Ever since I read a biography of Mary, Queen of Scots listening to a CD of Bach music selections, I have decided to not do the ambient music thing. For years afterward, I could not listen to any of those Bach pieces without thinking of 16th century England.

So why the change? Well, mainly because it is always cool to try new things. Secondly, today is (or was depending on when I finish this post) the first day of a new month, so I need to come up with a monthly challenge. Granted, this will be more of an experiment than a challenge, but hey, experiments are good too. Lastly, I want to see if it puts me more at ease and less conscious of back pain.

Recently, it has seemed that I have an elevated level of constant discomfort. Fortunately, this has not been progressing to the point of outright “pain” that often. However, I almost never feel just ‘comfortable’. I feel I manage well enough and will be having a follow-up visit with my specialist tomorrow to discuss the medication I’m on and probably change it.

So, for any and all of the above reasons (newness, experimentation, comfort), I will be on a diet of ambient music – which mainly applies while I am studying. After final exams, I guess it will apply to exercising or working on my websites over the holidays.

As usual, some simple guidelines:

• Only Classical or pre-classical music selections (meaning no Beethoven and nothing written after him). I enjoy listening to all types of music, whether the gamut of later classical genres, cinematic scores, sound tracks, pop-songs, bluegrass, jazz, etc. However, if the music is to be ambient it cannot be any of the above, because I would getting nothing done other than have an enjoyable time listening to the music.
• 10am to 10pm. Any time I am in my room during these hours. Currently, I don’t get up earlier than 10am except on Friday when I have to get up before 6:30. This is thanks to the awesome streaming capability that the school website provides to access all the lectures. This will change next semester with more problem-based-learning sessions and shadowing/clinical experiences.

As always, ‘totally free blocks of time’ and ‘philosophically appointed times’ are exceptions. If you don’t know what those phrases mean, then read this and this. Keep in mind as you read these earlier posts, that I no longer hold to some of the statements in them. Like (I hope) everyone else, my thoughts and positions are constantly evolving in little or huge ways.

Anyway, I am looking forward to see how this month works out. Like all good experiments, what the end results will be is definitely a mystery to me at this point.

Early last year, I completed a monthly challenge of keeping my surroundings orderly. I learned a lot and did fairly well, but it did not really stick after the month was over. For the next month, my focus is going to be similar, but with a different twist. Instead of trying to keep everything orderly all the time, or following general principles of neatness, I am going to adhere to just a few very specific and easy rules that I hope will stick once the month runs out.

What this means is that I am not aiming for neatness, so much as relative neatness. My surroundings may be in varying degrees of order, so long as I follow these rules.

1. Any time I enter one of my living spaces (basically bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen area) after not being there for more than a few hours, do 30 seconds of tidying up.
2. Any time I leave on of my living spaces after being there for more than an hour, do 30 seconds of tidying up.
3. Move my already scheduled time each day for industry (fancy word for clean up) higher up on my priority list (right below exercise).

These rules are fairly simple and will not make me feel stifled – like I cannot ever leave a book or shirt on the bed. Let us hope that this allows me to more consistently ward off the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

Recently, I have noticed a problem I experience and I believe have experienced for some time. That is, I tend to be late to things. Not extremely late mind you, just a minute or two – but late is late. Part of the reason for this is because I hate getting to places too early and then wasting time waiting for the event to start. However, I feel like I am not respecting other people’s time when I show up late to things for whatever reason.

This month the challenge is to always be a minimum of 5 minutes early to everything, which means aiming for 10 minutes early. This is very straightforward and does not really need any explanation. However, I will make a couple comments.

• Calculate driving times based upon max potential traffic
• Plan an adequate amount of time to find a parking space and walk to the building
• With the above two guidelines in mind, leave for an event at the time that will allow me to arrive there ten minutes before it begins (assuming traffic is not horrible and I find a decent parking spot, this means I may be as much as 20 minutes or more early)

The other thing I hope to accomplish this month by working on punctuality is driving the speed limit. I have been pulled over twice in the past month and given one ticket (I will be taking a driver safety course over the next couple of months to remove this from my record).

The new month, according to the moon, began almost a week ago, so this post is late. However, I have already been striving for greater punctuality this past week and will continue to do so for the rest of this month.

For the past couple of years, seriously, the quality of my sleep has been poor. I don’t know exactly why, but ever since I had surgery on my intestines in the spring of 2013, it has been harder for me to go to sleep, I find most beds or mattresses annoying or uncomfortable in some way, I wake up frequently, and I rarely feel well rested. I have done extensive experimenting with a monophasic sleep pattern – one in which you get 6-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep at one time. This experimentation has included a variety of pillows and pillow arrangements, sleeping on different surfaces, sleep practice, specifically planned cool-down times before bed, and a reward and penalty system.

I tried out one type of polyphasic sleep pattern a few years ago over the summer and remember liking it. Unfortunately, once the fall semester started, it did not fit well with my schedule so I stopped. I would never recommend someone to adopt this type of sleep schedule for two reasons. First, I believe the consensus among sleep researchers is that it is generally unnatural. Second, it takes a lot of dedication and planning to achieve. However, I figure since my sleep is poor now anyway, and I have the time and energy to devote to this, I am going to give it a whirl.

Perhaps if I like it well enough after the end of this experiment, I will settle permanently on a biphasic sleep cycle, which is easier than a polyphasic, but with some of the same benefits. So, what will my new sleep cycle look like? I have tried it out a little over the past week, and here is my plan:

My core sleep at night will be 4 hours and 30 minutes to 5 hours and 20 minutes. What this means is that I will get in bed 5 hours and 20 minutes before I intend on waking up the next morning and read until I am sleepy but not later than 4 and a half hours before the time. My days will be structured in 6-hour intervals. After the first six hours, I will take a 20-min nap, and then 6 hours later I will take another 20-min nap. That is it. Fairly simple and definitely doable.

With this plan in place, I will still be getting between 5 and 6 hours of sleep every day, which is more than any other polyphasic sleep cycle I have come across, so I don’t feel this is ridiculously extreme. I will try to update you all on my progress every 15 to 30 days. Happy dreams everyone!

The past month and a half have been good. I always meditate 10 minutes a day minimum. I’m still getting used to defaulting to meditation. I think this is great in some cases and not so much in others.

The times I think it is great are when my mind is over-distracted and is trying to think or worry about too many things. In this context, meditation will help quiet my thoughts and when I finish I will be able to focus all my energies on whatever is at the top of my priority list at that point in time.

The times is doesn’t work as well are when I am confused about what my priorities are. While meditation can give me a much needed break from this confusion, it does not solve the problem. For this, I have been trying to more aggressively use totally focused blocks of time. This is a concept I believe I have touched on in a previous post but don’t know where right now so I can’t link to it. I will flesh it out more in an upcoming post.

I am also learning to love meditation for its own sake, not simply as a means to an end. When I first started meditating, I found it incredibly hard to not let my mind wander, but now I am coming to really enjoy these times of calmness.

If you have never meditated before, I highly recommend you to give it a try. Start small and just do it for one or two minutes. If you feel it is useful or beneficial, you can increase the time. It is important to get into an upright seated position that is comfortable and allows you to maintain a straight back. Lotus pose would be ideal, but I am far too inflexible for that. Therefore, I settle with hero pose, which is the perfect position for me. Feel free to experiment.

Eye contact is something that I have often found uncomfortable. Perhaps this is due to my many past insecurities, which I feel like I have mostly overcome, but which nonetheless have residual effects.

The goal for this month is simple: maximize good eye contact. What this means is as follows:

• If someone enters the room, space, workstation, or table that I am at, I will seek to make eye contact immediately
• Initial eye contact will be held for 2-3 seconds
• When having a one-on-one conversation, make eye contact for 75% of the time
• If having a group conversation, make eye contact all the time but with different people (75% with the speaker and 25% with the others; divide equally when I am speaking)
• Linger at least one second whenever making eye contact and at least two seconds when speaking

I  want to principally focus on this topic when giving speeches or presentations for Toastmasters this month as well. If eyes really are the windows of the soul, may I have many wholesome “spiritual” interactions this month.

So I was supposed to start a new monthly challenge last week. For those of you who don’t know or haven’t figured it out yet, I start my monthly challenges based on when the new moon is. This is one small way I try to stay connected with nature.

Therefore, this next challenge will last for close to two months and I believe it is warranted because of its importance. Meditation is something that is practiced by a lot of eastern religions. Although I don’t subscribe to any of these, I understand why this practice holds an important position for them. It has incredible benefits physically, mentally, psychologically, and emotionally.

I have used meditation in the past couple of years to provide mental clarity, physical stretching, and emotional peace. However, this month I am going to exploit it for psychological purposes in addition to the other benefits. First off, I am defining the mind here as the ability for rational thought and the psyche as the central force from which humans derive meaning and dictate behavior.

I have been trying to keep this blog lighter, so I won’t go into all the philosophical musings I have had of late on this topic. Suffice it to say, from my experience alone, I believe meditation is the most reliable, powerful, and easiest source of focus, inspiration, and drive. Unfortunately, though I try to meditate a little every day, I have severely underused this technique, especially in times of depression, either from physical pain or a perceived failure.

This month (and the next), the challenge is to make meditation the default response to any type of depression, confusion, or anxiety I find myself experiencing. Here are the flawed responses I usually have to these feelings:

• Deep thinking. This almost never is the right response in the moment. There is never an easy answer to the problem or depression I am facing, so thinking about it more and looking for a solution in this way is usually counterproductive.
• Sleep. A short nap can be a great thing, and one I advocate for here. However, a short nap can easily turn into a long nap and what ends up is just wasting a bunch of time which just makes me feel even worse about myself.
• Getting busy. Distracting myself from what is bothering me isn’t always a bad idea. However, if this is all that is done, then when I run out of urgent projects, then I will be sunk. This is not a good position in which to find myself.
• Talking to someone. Hashing out my feelings to someone is usually a good thing. The only problem with this is that you cannot always do so on demand. Maybe you cannot get a hold of someone at the precise moment you need them or maybe it would not be courteous to them to just dump all your problems on them.

This month, the goal is to not think, sleep, occupy myself with projects, or even talk to someone in those moments of psychological distress. Instead, I will do a meditation session for 5-10 minutes. After this time, the sky is the limit as far as what type of response I will have next. I have great hopes for this experiment and will let everyone know what I learned and what I will incorporate into my lifestyle from now on once I finish the challenge.

I learned four important lessons in my month of no fear in stuttering.

1. Speak while releasing tension. During a lot of situations, my speaking is perfectly normal and even I don’t have a problem with it. However, there are particular times which cause problems. I don’t have much trouble in one-on-one conversations or even that much in large group settings. It is small group bar-type settings with new people that are the worst instigators of the problem. Because of the narrow window in which the problem exists (which is a good thing), I found it very difficult to try to pinpoint the exact types of sounds that I tended to block or stall on. For the present, I think the best course of action is to just consciously focus on releasing tension when I start to speak. Breathing deeply and starting slow are great for this.

2. Say everything I want to say. This was a big part of the challenge for this month and it is incredibly important. Whenever I refrain from speaking because I think I will block on the sound, this increases my fear of stuttering which only worsens the problem. It is always better to face the fear. Many times, when I do, there is no problem at all. However, even when there is, it is still better to go for it and work on correcting whatever problem exists.

3. Don’t delay. This directly corroborates with the last point. The longer I wait to find the perfect way to say something, the more the tension builds which again compounds the problem. By speaking immediately and utilizing tension-reduction techniques, I have my best chance of fluent speech.

4. Don’t shudder after a “failure.” First off, it is better for me to view this as a learning experience rather than a failure. Shuddering or hating myself never accomplishes anything except for making whatever problem I have worse. Assessment is not a bad thing as long as it is not overly critical. However, even assessments can cause problems. Many times, it is better to just breathe and let it go. Look forward to opportunities for future success.

Unfortunately, I did not finish reading the book I purchased because I lost it halfway through the month. However, I think I have already gleaned most of the big-picture principles from it. The nice thing about the four lessons above is that they really can apply to a lot of activities in life. The theme is to consciously release tension, accept the challenge, do it immediately, and be resilient when things don’t turn out as planned. These are good principles for everyone to chew on!