Serotonin: The Feel Good Hit for High Status The most important neurotransmitter connected to status is serotonin. Serotonin helps regulate appetite and sex drive, as well as one’s mood. Individuals with low serotonin levels are often cranky, aggressive, and depressed, which is why they are sometimes prescribed antidepressants designed to Read more…
Get moving. No you don’t have to do an hour of cardio or run 4 miles each morning (unless of course you want to!). A short, targeted workout, or even a walk with your pet, can energize you for the entire morning — and yield fitness results. Research shows that getting Read more…
So here are the rules I’m going to try to follow: One browser tab open. I want to focus on reading one thing, responding to one email at a time, doing one task in my browser at a time. I realize that I might have to open multiple tabs to Read more…
To do this, we must spend more time with happy go-lucky people and less time with those that drag us back towards our negative tendencies, whether that is cynicism, gossiping, or belittling others.
Spend more time with the people that make you smile. Mix it up with the kids at your next family event. Enjoy your weekend afternoons doing anything but work. Let go and laugh away your stress.
As you fill more of your time with the good in life you’ll also be tempted by less of the bad. But if an alcoholic walks into a bar, he’ll drink. If a busybody goes for coffee with the town gossip, tongues will wag unproductively.
Enough is enough. Temptations, obstacles, and bad behavior do not serve us. Eliminate them from your life.
Take the high road.
Your Friends Should Respect You And Your Choices
Frugal Hound’s friends respect her choices
Real friends who are worth spending time with will respect your life choices. Mr. FW and I have discovered over the course of our extreme frugality quest that being honest with our friends and family about our financial proclivities goes over very well.Our friends are clued into what we value in life, and they’re respectful of the decisions we make. We take a non-judgmental approach to discussing finances and our friends–many of whom spend money very differently than we do–have no problem with the choices we make. They respect the journey we’re on and we, in turn, respect the journey they’re on.
4. Store things off the kitchen counter. Messes attract messes and clutter attracts clutter. The better we get at storing clutter out of sight, the less likely it is to accumulate. The kitchen counter is a good example. When countertops become an acceptable place to store things, more things begin to collect there. But a clean countertop communicates calm and order, promotes opportunity for its intended use, and is probably easier than you think.
We know what it is. It’s the stuff that constantly gets in our way because it is not where it belongs. It’s that disorderly mess of items that end up complicating even the simplest tasks. Papers, clothes, shoes, books, backpacks, dishes, gadgets, toys, bicycles, magazines, laundry, jackets, tools…you get the idea. It’s anything and everything that’s in the way because it has not been put away properly.
While we may excuse our clutter as a lack of storage or being too busy, its threat to our life’s priorities is greater than most of us realize. We try to dismiss it as no big deal – a mere inconvenience – when, in fact, it is robbing us of the valuable time and energy we should be leveraging toward more productive purposes.
According to Brian Tracy:
“If you read only one book per month, that will put you into the top 1% of income earners in our society. But if you read one book per week, 50 books per year, that will make you one of the best educated, smartest, most capable and highest paid people in your field. Regular reading will transform your life completely.”
What have we learned so far?
Most people don’t read
If you read 1 hour per day, you can quickly become an expert
If you read 1 book per month, you can be in the top 1% of income earners
So today I’d like to share 6 things that have helped me – and still helps me to this day – with this destructive and distracting thought habit.
1. Go for good enough.
Aiming for perfection usually winds up in a project or something else never being finished. So go for good enough instead.
Don’t use it as an excuse to slack off. But simply realize that there is something called good enough and when you are there then you are finished with whatever you are doing.
So find a balance for yourself where you do good work and don’t slack off but at the same time don’t get lost in trying to improve and polish something too much.
Finances, they’re so hard! Well, not really, if you take some time to get familiar with the topic. Here’s a great book list to help you do just that.