6 Remarkable Life-Changing Upgrades That Transformed My Life And That Of My Family

Effective things which transform your physical, mental, and emotional health rapidly and sustainably

“The accumulation of past habits projects your present life.”

We are what we think of the whole day long, underlined by the actions that we take consistently.

My question for you:

“Are you satisfied with your life as it’s presently projected?”

If not, or whether you’re life might require a nudge or two, follow me throughout this post and find out about 6 remarkable life-changing upgrades that transformed my life, and that of my family.

1. Emphasize becoming less perfect

Perfectionism kills your creativity and leads to unhappiness.

Perfectionism and fear go hand in hand whether you’ll admit it or not, deep inside you know that perfectionizing is the math of avoiding negative responses. Perfectionism delays delivery and exposure time, which inhibits your chances for growth and being discovered.

When you look around there are lots of things happening which you do not agree with right? Nobody is perfect. Understand that you’re the only one noticing. More people notice imperfections and perhaps much more people take advantage by action.

It’s not all that easy to do when it’s so deeply embedded into your system. However, once you reduce your thrive for perfection, you’ll notice that more opportunities appear.

Frankly, your productivity will increase. That’s why shifting away from perfection is one of the better life-changing traits I’ve acquired over the last year.

2. Renting a house instead of buying

The emotional detachment required has you by the throat.

A house is everything, you should make sure you can buy a house and devote your whole life to work for it. You could call it, “the American dream.” However, seen from my perspective, most Europeans are at least as attached to this dream.

A dream, a perspective, a craving, it delves into a strong emotional connection.

Is it worth it?

• We renovated a house for five years once and sold it later without loss or profit, yet we lived in a construction yard for those five years.
• We constructed a new house (small type) once, which was super costly for the size of the place and the ground, we sold it within two years, again without loss or profit.
• We’ve bought an older house undervalued, which we turned into an asset a few years later that we still own. Although, an asset sounds great, still because you own the place it’s costly. Besides, the asset made us have to leave our home which we didn’t want at that time.

Bottom line, buying a house is great when it doesn’t hurt you monthly and when it doesn’t make you perform actions against your beliefs and desires.

I can’t phrase it any better in short. Buying a house first of all in 80% of cases is a liability, I’m surprised that many people still are not aware of it.

Although this depends much on personal preference, your business mind, and your financial state.

Understanding how to live more in the present moment decides between buying and renting a lot easier, at least for us.

The present moment presents you with more life quality.

Now, money is something we all need, yet not heaps of it. This is where it gets interesting.

When you look at your monthly expenses rather than trying to accumulate huge amounts for financial worth within 20 years, your focus lies within the present.

Buying a house brings many expenses with it, while once you own it, you’re subjected to follow all new rules and regulations presented to you. You’re not free in choice over your own property and you don’t control how costly this can become.

Renting however creates financial space to live, invest in yourself, and do other things.

See it as renting your present moment, which can make a lot of psychological difference from thinking as throwing money in the garbage bin because you don’t own the place.

And let this just be the thing you need, a solid reason that dis attaches you emotionally.

Today we choose to rent, and we love it. By renting I’ve felt more free than from buying a house, besides that you can rent a great house for a reasonable price which would otherwise not be possible to live in when you would have to buy it. And when it would, it would cost you significantly more per month.

Renting offers you:

• Living in a house with more space that you otherwise couldn’t afford
• A financially dis attached life and relaxed state of living
• Mobility for when you would want something else
• Leaving you with lesser costs monthly

By being able to move to something with more space, the renting instead of buying mindset transformed our quality of life as a family in one decision.

Of course, we aren’t financial cracks, matter of fact I don’t like to be busy with money, but to get rid of financial stress it requires you to understand the math of finance well.

One thing which helped us to enlighten ourselves was by seeking a mentor. That mentor from who we got our ideas is no one less than the famous real estate marketer “Grant Cardone” if you will.

When I look back, buying houses had us required to work a lot physically, but let us stand still financially for over a decade. Whereas renting a house lifted our sense of enjoyment straight away.

“The aim is wealth and health not appearing to be rich.”

3. Implementing More Cardio To My Weight Training Again

You can lift weights for ages but N.E.A.T. matters a ton.

Dragging too many kilos is what you want to avoid to feel good.

Often it’s the BMI that necks you.

Solely lifting weights makes you big and slow. It’s a problem I had for about a year, a bit due to my new writing habit. For 20 I train with weights consistently as an amateur, it helped me to stay strong mentally and physically throughout my life, it’s my strongest habit.

A while back writing started to interfere with that, often I found myself skipping a workout…Unaware of its manifesting.

Suddenly I concluded when taken a family pic last year.

I noticed that my self-perception and real physical image had run out of balance. At the start of my writing journey, I must have overdone myself because of the elevated state writing brought me. This led to more writing and less exercise time.

In the beginning, I got away with it because my writing improved and I was in a positive flow. A couple of months later I experienced a writer’s dip. I found it difficult to finish posts to publish, and production went downhill.

It was only then I realized that also my exercise time had been decreasing from 12 hours a week to roughly 6 hours per week or so. In my mind, it felt like I was still performing but in reality, my writing habit took the upper hand.

I felt disappointed and also lost a certain amount of motivation. My physique was nowhere near what it was. And I tried to figure out what the problem was.

In the end, I must conclude that my activity level had sunken dramatically. Especially while being at home. Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis is your daily energy expenditure by physical activity next to your training. A daily duration that’s significantly longer than your training sessions.

The benefits of increasing your N.E.A.T. :

• While you’re at it, by the end of the day you’ll get more things done
• Increased conductivity for brain state(Which helps for writing)
• Conditioning and Toned body
• Easier to burn down calories
• Improved VO2max

As an extra, increasing your activity level is also very beneficial to improve your brain functionality.

4. Improve Brain Functionality

Sleep, brain breaks, meditation.

90% of people don’t take enough brain recovery periods to thrive 100% all day. You can’t help it, it requires great discipline, our society is entirely not built for you to be able and thrive at 100% all day.

Besides that, why should you?

If you aren’t busy with how we function as a human in a neurophysiological way, or can’t comprehend the effects of a sleep-deprived brain, the aftermath of sleep deprivation isn’t always that obvious.

I tell you this because I come from the outer end of the spectrum, where I neglected sleep tremendously.

When looking back, since emphasizing sleep, I notice lots of mistakes and wrong decisions I’ve made in the past related to my deeply embedded sleep problem. Nevertheless, regrets won’t help you much, so you’re better off writing them in a post like this so other people won’t make them.

Some brief things that helped me are,

Extended my sleep duration

I went from non to three full sleep cycles (3*90mins) to five full ones.

This was done by arranging my days better and keeping a consistent routine with early sleep timing and a pitch-black bedroom environment.

Starting the day with a very early workout has been extremely beneficial to me. See your entire day carefully priming for sleep. The early workout rewards you with an early psychological advantage that gives you a sense of victory to start your day with.

Other simple things that helped me along my day were, to not drink more than 3 cups of coffee, and stop drinking caffeine past noon. Getting natural daylight exposure as early as possible. Grounding, and taking brain breaks.

There are many forms of brain breaks that you can perform, the base idea is to just break up your work times so you can get some distraction once in a while. There is a famous system called Pomodoro which you might be familiar with already. Although you can be inventive by copying this principle with your own adjusted time stamps.

For me, the real gems are Meditation, CRPs, IRPs.

Here’s something I wrote six months into meditation that can help you gain more insight.

How optimizing brain functionality transformed my life:

• Fresher appearance, brighter eye’s without bags under the eyes
• Sharper and more accurate responding
• Better performance at my job offshore
• Improved dream analyzing
• Higher spiritual awareness
• Easier to recall memories
• Superhigh motivation
• Better workouts
• More energy

By focusing on the optimal restoration of my mental state, I could perform better in many ways consistently. These effects are difficult to present to you just like that. The best way to detect these changes is by the feedback given by your closest family and friends.

Why?

Because the results are compounded math since regaining momentum (in my case particular) roughly eight years back or so.

Additionally, you might want to acquire a healthy whole-food pallet which will make this whole operation worth paying attention to.

A no-brainer that you should acquire as a second nature already.

In the blend, optimal brain functionality leads to better investment strategies…

5. Investing In Ourselves And As A Family

Aim for time and quality instead money.

The chase for financial growth will never stop, there will always be more to dig for. It’s an extremely dangerous route to take when you’re looking to upgrade your life, which by reading this post here, I assume you are.

If you want a hidden gem of investment, I’ve captured it in this post.

I’ve learned a ton about the economy and money in the past, the only real thing I like about it is the chase to make accurate predictions, the psychological aspect. That’s why I found this the best advice to give you:

“The best investment you can make is an investment in yourself… you’ll learn more.”

-Warren Buffett -

Actually, I left this from the full quote: “And you’ll earn more.”

Because that’s not the aim you should have to transform your life. It can be a useful aftermath, and we need money to a certain degree (not as much as you think) yet solely earning more isn’t the best aim to shoot for.

How do we invest in ourselves as a family?

• We buy books periodically
• Often we follow a course of interest
• Tell each other lessons and present each other problems
• We let our kids in on important decisions which we need to make
• We go on a holiday as per discussed, even when we are limited on cash
• As parents, occasionally we drop everything that we are doing and make sure we spend a certain amount of time with our kids
• It doesn’t happen a lot, but sometimes we watch a movie or documentary together carefully picked, to learn something from

In a way, investing in yourself requires you to step out of your greedy comfort zone and teleport your thoughts toward the present time with a fuck-it attitude.

What I found for myself, is that reading more books was the best self-investment I’ve made over the last decade together with my Medium membership.

6. Replacing My Television By A Book Closet

Television programming.

Sinds I became acquainted with this phrase, mingled with some hypnotic awareness, for me, the T.V. somewhat doesn’t exist. The idea that you have to watch what’s presented has a strange cloud surrounding it.

This led to the goal to replace my T.V. with a book closet.

The information absorbed from books helps to feed your knowledge and intuition. The thing is, you want to rely on your intuition instead of presentations (suggested by television for instance). This is the ugly thing that television does, it presents your stuff.

Absorbing and observing are key to building intuition.

We are hugely influenced by data, whether correct or incorrect presented to us. I don’t like it one bit, do you?

Something I believe in is that you’re much better off when you seek for required information yourself. That means you’ll even benefit more when you pay for it.

Intuition is learned through real-life observations of the world around you, although, reading experiences lived by others throughout books can upgrade the precision of your intuition.

The fact that you choose what and from who you read makes the information valuable to feed your intuition. Almost as valuable as through your own observations.

A good intuition provides you with the ability to decide faster and better, without too much external influence.

Once you master this powerful skill to a certain degree, you’ll find it easier to ignore senseless and inaccurate information presented to you.

Reading more books has transformed me in these ways:

• Lead me to a very different and enjoyable way of thinking
• When I’m in a social conversation, I hold a huge arsenal of information that allows me to help and guide people if required
• More reading has made me make better decisions
• Equipped with more tools to solve problems
• Improved my writing

As a bonus, I wanted to implement The Magnificent Craft of Writing.

Daily writing provides mental clarity, reinforces your thinking, and feeds your creative mind.

Writing has transformed me as a person, and given me a great perspective to proceed through life. If you are only a reader here, this perhaps is the most remarkable self-transforming upgrade you could equip yourself with.

“When you feel stuck at the same level of life for a while, it might be interesting to acquire a serious upgrade, whatever that upgrade is, don’t let it wait forever.”

Take this:

Life-Changing Upgrades That Transformed My Life

Implementing More Cardio To My Weight Training Again

Replacing My Television By A Book Closet

Investing In Ourselves And As A Family

Renting a house instead of buying

Emphasize becoming less perfect

Improve Brain Functionality

Bonus — The Magnificent Craft of Writing

Related And Helpful Posts

Absorb, Read, Write, Sleep, Exercise, Thrive!

Thanks for reading this post!

Feel free to pick at least one of these life-changing upgrades and experience the positive effects.

P.S.: I’m a firm believer in building a prosilient mind, and like to inspire by writing.

Some of my writings are about: Sleep & Dreams/Writing tips/Life lessons/Mental Health/Circadian Rhythm/Submarine Power Cables.

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