Life Tips

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

With this article, I open the rubric of life advice. These are tips, proven in my personal life practice, about what most people should do in the logic of their daily behavior. You should not take the advice as dogma, since they all have only my subjective justification (I do not need a scientific justification here), and therefore something from the proposed one may not suit you personally. I will rarely explain the meaning of the advice, and even more so the reason why I came to them, since you can do all this for yourself, if necessary. The series of articles will consist of several parts, and each next set of tips will be more difficult than the previous one. Everything will end with one of the most important advice, the competent adherence to which, together with the correct approach to life, can greatly improve the quality of this life.

Yes, I forgot to say. There will be no primitive advice like "do not drink alcohol", "do not smoke", "do not watch porn", all this is understandable, if someone needs such advice, then this person will not be able to comprehend this series of articles until he gets rid of from a typical set of social nonsense. That is, I am not writing these articles for them.

Go

Develop and maintain a daily routine. It is necessary, if possible, to get up and go to bed at the same time, which is suitable for the maximum number of days in a year. Gradually you will get up without an alarm clock, that is, 3-4 minutes before it. The most convenient sleep modes for the human body are: 20: 00-04: 00 or 21: 00-05: 00. But in any case, it is better to get up an hour or two before the moment you get up in order to just be in time for work or school.

You need to sleep in the dark. The darker the better. Blindfolds do not count, it should be just darkness. This is due to the production of melatonin.

Go to bed no earlier than 2 hours after eating (or better even 3 hours). If you sleep on an empty stomach, after a few weeks you will find that you get more sleep and begin to have vivid and meaningful dreams.

Start your morning with a cold shower or wash your face with cold water.

If you do not take a cold shower in the morning, then it is still better to find time for such a hardening during the day. 5-10 seconds of moderately cold water every day will solve many psychological and physical problems in the future.

In the morning after waking up, you need to drink 200-400 grams (one or two mugs) of ordinary water (in no case, NOT mineral, NOT juice, etc., namely, plain pure boiled water at room temperature). You can have breakfast no earlier than 20 minutes after that. This procedure flushes out a lot of harmful substances from the body, usually making themselves felt only by the middle years and later (kidney stones, etc.). The cleaner the water, the better. Before breakfast, 20 minutes after water, you can drink another portion of water with some vitamins, for example, add honey and lemon to the water, but then breakfast is postponed another 20 minutes ahead of time.

Drink at least 2 to 3 liters of water per day (total, counting liquid foods like soup, juice, or tea).

Engage in some kind of physical activity every day. For example, do the right exercises. The most versatile and best method is regular running, starting or ending with a general warm-up of all joints.

We continue, now a few more difficult tips, already for consciousness and perception of the world.

DO NOT listen to music while on the street, in the car or somewhere else while waiting for something. There are many reasons for this, try to think about them yourself. Just a hint: consciousness and subconsciousness must process the situation in which you are, remember, connect what you see, in addition, there are many thoughts that require their early resolution, as well as useful intellectual exercises that can be done on the go. People who love to listen to music on the go, in pairs, in general, if only there is a background in their ears, as a rule, have a poor memory, do not know how to concentrate and more and more over time look like the inhabitants of "451 ° F". Think about why this happens … Of course, music in the ears is not the only reason for such shortcomings, but it is very significant.

Train your memory constantly. After a few years, you will thank yourself for this if you start doing the appropriate exercises. All memory needs to be trained: visual, tactile, musical, verbal, etc. There are a lot of exercises in this regard. Many of them are very convenient to do, just walking down the street or while waiting for something.

Constantly practice your skills of expressing your thoughts in words. To do this, strive to make presentations as often as possible (for example, in pairs at the university), explain to other people the answers to various philosophical questions, discuss with them, write essays in which you try to express your thoughts on a given topic as expressively as possible. … There are many different ways to achieve coherence and consistency in the presentation of thoughts.

Train your concentration skills regularly. This is very convenient to do on the street or while waiting, when many people grab their electronic devices to scroll through the menu.

For example, a great exercise is to find 7 elements in the surrounding reality on which to focus your attention and keep them in your head at the same time. First, we take one element (for example, the noise of passing cars or the ticking of a clock), keep our attention on it for a minute. Then we add a second element (for example, our breath), keeping both elements in our head. Then the third (for example, the sensation of touching your hand to something), hold three elements and so you need to learn how to bring to 7-9. More will still not work if done correctly. You can try to play the game "count to 100", when you need to count to 100 out loud, pronouncing each number clearly, but not being distracted by any extraneous thought. It's almost impossible. Further, there are a thousand and one other techniques that you can do both at home and in a public place, instead of bothering your head with all kinds of rubbish.

Take time to meditate. It can be different, and each person has his own way. Someone needs to sit at home in silence and organize their thoughts, someone, on the contrary, needs to rest from them, someone needs meditative music, and someone needs to run a long distance. Find your way and meditate regularly, this will help keep your nerves and mental stability.

Sometimes these tips can be followed without even allocating special time for this, if there is no time. Think how much time you waste walking down the street, being in many pairs at the university, waiting in line. But you should be extremely careful if you are not at home: some exercises knock you out of reality and you can accidentally go somewhere in the wrong place or get into a dangerous situation. Here you need to clearly understand what is being done and why. So, for example, don't even try to be distracted while driving. And music, by the way, distracts from driving, although you may not be aware of this until a certain moment.

Still, I will say that the most effective exercises cannot be done on the go. They need to be done at home with full concentration. I am sure that you can find the time, because one way or another, at least half an hour a day, each of you will probably be stupid, for example, in search of photos of kittens on the Internet.

As for me, the most convenient exercise for me, which is easiest and most often done when walking around the city, is working out dialogues. I am mentally talking to an imaginary person. He answers me something, I answer in response, while I can repeat each thought many times exactly until the form of its presentation begins to suit me. Sometimes it’s not a dialogue, but just a story to yourself. This is how verbal intelligence is trained. And for this you absolutely do not need to waste your personal time.

A summary of these tips: you need constant work on yourself in different directions and at any opportunity, as well as a refusal from a primitive attempt to occupy your consciousness with something superfluous, reducing its function to obtaining superficial pleasure.

We continue with the advice. Here are two more skills to master than not to master if your job involves writing. Since I run this blog, and in general I write a lot in different places, these skills are strictly necessary for me.

Write down ideas and thoughts that you find interesting. Despite training memory, people still forget something, especially when the information is not structured. It happens that an unexpected thought or idea comes to you: either you yourself come up with something, or somewhere you heard something. If this information is important and useful, I advise you to write down and then re-read your notes from time to time, crossing out those thoughts or ideas that are no longer relevant. Remember that an unwritten thought is likely to be lost, even if you have a good memory. This is due to the fact that such thoughts, as a rule, are not properly processed by you, but are postponed for later. As an example, I can cite one of my methods of writing articles: for a long time, all important and not very important information on a given topic is collected. All theses, opinions, ideas and even individual words that are supposed to be used are recorded somewhere in a random manner. Then all this porridge is systematized and brought into the proper holistic and consistent form. It is not very simple, but it turns out to be as wide as possible for a given volume to reveal the topic. If you try to write an article right away, it will turn out much worse (with rare exceptions).

Learn to touch-type. This advice, which is meaningless for many, hides a rather unobvious meaning. First, the computer is already an integral part of our culture and the ability to use it correctly should become the same skill as the ability to cook or use the phone. The keyboard is designed in such a way as to facilitate fast typing, while it is quite convenient, for example, when typing text from somewhere, looking at the text instead of the keyboard. At the same time, the eyes get tired less (you do not need to run them over the keys), you can work in complete darkness, save time (typing speed is 300-600 characters per minute, depending on the length of service and the difficulty of the text), with mechanical typing, you can generally talk with someone. then parallel or watch a simple program. Secondly, it is not quite easy to acquire this skill and do it correctly. Here you need endurance and work on your psyche. There is a wonderful program "Solo on the keyboard" (paid), I studied on it. There you need to do a lot of exercises, in each of which a certain text is typed, and three mistakes - and the exercise will have to be done again. I decided to complicate the task and after one mistake I started the exercise over again. Do you know how it happens? You write the text, now the last, 98th line … and bam! error:) All over again. I lost half an hour. This is very annoying, but the point is just to extinguish this feeling, again to master the adequate consciousness as quickly as possible. Such training, if done correctly and systematically, will teach you endurance and control over your personality. And the skill you acquire has many benefits. For me in this advice, what is important is exactly what I wrote "second". The fact that "in the first place" - I look at this as an additional bonus, a reward for working on oneself.

We continue … Now, advice that is difficult for comprehension will come, someone may even have a rejection of it due to an incorrect and superficial interpretation. Their understanding and precise meaning comes with experience, and I will try to give as short a formulation as possible so that you can remember them in the future. These tips are subjective and then everyone will find their own measure in their use. They are difficult in the sense that following them superficially can only harm you.

Don't be angry or nervous. I also do not recommend experiencing other negative experiences. They do not bring the desired result, but only aggravate your condition by destroying the nervous system. You may not drink, smoke, lead a healthy lifestyle (in a biological sense), but at the same time, your psyche may eventually become even worse than that of people with the above habits, if anger, hatred, resentment and other dregs are part of your daily life. Remember that you need to relate to everything adequately, to any disappointments and external attempts to somehow offend you, since everything that happens to you is mainly the result of only your behavior. It takes a lot of effort to figure this out. Well, what to do? You can deliberately demonstrate various negative experiences to people who expect them from you, or to convey some idea. Artificially playing anger or hatred may be the easiest solution to achieve certain goals in relation to some people, and pretending that you were offended can be very useful for the person who sought it to leave you behind, or so that the person who did it realizes something … But these experiences should be simulated only in the most extreme cases, when more correct methods for some reason did not work, and the result is needed now.

Do not brag or try to demonstrate your superiority on purpose to arouse envy or show your status. You do not need to seek emotional comfort by showing the other person how you can do something better than him, or that you have an item that is “cooler” than his. Such things should be done only for the purpose of teaching or showing something, but not for the sake of one's own pleasure from rising above a person. And all the more not for the sake of demonstrating their status. Such techniques, allowing you to motivate yourself for a short time, are useful only in cases where you have not yet learned to invent anything smarter. For example, among some people there is an opinion that quitting drinking or smoking is allowed by the realization that people who have not done this yet, they consider the dregs of society and feeble-minded, as if rising above them intellectually. This position should be immediately replaced by something more constructive as soon as your intelligence really becomes higher than those of those people.

Don't play the "scourge of God" by giving "reward" to people you think deserve it. Undoubtedly, inadequacy must be countered and tough and decisive in cases requiring immediate intervention. You need to teach a frank idiot a lesson and take up the upbringing of an ill-mannered person when there is an opportunity. But very often I observe that a person who has received a powerful tool of influence at his disposal begins to "punish" everyone who falls under his arm for certain misconduct, sometimes going too far, fanatically saying that only he knows what is right to the rest behave. You don't need to do this. Only be persistent in teaching others when you yourself are well aware of what you are teaching and prepare yourself for the fact that you may be wrong. Punish others when you understand the situation completely. There is a measure - and you need to act, observing the measure. At the same time, you need to clearly understand what you are doing and why. Playing with someone else's psyche is always very dangerous for both. Equally.

There is no need to prove that you are not a camel. A common mistake of people starting to think for themselves is to descend to some kind of explanations and excuses aimed at people who, due to their very limited mental abilities, try to mock you or simply satisfy their desire for self-righteousness, coupled with self-esteem. If you are right, try to explain, and if the interlocutor fanatically continues to ignore your arguments, do not waste time on him. Even if he thinks that he argued with you, in the end it will be worse for him and those who believed him. It is important to make a good attempt to explain something (when it makes sense at all), but not to throw beads in front of pigs when there are very few beads. Often the desire to prove something to someone is a consequence of the desire to have a high status and authority in society. Demonstrate your ability with good deeds and good decisions. The opinion of fools should interest you last. I could say that it should not interest you at all, but sometimes it happens that they can, without even knowing it, express a completely sensible idea. Rather, it will become efficient when you think it over and bring it "to mind" with your intellect.

The second most difficult tip (in my conditional list for today).

Never deceive yourself and do not try to "dodge" in a moral sense.

It happens that a person, as if by chance, learns about something. This information, from the moment of its realization, limits some of the person's actions. Instead of properly disposing of new knowledge, a person tries to dodge and act as if he had not received this new knowledge, deceiving himself that he might not have known, and the data came to him by accident, he did not want to learn. So, for example, a person accidentally heard arguments in favor of doing something very bad (for example, drinking, smoking, leading a hectic lifestyle). He still continues, trying to somehow rationalize his behavior, force himself to believe that the data is unreliable, came to him by accident, don't understand how, and you never know what someone says. The person in this example should start to figure out his own question on his own, take on the job of verifying the received data. Or, for example, one person secretly learned something about another, as a result of which his policy of relations with that person should change dramatically, but he still takes and does something as if he knew nothing, justifying himself by the fact that "And you did not tell me (a)." Remember: when important information comes, then this means that the time has come when you need it, or at least you can understand it correctly. Another question is what is considered important and what is not, but you yourself figure it out. Usually everything is very clear there, if not blunt.

It happens that a person knows that it is impossible to do something, but tries to adjust events in such a way that the desired action would turn out as if by itself, and this person himself would simply find himself on the path of certain circumstances that would be impossible to ignore and would only have to succumb to them. Such moral resourcefulness will be punished "from above" more than an attempt to directly but honestly break some promise made to oneself (or to someone).

It happens that one person tries to set up a bad situation for another or punish him for something, without warning and not calling him to start a frank conversation, as a result of which circumstances unknown to him may well emerge, making an attempt to conduct such an upbringing incorrect. Trying to teach someone a lesson, to justify oneself by the fact that the other person himself must guess the mistake he has made is possible only in a rare case, for example, when this mistake occurs systematically and has already been discussed many times and recognized as the culprit. When someone deserves, in your opinion, "punishment" by doing something bad the first or even the second time, do not try to be deceived, but rather figure out why he does it. Here people often deceive themselves, thinking up the worst about someone else in advance and even getting some emotional pleasure from the fact that “well, now I’ll tell him / her everything!”. Do not do like this. It will end very badly. Very bad.

As I promised in the last article, here is the hardest tip on my list of tips for today. He's the last one in this series of articles.

Never specifically expect to be rewarded for doing something good. Despite the seeming simplicity of the wording, this is a very difficult piece of advice, and therefore requires a thorough explanation. Firstly, waiting is tiring and soon begins to strain your nerves. Not only will you get tired of waiting, you will also not satisfy it. Ultimately, it turns out that when you get something good, considering it as a reward, it will disappoint you. It will simply "release" you, like a drug addict is released after the next dose, but it will not deliver you full joy. There will be, at best, a feeling of deception, and at worst, disappointment in life.

Secondly, by winding up the desire to receive a reward, you will unwittingly begin to exaggerate your good deed, from which you expect a positive effect. When you receive this reward, it will seem small. In conjunction with the first point of reasoning, the effect may even be the opposite. The desire to do anything at all may disappear.

Third, it may be that instead of being rewarded, you get the opposite, and in addition to the stress that comes from expectation, the cumulative effect is extremely negative. Why did you receive punishment instead of reward? It's very simple: something was done wrong somewhere, perhaps even earlier and in a different area altogether, and then you did something good, you are waiting for a good response from the world around you, and you are punished for some other act … Therefore, you need to be able to understand why something is happening to you. You need to learn to foresee the consequences of your actions. How to do it - figure it out for yourself. Everyone has their own way of mastering this skill.

Fourthly, some people think too primitively about kindness and mutual assistance in this world. So, they believe that if one person has done good to another, then he will certainly be obliged to return to him what was done by another act. This misunderstanding should be eliminated once and for all. If you did something good to another person, then there was a situation in the world in which you had something that he needed. Look at the situation differently: you had to give something, a person appeared who helped you with this. You needed to realize yourself, an opportunity arose to do it. That person doesn't owe you anything. The reward for your kindness is the ability to put it into practice, the reward for your work is the work you have done. The only way. If there are abilities and opportunities, you need to give them freedom.

When you need something, if you do everything right, a person will appear at the right time and give you what you need. Or some circumstances will work, allowing you to carry out the necessary. At the same time, one should not naively believe that in this way you can get any desired thing. There are things that you don't really need, but your value system does not yet allow you to understand this.

Any attempt to demand good in return from the person you helped will end extremely badly. And the more sophisticated your mind, the more cunning situations you adjust to get it from another person, the worse the result will be. The greater the strength, the greater the responsibility. The person you helped might go and help others, but he doesn't owe you anything. In any case, by helping, you have become more experienced, and this is already a reward.

In this case, of course, you can explicitly ask the person for a reciprocal service, but he is not at all obliged to agree to its performance. The only thing that, as I am sure, a person who has received something from someone else or from life is obliged to do is to dispose of the “gift” correctly and certainly then (when he himself decides) to return something good to this world. Not even necessarily for a specific person, but rather for society as a whole. If you were helped or taught something, it means that you need it to achieve certain goals, so the task of the person who received something is to dispose of it correctly.

The primitive forms of relations like “you to me - I to you” pursue a person downright everywhere. Take even the relationship between a guy and a girl: “Did I take you to the movies? Gave flowers? Did you see off home? Well, come on already …”In our culture it is so customary that some people can no longer get rid of the realization that they owe someone. They were given something - and now they already feel the need to return something else without fail. Do not do like this. It must be different.

Fifth, the full meaning of the “gift” will be only when the recipient does not know in advance what awaits him. A gift is an unexpected thing in the sense that you do not have to know in advance what exactly it is, even if you know the date of its appearance, and it is precisely by surprise that it is good. If you are expecting something specific, then the principle of surprise will not work. The surprise from the right gift gives a strong psychological effect that changes something in a person. Provided, of course, that the person really really needed to get exactly this. When a person knows in advance that he will receive something that he needs, the idea will not work. Not at all. That's the way a person is. In general, if a person knows the surprise awaiting him in advance, he will not receive the benefits that he could have received. But here it is important that this gift is correctly selected, if one person makes it to another, one of them should know the other well. If we return to the “gifts from above” (given in the form of life circumstances), then this point of reasoning does not apply to them, such an encouragement for something is always unexpected, and it can only be spoiled by what I wrote “in the first place” and "Secondly". That is, the gift of fate will always be unexpected, and if you try to speed up its appearance, it will only be worse for you.

Sixth, many people too superficially understand the meaning of the reward given for some good deeds. They think that “I took my grandmother across the road, I want this or that”. It is not right. Incentives are given for the ENTIRE totality of actions throughout the entire life of a person. The situation is brought to the point of absurdity when a person, doing a good deed, believes that he has earned himself the right to do nasty things. This vulgar understanding and use of indulgence does not end well.

There are people, and, unfortunately, the majority of them, who believe that just by getting rid of some bad habits and giving up some nonsense, you can immediately expect a good turn in life. Formal rejection of simple and obvious nonsense will only bring disappointment, both from the inability to do them (if they gave pleasure), and from the emptiness and instability that will follow. People who act in this way, how much in vain expect that, having become formally good, they will receive some kind of reward for this, just as they understand it vulgarly. For example, they may think they will find a way to get the same pleasure, but in a different, good way. If you do not change the value system, nothing will work, and in order to change it, you need to know a lot and be able to do, and not just sacrifice the joy of stupidity.

Seventh, do not forget about the "punishment" for bad deeds. One of the reasons the punishment often seems too harsh and the reward is too little is because when you reward you expect something good and expect it to be good. And when they messed up, then either you don't think at all that you will pay for it, or you try to somehow rationalize your act, soften it mentally, etc.

Take note of my personal experience: both reward and punishment come to a person exactly to the extent that he deserves them. It comes at the moment when it should come: not earlier and not later, but exactly on time!

Trying to influence this mechanism means making yourself worse. To try to lament that “I’m so good and my life is so bad” is to make yourself worse. Trying to force others (physical or psychological) to help you in something means making yourself worse, and often not only yourself.

The question may arise: how, then, to live in such conditions of uncertainty? It is possible and necessary to live in such conditions, but let everyone think for himself why. For now, I’ll say that you need to be able to believe. Whom to believe, how to believe, why to believe - you need to be able to figure it out on your own so as not to do stupid things both from excessive gullibility and from insufficient faith.

Over time, you will understand the meaning of this advice. Most likely, you will find (or have already found) another form of it, and not the one I described in seven points. I gave those explanations that are closer to me. Each of you will have their own over time, obtained from your own experience.