What can you eliminate?
Everyone talks about all the things you should do to optimize your life. They talk about all of the supplements to take. All of the hacks to incorporate into your day. The type, intensity, and frequency of exercise. But adding more to a busy life with limited capacity is a daunting task. Starting new routines and creating new habits requires consistency over a long period of time, and for that reason, for most people, they usually don’t stick.
That’s why I think that a much easier path is to eliminate the things from your life which do not serve you. Addition by subtraction. Remove what does not serve you and get back time and energy, and ultimately your health.
I think there are three things that almost everyone could eliminate tomorrow with minimal effort that would also drastically and immediately improving the quality of theirlife.
Alcohol
Social Media
Added Sugar and Processed Food (“food that isn’t food”)
Anyone, in any situation, could eliminate those three things and instantaneously be on the road to a better, happier, more productive, version of themselves.
These three substances rob all of us of our mental, physical, and emotional health. They cause unwanted and undetected spikes in stress hormones, and deleterious chemical reactions. They are at the core of depression, anxiety, weight gain, and chronic disease, and therefore at the core of the health epidemic in this country.
And it’s not just our healthy that they wreck. These three substances act as sedatives, muting our intuition, causing lethargy, and interfering with our critical thinking. They block our motivation, and they silence our ambition. They convince us to check out, when we want to be tuned in.
Alcohol, social media, and foods that isn’t food, are collectively and directly responsible for the increased prevalence of disease and mortality. If we could eliminate these substances from our lives then we wouldn’t need to do anything else.
We wouldn’t need to be more active. We wouldn’t need a multi-vitamin or a handful of supplements. We wouldn’t need to view sunlight immediately upon waking up. We wouldn’t need to find ways to disconnect and be mindful. We wouldn’t need to do any of those things but we would, because we would feel such an immense physical, mental, and emotional improvement that it would become immediately clear to us that we wanted to do it all.
Alcohol, social media, and food that isn’t food are mentally, emotionally, and physically destroying us. If we can eliminate them, the rest will take care of itself.