WTF, How is it Already 8:30?

A good point of context for why I started Non-Slop Fun in the first place is what my average morning routine has looked like for the last few years. 

It’s 2+ hours of noise, none of it productive. I end up stressed and unfocused, unsure of how to prioritize my work and oblivious to what is most important to me in any given moment. And the entire time it’s happening, I’m fully aware that I’m wasting my time– all that time spent in bed, waiting for the coffee to be ready as if having a hot cup of bean juice is my permission to behave like a functional human, is time that I could have spent journaling or reading or drafting or any number of things that don’t actively harm my mental health and well-being.

I go through waves in which I’m really good about remembering to lock down my phone before bed with Brick or just leave it in another room instead of charging it on my bedside table, and during those periods, I’m pretty good about getting up and starting my journaling while the coffee is still brewing. 

But then, life happens. I get stressed and overwhelmed. My nights get a little later. When morning rolls around, I don’t feel well-rested and ready for the day. I feel drained from the jump, and I stop having good nighttime device hygiene. I sit in bed on my computer, trying to just wrap up a few more things, justifying it to myself by saying “oh, I have to get this newsletter out ASAP” or “wait, I just want to capture this one idea before I go to sleep.” 

Morning rolls around, and I’m back to my bad habits– my decisions to waste my precious time despite being fully aware of my actions. 

In the past, I’ve written about sleep inertia and how I planned efforts to incorporate more movement at the start of my day to address this problem. 

That plan wasn’t bad, and I wouldn’t say it was a failure, but it certainly has come up short. The key challenge is the first step: getting out of bed without grabbing my phone. It feels silly to admit that, as a 30-something man with an established career, I struggle to just start my effing day without reaching for my phone and bed-rotting, but that’s the truth.

While my plan wasn’t bad and my intentions have been good, it turns out I’m a two-faced biatch, but so are you… so are we all.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman introduced the concept of the "two selves." He argues that we all operate with an experiencing self and a remembering self, and the two rarely want the same things.

As Kahneman puts it, "Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me."

The remembering self is the one who has his shit together. It’s the version of me who reflects on my life, values reading and writing, and decides at 10:00 PM that I’m going to leave my phone in the kitchen and wake up to journal. The remembering self is rational, goal-oriented, and full of excellent intentions.

But the remembering self doesn’t have to wake up at 7:00 AM. The experiencing self does.

The experiencing self lives entirely in the present moment. It doesn't care about my long-term creative goals or my desire to be a well-read person. At 7:09 AM, operating on sleep inertia with my prefrontal cortex barely online, the experiencing self only cares about immediate comfort and dopamine. And when the experiencing self spots a phone on the nightstand, it doesn't ask, "Is this aligned with my values?" It asks, "What did I miss while I was asleep?"

This often feels like an imposter-syndrome-triggering moral failing. I thought the fact that I kept grabbing my phone instead of my journal meant I lacked discipline or didn't care enough about my writing. But Kahneman’s framework offers a much more forgiving—and useful—perspective. The version of me reaching for the phone isn't weak; it's just the experiencing self doing exactly what it's designed to do: seek immediate gratification.

Obviously, knowing this disconnect between the experiencing self and the remembering self doesn’t solve this gap between who I want to be and who I end up being when the alarm goes off, but it’s a good start. The challenge for me moving forward (and maybe for you, too), is to figure out how to keep the remembering self empowered and making good decisions even when life is chaotic and stressful and less than ideal. As much as I love Kahneman’s work and the concepts he presents, I find that behavioral economists often frame things in very idealistic terms when life is anything but ideal. 

I’m also working to figure out how to convince myself I don’t HAVE to have coffee before I can do anything, but that’s a different kind of addiction and a topic for another day. Maybe. 

Keep creating, 

Blake