Love what you do
Cheapest mental health medicine
Being an active person is a bodily reminder that you’re alive and well. If you can walk, jump or move you probably should as much as you can if you aren’t already. In a sedentary job, I find this to be the critical highlight of most days that seem repetitive.
Did I:
- Improve my time?
- Perform more reps?
- Over perform? Under perform?
- plateau in this routine? Should I make an adjustment?
- gain? lose?
These general questions allow me to improve my physical abilities. As appearance is front and center in the influencer economy, physical activity generates far more benefits for your mind than it might for your body. Spark, a book about the importance of exercise for the brain, talks about the benefits of activity for lifting mood, beating stress, or fighting memory loss with the improvement of synaptic connections. Exercise for your mental health!
Seeing new places
Not everyone has the luxury to go where they want, when they want. Responsibility can occasionally get in the way, but often it’s our own self-sabotage that finds us in our own version of the Truman show; Same rainy/sunny days while repeating repetition of commutes, cooking/ordering food and seeing “What’s up”.
The Truman Show was a movie I watched recently, but spoke a lot to the importance of spontaneity in your life. Carl Jung and Albert Einstein were two folks that took these concepts seriously to enable their “Deep Work” abilities further when away. Einstein and Jung would travel to new places far and near as an outlet for unlocking ideas further to help form the world we live in today. The desire to want to do new things must be stronger than the fear of any consequences within reason. Whether it’s going to a cultural piece of your city locally or taking the next flight to Fiji, don’t be afraid to see a new place as it is often a valuable experience. If you don’t want to spend money, go outdoors and check out a park, beach or site near you. If it seems like a big commitment, just spend a couple hours or a weekend there.
Build things
Okay, a pretty general subject is to produce; physical or digital products, relationships, gardens, dinner, or anything alike. To build is to see your efforts manifest into reality in one shape or another. People can see it, feel it or opine, but more importantly you can do the same with a different perspective. Seeing our outputs is a form of externalized accomplishments that can be saved to photos or memory. It also happens to be the foundation of the world we live in today. Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations highlights how competitive offering of your solutions brings variety and better selection for consumers. The more time you spend waiting on what you’re building, the sooner someone else might come in and build it the way you didn’t. You’ll sooner be complaining as a client than perplexed as an owner as to why the thing you bought couldn’t meet your needs.
Everything you buy or make solves a problem and it’s up to you to share that with the world with reviews or marketing.
Laugh out loud
It seems obvious that laughter is behaviour virtually everyone enjoys. In the modern world with memes, animations or clever relatable jokes, we can find a lot to laugh about. The great part about laughter is that it’s one of the greatest abdominal exercises and can make a good sense of humor fitness equipment. Personally speaking, I know what it’s like to clap for the wrong reasons or laugh when it’s not the ideal time. It all just depends on the things you might find funny.
Genuine laughter and humor gives you the ability to share the things you enjoy unconsciously with those around you. It’s great to share laughter with others, but it’s most important that you can genuinely enjoy things that elicit your real laugh. Not “hehe”, “hah”, or “HA! yes, good one”. I’m talking about … 😂
Love you
Loving what you do takes on many different forms. For me, it’s a fine balance of activities where I am enjoying and challenging myself. If you aren’t where you want to be to love what you do and you’d like to be, challenge yourself to focus on the things you’d prefer to do and, more importantly, how you wish to make that a reality. It could mean becoming more educated, putting yourself out there for partners, or simply focus. It’s most important that you find a way to do the things that you love in at least one facet of your life.
Love yourself first. It’s the only way you’ll learn to love others.