3 More Lifestyle Habits to Give You New Life

Show me your habits, and I’ll show you your future.”

Or so the saying goes. It begs an urgent question:

Are your daily lifestyle habits giving you more life, leaving you stagnant, or are they slowly killing you?

You are the product of your daily habits. Your entire life is the result of the thousands of decisions you’ve made, but none more so than what you do everyday. These small changes to your lifestyle can help improve every aspect of your life.

1. Meditate

I’ve written quite a bit about the benefits of meditation, but here is the gist. Meditation will improve numerous aspects of your mental health including improving your dopamine balance, improving focus, decreasing anxiety, and improving impulse control.

Meditation is one of the only activities to “rewire” the brain that has a robust scientific basis. It has been shown to increase gray matter volume in the brain, helping with higher order decision making.

I use meditation in the mornings to get myself focused and help with getting my dopamine levels in order. Evidence suggests that meditating past 17 minutes will cause a gradual and positive increase in dopamine levels in the brain.

Here are some guidelines to get you started with meditation.

Find a quiet and comfortable place to lie down or sit. You can sit in a chair or on the floor.
Start with ten deep breaths, inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth. Pay attention to each breath and follow each breath cycle from start to finish.
Let your breathing normalize and close your eyes.
Concentrate on your breathing. Each time your mind wanders off, gently bring it back to your breathing.
Start with about 5 minutes and gradually increase to 20-30 minutes.

The point is to exercise your brain’s ability to quiet down and focus on your breathing. In a world where we are constantly stimulated, it’s important to give our brains a chance to quiet down and rest.

2. Get the hell away from screens

Tech companies are experts at hijacking your attention away from what matters to you. If you are not careful, hours of your life will be stolen from you.

There is a simple reason for why we start to crave screens: our dopamine system. Dopamine is what motivates and pushes us towards certain goals and outcomes. In our evolutionary history, it’s what drove us to hunt and mate for the survival of our species. In modern times, it’s what motivates us towards advancing our careers and dreams.

The dark side of dopamine is that it will confuse things that give us pointless pleasure with things needed for survival. Hijacking the dopamine system is what leads to certain addictions and habits.

Scrolling through social media feeds is a low-effort, high pleasure activity that gives our brains an easy hit of dopamine. The problem is that there is no value to 95% of our daily screen time.

It’s already bad enough that precious time is lost through this screen time, but it’s effect on your brain is worse. It will make you less focused, more impulsive, anxious, and resistant to effort.

Don’t let the tech companies trick you. You don’t need your low-quality screen time to survive. Here are some tips to manage your screen addiction.

Delete all pointless apps on your phone.
Switch your phone screen to grayscale through the settings.
Read a real book.
Place your phone in a designated spot far away from where you normally hang out.
Explore what you are truly interested in. No one is passionate about scrolling through shitty content.

3. Find your purpose and pursue it everyday

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
Victor Frankl

A life without purpose is an empty life. Having purpose in your life is underrated and undervalued. There is almost nothing more important that feeling like your life has meaning and purpose.

In fact, it’s so important that people who feel like they have a purpose consistently live longer and lead healthier lives. One interesting study showed that simply giving an elder resident in a care home a plant to take care of improved quality of life.

Perhaps no one has demonstrated the importance of having purpose more than Victor Frankl, the father of logotherapy. Frankl lived through the horrors of the death camps during the holocaust and largely attributes his survival to his resolve of maintaining a purpose in life. He noted that those who still gave their lives meaning fared much better in the camps and in life. For more on Victor Frankl, give his book Man’s Search For Meaning a read. It should be required reading for everyone.

What is your purpose? What are you passionate about? This needs to be explored on a daily basis. Who do you value? What is the most important thing in your life? Once you have figured this out, you should pursue it everyday. Give everyday of your life some sort of purpose and meaning.

The meaning of life is to give it meaning.