I’ve been doing weight lifting twice a week with a personal trainer since before I got pregnant. I would take a few months of break right before and after giving birth, and then go back to a personal trainer to help with back/shoulder pain, pelvic floor, diastasis recti (when your abs split in half – in a bad way – during pregnancy)… But mostly, just to feel like I’m doing something when the whole world seems frozen around me, and I’m left alone in the dark. (My personal trainer is basically my therapist, auntie, personal trainer, female aging specialist, postpartum doula, and two-under-two mom senpai).
Because I gave birth 19 months after my first baby, I basically got pregnant before my abs could come back together, so I’ve had malfunctioning abs (you could literally put your finger between my abs around my belly button) for like… 4 years. Recently, my personal trainer told me that she doesn’t see an indentation anymore. So, basically 21 months after having my second baby, my abs are fused back together! (Was anyone going to tell me things like this can happen?!)
Anyways, all this to say weights and ab exercises have escalated in the past week or so now that it’s “safe,” and I don’t know if it’s directly related, but I’ve been getting hungry around 3-4PM after having “normal lunch” I’ve been having for months. I don’t know if my metabolism went up, or I’m just burning more calories because I’m working out more, but it got me thinking about little ways small changes to my life have outsized impact on my QOL in the “grand scheme of things.”
I began using a diet app half a year ago, which helped me lose 10 pounds in 3-4 months without feeling hungry. It helps me track my calories and macros, helping me drink more water, eat more protein and fiber, and see where I’m at, calorie-wise, during the day. I’ve been eating a lot more homemade salads filled with a lot of things I enjoy eating, and rather than focusing on what I “can’t” eat, I’m feeling more excited about the little things to add (like avocados and few ounces of carrots) to help me up my nutrition intake.
When I want a snack, I find myself rooting through my cabinet for some fudge covered cookies, but mostly end up choosing to eat 3 oz of blackberries (lots of nutrients and 5g of fiber!), or some carrots or cabbage instead to satiate my munchies (though I did eat those ritz fudge covered cookies last night, no regrets). I also realized that most of my previous weight-loss attempts probably failed because I was just eating less, not really focusing on what makes and keeps me full.
With my salads, I make sure to include plenty of protein, and get some nice fats like avocado so that my stomach isn’t grumbling after a few hours. I don’t “eat less” so that I consume less calories, because I’ve noticed that when I do that, I just end up eating a lot of snacks to compensate because I get hungry quickly. Or sap up all of my self control by not eating snacks, making me annoyed. And as long as I put it into my calorie calculation, I have treats too!
Perfection is enemy of progress, and it definitely holds true for losing fat. I want to lose fat, but gain muscle, so the weight itself isn’t a very good measurement of my progress. Keeping this in mind keeps me from spiraling and losing motivation when my weight goes up. And when I’m with friends, I don’t “not” eat or drink with them. I just try to make better decisions. But sometimes, hey, YOLO. I don’t live to diet. I diet to live.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about my sleep. More generally, my LACK of sleep. Yes, I sleep. My kids are thankfully sleep trained, and will sleep through the night 98% of the time. We don’t co-sleep, so my sleep is mostly well protected. But despite that, I have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, and have been waking up exhausted. The cherry on top was when I began feeling depressed and even more exhausted after daylight savings began in the fall.
It all started with getting into my car with my toddler in the carseat, and suddenly thinking that it would be so easy to just slam into a tree and disappear. That frightened me. And though I know I would never do that because my kids are in my car, the fact that, for no reason, I felt like I wanted to disappear was a wake up call. I debated therapy and even medication, but in the meantime, I bought myself a sunlamp. And it changed my life.
I really didn’t think it would make such a huge difference almost literally overnight, but it did. I am up in the morning feeling energized, and not groggy. After a month, I realized that I no longer had to schedule out 1~2 hours at a minimum to lay down in the early afternoon so that I last through the evening with my kids. And I wasn’t yawning at 4:30pm every day, not sure how I’ll make it through bed time routines for the toddlers.
Feeling excited about the sudden agency I felt about making myself feel better and making my body feel better, I started thinking about all the things I’ve just chalked up to being a tired mom of two toddlers. Like my low quality of sleep. I get up multiple times to go to the bathroom, and then can’t get back to sleep. Once I’m finally back to sleep, I’m up again to pee.
I take melatonin to sleep, but sometimes even that doesn’t work, and I keep on taking more. And at 3am, I go the nuclear option, and take Unisom. But Unisom definitely makes me feel groggy when I wake up, and makes me have very very strange dreams that exhaust me. Yes, I’m “sleeping,” but am I “resting”? I don’t think so.
So for the past few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with a few things.
- I read that when your body gets ready for sleep, your temperature goes down a few degrees to make you fall asleep. This got me thinking that I should take a shower way before my bedtime instead of right before I crawl into bed so that my body has time to lower its temperature to get sleepy.
- In the same vein, I read that melatonin starts getting secreted 12~14 hours after your first morning sunlight exposure. So I try to wake up by 7:30 to turn on my sunlamp, and take melatonin pill when I take a shower around 7 to start it working BEFORE it’s bedtime (until then, I was taking all of my vitamins right before bed).
- Both of these new habits were changed to match a trigger (Atomic Habits anyone?) by making putting my 2nd son to bed a trigger. Usually, I would go back downstairs to eat or browse the internets, but I decided to take a shower and take my vitamins right after he goes to sleep. This gives my body few hours to metabolize the melatonin tablet, and take my body temperature down before bedtime.
- I’ve been drinking a lot of water, because more water is good, right? Well, apparently not if you’re a postpartum mom. So experimenting a bit, I decided that I’ll stop my water-hose drinking around 3PM, and after that, I’ll drink 1 glass of water with dinner, and a little bit when I’m taking my vitamins. I’ve had success in getting through the night without getting up to go to the bathroom for the past few nights! Initially, I stopped drinking water around 7:30PM, but that didn’t seem to cut it, so I’ve gone all the way to 3PM.
- Trying to activate my default mode network (DMN) more, which is apparently very important to process the avalanche of information you take in daily. If you know me, you know I listen to audiobooks on 2.5~3x speed, and watch videos at 2x speed. I spend my driving time listening to audiobooks. But I’m making an effort to “zone out” more to activate the DMN, which means at least for the shorter drives, I’m not listening to audiobooks anymore, and just driving. The shorter drives aren’t very labor intensive to my brain in the first place because they are going to familiar places, so I find my brain being a chatterbox, rattling around with different topics of conversations and thoughts while I drive. Not “consuming” all the time is also apparently good for resting your brain, which probably will contribute to sleeping better!
- Setting my phone apps to deactivate at 9PM. In the beginning of the year, I deleted all of my cellphone games and social media, set my phone apps to shut down at 9PM, and turned on the “night mode” to turn screens orange. (I wrote about this and other stuff in my “Mindful Goals for 2026” post on my blog). Ever since not having social media and my games on my phone, I get really bored really early, and find myself getting ready for bed at like 8PM, poking around, organizing things, giving up, and just rolling into bed and reading my Kindle. Last night, for the first time in forever, I actually felt sleepy, and just rolled into bed and slept without reading!
Everything I’m doing are tiny small things. But cumulatively, I feel like they are really making an impact on my sleep. And these tiny successes are making me feel like maybe there are a lot more things I can control about my life and body than I assumed.
Of course, I’ve been lucky that most things I’ve been reading about and experimenting with have worked out, and not everything will be like this. But even if they don’t work, I’ve learned to tweak things here and there (like my water intake time), and for the first time in a while, I’ve come to think of my life and series of experiments, where the “goal” is actually my whole entire life, and I’ll continue testing and tweaking every day without expectations of an outsized change. Just 1% QOL boost here and there.
Sleep is such a huge part of our lives, and for me, as someone who needs good sleep, I can only imagine how much QOL improvements I’ll get over time by “cleaning it up” now and starting new habits!
Anyways, all this to say, if you are feeling SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) like me in this chilly gloomy season, maybe try a sunlamp?
Originally published on my Substack, Hiroko’s Momusings.