No caffeine multiple days in a row. I often enjoy it, and I don’t think it’s really that bad for you, but I don’t like the way it adjusts my personality and state of mind if that makes sense and it’s easy to get addicted enough to start feeling like crap if you don’t have any.

I only buy mint-type candies. Junior mints until the trade war; something local now.

I need something to crush sweets cravings, but I also want to limit how much I’m actually going to eat. With the strong flavour, I find those work pretty well.

After a long, unhealthy relationship, I ended up in a very promising relationship.

It took many years if half truths to her, and then full disclosures, and eventually, a full and total disclosure of my past, my desires, my weaknesses, the whole lot.

She barely flinched. She saw me for who I was / am.

From that moment we bonded deeper than I’ve ever thought possible.

Nobody could hijack us. Nothing could try to surprise us and derail / damage us. Shame was thrown out the window. There is none. We know everything. We meet as honestly as is possible each day.

Do it. I highly recommend it. However, there was a right time. If we’d done it too early, we wouldn’t have worked.

So with that backstory. Always telling the truth to my partner. No matter how scary it seems.

Truth, truth, truth.

If you’re thinking about something that takes less than 2 minutes, you should just be doing it. I will admit I got this from one of those productivity guys

Professionally, never bitch down or laterally. If you’re going to bitch up, do so in private.

…I think that was from some war movie… Saving Private Ryan? But fuck if it isn’t solid advice!

Have fun

1 hour every night i can do anything i want that includes no electronics. I usually just sit and think things through and it has helped a lot with my anxiety.

Stop responding to text messages a much as possible after 9pm. Really helped my sleep and staying sane.

Guess more of a reminder than a rule but: “ambiguous behaviour is not aggressive behaviour”.

One is from the YouTube channel “How to ADHD”: put things away, not just down. I was diagnosed in my early 40s and it shed some light on the source of a lot of problems in my life. Letting clutter accumulate has a huge effect on overall mental health.

The other one is a social media thing I picked up years ago that I soon realized applied to real life, as well: before posting/saying something, think about whether it benefits the audience to read/hear it. It really makes you introspect about the energy you’re putting out into the world. It also makes it almost second nature to realize whether someone else is on the whole adding to or subtracting from your life. I’ve met so many people who I’m convinced would never speak if they weren’t constantly seeking others’ validation or trying to gain something material for themselves, and it’s scary to think about how much worse off I’d be if I’d gotten close to them.

Don’t spend more than you can afford

Usually in the form of asking questions:

1. “Does this task take 5 minutes to do and do you have 5 minutes to spare?”

If the answer is yes, then just do it. It has helped me keep things tidy a bit better rather than spending a full day cleaning up everything. Now, if tasks get left, rather than a full day cleaning & tidying it’s only an hour or so.

My space being tidier has brought me some much needed stress relief.

2. “Do you need this item right now? Can it wait until the end of the month when you get paid?”

Struggling with impulse purchases so this question has helped me stop spending as recklessly though I do relapse sometimes but nowhere near as bad as I was.

3. “Got paid? Great! Have you money-potted your paycheck?”

Further aiding my financial responsibility efforts, every time I get paid I use my bank’s money-pot feature to portion it out to make sure rent, bills, phone, food, transport, subscriptions, activities, etc. are budgeted appropriately. The rest is stuffed into savings to resist the temptation to spend it.

4. “What would a healthy and active person do?”

To lose weight and improve my fitness, everytime I want to get something unhealthy for lunch or dinner I ask “would someone who’s trying to lose weight eat that?” or “would a healthy person chose that fizzy drink or have water instead?”. On my way home from work I go to the gym and on the days when I don’t feel like it I ask “Would someone who’s active skip going to the gym? Sure they would if they’re feeling unwell and sick, are you feeling ill and sick? Ok you’re tired, but can you at least do 5 minutes on the treadmill?” because I don’t want to be breaking that habit that has been going really well for the last 8 months.

Honestly at the moment my life has been a bit of a rollercoaster so I’ve not been asking myself these questions and been slipping on the good habits recently, speaking of which…

5. “Did you keep the habits up? No, that’s ok you stumbled a bit there. Now what small changes can you make to make the good ones easier to do and the bad ones harder to do?”

At the end of the day, I’ll take the path of least resistance so I’ve got to make sure that path is the one that will lead me to the outcomes I want. I’ll be having a think about these this weekend because I am determined to get back on track, so I’m going to sit myself down and work through it like a friend would.

Which leads me to the final question:

6. “Would a friend talk/act that way to you?”

I struggle with self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. Some days I really feel like I just have no value and the self-loathing is immense so when I get overly critical and verbally/physically beat myself up I try to hold onto a moment of calm and ask that question to myself. I don’t need to answer it because I know the answer and just need a moment to just breathe and chill to try and break the negative thought spiral.

I brush my teeth whenever I come in from outdoors (even if that’s multiple times a day). That way, it’s doesn’t block me from going straight to bed once I start falling asleep in the evening.

Refusing to use social media like Snapchat, Instagram & Twitter. Major downside is my generation is mostly using them so I know fewer Zoomers on the Fediverse but honestly, I would take that over me comparing my body to guy’s fitness picture and feeling insecure about it. Also, I barely interact with people I know in my high school and I to some extent, wish to be forgotten from them. Some really have messed with my mental health, that’s all I will say.

When there’s elections I wait for somebody to mention the result in conversation unprompted and find out that way, to stop myself from doom scrolling