As cliche as it sounds it felt like if I took care of these two things, everything else will take care of itself. Since last 15 days, I feel reinvigorated once again as I focus on these two things. There is a long way to go to fully undo all the damage, but I feel I am on track.
At some level our bodies are like machines. Feed it crappy fuel (food) and don’t give it good maintenance (exercise and sleep) and it won’t run well.
those are actually the 4 pillars of health: eat right, exercise, get enough sleep, minimize stress
- Clean the spaces you are in, bedroom, kitchen, office, living room, etc - Learn to communicate with an open heart. The book "Nonviolent Communication" is a great resource. - Be careful of your thoughts. Don't even joke negatively about yourself. It really does affect you even if you're not aware.
Eat well, get some sun, drink water. You are like a houseplant with more complex emotions.
90% of the time when I’m feelint crabby it’s because I’m hungry or dehydrated. Moving also always helps.
Some beliefs are so destructive that no amount of exercise will alleviate their effect. For instance, some people are what I call blamers. They believe that their misery is because of life, others, society... They refuse to accept what life has given them (whether their look, family...). They honestly believe that their misery is result of external consequences. No amount of exercise will fix that. Contrast that to those who are always grateful. Always glad with what they got. Happiness for these is simple.
So, for some, it can help.
This is a significant, non-scalable investment of time and effort in the well-being of another. It wouldn't surprise me if such experiences were in extremely short supply in those people's lives. From my experience, there's a significant chunk of the population for which this sort of investment is a required component for their on-going sense of self-worth.
I'm not sure why, but my experience is that tech culture is particularly prone to an almost axiomatic rejection of this aspect of human interaction and well-being, and often exhibits significant prejudice towards those for whom this external requirement for well-being manifests.
Quick thought experiment: would you tell a physically abused child, to their face, "Do you honestly believe your misery is a result of external consequences? Be grateful for what you do have."
Some people habitually blame things that they caused themselves on others. Others commit the converse and blame things other people did on themselves. I don't think either of these facilitates your mental health.
If you are an adult, almost certainly things happened to you that weren't your fault, but that are your responsibility. That's life. Life is the process of dealing with those things, and then you die. It sucks, but it's worth it. Am I out of platitudes yet?
All these habits are founded on a desire to be better, which in turn needs to be rooted, at least partly, in compassion for yourself. If you don't want to be better, because you don't think you deserve it, because you have had that beaten into you, why would you exercise or eat better? And the only way you're guaranteed to have compassion for you when you need it is to learn how to generate it yourself. You're not going to exercise or eat clean or anything healthy sustainably if you're sustaining it by abusing yourself verbally or emotionally. So don't do that.
Some examples:
* treating all human beings as a whole, which allows people to share happiness on other people's achievement - this kind of resonates with the theory of Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, where it argues that the goal of all humans is to maximize the chance that the entire gene pool will continue to exist
* reduce sense of one's own identity - which helps people during hard times by thinking about how small one single person is compared to the entire race, maybe even the entire universe
And of course, there's the advocate around being grateful, being compassionate, do more meditation etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain#Metabolism
As mental health deteriorates the consumption of resources required by the brain can fall out of rhythm to the detriment of the rest of the body.
No matter what the exercise is, ease in, find a trainer (you don't need one for long depending on what you're doing), and be smart.
Though, I wouldn't say it was the only "code to living a good life". After a problematic job, I'd also add work/life balance, on top ofrelationships (friends and family) and your faith.
Go figure, at some point your body stops being able to find something (I still have no idea what) to do with an extra 2-2.5k calories a day of crap, 6hrs a night of sleep starts to leave you dragging after one night of it, and you can't live like that anymore (well, you can, but it'll be... very bad).
Doing the same with a car at 80,000 miles is outright dangerous. But if taken care of properly, older cars can drive just as great as newer ones, and sometimes a well-maintained older car can drive even better than a neglected newer car.