12 Elements Needed To Have An Optimum Lifestyle
Living a dope life is possible.
What does an ideal lifestyle look like? How do you create your perfect lifestyle? There isn’t a lifestyle that is perfect but you can have many wins in some particulate areas of life and in other parts you may still struggle. The goal is to have more vital areas than weak areas.
As long as we have a pulse, we will always have an area of our life that needs improvement. The trick is to find a balancing act between acceptance and the need to continuously improve.
Non-Toxic Environment
Most don’t realize how important one’s environment is. The quality of one’s environment has a lot to do with emotional happiness. As children, we don't have control over our surroundings and these surroundings shape us for better or for worse. As adults, we have some control over our environments. The average person is always looking forward to a vacation. Wonder why people feel refreshed after a vacation? This is because being in a new environment with little stressors brings clarity and rejuvenation to one’s mind.
“Perhaps most importantly for health, the environment can create or reduce stress, which in turn impacts our bodies in multiple ways. This is because our brain and our nervous, endocrine, and immune systems are constantly interacting. As neuroscientist Candice Pert puts it, “What you are thinking at any moment is changing your biochemistry.”
Having Enough Financial Resources
Money doesn't solve all of your problems but it solves a lot of your problems. What does it truly mean to have enough financial resources? It depends on your ideal lifestyle. The keyword here is your ideal lifestyle. Many get caught up in living other people’s ideal lifestyles. The subconscious effect this has on people can be seen in trends. You see people driving the same cars or moving into the same type of homes based on what they think is ideal. This will lead you down the path of insanity trying to keep up with everyone else. Your ideal lifestyle may not be as expensive as you think. But it also may not get you adoration from others either. Find out how much your ideal lifestyle will cost you.
STEP 1: YOU HAVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU WANT. We all have different goals and expectations. We all want something else. We all have different starting points and levels of determination. This leads to an important question…What exactly do you want your dream lifestyle to be? I’ll spare you the awkward verbiage about manifesting from the universe or finding your why. I’ll just state that if you don’t know what you want, you’ll never get it. There’s no way around this.
Having A Vision For Your Life
Life is going to have its share of challenges whether you have a vision for your life or not. It is going to be even more challenging when you have a vision. Having a vision isn’t a guarantee things will work out the way you want them to but having a vision will definitely enhance your life. The benefits that I have personally noticed about having a vision for my life have made me a better man but the journey is never-ending. Without a clear vision for your life, you won’t be able to deal with adversity, get up in the morning when motivation isn’t there, or get distracted by other life paths that you don’t want to do.
When you begin to feel adrift in life, get back to basics and focus on your vision: the life and career that would bring you lasting contentment. This isn’t about money — it’s about being true to yourself. Find honest answers to questions like: What does your ideal life look like? What do you most want to leave behind when all is said and done? What’s your vision, your dream? That’s what you need to fix at the forefront of your mind. When you focus on vision instead of everything going on around you, you’ll sharpen your ability to get what you want and make yourself more resilient against the bleak thoughts that can crowd your mind when you’re stressed out.
Taking Care Of Your Mental Health
Ever since 2020, mental health issues have been on the rise. When people hear the term mental health, they go into a space of ignorance and associate it with being “crazy”. Mental health isn’t any different than physical health. Even in a time when health should be prioritized, obesity rates are still skyrocketing all through the USA. Physical health is only prioritized for vain reasons and mental health is only a concern when depression starts to affect our entire lives. Having a therapist like wealthy people have a lawyer on speed dial should be normal. There isn’t anything wrong with having a therapist to help you make sense of your negative thoughts. To have someone listen who isn't close to you allows you to let your thoughts flow freely without biased opinions from loved ones.
Depression can’t be willed away. It’s a serious mental health condition that affects a man’s daily life, including the way he eats, sleeps, feels, and thinks. It can also affect his ability to work, go to school, and maintain relationships with friends and family. Depression is NOT a sign of weakness, and it can affect any man, regardless of his age and race or ethnicity.
Having Great Physical Health
I heard a great quote that describes physical health from a dietician by the name of Chef Eric Paul. “A lot of people are in great shape aesthetics wise but what does their plumbing look like?” The plumbing that he is referring to is our internal organs. We get so focused on how much weight we are losing but neglect to think about things like blood pressure, blood sugar levels, or hormone levels. Having a great body does have many benefits but having awareness about what goes on the inside and the outside of our bodies will allow us to live a long life.
Exercise also increases muscle strength, coordination, and balance. Your muscles (and connective tissue linking the bones) are important for maintaining upright posture against gravity and enabling movement. They also produce heat. Movement of the joints lubricates them with synovial fluid, reducing stiffness. Stretching exercises can facilitate mobility and flexibility of the joints, increasing your range of motion.
Having Flexible Employment Opportunities
There isn’t a worse feeling than being in a relationship and feeling trapped. You know the relationship is coming to an end and you have to start all over again on the dating market without any options. This is the same feeling you get when working for an employer whose relationship with you is coming to an end. You end up leaving in a desperate space willing and looking to accept crumbs for the next job out of desperation. When you have options, you will make better decisions that come from a place of clarity. Start expanding your network and work on one skill so that your value improves when it is time to leave your employer.
The job skills in demand are ever-changing to reflect the rapid shifts in the way the world works. As new skills become more relevant, others become obsolete. According to a survey by McKinsey, 87% of executives report experiencing skills gaps. The faster companies can fill these gaps, the more competitive they will be in the post-pandemic world. For candidates, identifying and developing the most in-demand skills can give them an advantage over others in the job market
Investing In Personal Development
If you want to live a dope life and create your ideal lifestyle, you can’t avoid personal development. Living your dreams requires improvement in every aspect of your life. When you strive for improvement, you have to be able to prepare yourself for stress. This isn’t the kind of stress from the obstacles of life but stress from putting yourself in uncomfortable situations that will help you grow. Personal development will overall make you a mentally tougher individual.
As life progresses, you are guaranteed to face a variety of circumstances, changing environments, and new roles that require you to adapt to them. A personal development plan will help you to handle the pressures that come with the continuous changes and challenges, so that you are well-equipped to excel in all the areas in your life. Personal development is an ongoing process of self-improvement either in your career, in your education, in your personal life, or in all of these areas. It is about setting goals for yourself and putting plans in place to reach those goals.
Having A Positive Self Image
How we feel about ourselves is a compass for how we present ourselves to the world. This includes things such as how we dress, how we view our body types, how we treat our bodies or even our body language. We operate in a world controlled by our subconscious views about our self-image. We all have heard the law of attraction theme about how thoughts create our reality. This is debatable but many doctors have talked about how our thought creates our biology. It means that having a negative self-image of yourself impacts the physiology of your body. Observe the difference between people who are having a bad day and people having a good day. The bad day individuals are usually slumped over protecting themselves from potential threats. The good day individual display open body language and appear to have more energy.
When we have a thought, it creates neural pathways and proteins. So our thoughts literally create physical matter. The neural pathways created by our thoughts influence our moods, habits, and behaviors, 95% of which are non-conscious, meaning we slip into these moods and habits and behaviors habitually, without even consciously thinking about it. The proteins created by our thoughts influence genetic expression.
Discipline Equals Freedom
Saying discipline equals freedom sounds like an oxymoron. When we think of discipline, we think of a monotonous and mundane routine. This sounds like the exact opposite of routine. There is some truth to this thought process. But the freedom comes from having the ability to stick to your routine regardless of internal or external circumstances. The freedom comes in knowing your goal or goals depends on the daily habits and routines you stick to every day. Living your ideal life requires discipline. When you feel you are living out everything you dreamed of, that is where the freedom you experience will be worth it.
One of the best mental disciplines for people to implement is simply putting together a schedule or a task list and actually executing it. Write the list or the schedule the night before, and then do what you said you would do. Life becomes much better when you do that.
Using Skills For Entrepreneurship
We are living in a digital age at the moment. What a time to be alive. With so many opportunities online, it seems a lot of people in the workforce are leaning towards entrepreneurship through online channels. Online entrepreneurship isn’t the only option although running a business online does give you more autonomy. The downside is entrepreneurship isn’t easy and it isn’t for everyone. It requires patience, time, and resilience. It is recommended to find or create a skill over time that you can monetize in the future. Take a course, get a coach, or take free classes online to get started. The sooner you start, the closer you are to having autonomy over your life.
First and foremost, being your own boss means setting your own rules (and your own hours). For a lot of people — especially right now — that means working from a home office. As of 2018, 50% of small businesses were operated from home. Now, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, that number is even higher. 42% of the U.S. labor force is now working from home full-time, and the number of entrepreneurs is probably much higher — because that’s the kind of flexibility that comes with being your own boss.
Having Fulfilling Romantic Relationships
Nobody is meant to be alone. Being alone for long periods of time leads to feeling isolated. But that doesn’t mean you should sacrifice things that you value just to have anything that breathes laying next to you in bed just to avoid loneliness. The most successful relationships I have seen are people who already had fulfilling lives before they got together. This also included the dreaded P-word, personal development. They relentlessly worked on themselves to become the best person they could be before entering a relationship. It is part of the process of setting yourself up for a successful relationship. A successful relationship is going to look different for everybody.
KEY POINTS
Fifty-three percent of marriages in the U.S. end in divorce.
One sign of highly successful and enduring relationships is the partners’ ability to stand together in the face of external challenges.
Couples who disagree about money once a week are more than 30% more likely to divorce than those who argue about money a few times a month.
Improving Your Relationship With Food
We have a love and hate relationship with food. We love it when it brings us pleasure setting our dopamine receptors on fire. We hate it when it brings us mental and physical pain when we gain weight. To improve your relationship with food, you should be honest with yourself about the kind of food you put in your body. This means being aware of how the food will affect your internal organs. When you start to become aware, you will feel more in control instead of becoming a slave to food. A small step in this direction is to start journaling how your body feels when you eat certain foods. This will bring some awareness.
In our society, our relationship with food is that it’s more than fuel; it’s often how we express ourselves and how we share our lives together. Food has its place in the foundation of relationships, whether we’re dining out for a first date or bringing a meal to a friend to celebrate a big event or mourn a loss. Given its importance, it’s vital that our relationship with food be a healthful one in order for us to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
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