Healthy Habits

[Suzaku]

Do you have a set of healthy habits you fall back on regularly to stay in the zone? What are they and why are they helpful? Do you use them to counter a negative habit?

What is the ideal mindset you always want to be in?

I've mentioned before I'm addicted to candy and once I start eating it I'll binge eat it. My mom had a problem with it when I was growing up, and she showed her love through sweets and food because she wasn't "present" when I was growing up. She struggled with anorexia and then would binge eat candy. I noticed that candy addiction became a big problem for me. So now I don't keep it around at all, though holidays tend to trigger it. I've replaced the bad habit with walks during the idling time I might be thinking about candy (assuming the weather is decent), or I'll put frozen berries in a bowl of milk and wait until the milk freezes around the berries, and eat those. Sometimes I'll have flavorful tea too.

[DirectorAbbie]

I try to eat food occasionally and avoid putting stuff in my mouth that tastes putrid. I also ride a bicycle because I'm a cheapskate. And I avoid hiking through No-Man's Land, for health reasons.

The ideal mindset is one that's focused on God.

[Cosmic Teapot]

Take a walk in the woods (1-2h) at a fast pace. 4-6 times a week: Keeps me from overthinking and helps me to sleep better. I started this habit 4 years ago to counter emotional problems. Worked for me.
(healthy body = healthy mind)

When I have a thought that won't leave my head, and that I analyze over and over with the same conclusion, I sit down and write an actual analysis. Yes. Like in school. Then I throw it away. It's so stupid it works. Somehow having the conclusion on paper gives me peace. And I like throwing things away.

Count calories to stay thin...I have a horrible sweat tooth, and at this point my blood is probably toxic, but at least I'm not obese

I have a collection of books I find most useful. I make sure to read and mark a view sites every now and then to remember the most important lessons

There where more habits I tried to establish but tbh it rarely works out si-Porl?


My ideal mindset:
(1) Remember that I am biased* and that most things are relative.
(2)I want to discipline myself to observe my thoughts, emotions from an accepting point of view instead of beating myself up with thoughts like: "I should not think / feel that way!", "I mustn't be sad / angry!"
Guarding myself from that is what made me depressed in the first place.

( "Emotions are like visitors. Let them come and go, but if you won't let them in, they will knock on your door forever to make you crazy." - or like that by forgot-who )

*lack of or incomplete information, priming/ anchor/ halo effect, current emotional/physical state, ...

[Raver]

Jogging outside 30 minutes a day 3-5 times a week with a specific trail I made up in the area. I usually do it during the Spring, Summer and Fall and I don't jog in the Winter because I prefer jogging outside rather than inside and it gets too cold in the winter to jog outside. I do it for the physical benefits of weight loss and improved cardio and energy. However, the mental benefits where I become mentally sharper and learn faster is the best part of it. It also improves my sleep quality as well as an added side benefit. My goal is to eventually be able to do this all year round though including the Winter, which I'll have to do inside.

[Suzaku]

I've started going to bed early and waking up early, starting yoga first thing in the morning along with some reiki. Even though I'm not a morning person at heart, I get the most done first thing in the morning. o.0 (is up at 5:57 AM and well-rested, WAT).

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

Well these are all a work in progress...

I'm too much of a peace loving ****** that just likes to take life slowly and stop and smell the flowers. So I gotta remind myself life is a challenge and competition and there isn't anything wrong with that... by moving my body more intensely and pushing myself to the limits, I can maybe be a little more bad ass jew sage-y and a little less goyim-y. While I value my softness I also value being a hard bad-ass even more cuz: the world is a jungle lol.

I need Se. I am often healed ironically by just screaming really loud. (like I just did after I took a shower) If I'm in emo mood, and just fed up with everything- there is nothing like a good scream.

Learning so say 'no' I am working on this one. I mean I didn't like how cruel & selfish the world was and how everybody just accepted that, I wanted to be a good person that said 'sure I can do that/I can help out' when somebody asks for help. But people naturally take advantage of people like that... so the next time somebody was like 'oh Sam is a nice and responsible guy (read: beta male) I'm sure he won't mind if I ask him to do this' I have recently said 'no' without feeling guilty. Sometimes I said it too angrily, hateful and resentful though. I am still working on being assertive and not too aggressive or too passive. But fuck you assertive sally, you have problems too. But yeah you sometimes just have to let nature take its course and let everything die and be a selfish asshole like everybody else for your own peace and sanity.

[Satan]

go to bed by 9:30pm, finish dinner by 7 pm, don't have calories between 7 pm / 7 am, get at least 30 minutes of exercise a day. don't drink coffee too late in day (time varies depending on how tolerance is, and how sleep hygeine is)

[FDG]

during spring-summer i do two workouts 30 mins one before work 6:30 - 7:10 one after work 18:00 - 18:30 - this way i can keep calm even during stressful negotiations.

reading at least one hour before bed instead of watching tv / doing stuff at the computer.

[xerx]

* do drugs to feel invincible

* during stress, pick fights with police to blow off steam

* entirely skip all work and commitments to avoid stress caused by failure

* abuse caffeine to boost metabolism and weight loss

[FDG]

* abuse caffeine to boost metabolism and weight loss

pff newbie there´s stronger stuff around

[xerx]

pff newbie there´s stronger stuff around

like?

[Chae]

My healthy habit is drinking tons of water Keeps the system running, it feels good. No, no negative counter-habit in that regard.

[wacey]

I could say a lot of things yet one thing stands out the most because it has the best potential for 'keeping it real' and that is getting yourself outside and into nature.

This is something I default towards and its a sign of health imo.

[WinnieW]

My healthy habit is to take an airing every day (outside of a city of course), at least for half an hour, unless the weather conditions are really bad.
It also improves my mood.

[wacey]

Another good one is putting on some head phones and blasting music while doing something..maybe sitting, maybe out for a walk, maybe out driving. Music can clean up a lot of emotion by activating it and amplifying it. Just feels healthy to put all that mental energy into something creative and rhythmic. Huge fan of music, huge fan of listening to music. Probably a lot healthier past time than many others out there.

[nickelslick]

There are a couple of ways I deal with sugar cravings. When they strike, it could be that your body is simply craving glucose, so maybe try making sure you have starches in your diet, with some fat/acid to lower the GI. A baked potato smothered in sour cream or butter for example. Since fats can taste sweet, some say a craving for sweetness could even be a craving for fat-soluble nutrients, so that's a 2-in-1 solution I guess. (Probably less likely)

I have a cola addiction too, and what helped was switching to carbonated mineral water. Your brain starts to associate the caffeine/sugar dopamine spike with the fizz, so when you get the fizz by itself your brain is tricked into satiety. Carbonated water is supposedly bad for your teeth though. Sigh.

[wasp]

unhealthy habits are a combination of instant gratification + filling the "void" (which can be emotional, mental, or spiritual)

unhealthy habits are merely a tool to reinforce preexisting negative feelings. that's the root cause of stress-eating. people eat more than they need to eat because they want to replace the hole left behind by their negative feelings with excessive food as a way to avoid addressing their negative feelings, but those negative feelings will still be there by the next time they get hungry, so they develop a habit of turning to food whenever those negative feelings resurface as an avoidance tactic, which eventually becomes a direct act of self-sabotage, so the solution has never been to eat less, it's been to resolve whatever internal discourse is pushing you to numb yourself with food, then you'll naturally eat less as a result. that's exactly why negative reinforcement never works, it's why you shouldn't view your unhealthy habits through the lens of shame. there's nothing shameful about them, but some people seem to think that it's productive to guilt-trip people by judging the byproduct of their unhealthy habits, instead of giving them positive reinforcement whenever they do try to improve, which instills positive feelings in them, and it's exactly those positive feelings that motivate them to turn to healthier habits.

[niffer]

Eat foods with collagen

Never hold in my pee

[Kill4Me]

Training is a big one. I love having my body worshipped and so put the time into making it as perfect and chiseled as possible. It's an expansion of my willpower. It’s nice having the best body anywhere I go cuz then all eyes are on me. My hard, chiselled body dominates the scene, owns the reactions of those around me and can still keep me in the power position to remain nonchalant and indifferent towards them. It is also a good business strategy because whatever I say gets amplified (kennedy didn't beat nixon because he was smarter). It doesn't take much effort to seduce the beautiful ones. Plus, I have a nice long strong neck and chiseled jaw to go with it and long-ass strong legs for 5’10. Come now, I didn't get the student teacher in high school because of my personality. Like I say, you can go further with the body of an Adonis and the personality of a grapefruit than you can with a larger than life personality and a grapefruit for a body. hahahahaha…. I began training as a kid. used to flex in the mirror all the time as a kid and would always make other kids feel my biceps at recess….I liked being the top dog, the most feared, the strongest, the toughest, the most athletic, the most ruthless, the most cunning hehe (this was before fighting became my main strategy for power). I was the first one that could flex my chest muscles up and down. I was always ahead of the curve. My motto is ABE. Not like Abe Lincoln, but A.B.E....ALWAYS BE EXPANDING

My body is also an object that serves the interests of my cold, calculated power gamez like my fists did in high school and my brains is too. Competing in the cutthroat rough and tumble to win so that I keep the incomez flowing in so I can keep acquiring material things means I need to be at a peak competitive stone cold killer physical shape day in and day out. …lean and mean….[as an aside, it also brings me psychological pleasure. My conniving, hustling ways and aggressive strategies stimulates my pleasure centers, so when I have been particulary aggressive, willful and clever, driving home on the highway afterwards remembering what I did for the moneyz and power, I start to moisten my upper lip with my tongue in mouth-watering pleasure. It’s like I get all aroused and so turned on heated up just having worked my schemes and connivances….my body starts to pretend its having an orgasm at just the thought of it…..so cold, empty and lifeless, no soul --- just raging, maniacal temper like the wild seas below. Hehehe, the way I like it.] Sex is also a healthy habit I fully but embrace with protection. I loves to fuck and am a major shameless exhibitionist. I can do fucking for hours and hours. With my girlfriends in high school, I’d be fucking all over the house. I can fuck in front of people too or as part of a strategy to get something. I love executing bold plans and am a strategic/tactical genius, always at least two steps ahead of even the ivy league schmucks, mhm. Being healthy and perfect and dressed to kill just makes it all the more easier cuz they never see me coming. lul.

I train twice a day to keep the hard, willful lifestyle in full swing and grabz people by the throat. I don’t ever want any warmth, tenderness or life creaking in, not that it would cuz I’m so dead. I’m in the gym twice a day like a fckin attention-craving machine dead to life (mmm). I’m exercising power on three levels: brains, looks and brawn….Nature has gifted me in all three areas. All the surface runs on an instinct for power, even deeper than temper. I self-program myself to do whatever the fucks my instinctive power calculus tells me too and I doesn’t let anything get in the way of that (a vacuous entity; a void in the universe I am) but I end up getting everything I want in the material world. That’s just the price of running things, so wicked. I’m super materialistic – more a hard materialist – I loves hard interaction with the material world, just one big insatiable power-hungry attention whore. Thus, my typical day goes like this…I wake up around seven. I go to eat breakfast. I begin to work --- either at my office or out wheeling and dealing. I work until twelve and then go get lunch, and then back to work. Around three o’clock I leave work and go to the gym. There at the gym I will do a body part….like today I did arms (biceps and triceps). I’ll typically do twelve to fifteen sets for each body part. I do less reps on compound exercises but go up higher in weight and more reps on dumbbell exercises but stick to lower in weight. So on chest day goes dumbbell flies more reps and sometimes negatives (which means holding it at different points on the way down, so I can explodez up from a motionless position which develops that density and increases strength) but less reps on the flat/incline benches and heavier weight. I do four or five different workouts to hit different parts of whatever body part I’m doing. That will take forty-five minutes to an hour. Then after that, I’ll jump on the sit-ups bench and put it on an decline, then do sets of sit-ups. Then I’ll pick up a 25 pound plate and do a set of sit-ups with the 25 pound plate cradled over my chest. I will also do another exercise for my obliques.

So after I am finished with that particular body part plus abdominals, I leave the gym and go back to work for another hour. After that, I get in my third meal. Then I’ll do stuff between 5:30-7:30. [Like today, I went to clean out my car because I have my rims coming in tomorrow and will need room in my car to store the factory wheels after they put the new shiny black chrome rims on my car….yippie, I’m getting my new rims tomorrow!!!] But that is only my first session at the gym. Then at some point between 8:00-10:00 p.m, I will go back to the gym and do a 2 and a half mile jog on the treadmill. If I am going out that night, I will do it at 8:00 pm. I just do a jog…Currently I set the treadmill to 4.8 and run for a 2 and a ½ miles….it takes about 31 and a half minutes. I’m about to increase to 5.0 because 4.8 has gotten too easy….like earlier tonight, I could have went for another forty five minutes. So I’ll move up to 2 ½ at 5.0 until I master that speed and go three days on, one day off etc. I could go faster but I don’t want to burn muscle. After I do my 2 and a half mile jog, I finish my sit-ups workout from earlier in the day, typically with three sets of hanging knee raises to keep those lower abs nice chiseled and tight and then more situps on a decline. Abs are the most important part of the body to me. I’m a solid, ripped, chiselled build right now and tight shirts fit me perfect. That gives me the time to have the nightlife where I can go ….get home by 1 or 2, fall asleep quickly and up the next morning for the same. Obviously if I’m in super overdrive at work, or working a deal or wheeling and dealing, I could be working longer days and then have to make improvised adjustments. I’m in action mostly morning, noon and night.

I never smoked cigarettes….I drank in my teens but after that I didn’t. I never did drugs. I smoked weed a few times but that was it….I saw all those self-indulgences as for weaklings. My mind was just too strong to be swayed into any of that…super strong. Plus, I had a coke head family member, so I instantly saw how drugs could turn people against their own interests and considered him to be a major weakling, so I always knew better than to get involved with it. He stole my baseball cards. I had fuckin killer collection, books full. I was the one who stayed home when they all used to go visit him at the rehab. Then he would relapse and rob again. So one day when I was older and bigger I gave him a beating….like an angel of death coming around to collect a debt….Of course, I manufactured a situation by the dryer that made him explode tehe, and then I did punches upon face, boom, bash bam he had nothing in return before it was broken up by another family member….tried to bite a piece of his cheek off when he close quartered on me then elbow to face as he tried to jump away from the face bite!

[Adam Strange]

I don’t have any healthy habits, other than not smoking, drinking, or eating anything that came from a cow. (But I’m not being an absolutist about this stuff, either.) Instead, I tend to experiment with fads. Most of them don’t become habits.

[Kill4Me]

By the way, that's 15 sets for biceps and 15 sets for triceps, not 15 sets all together when it comes to arms day (like today). I don't usually finish all 15 sets for triceps. I'll do 15 sets of biceps and then 9 sets of triceps for Tuesday, but then perform an additional six sets of triceps after my back workout on Friday.

[Spermatozoa]

This is a great thread. I will contribute what I can.

I have had lifelong struggles managing a routine, but a trick I've discovered to manage that is to have a fixed activity at the beginning and end of each day, allowing my creativity to roam freely and experiment in between this.

I have used Kundalini yoga to provide this backbone: every day I wake up, I perform a kriya (set of exercises) in bed to increase my energy level and become aware of my bodily sensations. Then I have a cold shower to pinpoint my focus, I then go downstairs and make a cup of tea, the same tea every morning, oolong tea with nothing added to it. And when I go to bed every night, I put my headphones on and silently recite SA TA NA MA (the mantra of infinity) for ten minutes to the same music which activates the navel chakra. That's the only part of my day which remains constant but it's enough to ground me.

Also food wise - I used to suffer from brain fog and lethargy, but both vanished once I removed sugar and carbohydrate rich foods from my diet. I now only eat meat, fish, green vegetables and dairy. No starches, grains, bread or fruit. I made these changes a month ago and have lost about 0.5% body fat per week (2.5 pounds per week).