💌 My life routine. Why you should work like a lion and not a cow. How to split responsibilities in the household, and more.

Happy Monday! Hope you all have had a wonderful start to the week. I saved so many incredible reads over the last few days that I want to share, but we're being intentional here with the posts we share each week! I'm excited to share more in the upcoming few issues. Make sure to stay subscribed and share this newsletter with others to learn more 💙 We grew an additional 130 members last week because folks shared - so your support is greatly appreciated! ✨

🔍 Today at a glance:

Length: 8 min | Readability: Grade 9-10

• I'm getting real real. My brutally honest life routine. And more from some amazing women coming next week!

• Life entails a lot of breaking out of boxes. Here's a take on why it's not so bad.

• Emotional push-up exercise!

• Tweet of the week: get 7 types of rest to prevent burnout.

• And of course...the weekly roundup of articles and advice this week - why you should work like a lion (not a cow) — and what that means, if it brings you joy you're not wasting time, how to divvy up responsibilities in the household, how to let go of things in a constructive way, and more!

🧠 Starting off. My life routine

I spoke about what I interpreted to be a "life routine" last week, and why I was inspired to start doing a series where I interview ambitious working women on their life routine. It was only fair that the following week that I start off with my own personal routine, insights, learnings (read: struggles, trauma), so here is our first edition! Only real talk. No BS.

Wake-up time: Brutally honest, but it's 8AM. I'm not your 5AM overachiever. Fortunately, I don't generally have meetings until at least after 10AM PST these days (bless!). Don't ask me about the time where I had to wake up at 4:45AM PST for my 5AM meetings with South Korea. I will be triggered 😆. These days, I've been also intermittently waking up at 7AM because my partner wakes up for his morning meetings and classes, so I'll wash fruit and lay it out for him. Simple things. Acts of service. Just a thing we do for each other. Then I go back to bed to get a crappy additional 30 minutes of sleep until my alarm wakes me up.

I remember I did this experiment where I used to wake up at 4AM PST. Yes, 4AM PST back in 2019 when I was truly engrained in that hustle culture, and honestly it was a thrill! But I was also chasing something that made me feel like I had an edge in my life. I enjoyed the routine. Now I'm a bit more lax with myself and go with the flow. Ya girl knows she can succeed and do well even though she wakes up at 8AM.

Daily work life: I work as a product manager at a mental health company. Work is challenging, fun, crazy, all the things that a workplace is — and I try to practice what I preach and incorporate what I consider to be balance in my daily work-life integration.

I generally try to work from 9:30AM/10AM and then either take a break to do something I want to do in between, and end at 5PM - and I'll get back on later during the night. It really varies depending on my mood! I use my Google Calendar to schedule in all my rituals, and I change the timing based on how I feel that day. Today, for example, I blocked an hour out of my lunch to go to a quick workout class nearby walking distance at my local gym. On days where there's fires, I won't be able to get to my sanctuary (aka the gym + steam room/sauna) and everyone knows I will have not worked out because I'm a bit crankier.

How do I stay sane?:

• Lots of therapy. I started off chatting with my therapist over 2 years ago a few months after the pandemic started. I now have graduated to seeing her every two weeks, but she is my saving grace for my mental health.

• Workout classes + steam room. I feel sane if I can work out a few times a week (ideally everyday or every other day, but you know that's not how life works!) and go to the steam room after. I go to Equinox after moving to the Bay only because this is the closest (read: only) gym nearby, but you DO NOT need a fancy gym membership to incorporate this if you're curious. For 2 years, when I lived in the suburbs of Bellevue, I relied on Caroline Girvan workouts using at-home weights (I did ~20 min around 3xs a week - and I was a little lazy about it TBH) and this Amazon steamer (it is a godsend, please try and let me know because I will actually geek out with you!). It's amazing.

  • Steamer #1 - it's intense you can only be in for <15 minutes or else you will start losing too many electrolytes. But it feels so good! Worth the investment.

  • Steamer #2 - A bit more relaxing of a steamer and it's reliable! Just make sure you wipe the steamer after you're done with each session so that it lasts long. I couldn't find the exact brand that I used, but this looks the same as the one that I used.

• Choose my battles. Therapy taught me this. I used to get easily triggered and at a certain point, I just had to realize that it wasn't helping anyone or me. Need I say more?But this is something that could be worth a whole article. Let me know if you want more thoughts on this, but this is truly how I stay sane. Choose your battles and let the rest of that ish goooo.

• Venting to my partner. Why have one therapist when you can have two therapists? And one that is free! Granted, we are both each other's life coaches and therapists, but I can't deny that I talk through a lot of my anxiety with my partner. Bless the universe for bringing him into my life.

• SOS Mode: Daily Jay meditations via Calm. During my worst (and I mean really bad) days, I will listen to a Daily Jay meditation on the Calm app (I'm a little biased 😉) and count the 3 things I'm grateful for. Some days, it's truly that I'm just grateful for the fact that I'm breathing because it's a sh*t day.

• Monthly massages. I like to come out of a massage feeling like my therapist has massaged me to the bone. I'm going to leave it at that.

What do I struggle with?

• Insomnia! After 1.5 months of insomnia and experimenting with different hacks (read: desperation), I finally figured out the best way to get me to fall asleep is to i) not do any work before bed, ii) work out in an intense HIIT/cardio form for 30-ish minutes before bed, iii) take a hot shower, and iv) to ease myself and sort of meditate into sleeping. But I still struggle on certain days when my mind doesn't shut off. I used to resist it; however, now I am just aware of it and let myself fall back to sleep without putting pressure or anxiety on myself.

• Corporate America. I'm always asking myself whether I want to build a startup or if I want to climb the ladder. I could be great at either, but still contemplating it. I don't have the answer, but let's see how life unfolds!

• Pressure of being an only child responsible for taking care of my mother and grandma. Need I say more. 😂

What drives you?

• Honestly, when I grew up, it was the chip in my shoulder to prove that I was worthy of being loved and that I would become so successful someday that my father would regret that he abandoned my mother and me. But trauma~ aside, therapy has helped me heal a ton of that. At the core, I'm just driven. I enjoy the stuff I do and I want to do it well. It's as simple as that. I take breaks when I can, and there's always more I want to do with my time, but at the end of the day, so long as I'm saying "hell yes!" to the things I enjoy (and saying "no" to the things I don't enjoy), I don't feel that burnt out. I love working hard on the things I enjoy.

• Taking care of my mother and grandmother. Most of the trauma I have is with my mother, which I realized has been passed (i.e. generational trauma) from my grandmother and generations before that -- despite all of this, I still want to make sure I can support and provide for my family. They made a lot of sacrifices for me, so I do feel a part within me to make sure they live a good life that they deserve. They gave me the best that they could, so I love them dearly.

• I think I'm just built this way. There's so many different perspectives, but after unraveling everything, I think this is how my mind has been built and trained. I am interested in certain spaces, and I want to align the projects and work with those values - and get paid for it!

🤓 We are born into boxes.

I love this comic from The Woke Salaryman, where he discusses his perspective (visually) that in life, we are born into a series of boxes. Throughout each stage of life, we increasingly progress and "break" those boxes. However, at a certain point, you realize that there's always another box. How do you reconcile life just being a series of boxes that you have to break? He puts a positive spin on it - that breaking boxes can be fun, there's opportunities to grow and improve your life, and it's not so bad after all.

💪🏼 Emotional push-up

Did you ever make an assumption about what someone else is feeling or thinking and then found out you were way off?

All too often, our assumptions about others reveal more about us than they do about them. In this podcast episode by Dr. Emily of "Emotional Push-Up," she explores the meaning we assign to other people's words, intentions, and actions in order to better understand ourselves.

The meaning we make around other people’s words and intentions and actions when they say something that triggers us provides an opportunity on how we can get curious around that to see how we feel about ourselves. Often, as humans, we project the emotions and things we don’t want to face in ourselves in other people.

Exercise:

1. Think about something that someone has said to you or something that happened to you that rubbed you the wrong way.

2. Reflect on what meaning you make of that response. What assumptions did you have about why this happened?

3. What could your assumption possibly teach you about yourself?

💙 Tweet of the week:

👀 Weekly Finds:

• 🦁 Why you should work like a lion and not a cow (i.e. how to work hard, effectively). I sent this to my engineer, so you know that I genuinely love this article. How does a lion versus cow work, and why does Naval think you should work like a lion? How do you work hard effectively? This article might be kind of life-changing for those of you who've never heard of this concept, so please do take a read! Here's a written article about someone's perspective on it, which was an insightful read as well.

• 🧹 If you're sick of unequal household responsibilities, here's a helpful tactic. If you're the person in the household who always seems to be the one bearing the brunt of the domestic work, you might be feeling unappreciated and resentful. But there are steps you can take to ensure that the household chores are fairly distributed. That includes defining what fairness means in your home -- then splitting up responsibilities accordingly. This comic below highlights some of Rodsky and Misla's top takeaways on how to divvy up housework.

• 🪢 Drop the rope! How to let things go. In relationships, we are sometimes the instigator and sometimes the reactor. But we also have the power to let go. Dropping the rope means not pulling back and forth, but instead coming at the problem or approaching the relationship in a more positive way. Stop pulling and start engaging. Deborah Liu dives into this topic in more depth.

• 😁 If it brings you joy, you're not wasting time. If you feel guilty about pursuing or doing a certain thing that isn't traditionally considered "productive" but gives a joy, enjoy this light-hearted read by Leslie Ralph about why that's okay. You're not wasting time!

• 🌎 News: South Korea holds competition for zoning out. Cool find this week - this competition in South Korea challenges you to zone out and do nothing for 90 minutes. Talk about turning your passion into a side hustle 😉

Hope this newsletter helped and please reply to this email or submit here if you have any feedback! Feedback is a gift and helps me improve and make sure that these newsletters are more useful, thought-provoking, fun, and/or insightful for everyone.

That’s it for today! See you next week 💌