If there was a drug that provided all the benefits that exercise does, the whole world would be taking it.

1. Drink more water
2. Practice cooking
3. Increase whole grains
4. Increase sweet vegetables
5. Increase leafy green vegetables
6. Eat less meat, dairy, sugar and chemicalized, artificial junk foods; consume less coffee,
   alcohol and tobacco

• Learning and memory: Sleep helps the brain commit new information to memory through a process called memory consolidation. In studies, people who’d slept after learning a task did better on tests later.
• Metabolism and weight: Chronic sleep deprivation may cause weight gain by affecting the way our bodies process and store carbohydrates, and by altering levels of hormones that affect our appetite.
• Mood: Sleep loss may result in irritability, impatience, inability to concentrate, and moodiness. Too little sleep can also leave you too tired to do the things you like to do.

• random creative ideas that come to you
• things you are grateful for
• your goals and aspirations
• internal stuff that you need to process better
• food you eat, and other habits you are building

Your television set can make you rich or poor. If you watch it all the time, it will make you poor. Psychologists have shown that the more television you watch, the lower are your levels of energy and self-esteem. At an unconscious level, you don’t like or respect yourself as much if you sit there hour after hour watching television. People who watch too much television also gain weight and become physically unfit from sitting around too much. Your television can also make you rich—but only if you turn it off. When you turn off your television, you free up time that you can then use to invest in becoming a better, smarter, and more competent person. When you leave your television off when you are with your family, you will find yourself talking, sharing, communicating, and laughing more often. When you leave your television off for extended periods of time, you break the habit of watching television—and you will hardly miss it at all. Your television can be an excellent servant, but it’s a terrible master. The choice is yours.

“Television, for example, is one of the primary means by which most people relax and recover. For the most part, however, watching television is the mental and emotional equivalent of eating junk food. It may provide a temporary form of recovery, but it is rarely nutritious and it is easy to consume too much. Researchers such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi have found that prolonged television watching is actually correlated with increased anxiety and low-level depression.

• Do a spring cleaning in you home, and give away / throw away half of all things that you have not used in the past 12 months
• Delete all the apps on your phone that you have not used on the past 6 months
• Close those 30 tabs open in your browser. Are you even gonna read all that stuff?
• Make a list of 3 people you no longer want to spend time with, because they are not adding anything to your life
• Make a list of 3 activities or projects you want to say “no” to

There was a fascinating study conducted on the 1979 Harvard MBA program where graduate students were asked “have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?”  The result, only 3% had written goals and plans, 13% had goals but they weren’t in writing and 84% had no goals at all. Ten years later, the same group was interviewed again and the result was absolutely mind-blowing.
The 13% of the class who had goals, but did not write them down was earning twice the amount of the 84% who had no goals. The 3% who had written goals were earning, on average, ten times as much as the other 97% of the class combined!

…we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.

“Poets and philosophers have always counseled people regarding the benefits of being in nature, and now science is catching up. In a study published in the journal Psychological Science in 2008, neuroscientist John Jonides, Ph.D., and his colleagues measured students’ performance on tests of memory and attention before and after taking a walk. One group strolled through a beautiful arboretum near the campus of the University of Michigan, and the other walked in downtown Ann Arbor. The researchers discovered that those who walked in nature improved their test scores by 20 percent, while those who walked in the city showed no improvement (moreover, they reported a decline in perceived well-being). The researchers concluded, “In sum, we have shown that simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control. To consider the availability of nature as merely an amenity fails to recognize the vital importance of nature in effective cognitive functioning.””

• breakfast
• some stretching or light exercise
• a few minutes of meditation
• planning your day – write down the three most important things you need to do today