making your home work
There is a power to our word that is very often underdeveloped — words are magic, and can create the world around us. But most of us use this magic as if it weren’t powerful. The first way we see this is that we often don’t honor our word to ourselves. In his wonderful book, The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz puts …
One of the best long-term things you can do for a happier life and better relationships is to cultivate a positive mindset. People with positive mindsets live longer, happier lives. They have lower rates of heart disease, cancer. They live about 7.5 years longer, on average. That’s huge. So developing a positive …
On average, people spend more than 3 hours on their phones each day, picking up their phones nearly 60 times a day … with some people spending closer to 4 hours. These numbers aren’t meant to be judgments — it’s not a bad thing to look at your phone — but instead are meant to bring some awareness to our phone usage. A …
Developing a strong sense of self is one of the most under-appreciated ways to be happy. To have healthy relationships, with others and with yourself. It’s not often understood, and as a result, problems in this area cause problems in all areas of our lives. Let me point out just some of the common symptoms of an …
My wife Eva and I have been vegan for over 11 years now, and we love it. I don’t talk about veganism a lot on Zen Habits, but today I’d love to share a little about it, if you’ll indulge me. Let me start by talking about why I’m vegan, and then I’ll share a few tips on how to make becoming vegan as easy as possible, …
When we are procrastinating, avoiding exercise or some other habit we want to create, or avoiding taking on a difficult project … the underlying cause is rarely what we think it is. We think that all we need to do is do the thing we’re avoiding, and stop procrastinating. Simple! But then when we fail, we wonder what’s …
Recently I got a running watch, and have been keeping most of my runs below a certain heart rate, to build up my heart’s aerobic fitness with lots of slow running. The pace of my runs has been incredibly slow for the last month. It’s helped me to fall in love with running again. I’ll share more about that, but it has …
There’s rarely a moment in the day when most of us stop moving and stop the noise. For most of us, we’re working, we’re moving, we’re driving, we’re listening to things on our headphones, we’re watching things, we’re filling up the little spaces by checking our phones. This isn’t wrong — it’s a very human tendency to …