I will go straight to the point. Whenever there is something that prevents us from living the most functional, active, harmonious, thriving, blissful, joyful, creative life, the main law of breaking free from that is to use “+” instead of “-”. It will become clear in the next paragraph.
Look, you have 24 hours in a 1 day cycle. This cycle can be broken up into the parts: sleeping and being awake. Roughly 2/3 of the cycle is nominally active part. For majority of people, 0.5 of this active time is devoted to earning means for living, and remaining 0.5*2/3, which is 1/3 of the whole cycle is devoted to:
Commute from work and/or some work-to-rest transition time
Food consumption
Socializing
Hygiene
…who knows what.
That “who knows what” time needs to be inspected and mathematically tricked. Let’s say, you want to become more energetic and you know that coffee in the morning is kind of eh idea, so you’d like to quit drinking it, but you still drink it because it is a ritual, it is your morning, and mainly coffee is something that kind of works! You have 40 minutes to get ready in the morning, and you can either slowly drink coffee and quickly get ready, or you can shrink the time that you spend drinking coffee by 50% to add, or “+”, a morning sports routine or an energetic walk that would occupy the remaining 50% of your time previously devoted to the coffee drinking. You will notice how your day feels longer and more substantial now because we perceive time in a form of events and experiences, not as a physical process. Your brain will make you happy for some added accomplishment and will reward you with some tasty hormones that will carry you through the day in a completely different mood. You will feel more ownership of your life too. You can continue dividing the “who knows what” time slots and notice how you start juggling the new habits and introducing them with pleasure, maybe eventually replacing some negatively contributing habits with those that grant you the highest quality of life and sense of meaning. Do you see how “+” principle works? Maybe in a couple of weeks you get so hooked up to the non-linear gratification through will power-to-achievement sequence that you will forget that coffee existed! I am not even mentioning that in the “coffee time slot” you can introduce its own type of “+”’s, such as tasty teas or home-made lemonade with tarragon, for example - something exquisite and special to meet the standards of your morning rituals aesthetics and something that will make you want to get up even in the gloomiest and coldest day!
Now, let’s imagine the opposite, if we operated “-” principle applied for quitting drinking coffee. You go to bed with an intention that “tomorrow, no matter what, I am not having coffee”. You go to bed nervous because you are going to give up on something that kind of worked for you to spend morning with pleasure and that was giving you energy loan. Your perceived world goes to some impoverished state and you feel like you need to prepare for a struggle. Believe me, your brain will do everything to avoid that! You will likely go through a nightmare of extreme will power exertion, everyone around you will be drinking coffee, the car exhaust will smell like fumes from a coffee roastery. The whole day of stress from subtracting the activity that kind of worked will result in a poor night sleep, so the next morning you will wake up already having a huge justified incentive to have a cup of coffee. So in this story, a hero would go from being equipped with a tool to being disarmored.
This principle of added options will apply to many neutral to dysfunctional “who knows what-s”. If you (still?!) watch TV, break that time in half and listen to music, dance, or sing in that time slot - whatever. If you smoke, devote 50% of time smoking to taking care of the plants or organize an indoor garden, or stretch (it’s up to painful enough to distract you from other sensations). And even if you are stuck in any form of relationships that either debilitate you or just take up too much time to, say, gossiping or listening to someone’s endless complaints, expand your circle of acquaintances by a factor of 3 and enjoy other perspectives and new options instead of just quitting on the “last resort” people and creating vacuum of perceived misery and loneliness around you. If it is quitting sweets for good, it is important to not get stuck with just a bunch of kale in your fridge - absolutely get some healthier alternatives to your habitual desserts in abundance and enjoy them as great options. Raw Form of Life can get you covered with those. Healthy eating, relationships, activity are not punishment, they are pleasure before, during, and afterwards!!!
Do not cut out the scenarios that kind of work. Add new scenarios and options that do work and watch dysfunctional processed die out! This will make your farewells to “bad habits” drama-free and stress-free, and will bring your life to a new level.
Thank you for reading and, please, leave your comments below!
Raw Form of Life.
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