I spent all of 2024 tracking my spending and saving. I didn’t “budget”, just had a spreadsheet and wrote everything down week over week.
I would recommend it as a habit people may benefit from just to understand where their money goes.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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Checking up on your friends and asking how they are. It never hurts to be there for your friends when they're having a bad day! ❤️
I stopped doing this with some of my friends. They were always happy to hear from me, but the relationship felt one sided. Once I did, I found out I was right.
Waking up at the same time every day, no matter if it's a weekend or a weekday and no matter if you stayed up too late and won't be getting full 8 hours of sleep.
As obvious as this might sound, this has really helped me to regulate my sleep schedule, something I've really been struggling with for pretty much my entire life.
Learn stuff, don't eat processed foods and get exercise - gardening and foraging are good places to start for most people. Stay far away from negative, manipulative and lying people.
Just go for a walk. Calling it exercise scares people into thinking about running, cycling or the gym but for the last month or two i just make it my mission to go for a long-ish walk once a day. Nothing strenuous, some days I walk a couple of kilometres to the nearest big supermarket to pick up some stuff, or i'll get something delivered to a post locker thing or I'll just go for a nice walk around the nearby park and bring my neglected camera with me to take pics of some birdies.
You would be surprised how many calories it adds up to and how much better your well-being can get from some sunlight and fresh air.
So many people don't care about how their behaviors affect others. They are loud on the public transport, interrupt others when they talk, act like they are better because they got good looks, and a bunch of other things.
I really think people would get along better if all of us were more down to earth and listening and relaxing.
Be the opposite of what you see in reality shows.
Just use a password manager, FFS it makes all of your online interactions safer.
Once setup, it is easier than not using one.
Which app would you recommend/suggest?
Bitwarden is the best in my opinion
I use keepass XC, and keep it up to date on all my devices using syncthing.
I have considered bitwarden with self hosting, but keepass had always worked well.
Learning how to say no, how to do it politely and how to do it firmly. I'm better at the latter but being able to do either is a goddamn superpower, it's incredible how many Americans cannot regardless of their situation, title, age, wealth, etc.
Never start nicotine
I'd also like to chip in that alcoholism is sneaky. Be careful with drinking
Absolutely lifting weights has been my all time favorite self improvement thing, would highly recommend it
I second this as a non-sporty person. I bought a couple of barbells (15kg apiece) for use at home and 20-30 minutes of just messing around with them daily has solved so many joint aches, it's almost ridiculous...
If I could offer you only one tip for the future....
sunscreen...
would be..
it.
The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists.
~ Baz
jokes on you buddy, I don’t go outside
Read books.
Really anything, philosophy is great but some don't have the patience for it.
If it's graphic novels or "kids" books, it's all good. Spend a bit of time every day reading.
Couldn't agree more.
Secondly, never ask for book recommendations on Lemmy or Reddit. You'll just get a list of pretentious, wanky suggestions that people pretend to like
The best fiction is sometimes just a trashy, edge-of-your-seat thriller
Getting an electric toothbrush, and flossing daily. My dental hygienists love me.
Using a password manager and moving around every hour or so
3 - using an Oxford comma where appropriate
Eating magic mushrooms. Did you know they are not addictive, and tolerance levels are quickly built up. If you try to trip on shrooms daily they won’t have much effects after 2-3 times and takes almost two weeks for your tolerance to go back down. Probably best to avoid eating poisonous mushrooms. 🍄🍄🟫
Learn to eat healthy, in good portions, not too much, not too little and fast once in a while.
It's a pain when you're younger but gets easier with age because you start losing or degrading your sense of taste (like all your other senses) anyway.
If you get that habit early in life, you'll keep it forever. And if you take care of your system early in life, your older self will thank you for it. Otherwise if you abuse yourself, and you do end up living a long life, you'll be miserable for the last decade or two of your life and probably won't know your name or where you're from.
Get in the habit of developing habits.
I’m divided on this.
In one hand, when I haven’t done my habits for awhile it seems like everything goes to chaos.
But many days I dread all the annoying chores I do making everyday feel the same.
when I haven’t done my habits for awhile it seems like everything goes to chaos
Yeah, happens to me too. Sometimes just doing one little thing quickly builds momentum back up again.
But many days I dread all the annoying chores I do making everyday feel the same.
Again, yeah, happens to me too. What helps me is to not do chores but to see how efficiently I can do chores. It's more interesting to come up with processes/procedures/tools that get the job done faster. In the end the chore is done AND the next time it will go even faster because I'm more efficient. HTH
Not waiting for a day like new years to make a change that helps you.
The best time to do it was probably years ago.
The second best time is today.
Because if you make it about “new years” or some event, then it isn’t about YOU.
Do it for YOU, because you know that you’re worth the same amount of effort and affection as the others in your life.
Would you want this change for your friend? Turn don’t you think you skills care enough about you to give it to yourself?
I quit smoking the day my niece was born.
I quit drinking on April 1st, I've lost track of how many years ago it was, so that's nice.
don't discount the power of a specific date to reinforce a change and don't let the reputation of new years resolutions stop you from setting and crushing them.
Neither of those are New Year’s resolutions.
“The day my niece was born” is actually exactly the type of thing I’m talking about. You didn’t wait until new years, or your birthday, or something else unrelated to your motivations. You picked “now” because that was when you felt the desire.
So yes, special days can matter, but the days that matter to YOU are way more important than a day some guy named “Gregorian” chose 2000 years ago.
Nice backtracking on “some other event,” that’s better than what 90% of the internet would do!
I still think it’s fine to use external dates for self improvement. I’m not very religious, but I love lent specifically because it’s a socially encouraged time to change a habit that lasts nearly the two months it takes to make a new habit or break an old one.
One year it was soda because I drank a few cans a week, since then I very rarely have any in the house. Last year I gave up meat, which is something I would never have pushed myself to do on my own.
It’s just a lot easier to test a change when it’s not permanent. There’s certainly an argument to be made that a full year of change at new years is too long to successfully commit to, but that doesn’t mean the whole thing should be discounted.
You’re assuming it was backtracking rather than a simple clarification.
That’s unnecessarily unpleasant, and it’s cool you want to feel like you won the argument, but if you add in the context of “new years eve” and then read it as “some other event external to the reason you want to make a change” it’s not backtracking.
In fact it’s just context you missed because of your own life experiences and emotions.
Which is cool, but you look like an ass when you try and secure a win by pointing out your own misunderstanding rather than hearing my clarification.
It's an argument on the internet, there are never really winners. It seemed like backtracking because saying that a dissenting response is "actually the type of thing I'm talking about" carries an implication that the person responding misunderstood you, rather than acknowledging the possibility that you did not clearly/fully communicate your thoughts. As far as I and I assume the person you responded to could tell, that wasn't "actually the type of thing" you were talking about. Backtracking may have been the wrong term, but there was a level of condescension in your comment that was so close to being sincere that it rubbed me the wrong way. Combine that with me half-disagreeing with you and that made for a response with some snark at the front. I am a little sorry for that. Also, why would you write "because of your own life experiences and emotions?" Unless the discussion is focused on something related to how people become the way they are, that statement has about as much meaning as "this is an aspen. You can tell it's an aspen because of the way it is." All it says is that you assume there is something wrong with the person rather than actually say anything about what that person has said or done. At worst it's empty words and at best it's an empty ad hominem.
Tell me more about my “faults” and “condescension” and “ad hominem”, then reread your comments. Yep, there’s some condescension from me here, but you’re also once again trying to throw judgement. “Glass houses” and all.
You win, Have a nice day.
Memorizing long sequences of numbers and conveying mnemonics for them (e.g. 512 becomes EAB, 3.1415... becomes C.ADAE...). Technology allowed humans to forgot how to memorize, for example, phone numbers. This is not good for long-term memory.
Turning them into letters just seems harder to me, lol
Yeah, indeed it is. And to make things worse, our brains aren't really native to numbers, our brains are native to meanings and emotional correlations and names. We get to memorize a song or a smell better than we get to memorize the 10 first digits of pi.
I sometimes tinker with math, programming (this one used to be my professional field), ciphers and steganography (scientific, logical approach towards the alphabetical positioning), as well as Gematria and numerology (non-scientific, esoteric/spiritual approach towards the alphabetical positioning). This allowed me to memorize the numerical position for some letters (for example, L=12, H=8, T=20, W=23). I got these letters specifically memorized due to emotional/spiritual/meaningful correlations (e.g. Lilith's name can be represented by the sequence 12 09 12 09 20 08).
When some of the letters are memorized, the other letters become a matter of counting from the nearest letter, until they're also memorized. Then, the reverse conversion (numbers to letters) become a bit easier to do (if I managed to memorize that T is 20, with enough repetition, I get to memorize that 20 is T).
I also memorized that 97 is the ASCII code for lowercase a, while 65 is the uppercase A, so this also allows the conversion between a text and its numerical ASCII representation, although it involves a lot more of math than simply converting numbers to letters within the alphabet or vice-versa.
Biased take but you can’t remove meditation and mindfulness from its traditions specific goals. I get they have side benefits but therapy acting like they invested god through spreading it is just watering down what could help so many people
For me, it's reading or watching philosophies. Philosophy can change how we view things around us.
Open a Roth IRA and make max contributions to it every year. Most Americans will not be fortunate enough to rely on a pension upon retirement and that employer sponsored 401k will not be enough. They are throwing us to the wolves once they can no longer extract value from our bodies so start preparing now. The sooner the better.
Make your bed as soon as you wake up.
I work from home and tried to do this, but it’s easier to just wait until lunch. Once you’re in the habit though you won’t know how you ever didn’t do it before.
I don't know if the mental benefits are outweighed by not airing out your linen. might depend on the weather.