Cheat Codes To Life

 If you’re anything like me, you probably like spending your free time consuming personal growth content and implementing any new valuable tips to improve your well-being. Personal development is at the focal point of my life and quite frankly, it is always a work in progress.

After all, if you think about it, life is the real school and unlike typical schools, we get to be in class every single day of our lives. I like to consider personal development as a tool to help up-level ourselves by helping us do well in ‘life tests’. I have a firm belief that the more we work towards becoming the best versions of ourselves, the more we get to reap out of life.

To cut the long story short – you are one hundred percent responsible for the direction you want your life to take. The truth is, everybody wants more out of life, which is totally fine, I know I do! But are you willing to do what it takes to make this shift? Because the version of you that has whatever it’s that you yearn for acts and thinks differently.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always be where you’ve always been’’. T.D Jakes

If you want more out of life you have to upgrade your ‘software’ to enjoy better ‘features’. This means that you have to take certain actions that are out of your comfort zone and consciously choose to abandon self-sabotaging habits that no longer serve you.

Both of which will feel like swimming against the current because your ego, which is the identity that is attached to your current mindset and habits, is afraid of the unknown, will fight you for all your worth to ensure you remain unchanged.

No one is responsible for your happiness and personal fulfilments in life except you. You are the captain of your ship. Your mindset and habits direct the course of your life just as how the captain sails the ship to its desired destination.

Every single action you take every day is either directing you towards your desired destination, keeping you stagnant, or moving you away from it. Without further ado, here are the most powerful self-improvement habits in my opinion, that if done CONSISTENTLY will uplevel your mind, body, and soul and transform your life for good.

1. Meditate

If you could only take away one thing from this article today, is this, meditate, meditate, meditate! I started meditating close to two years ago out of a long desperate search for a cure for chronic insomnia that had tormented my life for 5 long years!

And sure enough within a few weeks into daily meditation, I started falling asleep immediately my head hit the pillow and throughout the night! I was in total disbelief and I never stopped. Along with getting a good night’s sleep, the amazing benefits that I have reaped from this practice deserve a special blog post.

Meditation is a powerful habit. In fact, in the last decade alone, meditation has become mainstream having received a lot of backing from neuroscience as a result of the thousands of scientific studies that have proven how meditation enhances the physical, psychological and spiritual aspects of our being. According to the EOC Institute, among other numerous benefits, meditation has been scientifically proven to;

1. Naturally flood the body with feel good chemicals like melatonin, serotonin and reduce stress hormones like cortisol.
2. It boosts immunity and helps in deep healing
3. Meditation awakens creativity
4. Helps in weight loss
5. It helps in longevity, life extension and anti-aging
6. Ends insomnia and improves the quality of sleep.
7. Naturally beats depression
8.  Boosts memory, intelligence, memory and focus.
9. Strengthens will power and self-control, among others.

Meditation has a lot of powerful effects on our state of being and for this reason, there are a lot of experts who strongly advocate for it and one that resonated with me the most is Emily Fletcher.

She is a meditation teacher and in one of her lectures at mind valley, she explains that imagine your brain was a computer and every single time you’ve ever been stressed out in your entire life, it left an ‘open window’ in your brain-machine. This is referred to as a premature cognitive commitment or a PCC and by the time the average human is 20 years old, we have approximately ten million PCCs in our brain!

This, in her opinion, is equivalent to opening ten million ‘windows’ in your computer which runs simultaneously at all times. Picture this, every single negative experience that you’ve ever encountered such as the kid that bullied you in school when you were ten, any rejection, disappointment, heartbreak, or any other stressful situation in your life has left an ‘open window’ of stress and is still running in the ‘background’.

She explains that we use our computing power to run these ten million irrelevant ‘windows’ which depletes brain power to effectively handle the task at hand. Stress sucks the brain dry off energy and when you meditate, you ‘close off’ these open windows one by one which frees up more energy enabling the brain to perform at its optimal state. I like to liken the practice of meditation to pressing the ‘reset button’ on your consciousness.

2. Cultivate an attitude of gratitude

In a previous article about the power of attention, I wrote about how we are instinctively wired to focus on what might go wrong or what is not working instead of what we would like to happen. Simply put, our minds have a compulsive instinct to view life from the half-empty filter instead of half-full.

Whilst this is the brain’s natural fight or flight adaptation to keep us safe from danger when the need arises, this adaptation has rendered us dysfunctional in the sense that we might tend to gravitate towards having a pessimistic outlook on life which diminishes the much-needed self-belief in our own capability to triumph over any negative situation in our lives.

To override this compulsive nature of expecting the worst, we need to cultivate an attitude of gratitude by consciously acknowledging the things that are going well in our lives and feeling deep gratitude for them, that is, having a half-full perspective.

There’s always something to be grateful for. The fact that you woke up this morning and are reading this is reason enough to feel grateful. Counting your blessings is one of the most powerful ways to rewire your subconscious mind which reprograms it to seek out what is already good in your life.

This goes a long way in overriding the instinctive nature of constantly scanning the environment for threats. Gratitude is the channel through which the things you want flows to you. The more grateful you are, the more this channel is reinforced and its capacity increases.

3. Move your body

 Believe it or not, just as everything in nature, at the fundamental level your body is energy which is in a constant state of motion. The fact things appear to be solid objects will be a discussion for another day. What we are concerned about, for now, is the idea that nothing rests, everything moves and vibrates at a certain frequency. A frequency is the rate of movement. How does this line up with self-improvement you might ask…

Well, if your body is energy, and energy is always in a constant state of motion, then lack of physical movement is going against the very nature of how things work.  ‘to move carefully or gradually’ is one of the definitions of the word ‘ease’ and the absence of ease which is dis-ease is how we describe someone with an ailment. What is at dis-ease is merely the stagnant energy in one’s body that manifests as a physical ailment.

That’s why exercise has been scientifically proven to have many benefits both mentally and physically which have a significant impact on our longevity. According to health line, the scientific benefits of exercise apart from weight loss range from exercise making us happier, it reduces the risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease- hypertension, many types of cancer, type 2 diabetes to improving our brain fiction and thinking skills to improving our sex life and so much more.

You don’t have to do a typical workout if you’re not into that, however, finding ways to incorporate movement into your daily routine like taking the stairs, dancing, leisure walks, and so on is of utmost importance. Your longevity, overall well-being, and health depend on it.

4. Reprogram your limiting beliefs

If there’s something you really want but you don’t have it yet, it means deep down you don’t believe you deserve it! You do not have a program/belief that allows it to be there or what most people refer to as your ‘mindset’.

You see, for you to successfully achieve anything in the physical reality, it has to happen in one of the following two ways;  it has to be conveyed into the subconscious mind for it to manifest into real life or you already have a program that allows it to be there’ as Dr. Bruce Lipton passionately states. The subconscious mind is what turns thoughts into things.

Anything that has ever worked out in your favor was as a result of the idea absorbed down into the subconscious mind and this applies to everyone whether we do it consciously or unconsciously. Think of it as your own rich fertile soil. If things seem not to be working out in certain areas of your life, it means you have to uproot harmful weeds which not only deplete all the nutrients from other plants but also take up space that is needed for planting edible fruits.  

Fear, self-doubt worry, anxiety, and so forth are the weeds. Rewiring your subconscious mind with positive and empowering beliefs through repeating affirmations is equivalent to uprooting the weeds in your garden and planting the seeds that you want. The attention given through this process is the water and with time, the seeds will turn into a bountiful harvest. What weeds do you need to uproot from your garden?

5. Adopt a morning routine.

 Recent research on psychology has revealed that we have about 70,000 thoughts every day and 90% of these are the same as yesterday. This means that people who want to embark on some type of personal growth journey often find that they have a slim chance of achieving any tangible change due to the heavy current and momentum of recycled thoughts and habits that pull them back into their old selves.

Enter a morning routine. When we sleep, our consciousness shuts off. We get a powerful reset, which means the first few minutes after you wake up become a golden opportunity to hijack this vicious cycle of regurgitating thoughts and emotions and recalibrate our vibration.

Tailoring a morning routine that fits your schedule is key. The goal here is to have a clear mind early on which builds positive momentum for the entire day. An ideal winning powerful morning ritual can be something like waking up, meditating, moving/stretching your body, and reading an uplifting and high vibe book. Mind, body, and soul.

But if you’re pressed for time, setting 10-15 minutes a day for meditation and reflection works just fine. The key here is to begin the day on a high vibration. Do not underestimate the power of a good vibe, it injects quality energy into everything that you do.

“If you could win the morning, you could win the day’’

6. Consume high-quality content.

I am sure you’re familiar with the phrase ‘you are what you eat‘, well, the type of content you read, watch and listen to may help to build or deteriorate your life just as how certain foods nourish or harm your body. You’re not only what you eat and drink but you’re also the kind of content you consume because your brain is constantly rewiring itself to suit the information you feed it. This can have a powerful influence on how you think and act.  

The more you consume a certain type of content the more the information saturates your mind, once this happens, it gets absorbed down into the subconscious mind which will become an actuality in your life.

Remember, you feed powerful energy to anything that you pay attention to and energy cannot be destroyed. With time, you start to unconsciously gravitate towards or attract similar circumstances in real life. This is because, your subconscious mind which is the one that creates your reality, notices what you spend your attention on and it will seek to make it true in your life.

7. Be mindful of the company you keep.

“You’re five friends away from being broke or successful’’ If you surround yourself with four miserable people you’ll be the fifth. We are done here, bye! But seriously. You are the total of the five people you spend the most time with. I am sure you’ve heard this so many times, but is there a valid justification for this?

In the early nineties, an Italian scientist discovered a very fascinating phenomenon. That there was a part of the brain that enables humans to learn from each other just by observation, referred to as mirror neurons. Through numerous subsequent scientific studies, it was discovered that when a person watches someone else perform an act, even without moving a muscle, the mirror neurons in their brain fire as if they’re performing the act themselves!

Many neuroscientists believe that mirror neurons not only help us learn something by observation but also allow us to empathize and feel someone else’s feelings. It also gets deeper, mirror neurons allow us to experience pleasure just by watching someone else receive pleasure. That’s why there is a very lucrative multi-billion dollar adult film industry 😉 or why ‘Mukbang’ videos are extremely popular online.

That the simple act of observing someone else receive pleasure gives you the satisfaction as if you just performed the act yourself. That is why the best way to learn something is by imitation and you are constantly and unconsciously imitating the people around you.

As a self-proclaimed ‘lay-woman’, I’d like to think of mirror neurons as human Bluetooth devices. The more time you spend with someone, the stronger the ‘Bluetooth connection’ you make with them and vice versa. In my opinion, it’s like you ‘sync’ not only with their habits but also with their mindset.

In fact, some neuroscientists believe that every time you meet someone, on a non-conscious level, your mirror neurons automatically start ‘coupling’ with the other person. Have you ever noticed how you unconsciously start to mimic the laughter of the one person you spend the most time with? Be careful of the company you keep, your environment becomes you!

8. Set healthy boundaries

If you don’t have a problem with blatantly telling someone ‘no’ and being totally okay with it, then skip this part, I am proud of you! Boundaries are rules in relationships. Teaching people our limits such as how we want to be talked about, spoken to, what we are willing to do or not do and so forth.

I think evolution is the driving force in life and if you stay frozen at the shore afraid to jump in the ocean of whatever you’re meant to evolve from, life will throw you in the deep-end where you’ll be forced to either swim or drown. Life has a way of helping us evolve even when we may not see it right away.

For me, in regards to setting boundaries, I had to be thrown into the deep end. In fact, until recently, I didn’t realize I had a problem with setting boundaries. I just knew I had a hard time speaking my mind and saying no when someone close to me needed something from me and in case I did say no I’d feel very guilty about it.

That as long as I do the ‘right’ thing and make everyone happy even if it’s not the right for me, then that’s all that matters, my feelings didn’t count. It’s like I had an automatic impulse to do right by everyone except myself. And as you can guess, I had to learn the hard way, I had to swim or drown!

 It all began unraveling when I stumbled on a phrase online that literally turned on a light bulb in my mind. That “Saying no is the highest form of self-care. Saying yes to someone else even when you don’t feel like, is saying no to yourself. Setting boundaries is an expression of love to yourself.”

I was mind blown! I didn’t realize that all this time I had been denying myself, love. I later realized that a lack of boundaries is rooted in people-pleasing tendencies for fear of disapproval from others. Now that I look back, I think that when you don’t have healthy boundaries set, you don’t have control over your own happiness. That somehow, your happiness and peace of mind are determined by an outside factor that you don’t have control over and this sucks!

9. Create vision boards, write down and visualize achieving your goals

If you read an earlier piece about why positive thinking fails, you know that the conscious mind and the subconscious mind do not speak the same language. ‘Men are from Mars and women are from Venus’ has a deeper meaning than most people realize.

The subconscious mind, which is feminine is subjective in nature and it has no way of knowing what you want. If you don’t speak to it in the language that it understands, it has to operate on a ‘best guess’ basis more like playing charades.

In this sense, creating vision boards, writing down, or visualizing what you want, are actually techniques to reprogram the subconscious mind or to help with this charades mode of function. These are attempts to get the subconscious mind’s attention, otherwise, it mainly works through and reproduces your strongly held beliefs.

If there’s something you really want and you strongly believe without a shred of doubt, that you’ll get it, then, that’s a direct command to the subconscious mind and you wouldn’t need manifestation tools such as vision boards, visualization, or journaling. Once it gets a sense of what you want, it will immediately move to execute it because that’s what it was designed for.

10. Spend time in nature

Mother Nature has the perfect vibration. We all know that trees absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, it is also believed that in the same way, trees help transmute negative energy and raise our vibration.

In addition, there is a growing body of scientific research on the health benefits of spending time around trees or green spaces. These include; boosting immunity, lowering blood pressure, curing depression and reducing stress, increasing the ability to focus even in children with ADHD, improving sleep, accelerating recovery from surgery or illnesses, and many more. Trees are healers.

Until next time. But remember, If you don’t take care of your mind and body, they won’t take care of you!

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Love and Light.