| I personally am starting with number 28: “Deal with that back pain.” —Chris Cohen, deputy site editor |
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31 Ways to Get Your Life Together |
Here at GQ, we’re the first to tell you that thinking about the bleeding edge of wellness is fun and interesting. What’s the perfect heart rate to improve your lactate threshold? Why, exactly, is processed food bad for you? What unregulated chemicals are people injecting this time? We could go all day.
But when it comes to actually improving your life, contemporary wellness culture’s fixation on extremes and novelty can get in the way of taking action. If you’re working on your mental and physical health (and related domains of well-being like your personal care, relationships, and financial picture), doing anything at all is so much better than doing nothing—and, in our experience, perfectionist fixation on marginal gains often leads to the latter state.
So we (and some of our most trusted expert friends) assembled a list of manageable and practical suggestions for dealing with life’s challenges. None of these will apply to every person. But if you’re ever feeling like you need to get your life together, one or two might help you.
- Do something—anything
- It is easy to feel like the events of your life are only subject to the big forces: maybe the decades-long trend of housing costs rising faster than wages, perhaps the fact that we’re all just collections of stardust in an extremely temporary arrangement. But whether or not free will exists (we will leave it to the theologians), the research is pretty clear that’s it’s better for your general well-being if you at least act like you’re in control of the major happenings in your life—if you cultivate an external rather than an internal locus of control, as you may remember from undergrad psychology. If you’ve got a problem, or something is bumming you out, you will probably be happier if you figure out a way to do something about it, even if it’s a small action and seems pointless before you start.
- Don’t wait until you feel motivated
- “A common misconception is that you need to feel good to get going, but often it's the other way around: You need to get going to give yourself a chance at feeling good. This is called ‘behavioral activation’ and it demonstrates that motivation often follows action, not the other way around. This is why it's so important to just get started on the things that matter to you and give yourself a chance. You don't think or talk or dream yourself into the person you want to become, you act yourself into it. —Brad Stulberg, best-selling author of The Practice of Groundedness and Master of Change
- Set a SMART fitness goal.
- If you’re already moving fairly consistently and you need more stimulus (or walking just feels boring), figure out how to push yourself. Compete in a powerlifting meet? Yes. Do a plank every day for 120 days? You betcha. Complete the Murph? Absolutely. The exact details are up to you, though we’d recommend making a goal that’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—SMART. Not “work out more,” but “go to Crunch twice a week in October” or “do the novice program in Starting Strength for three months.”
Read on for the next 28 suggestions, including how to level up your finances and set a good fitness goal.
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