Damn Good Habits to Build in 2021
MIND HABITS
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Body Habit
MORNING LEMONADE
Contrary to popular belief, caffeine isn’t the best tool to wake you up.
In fact, your cortisol levels are already the highest in the morning, so that caffeine unnecessarily adds to that and causes an even bigger energy dump after a few hours.
A better way to get your machine going is by giving your body warmth and hydration. Hydration includes not just water but also essential electrolytes lost by sweating during the night. So if you’re weird enough to like the taste, add some sea salt to your warm water. If not, add some sea salt to your warm water.
And by adding lemon, you can jumpstart your digestive system while freshening your breath.
Add another one or two glasses of water, and you’ll be ready for the day.
Feel free to share your favorite morning lemonade recipes with your peers and let them know how your energy levels are evolving.
Body Habit
EXERCISE
Even if you don’t aspire to become the next Arnie, you should make sure to incorporate at least some kind of exercise into your daily routine.
Mens sana in corpore sano is not only a Latin phrase to impress your friends but also a very true statement. A healthy mind lives in a healthy body.
Exercising helps you get rid of brain fog, neck- or back pain and increases your energy so that you can be more focused and in the moment.
As Dr. John Ratey says: “Exercising is like taking a little Prozac and a little Ritalin” – without the side effects. It boosts your mood and focus for up to 12h and elevates your metabolic rate for up to 48h (depending on the workout’s intensity). We, therefore, recommend exercising in the morning to enter your day in a flow state.
identi will help you stay motivated with colorful progress visualizations, workout instructions from professional coaches, and, most importantly, like-minded peers who will hold you accountable.
Mind Habit
MEDITATION
80% of ultra-high performers, from Oprah to Le-Bron James, have some kind of mindfulness habit.
In an era of constant distraction, where the average attention span is 8s – less than a goldfish – the ability to turn down the noise and pay prolonged attention is nothing short of a superpower.
Through the phenomenon of neuroplasticity, the meditator’s brain increases the density of neural pathways in the hippocampus while reducing the density in the amygdala.
This means that your brain will be physically less able to experience anxiety, stress, and depression, while your memory, focus, empathy, and even immune functions can go to the moon…or mars.
Researchers compare meditation to weight lifting for your brain.
So whenever you get distracted and manage to re-focus on your breath, your brain is basically doing a bicep curl. So enjoy your gainz!
We’ve got simple instructions to get you started and a community of like-minded peers to exchange experiences meditation habit with simple instructions to get started and a community of like-minded peers that will hold you accountable.
Mind Habit
GO FOR A WALK
Ask Jack Dorsey, the billionaire founder of Twitter and Square, about his best investment, and he’ll tell you that it’s walking 5 miles to work every day.
Listening to audiobooks, podcasts, or just the sound of nature and the environment, he’s able to structure his thoughts, calm his mind, and come up with the next billion-dollar idea.
The alternating left-right-left movements induce a bilateral hemispheric stimulation, which is basically similar to what happens during rapid-eye-movement sleep phases.
This bilateral hemispheric stimulation helps your subconscious mind process traumas and other experiences and makes room for creativity.
So if you feel confused, unfocused, or uninspired, just take a walk and let your subconscious do the work.
identi will help you stay motivated with colorful progress visualizations, instructions from professional coaches, and most importantly, like-minded peers that will hold you accountable.
Emotions Habit
STRIKE A POWER POSE
We’ve all been: There’s a presentation or job interview coming and it’s giving us the creeps…
When we’re anxious, we make ourselves small, while when we’re confident or happy, we take up a lot of space. Even blind people, who couldn’t have learned it by copying others, raise their arms when they celebrate – it’s in our genes.
Luckily for us, our body and emotions are connected in both ways – so we can fake it ’til we make it.
As Amy Cuddy describes in her fascinating research, simply striking a power pose for two minutes elevates your testosterone levels by 20% while lowering your cortisol by 25%.
So whenever you’ve got a job interview, date, or presentation ahead, take a stance like Wonderwoman (also known as Beyoncé) or Arnie. And yes, it looks ridiculous, and you might have to do it in the bathroom not to get fired. But if you hold that pose for two minutes, breathe slowly, and smile, you’ll crush it afterward.
Emotions Habit
MAKE YOUR BED
Start your morning routine with a win to build momentum!
The Former US Special Forces Commander, Admiral William McRaven, famously proposed a daily habit based on 37 years of being a Navy SEAL. And it may surprise you that he claims it to be life-changing because the last person who told you to do it was probably your mom. Make your bed!
Getting things done is highly influenced by our ability to build momentum – and by acing the very first task of the day, you’ll experience a tiny sense of accomplishment that motivates you to get the next things done as well. It’s like a domino effect.
(It also adds to our rule of making habits too simple to fail.)
So tomorrow morning, after getting up, immediately turn around, straighten your sheets and pillows, and continue winning your day.
Work Habit
WOOP IT
Gabriel Oettingen started her research to understand better how to reach goals with the power of positive visualizations.
She brought people into a lab and had them fantasize about their future. In a matter of minutes, their blood pressure went down significantly.
And while this sounds great, she was disappointed when she realized that the last thing you want to be when reaching your goals is relaxed. You want to be energized to get off the couch and take action.
So she reasoned that she had to ask people to dream and then confront them right away with the constraints of reality that stood in the way of their dreams.
And based on her insights, she came up with a super simple and effective exercise:
1. Wish: In 3-6 words, Write down a Wish, personally or professionally, that you can achieve in a year, month, week or day.
2. Outcome: What is the #1 benefit you would experience as a result?
3. Obstacle: What obstacle *within you* stands in the way of achieving that wish?
4. Plan: What’s the #1 most effective thing you could do?
Formulate it as an implementation intention: If (trigger happens) … then (I will take this action) …
So next time you‘re unsure about how to proceed, just Woop It!
Work Habit
SHUT-DOWN COMPLETELY
“If you wanna be intensely on, try to be intensely off!“
There are many reasons why rates of burnout are increasing in our society. For example:
- unclear job expectations
- dysfunctional workplace dynamics
- extremes of activity
But there are still things that are in our hands.
1. Social support
And that‘s one of the main reasons why we‘re building identi so that you can get the support of like-minded people – especially when times are challenging.
2. The ability to shut-down complete
What do I mean by that?
Well, look at the world‘s fastest people: When these guys aren‘t racing, they barely move! Or NBA legend LeBron James for example, averages about 12h sleep per day.
Their ability to be intensely on is directly connected to their ability to be intensely off.
If we translate that to the rest of us who rather wanna be athletes with our brains, we need to hone our ability to stay away from inputs and thoughts connected to our jobs, studies, or art for extended periods of time.
The best way to do that is to shut-down completely.
At the end of your working day, do one last check to feel relaxed about not having missed something urgent, plan some time for the next day to tackle unfinished tasks, shut-down your computer, put your phone in airplane mode and ideally put both of them out of sight in a cabinet.
If you do that at least two hours before bedtime, your ability to be intensely on the next morning will be at a whole new level.
