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A review by stagasaurus
Hell Week: seven days to be your best self by Erik Bertrand Larssen
3.0
I did like this book. It reframed a few things for me. I really like the idea of using a hell week as a way of practicing being your best self without huge commitment. I didn't follow the week as described in the book, I made up my own rules about what it meant to be my best self and followed those. What I learnt:
* It is expensive and time consuming to eat a super healthy diet. I normally eat sort of meh healthy, but trying to up my game cost a lot extra, and the more I tried to keep it to budget, the more time preparing food I had to do. This time felt like time wasted as I was trying to do productive work. This was something I hadn't considered before and something to think about where the balance is.
* Doing exercise every day definitely gave me more focus and helped me sleep better.
* If I wake up early in pain I can just get up and read rather than trying to force myself to go back to sleep.
* Keeping my phone away from myself is a good good good thing.
* What exactly am I saving my "good" clothes for? Unless I will be doing physical manual labour I can totally wear them on a "normal" day. It's not like these are designer pieces, just my favourite things in the wardrobe.
* I read a blog post where someone complained that she wouldn't be doing the "look your best" thing because she didn't have time to curl her hair daily. Nowhere does it say in the book that you have to curl your hair. I learnt that my definition of looking my best is to be clean, neat, brush my hair, brush my eyebrows and put on lip balm.
* Even when you are really trying to focus, there are only so many hours in the day for reading, meditating, preparing healthy meals, exercising, keeping your home hygienic, looking after others, doing productive work. I learnt that even the best me has only 24 hours. I definitely need to find some marginal gains, because a lot of my life is spent on Alice-running-to-keep-in-the-same-place tasks.
It was a useful exercise.
* It is expensive and time consuming to eat a super healthy diet. I normally eat sort of meh healthy, but trying to up my game cost a lot extra, and the more I tried to keep it to budget, the more time preparing food I had to do. This time felt like time wasted as I was trying to do productive work. This was something I hadn't considered before and something to think about where the balance is.
* Doing exercise every day definitely gave me more focus and helped me sleep better.
* If I wake up early in pain I can just get up and read rather than trying to force myself to go back to sleep.
* Keeping my phone away from myself is a good good good thing.
* What exactly am I saving my "good" clothes for? Unless I will be doing physical manual labour I can totally wear them on a "normal" day. It's not like these are designer pieces, just my favourite things in the wardrobe.
* I read a blog post where someone complained that she wouldn't be doing the "look your best" thing because she didn't have time to curl her hair daily. Nowhere does it say in the book that you have to curl your hair. I learnt that my definition of looking my best is to be clean, neat, brush my hair, brush my eyebrows and put on lip balm.
* Even when you are really trying to focus, there are only so many hours in the day for reading, meditating, preparing healthy meals, exercising, keeping your home hygienic, looking after others, doing productive work. I learnt that even the best me has only 24 hours. I definitely need to find some marginal gains, because a lot of my life is spent on Alice-running-to-keep-in-the-same-place tasks.
It was a useful exercise.