30-day challenge: body, mind, spirit

I work in the wonderful world of information technology, and as anyone who does can attest, the needle is constantly moving in that field. There's constant pressure to learn new things in order to make yourself more useful or interesting to prospective employers. So, the order of things is constant change.

I am taking a 30-day challenge to improve my Javascript skills, and I thought, why not challenge my whole self? So I've chosen some ways to challenge mind, body and spirit for the next 30 days.

A finite challenge like this can be a successful strategy- since it's of limited duration, there's no scary feeling of having to maintain a new behavior indefinitely. And if you adopt good habits during that period, all the better!

So the Javascript is one part of the mind component. The other part is committing to a mind dump at bedtime. Studies show this helps you re-program yourself to stop lying in bed and worrying, thus messing with normal sleep. The brain dump gets all the worries out onto paper and clears the mind for rest.

The body component has a piece designed to help with sleep, too: a brief yoga/stretching routine before bed. I am the kind of person who finds yoga relaxing rather than invigorating- so this would be more useful to me, personally, than, say, using it to start the day. For energy throughout the day, I'm initiating a daily workout routine. It's a simple one: walk as far as I feel comfortable  (I am still recovering from a broken ankle from late last year- this is month 8 of the recovery and still feeling it);  and  I'll greet the day with a  five-minute kettlebell workout. Nothing too heavy or rule-bound- the goal is to do it consistently for 30 days, not get swole. Easy, manageable changes.

The spirit component is to commit to five minutes of meditation a day. Abbey has told me more than once she thinks I need to meditate. I do tend to rush and not be present in the moment, especially when I have more than one thing on my plate. So all-consuming is this tendency that I was rushing on that fateful morning 8 months ago, when I flew down some stairs  on a roll of gift wrap and broke my ankle. She's right- I need to slow down, take one thing at a time, be more present and mindful. Five minutes of meditation is not too much, but perhaps enough to nudge me into a more mindful lifestyle.

Some would argue I am attempting too many changes at once. That's why they are gut simple. It's an experiment. I want to feel a minor transformation. I don't know- it's an approach, and I will post my observations.