Your need for lay-in is not a reward, it's a warning!

So your need for a lay-in is not a reward, it's a warning. Now, I say this because many of us get caught up in this idea that I've worked hard all week, so therefore weekend is now here and I deserve a lay-in, or I want a lay-in, or I need a lay-in. Now, unfortunately, those three things are kind of different. Where it— when it comes from a place of I want it but I don't need it, not such a big deal. When it's a case of I deserve it because I've worked hard, not necessarily such a big deal, apart from maybe a little bit of an entitlement factor there. But when it's a case of I've worked so hard, I now need a lay-in, that's where we walk into a few issues. Now, I've spoken about this before. Some of you may have seen my video when I have spoken about this before, but the reason I bring this up again is because this is a place where I currently find myself. Now, I didn't realize this is where I was finding myself until this morning when I happened to be late for work. So normally I get up at around 6 AM, start getting sorted, get ready, because I have to be at my gym, or at the gym, to, um, start with my first clients at 7 AM. Problem is, today, without even realizing, continued to hit the fucking snooze button until 7:05. Then I finally look at my phone, I'm like, Holy shit, I'm late. So I obviously have to leap out of bed, rush to work, and so on. Luckily, I only live a half a mile from the gym that I use. Now, that's all well and good, but the problem is I've sort of recently been noticing that I'm more and more tired. And, you know, it's a multitude of factors. I tend to work hard. I do fairly long days because of the type of stuff that I'm trying to do. And as I'm transitioning out of my gym into the online space and so on, with my business that's at the moment requiring me to do extra hours and so on. Plus I have the fact that my partner and I, we have a 14-month-old who co-sleeps with us, so my sleep is relatively broken and so on. And the past few weeks her routine has gotten a little bit messed up, so it's not as consistent as it was. And as a result, that's pushed our sleep routine out as well. Then last week I attended my, um, my coach's course, which unfortunately he's based in California, which means it's 9 AM till 6 PM their time, which is actually 5 AM till 3 AM here that we were running. So did that 4 days in a row. Now that's all good, I'm not complaining about that, you know, it's part of the thing, I chose to do it, so all well and good. The problem I now have though is it's whacked me out of my, my routine and my sync, and all these different factors that have kind of lined up have now led to this point where I myself feel like me, I could do with a lay-in and don't really want to get up in the morning. Now, if it was a case of, oh well, this is a one-off, not such a big deal. But as I say, it's kind of been creeping up a little bit where our routine's a bit off, and this has kind of just brought it to a head. Now, it would be wrong of me to just continue doing it and then expect the likes of yourself or my clients to carry on, you know, you better make sure that your routine's spot on and that you're taking care of yourself and you shouldn't need a lay-in at the weekends. But my point is, what I need to do as an adult is listen, because it's very easy for us to kind of ignore these things and just, oh well, you know, it's just because life's busy and, you know, I'm stressed out, so therefore I'll just make do. And we just get on with it because we don't like to complain, especially as men. We tend to just try and keep our thoughts to ourselves, keep our feelings and emotions and so on to ourselves. So we might know that we're feeling a bit tired, worn out, and lethargic and so on. But we don't want to bug other people with our problems, so we keep it to ourselves rather than actually change something and do something about it. So if you find yourself in the same kind of place where you've kind of gotten into a bit of a rut, maybe you're working real hard or working late, maybe you're not taking care of yourself in the way that you know you should with exercise and food and so on. And as a result, you're getting to the weekend and feeling like, you know what, I could really do with a lay-in. I'm actually, if I'm honest with myself, pretty fucking tired. In fact, maybe even exhausted right now. But pushing through and moving on. There are 3 ways I would suggest that you try to tackle this. Now, you don't have to do all 3. You may find that one of them is adequate, and it will depend on the specifics that are leading to your current state of feeling like you need this lay-in. So the first one is, of course, we reduce our overall workload. Now, for some of us, that might not be possible because of the way business might be right now and so on, and maybe kids and family and all the rest of it. Maybe you've got too many things to juggle that you can't yet do anything about. But if you can, that's the first thing we want to tackle. We want to look at, well, what's my overall load going on? What are all the different stresses that are going on throughout the week leading me to getting to the end of my week and therefore feeling tired, exhausted, worn out, and needing this lay-in? Now, that's not to say that you can never have a lay-in, but ideally we don't want to need it. Okay, so what things could you maybe tweak, shift, change, delegate to others, or remove from your schedule and your routine that can help you reduce the overall stress load on your body? Because if the body has less to adapt to and less to overcome, then it's going to have an increased amount of energy and of course need less sleep in order to fully repair and recover from that. So that's the first thing we try to reduce, the overall load. The next thing is we support our body from the ground up and therefore improve its ability to adapt to that stress load. So what that would mean is we might look at it and go, well, I can't really do much about my schedule and routine and all the things I've got at the moment. But what I could do is maybe improve the way I'm eating, improve the quality of the foods that I'm bringing in so my body has higher levels of nutrition and better resources on board to help repair it. Maybe it could be a case of, right, well, I'll get back into a good sleep routine and so on. I'll make sure I'm getting my 7 to 9 hours or whatever it might be, because I've let that slip for a while. And now as a result, the tiredness and the exhaustion has accumulated. The third thing is that we get specific with our routine. So for some of us, it's not necessarily that we have too much going on, or that we're not doing enough to repair and recover. It's more a case of our routine is all over the place. We sometimes get this with people who do rotating shift patterns. If the pattern shifts too quickly, even though you might be doing things optimally within that shift pattern, because it's changing so quickly, the body can't get into a rhythm. Now, of course, if we have a relatively sporadic daily routine, so a couple of days I'm like this, a couple of days I'm like that, then a day here, a day there, and all the rest of it. Then it's also very difficult for the body to adapt. So it might just be a case of, well, I can keep my stress load high, I can continue to try and nourish myself if that's what I'm doing, but I now just need to get more specific, specific with the rhythm that I'm trying to use. So I make sure I go to bed at the same time, I get up at the same time, I eat at the same time. Ideally, we train at the same time and things like that, because the body loves repeated rhythms and routines. So where possible, we would try to do the same things at approximately the same time each day, because that helps to give the body a nice rhythm that it can start to adapt to over time. And as a result of that, because it kind of knows or suspects what's coming up next, it's already in this pattern, in this routine that the body's gotten used to. Therefore, it tends to be a lot easier for us to actually feel good as a result of that, because we're not doing things at random times that cause our physiology to have to do random things all over the shop. Sort of be up, down, and all over the place, like we see often with people who eat too much junk and sugars and things all over, all over the place and all throughout the day. So they've got blood sugar spike here, then a crash, then a spike, then a crash, then a spike, then a crash all over the shop. Often we get the same thing in terms of lifestyles, like stimulus, rest, stimulus, rest, stimulus, rest. But we've got this constant flow of peaks and troughs that's irregular, whereas at least if they're regular, the body can often overcome them or adapt to them. and therefore we tend to feel a lot better. We have increased energy, increased vitality, and more abundance within ourselves that will enable us to want to do more. We often wake up in a better mood, less anxious, less depressed, and so on, because we actually feel better and the body has had an opportunity to fully recover. So that's what I'll leave you guys with tonight. Let me know in the comments if or where you're struggling with this yourself, and maybe you have some specific challenges that you're facing, and I can obviously get back to you with some specific recommendations or answers that that may help you to kind of get your routine or your rhythm back in sync so that you don't get to a weekend and feel like you have to have a lay-in in order to recover. So, leave it there, guys. Thanks for watching as always, and I look forward to chatting with you guys in my next video. Take it easy, people.