# 60 Days of my life
March 18 2021
After some time of working full time, while studying for a master’s and taking care of my family at the same time, I started to experiment mental fatigue. The coronavirus lockdown only made things worse; so, I decided to spend some time finding ways to help my brain.
I found an article that described mental fatigue like “the feeling that your brain just won’t function right. You can’t concentrate, even simple tasks take forever, and you find yourself rereading the same paragraph or tweaking the same line of code over-and-over again.” So I decided to put in practice different strategies from that article and also others from this one.
For this project, I chose practices that are easier to track. Basically: workout, meditation, water intake and learning to code. This project is partially inspired by the personal annual reports from Nicholas Felton.
Workout
Work in front of a computer and being in lockdown is a recipe for getting in bad shape. Since gyms are closed, I found an online workout program that only requires a couple of dumbbells. It has five routines per week, with two days of pause: upper body, lower body, all body, cardio and active recovery.
Reps by kind
This chart shows the number of repetitions (reps) per kind of routine. It’s an aggregation of all the exercises inside each category, by day.
Note: Cardio exercises are filtered since they are tracked with duration instead of reps.
Total reps
9,302
Cardio time
03:12:00
Total repetition types
Top repetition weekdays
| Thursday | 2,754 |
| Tuesday | 2,340 |
| Monday | 2,520 |
| Saturday | 1,688 |
| Friday | 272 |
Top time:
V-Crunches
Top rep:
Bent over dumbbell row
Water Intake
Pretty straightforward: Stay hydrated. “Studies show that even mild dehydration can negatively impact cognitive performance. Drink plenty of water – coffee doesn’t count.”
Litres per day
This is the easiest routine to maintain. I just kept my water bottle with me at all times. Each bottle accounts for 0.5 litres.
Bottles consumed
149
Total litres
74.5
Meditation
“You can’t cope with stress well if your brain is on high alert at all times.” I used to be skeptical about meditation practices but I found that it can be really pragmatic. It really helps me to regain contact with the present moment. Simple breathing exercises can make wonders with the right intention.
Minutes per session
These are minutes per session about the series “Focus” on Mindspace. There were some days when I simply was too busy or simply forgot to follow them. It becomes more obvious as they work charge increased.
Note: You have the choice to increase the duration of the session, which I did a couple of times up to 20 minutes.
Total minutes
390
Longest session
20
Learning Code
At first, adding more learning seems counterintuitive. But I considered it a “wisely chosen extracurricular activity.” Apparently, “pleasant activities, ones that give you a sense of purpose […], and ones that make you feel accomplished or masterful (such as learning a language) improve mental health.” So this was a no-brainer. I’m determined to learn to code, as challenging as it is, and found that gradual exercises work really well for me.
Coding sessions
I’m just considering sessions where I was purposely on Code Academy. I had less time towards the end of the course. While I spent a good amount of time learning how to code this page, I did not consider that time in my database.