Today, it has been four weeks since I started my first challenge, and I’m here to share my results.

First of all, did I do it 100% every day? No. Is that bad? Nope!

There were some great days and some not-so-great days. Some days, I felt I needed a bigger break from life than what my books could give me.

However, because I was focusing on the negative, I disregarded the truly positive changes I’ve noticed in myself because of the challenge. So let’s see the positives!

Sleep

One of the biggest reasons I started the challenge was that I was having trouble sleeping. When I would see that it was time for me to go to sleep (I’ve been going to bed around 10 pm for years), I found myself way too wired to sleep. Once, I even stayed up for two hours just looking at the ceiling! It was affecting every aspect of my life because I woke up tired almost every morning. So, I desperately needed a change.

Now, about an hour before I go to sleep, I can feel my body starting to get ready to sleep.

However, not all nights were easy. Sometimes, I was upset about something, and no book could calm me enough to fall asleep. So, what I did was use an incredible app called “White Noise” that gives you continuous noise. There is a free version and a paid one. I paid for it and have been happily using it for over ten years. It never fails!

I don’t mean to promote the product, but it’s a great alternative to trying to sleep from watching series.

Other activities

Contrary to popular belief, I never intended this to be a full-on reading challenge, but more of a stop-watching series challenge so I could do other things challenge. When I started the challenge, I felt chained to watching series. Then, I would get frustrated when I saw that two hours had gone by and I hadn’t done the things I wanted to do that night.

So, by giving myself the guideline of not watching a series past 8 pm, I opened the night to do whatever else I wanted to do.

These included some pending paperwork I had to do, listen to music while coloring mandalas, look up what I would like to study in the future, and much more.

Outlook on Series Today

Soon after starting the challenge, I started noticing that I preferred the plots in the books I was reading rather than the ones in the series I was watching. At times, I didn’t even want to watch series because they started to bore me.

Also, a giant plus is that you do not need Wifi to read a book! It may not sound like a big deal, but I used to move my router every Friday night after work so I could binge-watch on the weekend without losing connection. I haven’t done that since I started, and I don’t feel the need either.

Reading

Even though I didn’t want this to be a reading challenge, one of my goals was to try to read the books I’ve had on my to-do list for years. So, I used this time to finish a book my grandfather lent me, “The Ballerina of Auschwitz” by Edith Eger (I’d recommend it!), which I had been trying to finish for months.

However, after I finished the Ballerina of Auschwitz, I didn’t feel engaged with any other book. Something I have done in the past when I get into a rut and can’t focus on any book is I re-read one of my favorites and it kick starts my motivation to keep reading. In my case, for years it was “Sirena” by Donna Jo Napoli. However, I’ve used this so many times that it wasn’t working either, so I had to find another one.

When I started the challenge, I was also reading The Lord of the Rings, but as an ebook. Unfortunately, reading on my phone started to give me headaches from the blue light, so I had to stop. Then, the bookstores in Peru had “Book Week” and I found the books on sale. I was so happy when I got them that I started dancing and singing and posted a picture of them on my social media.

Since I got it, I’m back to reading every day and the best part is that I do it because I’m excited to see what happens next (even though I’ve watched the movies 10,000 times) and not because of the challenge itself.

Rough Days

As I mentioned in the beginning, I didn’t do the challenge every single day. There were days where other factors were bigger than my desire to complete this challenge. During this time, we’ve had the first round of elections in Peru, which was quite disappointing. Also, COVID is spreading rapidly. These have been weighing on me, and there were times where focusing on a book was not enough for me to relax from the bad news we’ve been getting. So, there were days where I extended my 8 pm rule a bit.

I also noticed a couple of things that I needed to adjust. I didn’t factor in watching YouTube videos endlessly as an equivalent of binge-watching. This was a big mistake because it is not a substitute.

The biggest challenges were weekends. Because of the pandemic, our activities are limited (on Sundays we cannot even go out for a walk), so it was difficult to turn away from binge-watching. So, I had to find other things to do that made me feel good. I started opening up to more people and talking to my family and my boyfriend more to pass the time. We also switched to having movie nights and creating a nice little date night routine.

Conclusion

I am so happy that I did this. I have set a new habit for myself to focus more on what I want to do, and take back the power that binge-watching has had on me. Now, I’m slowly accomplishing goals that I set years ago but never seemed to have time to do them.

The biggest benefit is taking back those two hours before I go to bed to do everything and anything I want. Opening up that time slot has made me realize that it wasn’t that I didn’t have time to do things, I was just using it for the wrong reasons. I don’t see myself ever going back and I encourage you to do the same.