Quit These Addictions to Wake up in 6 Months like a New Person

#7 – Give up thinking life is unfair.

Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash

Your habits determine who you’re on the way to becoming.

Building new habits to create change is obvious. But what stops a new habit from forming is your addictions. We all have them. Once you consciously know what they are you can gradually remove them from your life.

Here are the biggest addictions to give up.

Give up porn

Porn is terrible for your health. More people are quietly addicted than you might think. The challenge is that porn has morphed.

Youtube, Reddit, Twitter and Instagram are now all gateways to porn. It starts out with innocent content and one cheeky photo. Then quickly the links can lead to an OnlyFans page or a naughty website you never thought you’d be clicking.

Well-known podcaster Tim Ferriss quit porn. The results were nothing short of amazing:

• A dramatic rise in sex drive.

• Better focus and cognitive endurance

• A surge in productivity of 50%-100%

Porn is toxic. Give it up and choose real-world healthy sex. And don’t forget to block the softcore porn channels that have found their way into social media.

Give up Netflix

You’ve heard it before. You know streaming back-to-back tv shows is bad. Netflix is designed to be addictive. It’s supposed to quietly whisper in your ear, “Hey, you’ve got to urgently watch this” or “It’s okay to watch this first before doing that.”

The way I got hooked on Netflix is the disappearing nature of shows. Content on Netflix doesn’t stay there forever. If you don’t watch it, it’s gone forever. That sense of loss really messed with my brain.

I still relax and wind down with content. I’m simply trying to relax more with a good book where I can learn something new, instead of a tv show that adds no value to my life. You can do the same. Books are incredible.

Give up hate

It’s easy to spot a point of view you disagree with. Open up Twitter and it will take minutes to find one. The hard part is choosing positivity over hate.

Hate makes you angry. 
Anger sucks away your precious energy.

Another approach is non-reactivity. Choose to scroll past the opinion rather than leave a tempting comment. Or if you must comment then try to leave a helpful question that makes the creator rethink their position.

Internet debates never end, though. There are always more links and more people to backup and argument no matter how useless it all is. Try to love all opinions. See hate as an energy drain and don’t play the game.

Give up Instagram

Instagram reinvigorated selfishness. The world doesn’t need another photo of your face with a tonne of hashtags jammed below it. Instagram is only for the good moments, but who has endless high points?

Nobody.

When all you do is share moments that create envy in other people’s lives, you distort your own worldview. You end up only documenting the moments that are Instagram-worthy and discarding all the brilliant moments that don’t involve an exotic location or an amazing outfit.

Instagram equals envy. Give up creating and taking in more envy. 
Replace envy with writing. Share your thoughts honestly on a blog or newsletter.

Turn your life experiences into lessons that help others. That’s the secret to finding meaning in life.

Give up complaining

Life isn’t supposed to work in your favor. When it does, continuously, life gets extremely boring.

Complaints don’t change anything. Build stuff instead. Builders take problems and turn them into solutions. Creating solutions makes you more money than you had before all the complaining.

Complaining is where a healthy mind goes to die. When I began to complain too much in my career it started to turn my colleagues away from me. My phone call meant “complaint” when they saw it.

Complaining is a sign you need change. In my case, complaining became a sign that maybe it was time to quit my job and do something else. So complaining isn’t all bad. Complaining can simply be a compass to a better life.

Give up sugar

There are lots of reasons to quit sugar, including losing weight. The most important reason is because sugar kills your productivity.

Wait, what?

Sugar spikes your blood sugar and energy levels. You get a short-term energy boost as a result. After the boost comes the sugar crash. This is where you become a tired, grumpy old mole.

You don’t want a short-term energy boost. You want a sustained level of energy so you can achieve a decent quality of work and inspire a few people along the way. Tiredness equals demotivation.

The easiest way to have more energy is to eat more plants. You already knew that.

Give up thinking life is unfair

On my social media journey I’ve unfortunately become surrounded by a new class of writers: demotivators. They talk a lot about inequality which is important, but they end up going down the path of “life is unfair.”

Life isn’t unfair.

You get what you work hard for. There are no free kicks in life. Even if you inherit millions of dollars what you really got was a disadvantage. Money you didn’t work for makes us lazy and entitled.

The trouble is the “life is unfair” crowd hasn’t seen both sides of the equation. All they see is a Mercedes Benz and have a cry about life being unfair. What they don’t understand is a lot of these Mercedes Benz drivers are deeply unhappy, although you’d never know if you asked.

Get “life is unfair” out of your mind. Life will never be 100% fair for anybody. All you can do to make life fairer is do your best work, self-educate, surround yourself with people who know more than you, and be humble.

Your life changes when you're no longer addicted

After you slowly quit this list of addictions your life will improve. You’ll wake up like a new person because the time wasted on addictions will be freed up to work on the life you actually want.

With the addictions gone, build a few new tiny habits.

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