A small list of daily decisions that keep my head clear and quiet the cycle of self-loathing. Full disclosure: I don’t always keep them (hence the title). But when I do, my mind gets a break and my productivity climbs. Take whatever’s useful and leave the rest.
Mind #
- Kill social media. Delete all of it and clear out your notifications. Try it for a week and you’ll realize how much you don’t need it. Stop looking at your damn phone so often.
- Get tech out of your bed. Charge everything on your desk, never within arm’s reach of where you sleep. Bonus: you have to actually get up to turn off the alarm.
- Sit with your thoughts instead of drowning them in music. It’s an easy addiction and
it crowds your mind more than you’d expect. Even the negative thoughts are worth
processing. Let them run their course.
- Especially in the car. Kill the music and just pay attention to the road.
- Read actual books. Anything. Fiction, biography, self-help, the Bible, whatever you enjoy. Reading forces you to delay gratification and commit your focus, the exact opposite of the junk food, porn, and short-form video this world runs on.
Body #
- Drink water (mostly). It’s the one thing your body actually answers “yes, that’s what I needed” to. Keep a big bottle on you, 24 oz minimum, 32 preferred. Full transparency: I am addicted to Coke Zero and I will down four cans at a party.
- Sleep enough. Stop chasing a magic number of hours and aim for waking up not-tired. Set an alarm to go to bed, not just to wake up. I’ve struggled with sleep my whole life. Some weeks I’m down by 11pm every night; other seasons I’m up until 4am watching LCK.
- Take your vitamins. Omega 3, vitamin C, vitamin D, magnesium, biotin, whatever your body actually needs.
- Stretch before bed. 10 to 15 minutes, four deep breaths per position, hit every major muscle group. Do it especially on days you trained or sat in a chair for hours, which is basically all of us.
- Track your macros if you have a fitness goal. Gaining, losing, recomping, it doesn’t matter, you have to track. You don’t need an expensive subscription. Snap a picture of your food, have an AI estimate the values, and add them up in any free app. That’s more than enough.
Space and habits #
- Keep your desk clean. A minimal, tidy workspace makes you feel more productive. No idea how much research backs this, but anecdotally it’s true.
- Journal daily. It doesn’t need to be deep. A one-line “highlight of the day” plus a little habit tracking is plenty.
- Keep a short list of daily habits you can actually track. Don’t build a 30-step routine you’ll abandon by Wednesday. Pick a manageable handful and check them off. A few done consistently beats a long list you quit.
Heart #
- Be patient with the people closest to you. We hand strangers endless kindness and then go cold on the people we’ve known the longest. Posture your heart to treat everyone the same.
- Slow days are allowed. Spending a day in bed doom scrolling is fine. But if it becomes the lifestyle, it’s time to reevaluate your goals and values. Nobody expects you to grind every single day, but it’s good to be striving toward something. And at the very least, have some compassion for yourself.
The bottom line #
I don’t care what goals or aspirations you have in life. The bottom line is that you are loved, and you are cared for. The Lord our God looks at you with a beaming smile.
So don’t get caught up in this looksmaxing bull crap. These systems are sometimes designed to make you feel as bad about yourself as possible, like there’s something wrong with you. There isn’t. You are perfect and uniquely made exactly as you are, purposefully hand crafted by our savior.
Go chase your dreams and work hard. Just do it out of gratitude to the Lord for even having the opportunity, not out of a need to prove yourself or make yourself more desirable to anyone.