Is your environment bringing you down?
Your environment has a huge impact on your health, happiness, and your relationships.
The physical clutter around you… the people you choose to spend most of your time with… the sounds that fill your ears… they all have large-scale measurable effects on you.
Our habits become attached to certain environments. They can even become attached to certain objects in our environments.
“Hey, there’s that couch that I sit on and usually play video games. What should I do on it today? Hmm… probably play video games. Yeah, that sounds about right.”
So before you become a slave to your surroundings, let’s take some steps to become more intentional about the environments that we find ourselves in.
Here are five things you can change starting today to master your environment for more mental and emotional freedom.
1. Remove Physical Clutter
Physical clutter creates mental clutter. Walking into your bedroom and seeing piles of unfinished tasks (laundry, mail, books, etc.) stresses you out.
Do yourself a favour and purge all of the objects that you know that you don’t really need.
Donate it to charity, give it to friends, Craigslist it… do whatever it takes. Your stress will drop, and your mental clarity will soar.
2. Shake Up Your Social Circle
Few things have such a great impact on our overall mood. The people in your life either motivate and encourage you, or bring you down and suffocate you.
Why does this matter? We become the average of the five people we spend the most time around.
Do your friends/room mates motivate and inspire you? Then invest in those relationships like your life depends on it and make them feel amazing.
Do your friends/room mates hold you back and depress you? Cut them out of your life. Like, now o’clock.
There is truly nothing more valuable in your life than the time that you have to spend. Are you going to spend it with people who kick you in the ass, or encourage you to sit on your ass?
Friends don’t let friends go soft. They constantly remind you of what you can become, and they hold you to those standards. Don’t settle for any less.
3. Environmental Noise
Constant noise has been proven to raise stress levels, anti-social behaviour, and aggression in people.
Do you live near traffic? Airplanes flying near by? Do you ‘have to’ listen to music while you work?
Humans have only lived in multi-million person mega cities for less than a hundred years of human evolution (prior to which we lived much quieter, and simpler lives).
I personally wake up at six a.m. every day to accomplish all of the most important tasks of my work day. Why six a.m.? Because the world around me has yet to wake up and everything is considerably quieter.
Give it a try. Remove constant noise from your environment and track the response your body and mind have.
4. Environmental Light
Do you have a computer, television, cell phone, or other blinking electronics in your bedroom? Time to change that.
Electronics are a double-whammy of negativity for your sex life. They distract you and make you less present in the bedroom, and the environmental light that they throw off disrupts your sleeping patterns (thereby reducing your testosterone production and a whole whack of other things that will mess up your libido).
Whatever you are doing in any moment, your brain is getting better at it. So if if you have trained your mind to think of your bedroom as one of the main places that you catch up on your e-mail and social media, you will have a much harder time getting to sleep.
Make your bedroom a cell phone free zone. Not just during sex, but always. Your sleep patterns, stress levels, and sex life life will thank you.
GO TO BED!!!
5. Sleeping With A Partner
What else did humans used to do that we no longer have built in to our western societal standards? Sleeping with or near other sleeping people.
While I won’t recommend sleeping in a nomadic tribe of 20-150 people just to get the soothing sounds of snoring surrounding you, sleeping in the same room as your partner has major benefits for your sleep patterns, oxytocin levels, and dopamine.
Wait… sleeping with someone makes people healthier and happier compared to sleeping alone? Not too surprising.
So for all you single people, hop to it. Getting into a compatible relationship has never been easier. Besides, it could help you live longer in the process.
Clean Up Your Act
It is unavoidable that you will form habits that latch themselves on to your environment. What those habits are are 100% within your control.
If you’ve been feeling lacklustre in your life lately, it could be due to the unconscious affect that your environment has been playing on you.
Make your video game couch into your reading couch. Turn your bright bedroom into a light fighting fortress. Tap in to your inner rhythms by turning down the constant background music.
Implementing just one or two of these tips could make you into a better rested, more deeply fulfilled, more productive version of yourself.
So what are you waiting for?
Take the first step.
Dedicated to your success,
Jordan
