The difficulty of behavioral goals

The scenario of a life turned upside down can be improved by:

• Monitoring the quality of one’s input.
• Pushing yourself for some exercise, which is sure to beat the blues.
• Reading actual paper newspapers instead of mobile phone articles.
• More fresh food, less processed food.
• Working with work clothes on, not pajamas.
• Bringing a change in routine and scenery.

Solving a problem is very difficult when its cause is hard to trace. You can’t isolate the trouble the same way you would dunk a leaky inner tube into a bathtub to see where the bubbles come out, for example.

What you can do is try to focus on better inputs: i.e, if you're struggling because of the pandemic and its social and health consequences, try pouring more vegetables, books, and exercise into the front end of the system, while reducing the intake of sugar, Netflix, and news.

There are 2 types of feel-better activities:

• Those that immediately improve your mood, but often at the expense of overall well-being. Easy to start doing, and often hard to stop, they tend not to have long-term rewards.
• Those are activities that improve your well-being, and your mood too, but usually not right away. You never regret these activities and they take effort.

In an almost paranormal way, one’s genuine and conscious appreciation of others, devoid of any impurity, has an immediate effect on the people around us.

It is an invisible broadcast one gives out, a vibe that one is vibrating with, an aura that glows like a light bulb for all to see.

Capitalism has made us only understand one kind of wealth, as it is only concerned with the ‘monetary’ economy.

Kindness and empathy towards others produce a different kind of wealth, which benefits everyone. Indifferences are quelled, and goodwill, warmth and support are produced.

Cardio doesn't always necessarily lead to excess hunger or binging.

Some people are more sensitive to large quantities of cardio and are more binge-prone than others. Reducing the amount of cardio lessens the urge to binge or makes it disappear altogether.

Binge eaters tend to aggressively cut calories while leaning on willpower to deal with hunger and lack of energy. 

But willpower is limited, so this strategy will backfire.

The ratio between positive and negative feedback should be 5.6 (or nearly six positive comments for each negative one).

It must be related to genuine observations, that reflect back their effort, not ability. Praise the process, not the person.

Highlight aspects of someone’s performance that were under their control  - their planning, their creative ideas, their dedication  - over qualities they were born with. 

Clean eating is about choosing whole foods and ingredients, products that are minimally processed, and as additive-free as possible. It is not a punishing mindset, but a prioritising one:

• Whole foods and ingredients first.
• Minimally processed foods made with whole and familiar ingredients.
• Where possible, avoid synthetic chemicals, pesticides, and preservatives, as well as artificial sweeteners, flavours, and colours.

The practice also promotes home-cooking and developing a culture of food that leads to meals that taste great and are better for you.

• It's not a hard science. It is a conceptual framework to help navigate the vast food choices available.
• Exclusive and judgmental. It's not an all-or-nothing approach, nor a tool by which to measure someone's value.
• Versus "dirty." Clean eating can only be contrasted with "messy," where western diets are complicated and confusing.
• Inflexible. It is an inclusionary approach that you can adapt, whether you are vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, gluten-free, nut-free, dairy-free, egg-free, or simply choose not to eat certain foods.
• Only about avoiding processed foods or chemicals. It is about moving toward quality and making the healthiest choice.

There is a way to re-organize your unresolved thoughts and separate the important from the messy mental pile. In the quiet of the day, you sit down with a pencil and paper and ask yourself three questions.

• What am I anxious about?
• What am I upset about, and with whom?
• What am I currently feeling excited or ambitious about?

When you ask what you're anxious about, you may not have a clear answer. You may have fragments of responses that may not make much sense by itself. For example, "I am anxious about floorboards. Book mess."

Record these answers as they will give a hint about the main sore points in the back of your mind.

The phenomenon of rebelling against any perceived control from others is known as control aversion. People do not want to be explicitly told what to do and form a natural rebellion against strict commandments.

While they are trying to learn things at home using the online tutorials, they are increasingly having a short temper and lack of patience.

The stressful and uncertain situations created by a global crisis, from which the news industry is thriving nowadays, is making the positive words and messages from the instruction videos sound forced or even fake. Staying in isolation is also linked with increased frustration, anger and stress.

People want to connect with others in-person and traditional methods of doing things, like cooking with a recipe book or taking a live workout class are always preferable to sitting isolated in a closed room.

People with high hope have a good number of difficult, challenging goals, and a good scorecard of achievement.

They have lower rates of anxiety and depression and greater happiness. They cope well with problems that consume the rest of the world.

Instead of wishful thinking, we need to know what we want (specific goals), and have the drive and passion to go towards it (agency) and should be able to generate methods and devices to achieve what we want (pathways).

When we do a sum total of these three, we get hope: Hope= Goals + Agency + Pathways

When you are time-pressured, you see time as a precious and scarce resource. This triggers a stress response, which can improve motivation in the short term, but often at the expense of morale in the long term. And an unhappy worker is a less productive worker. With lower productivity, there is even more time pressure to get things done.

And on goes the cycle.

When a time constraint is placed on you, it will play on repeat in your head: “Get to work!”. If a task takes longer than expected, thoughts like “What is taking so long?" might appear. And at the end of a chaotic day, you might find yourself thinking “You have done nothing today!”.

But you can overthrow this tyrant.