Top 5 thinking habits to start in 2022

Top 5 thinking habits to start in 2022

In this article, I am going to share five thinking habits that will impact the way that you think about your problems, about your goals, and about your struggles, and change the way that you live for the better. These are thinking habits that have helped me to become more capable, more productive, and to do more impactful stuff.

Remember to answer yourself

Matthew McConaughey said in a Tim Ferriss podcast “if all we are doing is asking ourselves questions, but we never come up with an answer. Well, that can lead to some very imbalanced insanity at times”. Pay attention to the questions that come up in your mind, the questions that you ask yourself, and instead of just ignoring those questions, or letting those questions stress you out, actually follow through and answer those questions.  

If you ask yourself, why am I remain so worried all the time? Pay attention to that question and actually sit down and think about it. Then, once you've answered that first question, let it lead to even better internal questions. Like, what are the little steps that I could take to make my mind a more peaceful place?

If you are in a time of struggle and you're constantly asking yourself questions, but you're never actually giving yourself any answers, giving yourself the space to sit on those questions and think them through. You're going to find yourself stuck in a rut.

Force yourself to sit with uncomfortable questions and actually answer them and then move on to the next question that your mind brings up. You can do this in the form of journaling on paper or digitally. When I am feeling at my healthiest self, I like to sit down and meditate on those types of questions.

Think of self-care activities

People pay top dollar for supplements that will enhance their mood, increase their energy, give them clarity and focus. And they are religious about taking these kinds of supplements on a daily basis. They won't skip their lion's mane with their breakfast, and some of these nootropics can be really helpful, but getting seven to nine hours of sleep, going to sleep at the same time and waking up at the same time, getting some movement in your days, getting connection in your life. Those are the most potent nootropics that one could ever come across. They are far more powerful than any supplement.

If you're struggling to prioritize health and wellness, maybe you put work first and self-care second then try thinking of all of those self-care activities as nootropics. It's a bit of a clinical way to think of these activities, but it's effective.

If you're a type-A personality, you have a big workload. Maybe you're a high achiever, and you always find yourself thinking, well, maybe I'll get to exercise, sleep, connection after I get all my work done, but never actually get around to those self-care activities. This can be a helpful form of thinking.

A well-planned vacation is a nootropic that has a 94% chance of increasing your happiness and energy levels according to a study of 400 travelers. Sleeping longer is a nootropic that gives you a longer lifespan, reduces your chance of Alzheimer's, and helps you to learn better according to Professor Matthew Walker, the author of “Why We Sleep”.

Investing in the quality of your relationships and spending time with the people that you love is a nootropic that will increase your health and happiness more than any other factor according to one of the longest-running studies in the history of more than 1300 people. To be more productive, to grow, to be successful, to be happy, and to lead a good life, you need to be putting these self-care activities first.

Struggle is Part of Process

This is something that I believe if everyone embedded in their brain would make a world a much better and more self-compassionate place. The phrase struggle is part of the process, it’s an acknowledgment that no matter what changes you're trying to make. For example, getting your license, starting a meditation habit, starting an exercise habit that struggles are always going to be there and that it's normal.

No matter who you are as a person, how much discipline you might have, what you are trying to achieve, there's always going to be a struggle. It is normal to start on a high and right for one week straight, and then maybe have a dip in motivation. It's normal to start working out at home every day because you see someone doing it online. And then, after a few days, finding yourself waning and maybe not doing it as much anymore.

I'm not saying that you should just accept defeat whenever you come across a struggle, I'm just saying that when it comes along, you should recognize it as a very normal thing that everyone goes through. When we normalized struggling to achieve goals and struggling to change behavior, it makes it so that we can move past it with more ease.

When you start to think that, struggling to change Behavior, or struggling to achieve your goals is this abnormal thing, and that when you are struggling with those changes that you are abnormal, it makes it a lot harder to keep on moving forward. You lean more towards beating yourself up and feeling bad about not being able to make the change verse accepting the normalcy of that struggle, and trying to think of ways to keep yourself motivated ways to change what you're doing to make things easier and ways that you can stick to whatever it is that you're trying to pursue.

Set “Want To” Not “Have To” Goals

If you go to the gym because you feel like you should, you feel like you have to, not because you want to, decide the fact that you hate stock standard gym workouts, you're probably not going to keep that habit up. If you're writing content because you feel like you're expected to, not because you actually enjoy doing it, you're going to create bad work, and you'll also going to struggle with that habit. Instead of trying to pursue these goals that we feel like we should be pursuing. Think about what you actually want to be pursuing.

There are many different paths to often get to the same goal. You don't have to follow the same path that everyone else has followed. For example, when it comes to working out, you are more likely to do an activity that you enjoy if that looks like Zumba or regular daily walks or rock climbing, but it doesn't look like going to the gym and doing a stock standard workout that's perfectly okay.

A few helpful problems to consider when you are pursuing your goals are the questions. If no one knew that I did this, would I still want to do it? If I knew that I would fail, would I still want to do this? And am I doing this because it looks good, or because it feels good? You're more likely to pursue a goal that has a process that you enjoy doing, rather than a process that you dread doing.

Stop Treating Tasks Equally

Often, when you make a traditional to-do list without using any prioritization frameworks, you give all of the tasks that you write down equal importance in your mind. Uploading on Instagram becomes just as important as creating a content creation strategy. Creating a new revenue source is just as important as answering all of your emails.

If every day you prioritize one important impact for a thing, at the end of the year, you will have achieved 365 important impactful things. If you just prioritize even three important impactful things that you do every single week that move you further towards your goals, that's 156 moves that you are going to make towards your goals by the end of the year.

Don't create a to-do list without weighting them and without considering whether what you are pursuing is significant. One way is that you can figure out how you are weighting all of your to-dos or where you are actually spending your time whether it's on the significant or the insignificant is by tracking your time.

Tasks are not created equally, and we shouldn't be prioritizing them equally. When I am prioritizing my day in my life that collective at daily planner in my head, I asked myself, what is the most significant thing that I can work on today? The thing that is going to have a longer-term impact, and that's what I like to spend my most important time in the morning doing.

I appreciate you so much, and I will see you soon.