Things I did to reboot my life(medium.com) |
Things I did to reboot my life(medium.com) |
Here's my list:
- Eat properly(no junk food, no coffee, no nootropics)
- Information diet(only "healthy" information during the day, 20:00-22:00 I can do whatever I want. Basically it means no hn/reddit/youtube/movies, reading and learning is fine)
- Daily exercise
- Daily fiction writing(250 words at least)
- Daily coding(or studying anying related to Computer Science.)
I will keep struggling to incorporate all these things into my habits, because that is what perfect and healthy life for me would be like, it's just it's surprisingly difficult for me.
By the way, if you have such list - can you share it?
If I picked up a violin for the first time in my life I'd have no idea how to play it and I'd make a hell of a noise. But with lessons and practice I could, eventually, produce a tune.
The same thing happens with your reboot - you're used to something; you've changed that thing; change is tricky; you sometimes slip back.
That's not failure, that's rehearsal.
I recommend giving up coffee. I tracked my habit and when I gave up it took me only about 10 days to completely stop drinking coffee. Soda as easier. I drink carbonated water now.
I was drinking 100+ oz of coffee a day most days. I had it easy giving up but I have heard that others with heavy habits get a lot of withdrawal symptoms. I had a few headaches and I quelled them with tea.
Then a few years later I started drinking coffee regularly. Same thing happened when I quit.
Now, I drink green tea in the mornings occasionally and have had no problems with stopping.
If you don't have a need consume caffeine, don't start. It seems to follow the tolerance/withdrawal pattern at even small doses.
Looking at all the comments, and thinking about the effects I feel during this 7 days (and the experience of the previous 30 days), I will definitely want to keep that coffee low, no matter how much I like cafes, the drinking, the flavour...
By the way, for me it took about 3 weeks after quitting coffee cold turkey to stop thinking like "I'm a grown-up goddamnit, I can have a coffee whenever I want!". The 4th week then was really-really good.
Tea is works a lot better, and I'm lucky here in Taiwan for the awesome teas available. But have to be careful about that, a strong oolong (that I like a lot) just as a hammer-hit to the head as a cup of coffee sometimes....
Yes, I track these habits. There's an awesome app called TracknShare, super convenient. Here's how my list looks like: http://imgur.com/I9qK9iu
I measure writing by the number of words I write each day, and I measure CS in "Pomodoros"(from pomodoro technique, 20-minute-sized chunks of uninterrupted time).
Participating in /r/WritingPrompts really helps with daily writing. Prompts are a great place to start, and provide instant gratification, also it's really fun.
When I have an interesting and exciting project to work on - I can easily stay on top of CS, but if not it becomes super hard.
The main thing about healthy food - is just throwing away everything unhealthy, and replacing it wih a lot of delicious healthy alternatives. If I get hungry and I don't have some nuts/berries to chew on immediately - I know I will go and buy chocolate/pizza. So it's mostly about controlling my environment. If everything around me is healthy - it's not that hard to keep it up.
When it comes to coffee and reddit - I still haven't found a good solution, I'm addicted to that stuff.
Exercising isn't that hard to keep up, just set a goal that is easy enough to not be intimidating, and spend several days paying attention to it, because when I don't I simply forget.
Sometimes when I was in the process of losing weight this way, that I would be a little bit hungry when it was time for bed. But this is ignored. If it's more distracting then I have ~150g yogurt, usually skyr, but sometimes plain greek and sometimes that I'll mix in a teaspoon of honey or jam. Most U.S. yogurt is a massive sugar bomb.
Often this has more to do with discipline (do the exercise, don't eat everything on the plate or don't fill it up to begin with, or don't eat out often) rather than motivation. Needing motiviation is understandable but it's a weakness to rely on it; having discipline is more powerful.
This is the key point, honestly. Hacker News and other online forums are fun and all, but ultimately they waste so much time.
About film: If you have Hulu, watch the Criterion Collection films on it. Criterion is a company that releases and remasters some of the best films of all time (from all countries!), and about 600 of them are on Hulu[1].
[1] https://www.criterion.com/library/expanded_view?m=hulu&p=1
I have "trained my brain" to scan headlines very quickly to see if they are relevant or of interest to me. Consequently, I have developed a troubling trait of reading most things only to "cognitively dump" immediately thereafter. I now find that I cannot hold concentration to read larger tracts of writing. Or that I will read something but fail to recall only moments later.
Being an engineer myself, I've always loved what i do, but I found that I felt infinitely better when i was disconnected from the tech. It's almost like being blindly in love with someone who hurts you. So for my "reboot" i quit my job, sold everything and started doing things that are completely out of my comfort zone like long distance backpacking trips, going into the nature, camping, paragliding, kayaking. As a consequence, I've dropped weight and become healthier by simply being outside more. Things like healthy diet and exercise didn't seem like impossible chores but very natural habits to transitions to.
So take this with a grain of salt, but when someone who tries to change their life is telling me that they want to sit in 4 walls and watch Netflix more, or get an android app that monitors their sleep, or that they want to try and do more daily coding, i realize that they have no idea what they're doing.
I've had a gym membership for behind my apartment for 2 months now. Tomorrow will be my first day going. I got the membership to remind myself that I have to do it. It's working.
By devoting 10 min 3 times a week doing some high intensity intervals you can achieve a very good level of fitness. Even better, it won't require a monumental amount of mental effort (like e.g. long distance running does).
I recommend you do this on a machine whose exercise is low impact for your joints (either a Concept2 or an Airdyne). These can be found very cheap on Craigslist if on a budget.
Add in some free weight exercises (dumbbells or kettlebells will do, a pull up bar also recommended), some abs and some dynamic stretches to have a really sound training plan.
I think rebooting should be required of a lot of your average (and not-so-average) typologies. Breaking the mold is essential to the progress of the species, and doing it on a personal, familial, or social level. Perhaps this is what drives the primordial desire to see the world burn?
Some people aren't going to be able to maintain lots of change all at once. And inability to maintain it all creates feelings of hopelessness or despair or similar.
It's important to remember that you don't have to change everything now. Just do one thing this month, and stick at it. When you've got that one thing working and maintainable you can change something else.
There are some nice motivational subReddits.
There's probably a niche in the market for a service that pairs or groups people who want to achieve change so that they can motivate each other - virtual motivational cards and voice messages etc.
- don't try to change too much at once
- if failing, adjust rather than abandon
We intentionally limit the number of daily tasks to six. And if you're continually nailing or failing a task, the app suggests you tweak your target.
I've managed to go from staying up late (working on projects when I'm fading) to knocking off tasks from 5-7am before the family wakes up (when I'm fresh and motivated). I leave less-essential tasks like watching movies for late at night when I'm getting distracted or tired.
When we started beta testing, I kept failing to find 30 minutes/day to read a book. I changed to 10 minutes which felt paltry, but it was something I managed to stick with and started making progress on my pile of unfinished books.
Most of the mentally exhausting problems I have is most of the problems are outside my control and are how I start my day. I'm woken up either randomly by my cats or by my phone due to a production outage I have little power over. Each of these attempts to "reset" are quickly squashed due to the choices others made (I never wanted pets but I inherited them in a way, prod goes out due to services I have no control over and monitoring other people's services is both infeasible and encourages others to sit back while I do what should have been their basic duties).
So for some people, I reckon simply quitting work and purposefully not looking to work until you're ready and itching to do so again is worth trying. Much easier said than done for those not earning handsome salaries, but there are degrees to a full-blown resignation possible for most jobs I believe.
I had a breakdown a few years and tried to change a lot of things at once — it didn't really work! You can read some more of my thoughts about this at https://gumroad.com/l/reset-your-brain
Central to my approach has been thinking what I want to achieve (quality), in what areas I want to achieve it and how.
For me rebooting has been mostly about decluttering and focussing. So I've ended up with a list of very few areas where I want to excel, and some tools I will use to achieve my goals. Everything else I have got rid of.
The reason for a more general approach is because the moment things are calcified like this, they are very difficult to uproot and change. Think of this as a recipe where the ingredients can be swapped out. The recipe doesn't change, but the ingredients do, and not so drastically that the recipe is destroyed.
This also applies to healthy eating habits. Once you've reached your target weight and the novelty wears off, it's much harder to eat clean. Personally, I like pizza once per week, usually on Friday, as celebration and reward that it's finally weekend.
For exercise it boils down to discipline. At least for me. Plus, I feel really, really bad and get in a terrible mood if I cannot physically exert myself every day.
My only problem with this is the victim-hood that happens when this high carb crap clamours for our attention in ADs and the media. Invariably you will get victim-hood and people gorging and gulping their way to negate such imagery. I know I don't look at a McBigMac the same way when I've had one.
Like I said, I am not sure if the author meant this, but making the choice of watching better films has paid off for me.
You can't keep doing the same things and expect results to be different. You need to look inward and see what is causing the drift.
Last night, I watched an interesting talk by Guy Spier, a value investor. I was expecting the talk to be focus on value investing, it turned out be much more on making life choices, changes and gaining wisdom.
Guy Spier: "The Education of a Value Investor" | Talks at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifDCmRBElPY
Guy Spier, The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment http://www.amazon.com/Education-Value-Investor-Transformativ...
I'm rather dismayed that the post, every single comment on this thread (as of my writing this, et least) as well as what appears to be the gist of Guy Spier's book is about "me, me and me".
I'm all for finding oneself and personal improvement. Please, please do take better care of yourself, both mentally and physically. But if that does not lead you to realizing the best path to improving your lot is to improve the lot of others, then that makes me and the whole world quite sad.
If you ever want to continue this convo feel free to email me, it's my HN username at gmail. Maybe you could use an accountability partner or someone to bounce ideas off of? Either way, good luck with your project!
I've tried to simplify my list as much as possible, because many details are hard for me to keep in mind, and when I have too many things to track it's hard for me to focus. Now the list of things Im tracking doubles as my daily goal list.
But I'm sure your way creates a lot of interesting results. Did you notice some interesting patterns?
I also used to use Emacs org mode for that sort of thing, it was pretty convenient. It has a neat todo list function, so you can track things and have a list of daily goals separately. (though it won't create charts).
Also yeah, once I keep up with all my habits for like 30-60 days, I will add "Social" and maybe meditation. It's great that you're doing this, I found it very helpful.
It's awesome.
There's a bowl of starbursts in my office that I'm currently fighting against. It's new. It's refilled every Monday. It's evil. I actually grabbed a handful on Friday to sneak home, luckily karma kicked in and all of the bags were missing the pink flavor so I didn't eat any.
Did you drank a LOT of them? Because if you were just drinking some in moderation (as opposed to 1 or even 2 bottles of Pepsi a day like I did), it probably didn't matter anyway.
Also were you younger? Because if you did that "break" at, say 25, it's not like you'll see much difference. Your body can still tolerate a whole lot of abuse at that age.
I stopped drinking soda around 21 or so, I'm 31 now.