What’s inside:

• 🌄 Win The Morning
• 🩺 Med-Diaries #4
• ✏️ Insights - This week’s podcasts, movies, books and other cool things

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I've been experimenting lately with a new routine; waking up early.

Hear me out, this isn't one of those motivational talks telling you that you need to get up at 4am and run 6 miles to #Grind in order to be #Successful.

I'm just talking about the benefits of waking up earlier than you normally do, whenever that may be.

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Win The Morning

6am in Aberdeen, taken on one of my earlier mornings.

If you wake up at 9am every day and sleep at midnight, your daytime is 15 hours long. If you wake up just 1 hour earlier each day, your daytime per year increases by 364 hours.

364 hours a year is a lot of time and that's just from waking up 1 hour earlier. You can get a lot done in that much extra time. That's the equivalent of reading 36 average length books. You can quite easily fit in a 20 minute work out every day and still have time left over.

You can do whatever you want with that time.

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Why Waking Up Early Is Good

I've been trying to wake up around sunrise these days so I can work on my YouTube videos, this blog and some other things that I can't seem to fit into my normal daily routine.

I find them easier to do early in the morning for a number of reasons:

1. No one is awake to distract you. Social media is very inactive since most people are sleeping, so there's nothing there to capture your attention. All of the group chats, WhatsApp and co are also inactive, so no one is disrupting your flow with an unexpected call.
2. You have more time. If you wake up at 8am, you have 16 hours of the day left so even if you spend 5 hours of the morning on yourself, you're still left with 11 HOURS to attend to all of the other important things for the day.
3. Energy levels are high. Our bodies function very similar to our phones. We begin the day on full charge and as the day goes on, we deplete our battery until the evening where we go to sleep and recharge. It makes sense that the time of day when you have the most energy is in the morning. So you might as well utilise that energy and put it towards something important.

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It Gets Easier

Waking up early is seen as this impossible task. I've heard the phrase so many times - I'm not a morning person.

Let me tell you something, there is no such thing as being a morning person. You're not just born with the ability to enjoy mornings. So called morning people just sleep on time and get good rest. It's really that simple.

I am a morning person when I have rested well. I’m not a morning person when I sleep at 4am, obviously.

Don't just focus on quantity of sleep (your typical 8 hours), try to get good quality sleep too. That means low light conditions, ideal temperatures, a comfy pillow and mattress with a nice wind-down routine.

The first few days of waking up early will be a bit of a drag, but in time it becomes easier. Try it out for a week and see for yourself.

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Ps. I've been digging into the science behind sleep, routine, circadian rhythm etc and I've been experimenting with all of them lately, so I'll be talking about how you can take control of your routine very soon! I just want to try and test the methods myself first.

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🩺 Med-Diaries #4

Date of entry: 05/04/21

Hey guys 👋🏾

This week I submitted my very last assignment of year 1, the groupwork on the Placebo Effect💊 - it was actually so interesting and fun, it feels weird to call it work. I'm so glad my med school has these fun projects at the end of each year, it's a nice way to round off the year.☺️

I'm going to write some of it up and maybe turn it into a blog post or something. I learnt some really cool things that I want to share with you all ✍🏾

Since university is over, I'm at home 🏡, enjoying some well needed social interaction with the fam 👨‍👩‍👦 Each day I'm committing myself to at least 3-4 hours of Anki ⏳ (basically how I do all of my revision). Being at home is a little harder with all the distractions so I try to wake up early (7-8am 🌄) and get my work out of the way by 2-3pm. That way I can spend the evening chilling 😎

I've been using a retrospective revision calendar 🗓️ (basically where you write down the topics you cover each day and give each of them a traffic light ranking🚦 (Green - good, yellow - okay, red - bad). In about a week I'll have a really good idea of which topics I know best and which ones need work.

My exams are in 1 month so I'm ahead of schedule as of now👍🏾. I do this thing where I pretend the exam is a lot sooner than it is and I aim to be READY a week before - that way I can spend the final week fine tuning anything that isn't sharp.

This week I'm covering all of the MAJOR diseases of Resp🌬️ & Cardio💓 and all of Term 1 anatomy (Bones & Joints🦴, Skin & Tissues🧬, Muscle & Nerve💪🏾 and the Vertebral Column). There isn't really much else exciting going on so I'll update how the revision is going!🔜

Until next week, stay healthy! 😄

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✏️Insights of the Week

🎙️Audiobook: The Alchemist

Links: Audible​

This book is a fictional story about a boy who sets on a journey to find The Alchemist. It's full of life lessons and the story is actually quite nice too. This is the first audiobook I listened to and it was definitely worth the time. If you cook, clean or go for walks often this is the perfect book to listen to in the background, it doesn't require too much attention.