Cultivate trust, respect, and patience for all of life’s experiences, understanding that everything is a process, whether good or bad. This mindset helps navigate challenges with greater acceptance and peace, and allows you to appreciate the good more fully.
Focus on making continuous progress in your goals and lifestyle changes, rather than striving for an unattainable perfection. The pursuit of perfection often hinders actual progress and can lead to giving up when challenges arise.
Adopt the mindset that adverse experiences are ‘happening for you’ rather than ’to you.’ This perspective helps you learn valuable lessons from challenges and emerge as a stronger, better human.
Allow yourself to fully experience and express all emotions, including vulnerability, especially in front of loved ones like children. This models healthy emotional expression, fosters strength, and counteracts the suppression of feelings.
Focus on living in the present moment, rather than dwelling on past achievements or future goals. This helps avoid getting overwhelmed by the scale of a challenge and allows you to appreciate the current experience.
When facing adversity or seeking well-being, leverage simple, free tools such as human contact (hugs from your tribe), breathwork, meditation, mobility exercises, and cold water therapy. These practices help downregulate the nervous system, process emotions, and shift your state.
Consciously use breathwork throughout your day to regulate your physiological state, whether to ‘upregulate’ for alertness or ‘downregulate’ for relaxation and rest. This practice can profoundly control your biology and influence overall well-being.
Breathe primarily through your nose, engaging your diaphragm (belly breathing) to utilize the full potential of your lungs, rather than shallow chest breathing. Remember that noses are for breathing and mouths are for eating.
Practice the 3-4-5 breath (inhale for 3, hold for 4, exhale for 5) for about a minute before meals, ideally with family or friends. This shifts your body out of a stress state into ‘rest and digest,’ which can improve digestion and reduce adverse reactions to food.
Before entering your home after work, take a moment to do breathwork to down-regulate and release accumulated stress or negative energy from your day. This prevents carrying work stress into your personal life and allows you to re-engage with family calmly and present.
Set timers (e.g., every 25 minutes) during your workday to take short breath breaks, returning to your breath for a moment. This helps reinstate moments of reflection and rest that are often lost in modern, constantly-on work environments.
Engage in down-regulating breathwork before going to sleep. This promotes a ‘rest and digest’ state, which is conducive to better sleep and overall recovery.
When practicing breathwork or any personal challenge, aim for your ‘present best’ rather than striving for a fixed tempo or ‘personal best’ that might cause stress. Everyone’s respiratory system is unique and can change daily, so forcing a tempo can be counterproductive.
Download and use ‘The Breathing App’ by Eddie Stern to guide your breathwork, experimenting with tempos like a 4-second inhale and 6-second exhale. A longer exhale helps to lower heart rate and blood pressure, promoting relaxation.
Consciously reduce reliance on modern ‘pacifiers’ like mobile devices, gaming, excessive shopping, alcohol, or drugs, which provide high dopamine hits. Instead, cultivate natural ways (like human connection and movement) to foster true happiness and engagement.
Be mindful and significantly limit your children’s exposure to technology and devices. This protects their developing brains from known negative impacts, following the example of tech industry leaders who prioritize device-free environments for their own kids.
Incorporate biologically normal movements into your daily life, such as squatting while watching TV or for 30 minutes a day, and going barefoot indoors. This helps connect with your feet and the ground, aligning with a more natural lifestyle.
Value and prioritize simple, free activities like walks with family, meals with friends, and ensuring good sleep. These fundamental practices are crucial for overall well-being, helping to navigate adversity and mental challenges.
Recognize that true sustainability extends beyond environmental actions to include personal practices like breathwork and meditation. These help you sustain your own well-being and life amidst chaos, making you a more ‘sustainable human being.’
Embrace minimalist living by removing attachment to excessive possessions and focusing on fundamental needs. This practice encompasses many sustainable and well-being principles, reducing materialism and promoting a more natural way of living.
Seek ways to align your physical, social, and spiritual needs with nature, especially in urban settings, by making small, biologically aligned changes to your habits. These small changes can make a big impact on your happiness and overall way of living.
Actively recycle, reuse, and upcycle, and consciously choose to support businesses and products (e.g., electric vehicles, sustainable fashion) that are committed to environmental change. Do this without striving for perfection or causing personal anxiety.
Support and join environmental advocacy groups (like Surfers Against Sewage) that work to change legislation and make a systemic impact. This amplifies individual efforts and contributes to larger societal changes in sustainability.
Refrain from publicly shaming or berating others on social media for not being as sustainable as you are. Such behavior is counterproductive and not ‘sustainable’ for fostering positive change within the community.
When possible, choose products with lower carbon impact, using tools like carbon analytics at the point of sale to guide your decisions. This allows you to individually contribute to sustainability by making environmentally conscious choices.