Are you lying to yourself?
I shut my alarm off at 6 a.m., sat up in the dark, and debated. Go to the gym, or go back to sleep?
“Didn’t sleep well again,” I wrote in a text to one of my gym-mates. “Gonna try to go back to bed and work out after work.”
A half hour later, as the dark sky turned light blue, I could have been doing cross-body deadlifts with a kettlebell during the warm-up. Instead, I watched my ceiling fan spin, lit up, but only barely, by the dim light seeping in through the cracks between the slats in my shutters.
I never did fall back to sleep.
I was in bed by 9:40 the night before, but I wasn’t tired when I got there. Every time this happens to me, I marvel.
“I wanted at least eight hours of sleep,” I’ll say. “I have no idea why I can’t pull it off.”
What I really don’t know is why we still believe the lies we tell ourselves like this one—why we pretend that our thoughts and words are truer indicators of our goals, priorities, and flaws than our actions are.
As if never hitting eight hours of sleep has nothing to do with waiting until eight hours before my alarm will ring to start getting ready for bed. Surely, it is unrelated to training my brain to be awake in bed by often working from my bed instead of my desk. And it couldn’t possibly be connected to the blue light I absorb by scrolling from who knows when until I turn off my light.
But let me tell you more about how “I don’t know why I have a hard time getting eight hours of sleep.”
Our thoughts and words tell us what we want to hear, but our actions tell us where we need to grow. Our thoughts and words call out our circumstances. Our actions call us out. They don’t literally speak louder than words, but they do speak more honestly.
When there are words you won’t say about yourself, when there are realities about yourself that you deny, your actions will out you. Listen to them.
The truth—the reality I deny—is that I consistently create conditions in which getting enough sleep isn’t possible. Denying the truths our actions tell us delays our growth. And I think we all secretly like that.
As long as we believe there is nothing we can change about a circumstance, there is nothing we have to change about it—we aren’t on the hook for anything. We don’t grow, but we’re cool with it, because we also don’t have to feel any growing pains.
This allows you to say things like “I didn’t have time to finish the article by deadline,” despite all the notice your editor gave you and the 16 episodes of Seinfeld you binged on Netflix after she assigned it. You say you didn’t have time. Your actions say something else.
Will you listen to them? Will I listen to mine?
To step away from my phone at night and actually get ready for bed, I have to dig deep, addicting as smartphones are. I might not have the willpower anymore to ignore a phone I can see, but I do have the power to put it where I can’t see it. I am more inclined to do that when I consider my options.
We might think my options are “scroll now” or “get ready for bed now.” They’re not. My real options are the same as the options are for anybody else: “suffer a little now” by doing whatever difficult, inconvenient, or uncomfortable thing I should or “suffer more later” by doing whatever feels good, what requires less discipline, or what’s most comfortable. I often choose to suffer more later. Why? Because I don’t want to suffer.
And that’s asinine.
You don’t prevent suffering by perpetually prioritizing your comfort; you only postpone the suffering, and you probably compound it.
Is that really what you want?
Do you want to avoid a little suffering now to the degree that you cause more suffering later?
Or would you rather just agree to sacrifice some of your present comfort, to exert yourself when it’s hard, and to cultivate some discipline?
Because I think you can. I think we all can.
But we won’t, unless we agree to listen to the truths our actions tell us—and act on them.