Plan, Do, Check and Act your habits
Last year, precisely at this time, the first case of COVID-19 — 19 in Portugal, my home country. Most of us did not imagine the tremendous impact and changes that were going to take place in the following months (or years) in our lives and in the lives of those around us.
For many people, the pandemic brought profound changes in routines.
Today the post is dedicated to people who work in shifts or simply to people who, as a result of the profession too, have difficulty controlling their environment 100%.
My experience
I never worked in shifts so to write this post I was based on research and the closest I had to this type of work.
At my last job, I lived in Brussels, but as a rule, I travelled outside Belgium from Tuesday to Thursday. These days, I stayed in hotels, which may or may not have gyms, whose schedules were not always fixed to allow me to maintain my routines, and restaurants also did not always have healthy options.
In 2018 when I moved to Brussels, I couldn’t train because I was dealing with all the bureaucracies of changing countries and finding a home, and I didn’t prioritize physical exercise. This, coupled with travel and the lack of control over food due to having meals outside the home made me feel negative changes in my body and mind. I didn’t put on much weight, but, I felt less confident and with less energy to face the day.
I started to make some changes in my daily life to try to control as many things as I could depending on the work I had.
4 Tips for maintaining habits when you don’t have a fixed schedule or routine — The PDCA of habits
PDCA (plan–do–check–act or plan–do–check–adjust) is an iterative four-step management method used in business for the control and continuous improvement of processes and products. It is also known as the Deming circle/cycle/wheel, the Shewhart cycle, the control circle/cycle, or plan–do–study–act (PDSA). Wikipedia
1. Try to create routines in the middle of chaos — PLAN
On Sunday or on the day off at the beginning of the week plan your next week’s routines:
- what is your schedule each day
Food
- What are you going to eat each day and do the shopping for, to avoid having to go to the supermarket several times
Physical exercise
- On what days, hours, where and what do you want to train (for example: Monday at home at 6 pm take a step class via zoom OR Wednesday at home at 7 am do 10-min abs + 15 min glutes with the video of YouTube from MadFit)
Mental Health
- Plan at least 10 min a day for yourself, whether to meditate, or to write your journal of gratitude, your achievements, learnings (what I call daily morning or night). I advise 10 on waking up and 10 before you go to sleep, but 10/5 or 5/5 would also be great.
Sleep
- Plan 8h to sleep. This list from ONWARD Healthcare of 10 Tips for Nurses who work night shifts (this can be applied not only to nurses, but doctors, assistants and other professions that require working night shifts). Here in point 4, it can be read that there is still some uncertainty whether the best for these people are to keep the same nighttime on their free days or to enjoy their free days. But according to a study by Vanderbilt University Medical Center they warned people who stayed up 12 hours before a night shift.
2. See the plan as a plan — DO
You should obviously try to follow what you have planned for the week, do your best daily. If you fail one day, don’t think that it is no longer worth continuing to stick to the rest of the week. You cannot change the past, but the present is still being written now. See this video from Jordan Peterson about goal setting and planning.
Food
- Make the maximum meal preparations for the week on Sunday and freeze (especially if there are no healthy meals at your workplace)
- Have coffee in a conscious way. Avoid coffee 6–8 hours before going to sleep.
- Drink at least 1.5L of water. Water will give you more energy and control your hunger levels.
- Prepare before leaving home or the night before snacks to take to work (I will always advise fruit). If you always have a piece of fruit, the tendency to resort to the machines that you usually have in hospitals or some factories is less.
My experience
Initially, when I was travelling I didn’t take snacks, and what happened was that after a whole day at work I arrived at the hotel and was hungry. Then my possibilities were cookies, bars, French fries or in madness there was yogurt with granola that was half sugar. As I was hungry, I ended up choosing what seemed less bad, and I assumed that it was just because I was travelling and that at home I would eat better. The problem is that the trips for me were not sporadic. What I started to do was take fruit in the suitcase (usually apples that are the easiest to transport without spoiling).
Physical exercise
I started this post I mentioned being dedicated to people who work in shifts (production factories), health professionals who can work in 12–24h shifts or people who don’t always have the same routine. At this point it is difficult to speak without having had the experience, however, I will still try to give some tips that helped me and that you can try to apply them in your context.
- On days when you are taking long shifts what you can do is use stairs instead of elevator as soon as possible, try to take 5-min breaks every 90min
- Learn to enjoy training. When you train, whatever the modality, put all your effort into training, give your maximum. At the end, think about what you did (you can even record your weight, repetitions, some exercise you did, etc.). Thank your body and mind for working together to finish your workout successfully. In the next workout think about what you did in the previous workout and try to do 1% better
Don’t think about the calories you are losing, the weight you are loosing, but how much better you are after each workout.
My experience
What I did to be motivated to train on more tiring days was 1. To be constantly competing with me. That is, today I knew how to do a workout in 10 ‘, my goal tomorrow was to do the same workout in 9’59 “, or to increase weight, or to do more repetitions; 2. To be able to thank me and my body at the end of the One thing I loved when I tried yoga was the position of Shavasana, which was a way to do this even after a yoga workout. The feeling I had after a workout is mission accomplished, being relaxed and at the same time energetic time and the feeling of being able to conquer the world.
Mental health
- When you wake up, dedicate the minutes for yourself that you defined in the plan, you can meditate or make your morning diary / wake up — think about what you want to do during the day, write something because you are grateful, someone you should say thank you, etc.
- Before you go to sleep, reflect on what you achieved, your achievements, who you helped or who helped you, what could have gone better, what you learned. Writing allows you to internalize what happened on the day, to cement the learnings, difficulties, successes, etc.
- Whenever possible, get some sun (15–30 min of sun daily is necessary to get your daily doses of vitamin D).
My experience
During the periods when I had to travel, what I did to try to deal with stress levels was:
1. 10 min of meditation (at the time only with YouTube videos) or yoga (I was using YouTube videos from Yoga with Kassandra).
In addition to this I now also advise:
2. create the routine when waking up and going to sleep. Waking up might be writing your gratitude diary, something that could make your day spectacular and your goals for the day. Before you go to sleep you can write what you liked most about the day and what stresses you the most and what you learned from it and how you can improve next time.
Sleep
Has it ever happened to you to wake up in the middle of the night and not know where you were? I don’t say after a night of alcohol. I already woke up in the middle of the night and did not know what country I was in, nor the configuration of the room, where I had to go to the bathroom and where I had put the phone to charge because of the constant business trips to different countries and different hotels.
PREPARE THE ROOM
- Optimizes the room to try to have as little light and noise as possible, avoids stimulation in the room (avoids having a TV, computer, tablet or mobile phone in the room, or at least messing with it) and keeps the room cool (the ideal temperature is between 15 -19 °C).
PREPARE TO SLEEP
- Create a sleep hygiene routine — take a hot water bath, meditate for 5 min, avoid light 30 min before going to sleep (lights on can give wrong signals to your brain that after all it is not time to sleep).
My experience
Many of the things I mention above, I did not know at the time that I made business trips. What I did when I had trouble sleeping was to put sounds of nature on YouTube or on Netflix the series “Planet Earth” with the phone’s luminosity at minimum and volume also low. I’m not sure why, but when I started listening to this series 5 min later, I fell asleep.
PREPARE TO WAKE UP
- If you have to do the night shift, create some light — if you are alone in the room, open the blinds and spend 5 minutes stretching your body, and you can also think about investing in smart lamps.
3. Accept that we are all work in progress — CHECK
Preferably on the last day of the week (Saturday or another free day at the end of the week) think about what you can improve.
- That time you failed during the
- week because you failed?
- Example 1: I work at home in the kitchen and spent the day eating snacks. Can you work in another room in the house? If not, how can you optimize your environment to have healthier foods like fruit more visible and others more hidden? Can I just eliminate bad snacks from home? Can I prepare snacks the day before to eat during the day, even when I’m at home?
- Example 2: I had too much work, and I was unable to train. The day has 24 hours for everyone, the priorities we give to everything in life is that it can be different. There are small solutions for people with little time like choosing high intensity training (HIIT), you can get a standing desk, a treadmill and an adapter and work while walking.
As a rule, we are our greatest critics. Try to do this part in a constructive way. Focus on what you can control.
My experience
A few months ago it seemed like it had no power when the weather was rainy or just cloudy. I told myself that I was like a plant that needs the sun to feed. And I said it so many times that I started to believe and internalize it more and more. One day my boyfriend said to me, “If you keep saying that, your brain will start to believe it and you will stop working without the sun”. From then on, I started to say to myself “It is not time that will control me”. Whenever I felt out of energy, I would repeat this phrase in my head.
4. Replan the new week with what you’ve learned — ACT
We go back to the first day of the week, now it’s time to replan your new week with everything you learned in the previous week.
We live our lives on the run. Reflecting on your day teaches you to value what you have learned, to thank the people who helped you and to think about your mistakes so that you can change. At school, as a rule every day, or almost everyone learned something new and throughout the year we kept reviewing it so that you could internalize what we learned and take a test on the topic. In life, so that you can start enjoying the moments, create good memories and learn from the less good things, you need to slow down to reflect on the moments you spent during the day.
Success comes from persistently improvement and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working. Derek Siver on the book “Anything you want”
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