Cultivate a small, inner circle of long-standing friends and family who are honest and genuinely care for your best interests. These durable, trustworthy relationships provide stability, allow for honest feedback, and are crucial for a long, healthy life by mitigating stress.
Actively share your worries and stresses with trusted individuals in your life. Having people you trust around you helps mitigate stress, contributing significantly to a long and healthy life by embodying the principle to “never worry alone.”
Engage in marriage counseling as a proactive measure, not just during crises, to navigate new life phases and learn to handle potential problems before they arise. Treat your marriage with the same maintenance and work as other important aspects of life.
Prioritize authentic relationships with people who are honest, truthful, and straightforward, rather than those who require you to perform or are only present during good times. These genuine connections provide crucial support in challenging moments and offer foundational stability beyond external success.
Allow your adult children the freedom to make their own choices, live their own lives, and make mistakes, even when you believe a different path might be better. This requires checking your ego at the door and accepting the anxiety that comes with their independence.
For women, reframe menopause not as an end, but as a liberating and productive new beginning. This mindset shift helps overcome the strange shame often associated with it, allowing women to move forward, be more productive, and view it as the beginning of a better, freer half of life.
Define “growing old gracefully” for yourself based on what makes you happy and feel good in your own skin, regardless of external opinions. This approach helps tune out the constant, contradictory chatter about appearance and allows you to live authentically.
Prioritize taking vacations alone with your spouse, especially after years of being surrounded by family. This allows you to rediscover quiet presence and comfort with each other, fostering peak happiness and marriage by simply being together without the need to entertain.
If traditional meditation doesn’t work, find repetitive physical activities like dance or running that allow you to go into a different headspace and manage anxiety. These activities can serve as a form of meditation by providing a repetitive behavior that helps dial into a different headspace.
Acknowledge that a certain level of anxiety can be “constructive anguish” that helps you get things done and manage multiple tasks simultaneously. This type of anxiety can be a powerful energizer, enabling high productivity and the ability to handle complex situations.
Immediately RSVP “no” to events you don’t genuinely want to attend, especially if they trigger social anxiety. This proactive approach is the easiest way to prevent built-up social anxiety and the self-destructive behavior of trying to get out of commitments later.
When invited to do something, ask yourself if you would still do it if it were scheduled for tomorrow. This helps you avoid saying “yes” to commitments that are far in the future but would be undesirable if immediate, preventing future regret and anxiety.
Consistently expose yourself to things you fear, such as public speaking. Fear generally disintegrates in the face of consistent exposure, which can eventually reprogram your brain and make the uncomfortable activity feel less daunting over time.
If you wake up in the middle of the night with restlessness or anxiety, try a walking meditation. Slowly walk around, bringing attention to your full body moving to tire out your mind and body, allowing you to eventually fall back asleep.
Do not reach for your phone or any other device when you wake up in the middle of the night. News scrolling and blue light from devices trigger new anxiety and are the least effective ways to put your mind to rest, making it harder to fall back asleep.
If you’re struggling to sleep, get out of bed and do something relaxing (like reading a book or watching TV, but avoid news or blue-light devices) until you’re tired, then return to bed. This prevents your brain from subconsciously associating the bed with struggle rather than rest.
When using social media, adopt a “post and dump” strategy: post your content, then immediately close the app and disengage. This helps you avoid looking at toxic comments and prevents you from getting drawn into negativity, allowing you to tune out unhelpful noise.
If you find yourself unable to handle negative comments or the urge to “right wrongs” on social media, set up smart barriers and boundaries by choosing not to look at it. This protects your mental health from being inundated with unproductive negativity and “bullshit.”