3 Essential Kinds of Psychological Hygiene Most People Ignore

Nourishing the psychological underbelly of your well-being.

Advice about how to optimize your health haunts the internet: Sleep well, eat whole, unprocessed foods, and move. Yawn.

Because most people focus on the window dressings of wellness, they remain dead inside, even while doing all the “right” things.

If you want fulfilment, ease, and (gasp!) even the occasional glimpse into joy, experiment with seeing the following practices as fundamental to your well-being as eating or brushing your teeth.

Let me know how dramatically your life improves.

A Creative Act a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

“To not create is itself a stressor: It deadens our bodies and our spirits.” — Gabor Mate

People make the mistake of seeing creative production as something they do only when they’re feeling inspired.

This is a mistake. If you’re a human, you were born to create. Without it, you lose your edge.

The idea that creativity is a special state creates a negative feedback loop. The very perception that you should only engage in creative acts when you feel inspired kills your inspiration. Then the urge to create becomes an endangered species.

I invite you instead to see creative production as something as fundamental to being alive as bathing or eating. This perspective shift will diminish the perfectionistic streak that convinces you it isn’t your time to create until you know exactly what to say.

Instead of believing you should create when you have something to say, create to figure out what you have to say. It’s in there somewhere (even if it’s hiding deep behind your rib cage).

Consume Consciously & Minimally

Beware of seeing information consumption as something you do to be informed or entertained. This is how the mainstream media sinks its teeth into you.

What you read determines how you think. When you consume news about violent crime, impending catastrophe, or similar topics, you’re conditioned toward a fear- and anxiety-based existence.

The legacy media lost its prowess long ago. The journalists who produce it know it, and this inflects their writing strategies: they resort to fear-mongering.

Reflexively consuming this type of information is like brushing your teeth with maple syrup — it’s the opposite of hygienic.

Instead, see consumption as a form of nourishment. Read to tune your reality filter in the direction of beauty and self-possession, rather than a ticker-tape announcing all that’s going wrong in the world.

Also, it’s not just the nature of the information you ingest that matters — it’s the volume. Think about the way a computer slows down when you’ve got thousands of tabs open.

If you’re over-consuming information, your thinking will feel slow and labored. Ingest only what you need to optimize your mindset.

Revive the Pulse of Your Motivations Weekly

The average person lacks a philosophy of life. Their only justification for their lifestyle is that they’ve lived this way for 20+ years, and it’s working well enough.

Be different. Devote 30 minutes every week to unraveling the motivations behind everything you do and stand for: your work, your relationships, your hobbies, and beyond.

Why are you focused on that type of work and not the 27,000 other possibilities? Why invest time and attention into your current best friend, rather than finding another? Do your hobbies feel alive to you, or are they relics from the past?

This is a form of psychological hygiene because it makes willpower obsolete, removing the bloat and friction from everything you do.

Instead of having to repeat affirmations or recite pep talks in front of the mirror, motivation for action becomes a natural byproduct of simply being awake.

See Intensity as Your Lifeblood

“At 30, who isn’t a melancholy anti-hero haunting French literature?” — Noah Eli Gordon

For hundreds of thousands of years, ancient humans lived on the edge between life and death. They had to hunt for their food and escape the claws of lions. Intensity was inseparable from life itself.

In our modern world, it’s easy to succumb to the monotony of living, often without even knowing it.

We think about bathing, brushing our teeth, and eating as forms of hygiene, but staving off apathy should be number one on this list — there is nothing more dangerous to your well-being than losing touch with the natural joys of being alive.

If you don’t consciously meet your need for intensity, it will leak out in self-destruction. You’ll unconsciously court risk by willingly ingesting poisons like alcohol or processed sugar.

Consciously, you’ll tell yourself you’re ingesting these products for fun or pleasure, but you and I both know that you’ll do whatever it takes to jolt yourself awake from a life drained of the beauty, intensity, and thrill that is your birthright.

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