Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

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Nah, you can do it with kids! I have two that are about to be 4 and 6, here are my weekdays:

- Alarm at 4:30. 5 mins of breathing exercises, 20 mins of meditation.

- Make coffee, have breakfast, out the door to work by ~5:30.

- Get to work's gym by 5:45, cardio for 60 mins.

- In my office by 7:00-7:15.

- 3:30, 25 mins of breathe work and meditation again. Tuesdays and Thursdays, this is 3:15 so I can fit in ~30 mins of strength training.

- Head on out, pick up my youngest from school, home by ~4:15-4:30-ish. Ballpark depending on traffic, actual gym times, etc.

- Cook dinner (kiddos often like to help), eat with family, hang out with and play with my kiddos until 7:00PM.

- Kiddo bath and bed time, wife and I take turns doing this every night. Whether I'm "done" at 7 or 8, it only takes me ~30 mins to shower and prep my shit (clothes, lunch, etc.) for the next day.

- Leaves me with ~1-2 hours each night to hang out, read a book, and enjoy my wife's company before heading to bed at ~9:30.

It's busy, but I don't feel like I'm overstretched and I don't feel like it leaves me missing out on anything.

There’s a few things required to make that work for you.

You fall asleep instantly every night or function on less than 7 hours of sleep long term. You have a 15 minute commute. You don’t seem to need any slack time to deal with any issues that pop up.

4 year old has a meltdown because the 6 year old ate the last fruit snack. One of the kids decides to wake up at 3am. Friends come over for dinner and throw off the routine. Oops forgot to buy an ingredient for dinner, now you have to load up all the kids and go to the store. Ugh piece of plastic is lodged in the garbage disposal better get the flashlight and chopsticks.

And that’s not even mentioning regular household maintenance. Laundry, dishes, cleaning, grocery trips etc…

I’d need at least 2 extra hours in every day to handle all of those unexpected and expected issues. Probably closer to 3.

So I made my original post knowing full well that my situation is my own and YMMV, but to speak to those concerns wrt my schedule/life...

>You fall asleep instantly every night...

Actually, yes! Two points there. First, when I'm out of my routine, not working out, drinking lots of coffee and eating like garbage, I sleep like ass. When I'm in my routine, eating well, and only having a cup of coffee with breakfast, I'm incredibly energized throughout the day and end up suddenly feeling tremendously tired right around 8:45/9:00.

The second part is that my father's side of the family is notorious for falling asleep anywhere, anytime. There's a litany of photos of us passed out on couches in the middle of packed parties.

> Meltdowns

They happen, but they don't really rock the schedule in my experience. Bedtime somehow always ends up being bedtime. Might shift by ~15 or so occasionally, but never in a way that nukes my bedtime or anything.

>One of the kids wakes up at 3am.

This is entirely YMMV, but we sleep trained. For whatever absolutely fucking weird reason, neither kid has ever got themselves out of bed in the morning, they always wake up and wait for us to come get them. Earliest I hear one of them is occasionally 6 on the weekends, usually closer to 7. I feel tremendously lucky here, and recognize how not normal this is.

>Forgot dinner ingredient and load kids up...

Nah. I do my best to buy ingredients on the weekend for the week. Definitely isn't foolproof, but usually we just pivot to a meal I'd planned for another night, or we always have easy to make shit like mac and cheese or grilled cheese and tomato soup lying around to fall back on. Life doesn't need to be perfect and I'm cool with pivoting and not sticking to plans.

>Friends coming over

For our own sanity wrt my wife and I's schedules, we hang with friends on the weekend. Weekends are a lot more freeform for us.

>Household maintenance

Naturally, whoever isn't playing with the kids just falls into keeping the laundry moving and cleaning the kitchen. I'll take the kiddos to the grocery store on Saturday. Dishes happen quickly, we all help there.

I’m not doubting that your schedule works for you, I’m just saying that it’s at the extreme of what is feasible with young kids.

> neither kid has ever got themselves out of bed in the morning

My wife is a pediatrician. This is so incredibly not normal to have 2 kids that absolutely never get up early that you won the lottery. And not the regular jackpot. You won the powerball multi-state $500 million lottery.

> For our own sanity wrt my wife and I's schedules, we hang with friends on the weekend. Weekends are a lot more freeform for us.

I wish I knew what a weekend was. My wife works in the ER, as do many of our friends.

> Naturally, whoever isn't playing with the kids just falls into keeping the laundry moving and cleaning the kitchen.

There’s so much more daily maintenance work for our house than an hour a night for one person.

Just making my kids lunch for the next day takes me 15 minutes. It takes me 20-30 minutes to fold one load of laundry.

And the irregular things I mentioned were just a tiny part of it. The other day my 4 year old got a whole stack of puzzles down and the 2 year old immediately dumped out all the pieces. Took me 2 hours to sort that out. Last week the tankless hot water started randomly cutting out and I spent 2 hours dealing with that.

Yesterday we took 2 of our 3 kids for a well check to their pediatrician. For some reason it took 1.5 hours instead of the 30 minutes we had planned. A few months ago one of my many spoke alarms started randomly going off once a night for a few days until I could track down the problem. 3 months ago my 2 year old tripped on the very bottom stair and had a freak fracture. That took hours of time up front and then reverted to crawling for 9 days. And for 6 weeks he had to wear a boot that I had to remove and reapply multiple times a day.

Our 2 month old blew out her diaper a few days ago and I had to take all the padding off, wash it, then figure out how to put it back on. Big storm recently knocked most of our Christmas wreathes off and I had to deal with that.

My kid was recently “snack leader” for his preschool class, which means for a week I had to make healthy snacks for the whole class.

All of that is just the random stuff that has popped up over the last few months that I can think of.

The original post who mentioned this kind of thing isn’t feasible with kids was correct. 2-2.5 hours of exercise/meditation and a full workday isn’t something that most people with kids can pull off.

I'm genuinely jealous of your ability to either:

- fall asleep at 9:31 and function on 7 hours of sleep

- or fall asleep at 10:30 and function on 6 hours of sleep

If I'm not getting 8 hours, I feel like a zombie the next morning.

Sorry to confuse, it's 9:30 every night. Anything less than 7 and I'm wrecked. 7.5 is ideal, but I also feel great with 7. My non-scientific guess is that I spent so much of my teens and 20s getting less than 6 hours that my body is delighted by 7+ lol.

But yeah, I imagine I'll need more as time continues to pass and I get older.

/shrug

Edit: To say nothing of my mild fear of an inadequate amount of sleep in middle age possibly contributing to dementia, but I digress...

My neurodiverse mind often won't let me sleep that early. It just whirls with problem solving that keeps me up all night if I go to bed in a whirl. Yes I know how to meditate. Imagine spending years at it and finding yourself in a mental state that means you can't clear your mind any more. You can't 'let it go', it just comes straight back in a more aggressive way with flash backs and visions. What would you do now?

Not the person you're replying to but I am confused by your comment. What would you do? You'd try and meditate. If that doesn't work, you distract yourself with something else. The mind whirling keeping you up at night is rarely a productive thing, speaking from experience.

I hope my comment doesn't come off as dismissive but learning to meditate is practicing to "let it go". It isn't a switch. You're teaching your mind not to get "too attached" to anything you consider unwholesome.

No, your tone is fine, and thanks for that. A whirling mind is not often productive but it can make great leaps forward. It can also be paranoid, dangerous and self-destructive.

I was trying to make the point that self- help easy fixes are not always successful. I spent decades actively learning to sleep. It works most of the time. It is good to learn. I use a mindfulness sleep meditation most nights. I also learnt from sleep hygiene that going to bed early is normally a big mistake for me, precluding much of the 'go to bed earlier, get up and exercise' advice.

I have also hit periods in my life where I simply couldn't mediate for weeks on end despite regular practice over a decade. I was mentally ill. No routine or hacks was going to get me to exercise. I needed therapy (EMDR) and rest, and when I got really self-destructive I needed sleep medication (useful only for a very short time). The 'hack' people just made me feel bad about myself for being unable to get a grip.

That is what I want people to see, exercise is only useful if you are well enough to do it. If you are not well enough to shave, then don't beat yourself up for not getting exercise. Put a pin in it, and do it later.

My latest illness was (psycho-somatically) interfering with my cortisol levels, and it made any exercise crippling. I couldn't recover. I didn't get the boost. I beat myself up about not being able, and it made me worse.

Exercise and therapy rather than exercise or therapy might be better advice.

Edit, typos

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Nah, I typed it up in like three mins lol

How did you fit those 3 minutes into your day!?

This sounds utterly horrific but I'm glad you're enjoying it.

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