From Mindless to Mindful: One Life-Changing Routine
As recently as a quarter ago, my morning routine consisted of:
- sleepily checking the time
- checking to see the battery percentage on both my watch and my phone
- as if charging them overnight wouldn’t be enough to have the batteries up to 100%
- and right before I unplug my phone and watch
- I check the time again to see just how many more minutes I can spend laying on my bed, mindlessly scrolling through both Instagram and Snapchat, before I have to get up and get ready.
I don’t even know how much time I’ve wasted mindlessly scrolling… looking at posts published by people I don’t even care about.
Finally, thanks to Apple’s latest update featuring screen time, I saw just how much time I’m wasting, mindlessly scrolling on those two apps.
After two weeks’ worth of data, monitoring myself and seeing if I can decrease the time I spend mindlessly scrolling, I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t decrease my usage; HENCE, I deleted them.
To fill the sudden void created by yours truly, I decided to peruse the App Store and see what apps are waiting for me to implement into my daily routine. Out of all the applications I saw, it came down to a game, a reading app, and a meditation app.
I decided to try the meditation app first. After just two days, I quit. Instead of giving me a headstart to my day, stimulating my mind and waking the rest of my body up, it accomplished the exact opposite. I would get so into it to the point where I’d fall back to sleep, hoping I dream about what I’m visualizing, instead of continuing to daydream. Alas, it wasn’t a complete failure as I ended up getting more sleep, which is much better than anything I can come across mindlessly scrolling on social media.
Then, I turned to the more productive and educational choice, on a literal level: reading. Though I enjoyed it, I decided against making it a permanent part of my daily routine as my mind isn’t ready at that time of day to fully grasp the concepts and information that I was reading, let alone to understand and encode them into my long-term memory. I found myself re-reading the same things later in the day, nullifying the productivity I thought I was enjoying early in the morning. With no other option, I turned to the last application, the game.
Similar to when I realized that meditating won’t become a fixture in my routine after two days, I knew right there and then that this game will supplant social media to become the new third step on my daily morning routine, and it has. In the first week, I saw the game for what it is: just a game. I enjoyed playing it for the mental stimulation I received, mostly unlocking my competitive nature as there’s no way I would let an artificial intelligence beat me, especially first thing in the morning. As days went on, the game evolved into more than what it is.
The game in question is none other than chess. Of course, to those who know, chess is not just a mere game, it’s much more than that. Among many of the skills chess requires are cost-benefit analysis and spatial intelligence, two of the most critical ones in my opinion.
Imagine waking up and having to rely on the cerebrum and our lobes, one of the three main components of our brain, to control our body while the other two components, the cerebellum and brainstem, collaborate together to keep you in bed.
Side Note: A little brain anatomy joke. (The cerebrum controls higher functions, which is what chess requires, while the cerebellum coordinates muscle movements and the brainstem connects the cerebellum to the spinal cord… and we all know how good it feels to keep our spinal cord connected to our beds early in the morning while minimizing movements)
As days went on, I progressed from playing against a difficulty that I can easily beat to a difficulty within the upper-echelon, which opened my mind to similarities between the levels of difficulties and life. The easy AI, which I appropriately nicknamed EZ, was simplistic and didn’t prepare itself for the future, be it either moves I may make or its own. It resembled more of a human than an artificial intelligence. Any piece I set up as bait was captured and I’d often find myself turning pawns into queens, turning the game into practice, and prolonging the game by trying out multiple ways to beat EZ. The harder AI, who earned to keep the nickname AI (or Alex Intelligence), is much more complex and resembles more of a computer than a human. Like my style, it has a contingency plan to a contingency plan to a contingency plan, having established multiple supports before proceeding to make a move, and thinking of all possible outcomes to an outcome of an outcome. Unlike my style, however, AI doesn’t seem to understand what sacrifice is.
This is the beginning of how I went from mindlessly scrolling on social media to being mindfully thinking about everything by the time I get out of bed.
With 20 possible first moves that quickly goes up to 400 after both turns, that then expands to 197,742 after both players’ second turn, after which the possibilities just balloons over to a gargantuan 121,000,000 possible moves after just three turns, it’ll be a sisyphean task to accomplish all in one lifetime. I began seeing similarities with chess and my life.
In life, I can either be white or black, which means I have the choice, everyday, to either be offensive or defensive, either proactive or reactive, and to either be progressive or conservative. And regardless of what decisions I make, there is no possible way to live out and experience every possible scenario in my life.
More often than not, I choose the former, opting to make the first move and have people react to what I’m doing rather than the contrary. Unfortunately, there are some occasions where I have to be reactive as there are some unpredictability that I just can’t get a read on. Despite varying ways of how I approach different situations, I always, always, envision possible outcomes to a decision, possible outcomes to the possible outcomes of said decision, and ditto for other outcomes of other decisions. Simply, I have a contingency plan to a contingency plan to a contingency plan. Granted, of course, this is only for bigger life decisions, like deciding what I should eat for dinner before even eating breakfast.
As it currently stands, I have a plan for the next 10 years of my life—every quarter, every season, every year—except for, ironically, this summer since I failed to construct a contingency plan to the contingency plan of my contingency plan for my original plan (which in chess terms, I can admit that I’m going to be in a check). Nonetheless, that’s the beauty of life! It’s not always about having plans or implementing them, it’s also about adapting as there’s only so much that I can control. In a couple of years, most likely months, I’ll look back and reflect to identify which moves led me to where I will be and how I’m currently doing.
In my opinion, there are three possible outcomes to a chess match: a win, a learning experience, or drawing a stalemate. Be that as it may, I think there’s no better analogy to life than chess. We’re ecstatic when we win, we’re not the best when we learn, and we tend to feel neutral when we have neutral days.
As a disclaimer, I’m not a Chess grandmaster and I’ve barely logged two decades here on Earth. I, however, am an expert of my own experiences and want to share how chess have not only changed the way I make decisions and view life, I want to change people’s lives as well. If I can help change one person’s routine from mindlessly scrolling to mindfully thinking, then I have accomplished what I set out to do, especially since since nowadays my cerebrum is always persuading my cerebellum and brainstem to keep moving and working.