Sleep Challenge Part 2

Determined to kick off the new year as the healthiest version of myself, I met with a nutritionist and Korean acupuncturist over the last month (both of which deserve a blog post in their own right).  Their biggest piece of advice?  I need to get more sleep.  Apparently 7-8 hours (which is actually really good for me!) is not quite enough.  I need to be getting 8-9 hours each night! ("No drugs, just sleep" -- my acupuncturist says).

The crazy thing is that never before could I actually do that than here in Seoul, where I set my own hours and have tremendous freedom over my own time.  But since I have work calls until 10pm on most work nights and the earliest I can reasonably be in bed is 10:30pm, that means not setting the alarm until 7:30am!  While I know Tyler would be thrilled with this new development, the truth is somehow this is really hard psychologically for me.  In fact, when I read a new year's blog post entitled "The 5am Club" (all about how successful people wake up at 5am and embark on their projects while the rest of the world still sleeps), I was more drawn to the "challenge" of waking up at 5am than to the supposedly "easy" task of staying snug and warm in bed.  The former is somehow more exciting and certainly seems "more productive" than staying in bed for hours on end.

(As an aside though: the #1 sign you need more sleep is when you read a Quora post on spending time in prison and think "Ah, prison seems kindda nice" when the first answer is "Sleep: During extended lock downs and prolonged periods of cell time, nothing beats a good nap"... in fact, I challenge you to read this whole article here and not think that there's something "nice" about how the inmate describes his time in jail, highlighting what's missing in many of our busy lives... like sleeping, writing letters, playing chess, and reading)

What's more, when my nutritionist said I should be feeding my body not only with healthy foods, but also with healthy (e.g. stress-free) thoughts, my heart skipped a beat with anxiety at my "homework" to schedule one hour each day of "doing nothing."  For me, multi-tasking or even jumping out of a plane somehow is easier than having an hour of "dead" time (literally "nothing" -- like, no reading, no journaling, no yoga... what does that even mean?!)

So as I rush to finish this blog post in the four minutes left before a work call, I am announcing my intention for a new challenge: getting 8-9 hours of sleep every night for the next two months through the end of March with one cheat day each week (my dear friend Giselle tells me that the whole 21-days to create a habit is all bunk; article here) -- science tells us it's actually a bit over two months, 66 days to be exact.

If anyone wants to join in, let me know -- we can compare sleep app scores! :)  'Til then, happy sleeping... I guess I'll be hibernating for the rest of this winter!

Saturday Outing

Clear Saturday morning, 45 degrees.  It's the first mild day in a while here, and we use the opportunity to head to Yangjae Flower Market, Korea's largest flower market.  It opens for wholesale at 1am every Monday to Saturday, and opens to the public at 6am.  Highly protective of our sleep, however (I smiled reading a Wall Street Journal article called "Sleep is the New Status Symbol" -- an oldie but a goodie), we get there at a much more reasonable 10am.

Expecting it to be packed, we were pleasantly surprised to have the giant greenhouse largely to ourselves.

A bit overwhelmed at first, we approached the situation much as one would approach a buffet: by doing a once-over and checking everything out first.  We got excited about just about everything (rare for us, I know).

The first time I went to Yangjae was back in the fall.  For the last four months, I've been taking myself out on an "artist date" every Tuesday afternoon.  It's become a Sabbath of sorts for me, a time to unplug, think, wander, and play (can't take credit for making this up: it's a core tool in "The Artist's Way" and one of the the key principles of a time management book that Andrew and I love called "Manage Your Day to Day".)  While the practice seems to be gaining more and more traction (Obama apparently takes one day off each week to just think and Bill Gates takes two weeks off a year to do "nothing"), it still results in some funny conversations:

Tyler (after a particularly challenging day at work): "What did you do today?"
Trish: "I went to the aquarium!!"
Silence.
Peals of laughter from both of us.
Trish: "Wait, why are you laughing?"
Tyler: "No reason, five year old Trish."

As beautiful as that fall trip to Yangjae was, I've been hesitant about going back because it was also just so hard.  No one spoke English, and buying even just two small potted plants was a huge win (as was getting them back home).

So I was downright shocked at how much of a pleasant and inspiring experience today's trip to the flower market was! -- of course, it helps that we now know our numbers and can string basic sentences (okay, phrases) together like: "lots of sun or just little?" and "water -- how much?"

We are now the proud owners of all of these delightful plants...we promise to do all that we can to keep them alive until you all come visit!

For our living room (yes, that's an orange tree that Tyler's been wanting for the last three years and the most unique bonsai tree I've seen!):

For our bedroom and my meditation/yoga room (saying "my room" really never gets old):

Baaa...

2015 is the Year of the Sheep.  While lunar new year doesn't yet start until mid-February (February 19th to be exact), Seoul is starting the party early.  The city is decorated with sheep a-plenty.  The thing is, though, these sheep are not dramatic and bold like Chinese imagery.  This being Korea, all the sheep are cute.  See exhibits one and two below compared to the Chinese sheep above.

I'm told this is a big year for me, since I was born in the Year of the Sheep in 1979 (each animal sign comes every twelve years).  When Giselle came to visit from Hong Kong, she brought a cup coaster that says that sheep are charming, elegant, and artistic.  I'll take that.

But when I looked up my Chinese horoscope tonight, all I read was doom and gloom: "Sheep year people are often worriers who are shy, pessimistic, moody, indecisive, oversensitive, weak-willed and puzzled about life...They do not dare to express their love openly and usually have interests in strange theories."  The same site says I should stay away from "sharp tools and weapons such as knives, swords, saws, and scissors, because [I] may easily get injured this year."

Hmm... I think that'll probably be the last Chinese horoscope I read for the year (much to Tyler's relief).

So what's with all the cute sheep in Seoul?  I'm not quite sure.  Some of it ranges from the cool (an art gallery focusing on sheep lets visitors write their dreams for 2015 on a cute sheep postcard, which will get sent to your home midway in the year)...

... to the super weird (and seemingly un-hygienic): there's a Sheep Cafe in Hongdae that has... you guessed it, sheep that customers can pet and feed (the owner lets them out of their fence twice an hour and customers can feed them dried grass).  You can't make this stuff up.  Apparently the waffles there are good too.

*     *     *

Lunar new year is a big deal here (and note: I did not call it Chinese new year because I got enough dirty looks when I came here calling it that!).  While Koreans have off one day for January 1st, they have three days off for lunar new years (which conveniently also falls on Valentines... Bali, here we come!)

The three day celebration is one of the most significant traditional Korean holidays, with families celebrating the day before Korean new year, new year's day itself, and the day after Korean new year.  Fun fact: Korean new year is generally the same day as Chinese new year, except when the new moon occurs between Korean midnight and Chinese midnight -- in which case Korean new year is one day after China's.

In modern times, traditions of Korean new year and "western" new year have merged.  In both, you bow to elders and eat "ddukguk" or rice cake soup.  Having a bowl of this soup symbolizes getting a year older (apparently this tradition stems back to the Pre-Josun Dynasty, which started in 1392).

In fact, on January 1st, all of us here in Korea turned one year older! (and plus I already gained a year moving here in September, since Koreans consider a baby one year old once its born).  There's a Korean expression, "How many bowls of rice cake soup have you eaten?" which essentially means, how old are you?

With Giselle arriving shortly after the new year, Tyler did some research into good ddukguk in the city.  We headed to Gaeseong Traditional Dumplings House near Insadong.  My mouth is actually literally watering just thinking about it.  The recipe is based on the current owner's grandmother (who made it for other villagers in Gaeseong) and who handed the "secret recipe" to her daughter, who then passed it on to her daughter.

We ate it and all turned one year older.  The soup was worth the extra year in age, it was that good.  Anyway, it doesn't really matter because I've lost track of how old I'm considered here anyway...

So whether I'm now 35, 36, or 37 (yikes!), I've resolved that this year will be a great year indeed...  Despite what the Chinese horoscopes say.

Here's to a happy and purposeful 2015!

Hellooo after a long hiatus of holidays, family, and celebration!!

Over the weekend, one of my best friends sent me an article from The New York Times called, "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This", with the teaser: "What happens if you decide that falling in love is not something that happens to you, but something that you do?"  The author talks about her own experience testing out what happened in a lab when psychologists tried to make complete strangers fall in love (the answer: be prepared for weddings!)

The study is fascinating in and of itself -- essentially consisting of 36 questions designed to do for intimacy what the boiling water does to the frog: you don't realize you're being intimate with a complete stranger until you're already well past that line (link to these 36 questions here).

But for me, what's even more interesting is the element of choice in an area that we presume "happens" to us, like falling in love.  The NYT article ends with: "Love didn't happen to us.  We're in love because we each made the choice to be."

When I started meditating seven years ago, a big "a-ha" for me was this concept of choosing to be happy (not that this is a lesson that I learned once and had it stick; here's my current phone wall paper:

To me, this was about having the agency and making the choice to be happy / grateful / joyful, regardless of the external circumstances.  It's about purposefully choosing our own internal world.

But what I started thinking about since the new year is: what if this internal world actually influences and changes our external world?  Amy Cuddy, an HBS professor, talks about this in her TED Talk, "Your body language shapes who you are".  In this talk (which is one of my favorites), she talks about the interplay of external and internal perceptions -- using one's body language as a type of cognitive "short-cut" to not only have external people view you as more confident, but for you to also feel more confident as a result (what I like is that it's really less about confidence, though that's certainly part of it -- but about making you be more you by stripping out all the fears and doubts; author and coach Tara Mohr has a great new post on this here called "The Confidence Myth and What it Means for Your Career").

So let me explain what happened to me.  On December 20th, I left for the Philippines to meet my parents and family for the holidays.  The weeks leading up to that were among my worst weeks here in Korea (which is likely why I wasn't posting quite as much).  One of many un-written posts swirling in my head but never quite making its way on the page (which I may resurrect in the new year) was around not feeling at home anywhere -- not in the US when I came back for a short work trip; not in Korea when I came back here.  Every day seemed like a small battle, with strangers shoving and pushing me on the subway (sometimes involving elbows and most always involving old women, called "ajummas").  While I was connected to plenty of people through facebook and kakao (which is what everyone uses to text here), I felt like I had few friends and certainly no community.

I returned to Seoul on January 2nd (in time to meet Giselle here on January 3rd!).  The ten days since being back have been the polar opposite of the weeks leading up to vacation.  It's a bit like the Matrix in some ways.  Same place, but somehow it's now been flipped upside-down.  Or maybe I have.  Starting at the airport (which I raged about on both my trips from India and the US in the fall/winter), everyone was so incredibly nice and everything was just working.  When I went to my usual pho lunch place to pick up some takeout, as I was leaving, they ran to my bag and placed my favorite shrimp spring rolls -- just 'cause (I hadn't ordered them this time).  Even though I'm now overly cautious on the subway given my new camera -- oops, I mean i-phone -- no one has pushed me.  In fact, the ajummas now beckon me to sit down in the seats reserved for them!  In transferring all of my kakao contacts from my old phone to my new phone, I realize that I have a ton of friends -- multiples more than in India and some who I feel incredibly close to already.

Sure, this could very well be that I'm still on a high from an incredible trip to the Philippines or that one of my very best friends came to visit for four days or that the city is in a great mood from new years.  AND it might also just be that what's inside all of us reflects back to us externally like a mirror.  If I'm feeling angry and angsty inside, that's sure to be reflected externally.  Something happened during my trip that was like a switch.  I chose to (re)-claim my happiness and joy and gratitude, and like the universe winking, it's now reflecting back onto me.

I decided not to make resolutions this New Years.  It's the type of thing that generally makes me stressed in the new year ("what's the perfect resolution??") and stressed at the end of the year ("I have one month to accomplish this!!").  One of my mentors establishes three goals (including professional and personal) every year, and she's one of the most successful, inspiring people I know.  So perhaps I'll go back to that next year.

But for now, what I've done instead is choose a theme.  2015 is the year of creating.  It's the year of purposefully creating what I want in my life, both personally and professionally.  Just like the NYT article, it's about getting beyond the thought of things/events just happening (forming a community, starting a family, launching a business) and deliberately choosing to create the life I want to live -- not in three years when we leave Korea, but right now, just where we are right here.

And you know what?  I have a feeling this approach of creation and creativity will be a lot more fun as well.  After all, Einstein knows what he's talking about.