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Find some exercise you enjoy and stick to it -- walking, running but not on hard surfaces, especially if you are over 40 , cycling, and swimming are all excellent. Exercise not only improves health immeasurably, but also clears the mind and makes you feel good. Not a whole book!
But for at least half an hour be alone with a book. There are so many books of so many different types that if you can't find a book you really want to read, you are not being serious. Make sure you have a small pile of real books or a few on your Kindle that you want to read. Take a book or Kindle everywhere you might be able to read for a few minutes.
Without excitement, we are not fully alive. Some people are fortunate: But if you don't or even if you do , find excitement, again for at least half an hour, in some activity that really turns you on -- sport, sex, dancing, games, gambling, playing cards, anything at all that doesn't do you or someone else harm.
Modern life is often far too tame. We are designed to get our thrills and if we don't, we may turn to destructive drugs to do that for us.
Shout, scream, holler, or just enjoy -- but do it intensely. Before you start each day, work out what is going to give you half an hour of excitement. If it has a strong physical element, so much the better.
In this life, we face many tough decisions every single day. Some of these decisions are small, and others can literally change everything. Life is full of big moments and big decisions. aren't that dependable, so the more important question might be: what do you want to major in?.
We spend half our waking hours working. Utterly mad not to enjoy it too -- even if it requires years of learning or experimentation to find out what that is.
This week I met a friend I hadn't seen for six months. He'd just split up from his wife and he was extremely happy about it. His children are grown up, so I'm sure he made the right choice. Better of course to make the right decision first time. Fine, it's hard to do, and I didn't, so who am I to talk?
Actually a very good person to talk, because I didn't think about my first relationship as seriously as I should, nor try it out gradually until I knew whether it would work. It may be that no single decision is as important this one in terms of happiness, for you and other people too. So give it the thought that it deserves, and beware of your first answer. You may find the order here a bit odd, but friends in aggregate are probably an even more important cause of our happiness and value than our partner. Over time, we become more like our friends, and they become more like us.
We influence each other enormously -- or else we are not true friends.
So if you want to know what somebody is really like -- a prospective partner, for example -- get to know their close friends. Cerf's advice is to stop basing day-to-day choices about fitness and diet on individual numbers.
They too easily become the goals themselves instead of a metric for tracking progress. In his own life, Cerf covers the number on his bathroom scale. The scale logs each weigh-in, but he looks just once at the numbers at end of the week. He said it helps him think less about numbers and more about the bigger trend of weight loss.
As a neuroscientist obsessed with choice, money is one of Cerf's biggest interests. He's found that a lot of people struggle to budget properly because they're up against so many timescales for spending and saving. Paychecks, for example, tend to come twice a month. Bills are paid once a month.
People go grocery shopping perhaps four times a month, but eat three meals a day. Cerf's advice for making sense of all these scales is to adjust budgeting around just one.
It might take a few months of experimenting with allotting per-diems or lump sums at the start of the month. But Cerf said the result is less stress and a greater sense of control over finances. Since Cerf views human decision-making as inherently faulty, he isn't surprised when people have trouble finding the right romantic partner.
Often, they are too close to the situation to have any clarity. When it comes to this I suggest chasing your dreams no matter where they bring you; after all, you only live once. Figuring out who you want to spend the rest of your life with is a complicated decision. For some people, it may come easy, but for most, it is filled with a lot of mistaken true loves and failed relationships.
However, in the end, you will know when you have found the one you were meant to be with. This is a decision that most people forget to make. It is one that should honestly be made before the rest but tends to be overlooked.
I made the decisions to only put work into those who truly care long ago and I am so much better for it. I am sure there are more decisions we all have to make, that also influence our lives in big ways, but I think we can all agree that the ones listed above are important regardless of who you are. Have you made these decisions yet and if you could add one decision to this list what would it be?