I've been on a "self-improvement" quest. It started a while ago - a year, maybe more? - and has taken various forms over that time. The original idea began not as much for me as for another person. I think that a lot of "self" improvement starts that way. Quitting smoking for a family member's health. Losing weight in order to have a child. Getting more sleep to improve mood, and therefore interpersonal relations. Maintaining or increasing fitness to better enjoy time with others. Changing one's appearance to be (and feel) more attractive.
Eventually, though, it seems like if it's a habit that will hang on, it becomes at least as much about oneself as anyone else. And it becomes, to some extent, its own reward.
One of the areas that I've had to address is the amount and quality of sleep that I get. Until the last few years, I'd been a great sleeper. I could sleep anywhere, at any time, and had no trouble "making it up on the weekends" when I'd been out late during the week, for instance. It's quite different now. Trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, restlessness in between. The only time that I sleep really well is in the early morning, probably from 2:00 on. Part of it is that my current job is a horrid deviation from my natural sleep cycle. Another layer is that the people in this neighborhood - and specifically, my nearest neighbors - believe in excessively early morning activity, regardless of noise or effect. The loss of sleep was becoming such a problem that I sought treatment from my doctor. In addition to recommending removal of my tonsils, to be sure that I was breathing properly, he prescribed a change in migraine medication and the addition of another drug. It wasn't a miracle cure, but the changes did make a difference. Apart from periodic blips on the radar (such as the last week) I sleep more, and better, than I had been before treatment.
My doctor also suggested that my weight could be causing some of the sleep problems I'd been experiencing. During adulthood, my weight has cycled (slowly) from the unhealthfully thin that I was in college, to the very unhealthfully heavy that I was at the end of my marriage, back about halfway, back up about halfway, back down quite a bit, back up quite a bit, and now back down again. Since October, at my doctor's order, I've tracked everything I eat on a phone app. It's annoying (I call it the Phone Food Nazi) but it seems to work. That level of "forced" honesty (what's the point in lying when I'm the only one who sees it anyway?) has transformed the way that I choose to eat. There's still a lot of weird, individual, bad-for-me crap on the menu (typically, Saturday lunches are PB&J on a tortilla with a side order of 1/2 pound of bacon), so don't be thinking it's all about denial.
Much more of it can be accounted for by exercise. My job entitles me to two 15-minute breaks each day. Though it is the rare day when I actually take both of them, when I do take one, I change into sneakers and just set off walking. On those walks I pick a pace around 2 km/hr and come back sweaty as hell (really looking forward to that brief break in the hot & humid before it gets cold again!) but ready to sit again for a couple of hours. Once I get home in the evening, I eat dinner and then head to the basement workout room for an hour on the treadmill (2.5-3 km) and then an hour on the bike (12-15 mi). I haven't lost an insane amount of weight, but my shape is changing and I've certainly got muscles where they were only hiding in shame before. My face looks different (the most frequent comment that I've heard) and my feet are distinctly smaller (pain in the ass, with so many shoes!).
The biggest effort that I've made, though, is that I got braces - Invisalign. The first set was started on February 1. At first, I was on a 14-day schedule, and then 10 days, and now 7 days. There are 28 sets of trays in my expected course of treatment, and my current set is #16. My teeth look distinctly more straight and are vastly more evenly spaced now than they were, though I'm hardly showing them off. For those unfamiliar, Invisalign often employs the use of "attachments," which are little nubs glued onto the face of some teeth. The Invisalign trays are designed to fit over the attachments and use the little bumps as levers to accomplish more specific movements. (Think of the trays moving teeth N/S and E/W, while the attachments make changes to them in relation to that plane.) I don't know if it's because my teeth are so relatively small compared to most peoples' "adult" teeth, or because I'm so elderly compared to most people using Invisalign in the first place, but I have a LOT of attachments. Most people get maybe 4 or 5, and I have 14, including 2 on one tooth. To any adult considering Invisalign, I suggest thinking hard about the effect that having something glued to your damn teeth will have on the rest of the life you like to lead while you're in them (I brush my teeth on average 7x/day). For women, I also caution that wearing lipstick is absolutely pointless. It immediately smears all over the trays, making your face look like a horror film come to life.
Compared to that, having my hair dyed a red so dark that it originally looked purple, and cut into short bangs, seems pretty tame.
[the title quotation is by Percy Bysshe Shelley, from The Cloud]
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