Thought about it, snce it’s near New Year’s.
In my opinion, exercising/training/stretching atleast once a week would be a good thing for most people.
Floss daily. Brush your teeth twice daily.
Use a tongue scraper.
The amount of people I used to meet through tinder back when I was single that seemingly or self-admittedly did none of that, just brushed once a day, was very concerning. Still is.
Did you really talk about dental care on Tinder? Just curious, I’ve never used it.
No, but we’d eventually meet with them and spend nights and you get to experience it first hand…
Absolutely lifting weights has been my all time favorite self improvement thing, would highly recommend it
I second this as a non-sporty person. I bought a couple of barbells (15kg apiece) for use at home and 20-30 minutes of just messing around with them daily has solved so many joint aches, it’s almost ridiculous…
Just to note, the form has an impact and can cause more negatives than it solves if not done properly.
Duly noted and you are very right! I looked up a couple of simple exercises beforehand as I’m really not keen on getting a herniated disk or something.
From what I’ve seen, as long as it’s nothing fancy like advanced calisthenics and power training, the exercises are straightforward and easy to grasp.
That’s why you start off light until you get your form down then work your way up.
Make a list of all the tasks you want to do for the day, every day. This is so important for me if I don’t do this I just never get anything done.
Also always plan to do something productive every day even if you just feel like relaxing. You will feel so much better relaxing if you know you’ve done something your proud of.
Reading books on daily basis. It’s a qualitatively different experience from reading websites or consuming other form of media. If you have trouble getting into reading, I recommend picking a particular time and place, then reading at least a few pages every day. Eventually, it will turn into a habit and you’ll be reading for longer periods. Another thing I recommend is finding books on topics you’re interested in, be it fiction or non fiction, and don’t feel bad about abandoning books if you find you’re not enjoying it.
For me, it’s reading or watching philosophies. Philosophy can change how we view things around us.
Make your bed as soon as you wake up.
I don’t know if the mental benefits are outweighed by not airing out your linen. might depend on the weather.
Why?
I work from home and tried to do this, but it’s easier to just wait until lunch. Once you’re in the habit though you won’t know how you ever didn’t do it before.
But I’m still in it!!
I spent all of 2024 tracking my spending and saving. I didn’t “budget”, just had a spreadsheet and wrote everything down week over week.
I would recommend it as a habit people may benefit from just to understand where their money goes.
Yes, track the dollars even if the outflow is greater than the inflow. Then you will at least have an idea of where to start
Also, generally avoid alcohol consumption. It’s weird that this drink, when consumed regularly, has the ability to hijack and reprogram your biology so much that stopping can kill you. Just best to avoid it.
I imagine it would be useful as a learning experience, even if that level of tracking didn’t go on forever.
I’m thinking of how tracking calories feels analogous; the time I spent dedicatedly tracking the calories of my food consumption was super helpful in recalibrating my intuitive understanding.
The first few months were a lot of effort because I had to do stuff like putting a bowl on a weighing scale and add what I considered to be an appropriate amount of cereal, and working out how many calories were in that, then doing similar for the milk. It was shocking to see how many calories were in some of the typical things I ate, but beginning to be honest about that and logging my reality was necessary to starting making positive changes. Because I tend to slip into disordered eating when I try to lose weight via calorie counting, I’ve found that I need to take a more freestyle approach and go for more qualitative goals like “eat more veg”, “cook more meals”, “drink glass of water before snacking” — goals that can be specific and towards being healthier, but don’t require too much number crunching. However, I wouldn’t have made as much progress without having spent a decent amount of time tracking things, judgement free.
The judgement free part is the hardest part, and I imagine that applies for tracking spending too. Did you ever have instances where you saw how much you were spending on a particular thing and cringed so hard that you found it harder to be truthful in your tracking? I know that I struggle with guilt a lot, and that can make it easier to put my head in the sand.
I did a similar thing with food. It was tedious but interesting at first… then it just became tedious. However, by then I “understood “ enough, I didn’t have to actually do it anymore.
Thanks for sharing!!
This is what I did this year and last one too.
I started tracking my spending to see where my money was going which was very insightful. Patterns emerged I never could have seen if it wasn’t all laid out in one spreadsheet.
For instance, I learned based on a little experimentation that driving 65 instead of 75 on the highway saved me like $50/month. Yeah, I’m that guy and my commute takes another couple minutes but I still do this today. I’ve reframed it in my head as a $50/mo subscription that doesn’t give me much value for the money and only costs an extra few minutes a day. Worth it in this inflation era.
Also realized I was spending money in all these categories that I could be getting some high cash back credit cards for. When you can see your spending averages over time, it’s easy to be confident about getting a strategic 5% card for gas or online shopping that can claw back a decent chunk of the money you already know you’re gonna spend.
It’s definitely useful to track your spending, in more ways than one
Definitely agree with your comments. The more you see the more you understand. The more you understand, the more you can control. Even if just a little bit.
Learning how to say no, how to do it politely and how to do it firmly. I’m better at the latter but being able to do either is a goddamn superpower, it’s incredible how many Americans cannot regardless of their situation, title, age, wealth, etc.
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But how does this improve your life? By improving your memory all around?
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I’m reminded of Plato’s argument against writing, in which his position was roughly that relying on writing will make us become less practiced at remembering. I especially love the line, which goes hard.
“What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.”
Though the entire passage where the quote is from is great; It’s thought provoking even if I don’t necessarily agree with it.
Turning them into letters just seems harder to me, lol
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Not waiting for a day like new years to make a change that helps you.
The best time to do it was probably years ago.
The second best time is today.
Because if you make it about “new years” or some event, then it isn’t about YOU.
Do it for YOU, because you know that you’re worth the same amount of effort and affection as the others in your life.
Would you want this change for your friend? Turn don’t you think you skills care enough about you to give it to yourself?
I quit smoking the day my niece was born.
I quit drinking on April 1st, I’ve lost track of how many years ago it was, so that’s nice.
don’t discount the power of a specific date to reinforce a change and don’t let the reputation of new years resolutions stop you from setting and crushing them.
Neither of those are New Year’s resolutions.
“The day my niece was born” is actually exactly the type of thing I’m talking about. You didn’t wait until new years, or your birthday, or something else unrelated to your motivations. You picked “now” because that was when you felt the desire.
So yes, special days can matter, but the days that matter to YOU are way more important than a day some guy named “Gregorian” chose 2000 years ago.
Nice backtracking on “some other event,” that’s better than what 90% of the internet would do!
I still think it’s fine to use external dates for self improvement. I’m not very religious, but I love lent specifically because it’s a socially encouraged time to change a habit that lasts nearly the two months it takes to make a new habit or break an old one.
One year it was soda because I drank a few cans a week, since then I very rarely have any in the house. Last year I gave up meat, which is something I would never have pushed myself to do on my own.
It’s just a lot easier to test a change when it’s not permanent. There’s certainly an argument to be made that a full year of change at new years is too long to successfully commit to, but that doesn’t mean the whole thing should be discounted.
You’re assuming it was backtracking rather than a simple clarification.
That’s unnecessarily unpleasant, and it’s cool you want to feel like you won the argument, but if you add in the context of “new years eve” and then read it as “some other event external to the reason you want to make a change” it’s not backtracking.
In fact it’s just context you missed because of your own life experiences and emotions.
Which is cool, but you look like an ass when you try and secure a win by pointing out your own misunderstanding rather than hearing my clarification.
It’s an argument on the internet, there are never really winners. It seemed like backtracking because saying that a dissenting response is “actually the type of thing I’m talking about” carries an implication that the person responding misunderstood you, rather than acknowledging the possibility that you did not clearly/fully communicate your thoughts. As far as I and I assume the person you responded to could tell, that wasn’t “actually the type of thing” you were talking about. Backtracking may have been the wrong term, but there was a level of condescension in your comment that was so close to being sincere that it rubbed me the wrong way. Combine that with me half-disagreeing with you and that made for a response with some snark at the front. I am a little sorry for that. Also, why would you write “because of your own life experiences and emotions?” Unless the discussion is focused on something related to how people become the way they are, that statement has about as much meaning as “this is an aspen. You can tell it’s an aspen because of the way it is.” All it says is that you assume there is something wrong with the person rather than actually say anything about what that person has said or done. At worst it’s empty words and at best it’s an empty ad hominem.
You’re quite right that there are no winners to internet arguments, but this didn’t need to be an argument.
I think things often escalate in online discussions because tone and intent don’t come across well. Sometimes we start writing a comment and find ourselves struggling to put words to our point, possibly due to other tasks demanding our attention. Often we don’t realise a clarification is needed until after people have already read our message.
Given those factors, if we want to avoid turning discussions into arguments, we need to assume good faith from the people we’re talking to. That can seem like an absurd prospect given how many people online are arguing in bad faith, but if you can’t reasonably assume a particular person in a conversation is arguing in good faith, are they really worth your time?
For example, I didn’t read the person you’re replying to as being particularly snarky, and I’m surprised that you read them as such. You’ve written a decent amount here that seems determined to be having an argument, but I’m not sure what the actual argument at hand is. It seems like you might be feeling the need to defend yourself based on the miscommunication that happened up-thread? Which I can understand, but I don’t understand why you feel the need to break things down to the nitty gritty wordy bits. If I were being uncharitable, I would probably consider you to be trying to stir shit up and start arguments where there are none. However, if I am assuming good faith of you (which feels reasonable, to an extent, because you clearly spent time writing this comment, and I also appreciate that you partly apologised), then I still read you as being defensive, but in a way that I’m far more sympathetic to, because I do it sometimes myself.
I think you captured the grim nihilism of most internet arguments well when you said that no-one really wins in an internet argument. Certainly though, there are losers, and sometimes when I find myself arguing for longer than I should be, it’s because I feel like I’m trying to “save face” in a way, and avoid being the loser. Sometimes it’s when I have fucked up and communicated my original point unclearly, and sometimes it’s because I feel like people are unjustly accusing me of something (by implication, usually). However, that mode of discussion sucks for everyone involved, and ultimately, wanting to avoid that shit is a large part of why I’m here on Lemmy, where I find I have more discussions than arguments.
I fear that my comment here will seem overly accusatory or judgemental, but I hope that you’ll recognise that I have no stakes in this discussion and wouldn’t have spent this time writing this if I was just trying to throw shit. Your parsing of condescension in the above comments is not invalid any more than my reading of those same comments as being patient and reasonable is. Words can be slippery, even for the most skillful of writers. But I think you’ll find that assuming good faith of the people you’re communicating with can lead to far more productive discussions because people become more inclined to show you more slack in turn, which is nice.
Tell me more about my “faults” and “condescension” and “ad hominem”, then reread your comments. Yep, there’s some condescension from me here, but you’re also once again trying to throw judgement. “Glass houses” and all.
You win, Have a nice day.
Not the commenter you were arguing with, but I really liked that last sentence. I’m going to hang on to that feeling.
Biased take but you can’t remove meditation and mindfulness from its traditions specific goals. I get they have side benefits but therapy acting like they invested god through spreading it is just watering down what could help so many people
Do you care to elaborate?
I’ve tried getting into both a few times, to the point of noticing some benefits, but I fall off the wagon bc everything I read about it quickly goes into religious territory.
Since it appears you dislike all religion I’m not sure my main point fits your tastes but I could say many of the various goals of Buddhist meditation such as realization emptiness of self or of phenomena, realization of impermanence, especially dhyana are all absent from whitewashed or medical meditation. I would say these can all be labeled as helpful but not necessarily religious goals but ontological.
To me this does two things, one it presents a false narrative of meditation by displacing it from its thousands of years of tradition. Two, it robs the practitioners of multiple goals and benefits, instead presenting it as simply calming. Which was never its goal, except maybe samatha meditation.
Essentially, I feel western mainstream and medical meditation denies meditations long history, makes up some goals and benefits that are not within the proven one’s, all while acting like they did it themselves.
Reminds me of the Duke University Koru counseling group which gave a talk on how their program came up with walking meditation…
I hope that’s helpful or at least clear. I do prefer traditional what you would call religious Buddhist mediation but even traditional does not have to contain things you dislike. For instance traditional Chan/Zen and vipasana teachers have been quite open to all students while teaching the full meditation
Thank you for taking the time to reply and thoroughly so.
I think the best differentiation you made between ontology and religion is key. My issue with religious texts is that they (usually but not always) demand a full commitment with other practices and beliefs that I don’t find fitting for me personally, and it seems like an all or nothing approach, so I end up quitting.
Let alone as you mention how these ancient practices have been stripped of their original intentions to be made more palatable to western audiences. Not only that, but now some people have even tried to co-opt them by sticking a western religious approach, further (imo) disrespecting and confounding.
I’m being kinda contradictory, and this is why I haven’t sorted out my internal conflict between the search for inner peace -I wouldn’tbe so pretentious as to call it enlightment-, and my unwillingness to submit to religious dogma (I’ve had enough bad experiences, and not only with one religion).
Emotional processing. Just sit or lay down for a moment and let that stuff come. Go straight into all of it. Awkward and painful moments. Frustrations… It’ll feel so much better afterward!
Something to avoid would be letting others set your standard. You set your own standard.
Checking up on your friends and asking how they are. It never hurts to be there for your friends when they’re having a bad day! ❤️
I stopped doing this with some of my friends. They were always happy to hear from me, but the relationship felt one sided. Once I did, I found out I was right.
Getting an electric toothbrush, and flossing daily. My dental hygienists love me.
Never start nicotine
I’d also like to chip in that alcoholism is sneaky. Be careful with drinking
Yeah alcohol really sucks. It’s so embedded into society most people expect you to start drinking regularly as soon as you can. I think it’s getting better but still people are nowhere near as cautious about alcohol as they really should be it accounts for 10% of deaths worldwide, that is just mind boggling.
I had to avoid alcohol for a while because of a medication I was on and it drove me mad when people would press me after I said “I’m not drinking”. I think it makes people feel weird about their own alcohol use? But if they’re that self conscious, maybe they need to do some self reflection about whether their alcohol use is a problem.
A phrase I’ve been seeing more in recent years that’s a small thing that feels impactful is stuff that says “alcohol and other drugs”. It is a drug and needs to be treated with respect, and ideally caution
Does it really matter why you aren’t drinking? I tend to avoid asking questions like that especially immediately after I find out that is the case. No matter what reason someone has it won’t (or at least it shouldn’t) change there choice if I know.
That’s exactly my point, it’s a ridiculous question to ask. Like, there are so many bad outcomes to asking it.
And honestly take it easy on weed. A little for fun is fine, but chronic heavy use can kick off schizophrenia and depersonalization disorder, and literally lower your IQ.
