Shoulds
The most fun part of life, right? Shoulds are often really important areas for your medium & long term health, care, wellbeing, so they should really be thought about & regularly worked on, even if you can only keep adding to them 1% at a time.
If you need help and motivation with things you really need to be doing but are finding triggering or emotionally difficult, there are definitely methods to support you. I’m creating content to make this much easier to achieve, and there are lots of other people who create content for this as well, so don’t get stressed by shoulds, just commit to regularly working on them. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, but it’s often with help, done 1% by 1%, and the person who keeps trying for the longest wins.
Once you have started work on yourself, these are also highly relevant to your community. You can’t make the horse drink, but you can influence the horse as best as you can/ do your best over a fair amount of time.
Also, as a quick reminder- one of the largest reasons for depression is people strongly believing that life “should be easy”.
If you can find support, you should definitely go for it. But don’t cause yourself problems by believing that things “should be easy”… this is just decades of marketing from thousands of companies selling you millions of different products (and for good reason- income is one of our most important methods for meeting primary needs).
Life wasn’t easy 1000, 500, 100, 50 years ago so let’s not make our expectations too different from what life has always been like throughout human history.
But the good news is, we live in an age where a lot of people also sell ways to make meeting shoulds easier than it would be by yourself. So don’t be afraid by things looking challenging at first- we solve things like this % by %, and often with support and help.
Health
What are you at risk of later in life? Are you doing something about reducing these risks?
What concerns you more- the quality of life of your last 10, 20 or 30 years, the age you die (you might have kids or grandkids), or both of these? What are your risks with these?
What are the checkups and tests people recommend for someone of your 10 demographics (e.g. gender, age, background, health habits, etc). Do you have a list of these? Are you ticking them off (e.g. once a fortnight)
How fast are you at dealing with your worries? If you have a health risk, how long will it take before you do something about it? What are your top 10 phobias with health risks? Are you regularly doing something to fix these phobias so that you will react quickly if you have a risk?
What doctors recommend for everyone
How is your body weight? Are you approximately within the healthy Body Mass Index? Are you obsessed with losing weight beyond this Body Mass Index? It might be worthwhile reading this (www.bettermindbodyhealthhappiness.com/topics/self-esteem)
Calories- are you eating the recommended amount of calories for someone with your demographics or are you eating more than you need? For people in winter, your body often needs more calories to keep you warm, and this is perfectly OK.
Are you drinking enough water every day? Your body is approximately 60% water, and you need to replace this regularly.
Are you exercising enough each day/week? Can you keep doing this for life? Are you exercising in a safe way?
Are you eating a wide variety of foods? Are you eating from each of the main food groups?
How much unhealthy fats are you eating regularly (healthy fats are good for you in moderation)?
How much sugar are you eating regularly? I am going to create a content section for help with this.
How much salt are you eating regularly?
How is your mental health around this? Are you obsessing, or is it a time-balanced, mental health-supportive part of your life?
What Your individual doctor needs You to do for your health
How often are you seeing the general and specialist doctors that you need to see?
If some appointments or treatments are more expensive, use longer term thinking to solve this- across your entire life, how do the financial costs now compare to future disabilities, future pain or the risk of death? For example, I would be OK with living 5 years less if I had a higher quality of life. However, I wouldn’t like to have a 10 year illness.
What can you do to reduce fears of certain types of doctors, appointments or treatments? This is especially relevant to people who try to look stoic but may still have medical fears, like older men. How can they be supported in doing what is best for them?
How can you save money for important treatments and appointments? Do you have a weekly or monthly budget for discretionary spending (i.e. money that prevents the economy from going into recession- please see economic page on this site). Depending on what items you are currently saving for or paying off (e.g. a mortgage), different people will have discretionary budgets adapted to their current stage of life. On one hand, discretionary budgets across the population are what prevents recessions. On the other hand, if you are poor and really should get a medical appointment or treatment, it might be a very good idea to transfer some of your discretionary budget to your medical appointment or treatment- for a poor person, this is money very well spent.
If the medical appointment (including prevention appointments, such as cancer prevention appointments) or treatment is beyond your budget, it might be a very good idea to set up a saving plan with your current income, and if you have the time, an additional income generating plan (e.g. a temporary part time job, even if it is different from your usual field- however, check your job contract’s term and conditions first). Just be absolutely sure that it is stable growth and not gambling.
Addictions
While some addictions are chemical, and the secret is that you should have never, never taken whatever it was in the first place, I think that two reasons that people get other types of addictions as a way of either managing suffering or pain (including plain old malaise, which is a fact of life; Buddhism’s "dukkha”), or because their brain chemicals have been turned upside down (e.g. with technology). People get addicted to all sorts of weird things, as well as some of the popular things. Some addictions are just bad for you, like drugs, while other addictions are OK or even good if they are in moderation.
The question is this- are your distractions from pain and relaxants healthy or unhealthy? Are they useful or not useful? If they are healthy, you need to ask yourself- what is your goal amount of time on them, and are you (generally) doing this? If you are, then you are not addicted. If you aren’t, then maybe you should do something about it?
Social
What are your social goals over life? Are they realistic? Do they need to be modified?
Are you balancing what will truly make you happy versus external appearances/ external rewards the perfect amount (to be clear- both are important for happiness)?
How is your financial education?
How good is your financial education? Have you developed the #1 core skill you need (e.g. strongly limiting credit card use)? The #2 skill (e.g. creating a rainy day fund which you then invest)? The #3-#10 skills?
How is your IQ with credit? This is an area that is very strongly worth getting educated in. There have been stories of people who have got stuck in ongoing 4 month, 8 month, 12 month or even longer cycles, where they pay more on interest each month than they do on the original item because >>> they couldn’t understand the terms and conditions of credit properly.
This is an area very strongly worth investing 10 minutes x 20 times to get educated in. I can’t emphasise this strongly enough.
Once you have built up some confidence in the most important and urgent areas like the area above, what other areas of financial education will help increase your financial security, then financial growth? Can you spend 10 minutes x 20 times on a combination of these?
One of the core areas is budgeting. In very simple terms, do you spend less than you have? Or do you spend more than you have? While it seems really obvious that this is usually not smart at all, some people may complicate things to avoid facing the facts about their situation. However, staying within your budget is a good way to prevent problems later on.
What are your dream life goals that involve money? What are more realistic dream life goals that involve money? And what are the things that you really need to buy over your 90 years? Nothing in this life is guaranteed- absolutely nothing- but at the same time you should really create and frequently improve your plans and skills to get to 1, then 2, then 3.
What would you add to the list above?
If something is important, it is well worth regular trying. And if you fail the first eight weeks, you can also say that failure is character building.
What things do you need to find solutions for, even if you know they might take weeks, months, years or even decades to solve? Clarifying what is important, writing it down, and committing to spending some time on these every week is a good place to start. If you work on impossible but important things for two hours x ten weeks and make big progress for two of those ten weeks, that time is well worth it. You will also be developing very important skills, like patience, strength and effort- like an adult version of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment.
