How To En-Joy Life (With Long-Term Benefits)

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• By now, many people’s New Year’s Resolutions are hitting stumbling blocks—and that’s ok!

  • By working out what we actually want/need from our resolutions, we can adapt to life’s hurdles and modify our strategies as we go without dropping anything important

• Alcohol is bad for so many things, starting with many aspects of our health. Today’s featured video is all-but-guaranteed to boost any required will for reducing/quitting such.

• If you enjoy the condensed daily dose of digestible health information from 10almonds, you might well like today’s sponsor 1and1, too.

  • This (free!) newsletter's goal is to help you get 1% better every week and build positive wellness habits that stick. They also cover finances, relationships, and more.

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

No More Alcohol | "One of the Most Eye-Opening Motivational Videos Ever" (8:28)

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Prefer text? You might like our previous main feature:

How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol (And Why)

Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖

🧹 MAIN FEATURE

New Year’s Dissolutions?

We have talked previously about:

The Science Of New Year’s Pre-Resolutions

…and here we are now at the end of the first week of January; how’s it going?

Hopefully, based on that article, it’s been going just great since December! For most people, statistically speaking, it hasn’t.

Around now is typically when many people enter the “bargaining” stage of New Year’s Resolutions, which at this point are often in serious danger of becoming New Year’s Dissolutions.

What’s important, really?

When trying to juggle potentially too many new items, it’s important to be able to decide where to focus one’s efforts in the case of needing to drop a ball or two.

First, the laziest way…

The path of least resistance

This is perhaps most people’s go-to. It, without too much thought, drops whatever feels most onerous, and continues with what seems easiest.

This is not a terrible approach, because what we enjoy, we will be more likely to continue. But it can be improved upon, while still getting that benefit.

Marie Kondo your resolutions values

Instead of throwing out the new habits that “don’t spark joy”, ask yourself:

“What brings me joy?”

…because often, the answer is something that’s a result of a thing that didn’t “spark joy” directly. Many things in life involve delayed gratification.

Let’s separate the [unwanted action] from the [wanted result] for a moment.

Rather than struggling on with something unpleasant for the hope of joy at the end of the rainbow, though, give yourself permission to improve the middle bit.

For example, if the idea of having lots of energy and good cardiovascular fitness is what prompted you to commit to those 6am runs each morning (but they’re not actually joyous in your experience), what would be more fun and still give you the same benefit?

Now that you know “having lots of energy and good CV fitness” is what sparks joy, not “getting up to run at 6am”, you can change lanes without pulling off the highway entirely.

Maybe a dance class will be more your speed, for example.

The key here is: you’ll have changed your resolution, without breaking it in any way that mattered

Want more ways to keep on track without burning out?

Who doesn’t? So, check out:

How To Keep On Keeping On… Long Term!

Enjoy!

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If you enjoy the condensed daily dose of digestible health information from 10almonds, you might well like 1and1, too.

This (free!) newsletter's goal is to help you get 1% better weekly and build positive wellness habits that stick. They also cover finances, relationships, and more.

Unlike 10almonds, they put out new editions a couple of times per week, but there’s plenty of practical content in those, to make it very much worthwhile.

After all, gradual habitual improvement gives compound interest over time!

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🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World – by Dr. Cal Newport

There are a lot of books that advise "Unplug once in a while, and go outside". But it doesn't really take a book to convey that, does it? And it just leaves all the digital catching-up once we get back. Surely there must be a better way?

Rather than relying on a "digital detox", Dr. Newport offers principles to apply to our digital lives, that allow us to reap the benefits of modern information technology without being obeisant to it.

The book's greatest strength lies in that; having clear guidelines that can be applied to cut out the extra weight of digital media that has simply snuck in because of The Almighty Algorithm—and even tips on how to engage more mindfully with that if we still want to, for example using social media only in a web browser rather than on our phones, so that we can ringfence the time for it rather than having it spill into every spare moment.

In the category of criticism, the book sometimes lacks a little awareness when it comes to assumptions about the reader and the reader's social circles; that (for example) nobody has any disabilities and everyone lives in the same town. But for most people most of the time, the advices will stand, and the exceptions can be managed by the reader neatly enough.

Stylistically, the book is not very minimalist, but this is not inconsistent with the advice of the book, if you're curling up in the armchair with a physical copy, or a single-purpose ereader device.

Bottom line: if you'd like to streamline your use of digital media, but don't want to lose out on the value it brings you, this book provides an excellent template

Click here to check out Digital Minimalism, and choose focused life in a noisy world!

Wishing you a Sunday of the kind that leaves you feeling ready to take on the coming week,

The 10almonds Team