I Suspect It’s Actually Both Sleep AND Leanness

I posted recently about how I think the cause of my lack of energy and motivation, as well as my relatively poor mood was probably caused by a lack of sleep.

While I still believe it was a contributing factor, I am now thinking that my initial theory was probably correct. I’m simply too lean.

It’s annoying, because I’m not that lean. Sure, I have very visible abs etc., but I’m not even sure I’m below 10% bodyfat. I sort of assumed, having grown up very skinny, that I could naturally handle much lower bodyfat levels than most. I know it varies wildly by person, but I figured I’d be able to handle 8% or even 6% without issue. I now suspect that’s not true.

My symptoms seem pretty consistent with the experiences of others who have been particularly lean. I don’t seem to have the hunger that others experience, but I guess that’s not universal.

So now I’ve been trying to eat a ton and gain wait back, and I think it’s starting to work. My energy and motivation seems to be slowly coming back, and even my weight training performance has started to improve.

I lost a fair amount of strength when cutting, and after that I’ve basically just stalled for months while maintaining weight. I’ve heard that if you’re too lean, it’s almost impossible to put on muscle, and I think I’ve been experiencing that.

So I’m going to just keep eating at a surplus and see how things progress. If I continue gaining strength rapidly in addition to having greatly improved mood, focus, determination, discipline, and energy in general, then I’ll know I’m on the right track.

It’s a bit disappointing to think that the cost of being relatively lean is so high, because I was hoping to stay that way for lengths of time. But I’m not sure it’s worth it. I can’t afford to have all of those things drop so much.

Perhaps every once and a while I can do it for fun, but in general, I need to maintain my energy and discipline. Otherwise everything kind of lags and I don’t get anything done.

I’ll report back with findings going forward.

I Need to Focus on Hosting Problems and Write About Them in Blog

I realized that I really need to focus on problems people have with their hosting and just blog about those. It’s an excellent way to capture people who are very interested in leaving their website host.

I’ve been focusing hard on simply acquiring other businesses, but I actually think that it’s important to continue trying to get the low-hanging fruit of new clients.

After all, even after two acquisitions, the majority of my hosting clients still came to me as regular clients by themselves. It’s more work to acquire them on average, but if I just have these funnels in place, it could mean a steady stream of new clients.

Ultimately, it feels like if I’m just buying businesses, I’m simply profiting off of the hard work that they did in acquiring these clients. So it might feel kind of good to also be putting in the work on my end and acquiring clients in any way that I can.

Plus, having more clients makes my business more valuable, no matter where they came from. If I ever want to sell one day, I’ll want to have the maximum number of clients possible.

So going forward, I should really just be thinking constantly about what kinds of hosting issues people have and then blogging about them. I also need to pay attention to any issues my clients have. If anything ever comes up, I should blog about it!

One thing actually DID happen this week, and I should definitely blog about it. So that’s on the list for next week.

I Really Have Come a Long Way in the last 10 Years

I was just thinking recently about past events and behaviors and how far I’ve come since them. Particularly just in the time span of the last 10 years.

I think about my interactions with business contacts and clients, and I just cringe. I cannot believe that that’s who I used to be.

I would regularly do things that I now consider to be either wildly unprofessional or just… Bizarre.

The point of this post isn’t really as a list of examples, but some might be worth giving.

I remember when I first branched out on my own, I struggled to get anything done. I had one single client at one point, and the website still took months to build. I’d just procrastinate constantly and not make any progress.

For many years, basically everything I did was just a massive amount of procrastination. Any recurring task, I would push off until the last moment or later.

I remember realizing, the night before a presentation at my BNI group, that I knew nothing about the AV setup. I had just assumed the projector was always there and available and that somebody would help me with it.

I decided maybe that was a bad assumption, and emailed the chapter member in charge of it at like midnight the night before. He would later tell me that he saw my message and decided, “this isn’t my problem” and didn’t respond or worry about it.

And that was an important lesson for me. Though it did work out in the end.

When it comes down to it, I just don’t think I would see any potential in my younger self if I met him. Everything was sloppy and I had no discipline whatsoever.

I also made almost no money, and it’s no surprise why.

I feel very fortunate that I somehow improved over the years and am now doing a ton better. I’m also a person I actually like and people trust to get things done.

Sometimes it’s just so hard to see the progress, and I get frustrated. It’s also easy to just focus on one metric, like income, and not see everything else that has improved.

Even if income was the most important thing, I feel like it’s actually a lagging indicator. Developing myself pays itself off in all areas of life, in addition to also being the primary method to increase future earning potential.

But overall, it’s just nice to take a step back and see the progress. I’m actually embarrassed thinking about what I was like just 10 years ago, both personally and professionally. I’m not perfect now clearly, but I’ve come so far in so many ways.

And I think that’s a good thing. If you’re not embarrassed by what you were like in the past, are you even improving?

None of the changes came overnight. Much of it has been described in this blog, which I believe I started in mid 2018.

I think it points to the power of gradual improvement, and always taking steps in the right direction. Improving just a little bit at a time compounds into huge changes over time.

It would be fun to actually ask some of my friends if they’ve noticed any of the change. If it’s obvious to me, I wonder if it’s obvious to them.

The point is: I think I’m going in the right direction. There are setbacks, of course, and lately I’ve felt fairly discouraged, but as long as I just keep progressing, it’s all good.

The hard times will pass, and I’ll be all that much better for having strived to keep making progress even when it was really hard.

It Appears to be Sleep

I’m now something like 5 days into my efforts to sleep at least 9 hours per night, and it would appear that it probably was, in fact, the issue that was making me feel unmotivated and generally unhappy.

And it really shouldn’t be surprising. Sleep affects so much, and obviously can impact all of the things I brought up. The only reason I didn’t think of it right away was that I was generally sleeping more than 8 hours per night, and I didn’t think it could possibly make much of a difference beyond that.

But I was wrong! It seems that it can and it did.

I only even thought of it now because I had the thought, “if I’m starting to run a lot… Should I be sleeping more as a result?”

I outlined this in a previous post I think, but the answer is: yes. You should be sleeping a lot more.

So since I had this thought, I’ve been sleeping more than 9 hours each night, and the results do seem fairly impressive. Overall, I feel a lot better and in a better mood.

Motivation and focus are way up, as is productivity.

I also had an interesting result with my running. Usually once or twice a week, I run a very similar route that comes out to about 2.41 miles. Yesterday I completed this route in 20:07, which I didn’t think much of at the time, especially since it didn’t feel particularly challenging.

It wasn’t until I reviewed my other runs that I realized that this was way faster than my other runs. The previous record (for this year, anyway) was 20:53. I shaved off 47 seconds on a relatively short run. That’s huge.

I’ve also been struggling to improve my mile time (which is my ultimate goal), and set what I thought to be an ambitious goal for my run last week of 6:40. I ended up flying past that goal and finished in 6:33.

I now believe that lack of sufficient sleep has been significantly affecting my performance. I was starting to lose hope that I’d be able to get my mile down to below 6 minutes, but now I’m once again hopeful that I’ll be able to do it.

So one final thought I had today regarding my sleep is this: if all this time, I simply haven’t been sleeping enough, how does this pertain to drinking?

You see, in the past, after drinking, the next day I often felt unmotivated, generally bad, and just didn’t perform very well. I assumed this was just 100% directly caused by the alcohol.

But the symptoms were always almost identical to what I’ve been feeling recently due to a little bit less sleep (and to be clear: I’m not drinking at all right now).

To what extent did lack of sleep play?

Most times that I drank, I’d stay up later than I should. Given that I usually had commitments, I’d generally still get up at the same time, meaning I was sleep deprived.

Additionally, alcohol greatly impairs the quality of that sleep. Even if I slept “long enough”, it likely still affected me greatly.

So what do I do with this information?

I think that when/if I go back to drinking, it’s important to be especially careful around my sleep. I need to not stay up too late, and ideally I’d be totally sober by the time I went to bed. If not, I’m killing my productivity and mood.

This is great, too, because the whole point of me taking a year off is to gather insights like this. I’ll want to figure out if alcohol needs to be eliminated entirely. If I can figure out in which situations it is really damaging, I can reduce the incidences of them.

I’ll keep posting back here with the long-term results of my “increased sleep”. Currently, I’m struggling a little bit because it’s hard/impossible to keep up with all the sleep-related habits I’ve developed and still maintain 9 hours each night. So I may have to alter what is required as I go along.