You have goals that you want to achieve, and habits that you want to implement in order to reach those goals.

That’s great! Unfortunately, a motivation to succeed is simply not enough.

People don’t talk about it enough, but you will fall off the horse, stray from your goal, and slip back into your old ways. And when you do make a mistake, it will be tempting to let it totally derail you.

In fact, it’s very easy to let a single mistake cascade into repeated slips, leading to negative momentum. I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of habits that fail did so because mistakes weren’t handled properly.

Luckily, it doesn’t need to be this way. You can be more resilient and get yourself to climb back onto that horse.

Beliefs That Help You Get Back On The Horse

Certain people are able to gracefully recover from mistakes. What is it that separates them from everyone else?

First and foremost, it is their beliefs. If you can successfully adopt the following beliefs, you will be immune to the negative momentum that a slip up can cause.

You Will Make Mistakes, So Expect It

Everyone makes mistakes. Even the greatest people in every possible category make mistakes. In fact, they make many mistakes. And they know it.

This is simply a fact of life. No one is perfect (not even you!), and you can’t be on your game 100% of the time.

If you expect yourself to execute whatever plan you have flawlessly, you will inevitably be disappointed.

Let’s say you planned to stop eating dessert every day. Perhaps you could keep this up for a week, maybe even two. But sooner or later, the temptation will be too great, and you will give in.

If you are like most people, you will then feel a sense of guilt and disappointment in yourself. This feeling sucks. To protect your ego and avoid that pain, you give up on your plan altogether. Now you won’t need to feel guilty, because there is no plan to break!

Here’s the problem: the guilty feeling is completely unnecessary. If you can accept the fact that you will make mistakes, and that these mistakes are a part of the plan, then you need not feel guilty at all. Instead, just enjoy the fruits of your mistake (mmm…delicious dessert) and know that you can continue on with your plan next time.

You Are Both Responsible And In Control

When you are sticking to your habit, it’s because of the choices that you make. But when you fail, somehow it’s never your fault. There is always someone or something else to blame for it.

This is incredibly dangerous. When you make an excuse for your slip up, you are surrendering your control of the situation. And when you don’t have control, you may not be able to make the right decision next time.

No matter what external factors are in play, you are still responsible for your response to them. No matter how much the odds may be stacked against you, you still have power.

This doesn’t mean you should actively blame yourself and dwell on your mistakes. Rather, you should recognize that it is your own decisions that led to the mistake, and that you can do it right next time.

Prepare Yourself For Your Mistakes

Mistakes are inevitable, and you control your response to them.

It clearly follows that you can take measures to prepare for your mistakes in order to make recovery as easy as possible. Relying on motivation alone is a huge mistake itself; having a plan in place will drastically increase your chance of success.

Reflect On The Causes

Whenever you slip up, consider what the causes are. There is almost always some sort of “trigger” that causes you to falter. This doesn’t need to be a lengthy or difficult process.

For example, if one day you don’t go to the gym, just ask yourself why. Was it because it was raining outside? Were you just too tired or hungry after work?

There are a million possible reasons, but in most cases it is easy to pinpoint the exact reason you didn’t follow through.

It can be helpful to keep a journal for a couple weeks to see what excuses tend to pop up over and over again, but it really isn’t necessary unless you find yourself having more serious problems sticking to your routine. For most people and most goals, a quick reflection will suffice.

Have A Plan For When You Do Falter

Once you know what your most common or most likely excuses are, you can plan around them. There are two major types of solutions to these excuses, which I will call proximate and systemic.

A proximate solution is in the form of an “if-then” statement. If [excuse], then [alternate behavior]. “If it rains, I will do a bodyweight workout at home instead of going to the gym.” This type of solution works best on excuses that you can’t predict in advance. Bad weather, an emergency at work, getting stuck somewhere, etc.

A systemic solution involves changing your approach entirely. This should be done to counter more predictable excuses. For example, if you find yourself routinely being too tired to work out after you come home from work, an “if-then” solution won’t suffice. Instead, you may need to change your schedule so that you have time to work out before going in to work.

Accountability

Finally, you must make yourself accountable for those times that you will slip up. Something real and tangible, besides guilt.

Feel free to decide on an acceptable level of faltering from your plan (or build it into your plan, like with a cheat day for dieters). But beyond that level, there should be consequences for your failure to stick with the program.

The best thing here is to inform a friend about what you are trying to do, and pledge to give him money when you don’t follow through. Your punishment can increase to prevent a negative momentum from building. It’s okay to not go to the gym once, but on the second day in a row you owe him $10, the third day $20, etc.

I’m sure your friend won’t mind playing this role.

A Sure-Fire Process To Get Back On The Horse After You Fall Off

Even after taking all the precautions outlined above, you will still make mistakes sometimes. When you do, here is the process you should go through to avoid negative momentum.

1. Accept Your Mistake Instead Of Dwelling On It

Ok, so you messed up and you know it. Don’t worry about it. Just relax and take a few deep breaths.

The key here is to avoid dwelling on your mistake. Acknowledge that you slipped up. It happens. And it’s no big deal as long as you are able to move on.

You can even reframe your mistake. Eating an extra portion of dessert was a welcome vacation, something to be enjoyed.

If you let your mistake suck you in and allow yourself to feel guilt and disappointment, you are far more likely to give up. Plus it just sucks.

Instead, accept that you made the mistake. Re-affirm your personal responsibility. Any excuses you have are irrelevant beyond the point where you are learning from them (see the section above).

The past is the past, and it cannot be changed.

2. Own Up To A Mistake If It Affects Others

Oftentimes your slip up only really affects you, and this step could be really easy.

But there are other times where your mistake might have ramifications for other people. If you have goals at your workplace, this is very likely.

When other people are affected, you must be able to fess up to them right away. Set things straight, apologize, and emphasize how you won’t do it again. Then don’t do it again.

Also, if you’ve made yourself accountable to someone else, you must commit to honesty and accepting whatever the agreed upon consequences of your actions were. Don’t lie and say you went to the gym just because you don’t want to pay your friend $10.

Ideally, you would actually pay them, get your 25 lashes, or whatever consequence you chose, but sometimes they aren’t around at that time. But you must commit to it now. Set aside the money. Call up your friend and tell them to bring their whip over. Whatever.

3. Change Your Focus To The Next Opportunity

Miles Davis once said, “When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that makes it good or bad.”

As quickly as possible after your mistake, you want to move on to focusing on your next opportunity.

You didn’t work out today, but you are ready to go at it tomorrow. There’s no need to think about working out every day, just the next one.

Focus on one step at a time, the single decision you can make at that moment that will get you back on track. If you can get back on the horse at the next opportunity, then good for you! You didn’t let it derail you.

Conclusion

Remember: mistakes are inevitable. If you can’t accept this, your chance of succeeding at your goals will decrease dramatically.

While it can be tempting to give up after you slip up, don’t do it. If you can consistently show resilience, success is only a matter of time.

Do you have any stories about picking yourself back up after slipping? Let me know how you were able to recover in the comments.

The post Maintaining A Habit: How To Get Back On The Horse After Slipping Up appeared first on Feel Happiness.

With the summer just about here, it’s time for the return of one of my oldest friends: sunburn.

For pasty white guys such as myself, sunburn is pretty much a fixture of the summer months. Besides being painful, sunburn is also a huge risk factor for skin cancer…not good.

Luckily, people like you and me can protect ourselves. Sunscreen has been around for a while, but research is also beginning to shed light on how to use nutrition for natural sun protection.

In this post, you will first learn why sunscreen is a risky means of obtaining sun protection, and then how your diet can help stave off sunburn and protect your skin. Finally, I will discuss a protocol for staying safe during the hot summer months.

What’s Wrong With Sunscreen?

If used properly, sunscreen is without a doubt one of the best ways you can prevent sunburn. So why don’t we all just use sunscreen to protect ourselves and forget about it?

It’s not quite so simple. First of all, many people do not use sunscreen properly. Whether you miss a few spots, apply it when you are already out in the sun, or forget to reapply, you are probably making a mistake somewhere.

Unfortunately, that’s not all. Sunscreen itself has its own set of risks.

Sunscreen And Dangerous Chemicals

Sunscreen contains all sorts of chemicals that have negative effects on your body. I guarantee that if you look at the list of ingredients in your sunscreen, you won’t recognize the vast majority of them.

Seriously, take a look. Do you have any idea what oxybenzone, benzophenone, octocrylene, or octyl methoxycinnamate do?

Neither do I.

Titanium dioxide, another one of these chemicals found commonly in sunscreen (even the ones commonly regarded as safe), greatly increases the rate of cell death in human skin cells¹. And then there are the various chemicals that act as UV filters that have been found to have numerous endocrine disrupting effects in animals, including reproductive and developmental toxicity and problems with the  hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis². We don’t have much evidence of what these chemicals do in humans, but the animal evidence isn’t promising.

The Environmental Working Group warns against use of the majority of sunscreens due to the uncertain effects of many chemicals in them³. Most notable is oxybenzone, found in about 80% of all chemical sunscreens, which can penetrate the skin, cause allergic reactions, and disrupt hormones.

While the jury is still out on the effects of many of these chemicals, they very well may pose a threat to your health.

Sunscreen And Melanoma

There is a lot of evidence that sunscreen can reduce the rate of skin cancer. That being said, they only seem to prevent squamous cell carcinoma and basal cell carcinoma, both of which are rarely fatal.

Melanoma, the least common form of skin cancer, is responsible for 75% of skin cancer deaths. Shouldn’t this be the type of cancer that we are therefore most concerned about?

A huge meta-analysis found no association between sunscreen use and risk of developing malignant melanoma⁴. In such a large study, you would hope to see a reduced risk, but this isn’t the case. In fact, there is some evidence that use of sunscreen can lead to an increased risk of developing melanoma⁵.

How is this possible? It might have something to do with the sunscreen itself, but it could also be behavioral. When you put on sunscreen, you feel like you are protected, so you end up spending more time out in the sun, resulting in more UV exposure.

Sunscreen And Vitamin D Synthesis

Our bodies produce vitamin D naturally through exposure to the sun. This is by far the best source of the vitamin available to humans.

Unfortunately, sunscreen greatly diminishes our bodies’ natural ability to synthesize vitamin D, even beyond the SPF advertised⁶.. In fact, an SPF 8 sunscreen (relatively weak) reduced vitamin D synthesis by over 95%⁷.

Of course, vitamin D is critically important for your health. It does just about everything…check out those links and see for yourself.

There is significant variation in cancer mortality geographically, and exposure to UV-B largely accounts for that effect⁸. By carefully increasing exposure to sunlight, many people can reduce their risk of cancer death.

Nutrition For Sun Protection

Since sunscreen is not a perfect solution to the whole sunburn problem, it would be great if there were another way to get protection from the sun. Believe it or not, components of your diet can have a huge effect on your skin’s ability to naturally protect itself against sunburn⁸.

It shouldn’t be too surprising though. After all, we know that what we eat shows in our skin (check out this review for lots of information on nutrition’s effect on skin health). By consuming more of certain nutrients and less of others, you can make your skin much more resistant to damage from the sun.

Macronutrients And Sun Protection

For our purposes, macronutrients will be defined as anything that we consume in large amounts that provides energy (calories). I have three general recommendations for consumption of macronutrients to protect your skin.

1. Increase your consumption of omega-3 fatty acids, especially EPA. Besides being fantastic for your health in general, the anti-inflammatory omega-3′s also significantly increase the threshold of UV radiation required to cause sunburn⁹. In particular, EPA, which can be found in large amounts in fish, significantly reduces the toxicity of UV radiation¹⁰. While the exact mechanisms by which omega-3′s protect the skin are unknown, you can learn more about possible mechanisms here (warning: only for nerds).

2. Reduce consumption of omega-6 fatty acids, particularly from vegetable oils. At least in mice, a diet high in omega-6 fats significantly increased the incidence of tumors when exposed to UV radiation¹¹. This effect can be negated by consuming more omega-3′s in order to balance out the inflammatory response. Ultimately it is the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 that matters, so consuming a diet high in omega-6 fats will make it harder for your skin to protect itself from sun damage¹².

3. Consume less alcohol, especially if you are going to spend time in the sun the next day. When you drink alcohol, your body uses up antioxidants to detoxify it. If you then go into the sun soon after, your antioxidant defenses will be lower. In fact, alcohol has been shown to decrease the amount of time until sunburn¹³.

Micronutrients And Sun Protection

Micronutrients are the vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals that you consume in your diet. All of the nutrients in this section are antioxidants that help prevent oxidative damage to your skin from the sun’s rays. Here are the nutrients you should focus on:

1. Eat more carotenoids. Carotenoids accumulate in the skin, and have been shown to have a measurable photoprotective benefit directly linked to their concentration in the skin tissue¹⁴. Supplemental carotenoids help scavenge free radicals and protect the skin from UV damage given a ten week intervention¹⁵. A meta-analysis concluded that supplemental beta-carotene for a minimum of ten weeks protects against sunburn, and that longer duration confers even more protection¹⁶.

Other antioxidants may strengthen the effect of carotenoids. When consumed with vitamin E for eight weeks, sunburn suppression was even more pronounced than with either nutrient alone¹⁷.

Carotenoids are responsible for the red, yellow, and orange color of fruits and vegetables, and can also be found in some dark, leafy greens. Good sources include carrots, spinach, sweet potatoes, mangoes, apricots, egg yolks, and tomatoes. Speaking of tomatoes…

2. Eat more lycopene from tomatoes. Technically, lycopene is a carotenoid, but it has enough of its own research to warrant a separate section. Consuming 40 grams of tomato paste per day for ten weeks resulted in a 40% reduction in sunburn¹⁸. Cooked tomatoes have a higher concentration of lycopene, so things like tomato paste are recommended, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat them raw, too.

3. Drink green tea. Considering the many health benefits of green tea, you should be drinking it already. But you probably didn’t realize how good it is for your skin. Polyphenols from green tea increased time to sunburn in rats, and drastically reduced tumor incidence, multiplicity, and growth in mice^19,20. In women, green tea was found to decrease the degree of sun damage by 16 and 25% at 6 weeks and 12 weeks, respectively²¹. It also improved overall skin quality. How does it do this? Here is a long explanation of possible mechanisms, again, only for the truly nerdy.

4. Make your desserts dark chocolate. I’ve explained why dark chocolate is the healthy dessert of champions before, but it can be particularly helpful if you are concerned about your skin. The flavanols in cocoa increased the amount of UV radiation required to burn the skin by 15 and 25% after 6 and 12 weeks of treatment, respectively²². The cocoa also reduced skin roughness and scaling, as well as improving a few other measures of skin health. Nice.

5. Get more vitamin E and C in your diet. These two vitamins are your body’s primary fat and water soluble antioxidants, and well worth getting in your diet for optimal health. It appears that their antioxidant effects protect your skin along with the rest of your body. When consumed together in large amounts for 50 days, they nearly doubled the amount of UV radiation needed to cause sunburn²³. A smaller dose of the combination was found to significantly increase the time to sunburn after only eight days of supplementation²⁴!

Recommended Sun Protection Protocol

Nutrition alone is unfortunately not a sufficient strategy to combat sun damage. Many of the nutrients take weeks before they have any noticeable effect. In addition, to have a truly significant effect in practice, supplementation might be required.

That being said, nutrition can be a powerful tool in your sun protection toolkit.

There was a lot of information in this post, and there are many complications in our relationship with the sun. Here I will summarize some of the best practices that will help keep your skin safe from chemicals and UV radiation, while still getting enough vitamin D.

1. Follow the nutrition guidelines above. Balance your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, and consume as many antioxidants as possible. You should consider supplementation. Antioxidant supplements will do more than just protect you from the sun, so it might be a justifiable expense. That’s up to you.

2. Get regular, small amounts of sun exposure during the middle of the day for vitamin D. A blanket recommendation for how much time to spend in the sun per day is impossible, because there are so many factors at play here. Your latitude and skin pigmentation are two of the biggest ones. If you live further from the equator or have darker skin, you need more time. Get exposure over a large portion of your body, without sunscreen or other sun protection.

3. Moderate your exposure to the sun. Try not to be exposed for long periods of time in order to avoid burning. As much as it may suck, covering up with clothes will help prevent sun damage, so do it if you must. There are very light, long sleeve shirts available for this purpose, most commonly marketed to hikers.

4. If you must use a sunscreen, find one with fewer chemicals. Here is a guide to choosing a safe brand of sunscreen. For a while my favorite were the spray-on kinds, but those are bad for you because you can breathe in the chemicals. Most of the safer ones don’t absorb into your skin, but rather stay on top of it, so they are more noticeable.

If you follow these recommendations, you’ll be able to balance the complicated needs of getting enough sun but not getting too much.

Footnotes

1. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1010603007002110

2. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2605.2012.01280.x/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

3. http://www.ewg.org/2013sunscreen/the-trouble-with-sunscreen-chemicals/

4. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447210/

5. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1097-0215(20000701)87:1%3C145::AID-IJC22%3E3.0.CO;2-3/full

6. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1562/2006-06-29-RC-956/abstract

7. http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/64/6/1165.abstract?ijkey=e819c093a0798cf0c91b889649a012557778352f&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha

8. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20137053

9. http://www.journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/cdp/article/S0361-090X(06)00087-0/abstract

10. http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/5/919.long

11. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-1097.1992.tb02147.x/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

12. http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/7/1078.full

13. http://www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/343908

14. http://jn.nutrition.org/content/132/3/399.full

15. http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2004/pp/b316082c

16. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-1097.2007.00253.x/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

17. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/71/3/795.long

18. http://jn.nutrition.org/content/131/5/1449.full

19. http://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/201562

20. http://jn.nutrition.org/content/135/12/2871.long

21. http://jn.nutrition.org/content/141/6/1202.long

22. http://jn.nutrition.org/content/136/6/1565.full

23. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0891584998001324

24. http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/9448204/reload=0;jsessionid=D7LAXuV5qjsCIzmgSMi2.0

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It was a brisk morning in January 2009. At a Metro station in Washington D.C., a man with a violin played six Bach pieces for approximately 45 minutes. About 2000 people walked past him during that time, most of them on their way to work.

Ten minutes after he started playing, a three year old boy stopped to listen, but his mother pulled him away. The kid kept stopping and looking back, but the mother was persistent. Throughout the 45 minutes, several children had similarly tried to stop, but every single parent dragged their child away in a hurry.

By the time the man had finished playing, only six people had actually stopped to listen, and only 20 people had donated money ($32 total).

The violinist was Joshua Bell, a world renowned musician. He was playing great music with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. Two days earlier he had a sold-out concert in Boston, where the seats cost an average of $100 and he played the same music.

This social experiment was organized by the Washington Post, and you can read more about it here.

How crazy is that?

Despite being in the presence of what most people would consider incredibly beautiful music, only a tiny fraction of people paid even the slightest bit of attention.

While this is an extreme example, I think most people would agree that they don’t appreciate beauty as much as they should. And that is a serious shame, because appreciating beauty can benefit you in a number of ways.

The Benefits Of Appreciating Beauty

When you appreciate beauty, a number of good things happen.

Appreciate Beauty And Experience More Pleasure And Happiness

It is somewhat intuitive that when you appreciate beauty more, you also experience more happiness.

Art and music therapy are respected for their ability to lift peoples’ spirits. In this case, the process of creating something beautiful enhances peoples’ lives by helping them express themselves.

But creating isn’t the only way to take advantage of the mood-boosting effects of beauty. In fact, staring at great artwork has been shown to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for reward and the experience of pleasure¹.

Over time, you can learn to recognize and develop your own personal taste for beauty. When you appreciate beauty more often, you will experience the pleasure associated with it more often as well.

Appreciate Beauty And Become A More Hopeful Person

An intervention designed to help people appreciate beauty more led to an increase in the hopeful personality trait².

In this study, the intervention involved writing a weekly journal about beauty and having a discussion once per week about beauty. In other words, spending some time consciously improving your ability to appreciate beauty will help you have a more positive outlook on the future.

Beautiful Things Can Be Perceived As More Usable

Performance in search tasks on a website was substantially better when the site was aesthetically pleasing, even when the site was designed with poor usability³.

Another study found that peoples’ reports of perceived aesthetics of a machine was correlated with perceived usability⁴.

What do these studies mean for you?

Perhaps nothing. But perhaps being able to appreciate beauty in something may also make it more functional or easy to use.

Appreciate Beauty For Personal Growth And Self-Actualization

Learning to appreciate beauty will help you grow as a person.

Are you familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? It is a representation of human needs in the order they must be fulfilled, starting with physiological needs such as food or sleep and ending with self-actualization.

Maslow believed that beauty is a value that guides one’s growth toward self-actualization, and that peak experiences in self-actualized individuals often include perceiving the world as beautiful⁵.

Now that you know why it is so important to appreciate beauty, we must explore what beauty actually is.

What Is Beauty?

It may seem like an easy question, but philosophers have debated what beauty is for millenia.

There are many different conceptions of beauty, some overlapping and some that completely contradict each other. Learning a little bit about major streams of thought on what beauty is will provide key insights into how you can appreciate beauty more in your own life, even if there is no definitive answer.

Is Beauty Really In The Eye Of The Beholder?

It’s a common expression, but is it true? The most important issue in defining beauty is whether it is a subjective quality or an objective quality.

If beauty were truly in the eye of the beholder (entirely subjective), then anything could be beautiful. The word begins to lose all meaning other than perhaps some positive judgment or liking of the object in question. Besides, while there are variations in our individual tastes of what we find beautiful, they do coincide to a huge degree. Almost everyone thinks that a sunset is beautiful, for example.

On the other hand, if beauty were completely objective, it would imply that a world without perceivers (you and me) could be beautiful, or that beauty could be detected by scientific instruments. While you might argue that this could be possible, beauty still seems connected to our subjective response. The idea that somebody’s experience of beauty could be dismissed as inaccurate is silly and downright hostile. You probably feel that other peoples’ tastes deserve some respect even if you disagree with them. Contrast this to how you feel about, say, moral or political opinions.

Modern neuro-imaging research can shed some light on this problem. When viewers naive to art criticism were exposed to images of masterpieces of Classical and Renaissance sculpture, those judged as beautiful set off two different processes in the brain: one based on triggers intrinsic to the stimuli (objective beauty) and one based on the individuals’ emotional responses to the stimuli (subjective beauty)⁶.

In the end, beauty probably consists of both objective and subjective components. You are entitled to your own opinions on what is and isn’t beautiful to you. If there is something that you don’t find beautiful, someone else may be able to give you a convincing reason why it is and change your mind.

The key takeaway from this section is that your own appreciation of beauty can be expanded well beyond your current tastes.

Beauty And Usefulness Or Uselessness

Philosophers also argue about whether beauty comes from something’s usefulness or its lack of usefulness.

On one side, there are the philosophers who believe that beauty is directly related to an object’s usefulness. If the object serves its purpose well, it is beautiful. An airplane that isn’t pleasing to the eye but can safely help people travel is far more beautiful than the most aesthetically pleasing chair that will fall apart when someone sits on it.

On the other side are those, including Kant, who believe that in order to appreciate beauty, you must focus on the form of your mental representation of the object for its own sake. If you are experiencing the beauty of something, you are indifferent to its existence. For example, if you are looking at a beautiful valley as a real estate opportunity or a beautiful woman as a possible sexual conquest, you are not having an experience of beauty. In Kant’s view, beauty is a form of “disinterested pleasure”.

Again, we need not conclude that one or the other view is correct for our purposes, but you should be familiar with each. Both appreciating the usefulness of an object and having the experience of disinterested pleasure will benefit you.

Beauty As An Invitation To Further Experiences

This is an idea advanced by Alexander Nehamas, author of Only a Promise of Happiness.

In this view, beauty is a way that things invite us in, while also possibly fending us off. A beautiful object is inviting us to explore and interpret it, but this exploration/interpretation is also a requirement. Beauty is not something you immediately notice about an object, so you must delve deeper into it.

Beauty also has a social component. It is something that you share, and these shared experiences of beauty are an intense form of communication between people. Therefore, the experience of beauty is not just in your own mind, but it is something that connects you, other people, and works of art (or literature, music, etc.) together into communities of appreciation.

More Ideas On Beauty

I’ve already covered many of the key ideas in the theory of beauty, but I want to briefly cover a few more here.

The classical conception of beauty is that of an arrangement of individual parts into a grander whole according to proportion, symmetry, harmony, and similar notions. Have you ever heard of the golden ratio of mathematics, which some argue produces aesthetically pleasing proportions in art and architecture?

On the other hand, idealists view beauty as stemming from unity, and consider it a ladder to the transcendent. When you appreciate beauty, you form a connection with the larger universe, allowing you to feel the emotions of awe and wonder.

Beauty is often also connected to the ideas of love and longing. For example, Sartwell defines beauty as “the object of longing”, where longing is an intense and unfulfilled desire. For us mere mortals, it is a fundamental condition of our existence. Nothing is permanent, and we are always in the process of losing whatever we have, so we are always longing for something.

Each of these views has some merit or value to those of us who want to appreciate beauty more in our lives. As a big math nerd, I’m fascinated by the classical idea of how certain proportions can be more aesthetically pleasing than others. But I’ve also had what I consider experiences of beauty where unity is paramount. Staring up at the desert sky at night is absolutely a transcendental experience, and each individual star is almost irrelevant.

A Personal Story Of Beauty

Approximately two months ago, I had an experience of beauty that absolutely floored me and I feel compelled to share.

I was at a conference in Jerusalem with about 400 other young adults from all over the world, and my room had an awesome balcony. In this case, it was a little too awesome, because it seemed that everyone else at the conference converged upon it to party on a night where I wanted to go to sleep. I know, I’m lame, but what are you gonna do.

Anyways, at around midnight, I realized that there is no way I’d be able to fall asleep with all the noise coming from just outside my room. So I picked a good song to fall asleep to (“Luv Deluxe” by Cinnamon Chasers, which is one of the best music videos I’ve ever seen), put on my headphones with a high volume, and laid down.

What happened next is that I had some of the most vivid, realistic, and terrifying dreams I’ve ever had in my life. In the following 3 hours, I lived out, in detail, several years of my life.

At first things were normal, but then I began to go “deaf”, with all the conversations and regular noises that I would hear being gradually replaced by one song on repeat. After a short while, this song was all I could hear, and I could no longer have functional interactions with people. I got fired from my dream job, dumped by my dream girlfriend, and so on.

It was truly terrible, and it felt completely real. But at around 3:00 AM, I realized that I had put on that song when I went to sleep and became lucid. I immediately woke myself up and turned off the music. I was drenched in sweat and very unsettled.

Luckily, by this time only a handful of people remained on the balcony, including Elan, a great musician who was also one of my roommates. On his acoustic guitar, he was playing a fantastic song he wrote, “Ain’t Got No Radio” (listen to it here).

I had already heard him play the song the night before, and I had loved it then. But this time, it was as if it were the first new thing I had heard in years. Words simply can’t describe the beauty of that experience. This taught me that it can be helpful to approach everything as though you were a child and it was completely new if you want to appreciate the beauty in an experience.

In the next section, we will explore in more detail how to appreciate beauty.

Techniques To Help You Appreciate Beauty

Sometimes you have an experience of beauty and it seems effortless, but learning to appreciate beauty more often can take some effort. In this section, we will cover a number of techniques and mindsets that will help you appreciate beauty.

First, I want to highlight some readers who helped contribute to this section. On Twitter, I asked what people thought about the relationship between beauty and happiness, and got some good responses. Rika (@kika_kikok) said that recognizing the “togetherness” of things was a great way to appreciate beauty and feel happier. This is similar to the idealist conception of beauty mentioned above. Steph (@swsieb) said that you should try to find beauty in the ordinary, simple pleasures of life. Thank you guys for contributing!

You Must Take Time To Stop And Be Curious

When you are rushing around or in a hurry, you will pass by all sorts of beautiful things without noticing them.

If you want to appreciate beauty, you will need to stop whatever else you are doing and focus.

Consider the children in the story of Joshua Bell from the beginning of this post. They didn’t feel the pressure to get somewhere that their parents did, so they were comfortable just stopping and listening to music that was new and interesting to them.

A good way of applying this to your life is with the “noticing game”, an idea that I’ve borrowed from Lori over at Tiny Buddha. First, stop whatever else you are doing. Next, try to notice everything around you in as much detail as possible. Look at the entire scene and see every object. You can also pick a particular object in the scene and try to notice every detail about it.

I’ve started playing the noticing game when I’m waiting for the bus and I’m always amazed by both the natural and urban scenes around me.

Use All Of Your Senses

Beauty isn’t just a visual thing. You can experience beauty with all five of your senses.

You can go to food tastings, get a massage, listen to music, or use aromatherapy.

When you play the noticing game, you don’t need to just notice sights. Smell the air. Feel a rock on the ground.

In particular, I think the beauty of food is under-appreciated by most people and you would do well to learn more about mindful eating.

Notice Your Emotions

Try to pay more attention to your emotions in your day to day life.

You should start by paying attention to things that you already believe could be beautiful, like nature scenes, art, music, a sunset, etc., and ask yourself what emotions they evoke within you.

This does two things: it intensifies the emotions themselves, strengthening your appreciation for the beauty, and it helps you understand your own personal taste better.

Bonus: Apparently, fear stimulates a more positive appreciation of art than other emotions or physiological arousal⁷. So if you want, you can try watching a scary movie before going to an art museum. Or better yet, step outside of your comfort zone immediately before playing the noticing game.

Develop A Personal Aesthetic

Everyone has their own preferences, and different people will find different things beautiful.

You should actively try to discover your own taste. Paying attention to your emotional responses to art, music, and the like is a big step in this process. Take note of the things that you find beautiful.

You can also collect the things that you find beautiful. When you have a few things, try to find what they have in common. This self-knowledge will help you identify other objects or situations to find beauty in.

Create And Share Beauty

Beauty isn’t just something to be appreciated by yourself. It is also something that you can create.

You don’t need to be a talented artist, because beauty can be found in many things. You can consider beauty in the usability of something you create and be proud of your quality handiwork. Or you can just see the good in other people, which is also a thing of beauty!

And more than just creating beauty, you should share it with others. Appreciation of beauty is a communal thing. Do you like a certain musician? Recommend them to a friend who might like them too. Go to their concert and interact with other people who like them just as much as you do.

Conclusion

Being able to appreciate beauty is an important part of what makes us human, and cultivating this ability has many benefits.

Before I finish, I must recommend a movie that explores the topic of beauty in a very interesting and entertaining way. Cashback (the whole movie is on youtube, but its not safe for work) will make you laugh but it will also open up your mind. It’s about an artist who learns to stop time. Very cool.

What is the most beautiful thing you have experienced in the past month? Let me know in the comments.

Footnotes:

1. http://www.mcguilmet.com/uploads/3/0/3/5/3035519/art_and_the_brain.pdf

2. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057240600874430#.UZOlvKJmiSo

3. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140130903061717#.UZOncaJmiSo

4. http://www.ise.bgu.ac.il/faculty/noam/papers/00_nt_ask_di_iwc.pdf

5. http://www.lcsc.edu/diessner/pdf/EBS%20in%20TJP%20whole%20final%20copy%202007june16.pdf

6. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001201

7. http://cogaction.org/pdfs/Eskine%20et%20al.%20(in%20press).pdf

The post How To Appreciate Beauty – Even When It Doesn’t Smack You In The Face appeared first on Feel Happiness.

In my last post, I wrote about an alternative mindset for habit change, and I’ve been experimenting with it in my own life for the past two weeks.

Most people think of habit change as this long process. I have suggested that instead of thinking about it this way, you just focus on the single choice that you can make at any given moment, and try to make the right choice then. For more details, check out the link above.

During these two weeks, I’ve made a few observations about this mindset that are worth sharing.

My Observations

Almost everything I’ve noticed thus far has been positive, and this just adds to my belief that this mindset is superior for changing your habits for the better.

Here are my most noteworthy observations thus far:

1. It’s Easier To Make The Right Choice.

Any time I’ve needed to decide what course of action to take, it has been much easier for the past two weeks.

Instead of considering the long term implications of whatever decision I need to make, or how small of an affect that one decision will have, I just make the right choice. I don’t hesitate, because I don’t even need to think about it.

Normally when I try to change a habit, I find it difficult to make the right choices because it is daunting that I need to do that same thing every day, not just right now.

2. I Bounce Back When I Slip Up.

This one is huge.

Normally if I try to change a habit and I don’t stick to the plan, I’ll beat myself up over it. And even with all the guilt that I put on myself, I’ll oftentimes revert back to my old behaviors anyways.

The most obvious example of this is eating too many dessert foods. In the past, I would resolve to get in the habit of eating more healthy, but end up splurging on pastries at the beginning of the week regardless, just because it was easiest. Then I would keep getting pastries, because I had already messed up.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve had two days in total where I ate more dessert than I should have. One day was while visiting a friend and not being able to cook. In both cases, I started eating right again the next day, and I didn’t feel guilty about my indiscretion. I enjoyed my unhealthy eating much more, but did it much less.

3. It Can Be Powerful When Combined With Other Techniques.

When utilizing both this mindset as well as other, more direct techniques, failure to make the right choice becomes almost impossible.

My best example of this is a tactic I use when I want to work out. When I’m still iffy about whether I will or won’t work out, I put on my gym shorts. While it is not a 100% commitment to working out, it does make me far more likely to follow through.

I’ve been able to work out for 11 of the previous 14 days (remember that I was traveling for two of them) without a problem by combining the gym shorts technique and the alternative habit change mindset.

If you have motivational techniques that work for you, applying them while holding this mindset will super charge your ability to make the right choice.

4. This Mindset Functions As It’s Own Habit.

In other words, it combines multiple habits that you might want to adopt into a single one.

By making the right choices in as many situations as possible, I build the habit of doing the right thing, no matter what area of my life it may be.

I’ve found that, for me at least, adopting this mindset has helped me make the right decisions with regards to health multiple times per day, which is a good reason why health should be your first priority. I get to practice making the right choices, and then doing right in other areas becomes even easier too.

Over time, this mindset appears to be building momentum for me, and it’s only been two weeks. The way I look at certain decisions I need to make has become much clearer.

For example, I haven’t written anything in a while but I found it far easier to get myself to sit down and write this because I knew it was the right thing to do. I didn’t have to think about the pros and cons or anything, I just did it.

5. It Hasn’t Worked Against More Intense Fears Or Procrastination Attempts.

It’s not as though this mindset does all the work or removes all the discomfort of taking action. No matter how much it helps, you still need to go and make the right choice.

Unfortunately, there are certain things that are more challenging to overcome, and I haven’t found this mindset to help so much with them yet.

When I’m taking the bus to work and see a beautiful woman that I know I should approach and talk to, I still hesitate. Even though I know that it is the right choice, I falter because I can’t always push through the uncomfortable feelings.

That being said, I think the mindset could be effective for this type of situation for me, it will just take more time and momentum.

Conclusion

All in all, I really like how this new mindset has played out, even after as short a period of time as two weeks.

Given some time, I believe it will have drastic effects in almost every area of my life, and with minimal effort. I highly suggest you try to adopt this mindset and see what kind of results you can achieve.

If you have tried thinking this way, let me know how it has benefited you.

The post Alternative Habit Change Mindset – Follow Up appeared first on Feel Happiness.

When you want to change your life for the better, what are you most likely to do first?

If you are like most people, you think about changing your habits. For example, if you want to get in shape, you think about building a habit of going to the gym regularly.

This makes a lot of sense, because once a healthy behavior becomes a habit you can essentially leave it on autopilot. It’s smooth sailing from there on, right?

While habit change should be a priority, it rarely works out to be as simple and easy as you want.

Even when you decide that habit change is in order, I urge you not to think of it that way. There is an alternative mindset that will help make the process much easier.

But before I get into that, I want to discuss some of the reasons why the traditional view on habit change causes additional challenges.

Common Problems And Difficulties With Habit Change

The traditional view on habit change is that it is a long term process. While this is technically true, thinking about it this way leads to some serious problems with both forming a good habit and adhering to it.

Habit Change Seems Like A Daunting Task

Everyone acknowledges the difficulty of changing habits. After all, by definition, habits are ingrained in you, and you need to work against your conditioning to change them.

Plus, a habit is a part of your lifestyle. It becomes a “permanent” part of you (at least ideally if it’s a good habit). Doesn’t it seem like a huge responsibility to maintain it for your entire life?

Before a habit becomes easy, it takes consistent effort for approximately a month. It’s not that a month is a very long time, but it is significant. And a lot of people will struggle to make it that far.

Habit Change Can Be Hard To Maintain

Even after you have established a good habit, you are at risk of losing it if you don’t continue to follow through.

I’ve had to establish and re-establish the habit of working out regularly so many times in the past few years that I can’t even count them. For whatever reason, I’ll fall off the wagon at some point and spend a month or two inactive before getting myself in gear to try it again.

When there is any sudden change in your life, your habits will very often be broken. Consider the obvious example of traveling. How many people can honestly say they keep healthy while traveling, even if they do at home?

This applies to just about any shock to your normal routine, and doesn’t have to be as “major” as traveling or moving to a new city. What if there is a detour on your way back from the gym? Then maybe you eat fast food instead of going to the healthy shakes place you usually go to. More on this in the next section.

But here is the worst part: once you break your habit, you will be inclined to use it as an excuse to drop the habit altogether. If you eat an unhealthy snack in the morning, you are more likely to rationalize eating a big dessert at night. And then the next day you will stop eating healthy foods altogether.

Habits Require Specific Conditions To Work

It’s not just major life changes that can derail habits; mental and environmental variables also come into play.

Habits require conditioning to work. This conditioning may only apply given certain external factors or the mood you are in.

For example, you may build a habit of exercising, but it is dependent on the weather. You may only drive to the gym when it is nice out, so your habit isn’t “robust” because rain would be enough to stop you from going.

Or you might be in the habit of working out, but only when you can change into your usual gym clothes. If you don’t have access to them, your habit is broken.

Similarly, your mood state can play a strong part here. You have a habit of not drinking soda, but you only maintain it when you have energy. If you didn’t get enough sleep the night before, you will break it because you are tired.

A Better Mindset For Habit Change

Instead of thinking about habit change as a long term process, you should consider only the more immediate decisions you need to make at any given moment.

Let’s say you want to get in the habit of eating a healthy breakfast every day. When you wake up, you are confronted with a decision: do you eat a donut or cook some veggies and eggs? All you need to do is eat the healthy breakfast today, and you have succeeded. Tomorrow, you can do it all over again.

This mindset solves all the problems described in the previous section. Habit change is reduced to one choice at a time, so it is no longer a daunting task to consider maintaining the habit over a long period of time. Whenever you make the wrong choice, you don’t need to fall off the wagon. It’s behind you and now you just focus on making the right choice the next time it comes up. The environmental factors that affect your conditioning are also less relevant, because this mindset is focused simply on taking the right action no matter what.

Let’s break this mindset down further, shall we? We can think of it as a five step process:

Step 1: Awareness

The first and most important part of this mindset is that you must be aware.

Don’t go through your day on autopilot, because then you will be unable to do anything that follows. Plus, life is just better when you are being present.

Step 2: Recognize That You Have A Choice

When you are more aware in general, it becomes easier to see that in every moment or situation, you have a choice.

You can go to the gym or not go to the gym. You can get angry at someone or you can accept them. You can go to sleep or you can watch another episode of 24 on Netflix.

Of course, this is a huge simplification, and there can be more than two choices in each situation.

The key here is just to see that you do indeed have a choice, and you don’t just have to act on impulse (though sometimes that is the right decision).

Step 3: Make The Right Choice

Once you recognize that you are in control of the situation, you need to make the right choice.

The best choice in a given situation isn’t always obvious, especially when there are many options. But usually there are only a few obvious choices and you have a pretty good feel for which ones are better than others.

So despite whatever discomfort you may feel, you just need to suck it up and do the right thing anyways.

Step 4: Accept Your Decision, Good Or Bad

The reality is, you won’t make the optimal choice 100% of the time. You won’t even always make a half-decent choice. Perhaps you’ll make the completely wrong decision.

But that’s behind you. It’s okay now, and it doesn’t matter. Accept whatever choice you made, because it is too late to change it.

By focusing on things you can’t change (like previous bad decisions), you waste energy that could be used on choices that you actually do have control over.

Even if you made a good choice in the past, it’s still behind you. Don’t use previous good decisions as an excuse to “reward” yourself by making the wrong choice later.

Any previous choices you have made are irrelevant. Your focus should only be on what you can control.

Step 5: Move On To The Next Choice

When one moment is “over”, the next one is beginning.

And since each moment has a choice, you need to be ready to move on immediately and repeat the first four steps.

Over time, you will get better at staying “tuned in” to this mindset more often and for longer periods.

Conclusion

There is nothing truly new or mind blowing about this mindset, but it can be a great ally in transforming your life for the better through changing your habits more easily.

Simply pick a habit that you want to adopt (or eliminate), and follow the process above. This mindset can easily juggle several habits at once. This can lead to achieving serious results much more quickly than the traditional mindset for habit change.

What has been your greatest challenge in trying to change your habits?

The post A Counter-Intuitive Mindset For Habit Change appeared first on Feel Happiness.

The beautiful Mt. Herzl, but on a normal day (aka not today)

It’s amazing how different cultures handle certain things in different ways.

This past week through tomorrow is the most important week of the year in Israel. There are three holidays: Yom HaShoah (Holocaust memorial day) was last week, today has been Yom HaZikaron (the Israeli version of Memorial Day), and tomorrow is Yom Ha’atzmaut (the Israeli Independence Day).

I’ve spent the past four days on a seminar, traveling around the Jerusalem area and engaging in all sorts of activities to commemorate these days. While there is a lot that I could say about Holocaust remembrance and a number of the activities I partook in this past week, I don’t write a travel blog so I will focus on a more personal development related subject: coping with tragedy.

Israel as a nation is in a very different situation in the world and has a very different experience than the United States, which certainly impacts the culture here and the way Israelis commemorate Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut. I’m lucky enough to have had the opportunity to be here for these holidays and talk to Israelis about them in order to get a deeper feel for the psychology behind these cultural differences.

Background: Why Israel And The US Are Different

Israel is a small country, about the same size as New Jersey, with a population of approximately 8 million people. In it’s 65 years of existence, Israel has been involved in many wars with its much larger, more populous neighbors, and has been the target of many terrorist attacks. There is a draft, so the vast majority of young Israelis end up spending two years in the military.

Considering the facts above, every family in Israel either has a member who has been killed or the family is close with someone who was killed. And these soldiers or civilians who died will invariably have died close to home. Everyone has experienced a close, personal tragedy here.

Compare that to America, with 300 million people, and no wars fought on American soil since the Civil War. The fact is, most people don’t know anyone who has died fighting for the country. That’s why Memorial Day is about barbecues, beer, and good sales. And the 4th of July is about fireworks and beating our chests. I don’t mean to offend here; this is just my observation, which I believe to be true for the majority of Americans.

Israel Coping With Tragedy

In Israel, Yom HaZikaron is a very somber holiday. No beer, no parties, no barbecues.

Instead, there is a lot of crying. And a lot of remembering. And a lot of people rallying together and displaying their unity by wearing white shirts.

From sunset to sunset during the holiday, no public places of entertainment are open, and on the radio and television, all stations air programming about the lives and actions of the fallen (23,085 soldiers and 2,493 civilian victims of terrorism).

There are two primary things that I noticed about how Israelis cope with their tragedies during this holiday:

1. They actually spend time remembering, and
2. They do this as a community rather than in private, individual ways.

I’m sure this is true among military families in the US too, but it isn’t embraced by the entire national culture the way it is here.

For me, today started with a large group of us Americans and about ten Israelis sitting in a circle. Each Israeli took their turn telling the story of a friend or family member of theirs who was killed in battle or in a terrorist attack. These stories were not just about how the person died, but also about who they were when they were alive.

Afterwards, we bused over to Mt. Herzl, the national military cemetery. On an average day, you can walk around Mt. Herzl somewhat freely, seeing a few people here or there. But today, there were 100 thousand people there, most of whom were wearing white. They came in from all around the country, and literally any grave you walked past had people surrounding it paying their respects.

I wish I had an analogy to help convey what this scene was like, but there really is no comparison that I can think of.

Notably, it wasn’t just a huge group of isolated families, each mourning in their own individual way. Instead, it was like one massive, collective mourning unit. People were exchanging stories with each other about their friends or family members. Everyone tried to remember everyone else, which kept their loved ones alive in a certain sense.

Perhaps that is why Israelis leave flowers on these graves instead of rocks. And every grave had flowers, which were all free.

Compare this whole scene with the American “style” of mourning. Again, I can’t speak for every American, but most tend to be very private when it comes to remembering the dead. People shy away from community support (not all of it of course, but a lot) and try to handle their sorrow on their own.

There are also the Israeli sirens. Once at 8:00 PM last night and again at 11:00 AM this morning, there was a one-minute long siren across all of Israel. Literally everyone stops during this minute. Traffic stops and people get out of their cars. Other than the sirens, the only thing you can hear is the birds chirping overhead. When the minute was over, people reawakened and started to move about again. Truly incredible.

And finally, when the sun set today, Yom Ha-atzmaut began. Today is a day of huge celebration for the Israelis, since it is the day they declared independence. To many, it may seem strange that a day of extreme sorrow comes immediately before a day with lots of partying and celebrations. But the message for Israelis is clear: those who died had done so to protect something, and they would be damned if they don’t take advantage of it. Remembering the dead is truly something to do for a lifetime, but it’s also important to get on with life and celebrate the miracle that it is.

Conclusion

Perhaps the geopolitical differences between the nations of Israel and America fully explain their different  practices, in which case there would be nothing to learn from all this.

But I don’t think that is the case. I think that the Israeli system of remembrance is both superior in general and more respectful than the American system, and that us Americans can learn from it and grow in the process.

Do I think the US government should enforce some sort of mandatory “no sales” policy on Memorial Day? Absolutely not.

But I do think that when we experience a tragedy of some sort, we need to be more open about it. Instead of closing ourselves off, let’s accept the help and sympathy of others. And instead of dwelling on the tragedy, let’s remember why it happened and why we need to pick ourselves up off our feet and live our lives afterwards.

The post Coping With Tragedy: A Cultural Comparison appeared first on Feel Happiness.

Most people think that living a healthy lifestyle is a challenge.

When you look at the super fit and healthy people out there, it can seem almost impossible to get what they have. Six pack abs and a 100-year lifespan appear out of reach to “normal” individuals.

But achieving those levels of health and fitness is really just about engaging in healthy behaviors on a routine basis.

Each of the habits in this post may seem small by itself, but over time they can have a snowball effect on your health.

The trick is to focus on making the healthy choice in any given moment, rather than looking at all the things you must do in the long term.

With that in mind, here is a list of habits and behaviors you can adopt that will add up to a healthy lifestyle. Where applicable, I’ve linked to external tools and resources to help you get the most out of each entry. Oh, and this post is seriously long (over 16,000 words), so you’ll want to bookmark it for future reference. Perhaps on StumbleUpon, wink wink.

If you know of any resources that would make this guide more complete, shoot me an email.

P.S. I know only one or two of you will actually make it to the conclusion of this post, so I’m including my post script here. I’m just about finished writing a book about how your diet affects your mood, and I am looking for some feedback. If you would like a free copy, leave a comment below and I will email you within the next two weeks with the download in exchange for you giving me feedback. Thank you!

Dietary Habits And Behaviors

Diet is often the most hated part of being healthy. Most people look at a diet as a temporary thing. After three months on some “diet”, you can return to the way you used to eat.

I challenge you to think of your diet as a lifestyle of healthy eating rather than a horrible ordeal you must go through for a period of time, only to return to fast food burgers and french fries. You will be far more successful that way.

1. Make dietary changes slowly.

If you try to change everything at once, you will have difficulty adjusting to the new lifestyle. When you eat new foods or in different proportions, it takes time for your digestive system to get used to it, if ya know what I mean.

Food Shopping

A healthier diet starts even before any food enters your mouth. There are many new habits you can adopt that will make healthy eating easier…for example, heaving healthy food in your kitchen at home.

You need to buy your food before you eat it, right?

2. Plan healthy meals in advance.

Come up with a meal plan for your week, so you know exactly what to buy at the grocery store and you are more accountable to yourself (and less likely to eat out and unhealthy restaurants). Here is a template that you can use, but if you eat more than three meals a day you will need to adjust.

It’s a good idea to know how many calories you are supposed to be consuming per day based on your goals and your lifestyle. Use this calculator to get an idea of this number. Everyone has different caloric needs and the formula is not 100% accurate, so don’t be too concerned with matching this number exactly. It’s just a good approximation for planning purposes.

You can write a plan down and post it to your refrigerator, but there are also plenty of free or paid online tools that can help in the process. First, let’s look at the free ones:

• BigOven is a free (or pay for an upgrade) mobile app that works on most smart phones and tablets. You can use it to organize your recipes, find new ones, and then drag and drop them into a calendar so you know what you are cooking for that meal.
• Epicurious is a huge database of recipes from top chefs around the world. These recipes are easily searchable by many categories.
• Foodily is basically a social network for people who love food. You still use it to find recipes, but it is more based on your personal network and food interests. In other words, it’s more of a community around sharing recipes.
• DinnerSpinner is a free mobile app (with paid upgrade) that lets you search for recipes by ingredient. Very good for finding recipes, but not as good for planning a week of meals in advance. Womp womp.

If you want some added functionality, there are many paid services that are still quite affordable:

• Menu Planner ($2.99) for the iPhone and iPad and Food Planner (free) for Android are very similar apps that allow you to plan out your menu for the week. The main downside of them is that it can take time to initially get them set up by adding recipes to them. Lifehacker has a good article about using these programs to make a weekly meal plan.
• Once A Month Mom is a subscription service ($8/month for a monthly membership, $6/month for yearly) that walks you through planning, shopping, cooking, and storing a month’s worth of food in your freezer. You can choose from different types of menus (paleo, vegetarian, etc.), and if you can’t handle a full month of cooking at a time you can scale down to five or ten day meal plans.
• MealBoard ($2.99) is an iPhone and iPad app that can store recipes, create meal plans, and do a whole bunch of other stuff. Reviewers seem to think it has a steep learning curve.
• Plan To Eat ($4.95/month or $39/year) does everything, from storing and importing recipes, keeping track of nutrition information, monthly meal planning, and organizing your shopping list.

If you want to be very thorough with tracking what you eat, you should skip down to #36 for more information and tools that will make being accountable and sticking to your meal plan even easier.

3. Shop with a list based on your weekly meal plan.

Once you begin planning your meals in advance, food shopping becomes much easier. Make a list of ingredients you need in order to cook your meals, and only buy those items.

Old fashioned pen and paper lists work great, but there are free tools that deserves special mention here:

• ZipList. It can be used for meal planning, but where it excels is organizing your shopping list. The tool, which syncs up from most devices including smart phones, can arrange your list by its urgency, the store it is in, or even the specific aisle! Plus, you can use it to send the shopping list to a family member who is going shopping for you. Very convenient.
• Fooducate and ShopWell let you scan products at the supermarket and then will give it a grade based on how healthy it is. This is useful especially for people who know very little about nutrition or who haven’t mastered the art of meal planning yet.

4. Go food shopping on a full stomach.

When you are hungry, you are inclined to buy far more food than you need, and you will likely buy unhealthy foods that you crave.

5. Spend most of your shopping time along the perimeter of the grocery store.

This is where the produce and healthier foods tend to be located. Don’t just wander through the aisles aimlessly. Only venture inward if you need something specific and you know where it is.

6. Stop buying foods that are marketed as healthy.

Chances are, they are not. And if it says “all natural”, that doesn’t mean it’s healthy either. You should spend time educating yourself about what makes a food healthy or not so you can spot the rampant BS in food advertising and packaging. In the meantime, a fantastic rule of thumb is to…

7. Only buy real foods.

In other words, purchase foods that come directly from nature and are minimally processed. This includes plants, fruits, meats, nuts, etc. It excludes things like refined grains and sweeteners, or foods that have ingredients that you can’t pronounce. Real foods are as close to their natural state as possible.

8. Buy wild caught fish, grass-fed meats, and free range eggs instead of their grain-fed counterparts.

Grain is not a part of these animals’ natural diets, and causes the animals themselves to be unhealthy. Not only that, but most of these animals will be given growth hormones and other chemicals to develop faster. This unhealthiness gets passed on to you when you eat them. Sadly, finding animal products that are fed a proper diet is both more expensive and more challenging. The following sites can help you find grass-fed meat near you:

• Eat Wild
• American Grassfed
• Eat Well Guide
• Local Harvest

If you can’t find producers in your area, you can buy these products online. Because it is more expensive, feel free to only partly switch over to these healthier animal products. Even just one or two meals per week will provide you with substantially more nutrition value.

9. Buy more organic foods.

Normal produce is sprayed with pesticides and other chemicals that are harmful to eat. Organic foods are certainly more expensive than non-organic, but luckily not everything you eat needs to be organic. The research on whether organic foods are more nutritious or not is mixed, but if you can afford it, it certainly won’t hurt. The Environmental Working Group publishes a list of the most important foods to buy organic each year, as well as foods with the fewest pesticides. And if you are really curious, here is a tool that lets you see how many and what pesticides are found in different foods. I can’t decide if it’s really creepy or really cool .

Hydrating Properly

Staying hydrated is one of the most important things you can do for your health, but it is under appreciated.

There are a few things you can do to make the most of this area, most of which are pretty easy.

10. Drink a minimum of eight cups of water every day.

Some people say you don’t need to drink this much to stay hydrated, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. You won’t get water poisoning unless you drink a lot of water in a short period of time. The Institute for Medicine recommends that men drink about 13 cups of fluids and women drink 9 cups of fluids per day. This includes all fluids (including a substantial amount from food), but water is of course the best. If it is particularly hot and humid or if you exercise (and you should), you need to drink more. I’ve drank up to a gallon of water per day and I felt great doing it.

Try to keep water on hand at all times and sip it throughout the day. As a good rule of thumb, if you are drinking enough so that you never feel thirsty and your pee is clear or very light yellow, you are hydrated. Here is an online calculator that will tell you how many ounces of water you should drink today based on a number of factors.

11. Drink green tea.

I’ve already written extensively (and I mean extensively) about the health benefits of green tea, so I won’t repeat the reasons here. It is one of the most powerfully healthy things you can add to your lifestyle, plus it’s delicious. If you are extra sensitive to caffeine, are deficient in iron, have ulcers, or are taking certain medications, you shouldn’t drink green tea.

12. Don’t add cream or sugar to your tea and coffee.

That includes artificial sweeteners too. If you like your caffeinated beverages, drink them straight. You’ll grow to appreciate the taste and it’s healthier for you.

13.  Stop drinking soda.

Seriously. Soda is one of the worst things you can put in your body. They contain lots of calories from high fructose corn syrup, which is killing you. And don’t drink diet soda either. The artificial sweeteners can be toxic, and they stimulate your appetite.

Cooking And Eating Healthier Meals

The way you prepare your meals is obviously a huge determinant of your health. By following some of these simple guidelines, you can have much healthier but still delicious meals all the time.

14. Cook meals in advance.

So many people resort to eating fast food or unhealthy snacks because they “don’t have the time to cook”. This problem can be addressed very easily by cooking several portions at once. Especially if you have a weekly meal plan (but even if you don’t), you can spend a little extra time on your Sunday afternoon cooking meals for the rest of the week. Then when you are hungry you just need to reheat them. BOOM! Problem solved.

If you failed to prepare your meals in advance and you find yourself stuck with a bunch of random ingredients, Supercook allows you to find recipes by typing in the ingredients you do have one at a time. This will help you improvise with whatever you have on hand instead of going out to a restaurant.

15. Eat at restaurants less frequently.

This is easier if you cook meals in advance, and it will save you a lot of money. You have no idea what they are putting in your food. Because most restaurants want to make the most tasty dish for the lowest cost, you can bet that there are all sorts of unhealthy things in your meal including food additives, unhealthy cooking oils, and loads of extra salt. Plus your own kitchen is probably cleaner.

If you do go out to eat, most restaurants will allow you to substitute a side of vegetables for the fries they would normally give you.

16. Don’t add salt to your meals. 

If you are already eating mostly real, “whole” foods, this isn’t such a big deal. But until then, you should know that most packaged food already contains heinous amounts of sodium. According to the CDC, the average American consumes more than double the Adequate Intake of sodium (3436 mg vs. 1500 mg), and significantly more than the Tolerable Upper Intake Level (2300 mg). This raises blood pressure and could lead to heart disease and stroke.

17. Use healthier oils.

When cooking, you should look for oils that have a high smoke point, such as coconut and avocado oil. In general, saturated fats are the most stable under heat, so you should cook with those (I know, this goes against much of what you may have heard). Don’t use heavily processed vegetable oils such as canola, safflower, soybean, grapeseed, and so on. Extra virgin olive oil is an incredibly healthy choice for adding to foods and for low temperature cooking. Don’t use olive oil for high temperature cooking because it will oxidize and become very unhealthy.

18. Replace salad dressings with extra virgin olive oil or squeezed lemon or lime juice.

Most salad dressings are very high in calories, often from refined vegetable oils and sugars. Pretty much defeats the purpose of a salad, right? If you are opting for low calorie, use lemon or lime juice for some extra flavor. The best choice though is a small amount of extra virgin olive oil, because it drastically increases the absorption of the many fat-soluble nutrients in your salad.

19. Add a serving of vegetables to each meal.

Veggies are your best friend. They tend to be among the most nutrient dense of foods, meaning they have the most nutrition value per calorie. They fill you up faster and supply your body with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. What more could you want? Try to get a variety of veggies in your diet, and make sure to include leafy greens like spinach as well as cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli.

20. Have a balanced mix of carbohydrates, fats, and protein in each meal.

Many diets will demonize one of these macronutrients, but you need at least some of each. If you are eating real foods, the ratio probably doesn’t matter as much. That being said, try to have one source of each macronutrient in every meal.

Carbs are the least important to focus on because they are the most common in many peoples’ diets. The other two are more likely to be neglected. Everyone is different, but I’ve personally had great results with consuming about 40% of my calories from fat. That is more than you’ve probably heard, but results are results. If you hate doing math, you can use this calculator to find out how many grams of each macronutrient you should be consuming at each meal. If you are specifically trying to build muscle or burn fat, you may need to adjust your ratios according to your goal.

21. Eat your sandwiches open-faced.

You generally don’t want to eat too much bread (or too many calories), and two slices per sandwich can really add up.  Instead, focus on what is inside the sandwich, focusing on the protein and veggies.

22. Use mustard instead of mayo, BBQ sauce, or ketchup on your sandwiches.

Mayo contains deadly trans fats, and BBQ sauce and ketchup are loaded with high fructose corn syrup. Mustard, on the other hand, contains cancer-inhibiting phytonutrients and is a good source of several minerals and omega-3 fatty acids.

23. Substitute quinoa or whole wheat products for “white” carbohydrates.

White carbohydrates are those made from white flour or sugar. Food labels are VERY tricky here, so be careful. Unless the first ingredient on the label says “whole wheat flour” or “100% whole wheat flour”, it’s a white carb. If it just says “wheat flour”, it is a white carb. You’ll also want to avoid added sugars, which you can find a list of here. Honestly though, quinoa is delicious, extremely healthy, and easy to cook, so you should consider making that your primary source of carbs.

24. Add probiotics to your diet.

Probiotics are live microorganisms that reside in your gut and benefit the host, aka you. These organisms may improve digestion and help fight off the “bad” bacteria, improving immune function. Not only that, there is evidence that (at least in mice, but likely humans too) that probiotics play a role in relieving anxiety and depression (source)! Yogurt (make sure it isn’t pasteurized) is probably the most convenient dietary source, but any fermented food contains probiotics. Kefir, sauerkraut, miso soup, pickles, tempeh, and kimchi are also good sources.

25. Eat more omega-3 fatty acids.

This one is so so so so so important for both your health and your happiness. If you are interested in more details on why omega-3′s are so important, check out that link. Some of the best sources include fatty fish such as salmon and sardines (wild caught, not farmed) as well as flax seeds and walnuts. Nosh on walnuts as a healthy snack and eat fatty fish at least twice per week.

26. Eat more spicy foods.

Hot peppers contain capsaicin, and the hotter the pepper, the more capsaicin it contains. This substance has numerous health benefits, such as fighting cancer, reducing inflammation, pain relief, congestion relief, improved intestinal health, cardio-protection, and increased fat burning. The Scoville scale is a measure of the quantity of capsaicin in a pepper, and you can use it to find the best sources. Jalapenos are good, but if you have the cojones for it you should try habanero peppers. That stuff is intense. By the way, you build up a tolerance to spicy food over time, so if you don’t like it now, try adding small amounts until you feel comfortable with it.

27. Season your food with healthy spices.

Besides adding flavor to your meals, some spices are among the most nutrient dense substances known to man. Of special mention are cinnamon, turmeric, and ginger. Cinnamon helps control blood sugar, and has been shown to reduce it by 20-30%. Turmeric is a potent anti-inflammatory and anti-carcinogenic. Ginger has many antioxidants and is a strong anti-inflammatory, but is most known for its soothing effects on your stomach. Mike Geary wrote a great article about 10 of the healthiest spices, and I highly suggest you read it.

28. Stop frying your foods, and use healthier cooking methods.

The high temperatures of frying causes starches to form advanced glycation end products, or AGEs, which are incredibly toxic and linked to both cancer and diabetes. Fried foods absorb a lot of fat in the cooking process (often unhealthy fats, depending on the cooking oil), and fried vegetables lose a lot of their nutrition value. Here are some resources on healthier ways of cooking:

• Healthiest ways of cooking and preparing common foods.
• Quick broil cooking method.
• Healthy saute cooking method.
• Healthy steaming cooking method.

29. Soak meat in a special marinade before grilling.

We all love barbecue, but grilling meat leads to a buildup of heterocyclic amines, benzopyrene, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. “What the hell are those!”, you ask? They are all highly carcinogenic chemicals that you don’t want to consume.

Luckily, you can prevent the formation of a lot of these carcinogens. Soaking meat in a marinade of alcohol (from wine or beer) and herbs (including rosemary, thyme, garlic, ginger, and chili pepper) for four hours decreased the formation of these substances by up to 90% (Source 1, Source 2, Source 3). A marinade including both alcohol and herbs will be most effective, but including just one or the other will still have a strong effect.

30. Start your day with a healthy breakfast.

By eating a healthy breakfast, you set a positive tone for the day by having made a good health decision right away. You wouldn’t want to spoil that by eating junk food the rest of the day, would you? Secondly, this will give you more energy for whatever you need to do later. Good deal overall.

Healthier Desserts

A lot of people will screw up a day of healthy eating by scarfing down a pint of ice cream or a few donuts. Other people will think they ate healthy all day, but forget about the random small bits of junk food they ate between meals.

With a little bit of preparation, you can eat healthy while still satisfying your sweet tooth.

31. Replace the unhealthy snacks in your house with nuts, fruits, and veggies.

Wherever you go, keep a baggy full of dried fruit and nuts with you so you aren’t tempted to go to the vending machine. Chances are you like at least some of these healthy snacks, so just pick whatever your favorites are and keep them well stocked.

32. Replace your night time dessert with a piece of fresh fruit.

An apple is still sweet, and is a much better choice than ice cream. I know, this tip isn’t rocket science, but a lot of people forget that there are healthy options just as delicious as a bag of chips.

33. Learn to love dark chocolate as your primary “indulgence” food.

Dark chocolate is one of my favorite things in the universe. Almost everyone has heard that dark chocolate is healthier than milk chocolate by now. Aim for the highest percentage cacao as you can tolerate, and it should be at least 70% to get the health benefits. The bitterness of dark chocolate is an acquired taste. My brother used to dislike dark chocolate but recently he has built up a tolerance and now enjoys it!

The most well known benefit of dark chocolate is that it decreases blood pressure. But it does so much more than that! I’ve written a post about the less well known benefits of eating dark chocolate, which you should check out. Finally, dark chocolate is a high calorie food (one bar usually contains approximately 400 calories), so eat in moderation. Most research only used quantities of 100 grams or 3.5 ounces, and there is no evidence that health benefits increase with higher amounts.

Reducing Calories

Not everyone is trying to lose weight, but if you are, you must reduce your calorie consumption. Even if you don’t need to lose weight, caloric restriction has been shown to significantly improve longevity.

Either way, these tips are at least worth considering.

34. Eat only until 80% full.

This is the practice of hara hachi bu, which the Okinawans observed. The result? Almost 29% of Okinawans lived to be 100 years old, which is a rate four times higher than those living in western countries (Source). Of course, other factors (many of which you can find on this blog post) certainly contributed, but caloric restriction definitely played its part. “But then I’ll still be hungry!” you say? It takes about 20 minutes after eating before your brain registers that you are satiated. While you might still feel a little hungry for a few minutes, you will feel comfortable very shortly.

I know this is difficult for many people (myself included), so here are some resources that will help you.

• 6 Tricks To Consume Fewer Calories During Meals
• A Primer On Mindful Eating

35. Experiment with intermittent fasting (IF).

There are many different variations of IF, but they all involve occasionally going for a length of time (usually around 24 hours, but can be more or less) without consuming any calories, and eating normally the rest of the time. The way I have done this is picking one day per week where I eat dinner at a certain time and then don’t eat again until the same time the next day. While this isn’t easy, it’s nowhere near as hard as you think. Plus it has been shown to have similar life extension benefits as caloric restriction, without having to count calories day-in-day-out.

Since many people are curious about IF and I am no expert, I’m including a few pieces of literature that may help you get started.

• Mark’s Daily Apple has a great post on the science behind the many benefits of IF.
• He also has a very basic and easy to understand post on the different ways to practice IF.
• The IF Life has a more detailed guide on two common ways to practice IF, and includes answers to some FAQs.
• Finally, John Berardi has a free ebook that goes into much more detail on IF. If the other resources intrigued you already, take a look at this. It’s a journal of his own self-experimentation with IF and what he learned from the results.

36. Keep a food journal and measure how much you eat.

If you keep track of your eating patterns, you will be surprised at how much you learn about yourself. Incredibly, the practice of recording daily food intake doubled the amount of weight loss experienced by dieters (Source). When you have to write down what you eat, it makes you more accountable and encourages you to eat fewer calories.

Maintaining a food journal can be as simple and low-tech as carrying a notebook around with you, but there are many tools you can use to improve your journaling experience.

In college I took a nutrition class where we had to keep a food journal, and we used SuperTracker to log our food intake. The tool was very thorough but a little bit hard to use. It’s the only one of these tools I’ve actually used a decent amount, so it gets special mention. That being said, there are many other free tools you can experiment with, including:

• MyPlate, from livestrong.com
• My-Calorie-Counter
• FitDay, which seems very popular
• Nutritiondata.com has a searchable database of foods, including a detailed analysis of micro and macronutrient content.
• TheCarrot.com has all sorts of tools for tracking your diet and exercise. Highly versatile.
• MyFitnessPal, which I used for about a week as an iPhone app. It was also decent, but I don’t have enough experience with it for a proper review.
• There are even more tools you can use for food journaling at #48 on this list.

Physical Activity Habits And Behaviors

Getting enough physical activity is not only necessary for having a fit body, but also for living a long and healthy life. Regular physical activity helps prevent cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, hypertension, obesity, depression, and premature death (Source).

Unfortunately, most people who are inactive don’t know where to start. Seeing bodybuilders at the gym is intimidating, and you might not even know how to do a proper push up.

It’s so easy to make excuses and remain inactive, but there are simple things you can do (without being an expert) that will help get you moving while you begin to educate yourself.

Squeezing Physical Activity Into Your Schedule

No matter how many cats are laying on you, you can still get some physical activity.

The most common excuse for not exercising is the classic “I don’t have time!”

Luckily you don’t need to spend 2 hours in the gym every day to get in a good workout. In fact, there are very effective workouts you can do in 20 minutes or less!

On top of that, you can make small adjustments to your habits in order to spend a little more time being physically active. The mere act of breaking up sedentary time by standing up is enough to significantly decrease your metabolic risk (Source). We’ll go into easy ways to be less sedentary in this section.

37. Take advantage of short but very intense workouts.

You have a lot of options here, you don’t need a gym membership, and some of these don’t even require any equipment. Besides convenience, high intensity training has been shown to be more effective than other forms of training (Source). The key principle of high intensity interval training (HIT) is alternating short periods of maximal effort with less intense recovery periods. A few possibilities would be jump rope workouts, sprinting, and circuit training.

Instead of going into detail about all the types of workouts you can do, here are a few resources to help you:

• Greatist has a very informative infographic detailing the benefits of HIT and three different protocols for applying it.
• Tabata training is a style of workout that can be completed in only four minutes, but is very challenging. Learn how to design your own Tabata workout here.
• Nerd Fitness has a killer article about how to start doing a bodyweight exercise circuit training regimen.
• Bodybuilding.com has a good introduction to jump rope workouts. And here is a video that demonstrates many more advanced jump rope exercises.
• Zombies, Run! ($7.99) is an app and game that gives you missions that involve being chased by zombies and require serious interval training workouts.

38. Take the stairs instead of the elevator.

It only takes an extra two or three minutes at most, and sometimes is even faster. Climbing stairs is actually great exercise, and if you make a habit of it, you will be a far more conditioned person.

39. Whenever you can, walk.

If you simply can’t walk to where you need to go, make a point to park further away from your destination and walk the extra block or two. Similarly, you can get off of the bus or subway one stop early and walk the rest of the way. At work, you can get up and go to someone’s desk instead of using your instant messenger. Change the channel on the TV itself instead of using the remote. Be creative.

40. Do housework.

Instead of hiring someone to do it for you, you can get some low intensity physical activity by doing it yourself. Housework, besides being necessary, can add up to burn some calories. Gardening can be especially fruitful (see what I did there?). See how many calories you burn from common household activities here.

41. Exercise during TV commercials.

You might as well make the most of the 25% of TV time that otherwise would be wasted. You don’t need to do anything too crazy here. Just drop down and do ten push ups during each commercial break.

42. Do a short workout before you shower.

You shower every day, right? Just take five minutes before you hop in and do a few bodyweight exercises. Consider doing one round of the circuit from the Nerd Fitness article above.

43. Play.

Get involved in games or sports that keep you active and that are fun for you. Play with your kids if you have them. If you can get both pleasure and exercise at the same time…well, that’s awesome! Mark’s Daily Apple has a very persuasive post about why spending time playing is so important.

Workout Motivation

Drop and give me twenty!

If you aren’t in the habit of exercising regularly, it can be a challenge to get yourself motivated enough to follow through. Although not foolproof, there are a number of ways to make sticking to an exercise regimen far more likely.

44. Find a workout partner.

This won’t work for everyone. I’ve only had one workout partner who ever truly motivated me (shout out to my friend Bubba who got me a lot stronger that one summer). That being said, many people swear by it, and it can make you far more accountable when someone else is involved. When choosing a training partner, look for these characteristics. You can also use FitLink to search for a suitable workout partner by area code.

45. Put on your gym clothes.

This trick seems silly but it has been the most effective motivational technique I’ve ever used. When you are feeling wishy-washy about whether you want to work out, just change into your gym clothes. You don’t have to work out after, but somehow once you are suited up you are far more likely to be in the mood. I end up working out approximately 70% of the times that I don’t feel like it because of this psychological trick.

46. Create a backup plan for when obstacles spring up.

What are the most common triggers that make you not want to work out? You can probably come up with a few big ones for yourself. Some common triggers might be that it is raining outside, you already showered that day, you are tired, or you feel pressed for time. For each one of your triggers, come up with a “Plan B” that circumvents the problem.

If it is raining outside, you can work out at your home instead of going to the gym. I recommend the circuit training workout from the Nerd Fitness post in #37.

If you already showered, you can do a workout that won’t make you sweaty. Try yoga, walking, pilates, or even bodyweight exercises with longer rest periods to keep your heart rate low enough to prevent you from sweating.

When you are tired (not physically sore, just tired), you can shorten your workout. If you would normally spend 45 minutes doing something, commit to 15. Getting your body moving is likely to energize you enough to finish your workout anyways.

And if you feel like you don’t have time, go back to #37 and choose a short, high intensity workout. Tabata training only takes about four minutes but it’s still killer.

47. Learn to push through your own discomfort.

The techniques above are band aids, but in the long term, you must adjust your mindset. Morita Therapy teaches you to act despite the negative feelings you are experiencing rather than fighting the feelings themselves. I have written about motivation before, so if you want to learn about Morita Therapy and other tricks to help you take action, check it out.

You can also try using the Gym-Pact app, which allows you to earn money when you check in to the gym and lose money when you miss scheduled workouts. Strong incentive, obviously.

Maximize Your Workout Results

A tribute to the master of effective workouts.

Not all workouts are created equal.

And while getting in any amount of physical activity is better than nothing, there is no reason not to get the most out of the exercises you are doing.

The techniques in this section are designed not to get you moving, but to make whatever you are doing more effective. Keep in mind that a number of these are fairly technical, so get ready to nerd out.

48. Have an exercise journal.

Within a month of me starting mine, all my major lifts improved drastically. It will keep you motivated, allow you to see your progress (see #55), help you identify sticking points, find out what things work best for you, and keep you focused on your goals. I used a written journal (if you prefer a pre-made one, you can buy BodyMinder and keep track of three months of workouts at a time), but there are also online tools that may make your life easier:

• Many of the food journaling tools from #36 also keep track of exercise.
• Fitocracy turns fitness tracking into a game where you compete with others and can “level up”. The social networking aspect of this service is what sets it apart.
• FitNovo ($32.85/year) helps you plan for specific goals such as losing 20 pounds or running a marathon. You would use it to keep track of both fitness and nutrition.
• If running is your thing, the RunKeeper app uses the GPS in your phone to keep track of your distance, speed, etc. And you can control your music from within the app itself.
• Ease into 5K ($2.99) is a training program that takes you from beginner to running five kilometers in eight weeks.
• BodyDaemon is a free and easy to use fitness journal where you can record every aspect of your workout and body measurements. There is also an active community and you can create nifty graphs with it.
• Strength and Body is a free fitness journal/blog network. It has a very easy workout entry tool and lets you search your workouts by their specific type, which makes keeping track of progress easier. It allows a huge amount of customization and is personalized.
• MyFitnessJournal is a free tool for keeping track of fitness and nutrition. Ease of use is a huge plus with this one.
• Fitness Journal (prices range from $3.95/month to $89.95/three years), a comprehensive fitness and nutrition tracker, is probably the most feature rich tool on this list.

49. Make sure you exercise with proper form.

Perhaps you are groaning about how obvious this one is, but most people fail to perform their exercises correctly. If you don’t use correct form, you are more likely to get injured, less likely to get stronger, and guaranteed to look like an idiot. For any exercise that you plan on performing, make sure you know how it’s done first. Here is a very comprehensive database of exercises with descriptions and videos of them being done right.

50. You should primarily be doing compound exercises in your workouts.

These are exercises that utilize more than one muscle group. Compound exercises are functional; they train your nervous system as a whole in addition to just the individual muscles. The “big three” for weightlifters should be squats, bench press, and deadlifts. If you are very careful about form, try doing olympic lifts like the clean and press. If you prefer bodyweight exercises, focus on things like push ups, pull ups, body squats, dips, and burpees. And if you are up to the challenge, Beast Skills has tutorials on intense acrobatic exercises. What I’ve listed here is a starting point; there are many more compound exercises you can do.

51. Unless you are a bodybuilder, avoid isolation exercises.

This is the converse of the previous point, but it deserves its own spot. Amateurs will spend countless hours doing bicep curls and wonder why they aren’t getting ripped. Isolation exercises help to sculpt specific parts of your body. They are useful for aesthetics and rehabilitation purposes only, so unless you are a physique athlete or doing physical therapy, you are probably wasting your time. In the worst case scenario, isolation exercises can actually increase your chance of injury. Dr. Kareem Samhouri can explain this better than I can, so check out his 7 worst exercises to avoid.

52. Give yourself time to recover from workouts.

Some people actually over-train by not giving their body enough time to recuperate from their workouts. Don’t do this; you’ll waste a lot of time at the gym and are more likely to get injured. Recovery involves both leaving enough time between working out the same muscle group as well as taking the occasional week off to let your body “reset” itself.

Short term recovery strategies involve proper nutrition (see #54), hydration, and getting quality sleep. Don’t exercise a muscle that is sore, and don’t do heavy compound lifting more than two days in a row without taking a day off. Long term recovery involves giving your body a week off every once in a while, usually every four to eight weeks.

If you doubt the power of sufficient recovery, check out this case study of how Tim Ferris gained 34 pounds of muscle in only 8 short workouts.

53. Warm up before and cool down after your workout.

Most people shrug this off and consider it a waste of precious workout time, but it is very important for reducing your risk of injury as well as improving your performance. Let’s start with the warm up.

Your warm up is designed to prepare you for the workout ahead. Therefore, the way you warm up will vary depending on what you plan to do in your workout. Start with five minutes of light cardio to get your blood flowing and to elevate your muscle temperature. Then you will be doing 5-10 minutes of dynamic stretches, or moving stretches, that take your body through full ranges of motion. Sadly, I could not find a single database with a large list of dynamic stretches (if you know of one, do tell), but here are a few resources to help you find appropriate stretches for your workout:

• Bodybuilding.com has a guide for a number of the common dynamic stretches.
• Although there are no pictures or videos in this article, you can find descriptions of a few more unique dynamic stretches. If you think one of them will be useful to you, look it up on youtube.
• This post has pictures and descriptions of how to do some of the more common dynamic stretches.

When you’ve completed your workout, leave a couple extra minutes for a cool down, which will decrease muscle soreness. If your workout was cardio, do the same cardio at a lower intensity for five minutes, and then do some leg stretches. Otherwise, you’ll want to immediately start doing static stretches (the typical gym class stretch-and-hold kind) for the body parts that you worked out. To find the right stretches, you can use:

• This list of static stretches from bodybuilding.com, which currently has 95 stretches.
• For a high quality, pre-designed, full body stretching routine, check out this beginner’s stretching guide at Nerd Fitness.

54. Learn the basics of workout nutrition.

There is a lot of controversy in this field, and the science behind the “ideal” pre, during, and post-workout meals is far from conclusive. A workout uses a lot of energy, so you need the right fuel. Exercise depletes the glycogen stores in your muscles and liver, and then you get exhausted. The primary goals of your workout nutrition are to keep your energy level up during your workout, replenish your glycogen stores as quickly as possible after the workout, and to stimulate protein synthesis. So…how do you do that?

Note: I am basing my recommendations in this section off of this literature review and the ISSN exercise and sport nutrition review from 2010.

First, we’ll take a look at pre-workout nutrition. Since it takes about four hours for carbohydrates to begin being stored as muscle and liver glycogen, a carbohydrate-rich meal four to six hours before a workout will help ensure that your glycogen stores are topped off. Shortly before your workout, you should consume a light protein and carbohydrate supplement to maximize protein synthesis. This pre-workout protein has been shown to be even more effective than post-workout protein, but both help.

During long bouts of intense exercise (more than one hour), you should consume a drink containing both carbohydrates and electrolytes, such as Gatorade. Most exercise sessions probably aren’t long enough to warrant this, so staying hydrated is the main priority while you work out. You should be consuming fluids regularly throughout your workout. Don’t wait until you are thirsty.

After your workout, your first priority is to consume some protein, possibly with some fast acting carbs. The protein is what you really need in order to stimulate muscle protein synthesis, but the carbs will drastically improve the rate at which your glycogen levels are restored. Remember earlier when I said sport nutrition is a controversial subject? Some people suggest that you occasionally fast after your workout, because this stimulates the release of human growth hormone. Feel free to give that a shot too.

The protein source you use matters. Essential amino acids, and particularly branched chain amino acids (BCAAs), are the primary regulators of muscle protein synthesis. Both whey protein and BCAA powders are effective supplements for your protein needs. Carbohydrate powders such as maltodextrin can be mixed with the above proteins to make your pre and post workout supplements. You can also use milk, juice, or fruit as your carbohydrate source. Here are some recipes to help you make your own supplemental shakes.

Finally, if you are uncomfortable taking supplements, chocolate milk is a great substitute that contains a good mix of proteins and carbs.

55. Incorporate progressive overload in your workout regimen.

The human body has the amazing ability to adapt to whatever stresses it goes through. If you put your body through a challenging workout, your body will adapt, and the workout becomes easier the next time. Your fitness has improved. But at a certain point, the same workout will no longer put any significant stress on the body. If you keep repeating it, your workouts will no longer improve your fitness.

Progressive overload means that you gradually increase the amount of stress you put on your body. By continually increasing the stress, you force your body to continue adapting (stronger lifts, more muscle, increased endurance, etc.). Every time you work out, aim to somehow increase the stress you put on your body.

There are many ways to do this. Lift more weight, do more sets, add some repetitions, increase the number of exercises you perform for a given muscle group, or decrease the amount of rest time between sets. If you are running, you can increase the distance or your speed. The best way to increase the stress of your workout will vary depending on your goal, but you should always be improving no matter what. Oh, and make sure you are still using proper form (#49).

56. Get creative and vary your exercise parameters.

Your body adapts very quickly to the stresses you put on it, which is why you use progressive overload. The goal of progressive overload is to increase the intensity of your workout, and you may vary certain exercise parameters to do so. But you also want to add variety to your workouts for its own sake. You see, after a few weeks, your body adjusts to doing the same type of workout, even if you incorporate progressive overload. Damn, the human body is impressive.

How do you continue to progress even after your body has adjusted to your workout? Change it up! Every four to eight weeks, you should completely revamp your workout. A lifetime of optimal training will require dozens of different styles of workouts. Of course, you don’t have to change that frequently to see results, it’s just optimal. Most people have a hard time coming up with enough creative ways to change up their workouts, so here are a few ideas that might help:

• Here is a list of common exercise parameters you can vary. You can change anything on that list, but here is a simple example. You’ve been working out four specific lifts during the previous month, aiming for three sets of ten reps each. Next month, you can use the same exercises, but do five sets of five reps instead.
• Try “negative” reps. Normally you focus on the concentric part of an exercise, which is when the muscle shortens to overcome resistance. Negative reps use the eccentric portion of the movement. If you are doing a bench press, the concentric part is when you push the bar up, and the eccentric is when the bar comes down. When you do negative reps, you focus on making that descending portion of the exercise take longer.
• Try “isometric” exercises. These exercises are done in static positions. For example, you can hold the top position of a bench press for a certain period of time and count that as one rep.
• Try doing “complexes”, where you perform one rep of several different exercises right after each other and count that as a set, then repeat. Here are some examples of how to do complexes.
• Feel free to completely change your workout. Switch from bodyweight circuit training to power lifting to hill sprints to whatever you want.

Miscellaneous Physical Activity Habits

Here are some things you can do that I couldn’t quite fit into the other categories.

57. Take 30 minute walks.

Do it for the sake of taking a walk, and not just to squeeze a little bit of exercise into your daily activities. Even though you might feel as though taking a walk is a waste of time before you do it, everyone loves to take walks. Walking is a calming, pleasant activity that anyone can do and doesn’t require any equipment.

But regular walking is also incredibly good for you. A prospective study found that two or three walking sessions (on a golf course) per week resulted in improved physical performance, improved body composition, and increased HDL cholesterol (Source). Regular walking also helps control hypertension and slows the process of osteoporosis (Source). This is one of the simplest habits you can adopt to improve your health.

58. Go hiking more often.

All the benefits that walking provides, hiking will give you more. Really, hiking is just walking but out in nature, usually on more varied terrain and for a longer period of time. Don’t know where to go hiking? Chances are there are plenty of trails near you. Use these tools to find them:

• Scout.me
• Trails.com
• Trail Link helps you find trails that are located along railway lines. Kind of random, but whatever.
• Localhikes.com has a list of trails near U.S. metropolitan areas.

If you are new to this (or even if you have some experience), you should check out this beginners guide to hiking. Pay special attention to the points about preparation and safety. Hiking can be dangerous if you don’t take the proper precautions, so you must take it seriously.

59. Go barefoot.

The barefoot running movement is still small, but it is gaining traction. Traction, get it? Anyways, the point behind barefoot shoes is that they more closely mimic the way humans evolved to walk than real shoes (Source). Therefore, people who wear barefoot shoes should be less likely to get injured, though the evidence is not entirely conclusive (Source1, Source2). Having never used them myself, I can’t say too much about them. Here are two very informative posts about barefoot running from people who actually know what they are talking about:

• This is Tim Ferris’s experience with barefoot shoes, plus some of the evolutionary theory behind them.
• Here is a good introduction to barefoot running, including who should or shouldn’t practice and how to get started.

60. Wear a weighted vest.

The idea here is that they add to your body weight and thus increase the amount of work your body must do to move around but still maintain proper bodily balance to avoid injury. Anything you do, be it resistance training, cardio, or just walking around, will challenge your body more and improve your fitness. On the other hand, if worn improperly, weighted vests can increase the chance of joint pain or shoulder injury.

Wearing a weighted vest or weighted clothing in general is controversial and certainly not for everyone. Before deciding to purchase one, do some research and find out if it is right for you. To start you off, here is the Wikipedia article on weighted clothing.

61. Improve your posture.

It doesn’t matter if you are doing this for the health reasons or just to look more confident and attractive; either way, you should be paying attention to your posture. Poor posture can lead to many health complications including neck and back pain, slipped discs, and bad circulation.

Try to keep your ears, shoulders, and hips in alignment with each other when sitting, and include your knees and ankles while standing. Having strong abdominal and lower back muscles improves posture, so consider adding exercises that focus on those areas to your workouts. For more detailed instructions on improving your posture:

• An easy to understand infographic that covers good posture in any position from Greatist.
• Art of Manliness has a good introduction to maintaining posture, including a neat exercise at the end.
• If you work in an office, you should set up your workstation ergonomically.

Most normal people should focus on using non-technological ways to improve their posture. That being said, if you want a little extra help, you can spring for one of these apps:

• Upright ($2.99) lets you know when you are slouching. Just calibrate it and then put your phone in a shirt pocket or tie it around your neck. I know, slightly inconvenient.
• If you are willing to spend a little bit more, LUMOback ($149) includes a sensor that you wear around your waist that will also alert you when you fall into poor posture.

62. Start doing yoga.

I thought I would hate it, but I was hooked from my very first class. Yoga is great for you. In fact, it may be as effective or better than exercise at improving almost every health related measure except for fitness (Source). To find yoga classes near you, check out:

• Yoga Journal
• Find Yoga

You should take a class with an actual instructor before you start doing too much yoga yourself. But once you have some of the basics down, your smart phone can help you out.

• Here are 12 yoga apps you can download, covering various aspects of yoga.
• All-in Yoga ($.99) is one that I found useful when I started doing more yoga on my own.

Lifestyle Habits And Behaviors

Your health depends on so many things besides diet and physical activity. The two most prominent, sleep and stress management, are addressed here, along with other miscellaneous factors that impact your health.

Improve Your Sleep Habits

Getting a good night’s sleep is an often neglected aspect of your health. Sleep tends to be the first thing that is sacrificed in a busy person’s life, but this is a huge mistake.

In this section, you will learn some of the most effective tips that can help you get quality sleep.

63. Wake up at the same time every day.

Doing this one thing alone will practically ensure you regularly get a good night’s sleep. Unfortunately, it’s not a very easy thing to do, at least for most people. You must do this every day, including weekends. Using this method, it doesn’t matter when you go to sleep. This system is self-regulating, because if you got very little sleep one day, you’ll be tired and go to bed earlier the next day. It can take about ten days to two weeks to get completely used to it. If you want to go all out with this, you can also determine what is your perfect bed time given a time you plan to wake up.

64. Go to bed at the same time every night. 

I don’t think this is as practical as waking up at the same time each day, but if it works for you, go for it. When you condition yourself to have a certain “bed time”, you will naturally feel more tired as that time approaches. The advantage of this method is that your will power tends to be a little better at night than the moment after you wake up, so it’s easier to commit to a bed time than a wake time.

65. Consider your sleep cycles.

Instead of thinking of the amount of sleep you get in terms of hours, consider it in terms of 90-minute sleep cycles. To get all the benefits of sleep, you must complete full cycles. If you have a given time that you want to wake up, you can determine the ideal time to get to sleep by counting back in 90-minute increments. Everyone has different sleep needs, but this means you will probably want to go to sleep 6, 7.5, or 9 hours before you need to wake up.

In addition, waking up in deep sleep will leave you incredibly groggy. It’s much better to wake up during a lighter phase of sleep, which will leave you feeling more alert. There are apps that can help you with this, of course.

• Sleep Cycle ($.99) is one that I used with great success for about a year. Leave your phone on the corner of your bed. Based on the amount of movement it detects, it can determine what phase of sleep you are in and wake you up in light sleep. Side benefit: I found that I often had an extra half hour in my morning to do whatever I wanted!
• Sleep Time (Android) is a free app that works the same way as Sleep Cycle, though I have not tried it. There is also an iOS version.

66. Stop eating heavy meals before bed.

Forcing your body to digest a big meal makes it harder to relax, and therefore harder to sleep. You should avoid eating a significant meal for at least two hours before bed. But if you are hungry at night, you don’t need to deny yourself a snack. That being said, some foods are better for your sleep than others. Avoid greasy, spicy, and sugary foods, as well as anything that tends to promote indigestion for you. The best foods are ones that contain tryptophan, such as nuts and dairy. Magnesium also has a calming effect, so you can have small portions of foods that contain it. The key point though is to not eat a lot right before bed.

67. Stop doing anything in your bed except for sleep and sex.

This tip also relies on the power of conditioning. You want your body to know that when your head hits the pillow, it’s time to either nod off or get it on.

68. Create a better sleep environment.

The National Sleep Foundation has a good introduction to creating the right sleep environment. To summarize, you should block out unwanted noise, keep the room slightly cool, make sure your room is dark enough, and have a comfortable bed. I’m sure you can do a lot to improve in this area, and I will provide a whole bunch of resources here to help you with this.

Noise:

• White Noise is an app that can help block out unwanted noises using its own ambient loops.
• Simplynoise.com will provide white noise off of your computer.

The ideal sleep temperature for most people is between 60-68 degrees Fahrenheit, but people do differ. Figure out what works best for you. My old roommate always had a light fan aimed at his head, and that worked for him.

Light:

• Use a sleeping mask or blackout curtains.
• Make sure the LED lights from whatever electronic devices you have running are nowhere near you. Keep them out of the bedroom if possible. There are products that can block out these lights.

To have a comfortable bed, you need to have the right materials for it. Here are good articles on choosing a quality mattress, getting good sheets, and finding a comfy pillow.

69. Be sensible about your caffeine intake.

Everyone responds to caffeine differently, but you should probably avoid consuming caffeine after dinner. You should also generally moderate your caffeine intake, because it can stay in your system and affect your sleep even if you don’t realize it. I’ve written a very thorough guide on how to quit caffeine if this is a problem for you.

70. Avoid bright lights before bed.

Your body uses light as a cue for regulating your sleep cycle. Light prevents your body from secreting melatonin, the hormone that makes you tired. I know it’s hard, but you should try to stop using your phone, tablet, Kindle, and laptop for two hours before you plan on going to sleep.

If you are like me and can’t stand to put away your computer, there is a free program you can download that adjusts the color of your computer’s display based on the time of day in order to make it more sleep friendly. It’s cool to see it in use, and it definitely helps. You can get it here.

71. Before bed, prepare for the next day.

A lot of people, myself included, have difficulty falling asleep because their mind is racing with thoughts of what they need to do in the future while they are laying in bed. To avoid this, set aside a few minutes before you get in bed where you write out a to-do list for the next day. Not only will this slow your mind down, but it will help keep you organized and be more productive in general.

72. Use progressive muscle relaxation.

This is a stress management technique, but it is very effective for promoting sleep and doesn’t require the use of drugs (Source). Here’s how you do it (more detailed instructions here). First, while laying in bed, try to relax your entire body. Next, go through each specific muscle group one at a time and make it as tense as possible, relaxing it before moving on to the next one. Start with your forehead and move all the way down to your toes. When you are finished, check your body and see what parts are still tense. For each of these muscles, repeat the tension and release three or four times.

73. Take naps strategically instead of arbitrarily.

Most people don’t realize it, but napping is pretty complicated. Taking a 90 minute nap has completely different effects than a 20-minute power nap. Luckily, I’ve already written a detailed guide on how to take strategic naps in order to get the benefit you seek.

Manage Your Stress

You’re cute when you are stressed out.

Stress is not just a psychological concept, but also a physiological one. Stress isn’t all bad; it helps motivate you in threatening situations. That being said, the fast pace of modern society has led to persistent or chronic stress, which has some serious physical side effects.

Stress releases the hormone cortisol (as well as other hormones), prompting the fight-or-flight response. Elevated cortisol has been linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, reduced immune function, and cognitive impairment (Source). Another study pointed out that cortisol increases risk of osteoporosis, intestinal problems such as ulcers, and could potentially have negative effects on almost every regulatory system in the body (Source). If all of this is making you want to rip your hair out, keep in mind that stress also slows the speed of wound healing (Source).

I hope you are convinced that managing your stress is integral if you want to have good health. Plus, it’s probably worth noting that all of these stress reducing techniques will make you a lot happier.

74. Identify your triggers or sources of stress.

Many of these are probably obvious to you and don’t require any serious analysis, but some can be harder to find. Knowing what stresses you out is an important step in permanently reducing the stress in your life.

Write down the top ten things that you believe are adding stress to your life right now. Carry a notebook around with you for the next week, and every time you feel yourself getting more stressed out, make a note of the time and what situation prompted it. Also note how you responded to it and if anything you did made you feel better. Once you have a list of your primary stressors, you can more readily change your response to them.

Stress Check is an app that can measure your stress level in real time by calculating your heart rate variability. This can be a serious aid in figuring out what your stressors are, though it is not necessary.

75. Get organized and set priorities and deadlines.

This post isn’t specifically about productivity, but having some organization in your life can go a long way towards reducing your stress. Obviously this is a big topic, and I’m no expert. There are a lot of organizational systems out there, such as Getting Things Done, that you may want to check out. In the meantime, Zen Habits has a useful post with basic tips for getting organized.

There are also a million and one technological tools that can help you get organized:

• Evernote is pretty much a miracle, and lets you capture, store, and search for any type of information you can imagine. If there is one tool you should learn to use, this is it.
• Todoist is a minimalist, easy to use way of creating to do lists.
• Like I said, there are tons of resources, and I’m not familiar with most of them. But chances are you will be able to find something useful for whatever you need on this list of 100 tools for getting organized.

76. Reduce the clutter in your life.

All the extra “stuff” that you have adds stress to your life, but it’s hard to really understand this until you’ve gotten rid of a lot of your extra baggage. Everything you own is another thing to keep track of and to worry about losing or breaking. Detach yourself from unnecessary material items. Here is a good introduction to how you can reduce clutter. Last summer I went through my room and got rid of nearly half of my things (and that’s just the beginning), and you have no idea how much better it made me feel. Most of the stuff that you think you need is completely unnecessary.

77. Follow the Two-Minute Rule.

This is a technique made popular from the Getting Things Done system. Any time there is a task that you come across that you can complete in two minutes or less, do it immediately. Otherwise it just stays on your mind and adds unnecessary stress. You might as well just get it over with now.

78. Take a break whenever you feel stressed.

In those moments where it all just seems like too much, it’s best to step away for a moment. Do anything but whatever it was that was stressing you out until you feel a little bit better. In my opinion, the best thing to do is a simple breathing exercise. Close your eyes, try to relax, and take ten deep breaths. For each breath, count to four as you inhale, hold it for a four count, and exhale for another four. This works wonders almost immediately.

79. Learn to say “no” to requests.

People are constantly asking things of you, and it’s tempting to always say yes. After all, you don’t want to disappoint them, right? Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day, and you simply can’t do everything. Respect yourself and your own time. Recognize your own values and priorities. When you say no, you want to be polite but firm. You can’t be wishy-washy with a “maybe, but…” or anything like that. Then try to come up with an alternative solution for the other person’s request that doesn’t violate your own needs.

80. Avoid people who stress you out.

Sometimes this is difficult or impossible, but usually there is something you can do to avoid the people who cause you the most stress. Once you’ve identified your stressors (#74), you should have a good idea who these people are. Keep your distaste for these people to yourself unless you absolutely have to tell them in order to get rid of them. Usually there are better ways than confrontation.

81. Spend more time in nature.

The great outdoors is a wonderful resource for de-stressing. I’ll bet you intuitively recognize that being out in nature tends to have a calming effect, but there is also research to back it up. A prospective study found that spending time in a forest reduced hostility and depression, while increasing feelings of liveliness, particularly in more stressed out individuals (Source). There is also evidence that any engagement with nature, from seeing it on TV to actively participating in nature (gardening, etc.) makes us feel better (Source).

82. Play with your pet.

Enjoying the company of animals is a great way to take your mind off of something that stresses you out. This is going to be more effective if you are an actual pet owner, but most people (people who like animals, at least) feel better in the presence of furry little critters. Although actual research is preliminary, there is some evidence that exposure to companion animals decreases the physiological response to stress (Source1, Source2, Source3).

83. Give yourself a hand massage.

Massage in general is a phenomenal way to reduce stress, although getting an actual massage can be fairly expensive and requires an appointment. Luckily, you can reduce your stress at any time for free by giving yourself a hand massage. A five minute hand massage can reduce perceptions of stress immediately (Source), and regular hand massage may reduce stress and even decrease the chance of a mid-life crisis (Source). So, how do you give yourself a massage?

• Here is a very basic guide on how to give yourself a hand massage (with pictures).
• You can also learn more about self-massage in general, not just for your hands.

Moderation And Balancing Your Lifestyle

See? This guy understands what a balanced lifestyle is.

There are a lot of things you can incorporate into your lifestyle that will help make it more balanced and healthy.

84. Quit smoking.

This is probably the most obvious item on this entire list, and it’s probably also the most challenging. I’ve never had to go through this process so I can’t give any personal advice, but there are so many people out there who have quit and want to help. Here are a few things to get you started:

• Before quitting, it can be helpful to know what you are up against.
• Create a personal stop smoking plan.
• Another step-by-step method for quitting.
• There are many organizations dedicated to helping people quit smoking. Here is a list. Better yet, make it two lists.
• Smoking costs a lot of moolah, and it can be motivating to know how much money you are saving as you cut back. You can use this calculator to determine the financial cost of smoking.
• NCI QuitPal is an app that has numerous features that help you change your behavior and quit smoking.
• QuitSTART is an app that seems focused on how to manage and deal with cravings.
• MyQuitCOACH can be used to design and implement your personalized quitting plan, as well as monitor your progress along the way.

85. Drink in moderation.

Moderate drinking is defined as no more than one drink per day for women and two drinks for men. Excessive alcohol consumption is one of the absolute worst things you can do to your body. But moderate drinking has been shown to be cardioprotective and decrease all-cause mortality (Source1, Source2, Source3). Feel free to drink a little bit if it’s something you enjoy.

If you are a heavy drinker, you need to cut back. Many alcoholics have acquired a physical dependence. If you are one of them, you should quit under medical supervision. Here is some more information that might help:

• Create a plan to quit drinking.
• Another plan for quitting drinking.
• List of resources for recovering alcoholics and their families
• Find treatment centers and other resources

86. Minimize the use of pharmaceuticals.

In 2009, drug overdose became the leading cause of accidental death (and the sixth most prevalent overall) in the US, with 38,329 deaths reported (Source). The majority of these deaths involved prescription drugs. Remember: just because something is legal or even prescribed does not mean it is safe! And it’s not just abuse of prescription painkillers; all pharmaceuticals have risks, many of which a lot of people are unaware of. Make sure any time you take a drug, you know exactly what you are getting yourself into.

There are three specific classes of drug which are potentially dangerous and so common they deserve special mention: NSAIDs, acetaminophen/paracetamol, and antibiotics. NSAIDs such as aspirin and ibuprofen are often used daily by people without even thinking about it, despite the clear evidence that their use can cause stomach problems such as ulcers, and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease (Source1, Source2). Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, is the most common cause of acute liver toxicity, which is often fatal (Source1, Source2). Acetaminophen can be found in many OTC drugs and is potentiated by alcohol, so you may not even realize how close to toxicity you come. It’s just flat out bad for your liver. Antibiotics are certainly necessary in many cases, but are highly over-prescribed, leading to drug-resistant bacteria. Plus, there is evidence that a single administration of antibiotics leads to long-term or even permanent damage to the healthy bacteria in your gut (Source).

The moral of the story is this: don’t take pharmaceutical use lightly. If at all possible, avoid the use of painkillers and other non-essential medications. When you do use pharmaceuticals, read the labels and take them as prescribed.

87. Decrease exposure to toxic chemicals in your environment.

There are all sorts of chemicals in the products that you use that can be harmful to your health. It would be impossible to completely eliminate exposure, but you do yourself a favor by reducing it. These chemicals come in all shapes and sizes and we don’t fully understand the effect they have on our health. There are entirely too many chemicals and unknowns for this section to be truly comprehensive, so I will focus on the general category of “xenoestrogens”, substances that mimic estrogen in your body.

• Here is a list of xenoestrogens and their sources, and a few simple steps for avoiding them. The steps may be simple, but they aren’t easy.
• Here is an FDA report on BPA, one of the most common xenoestrogens that is found in plastic bottles and other sources. Here is a short guide on how to avoid BPA.
• The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has an FAQ on what to buy, resources for finding out what is in your cosmetics, and a list of approved companies to buy from.
• A guide to avoiding chemicals in your sunscreen.

88. Spend more time in the sun for vitamin D.

Most people think of vitamin D as “the other thing that is good for my bones”. Did you know that in addition to protecting against multiple bone disorders, vitamin D helps prevent muscle weakness, more than a dozen types of internal cancers, multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and many other diseases (Source)? If you didn’t, you might be alarmed that in the US, 36% of young adults and 57% of general medical inpatients are deficient. The numbers are even higher in Europe (Source).

While you can get vitamin D from food sources and supplementation, the best way is to let your body produce it naturally through exposure to sunlight (without sunscreen). There are many factors that make this complicated, such as latitude, skin pigmentation, and the season, so there is no simple recommendation for how much sun exposure is optimal. Here is a decent rule of thumb: get daily sun exposure of 10-30 minutes on a large portion of your body during the middle of the day. For more information on vitamin D:

• A very informative scientific literature review of vitamin D and its health implications.
• Information on what vitamin D does in your body and the best food sources.
• Some guidelines for ideal amount of sun exposure while avoiding risks of skin cancer.

89. Exercise your mind.

A balanced lifestyle requires an attitude of lifelong learning. The world changes rapidly, and you should constantly be learning new things to adapt. Plus, being more knowledgeable can make you a more interesting person and better conversationalist (although it doesn’t make up for poor social skills). Learning can expand your world by improving your skills and opening your mind to more than one side of an issue. The brain appears to follow the “use it or lose it” principle, because of the phenomena of brain plasticity. Essentially, your brain creates new connections and becomes more efficient as you use it. And while preliminary, there is some evidence that a more cognitively active lifestyle can reduce the risk of dementia (Source). Here are some ideas to get you started on exercising your brain:

• Learn more about brain plasticity and how to take advantage of it.
• Take up new hobbies or skills. I suggest learning a new language. While not entirely comprehensive, you can find some ideas for new hobbies here.
• Lumosity.com has all sorts of brain training games.
• More info on brain training

90. Watch less TV.

I’m well aware that there are many great shows out there, and it’s ok to watch some of them. But excessive TV watching has a number of negative effects. Every hour you spend in front of the tube increases your risk of dying from all causes by 11% (Source). Watching less TV means less exposure to ads and to a lot of negativity in the news. TV disrupts your social life by taking you away from the real people around you. Finally, heavy TV viewers report less life satisfaction, higher material aspirations, and more anxiety (Source).

It can be very challenging to cut back on TV, but here are two suggestions that might help. First, you can decide to allow yourself one hour of TV watching for each hour you spend active during the day. That way you must incorporate physical activity into your life in order to watch. Second, you can follow a “no TV while eating” rule. Eating is possibly the most common time that people watch TV, and you can drastically cut back by not allowing this. Plus it makes you a more mindful eater.

91. Have a morning routine.

The morning routine has many benefits to your lifestyle, and I highly suggest you implement this along with waking up at the same time every day (#63). Use this time to exercise or accomplish whatever productive things you need to do that day. I’ve already written a complete guide to morning routines, where you can learn everything you need to know about making this time as effective as possible.

92. Brush your teeth twice a day and floss at least once.

It took me a while to start flossing, but since I started I’ve never looked back. My teeth just feel so much…cleaner! Bad breath is terrible for your social life, and this simple habit will do a lot to keep halitosis at bay. Good oral hygiene may also benefit your heart. Periodontitis, or inflammation of the gums, affects 30-50% of the adult population in the US, and is considered a significant risk factor in cardiovascular disease (Source). People who rarely brush their teeth have a significantly higher chance of having a cardiovascular event (Source). Worst of all, poor oral health is associated with an increased risk of both cardiovascular and all-cause mortality (Source1, Source2).

Besides the connection between oral health and general health, having gum problems just sucks. You certainly don’t want that, whether or not it influences your heart. Visit your dentist regularly, brush and floss, don’t consume so much sugar, blah blah blah. Want a little more detail?

• Basics of good oral hygiene.
• Nutrition for healthy teeth.

93. Practice good hygiene.

This should go without saying, but you should not be a festering cesspool of gross. Good hygiene keeps you smelling like a socially respectable person, helps prevent the spread of infections, improves food safety, and just makes life more generally clean and pleasant. Shower every day (fine, you can skip a day here and there), wash your hands after going to the bathroom or before handling food, keep your living space relatively clean, etc.

Happiness And Mental Health Habits And Behaviors

Being happy is of course a worthwhile endeavor in and of itself. But why should it be included in a post about becoming more healthy?

There is a large body of research connecting positive feelings and happiness to better health. One way happiness improves health is by it’s relationship to psychosocial factors such as better relationships, more emotional/practical support, and adaptive coping mechanisms (Source). But it’s not just these factors.

Higher well-being, independent of health related behaviors, is associated with a decreased risk of coronary heart disease (Source). In addition, subjective well-being significantly predicted a lower risk of all-cause and natural-cause mortality (Source).

How is this possible? Greater happiness is associated with decreased bodily response to stress, including lower cortisol and ambulatory heart rate (Source1, Source2). Happiness has also been associated with better immune response, better cardiovascular function, and improved sleep (Source). And these results are independent of negative feelings; it’s not just a matter of avoiding depression and anxiety, because good feelings exert their own protective effect.

Clearly, becoming happier is in the best interest of anyone who wants to live a healthier life.

Personal Habits And Behaviors For Happiness

The techniques in this section are all things that focus on you. Applying what you learn in this section will help you both get more out of life and appreciate what you already have.

94. Practice gratitude.

Practicing gratitude is without a doubt the best and most simple way to become a happier person. You have a ton to be grateful for, whether you realize it or not. You are reading this right now, which means that you both have a computer and can read. That puts you ahead of a lot of people. And I’m sure if you think about it for a moment or two, you can come up with dozens more reasons why you should be grateful. Gratitude has been clearly linked with higher subjective well-being, and there is significant evidence that the relationship is causative (Source1, Source2). In other words, practicing gratitude will make you happier (whether you are already happy or not), and not the other way around.

What are the best ways to cultivate gratitude? The most well researched and supported method is by keeping a gratitude journal, or writing a daily list of things you are grateful for. This is a pleasant, self-sustaining activity that has been proven to increase happiness considerably. For a more short term boost in mood, a general contemplation of gratitude is effective, but habitual practice is necessary for long term benefit. Another good strategy is to express gratitude to somebody else. For example, you can write a thank you letter to someone who has done something nice for you.

Need more help with this? Gotcha covered:

• Sonja Lyubomirsky, a leading researcher on the science of happiness, shares more details on how to put these gratitude techniques into practice.
• Grateful160 is a tool that I have used and found very effective. I have it email me once a day, and I reply with some thoughts on what I am grateful for at that moment. At the end of the week it sends me the previous week’s entries to look back at, which is very nice! You can have it send you reminders up to four times per day as either an email or text message.
• There are also apps that can help you keep a gratitude journal. Gratitude Journal ($.99) and Gratitude Rock ($.99) are two examples of fairly simple ones. Thankful For is a free one.
• Gratitude Stream is different in that it not only allows you to log your grateful thoughts, it also shows you a stream of grateful thoughts from around the globe.
• Live Happy is an app designed by Sonja Lyubomirksy that allows you to log happiness, contact people with thank you messages, and do a bunch of other happiness-promoting activities.

95. Follow your passion and do things you love.

In other words, you need to create meaning in your life. People who believe that their life has a meaning or purpose report higher life satisfaction and psychological well-being (Source1, Source2). Not just any random meaning will do, however. Your life purpose must be consistent with who you are as an individual, or else it won’t do much to benefit your happiness (Source). Discovering the meaning in your life is no trivial task, but it is well worth the effort. Here are some resources to help you:

• I suggest you start with this philosophical discussion of happiness and life meaning.
• Finding your own personal meaning starts with a thorough understanding of yourself and your values. Learn how to find your values and then use them to write your own personal mission statement.
• Steve Pavlina suggests you do a particular exercise to find your life purpose in about 20 minutes. Realistically, it will take longer than that, but it is still a very useful exercise.

96. Set goals and actively work towards achieving them.

This is a natural extension of finding meaning in your life. The goals that you should be working towards must be in alignment with your values and purpose. Whatever your goals are (so long as they are consistent), I encourage you to pursue them wholeheartedly. That being said, only certain types of goals actually improve long-term happiness. Extrinsic goals such as attaining wealth, status, attractiveness, or fame don’t make you happier; in fact, they might even make you less happy. On the other hand, intrinsic goals such as intimacy, personal growth, better health, and contributing to the community do lead to long term gains in happiness (Source). In addition, the goals must be your own, rather than something you feel pressured into (Source).

Given that background, what are good ways to set and achieve goals?

• When setting goals, consider the SMART acronym: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Learn more about SMART goals and how to use those criteria on its Wikipedia page.
• After you’ve set your goals, you need a good framework for how to work towards them. I’ve written a lengthy post that covers the absolute best way to achieve your goals.

96. Appreciate the beauty around you.

We are often so absorbed by the chatter going on in our minds that we fail to see or appreciate the beauty that exists all around us. To truly appreciate the beauty of something, you need to be able to focus your attention on that thing fully so as to actually process it effectively (Source). Some people are more naturally inclined to notice beauty around them (artistic types, for example), but the rest of us must consciously devote time to the appreciation of beauty.

The best way to do this is through the “noticing game“, an idea I’m borrowing from Lori at TinyBuddha. The object of the game is to notice your environment in as much detail as possible. You can do this by looking at the panorama or the whole of the scene around you, or you can hone in on one specific item and appreciate its beauty.

By the way, I highly recommend the move Cashback if you want to get an interesting perspective on beauty. Warning: there is nudity. It’s on Netflix if you want to see it.

97. Meditate for at least five minutes per day.

You are more than welcome to go above and beyond five minutes, but this can sometimes be tough for beginners. There are many different kinds of meditation, but the general idea is to get your mind to focus on one thing and one thing only for a period of time. When your mind wanders, gently bring it back to your focus. The easiest thing to focus on is your breath. Here are a couple of beginner’s guides to meditation:

• A guide from The Conscious Life
• A guide from Lifehacker, including some podcasts and tools to help meditate
• Here is a free online meditation timer where you set an amount of time and pick some soothing music that will play in the background for the duration of your meditation.
• Here is a list of apps that can help you with your meditation.

98. Use cognitive reframing to change your negative thoughts to positive ones.

When you experience an event of some kind, it does not have inherent meaning. Its meaning is a function of the way you perceive and think about the event. Let’s say I approach a pretty girl and try to start a conversation, but she ignores me and walks away. My first reaction might be along the lines of: “Oh no! She rejected me! Something must be wrong with me.” But an equally valid and much more positive interpretation might be: “Hmm…well I guess she is in a bad mood today. Oh well, her loss.”

Learning to recognize your negative thoughts and then quickly change them to more positive ones is a great skill to have for boosting your happiness. You can learn everything you need to know about cognitive reframing here.

99. Write about your negative emotions and experiences instead of holding them in.

While you may think that writing about negative experiences will make you feel worse, it is a much better method of coping than ruminating over them in your mind. In fact, writing about negative or traumatic experiences has been shown to have marked effects both on life satisfaction and various health markers (Source). This can be even more effective when you try to see the silver lining in the negative experience, but the very act of writing alone seems to make a difference.

100. Make your first thought of the day: “Great things will happen today.” 

You should always start each day on a positive note. Interestingly enough, more optimistic people have lower cortisol secretion upon awakening (Source). I’m not recommending here that you be unrealistically optimistic; thinking that something great will happen on a given day is completely within reason. Having positive expectations about the future predicts higher success rates (Source). If you anticipate good things happening to you, they are more likely to happen.

Interpersonal Relationships And Happiness

Cultivating a thriving social life is one of the best things you can do for your happiness.

101. Spend time actively socializing with friends.

Everybody needs some amount of alone time, of course. But having a strong social network is critically important, and should not be neglected. Social capital, or the strength of family, friendships, and religious and community ties supports both well-being and physical health (Source). From a health standpoint, social relationships have been associated with lower mortality and greater chance of recovery from disease (Source).

I also read a very interesting paper that tried to measure the well-being derived from social relationships and translate it into a financial amount. It determined that an increase in the level of social interaction with friends and relatives is worth up to an extra 85,000 pounds per year. This effect is partly due to how little we actually value money for our happiness, but that’s a separate issue. Feel free to read the paper for more discussion of these results.

102. Allow yourself to express positive emotions through laughing and smiling. 

This is a particularly big problem for many men out there who feel like they need to seem “tough” at all times. Suppressing positive expression requires a continuous effort to manage your response to your emotions. Plus it leads to a sense of incongruency between your inner experience and outer expression, which causes negative feelings (Source).

Being able to express positive emotions has both health and happiness related benefits. Laughter is an effective method for coping with distress. It leads to less anger and more enjoyment, feelings of dissociation from the distress, and better social relations (Source). Even forced laughter can lead to a temporary boost in happiness (Source). A genuine smile increases happiness and can also help your heart recover after a stressful event (Source).

There is one final study I want to mention before moving on. Researchers took baseball cards and determined the “smile intensity” of the players, and found that it was linked with longevity. This is obviously an imperfect study, but they were able to use a lot of public information available on these players and the fact that they all had the same occupation to control for many variables. Interesting!

103. Be a more giving person.

A lot of people think they don’t have the time or money to give to others, so they hoard what they have instead of sharing it. While this is a completely understandable viewpoint, it is also a huge mistake. This mindset stems from imagining scarcity rather than abundance. What if instead of looking at life as a zero-sum game, you recognized that giving away what you have can actually leave you with more than what you started with? Learn more about the abundance mentality.

There is scientific evidence to support this. Your subjective sense of “time affluence” can be increased by giving your time away (Source). And that is in comparison to wasting time, spending time on yourself, or even getting a windfall of free time! Similarly, spending money on other people resulted in greater happiness than spending it on oneself (Source). People don’t just say generosity makes them feel better because they are “supposed to”; giving to others activates the pleasure center in the brain (Source). This inclination towards altruism may be evolutionarily hardwired into us. Toddlers under the age of two experienced more happiness when sacrificing a treat and giving to someone else than either giving away a treat they found or eating the treat themselves (Source).

The moral of the story is that you should share what you have not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it is intrinsically rewarding. What you give doesn’t have to be money or time. You can also give other people compliments.

104. Have more sex.

I’ll bet you don’t need too much convincing that this will boost your happiness . In one study, the happiness-maximizing number of sexual partners to have had in the past year is one, and more sexual activity predicted more happiness (Source). This might suggest that married couples are happier than single individuals. There is evidence that this is the case, but it appears that happier people tend to get married more than unhappy people, so it is uncertain whether getting married would actually make you happier (Source). Sex is also an integral part of marriage; sexually inactive marriages tend to be less stable and less happy (Source). Some people speculate that casual sex in young adults can be psychologically damaging, but this is not the case (Source). To summarize my findings: be sexually active and you will probably be happier. Duh.

Let’s stray from the obvious for a moment. It turns out (safe) sex can also be very good for your health! Some benefits include reduced blood pressure, better immune function, and lower heart attack risk. Very nice!

105. Assume that other people are friendly and have positive intentions. 

If you remember correctly from #103, being kind to others appears to be genetically hardwired into us humans. The natural inclination that people have is to be altruistic. Given that, doesn’t it seem like a perfectly rational thing to assume that other people have positive intentions? I think it’s obvious that trusting others and assuming that they are friendly will lead to an improved social life. There is also evidence that being more trusting is intrinsically valuable and may cause an increase in subjective well-being (Source).

Let’s forget about scientific arguments for a moment. Finding the positive qualities in other people is an important part of your personal development. As you get better at finding the positive aspects of other people, you become more proficient at finding the positive aspects of yourself. If you are interested in learning more, I’ve written a detailed post on how to see the good in other people.

106. Learn to forgive others and let go of grudges.

One of the hardest things you can do is learn to forgive others who have wronged you in some way. Think for a moment about what unforgiveness actually is. The refusal to forgive someone else is a self-imposed stressor. By not forgiving someone, you are essentially punishing yourself for what the other person did to you! When put this way, doesn’t holding a grudge seem like a stupid idea?

And if refusing to forgive someone is a stressor, you might expect it to have some negative health effects as well. Both forgiveness (the specific act) and forgivingness (a disposition or personality trait) have been found to improve the body’s physiological response to stress through lower blood pressure, heart rate, and quicker recovery from acute stressors (Source1, Source2, Source3). A word of caution though: people who will only conditionally forgive others, such as in exchange for compensation or an apology, have increased mortality risk (Source). You must be willing to let go of your grudge regardless of the other person’s response.

Cultivating a forgiving attitude is no easy task. A helpful first step is to find the positive intention behind the other person’s actions (see #105).  Beyond that, here are a couple of blog posts I think will be useful:

• Here are 30 suggestions from TinyBuddha blog readers.
• You can read a very interesting perspective on forgiveness along with a step by step guide to forgiving someone on the Deliberate Receiving blog.
• Perhaps even more challenging than forgiving others is forgiving yourself after you have wronged someone else. I’ve had a particularly trying experience with this, and I wrote about how to forgive yourself over at TinyBuddha.

107. Get yourself out of toxic relationships. 

A toxic relationship is one in which the other person drags you down, makes you feel angry, or drains your energy in some way. When you are involved in one of these relationships it can be hard to see and accept it for what it is, particularly when you are more emotionally invested in it. A toxic relationship doesn’t have to be romantic; certain “friends”, family members, or coworkers could be toxic to you as well. So, how do you extricate yourself from a toxic relationship?

• The first step is to accept that you are in one. Here is a list of signs that your relationship is toxic (romantic relationships, specifically).
• Here is a more general set of indicators that you are in a toxic relationship, plus some advice on how to deal with it.
• Finally, here is a step by step guide to getting out of your toxic relationships.

Conclusion

I spent about 80 hours in the past week writing this 16000 word behemoth, and consequentially have been neglecting my health. That’s why I’m going to keep this conclusion short 

A healthy lifestyle is built on a foundation of healthy habits. You don’t need to change everything about yourself at once. Just pick something from this list that resonated with you, apply it consistently until it is easy, and then pick another one. It’s as simple as that.

The post 107 Healthy Habits And Behaviors For A Healthier Lifestyle appeared first on Feel Happiness.

Your health is your life.

Well, ok. That may have been a bit melodramatic, but…

Your Health Is Your First Priority

There are many subgenres in the personal development/self-improvement field, such as happiness, productivity, confidence, finances, independence, consciousness, and so on.

It can be tough to decide where to begin.

I know that I can improve in all of these areas, but it’s nearly impossible to tackle them all at once.

What has worked well for me and what I recommend for most people is to focus first on taking care of their health. Here’s why:

•  There are many aspects under your control. Sure, in the short term you may not be able to control all the injuries or illnesses that you can get. But you do have the ability to make healthy or unhealthy choices many times throughout each day.
• You can get tested and measure variables. Just about any aspect of your health can be measured nowadays. With a small investment, you can figure out what health-related problem areas you have and then work to correct them.
• It’s very easy to measure progress. If you can measure the variables, you can also measure progress. There are all sorts of areas you might want to progress in (lower cholesterol, increase bench press, etc.), and being able to measure them allows you to see if what you are doing is working and correct course. Most other types of self-improvement don’t have this advantage.

I’ve found that when I take care of my health habits, the rest takes care of itself.

Making healthy choices regularly builds self-improvement momentum. Paying attention to your health makes you much more conscious in other areas.

For example, in order to eat a more nutritious diet, you would be well served to cook your own meals instead of going out to eat. You will end up saving a lot of money this way, and you will become more independent as your cooking skill improves.

Small changes can snowball and have a big impact. A single, simple habit change might have wide-reaching effects in your life while helping you live longer.

Your body is the closest thing to you, and as stated earlier, you have a lot of control over it. If you can’t take care of your body, how can you take care of anything else?

You can’t expect to manage a social life, career, relationships, family, and balance your checkbook if you can’t manage the aspect of life that you have the most control over.

Ultimately, that is why you need to take care of your health first. Healthy habits are the foundation for everything else in your life.

A Healthy Lifestyle Is Important For Your Happiness

Well duh.

Everyone hates being sick. But most people don’t really appreciate their health until it’s gone, so they don’t take care of themselves when they are healthy.

This is a huge mistake, of course.

The most important variable in my mathematical model of happiness is your longevity. By extending your lifespan, you can get significantly more total happiness.

Being ill is one of the biggest factors that lead to depression, or just reduced happiness in general.

On the other hand, having optimum health will improve your happiness beyond what it would be when you are merely not sick.

Neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine that are responsible for the experiences of happiness, pleasure, and motivation will function better when their environment is taken care of.

In other words, a proper diet, physical exercise, good sleep habits, and a lifestyle that includes stress management will vastly improve not just your health but your happiness as well.

The Sub-Categories Of A Healthy Lifestyle

There are three primary areas you can control that effect your health. They are your diet, exercise habits, and lifestyle.

You must be taking care of ALL of them. If you are weak in any one of these areas, your health and by extension, happiness, will suffer greatly.

Luckily, you don’t need to be a superstar in every area in order to have good health (although it certainly doesn’t hurt). The minimum requirements for each of these categories are fairly easy to attain, even though most people don’t.

Since we are talking about personal development here, you should strive for excellence rather than just the minimum.

But the most important thing is simply that you improve.

Wherever you are starting out with regards to health is ok. Accept that you may not be taking good care of yourself now, and do something about it.

Diet

People don’t give diet enough credit for its role in their health.

So many people I know, when trying to lose fat or gain muscle, would just think about working out more. Other than some vague notion of “eating less” or “eating more”, they almost completely ignored their diets.

I guess many people seem to think that adding a couple extra hours of working out into their schedule is easier than completely changing something as fundamental to them as their diets.

Luckily, healthy eating doesn’t have to be challenging. And like most things in life, it gets easier with practice.

Unfortunately, the study of nutrition is highly politicized and not well understood. But even with the million and one different dietary philosophies that exist, there are just a few principles of a healthy diet that you should keep in mind.

If you want to go on some sort of intense diet, count calories, measure your food, and so on, be my guest. But for most people, keeping these four principles in mind will be more than enough to do wonders for their health.

1. Eat Whole, Unprocessed Foods

If you were to apply just one thing from this entire post, eating whole foods would be it.

When you go to the supermarket, most of the food that you see is prepackaged and has undergone extensive chemical processing. It hardly even resembles anything natural.

Don’t eat this crap.

Yes, it’s almost impossible to avoid all chemicals and harmful processing in your diet. But you should do whatever you can to minimize it.

Eat whole foods. Most of what you eat should only have one ingredient. This means things like nuts, fruits, vegetables, some meats (check the label, preferably grass-fed), eggs, etc.

Pay particular attention to reducing the “white” carbohydrates and sugars in your diet. Unless the ingredients list says “100% whole grain” or something along those lines, it is a white carbohydrate and you should do your best not to consume it.

Reduce your consumption of breads, pastas, cookies, cereals, fries, pastries, and so on.

Again, it is very challenging to eliminate these foods entirely. If you can pull it off, good for you! But if not, just try your best to minimize them.

2. Introduce Variety Into Your Diet

Our bodies are very complex and require many different nutrients in order to function properly.

Different foods contain different nutrients and in multiple forms, so it’s best to consume a wide variety of foods to ensure you are getting what you need.

Here is where many fad diets fail, and where most nutrition science gets complicated.

The three main macronutrients are carbohydrates, fat, and protein. You need all three.

But in what proportion?

Based on my own personal experience as well as extensive research I’ve done, a high fat and low carb diet seems most healthy. I’ve looked and felt my best when over 40% of the calories I was consuming came from fat.

That being said, the science is convoluted and everyone is different, so I can’t in good conscience make a blanket recommendation.

If you stick to eating whole foods, almost any proportion should work, so long as you get some of each.

Of special mention here are the omega 3 fatty acids. These can be found in fatty fish such as salmon as well as walnuts, flax seeds, and a bunch of other foods. Eat more of these.

And then there are micronutrients. These are all the vitamins and minerals that your body needs so that it can undergo the various chemical reactions that are necessary to keep you alive.

It would be an absolute mess for you to try and keep track of all of them.

By eating a variety of whole foods (including animal products, vegetables, nuts, fruits, etc.), you will most likely get what you need.

3. Eat Loads Of Vegetables

Seriously, loads. Aim for at least seven servings per day, which has been linked with happiness and mental well-being¹.

Your diet can always use more veggies.

Most vegetables are nearly devoid of calories, they are very filling, and they contain tons and tons of health-sustaining micronutrients.

And even though you may not have believed it as a kid, vegetables can also be delicious. Just learn how to prepare them well.

The principle of variety is important here.

Try to consume as many different kinds of vegetables as possible, paying particular attention to their color. Different colors mean different nutrients.

Focus on leafy green vegetables such as spinach and kale, as well as cruciferous vegetables like cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbage.

I should point out that while fruits are also important in your diet and contain a ton of antioxidants and nutrients, they do not get a blank check for consumption. Because they have so much sugar, fruits should be consumed in moderation.

Eat. More. Vegetables.

4. Practice Mindful Eating

The final dietary principle is not about what you eat, but how you eat it.

To eat mindfully is to be aware of what you are eating. It would be unrealistic to recommend that you practice mindful eating at every meal, but you should make it a part of your lifestyle.

Sadly, most of us scarf food down while watching TV, on the way to work, or while doing something else. This makes eating less enjoyable and causes you to eat a lot more.

To learn everything you need to know about mindful eating, check out this post: A Primer On Mindful Eating.

I also want to mention two other dietary methods or concepts that are optional, but very relevant to mindful eating: Caloric Restriction (CR) and Intermittent Fasting (IF).

People who practice CR deliberately reduce their calorie intake by 15-40% every day. While there are many different ways of fasting, those who practice IF all integrate into their weekly schedule significant lengths of time (usually 24 hrs) without consuming any calories, and then eat normally the rest of the time.

Both of these practices have been shown to drastically improve longevity. Feel free to give them a try if you want (I personally have enjoyed the occasional fast).

If not, just be mindful of how much you eat and try to keep your calorie intake in check unless you are deliberately trying to gain muscle.

For more info:

• 6 Tricks To Consume Fewer Calories
  
• Avoid Binge Eating

Physical Activity

If you are inactive (like most Americans), you will die a lot sooner and you will suffer serious health problems before then.

There. I said it.

You absolutely must incorporate physical activity into your life if you want to be healthy. Luckily, there are many ways you can do so.

The types of exercise you should include will vary depending on what your intentions and your individual circumstances are. A fitness model trying to lose the last 4 pounds before a contest will exercise differently than an obese individual who needs to lose 150 pounds.

To make this simpler, I will start with the most necessary aspect of physical activity and move towards the more optional types.

1. Moving Around

The most important part of physical activity is to have a generally active lifestyle.

Even if you regularly work out, you cannot just spend the rest of your time sitting on the couch. The human body isn’t meant for that.

Instead, make sure you move around a lot. Nothing intense. Just spend more time standing up or walking around.

Here’s a simple habit to get into: make a point to get up from your chair every half hour, for one full minute. Either keep checking the clock or set a reminder. This is very easy and can go a long way for your health.

If you can walk somewhere instead of driving, do it. If you can park further away from where you must drive to, do it. If you can take the stairs instead of the elevator, do it.

All these things add up. There are so many ways to be more active and move around more.

It may not seem that important, but I can assure you that the simple act of moving around more will do wonders for your health.

2. Resistance Training

So many people are hesitant to try resistance training.

It tends to be women and people who are trying to lose weight that most often refuse to lift up a barbell, because they think it will make them gain weight or look too muscular.

I can assure you, these fears are unfounded.

Resistance training is the most important type of exercise you can do if you are trying to lose weight (or gain weight), and it takes time before you start looking freakishly muscular.

If you aren’t doing resistance training, you should be. Start slowly, once or twice per week, and build up to 3-4 times weekly.

You can use free weights, bodyweight exercises, kettlebells, resistance bands, etc. Try to avoid using machines, because they can build muscular imbalances and lead to injuries in the long run.

Stick to compound exercises, or ones that utilize multiple muscle groups. These are the healthiest and most effective. For example, bench press, deadlifts, squats, push ups, pull ups, and dips are all compound movements.

3. Cardio

Unfortunately, the most common type of exercise is also the least important.

When people decide they want to “get in shape”, the first thing they think to do is to start jogging. This is a mistake. Resistance training is more important.

That being said, cardio can still play a role in your healthy lifestyle.

Just as there are many types of resistance training, there are also many types of cardiovascular exercises. Jogging, sprinting, swimming, cycling, and interval training all fall into the cardio category.

They type of cardio you should do depends on your goals.

I don’t recommend long distance running as a means of improving your health. If you enjoy running marathons as sport, fine. But it can wreak havoc on your joints and reduces muscle mass.

If you want to gain weight/muscle, you should limit your total cardio time. It won’t help with that goal, even if it could benefit your general fitness.

If you want to lose weight/fat, you should sprint or do interval training, which has the greatest metabolic effect.

For everyone else, you should do whatever cardio you enjoy, and do it in moderation.

Other Lifestyle Factors

Besides diet and exercise, there are a number of other lifestyle factors that impact your health.

Here I will only focus on the three most important ones: getting quality sleep, managing your stress, and moderation.

1. Get Enough Sleep

I know, this is so much easier said than done.

There aren’t enough hours in the day, and it can seem impossible to find the time to get the extra hour or two of sleep that you probably need.

The reality is, not getting enough sleep drains your energy and productivity. So getting an extra hour of sleep means that the time you spend awake will be more effective.

While there are many different techniques that help you get more sleep, I’ve found one to be far and away the most useful.

Wake up at the same time every day, even weekends (a morning routine can help with this). Then go to bed whenever you are tired.

After a few days your body will adjust, and you will wake up feeling more energized.

You don’t need to worry about when you go to sleep, just the time you wake up. This makes it easier to stick to it.

Need to stay up late one night to get work done, party, or for no reason at all? No problem! Just know that when your alarm goes off in the morning, you have to get up.

This schedule is both flexible and will help train you to get the optimal level of sleep for yourself.

If your coffee drinking makes this challenging, learn how to break your caffeine addiction.

2. Manage Your Stress

Chronic stress doesn’t just suck. It’s also very bad for your health.

There are all sorts of ways to manage your stress, from yoga and meditation to playing sports and taking a nap.

It doesn’t matter what method you use, as long as you find it effective and you actually use it.

I suggest you find a productive activity that you enjoy in order to manage stress in the long term. But when you experience acute stress, try closing your eyes and taking ten deep breaths.

Stress in small amounts is normal and healthy, but most people let stress become a regular part of their lives, and that can lead to all sorts of disease later on. Not to mention it just sucks to feel stressed out all the time.

Don’t let this happen to you.

3. Everything In Moderation

The final principle of a healthy lifestyle is moderation.

Find balance in your life. Almost anything you do is acceptable, so long as it is in moderation.

The classic example here is with alcohol consumption. Enjoying a drink or two is fine, but when you are drinking a six pack every night you have a problem.

But moderation doesn’t just apply to drugs, alcohol, and vices.

Spending too much time working out, obsessing over what you eat, and working 80 hour weeks are all unhealthy.

Too much moderation itself is also a problem. If you go out and binge drink on a Friday night, or you go a week without working out, or you eat a full bar of dark chocolate (mmmm….), don’t beat yourself up.

It’s ok to let yourself go…occasionally.

Everything in moderation, even moderation.

Conclusion

A healthy lifestyle need not be complicated.

The ten principles above are both simple and a very workable guide to being healthy.

You are more than welcome to do more than this if you want, but these principles will go a long way towards keeping you healthy.

Before ending this article, there is one point that absolutely must be mentioned.

While you may have goals that include looking better by gaining muscle or losing fat, what is truly important is your health.

Be at peace with how you look. Nobody is perfect, and that is ok. What really matters is living a healthy lifestyle, and looking better is just a side benefit of good health.

I will soon be compiling a list of simple healthy habits and behaviors that you can adopt. Do you have any suggestions?

FOOTNOTES:

1. http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/October2FruitAndVeg2012BlanchOswaldStewartBrown.pdf

The post A Healthy Lifestyle Is Built Upon These 10 Principles appeared first on Feel Happiness.

“If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

 “If you own this story you get to write the ending.” 
― Brené Brown

Ancient Romans understood the concept of personal responsibility.

After a Roman arch was completed, the engineer who built it had to stand underneath it when the scaffolding was removed.

While you might not get crushed by a giant arch if you make mistakes, you still have personal responsibility for your actions.

What is personal responsibility?

It is taking conscious control of your responses to the events and circumstances in your life.

You are responsible for yourself, whether you like it or not. What you do with your life and what you have done already is up to you.

“But Mike! Things happen to me that I have no control over all the time!”

Sure. And while you may not be able to control everything that happens to you, you are nevertheless responsible for how you think, act, and feel in response to those things.

Responsibility cannot be split. If you “give” someone else any of the responsibility, you take it off yourself and can use it as an excuse to slack off when the going gets rough. Do you think the engineers in ancient Rome shared responsibility for their creations?

Traditionally, we have viewed the notion of “responsibility” in a negative way; it is a matter of obligation or of having duties. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

But as I will argue, accepting personal responsibility for your life is actually quite liberating.

Benefits Of Accepting Personal Responsibility For Your Life

There may be no more impactful thing you can do for yourself than to take responsibility for your life. There are all sorts of benefits that you will realize, and I will go over the most important ones here.

Freedom

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

By accepting personal responsibility, you gain the freedom to create your own life, any way you want it.

When you admit to yourself that you are solely responsible for your life, you immediately recognize how much control you really do have.

Any goal that you want to achieve is within your control, and external circumstances don’t control your fate.

Personal responsibility is also the foundation for personal development in general. By acknowledging your role in the process, you give yourself the opportunity to improve.

Trust And Respect From Other People

Let’s say you make a mistake while working on a project at work. If you admit your mistake, people are more likely to believe you about other things you do. Your word has more meaning to other people when you take responsibility.

But it’s not just a matter of trust. You also earn lots of respect when you take responsibility for your actions.

It is rare for someone to willingly and without hesitation fess up for their mistakes, so when you do, you will stick out. If you develop a reputation for being the guy who accepts responsibility for his actions, people will often simply ignore the fact that you made a mistake altogether.

Fewer Negative Emotions

There are all sorts of negative emotions that come with not accepting personal responsibility.

When you blame others, you may feel anger or resentment towards that person. You will almost invariably feel guilty or ashamed.

The worst part about denying responsibility is an overall sense of powerlessness. When you feel like you don’t have control over your life, you can easily become depressed.

Roadblocks To Accepting Personal Responsibility

I wish I could say it is trivially easy to start taking responsibility for your life, but there are roadblocks that you must learn to recognize.

Each of the following is a defense mechanism employed by your mind to help protect your self-image. Taking responsibility makes you vulnerable, and your ego doesn’t like vulnerability one bit.

Blaming Others

“Attack the evil that is within yourself, rather than attacking the evil that is in others.” 
― Confucius

When something goes wrong, do you immediately look for some external culprit?

It doesn’t really matter whose fault it is, anyways. What happened, happened. The question now is: how are you going to respond to it?

Unfortunately, all too many people fall into the trap of responding by blaming someone else for the problem. They shift their own responsibility onto someone else, and judge the other person for having failed.

It’s so easy to say, “I didn’t get the TPS reports done on time because so-and-so didn’t send me the information!”

When you blame another person, you give up control of the situation and your ego feels a little bit better. But even if it’s their fault, you are still responsible.

The fact remains that you didn’t do what you had to get done, regardless of whose fault it was. Now it’s just that much harder to move forward and respond in a productive way.

You spend your energy focusing on the wrong thing, like resenting another person, when you could use that energy to advance in your goals.

Making Excuses

“Every excuse I ever heard made perfect sense to the person who made it.” 

― Dr. Daniel T. Drubin

Making excuses is similar to blaming others, except it involves blaming circumstances instead of people.

When you set new goals, you often have a sort of “backup excuse” in case you are to fail. Think about this for a minute and you’ll almost certainly notice a backup excuse for one of your goals.

For example, I want to get 1000 subscribers to this blog by the end of the year. If I fail, I already know what my excuse will be: I was busy working on other things and couldn’t work full time on this blog.

This gives me an easy way out, and I can avoid the responsibility for the failure (which hopefully doesn’t happen).

Obviously, this is an unhealthy way of thinking. Success or failure in that goal is on me and no one else, regardless of external circumstances. And by taking responsibility and recognizing this, I am more likely to take the necessary actions to succeed.

Complaining

Complaining is simply a focus on what is wrong. This will make things seem worse than they are, and can easily distract you from all the good things going on in your life.

Complaining can easily become a habit, at which point you will always see things in a negative light. And your focus is on the negative aspect of your situation, rather than what you can do to change it.

The more you complain, the easier it becomes to not take personal responsibility. “It’s too cold out, I’m so uncomfortable” becomes the norm instead of “I should put on a jacket”.

A useful technique to combat regular complaining is to reframe your thoughts.

Playing The Victim

When you blame others, make excuses, and complain enough, you may develop a victim’s mentality.

The victim mentality is the opposite of personal responsibility. In fact, playing victim involves surrendering control over your life to external circumstance.

This is when people give up on controlling their own lives because they see themselves as having no influence. It’s a waste of their time.

Everyone will feel like this at least on occasion, but you can’t let it become regular. Once you are experiencing learned helplessness, it becomes very challenging to take personal responsibility.

How To Take Responsibility For Your Life

You need to make a conscious decision to become the sole person responsible for your life, and you need to make that decision now.

But you can’t just say you’ve decided to take personal responsibility and then have it be true. Surrendering responsibility is a habit that you need to remove, and here is how.

Recognize Your Choices

At any given time and in any given situation, you have a choice of how to respond.

It doesn’t matter how dire your circumstances are. You could be locked away in an extraordinary rendition prison, but you still control your mental state.

You can choose to focus on something positive, no matter how negative or un-free a situation you are in.

From now on, look at the choices you have available to you instead of feeling constrained.

Take The Blame

When something goes wrong, openly acknowledge it as your fault, even if you feel there were external circumstances that contributed.

If you shift responsibility to someone or something else, you will remain stuck in a rut because “it’s ____’s fault!”

It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. When you shift responsibility, you give up control of the situation.

Don’t be afraid to take risks or make important decisions. Don’t be afraid to mess up, even though it can be “scary” to take responsibility for your actions. It’s even scarier what you may have missed by acting out of fear.

So, when there is a problem, don’t ask yourself who is to blame. Instead, ask yourself: “What could I have done differently?”

This shifts the focus onto your control of the situation instead of feeling like a victim.

Accept Yourself And Your Circumstances

Accept responsibility for who you are right now.

It’s not other people who made you the way you are, but only your own thoughts and actions.

Sure, many of those thoughts and actions were conditioned in you by your family, society, friends, or any other external influence.

But it is you alone who had the thought or performed the action. And it is you alone who must take responsibility for them.

You don’t need to be happy with your situation or your life as it is, you just need to accept yourself and the fact that you are the one who got yourself there.

While negative circumstances may have had a significant impact on you and you may have experienced huge amounts of social conditioning, dwelling on them or blaming others won’t help you improve your situation.

Only through accepting personal responsibility can you move forward.

For more information on this, check out these posts:

Accept Yourself

Take Off Your Social Mask

Stop Relying On External Validation

Don’t depend on other people to feel good about yourself.

If you need external validation to be happy, you surrender personal responsibility for making yourself happy.

Sure, external validation is pleasant, and there is nothing wrong with that. But you cannot be dependent on it for your happiness.

Learn to validate yourself through acting authentically to your own values. This way you are in total control of your own happiness, because it is solely based on the way you act.

Be Open To New Ideas And Beliefs

You should be constantly challenging your own beliefs and filters through which you view the world.

Your limiting beliefs make it significantly more challenging to take personal responsibility. If you think that unless you have the body of a model you won’t get laid, you are making an excuse for your failure in a particular area. You lose motivation to do anything about it.

Forgive Yourself And Others

People make mistakes.

It’s inevitable. You do it. Other people do it. Everyone does.

You must learn to both forgive yourself and to forgive other people for any mistakes.

If you mess up, don’t beat yourself up over it. Just take responsibility and move on.

When someone else messes up, don’t hold it against them. If you cling to a desire to blame them, then you are shifting the focus away from your own personal responsibility for your life.

You Are Not Responsible For Other People

Accepting personal responsibility involves letting go of the need to feel responsible for others.

Everybody is responsible for themselves, whether they realize it or not.

If you feel burdened by other people, you need to let go of them. It isn’t your duty to take care of them, just as it isn’t their duty to look after you.

Conclusion

“In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” 
― Eleanor Roosevelt

Taking responsibility for your life can be a very challenging and lifelong process, but it is necessary if you want to truly be happy.

You cannot possibly live authentically to your own values without taking responsibility for your own life.

The post Take Personal Responsibility For Your Life And Your Happiness appeared first on Feel Happiness.

I have been managing Feel Happiness for just over a year now, and I’m proud of what I have accomplished so far.

From the beginning, my intention has been to help people live happier lives. This mission has served me well enough.

However, I have recently begun to question myself.

I know that I “like” being happy, but what is happiness anyways?

Do I want to experience the most possible happiness over my lifetime? Do I want to create the most total happiness for the world? Or do I want to have a number of intensely happy experiences in a short period of time?

Does happiness involve self-sacrifice? Does there need to be a meaning of life in order to find happiness? Or perhaps finding happiness is the meaning itself?

These are just a few of the questions that have been on my mind recently.

It would be irresponsible of me to continue writing in order to “help people live happier lives” when I don’t even know what that means.

That’s where this post comes in.

Here I will explore some of these questions in detail. By the end, I should know exactly why I am writing what I write, and you should understand exactly why you are reading it.

The point is not to define the word happiness per se, but to come up with some positive notion of living the good life. I’m willing to equate that with happiness, even if it isn’t scientifically rigorous.

Note: What you are about to read contains a lot of strange words and definitions. Don’t get too hung up on the words; they are merely placeholders for the ideas behind them. When I call something “happiness”, try not to let your preconceived notions of what happiness is get in the way.

The Challenge Of Defining Happiness

When you stop to think about it, it’s hard to really pin down what happiness is.

People use the word all the time to mean many different things: pleasure, life satisfaction, good mood, contentment, subjective well-being, etc.

But those things are all completely unique! Which combination of these things is equivalent to happiness?

A good definition of happiness depends on what you are using the word for.

A scientist studying happiness may require a definition that can be quantified and measured so that it can be more easily analyzed.

But for us, that isn’t necessary. In fact, the concept of happiness is ultimately a folk notion, and thus a matter of practical concern for ordinary people trying to lead good lives.

So how do we use the concept of happiness in our day to day lives?

I can think of four, which I will arrange in order of importance here:

1. Deliberating over choices. For example, you may ask yourself, “Which would make me happier: becoming an actuary or becoming a writer?” Happiness is often used as measure for important decisions, but it is not so much used for less important decisions, like what to wear today.
   
2. Evaluating someone’s condition. This can be either yourself or someone else. If you haven’t seen your friend in a while, you may judge them based on how happy they are. If they are happy, you would say they are doing well overall.
3. Help make predictions. Happiness has inertia. If I am happy now, it is likely to extend some distance in the future, be it days or seconds. So if you know that your friend is happy, you might find them more pleasant to be around and attempt to spend more time with them in the near future. Conversely, if my friend is depressed, I know that I’ll have a harder time attracting a woman when we go to the bar together.
4. Explain things. Your unhappiness at your job can be used to explain your desire to make a career change. Or if someone you met doesn’t return your call, it could be because they are unhappy about something, so you don’t take it personally.

A proper definition of happiness should be able to do these things, particularly the first two.

In addition, it needs to allow you to assess your level of happiness at any given time. You don’t need to be too precise, but if you can’t judge whether you are generally happy or unhappy at that moment, the definition ceases to be practical.

The Idea Of Intrinsic Value And The Good Life

Intrinsic value is a philosophical concept referring to the value that something has for its own sake.

Put another way, the value is an end itself rather than a means to an end.

For example, Aristotle believed that happiness was an end in itself. You seek happiness for the sake of happiness, not for anything else, and everything you do is to get more happiness. In his view, something like wealth would not have intrinsic value, because it is a means to the end of getting happiness.

Different world views have different intrinsic values at their core. Nihilists believe there is no intrinsic value, humanists believe that human flourishing is an intrinsic value, and utilitarians believe that utility is an intrinsic value.

In order to live “the good life”, you need to have a lot of positive intrinsic value.

Naturally, you must therefore figure out what qualities have intrinsic value to you in order to effectively live the good life.

What Happiness Isn’t

Philosophers, scientists, psychologists, and laypeople have been trying to find a good meaning for happiness for thousands of years.

What I want is to come up with a worldview that focuses on being happy to live the good life. As I’ve said before, this is not easy.

Before trying to define what this is, we should start by ruling out what this isn’t.

Objective Well-Being And Quantitative Methods

First things first, there is no good measure of objective well-being that I would be willing to equate with happiness.

Having a certain level of status, achievement, wealth, or health, is not enough to make someone happy.

There is also no way that we can take the factors that encapsulate happiness and distill them down into a number.

Sure, we can administer psychological tests, and give someone a rating for certain potential aspects of happiness (life satisfaction, positive affect, etc.). But these qualities themselves are not objective!

So, happiness must possess at least some degree of subjectivity and uniqueness to each individual, and is more qualitative than quantitative.

Hedonism

One of the first and most intuitive ideas for a definition of happiness is hedonism.

Hedonists seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

While pleasure definitely has the potential to be one aspect of happiness, it doesn’t seem reasonable that it would be the only thing of intrinsic value.

Consider this thought experiment by the philosopher Robert Nozick.

Imagine a machine that was capable of providing you with whatever pleasurable experiences you want, and you couldn’t distinguish those experiences from ones outside the machine.

Given the choice, would you prefer this machine to real life?

If pleasure were the only thing with intrinsic value, the correct answer would be yes. But in practice, most people say no, for a few reasons.

First, most people want to actually do certain things and not just have the experience of doing them. I don’t just want the satisfaction of having written a book, but also to know that I wrote it and the feeling isn’t a deception. Both of those pleasures (satisfaction and knowing that I did it) are important parts of my desire to write a book.

The second reason is that you actually want to be some type of person. As Nozick said, “Someone floating in a tank is just an indeterminate blob.” Couldn’t have said it better myself! It’s as though your identity would be committing suicide, because there is no way to determine what kind of a person you are if you are just hooked up to a machine all the time.

Finally, that machine limits you to a man-made reality. This world is no deeper than a world that people can construct. Even if you can experience a simulated contact with something of deeper significance, you can’t actually experience it. I’m talking about more spiritual things here.

Personally, I would not plug into the experience machine, and therefore I reject hedonism as my worldview for finding happiness.

And by the way, if you found this discussion at all interesting, I recommend you watch the movie Vanilla Sky.

Desire Theory

The desire theory equates happiness with getting what you want, or satisfying your desires.

This is definitely a step in the right direction from hedonism, but it’s still not quite right.

Let’s say one of my desires is to memorize every episode of the Simpsons (don’t judge me). No matter how great it would be to satisfy this desire, it just doesn’t seem to add up to a happy life.

There needs to be something more.

So let’s add another layer. Maybe happiness is some mix of hedonic pleasure, the satisfaction of your desires, and some objective measures (attaining certain status, good health, being charitable enough, etc.).

This seems like a step in the right direction, but how do we determine which objective measures are most important? Is having high social status really an end in itself? Adopting this theory would be highly complicated and impractical for a layperson, so it might as well be useless to us.

Cognitive vs. Emotional Aspects Of Happiness

Cognitive aspects of happiness require thought, such as whether you are satisfied with life on the whole. Emotional aspects are what you feel, or the experience of positive emotional states.

Which of these types would happiness really fall under?

To me, a good life would involve both cognitive AND emotional aspects in order to be complete.

Life satisfaction by itself would not be sufficient to determine my welfare. Life satisfaction involves serious consideration of ethics, which convolutes its relationship to happiness¹.

If I have certain ethical beliefs that I follow, I might be satisfied with my life. But if they were too draconian I might be missing out on pleasure and not truly enjoy life as it happens.

Conversely, emotional considerations also don’t capture the entirety of happiness. You can experience lots of pleasure, but if you don’t have a positive assessment of your life situations, you will be full of regret and not happy².

Cultural Issues And Happiness

Different cultures have very different conceptions of what makes a happy life.

A lot of research has compared Eastern and Western conceptions, but I’ll bet that most cultures have their own ideas.

In the west, happiness is based strongly on a person’s internal evaluation (cognitive) of them self, whereas in the east, external evaluation is more important³.

Similarly, subjective well-being in the east emphasizes role obligation, and subjective well-being in the west is related to personal accountability and pursuit of goals⁴.

Well, Now What?

We just went through an awful lot of information. What do we have to show for it?

Or as Homer Simpson said after his submarine was hit by a torpedo, “Enough of what’s out! What’s in?”

I’ve drawn two primary conclusions from the above discussion:

• Subjectivity. What makes a person happy is very personal, and it can’t be determined from the outside looking in. Only the individual can decide what makes them happy.
  
• Values. The subjective aspect of happiness comes down to the different values people hold. This would explain cultural differences, and why some people have such heated and differing opinions on the matter! What has intrinsic value to you?

Existentialism, Meaning, And Happiness

One particular worldview that I have always been fascinated by is existentialism.

Existentialists argue that there is nothing that holds intrinsic value universally. Because of this, many people with only a surface level knowledge of existentialism find it incredibly depressing and defeatist.

But for whatever reason, I’ve always been intrigued.

I’m not going to try and convince you to become an existentialist, but we can use their insights to help discover our new view of happiness.

Existence Precedes Essence

We all come into existence before we define ourselves. We are all individuals, and not the labels that other people use (and that we tend to accept) to define us.

Your true “essence” is the life that you lead. You can only define yourself through your actions, and you are wholly responsible for those actions.

In this way, you determine your own values and create your own meaning. Instead of there being a quality that holds intrinsic value for everyone, you have the freedom to choose your own meaning for life.

Each individual is solely responsible for giving their own life a meaning, and then living that meaning in a passionate and sincere way.

Authenticity

The idea of authenticity is kind of like the popular notion of “being yourself”.

Do you act morally because it is something that “moral people” do? Or is your choice one that you made on your own, regardless of the social sanctions implied by your actions?

Authenticity is acting in accordance with your values.

You can think of your life as an unfolding story. To act authentically is to be the author of your own story. On the other hand, an inauthentic life would be one in which you allow other forces to write your story for you.

This says nothing about what the right or wrong way to live your life is. Rather, authenticity is about how you live your life; do you live it as yourself, or do you live it to fit into certain roles?

Final Thoughts On Existentialism And Happiness

Camus, an existentialist author, said, “But what is happiness other than the simple harmony between man and the life he leads?”

I think this is spot on. But what creates this harmony between man and his life?

The answer is meaning.

How To Live A Happy Life

At this point, we have discovered enough about what happiness is that we can now dissect what it actually takes to live such a life.

While it may not always seem easy to be happy, you must first recognize that you have control. You have the power to choose whether you are happy or not.

I’ve distilled the “process” of living a happy life down into five steps.

1. Take Responsibility For Your Life.

First things first: you must realize and accept that you and only you are responsible for your life and for your happiness.

Sure, things will happen to you that you can’t control. But you can control how you respond to them, and nothing and no one will ever take that ability away from you.

Whether you decide to accept personal responsibility or not, you are responsible. What you do with your life is up to you.

If you aren’t happy, it’s up to you to make it happen. This means that you must take conscious control of your reaction to the events and circumstances around you.

2. Know Your Values And Your Purpose.

Without committing yourself to some meaning or purpose, you will drift along aimlessly.

You have values, and it is up to you to discover what they are. Through these values you can determine your mission or purpose.

It is important to note that your values will change throughout your life. The things that I used to stand for in high school are completely different from the things that matter to me now.

Knowing yourself is a continuous process of trying to find meaning in your world.

3. Cultivate Awareness.

To be aware is to be present in the moment while simultaneously cognizant of your values.

This doesn’t mean you must be consciously thinking about your values all the time (in fact, you shouldn’t), you should merely be aware of what they are.

Cultivating awareness is a lifelong process, and no one (except maybe a few Buddhist monks) can be aware at all times. For normal people like you and me, steady improvement is the name of the game.

What I mean by awareness here is not exactly what people often mean when they say “being in the moment”. It also includes recognizing the filters through which you view the world and being open to new possibilities.

So if you are religious, you need to recognize that you are interpreting your reality through your religious filter. Other people will interpret their realities through a secular filter, and you must accept those differences.

At any given moment, you should be present and experiencing it while knowing that a different experience of that moment would be just as legitimate.

4. Recognize The Choice You Have In Every Moment.

In every moment there is a choice. You have a multitude of different actions you can take.

There is no need to dwell on this choice, you should just be aware of it.

Right now I am writing up this blog post, but I don’t have to. I’m making the choice this very moment to type these thoughts down instead of, say, watching Saved By The Bell on Netflix. Or cooking. Or jogging. Or drinking to excess. Or….you get the point.

This step becomes much more obvious to you in real time if you are in the habit of setting and working towards goals.

5. Express Yourself Authentically With Each Choice.

So you’ve accepted responsibility for your life. You know what is important to you. You are present in the moment, and you realize that you have the choice to act however you want in that moment.

What’s left?

Act authentically.

You have the freedom and the responsibility to make the right choice.

Ask yourself, “What does this moment expect from me?”

This is the heart of existential meaning. You must act in the here and now in the most worthwhile and realistic way given your circumstances.

If you value good health and you walk past a bakery, you should consciously choose not to buy any pastries. Simple.

Be the author of your own story.

Now of course, this isn’t always easy, and you certainly won’t always make the right decision.

But living the good life means acting authentically as much as you possibly can.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Happiness is the harmony between you and your life that you achieve through finding meaning in every moment.

With this definition of happiness, there are no “guru’s”. Everyone is succeeding or failing on a moment to moment basis. You have no reason to listen to me or anyone about what makes you happy. You must take your own counsel and assess yourself by your own standards.

Find your own meaning, and live it authentically.

Where do you find meaning in your life?

Footnotes:

1. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10902-006-9006-5?LI=true

2. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00352944?LI=true

3. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224549709595429

4. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10902-004-8789-5?LI=true

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