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Workpost 11: Mentalities for Happiness
Byjack
Today I woke up feeling pretty awful from going to bed at 4AM last night.
I was feeling super overwhelmed with many many things in my life.
Today, I chose to wake up slowly, get to work slowly, and here are some of the mentalities that helped me:
- Cleaning is incredibly healing. Any time of cleaning, cleaning your workspace, your body, your clothes, it all is very therapeutic.
- What can I do for future Jack. This is the Matthew McConnehey’s idea of leaving breadcrumbs. Instead of the common idea of letting your future self deal with a problem (let future Jack deal with the dishes, let future Jack deal with talking to this person) think about what you can do now to make your future self happier. This can look like everything from cleaning, to setting up a super nice workspace, cooking yourself a really good meal.
- Focus on challenge and growth. I think oftentimes I get overwhelmed because I think about how hard things are. What helps me is thinking about everything in terms of challenge and growth. How can I challenge myself? What can I do to grow?
- Live in the hierarchy of being true to oneself. I was talking to a friend the other day about hierarchies and choosing the right one (don’t compete in a hierarchy you don’t believe in such as money). I want to compete and live in a hierarchy of being honest and true to myself.
I still feel a quite a bit of stress of the difficult conversations I’m anticipating, and the difficult tasks I have in front of me.
Unwelcome World
I feel sometimes
I am living in a world
Where every step is heavy
But the gravity only pulls on my heart
And the future feels unknown
Scary and not comfy
Vision Exam Challenge 1
Byjack
Today I booked at eye exam.
The date of the exam is Tuesday May 25th, which gives me about 6 days to prepare.
What I’m looking for this exam to do is to validate where I am visionwise and jumpstart my journey to better vision.
I’m going to be using the following ideas.
- Feel the feelings
- Don’t need to try to relax or try to tense, just notice the feelings and sensations
- Feedback loop
- Lots of vision tests to understand whether or not I’m improving or not
- Analogies
- Understand how vision works and try to strengthen and stretch where needed
- Use the same knowledge from stretching a good posture here (muscles work in groups)
Understing the Eye
According to this article, it says:
“When you look at things that are far away, muscles in your eye relax and your lens looks like a slim disc.
When you look at things that are close, muscles in your eye contract and make your lens thicker.”
So the key is to relax right? Well, yes and no. Muscles always work in groups. If certain muscles are constantly too tense, then there are certain muscles that must be weak (since if one set of muscles never relaxes, the other set must always be weak).
After researching further, I found the muscle responsible for focusing the lens of the eye. It’s called the ciliary muscle and it looks like it doesn’t actually work in pairs but is like smooth muscle tissue of the stomach.
An interesting article is here and I signed up for the guys course to see what was up.
The Sleep Deprivation Challenge
Byjack
Life is pretty challenging:
- I am severely sleep deprived to feeling pins and needles, dry eyes and nausea
- I have a big work project due by next week that I pulled all niters for but still am not close to being finished
- I have taxes looming over me
- I still have a messy apartment and other goals like exercise of my knee to work on
The challenge is simple: survive, adapt and thrive
The Health Challenge
Byjack
I’ve been feeling pretty lost as of late. I am thinking about my youtube channel, about my job, about coaching, about my health and about my challenges with youtube and fitness. I’ve been stressed out about all these different things and I don’t really know how to tackle all of them at the same time. I don’t know what to focus on, which ones makes sense to put energy into, and how I will go about focusing on any of these things.
I’ve been feeling depressed, overwhelmed and depleted, constantly self medicating with youtube videos and games.
Recently, I’ve been inspired by this video:
Health is everything. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you don’t have to choose between that and health. You will be a better entrepreneur with better health.
I want to drop all of my other challenges and focus on this for a while.
I want to focus on my health.
I thought about what this meant for quite a while because health is such a nebulous topic. I feel that Brian Johnson in project Blueprint is taking a very scientific approach to health, but I want to take a more personal approach.
Here are the areas that I care about:
- Mood: How positive and happy I feel overall
- Passion for life: How motivated I feel about life, relationships and projects
- Energy: How energetic and strong I feel
- Flow: how in the moment and attuned to my body’s sensations I feel
- Attractiveness: how healthy I look
Some ideas of times that I can measure these things:
- When I wake up: great for seeing how well I slept
- Around 10 AM: good for checking up on my morning routine
- Around 3 PM: good for checking on my afternoon routine
- Before I go to bed: good to seeing the cumulative effect of the day and how fulfilled I feel
I’ve tried these type of challenges before, but I feel that I sort of neglected the mental part of health, feeling healthier physically but mentally trapped and unhappy. I want to really commit to doing video journaling this entire time in order to make sure that I can express myself and work through mental challenges.
What would mean success to me is not just feeling much more happy, passionate, energetic, in flow and attractive, but also to create a lifestyle, mindset and routine that will maintain and grow that over time.
Vision Challenge 2: Making Things Easy
Byjack
So immediately after thinking about the eye challenge post I just wrote, I decided that I’m making things too difficult and over complicated.
I should keep things simple and increase my likelihood of success.
- Don’t limit screentime, instead, increase outdoor time and sports
- I love being on the water, go swimming and paddleboarding more
- Take off glasses as much as possible when it would make things easier
- Simple simple measurements for eyesight (see video below)
- Try drawing stuff from really far away for breaks in between long computer sessions
Current approx eyesight:
about 6cm away from phone for clear vision
100/6 = -16.6 diopters