Start Flossing
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here and I’d like to commit to doing it once a week. Because I’m sort of ‘back to the drawing board’, starting from scratch and just trying to get back into the swing of things, there’s no better topic that I can think of than the topic of flossing.
No, not this type of flossing.
I mean this type of flossing.
Flossing is a pillar of human hygiene — not just of the dental variety, but also apparently related to cardiovascular disease as well. The jury is still out on how certain it is that inflammatory gum disease can cause inflammation in the heart and arteries, but for the purposes of this post I’ll accept it as 100% fact.
Whenever I’ve had a bad period of time, often enough it’s the flossing that goes out the window first. Sometimes it’s a busy period of working too much and not engaging in enough self-care. Other times it’s a period of vacation, or friends and fun and drinking and partying. When I’m overtired from work, I skip the flossing and go straight to bed. When I’m a bit loopy, or staying up late dancing or laughing, the flossing gets nixed.
It’s funny because flossing takes 1 extra minute on top of the teeth-brushing. But I guess because we’ve brushed our teeth, the thought of the disciplined extra mile of flossing is easily dismissed.
But then there’s the moment, usually a Sunday night in preparation for a Monday morning, when we decide to get our shit together, to get serious about our lives again. Cook something healthy or decide to get into bed early and go to the gym the next morning. This is when deciding to take control of something extremely simple and easy can have extraordinarily powerful effects.
Doing miniature steps can help get us to bigger goals. If the goal is to get back on the treadmill or the healthy diet, start with flossing. If the goal is to get serious about our work and focus, start flossing. If the goal is an overall investment in discipline, start flossing. The effects of this trickle down. Rather than reforming an entire way of life, start with the little things.
Countless ‘life coach’ posts on Medium and other places will tell you that if you want to go to the gym in the morning, put your sneakers by the door. Or if you want to start going to the gym and don’t really have a practice of doing so, put your shoes on and just walk outside. It’s these little setups that put us on the road and trick our mind into believing we’re already on the path and should probably just see it through.
Same thing with writing. If you write one true sentence — a tip from Ernest Hemingway — then the rest can follow. The hardest thing is to start.
So I encourage us all to get back to the basics. Simple, achievable tasks that will make us feel good about ourselves and the way we’re taking care of our bodies. It takes 1 minute and it is the first step to getting to where we want to go IN LIFE.
Start flossing.
As a coda, do you floss before or after you brush your teeth? This is the question for the ages. I’ve heard dentists give differing answers. My position on it is that you get the majority of the food out of your teeth with the big bad brush, and then do the fine-tuning cleanup work with the floss. Others would say to floss first to loosen everything up and then finish it all with the brush. Seems like extra work.
How do you floss? Answer in the comments.