self improvement - The Fit Ethos

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.

3 Lifestyle Habits to Give You New Life

Are you living, staying stagnant, or dying? Before you answer, take a hard look at your daily habits. If you want to see your future, you can disregard your beliefs, values, and pointless platitudes you recite to sound deep. If you want to see your future, look at your habits. Does your day to day give you more life, or does it suck away at your life? It’s true that how you do anything is how you do everything.

What if you changed a few things in your daily life that pushes you towards your goals a little bit each day? Simple things can make drastic improvements to your health and outlook on life. Here are 3 high-impact lifestyle habits that will give you new life.

1. Sweat, train hard, & lift weights

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
Socrates

There is no argument about the evidence. Physical activity is essential for optimal health. Poor fitness and strength will plague your elder years if you don’t address them early. Exercise, particularly intense strength training, will improve the health of your musculoskeletal system, joints, and essentially every organ system.

But let’s set aside the “scientific” benefits for now. How will it affect your day to day life?

Regularly exercising at high intensities will give you more energy. It will make everything feel easier. It will teach you discipline.

Intense physical training will show you what your body is capable of. We often never learn what our body’s full potential is. How strong can you get? How fast can you really run? What are you actually capable of achieving if you learn to stick with an exercise program?

How long can you play with your kids? 5 minutes? 30? 60? What about for the next 10 years? How happy and full of life and energy can you really get?

These are things we often value but completely neglect when it comes to taking action. It’s hard to fully embrace living when it takes multiple attempts to stand up from a chair or having to sit out from running around with your kids, and it’s scary how quickly these situations creep up on us.

Get outside. Run hard. Jump. Lift heavy weights. Learn to live.

2. Eat good quality food

Recent inflation numbers aside, we are fortunate to live in a time when we have abundant and affordable access to good food. Even the run-of-the-mill, non-organic foods that Hacky-sack John scoffs at is miles better than what was regularly available a couple hundred years ago.

Unfortunately, with the boom in the food industry came a boom in highly processed foods.

These foods have much of their nutritional value stripped away in favor of texture and flavor.

I won’t lie. I love me good bowl of cereal, some chips, or chicken finger from time to time, but we need to exercise caution so these foods don’t make up the vast majority of our nutritional intake. It is easy to consume an excessive amount of calories and it’s hard to get the right combination of macro and micronutrients from these highly processed foods. What is more, we tend to lose a lot of food variety when eating a high volume of processed foods.

We tend to fare better when we eat a large variety of real, whole, and unprocessed foods. An easy way to add more variety is substituting certain portions of your current meals with items such as sweet potatoes, rice, salads (the possibilities with salads are endless), fruits, vegetables, good meats, and fish.

All of that being said, remember that the most important tenet of changing your body composition is still caloric balance.

3. Sleep well. Really well

Everything will get better or worse with sleep. When you sleep better, literally everything about your health improves.

Sleep impacts every system in the body. Disruptions to sleep can severely impact cognitive abilities, hormonal profile, emotional regulation, and physical performance. For gym rats, sleep deprivation will destroy your recovery and degrade your gym performance. Some studies cite a 20% reduction in cardiovascular capacity following a night of poor sleep.

If you neglect your sleep, no amount of bandaid interventions during the waking hours will reverse the damage done. There is no exercise program, nutrition plan, or supplement that will fix a lack of sleep.

Just go to bed on time. Here are some guidelines to get you started.

Go to bed before 11pm. The profile of sleep changes with different bed times, and tend to get worse with later bed times.
Make your bedroom as dark as possible. Cover bright LEDs with foil and tape. Use a sleep mask.
Make your bedroom as cool as your can tolerate.
Make your bedroom as quiet as possible. Use earplugs if needed. I recommend Mack’s Ultra Soft Earplugs.
Try and keep your bedroom for sleeping only. Keep work material and bright screens out if possible.
Go to bed and wake up at the same time everyday.
Try and get 7-9 hours of sleep every night.

You will be pleasantly surprised at how much better everything becomes when you regularly sleep well.

Give yourself new life

A better life is only a few habits away. Think about how different things can potentially be if you spend a little bit of time everyday to move towards your goals. Where can you be in a week? Month? Year?

If you want to see your future, just take a look at your daily habits and the group of friends you hang out with.

A Morning Routine That Actually Makes Sense

Morning rituals and routines are the trendy things to do. Every self-help guru and “entrepreneur” can’t stop talking about their importance. Wake up before the rest of the world. Meditate. Journal. Read a book. Go on a walk and listen to a podcast.

A lot of it is just horseshit and busy work. Morning routines have become a way to make people feel like they’re better than everyone else.

5 Daily Habits To Upgrade Your Life This Week

‘Tis another week. Did you jump out of bed this morning, excited for Monday? Are you ready to tackle another week, or did you dread the alarm? Did you daily routine go smoothly or are you scrambling to get out the door in a frenzy?

I get it. I don’t have my shit together every single day of the year. Things can get out of hand and chaotic if we don’t have good systems and habits in place. Here are 5 things you can do everyday to upgrade your daily living this week.

Start each day with a tall glass of water

We all need to drink more water. Hydration affects every process in our body. Everything will get better or worse with hydration. Dehydration can cause brain fog, headaches, decrease our alertness, make us tired, and decrease our physical performance in the gym by up to 20%! This means that if you are supposed to hit a 200 lbs overhead press, you may only get up to 160 lbs!

I relearn this lesson every time I work with one of my elderly patients. Any day that one of these individuals is dehydrated, their balance, cognition, memory, alertness, and physical performance suffers. What’s more, I can almost immediately tell if they are dehydrated upon meeting them.

We are usually dehydrated upon waking. Make it a part of your normal routine to have at least 8 ounces of water or more as soon as you can. Add a pinch of salt or a squeeze of lemon to help your body absorb it. We tend to better absorb fluids that have some sort of solute in it. I like having a small serving of creatine and a pack of Liquid IV in my water (not an endorsement, I just like their stuff). Ever since I started every morning with a big Mason jar of water, my mental clarity and focus has skyrocketed.

Upgrade your brain with books

One of my buddies said it best: reading is like a cheat code to life. Good books are jam-packed with information, actionable strategies, and experience. Why try and relearn every mistake and lesson that other people have already worked through?

It’s no accident that most successful people spend a lot of time reading books. It’s like installing new software into your brain. You will think differently and just know more when you spend time reading.

Set aside some time everyday to read at least for 30 minutes. I’ve been trying my best to get an hour of reading everyday. Replace the endless scrolling of low-quality content on your phone with a good book. You’ll be surprised at how many books you can finish when you consistently read everyday.

Get outside into the sun

Our bodies are governed by the circadian rhythm. The morning sun is one of the most powerful signals that resets our internal clock. This is vital to maintain a healthy sleep-wake cycle.

Getting outside during the morning to get some sunlight will make our brains wake up and be ready for the rest of the day. The sunlight entering our eyes sets off an abundance of processes that prime our mind and body for increased activity. This will also improve mood and sleep quality later in the day.

The best way to do this is to get outside before 9am and face your body towards the sun (obviously, don’t look directly into the sun). Depending on how bright it is, staying outside for 5-20 minutes on a sunny day and up to 30 minutes on an overcast day will work wonders for your health and mood.

For more on the benefits of morning sunlight, read this.

Set down your phone

You’ll be surprised at how much your brain craves silence. It’s unsettling at first. Some may even panic at the thought of not being stimulated for a brief moment.

When we let go of the chaos of the modern world, our brains will finally settle down. The fog and anxiety will lift. Our focus will sharpen. We might even become happy.

The main culprit of this modern overstimulation and overconsumption is our smartphone. Although a marvel in convenience and making our world more connected than ever, it also steals our attention and cognitive resources from more important things.

How many hours of your life has been hijacked by screen time? It’s scary. Some days I look at my screen metrics and see that 5-8 hours of my time was wasted on TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram.

What’s worse is that all of that content and consumption is usually completely devoid of any meaning or quality.

Fight back. Don’t let the Matrix steal away your life and energy. Create a dedicated spot for your phone when you get home and keep it there. Silence any notifications that aren’t important. You’ll still hear if you’re getting a call or text, but otherwise, let it be.

Do one thing everyday that will move you towards your goals

It’s one thing to have goals. It’s a completely different thing to have goals and consciously execute a plan.

What are your aspirations and what are you doing to move towards them? Perhaps it’s to start a business, learn a musical instrument, or organize your finances. What’s the one thing you can do today to move towards that goal?

Maybe you can set up a meeting with a mentor, set up a business checking account, or get a business license.

You can find a music teacher or enroll in a class.

You can find a financial advisor or set up an investment portfolio.

But nothing will actually set you on the right path unless you take action.

No matter how small, if do one thing everyday, you will build the momentum to get to where you want to be.

Maybe your goal is to lose weight or bench 315 lbs. What do you need to do to get there?

You can dial in your nutrition and set up a consistent meal plan. Maybe you need to start getting to bed a normal time so you optimize your recovery.

Maybe you just need to get up and start.

Imagine the possibility of a future where anything is possible. The only thing standing in your way is action.

Nothing will change unless you do.

And maybe that’s just what you need to get excited for a new week.

The Mindset You Need To Take Control Of Your Health

The internet is flooded with health and fitness tips. You can’t escape it. It’s everywhere. The fitness industry is a 30 billion dollar industry. Search for a new diet or exercise plan, and thousands will come funneling into your computer.

But none of it will help you.

In fact, nothing will help you unless you change your mindset. It’s the root of all behavior change and what drives every one of your decisions, and this particular mindset will help you take control of your health:

Tag: self improvement