This One Habit Shows If You’ve Successfully Graduated To Adulthood
How to perform at your peak, feel relaxed and find happiness
For the longest time, I was proud of my ability to “power through” difficult tasks.
- Stay up till 2am to finish that presentation? No problem!
- Survive on 4 hours of sleep a night so I could turn in the perfect project? Why not?
- Give 3 exams over 2 days without any sleep (and studying last minute of course)? Duh! Was there any other way?
I thought that it showed how hard I was willing to work, how much I cared and frankly that career and success was the most important thing in my life right now.
If I couldn’t put career first even now when I was so young and free of commitments, what was the point?
If I couldn’t push through discomfort and work hard, how was I going to succeed?
Yes?
NO!
In hindsight, this was the worst possible approach I could have taken. Sure, I was successful but at what cost?
- I was chronically stressed and should I say depressed?
- I was tired all the damn time! I didn’t know how people could feel fresh or perky when they woke up.
- I used to keep eating because I had to fuel myself somehow — I got to a stage where I would finish an entire loaf of chocolate bread on top of three big carb-fueled meals in a day. Don’t even ask me what that did to my weight!
- I got sick, pretty badly.
- My emotions were a big mass of jumbled squiggly mess. I had no mind space to think or feel, but just juggernaut ahead like a robot.
- I procrastinated so very much and was always left with a feeling of self-sabotage, which basically meant I couldn’t even celebrate success (because I could’ve always done better!)
Mindset of health
What I did not realize was that I could’ve had all the success in the world a lot more easily if I had just put my physical and mental well-being first,i.e. if I took care of myself first.
I was my biggest resource and strength,
not my ability to do analysis or power through sleepless nights.
Putting myself firmly back at the center of my world not in a selfish way, but in a caring way that let me operate at my peak performance would’ve been the ideal way to reach my goals.
There are three facets of a healthy mindset:
- Physical Health
- Mental Health
- Emotional Health
1. Physical health
Being physically healthy includes:
- Eating real food — basically as few things that come out of a pack or out of (most) restaurants as possible. Fruits, vegetables, meat, whole grains, beans — you get the idea. It doesn’t take a genius to know what unhealthy food looks like.
- Eating real food consistently — now this is harder. If we can eat wholesome healthy fresh food at 80% of our meals, it increases mental clarity, reduces brain fog and just powers our bodies a lot more effectively (no sleepy afternoons or donut cravings at 5 p.m.!)
- Physical movement — this is not about protein-shake filled HIIT workouts or body combat classes. If you like swimming or tennis, go play. If you want to learn salsa, that’s perfect. Just want to go for a walk in the park or a weekend hike? That’s amazing! Move daily in a way that’s fun and relaxing. It makes us happier, keeps the blood flow going and makes us much more creative.
P.S.: Did you know that creative sparks happen when we step away from the task at hand and stop thinking about it? The next time you’re stuck at a project, go for a walk!
- Sleep 8–9 hours a day — definitely the hardest thing to do especially because it’s difficult to imagine what it feels like to wake up with the rising sun, refreshed, with a bunch of new ideas in your mind. Sleep also helps us synthesize information, improves recall and gives us that vibrant, perky and stupidly happy feeling (for no reason) that we all so desire.
As a bonus, you’ll likely drop any stubborn weight (and finally stop having cray cray cravings) you’re holding onto as well! The body wasn’t meant to operate under the physical constraints we subject it to.
2. Mental Health
Our mental state is so intensely personal to us. It’s a mass of jumbled tumbled emotions — stress or sadness, satisfaction or happiness. We experience our mental state really strongly, and because this is so unique to us it’s hard to talk it out with other people.
Stress, more than anything, affects our mood — which then affects our relationships, our mindset, our creativity and makes us rely on external fuel like chips/cookies/Red Bull to keep ourselves motivated.
Being able to deal with stress well is the single biggest driver to finally feel like we have a handle on this thing called life.
When we feel in control and when we know where life is going, it makes us more confident, relaxed and has a snowball effect on everything else in our life — we have happier relationships, better food and sleep habits and a positive outlook on life.
I’ve written about how to deal with stress positively on other Medium posts here:
3. Emotional Health
Our emotional health is our response to our mental state. It is completely in our control.
We may be stressed but how we deal with it determines if we end up sad and hopeless or stronger and more focused.
- Do we view stress as a positive signal for something that needs to change? Or do we always view stress as negative?
- Do we have the grit — the persistence and passion — to follow through on tasks even in hard times?
- Are we able to leverage others around us to feel better — for example, maintaining meaningful relationships with our family and loved ones or letting our hair down on a Friday night and chilling out?
Good physical health automatically contributes to a strong emotional health foundation. By responding well to mental health stressors, we can continue to keep our emotional health strong.
What Should You Do Next?
Depending on where you are on your journey, you can take some of these next steps:
- Start with moving to better physical health as the foundation of this habit.
- Mentally and emotionally relaxed already? Great — working on eating, moving and sleeping better will 100X your happiness!
- Stressed but in control? Take care of yourself by doing things you love (hanging out more with friends/treating yourself to a spa weekend/ reading a book/ eating good food) to feel better emotionally.
- Mostly feeling like crap?
i.e., you’re trying to get healthier but you just can’t seem to be able to. In fact, it seems like your attempts are turning against you (you wonder since when you compulsively ate cookies at dinner with no self control whatsoever?!?)
and
i.e., you’re stressed about work/ career/ life and you’re feeling stuck and hopeless right now
If this is you, it’s even more important to start with getting the small wins (eat one healthy meal, sleep early today, go for a walk, stop eating those cookies at night) to build momentum. In addition, it’s important to work with your ambitious perfectionist personality tendencies (instead of against them) to make progress. There are more resources that can help here.
