CARING FOR YOUR HEALTH

If there’s one thing you don’t fuck around with, it’s your health. Face it, there’s no reasoning or arguing with it, if you don’t take care of your physical well-being, you’re basically screwing yourself from the back end of your life. Our physical bodies are a base factor that all humans must deal with, and everyone in human history has had to deal with it. Unless you’ve found some way to exist without being slave to your physical needs, you better take good care of your body, it’s the only one you’ve been given.

Slave to my body? That’s right, that’s what happens when you don’t take care of your body. Ever hear about those people who obviously didn’t pay attention to their diets and got so overly obese that they can’t even get out of their homes, or get out of the bed/couch they last collapsed onto before their legs gave out to their massively overweight bodies? Or people who have smoked so much that they lose a lung or get a hole put into their throats so that they can scare the hell out of little children? These are only a few extreme examples of what may happen when you extremely mistreat your physical self, but the point is even if these people woke up and decided to stop mistreating their bodies, their past decisions have put them into complete enslavement that they’ll have to free themselves of before they can start getting better.

But for most of us, we enslave ourselves through small mistreatments of our bodies, such as not eating a well rounded diet, overeating, under-eating, not exercising often enough, drinking too much alcohol, not sleeping enough, doing harmful drugs, smoking, not keeping ourselves clean, stressing ourselves out and staying in stressed states, etc, etc, etc. The list goes on and on. But not to worry, our bodies give us signs to remind us of how we mistreat it so that we may recognize them and fix the problems. Such signs may be headaches, pains, upset stomaches, upset anything, lack of energy, blood shot eyes, more susceptibility to catching illnesses, being out of breath going up a small flight of stairs, hangovers, coughs, etc, etc. You get the idea, you already know what these signs are, as you’ve most likely already felt many of these symptoms before.

STRESS, THE AMERICAN DRUG!

Studies show that a particularly common type of male pattern beer guts have a strong correlation with stress. While it’s not indicative that stress directly causes beer guts, the much more troubling suggestion is that stress causes people to be self-destructive, especially to their bodies. Ever walk into a meeting of corporate middle-managers? It’s like the beer gut is part of the uniform, just like the cups of coffee-sludge they’re drinking. The physical effects of stress have become the badge that good American workers can complain about while being patted on the back proudly. They’re “sacrificing” for their families and nation. What bullshit. How many people do you know talk about how stressful their work situations are? If you work with many people in many fields, you’ll notice how common it is. But it’s become an accepted thing, in fact when you and I think stressful job we usually also think “important” job. Notice how easy it is to make that connection, even though there’s actually none whatsoever.

But the problem I see in most of my “peers” in their twenties and thirties, is that most of us learn to ignore the symptoms of our bodies, and continue to mistreat ourselves physically. And this may be very tempting to do while we’re young and hip, and keeping up with the fashionable zombie/methamphetamine look and partying or drinking every night, trying hard to show how independent we are in our Gen-Y web 2.0 infused lifestyle. And if you don’t fall into that label, maybe you’re building up your “career,” working hard today, reading this at 10PM in your office while you finish up a project, but neglecting your sleep, diet, and health, so you won’t have to work so hard sometime in the future, whenever that future may be. They’re equally bad, especially in the context of our generation’s propensity for eating chips, drinking soda, and treating hamburgers, fries, and pizza as social food, or as “rewards.”

It’s easy for these ideals to become more important to us than health, we’re young, we don’t have to worry about slowing down until we’re older, right? After all, that gnawing feeling you have of “I’m making a bad choice for my body” most likely comes in the tone of voice that your parents talk to you in when they’re disappointed. And we all know we don’t need to listen to them, right? After all, we only live once, and why should we waste our young and beautiful years worrying about those things that only older (and therefore less free and probably fuglier) people worry about, right?

Well, sometimes the choice of responsibility is the hard choice to make, especially when it comes to being good to yourself. For as much as we talk about how awesome we are, there’s no such thing as a 20-something that doesn’t at least subconsciously harbor feelings of self-destruction. Sure, you may have just heard that french fries are more carcinogenic than cigarettes, but damn they taste good and they’re cheap, so fuck it. You can live your carefree party days today and worry about whatever harm you did to your body later. But if you want to actually attain your goals and become more than the person you are today, to become a more intelligent and successful person, to live consciously and act consciously, to achieve those dreams you have in doing something that adds to the world and is new and fresh and represents you, you’re going to have to start with the basics, and the most basic is your body.

OVERCOMING RESISTANCE

If you’re like me, you’ll scoff at the idea of changing now so suddenly, since after all you’ll “eventually” get to it. There isn’t any time now to worry about eating good diets every day, or getting to the gym often enough, or sleeping, who really needs to do that? I’m young now and I’m paving a road with my daily sacrifices on my body so that one day I can truly devote the right time and mental attitude to fully accomplishing these physical goals. I had this attitude for years, cranking out money with hard, stressful, unsatisfying days at work, learning to use my bank account and property as the only sign of my success in life. It was hard to break out of it, but I realized I was absolutely wrong in the decisions that got me there. I wasn’t paving a road for a better career with more money so I could later work on improving the parts of me that I don’t like. I was paving myself into a hole directed straight for mid-life crisis.

You’ve heard of that term, mid-life crisis. Maybe your uncle went through it and bought a Lamborghini, maybe your parents even got divorced in their forties after a mutual falling out, it happens a lot. A lot of 20-somethings look at being middle-aged as if it were a millennium away, its vague promises of stature and wealth and “adult” problems beyond the horizon. I thought that way too, being middle-aged is what I’ll be when I’ve “made it,” as if the clock was ticking and it was a slow steady race to finish before the time was up. A lot of my friends have this attitude as well, as if the ages of 25-40 are kind of just a gliding period where stuff happens, small successes mounting towards a large success later when you’re middle-aged.

Of course, middle-age is the age in which you’d start working out and taking care of your body, right? So just put that off, wait until then. Maybe you’ve got some big scheme you’d like to try, you can put that off until then too, right? Hey, maybe you have an idea for a novel, or want to go to Europe, or want to start a business. When you have the money, you can do those too, so just put them off too. Well, the thing is, in putting things off, you’re getting very good at doing one particular thing, and that’s putting things off.

When you get good at putting off your dreams and compromising your life goals, you do it over and over again easily, for decades until one day you wake up, you’re middle-aged, and you look back on your life and wonder what the fuck happened. Won’t happen to you? Then don’t let it happen, the seeds for mid-life crises are planted when the person is in their early twenties. See, delaying and procrastination is a skill, the more you do it, the better you are at it, coming up with even more convincing and elaborate excuses to stop yourself from doing things. Soon, your goal-making is automated, and you don’t even have to think about it, you’re just flowing through life, climbing up the corporate ladder, working at that dead-end job, or maybe even sucking money out of other people.

“I need money! Who can argue with that?”

I’ve been saying this, and things like this, all my adult life and I’m no better for having a bunch of goals that I never get around to accomplishing. I would find out topical stuff about things I really wanted for myself, and put them on my list of “life” goals, waiting for some day that I might actually take action on them. And I realized as I was growing more and more unhappy with myself, fear was crippling me, because I had allowed it to, using my own weaknesses and limitations as excuses, creating more weakness. Weakness in my body and mind. The excuses I was coming up with, that had become part of my life, that seemed even at the time to make me stronger, were all holding me back.

I could do one of two things to make myself feel better:

1. Keep ignoring the negative symptoms my body, emotions, and mind were sending me till I was totally de-sensitized to it, and hope I wouldn’t forget to accomplish my goals someday when I really felt I had the time to devote to my life goals, or

2. Achieve my life goals no matter how scary it was.

I decided I had enough of option #1 and that I was fed up with with it, so I’d try #2. So I decided, intellectually, to move ahead with #2, but what I found was that I had built up a huge amount of resistance (ie. excuses) to actually taking action towards accomplishing my life goals. I cried and got stressed out, sat around doing nothing for days, got mad at myself, and lashed out at people close to me, blaming them for holding me back. I acted like an ass. Eventually, the internal turmoil I was going through quieted down enough for me to be able to act, and after I got past the initial struggle, I started making small steps of progress.

I started sleeping more hours, and I lost those circles under my eyes. I felt more energetic, I felt less stressful. I got a gym membership, I went to the gym, I got even more energy, I built some muscle, I lost 10 pounds. I ate more regularly and in the right proportions and nutrients, I got even more energy, I weakened the Hangry Monster so he has trouble visiting or even showing up. I went to the doctors to make sure I was as healthy and as efficient as I could be and that I wasn’t hiding some cancer in my body, I got immunizations to make my body stronger, I got cavities removed from my teeth, I got better prescriptions and Lasik for my eyes so I could see more efficiently, I got warnings from my doctors of what I needed to look out for in my health. In other words, I was suiting up, charging the warp coils, and training the armies to continue in my journey to bring the ring of power to Mount Doom, to face Darth Vader and the emperor and bring peace to the galaxy, or whatever my life journey would lead me to.

I didn’t quite understand what I was doing when I was doing it, but in hindsight, I realize I was freeing my body. It had been enslaved, drained of energy, unable to feed my mind the nutrients it needed. Worse yet, I had been plagued with guilt and worry of my possibly deteriorating health, due to ignorance, due to lack of information, but mostly due to fear. It had been a slow process and it’s still an ongoing struggle to keep up the exercise, diet and sleep, but I’ve now put in motion so many changes in my physical well being, that they’re becoming easier to do. Beyond that, change and betterment are themselves becoming habits, skills that I’m practicing and making stronger. I know that the other goals I’m aiming for will not be far from being accomplished at most, and attempted at least.

CONCLUSION

Take care of yourself, and if nothing else about yourself, at least take care of your body. Your body will in turn give you the energy to look around and prioritize the other problems in your life. Your body is like a self-diagnostic tool, it tells you when you’ve fucked up, and when it’s stronger, your ability to meet and deflect obstacles — physical, mental, or emotional — becomes more active. Exercise, take vitamins or at least eat nutritious food, and develop a healthy sleep pattern (this article can help you reach that goal). If you can muster enough change in your physical self, you’ll be able to feel the benefits of it and have the physical power to start doing the stuff you really want to do with your life. People recommend that you start somewhere if you want to improve yourself, I say start with the physical, you’ll be surprised how you feel when you really take care of your body, and that even those seemingly small changes can help you realize how you can move forward. Ultimately, those life goals you may be leaving for later will never get accomplished until you say you’re going to tackle it today.

What’s auto-mode like? No, it’s not when Optimus Prime is the semi truck. An example of auto-mode most people will know is when they’ve been driving for some time and they realize there are moments in getting where they are that they don’t recall, but of course, they must have driven that stretch of distance. Since you haven’t crashed or anything, you must have been conscious and relatively paying “attention.” Driving has become so ingrained into you, that you don’t need to have all your attention and focus on every moment of the task, you just automatically do what you need to do, including watching for dangers and driving at appropriate speeds. I’m sure most drivers have experienced being in auto-mode then suddenly encountering a road hazard; your reflexes will kick in automatically and your full attention will be brought back to driving within milliseconds.

Needless to say, this level of consciousness, “auto-mode,” can be useful at work. Most people already go into some sort of auto-mode for the more menial monotonous tasks at a job. Unfortunately, similar to the slippery slope of World of Warcraft addiction, many people go into auto-mode for most of their lives, sometimes snapping out of it for family events and the occasional exam or meeting, at which point they freak out.

This is not the auto-mode we’re talking about. There’s a big difference between temporarily giving up mental engagement and being out of control of your life. The point of this article is to efficiently and awesomely be in auto-mode at the right times and places so that you continue to be promoted and get recognition for your “hard” work with phat raises and ultimately wear white fur coats and gold grills while throwing back Hennessy with honeys, as is the pinnacle of every career.

I would like to caution that if you are a doctor or firefighter or have some other job that needs concentration to make sure people don’t suffer or die, please don’t go into auto-mode when you’re saving me or my computer. Feel privileged that you have a job that actually adds something to society, and that people depend on you doing a good job at your profession everyday. If you have a profession like this and you’re still not happy with your job, get out of that role which may mean the difference between whether I and my DVD collection live or die, and try something different like the exciting world of corporate accounting or the exactly equally-less-meaningful job as an Apple Store salesperson. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I can continue showing 98% of the world how to slack off.

1. Learn everything about your job. When you first get your job or decide that you want to go into auto-mode, you’ll need to do some actual work for at least a month, but possibly less depending on how many bosses you have who will demand unnecessary tasks from you. If you’re new to the job world, it’ll take at least a full month for you to really understand what is expected from you at your job, and it will take about three months for you to gain all the skills and knowledge to go full auto-mode. If you’re really fast at learning jobs or you’ve done it a lot, by the time a month passes you’ll be ready.

What does it mean to learn everything about your job? It’s not knowing everything that will occur, or knowing every single detail about everything you have to do. It’s about knowing what to do in every possible situation that may come up in your job. The best way to learn how to do this, is to actually do your job. You’ll be encountering new situations every day, and you’ll need to think on your feet and determine what is the best course of action for you to take for each new situation. You’ll start seeing some similarities in the situations that come up and you’ll be able to react to them faster as you gain more experience.

Because each job is different, I can’t get more specific with describing how to do this step. But basically, just do the best you can at the job you’re at for 1-3 months, and make sure to pay attention to the different ways you approach each situation that comes up.

The most common mistake with auto-mode is to go into it without this very necessary prep time. Occasionally you’ll encounter somebody who’s in auto-mode their first day of work. These people are losers, but the fact that they usually don’t get fired right away is a testament to how effective a properly-executed auto-mode can be at many shitty jobs.

2. Note and study the approaches you’ve been using. After your 1-3 months of being an excellent employee, your boss(es) have probably been praising you for your great work (or they’ve even given you a promotion or raise!), or they’ve simply nit-picked something you did wrong on your first day, and since you haven’t been fucking up recently, have noted “stellar improvement.” You may be thinking “Hey maybe I can do well at this job even though I hate it, I wonder if I should try even harder.” The answer to that question is a hearty and life-affirming “No!” Instead, this is when you can start putting things into motion to go into auto-mode. Your first action should be to jot down everything you do at your job and the different approaches you’ve had to take in order to fix every problem or issue that has come up in the last 1-3 months. You’ll probably see some patterns come up and find that certain issues equals certain solutions and approaches. Study your list and start coming up with ways to help yourself recognize a situation and to execute an approach easily. Make notes of what you come up with.

You may be thinkin’, “Geese, this list-making is way too much work in addition to my work, what the fuck?” Don’t worry, and if this list were for you to reference later in your job, you’d be right. This list is just for you to organize a work pattern subconsciously in your head, after you’ve made it you could throw it out, but that’s not efficient. Instead, leave the list posted extremely visibly in your work area so that your boss can “mistakenly” glance at it when they come by. They can see how much work you’re doing, how you’re on top of it, and how they can’t fire you because you’re holding the company together.

3. Optimize your work structure for peak auto-mode. Now that you have a list of the approaches you need to excel at your job, make changes in the way you do your job so that the different situations can easily be filtered through the approaches. This may mean organizing the way you report to your boss or superiors, scheduling your day so that you have a routine that allows you to properly get to each new situation with the least amount of work but still maintaining an adequate solution, or even creating a database of solutions for your own use (or co-workers, too, if you often have to deal with fixing their problems). The optimization will be different for every job and it will depend on what your list from Step 2 says, but if you put enough good effort into this step, the auto-mode will run more smoothly.

4. Turn on Auto-Mode. Now that you have everything set up, go into auto-mode. What does this mean? The easiest way to get started is to stare straight ahead and start doing your work. When you’re staring at a blank point in space, you’ll find your mind will begin to wander, and soon you can start controlling where it goes. I used to stare at the exact center of my computer screen in between tasks and think about the scripts I was writing, solutions to problems in my personal life, basically anything I needed to do. Soon, I could go into auto-mode in a few seconds, 6 hours would go by, and all my work would get done somehow and I’d be refreshed and prepared for the rest of my life. You may find you have a few kinks, which means you’ll need to go back to Steps 2 and 3 to fix them. Common kinks are bosses who are constantly asking you to do things, or a change in your work protocol. If changes happen, narrow in on the exact details of the change, alter your work flow as necessary, test your new process, and continue auto-mode.

When you get it working right, it may feel weird the first few days, and you may experience huge amounts of extra time. When I first experienced this, I thought I was going to get in trouble for not doing anything “productive.” However, I soon realized that I was outputting the same amount of productivity as I was before I went into auto-mode. But now that I had optimized everything, I could just sit back, zone out, and relax while my bosses thought I was working just as hard as I used to if not more.

You know how they say that even though people may be working 40, 60, 80+ hours a week, they’re really only productive for a small fraction of all those hours? Well, now you’re enjoying being at work while being very efficiently awesome, and reaping the benefit of the large fraction of time that you now have due to your efficient productivity. That extra time is time you could be scrolling through online blogs (*wink*).

5. Update Steps 2 and 3 when needed. From this point on, updating Steps 2 and 3 will be the most work you’ll have to do towards going into and staying in auto-mode. Even after you go into auto-mode, you may find you need to periodically update your list, if only mentally. But don’t worry, updating is superbly easier to creating the list because you’ll only be changing a few things around. If you find yourself constantly updating your list and you very much dislike your job, you may need to think about firing your boss and getting a new one.

It may seem like this is more work to have to keep updating, but it’s really up to you. You can not update if you choose, as long as you do a good enough job in the first time around. Or you can choose not to update if you don’t care about getting a raise or promotion. However, if you do want those raises and promotions, update as often as you feel necessary. This may mean that auto-mode doesn’t get much usage, but rest assured that when you’re happy with the amount of money you’re getting and the position you’re at, auto-mode will be so optimized that you probably won’t be needing many updates after that.

Efficient Awesomeness at Work

“But doesn’t this mean I’ll be doing less work? That sounds ‘bad’ and I have feelings such as ‘anxiety’ about getting caught in auto-mode.”

You’ll probably have realized that except for the part about AUTO-MODE, the above is what efficiently awesome employees do at work to succeed. Well, you’re right. And for these super productive employees, they don’t need auto-mode because they love their jobs and the extra time they get, they simply use towards more awesome achievements at their work, for side projects, or in their private lives. Auto-mode is for those who are in a position they don’t like very much and quitting may not be a solution they are ready or prepared for. For those of you in that position, what exactly is it you’re afraid might happen? Give yourself a mental break, put on auto-mode, and maybe with the extra time and mental energy, you’ll be able to prepare yourself for quitting and getting a better job.

COMING SOON: How to quit your job!