Heya , it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson and welcome back to our Best of the Vlog series. In this vlog, we're going to be talking about how people who stick with their Bright Lines long term tend to get more and more particular about the hours between sunset and bedtime. It's called the Day Begins at Sunset, and I have experienced this myself that the longer I stay in food recovery, the more care I give to those pre-bedtime hours because a Bright Day starts the night before. Check it out.
This week's topic is one I've covered before, but never in a vlog. I actually covered it in a blog. You may not know that I used to have a blog, but I did. I had a blog for a very brief time in early 2015. I turned it into a vlog with videos. I believe the first vlog was August 5th, 2015, so it's been about eight years that every Wednesday I've been putting out a weekly video vlog, a vlog. Originally, I wrote them by hand, and it took me, I don't want to say all week, but it definitely took me a full day or two of work to write a blog because I'm quite exacting about my writing. Funny enough, I'm not exacting at all about my video shooting. I just turn on the camera, I talk for a bit, and then I turn off the camera. I don't have a teleprompter. I hardly have notes. It's almost always one take, and it's really, really fast for me to shoot a vlog, which is probably why I've been willing to do it every week for so many years. The longest part of it is showering and putting on clothes, which I don't usually have on. I usually have my house clothes. I wear the same thing all day every day, putting on makeup, blah, blah. That's what takes all the time to shoot the vlog. The actual shooting of the vlog is very, very quick. There is a little bit to thinking of topics and so forth, which I kind of like. I like it. But anyway, I wrote about this in a blog, which you might be amused to read. You can find the blogs the same way you find the vlogs. They're searchable. If you go to brightlineeating.com and you click on vlog and you type in the word "sunset," "sunset" into the search box, you'll see the blog. Sunset is a sign and the little essay that I wrote the blog back in March of 2015 on this topic.
I wanted to talk about this topic again here because we've got Boot Camp 2.0 and it's amazing. I'm just loving creating and teaching this stuff with the force accumulation and experience of all of these eight years of coaching Boot Campers to have their Bright Transformations. It's just wonderful to recreate this Boot Camp. We have a weekly module on the Morning Habit Stack and a weekly module on the Evening Habit Stack. These two incredibly important anchor points of living the Bright Life, but we don't put them in that order. In the Boot Camp, the Evening Habit Stack comes first, and then the following week we talk about the Morning Habit Stack. That's very intentional, and it's because in Bright Line Eating® the day begins at sunset. The day does not begin at midnight, nor does the day begin when you wake up. The day begins just before you go to sleep at Sunset. Now, we're not unique in believing that the day begins at sunset. In Judaism, the day begins at sunset. In the Baha'i faith, the day begins at sunset.
If you think about the way life goes, I think you might end up agreeing that in reality, in terms of human experience, the day begins the night before because good days and bad days aren't just born fresh. When you wake up, they are the recipient of whatever it was that you did last night. Now, anyone who's woken up with a hangover or a food hangover can hugely attest to this, or anyone who's woken up after a long good night's sleep because they got to bed on time or a very short night's sleep because they were up cavorting until three o'clock in the morning, the reality is that our Bright Day is the recipient of what we did last night. The huge obvious way this is true is whether or not we wrote down our food the night before, whether we planned out what we were going to eat today, if we wake up in the morning today and we already know what we are eating and we know it's in the fridge, it's in the house. For some people, I know they run their Bright Line Eating program such that their food is already weighed out, the meals are prepped, they're ready to grab and go, then you are so ahead of the game in terms of having a Bright Day. If you wake up and you don't know what you're eating and you're going to try to make decisions all day in the moment. Yeah, good luck making that a Bright Day. You might, but my guess is you won't 365 of those days in a row. Not likely. So, the day that we have has everything to do with the night that we had last night, and I just want to share a couple of things that are interesting to think of in terms of how to shut down the day, how to transition properly into an evening that's going to set you up to have a beautiful, Bright Day the next day.
One is this notion of Shut Down Complete, which I believe is a Cal Newport saying, Cal Newport has written some great books. One of them is "Deep Work," and he talks about shutting down the day like the workday, making it very clear that your workday is over and now you're transitioning to home life. I think for some people who work somewhere, let's say you work at a retail store in the mall, well, your Shut Down Complete is pretty well done for you. As soon as you finish your shift and you clock out and you drive home, that's Shut Down Complete. You're not going to be doing anything at home for work. When you leave the mall and drive home, your workday is over. But if you're like me and you work from home on your own business and you have a home office, well Shut Down Complete is a lot harder. I'm frequently logging into my computer and editing an email that's going out the next day right before bed. I don't have a clear Shut Down Complete, and that is how would, I was going to say a flaw. it's a growth opportunity for me in my recovery and in my life, is to work on Shut Down Complete. If you work from home, maybe it is for you too.
Another is Digital Sunset. I don't know where this notion came from, but I know that Brian Johnson of Heroic and Optimized Fame does talk about Digital Sunset. Maybe it came from him. Digital Sunset is shutting off your technology and making sure that you do so at least an hour before you plan to be asleep. It keeps you from getting blue light into your eyes, but even if you have those filters on your screens where at night it shifts from blue light to orange light, even still shutting down technology, just mentally speaking so you're not scanning and seeking and clicking and all of that mental stimulation is not helpful. You can switch from being a human doing to being a human being and just be a little bit before bedtime. That's another really helpful thing.
Writing down your food the night before, getting in bed in time to have a good night's sleep, having a habit stack that you do at night, whether there's some inspirational reading there. I'm still reading Rumi. I just love my Rumi book, "A Year With Rumi," I think it's called 365 Days whatever, "A Year With Rumi," Coleman Barks. I just love, love, love that book. I think I'm going on three or four years with it now, and it just maybe five years, it just gob smacked me every night. I write in my five-year journal, and I read the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Yeah, I have certain things. I do my nightly checklist. I ebb and flow with the nightly checklist. Sometimes I use it, sometimes I don't. But yeah, those are the things. And of course, my teeth brushing, flossing routine, and my prayer on my knees. Those are the things that I do always in a certain order. It takes a little while for me to shut down my day, and when I do it in time to get a good night's sleep, I am the recipient of that gift the next day. Lately I've not been, lately I've been having a really hard time getting enough sleep, and it's just my days are so full and I'm enjoying my kids, and I just want to be with them a little bit more. Just full life. And then six hours of sleep. But when I do get seven and a half hours of sleep or eight hours of sleep, I have a much better day because the day begins the night before the day begins at sunset.
I just wanted to throw that out there this week so you can consider how you're doing from sunset till bedtime, how you're doing, setting yourself up to have an amazing, brilliantly Bright next day. That's the weekly vlog. I love you. I'll see you next week.
