Today is my 30th birthday :)
For the last few months, I’ve been thinking about and writing down the most important things I learned in my twenties. Here’s the list (in no particular order):
Pleasure and happiness are not the same. Pleasure is a short-lived hit of dopamine: drinking, sex, fine dining, shopping, traveling, etc. Happiness is more a state of being. You won’t always feel happy, but you can feel good about how you choose to spend your time. Happiness is thinking positively despite the negative, it’s being genuinely appreciative and aware, it’s surrounding yourself with positive influences, and it’s making decisions that support your health over those that cause you harm.
Pay attention. We move quickly through life and are constantly distracted. You might think you know yourself, but do you really? To change, and to chart that change, you first have to have an understanding of your starting point—your baseline assessment of self—in order to track and observe your growth. Start with some of the following questions and simply record what you observe—lead with curiosity and without judgment.
Do you know what makes you feel good versus what makes you feel bad? Which people, foods, habits, experiences, or ideas literally energize you? What gets your “blood pumping” or makes your “mind race,” versus what puts a “pit in your stomach” or makes you feel “off”? Our brain communicates with thoughts and our body with feelings. Feel everything fully—the good and the bad—but recognize that you are ultimately in control of both your environment (what/who you expose yourself to) as well as your emotional reaction (this too shall pass). Avoid the bad, pursue the good.
Do you know what you think about? Your thoughts are how you perceive your reality. What percentage of your thoughts are positive? Negative? Do you control your mind, or does your mind control you? In order to be successful in life, your mind has to be stronger than your emotions.
Do you know what you’re unwilling to feel? If you do, that’s the area to focus on and attend to. And, what are your unhealthy behaviors that enable you to avoid feeling those feelings (e.g. shopping, eating, etc.)?
Do you know how you spend your time? “Of course, how you spend your days is how you spend your life.” Breaking up my day into a series of 30min windows helped me see exactly how I was using my time and spending my life. I could observe things like how often I engaged in activities that made me feel good vs bad. Figure out a time-management system that works for you, and always know what day it is.
Live deliberately. Once you see that your day can be broken down into a series of decisions and that those daily decisions determine how you spend your life, be intentional with how you spend your time, who you surround yourself with, what you think about, and what you feel. You’re not guaranteed anything beyond this present moment, are you happy with how you’re spending it? If not, remember that it’s ultimately your decision whether to be in the driver’s seat of your life or the passenger seat.
Want to heal yourself. The hardest thing for me was deciding that I loved and cared enough about myself to finally begin a journey towards health and happiness. I first had to realize that no one was going to walk into my life and fix it (or me), and, if I didn’t even care enough to help myself, why should anyone else? That’s why 2 of my “House Rules” are “no one is coming” and “if not you, then who?”
Decide to change. After you identify your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that no longer serve you and care enough about yourself to want to change, the next step is deciding what exactly you want to change and how exactly you’re going to change it. This can be an exercise in no longer engaging in something that doesn’t serve you or working towards something that does. Be as specific as possible:
what exactly are you tracking?
what's your starting point, your point A?
what does success look like, your point B?
when are you recording whether you did or didn’t do something? where are you recording it?
when are you evaluating your progress? This is important: you can’t just check boxes, you need to also consistently check in with yourself.
what’s the length of time you’re measuring against? how do you know when you've finished?
There is no change without change. We often hear, “what you think about you become,” and while I believe mindset plays an important role, I operate from the standpoint of “what you DO you become.” Nothing changes if nothing changes. Actions have consequences—what you put in, you get out—but inaction also has consequences. If you don’t try to change anything, you’ll stay exactly the same. You will not grow, you will not abandon the things that no longer serve you, you will never arrive at “point B” unless you actually do the work.
Anything in life worth doing requires consistency. The greatest returns come from the compound interest of that consistent practice. Science says that forming a habit takes 66 days in a row without any slips or failures. Daoist philosophy says it takes 100. You can’t “grow” unless you plant a seed, cultivate it for 100 days, and then harvest it.
Growth isn’t linear. Doing one thing every day for 100 days in a row can sometimes take two years, maybe longer. You will lose the thread. THAT’S OKAY. Remember that you are worth it. Stay the path, get back on when you get bucked off. Start again.
Embrace the human experience. Anything humans have done over and over again throughout our evolution to help us become the incredibly efficient machines that we are today is most likely still good for us. Seek out “natural movement,” eat intuitively, run, climb things, sleep well, listen to music, connect with other humans, make love, feel things deeply, learn and adapt, and be prepared for the inevitable forces beyond our control.
Get to know your body. The first thing I began exploring when my journey towards health and happiness started was my relationship with my physical self. It serves as such a good feedback mechanism and I’m shocked at how much I continue to learn about myself and my body every day. Here are some things that have helped me develop the relationship:
Meditate and visualize. Sit silently and with your eyes closed, imagine tracing an outline around your head down your arms, around your legs, and so on until you reached the point you started. Try to think about and feel each part of your body.
Work on yourself sexually—literally—masturbate, try a yoni massage, read books, watch porn. Figure out what you like and don’t like. The onus is just as much on you to be able to communicate your wants and needs to your partner as it is on your partner to listen and respond.
Learn how to breathe correctly. There seem to be endless benefits of learning how to breathe properly as well as engaging in different breathing exercises. I worked on my tight back and neck for so many months before realizing that changing the way I inhaled had the greatest benefit to my posture and pain.
Learn how it feels, and see what it looks like, to move your body in different ways—yoga, walking, stretching, dancing, working out, etc. Developing a baseline of your body lets you grow sensitive to it and how it may change. I can’t emphasize enough how good it feels to really know the nuances of my body, how it moves, how it feels. You can learn more about my process here.
Say thank you. Your body does so much for you every single day. Despite how you treat it, it shows up for you. I’ll never forget my friend who, on his path to becoming a doctor, described the day he looked down at a beating heart still in someone’s body and really internalized that the heart, with all of its responsibility, really is just this little delicate muscle. Once I grew an appreciation for all that my body does for me, I became increasingly invested in setting it up to carry out its best work.
Partner with nature. At the end of the day, we’re animals, just like the birds and the elephants and the rest of the animal kingdom that lives symbiotically with the natural world. Nature and humans have coexisted and co-evolved for our entirety, so part of the human experience is our relationship with nature. Befriend nature, let it help you and heal you as it always done historically. Listening to birds chirping is shown to be therapeutic, as is walking in the grass or dirt barefoot. Morning and evening sun affects our circadian rhythms, plants supply nutrients that target or enhance specific parts of our bodies, loving something alive that isn’t human is a special experience, salt water is cleansing, and so on and so on. Be thankful for and take advantage of how much plants and animals do for us mentally, emotionally, physically.
Eat and drink real things. Really know what a fresh carrot smells and tastes like. Learn what time of the year produces which types of crops. Grow something yourself. Craving broccoli? There’s a reason. Your body knows what it needs and nature is there to help—let it! Establish a baseline of what it feels like to have your human-hardware run efficiently as possible because it’s being fueled effectively through food and drink.
Nurture your intuition. Can’t figure something out? Write about it before going to bed and take some space to think about it/write about it again when you first wake up. If you’ve lost connection to your “inner voice,” dial down all the white noise that get in the way of you hearing it—tv, phones, gaming, and everything else that distracts you from spending time truly alone with yourself and your thoughts. That’s why we’re so connected to ourselves as young children—we were bored more often, forcing us to spend time alone only with ourselves and our thoughts.
Meditate. Just do it. There are so many benefits to meditation in terms of neuroscience, expanding your energetic relationship to the world, gaining insight to yourself… start with 1 minute a day and build from there.
Heal your inner child. No matter how healthy your parents were, they somehow impacted you as a child that you now need to explore as an adult. Most of your adult problems are a reflection of your childhood experiences and emotions. Seek out therapists that specialize in early memories or inner-childhood work.
Love should feel safe and be healthy. Pay close attention to how people respond when you tell them how they made you feel. Be with someone who is equally as committed to their own growth and healing as you are to yours. Establish boundaries and recognize toxicity, or, better yet, avoid it at all costs. It’s up to you to define what love means to you both romantically and platonically. People are going to treat you how you let them.
The health of your relationship with someone is determined by how toxic your own relationship with yourself is. Don’t look to someone to fix you or to heal you. Support you, sure, but be clear-eyed about what you bring to the relationship. Two unhealthy people can’t date each other. One healthy person and one unhealthy person can if the unhealthy person is putting in the consistent work to improve themself. A healthy person dating another healthy person is obviously ideal.
Health is wealth. It shouldn’t have to take a real health scare to realize that nothing else matters in this world if you don’t have days to live within it. Keep aging and death in perspective. Life is the longest thing we’ll ever do, but for some of us, it’s shorter than for others. Who says you’re not already at or past your midway point in life? Be grateful for every day, and do everything in your power to give yourself more days.
Nothing is guaranteed. All you have is this present moment—protect it. I told my dad that I think “maturity” just means “wanting to die less.” As someone who’s adventurous with a high tolerance for risk, I have to remind myself that no matter how confident I am that I can do something dangerous, sometimes you fall, and you die. Look both ways even though you know it’s your turn. Wear the helmet. Lock your doors. Things will happen, but don’t let harmful or dangerous things enter easily.
Define your set of principles. I wasn’t born to parents who consciously instilled a set of guiding principles or beliefs in me. It’s been up to me to figure out what is important to me, to determine my role in society and in the world, to define what I believe in, and to hold myself accountable to those beliefs. Read more about my House Rules here.
Forgive yourself—you’re only human. Something comforting that I think about when I’m feeling bad about something is to remind myself that there have been billions of other humans throughout time, some of whom must have felt this same way before me. No feeling is new. The biggest truth about the human experience is that we’re all flawed, but the second biggest truth is that with enough work and dedication, change is possible.
Lead with love. Love yourself. Love the people around you. Love this one beautiful and rare life you have. Assume good intentions, understand that the best way to get positive energy is by giving it, empathize with your fellow living things, understand that everyone is fighting their own battle, and see the beauty in everything. I promise you’ll never regret leading with love, even when not met with it.
I can speak to each in so much more detail and have guides and next steps on a lot of them, so, if that interests you please feel free to reach out.
xx