Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

This is the first of what I hope will be many reviews of personal development products (if you have one you want me to review, here are the guidelines). I’ve added it to my newly improved resources page, which now has many more links and is categorised for easy reference.

To get the disclaimers over with immediately, I have written for Steven Aitchison’s blog (and will again), and the links to his product in this review are affiliate links (meaning that if you follow the link and buy this or one of his other products, he gives me a commission). I got the product at a discount because I’m on his mailing list and bought early, but I did pay for it.

Why I Bought It

The idea behind How to Become an Advanced Early Riser: Getting 5 Hours of Sleep and Feeling Fantastic is that you can learn to get better-quality sleep, which means you can get up earlier, have energy throughout the day and achieve more in life.

I could definitely do with all of that. I’ve also been looking for a personal development challenge that I can write about on the blog, as I think that makes interesting reading. This is a challenge that’s relevant to me, that I believe I can do, and that falls into my interest area of using your thinking and behaviour changes to change your life for the better.

I’ve started waking up slightly earlier the last couple of months (at 5:45 instead of 6:00), and I have found that I feel less sleepy during the day when I do that rather than sleeping in (at the weekends, too). So I was already predisposed to take Steven Aitchison’s approach seriously, though I was somewhat skeptical about the idea that people in general can reduce down to 6 hours or less of sleep and that this is more healthy than sleeping for longer. His marketing materials cite research that people who sleep less than 6 hours a night tend to live longer, but (as he does point out inside the course), this doesn’t establish a cause-and-effect relationship.

The course is very reasonably priced, though, at $25 USD (and I got it at a 40% discount because I’m on his mailing list and bought before it was released to the general public). That falls well into the “Why not?” zone for me, provided that I have a specific need or use for the product, and as I already mentioned, I do.

If I were creating this product, incidentally, I probably would have titled it “How to sleep better and have more time and energy to do the things you value”. Getting 5 hours of sleep is a feature. Getting up early is a feature. Feeling fantastic is a benefit, but a vague one. The benefits I was interested in was having more energy and time, and that’s important because there are things I want to achieve with that time and energy.

What’s In the Box

There are two parts to the program, both downloaded from the Internet (in case you thought I was being literal about the box).

First, there are three PDF files, Ditch The Alarm Clock (a 19-page ebook Steven wrote earlier, about how to train yourself to wake up without using an alarm), the Early Riser file itself (66 pages), and a Success Log (basically an 8-page workbook). These come to 10 megabytes. There’s also a link to another download of 100 megabytes of audio.

There are four audio tracks: A guided relaxation meditation with a musical backing, the music track by itself, a second inspirational guided meditation to music by Brian Eno, and a high-energy track for exercising to.

The Forest Walk guided meditation uses a lot of visual imagery, and because I’m not a very visual person I don’t find that as useful as other people may. I was pleasantly relaxed by the end of the 23 minutes, but personally, I found myself much more relaxed after the 15-minute track with the Eno music. That track (Intention Manifestation) is a tiny bit New-Agey in its wording, which I’m OK with but it isn’t my preference. It incorporates a progressive relaxation script, which is probably why I found it more relaxing than the other.

I haven’t used the Warm Heart piano music track by itself (Steven suggests using it to fall asleep to) because it doesn’t really grab me that much musically and I don’t feel the need of music to help me fall asleep.

The high-energy track uses binaural beats, which I am personally a bit skeptical about. The theory is that by putting different sounds into your two ears using stereo headphones, it’s possible to actually shift the brain’s rhythms, and from all I’ve read that can be done, but it’s an area that’s rife with overstated claims of effectiveness with minimal scientific backing. It shouldn’t do any harm, though, and it’s a bouncy track which should be good for exercise (I haven’t actually exercised to it yet).

So, as you can tell, I’m not wildly enthusiastic about the audio component, but it’s not the heart of the material anyway. It’s OK, and other people may well like it more than I do. As someone who makes audio tracks myself, I’m unusually critical.

The PDF files do have some typographical errors (my former-book-editor reflex cut in and I sent a list of them to Steven, so by the time you read this there will probably be fewer). The writing style is simple and accessible, though he does tend to run his sentences on and leave the reader mentally breathless, and the design is clean and attractive.

What I Learned

I already know a reasonable amount about sleep. In fact, my own Sleeper’s Checklist contains a lot of the same items that Steven mentions, so most of the actual information was not new to me – which is about what I expected. The value of something like this, though, is the implementation, not the information. Steven makes it easy to absorb, explains it well, and accompanies it with specific, achievable exercises.

He emphasises taking a gradual approach, since this is a program of lifestyle change. If you do it well, he says, you’ll use it for the rest of your life, whereas if you try to implement it all at once you’ll get discouraged and lose the benefit. That’s good advice.

Speaking of benefits, Steven has a good exercise to go through to think about what you’ll do with the extra time you get by sleeping less. It’s well integrated into the program and he returns to it later, with good advice on how to use the time effectively to work towards your goals. This makes excellent sense as an approach to behaviour change and motivation.

For myself, I’ve been trying to think of a way to fit exercise into my daily routine, but just haven’t come up with one. In the evenings just doesn’t seem to work for me. One of Steven’s suggestions is to do exercise in the morning, so I my first step has been shifting my waking time back by another 15 or 20 minutes and using that time to exercise. By using some of the other tips (which I’m not going to reveal here – you’ll have to buy the product), I should be able to lift my energy and make more use of the time I already have to work on things that are important to me.

Since I bought the program last week, I’ve been applying this. I have woken up early (before the alarm) every day but one, and I’m confident I can do it daily with some more practice. I have been using the extra time to exercise and feel very much better for it. (I’ve restarted my stalled attempt to do the 100 Pushups challenge.) My mind is clearer and I haven’t noticed being more tired – in fact, I feel less tired.

Even if getting a sounder sleep, waking 20 minutes earlier and adding some exercise (and energy) to my day was all I achieved, I would feel well satisfied with myself and consider it excellent value for money. Steven certainly indicates – from his own experience over 15 years – that more is possible, though, and it will be interesting to see how far I can get.

I’m actually more interested in being able to stay awake later than I am in getting up very much earlier, since I already get up earlier than most people but go to bed very early as well. So far, I’m still getting tired very early at night, but we’ll see what happens with more practice. I’m falling asleep more quickly, though, so that’s good.

I’ll report back later in the year on how the challenge is going. In the meantime, I recommend you get your own copy of the Advanced Early Riser program ($25 USD).

Summary: What I think of the Advanced Early Riser

Key: Terrible Poor Average Good Couldn’t be better
Audio component:
Music
Spoken word (audio quality)
Script
Overall

PDFs:
Editing
Design
Content
Implementability

Overall Usefulness
Overall Value