Hearthside 01: What Happens When You Trade Hustle For Stillness

Welcome back to the cabin. 

Your body already knows how to sleep. The problem is that modern life keeps teaching it to stay on guard. From a quiet cabin morning, we walk through what real rest looks like when there’s no alarm clock, no traffic, and no constant background noise, just cool air, deep darkness, and the steady sounds of the woods.

We get specific about the habits that make that kind of sleep possible: going to bed early, cutting caffeine by late morning, keeping alcohol minimal, and protecting the bedroom as a calm, dark space. We also talk about something most people overlook: how noise pollution and always-on stimulation quietly raise stress, and why a few days in a natural setting can change your mood, your cortisol levels, and your ability to actually relax.

Then we zoom out to the bigger life question. We compare peaceful mornings now with the old routine of pre-dawn calls, weather checks, and job-site pressure, and we’re honest about the trade-offs of chasing a bigger lifestyle. We share a simple, repeatable daily rhythm that includes a short focused work block, making breakfast, spending time together, and ending the day in a way that feels complete. If you want practical stress reduction tools, we also dig into gardening, meditation, yoga, stretching, and why physical work outdoors can be genuinely restorative.

If you’ve been craving better sleep, a calmer morning routine, or a more intentional way to live, press play. Subscribe, share this with someone who’s running on fumes, and leave a review with your best tip for protecting your peace.

Transcript

A Slow Morning And Natural Sleep

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to the cabin. It's actually a little bit later than normal as I'm recording this. It's just after seven o'clock. I did get up at 4 30 like I typically do. Actually, that's a little bit later than I normally get up, but it was uh just a really nice, relaxing, peaceful night of sleep. I went to bed at um what 8 30 or maybe nine, nine o'clock, I guess it was. And it's just the right temperature, just cool enough at 50 degrees overnight. And it started getting that way before I got to bed. So just a perfect uh night for sleep. So at this point, I've already had my breakfast and my chag and haven't quite got around to making my coffee yet, but the water's boiled, so I'm ready to do that right after I finish talking you here. So that's fairly typical for me. I don't have, in fact, I haven't used an alarm in 15, 20 years, even when I was still working. I don't um, I just had trained my body to get up when I needed to get up. And I guess partially because I get to sleep early enough, so never really uh needed um that was never jarred awake by an alarm, just uh woke up naturally. That's the way I like it. And that um means part of that is because I noticed stopped drinking coffee by I don't know, 10 a.m. I wouldn't drink anything past that. And I don't uh drink much alcohol. If I do, it's a glass of wine. So yeah, um, you know, when I'm going to bed, I'm pretty toxin-free and and stimulant free. So I tend to sleep pretty well. So first thing I did this morning was start the fire. Cabin doesn't need to be warmed up at this time of year. I like to keep it cool. In fact, if I get a fire going on a warm day, even if it's cool in the morning, the cabin tends to stay warm and then it doesn't cool down in the evening. By the time we're ready to go to bed, I'd like the uh temperature to be a lot colder than well, as cold as possible, really. So we always have the windows open. And occasionally because we do, I'm woken up by you know, the frogs are hard to fall asleep too sometimes, but um we get used to them in the spring eventually and then find it peaceful enough, it helps me go to sleep. But there's always something rustling around out there. So if I wake up in the middle of the night, it's for that reason. I've heard a mouse walking by or scraping a tree or a bear, uh as you know recently. Uh owls hooting often. Uh, they often uh will wake me up just briefly. Um I go right back to sleep, so it doesn't disrupt my sleep too much. Callie's getting older and she tends to not want to get up as early, so she'll stay in bed and she'll actually jump up on the bed once I'm out of there and just lay beside my wife for a couple of hours, unless there's something I'm doing outside that she's more interested in doing. But she likes to sleep until six or sometimes seven before she gets out and starts her day of squirrel chasing and just patrolling the property.

Designing A Cabin Around Sunlight

SPEAKER_00 3:07

So what might not be clear, especially obviously if you're listening on a podcast instead of in person, is that I try to orient my buildings with the sun in mind. So this clearing, we're elevated above this meadow. This uh it's really just a beaver meadow. It was a there's a stream going through the center, but there's a uh beaver dam right there. I don't know, 50, 60, 70 yards just to the right of the cabin here. So I'm facing into that clearing, and it's almost south. It's about uh I don't know, I would say south by southwest. So the sun then comes up over here in this corner. Now the other thing I like to do is to have the bedroom situated in that quadrant of the of the cabin or of a house. So the sun comes up in the morning early, shines in, and wakes me up, or wakes my wife up, depending on what time of year it is. I'm usually up before the the sun. More importantly, in the evening, when the sun's going down, it's setting over here, and there's no sun shining into the bedroom, so that it's nice and dark in there. No street lights here, of course, as well. So it's very dark once it gets dark, which is the best way to sleep. Cool, the windows open and dark, and that fresh uh natural air that comes in here because there's no pollution, no uh car traffic or anything. So it's very, very good for sleeping. So that's it. It's the sound of the birds, sound of the wind in the trees. It's no road noise, no traffic, there's no sirens, there's nobody talking, there's no cars honking. It's just so peaceful. I just uh I think everybody should try to experience this. Uh if you're not a camper or if you don't get out into the countryside very often, I I think it's worth trying to do that just to experience it, especially if you, like I said, if you could sleep overnight in a place like that and really get comfortable with it. Some people are finding uh they get anxious when they don't have that noise that they're used to. But I think that uh it's almost like that underlying anxiety that you have from living with noise all the time. You've gotten so used to it that you forget that that is unnatural. So when you go into a natural environment, you might be a little anxious at first, but it's a different kind of anxiety, and then it uh dissipates. It's why people say when they do canoe trips or camping trips or backpacking or whatever, after several days, and it takes several days to get into that new rhythm, and then it's so peaceful, and their their cortisol drops, and they're they just become more at peace, and then it's extremely then disruptive going back to that noisy environment at the end of the trip.

From Early Calls To Quiet Mornings

SPEAKER_00 6:07

Now, this is in contrast to the way my life used to look, especially when I had my commercial roofing company or uh when I was working for um a commercial roofing company as a manager. I would be up by the same thing at bright and early 4, 4:30. But instead of relaxing, I'd be getting the calls from the foreman and the supervisors looking for direction of what's going on that day. I'd have to have checked the weather. And back in those days, I couldn't just get on a weather app. There was actually a phone number I would call, and it had a had the um weather forecast on repeat. So I'd have to sit there long enough to hear the specific uh weather forecast for the areas that we were working in. So that was uh not very relaxing morning. By the time I made the calls, dispatched the crews and got into the office myself by I think uh 5 30 some days, but 6-6 30, I think was more typical. And I would stay there till five o'clock at night and then take calls all evening as the crews were winding down. Much different life. I actually, in the end, preferred when I was the contractor, when I was the uh tradesman who was doing the work, the physical work as a sheet metal worker, not getting those calls at night and just getting up, going, and doing my job and getting as good as I could at that job, doing as good a job as I possibly could and getting uh some satisfaction from that hands-on work. And if I was forced to go back to work now or chose to go back to work, that would be what it would be doing with some kind of physical work and probably carpentry, not uh sheet metal work. Especially because I could do sheet metal or I could do carpentry work outside of a city as opposed to what I had to do was work on commercial buildings in in towns and cities. I don't miss that for sure. I don't miss that uh hustle and bustle. And looking back, I definitely uh would have chosen. In fact, my wife and I have discussed this many times. We should have moved up here when the kids were young, or even before we had kids, and chosen to live more simply and not chase the dream, the to not try to climb the ladder and become more successful. We would have found more than enough work in the small towns surrounding here, near here, and uh been much happier for it. So I definitely don't miss those days. I don't miss um the more luxuries that we had at that time. Yeah, she's back in. Kelly's just panting away. She must have been digging for squirrels. Looks like there might be something trying to get under the uh master bedroom edition. And also, she doesn't like rain, she doesn't like the sound of rain, so I can hear it hitting the the metal roof in the outdoor kitchen. So that's one of those peaceful sounds that you get to hear when you're uh away from the city noise. I love it. Love that people said, isn't it not too noisy and they find that um annoying, but I love the sound of rain on a metal roof.

Tea Editing Breakfast And Shared Rhythm

SPEAKER_00 9:22

So I mentioned I get up in the morning, I'll have my tea. My wife sleeps in a little bit later than me. She needs more sleep than I need. So I have um my tea and my my uh chag uh on my own, and then I'll do a little bit of editing many days. So I like that. Instead of spending a full day in front of the computer, as you know, I need to make this content and upload it, and it is still me doing that, so it's taking takes a lot of time. But I find instead of dedicating a full day to it and being stuck inside in front of a computer or even taking the laptop outside and working, I find that too difficult on my body to sit still for that long and to be hunched over with my back. So typically I'll have that tea, I'll do some editing for, I don't know, hour or so, and then then um make breakfast. And then by that time, my wife's up and I'll make her breakfast as well. Every morning I make her breakfast if we're together, and then uh she'll make the coffees typically. And then um after that, then I we start our days, and she goes off and does her thing, and I go off and do my thing, and that's um the way we've always operated. Then we come together in the evening for dinner and spend the rest of the evening talking and playing games and relaxing together and talking about this, talking about what I'm doing here and what we're doing together on the uh on the brand, the website. And that's uh the way or that's a typical day in our life, and we couldn't have we love it. We love um how much time we get to spend together doing that, and how much time we get to spend in peaceful, quiet settings.

Lowering Stress With Gardens And Yoga

SPEAKER_00 11:08

Before we left the suburban life that we're living, I knew that my stress was too high and that I needed to find ways to relax, which I tried to do. Like we lived in a small village. We didn't live in a city. I haven't lived in a city since I was uh 20 to 21, I think it was. 21 to 20, no, 21 and a half to 23, something like that. When I lived down in the city with my dad when I first started my sheet metal apprenticeship. Other than that, I've lived in small towns, but um for our my entire marriage, we lived in small villages. So it was um not as bad as living in the city as far as noise and pressure and stress is concerned, but still, it was uh not the same as this by any means. So my way of relaxing or de-stressing is first of all, we had half an acre that we lived in for 20 years before the cabin life, and in that half acre, we had our vegetable garden that I made, and then we had four what I call formal landscaping. And we did all of that ourselves, much like we did here at the homesteads. We did do all the work ourselves always, first of all. We like that creative process, and I like doing things, getting the work done without being reliant on someone else and without the cost of paying somebody else to do it. So those gardens, we really get a lot of satisfaction out of it. It brings in wildlife and there's the smell of the flowers and the just the structure and the variety of all the different plants. So we we de-stress that way. And then I also took up meditation and yoga just to find, again, ways to lower my cortisol, lower my stress, and to just become more at peace and alone with my thoughts, which I think is important. A lot of people are missing. So if I was still in that urban or suburban life, I would definitely continue to be doing the yoga, or at least stretching of some kind, to getting the body moving in the morning and taking time before getting online or picking up the phone and just as much time as possible, but at least five minutes, if you can, just to um I don't know, just get your mind straight, get your body straight, your breathing straight. Relax and de-stress before you get into your stressful

Heading Outside For Restful Work

SPEAKER_00 13:35

day. Anyway, it's time to for me to get outside and do some physical work, which for me is still de-stressing. Getting my hands on natural forest products or forest uh trees and so on. Just fine, so connecting, I guess. Trying to get out there and do that and not worry about that rain because it's warm enough that if I get wet, it's just actually gonna help cool me down. I have to keep my long sleeve shirt and pants on because the bugs will uh they'll they'll force me to do that. They'll want to get provide them a feast. Especially with the little bit of rain and dampness in the air. So I'll get out there and do that and uh yeah, just uh enjoy my day and appreciate the lifestyle we built here. She's anxious, she wants me to get out there with her. Anyway, that's it. Thanks for watching. Appreciate it. Look forward to seeing you back here at the cabin next time. Take care.