a hotel in Reno, Nevada typing this and it is 3:43 AM. I have always used the early morning hours for taking care of myself, even and maybe especially when I lived alone. I do not live alone and I can hear the soft breaths of my little ones in the background as I type this. One of the best ways I have found to set boundaries is to make certain that I am making time for the ones that I love. That way, when I am working, they are not on my mind but rather in my heart. On days when I don't give them my best, I am bothered by this and it is difficult to focus.
I cracked open my date book again, after neglecting it for a while (knee replacement surgery) and I'm looking forward to reading more tips.