Catposting
2025-09-25

I've been waking up 5am in the last 2 weeks, because I made a compromise with myself to work on my own game before going to work. I wasn't sure I had it in me to actually go through with the plan, because I always thought myself as a "night person". But as of late, I started noticing that this isn't true - I just never had that much of a discipline, and too much of existential crisis before going to sleep.

Some things that have been helping me though:

1. Breathing exercises before sleeping (specially if I start feeling the Existential Dread (tm)). I'm not sure where I've read it for the first time but the 3-6-9 breathing exercise helps me quite a lot to calm down my heart rate (breath-in for 3 seconds, hold your breath for 6 seconds, breath-out for 9 seconds).
2. Reading technical things on Kindle before sleeping. I maintain a "last week gamedev tech news recap" newsletter on EnginesDatabase.com, so there's always a lot of stuff to read. What I do is that I created my own little tool to download those articles from the web, convert them to an epub, and transfer them to my kindle. That way I can read at night without using my phone.
3. Complete ban of phones in my room. The only tech device that I'm allowed to carry to bed is my kindle.

Other than that, it's really a matter of going to bed early, read a bit on my kindle, close my eyes, and do some breathing exercises.

This post was just one big excuse to post my morning setup after I wake up and start working on my game. I have two monitors (the laptop monitor and the desk monitor), but understandably I can only use one of them in the morning.