How I Am Changing My Life

It’s a challenge, but I’m ready to take it

On the first of September, my work starts. It’s a so called “dual study” at a company and university nearby, which marks a new chapter in my life (I’m already very excited) and I take this, to do some fundamental changes. What am I changing?

I got into reading a lot of motivational posts on topics like self-improvement, motivation, reaching success, doing more, using your time etc. lately. They not only let me look up to those people, who reached that state of life, where they feel, like they finally use 99% of their time “useful” and their life has a true reason, but it also made me wanting to reach that too. I just want to start with it, so I made a list of things, I’ll change:

Bed-times

Getting up late, is one of the reasons, why people don’t get things done. Instead of getting up early and using the most productive hours of the day, their wasting it through relaxing, sleeping and continuous alarm snoozing.

I set myself the goal to get up at 6 AM on workdays and 7:30 AM during weekend. I never had real problems with getting up early. When I was still in high school, I had to get up at 6:15 AM, but after I finished that, I used to get up at around 8 or 9 AM or even later, depending on my mood.

But to not being tired in the morning, it is also required to go sleeping earlier. I want to go to bed at least before midnight, better at around 10 PM.

This is probably — although it might not sound so for many people — the easiest change for me, as I just don’t need much sleep. I’m totally fit after sleeping not more than 7 or 8 hours.

Running daily

In addition to my bed-times goal, I also want to give my physical conditions a boost by starting to run daily, at least on work days. The distance of my daily runs isn’t that important for the beginning, but I want it to be around 5 km.

In the past I ran like two times a week around 10 km, so I’m not like a running beginner. But the change will be the time, when to run. I used to run somewhere in the afternoon or evening, but now I’ll run during a time, when I still can hear the birds, doing some sounds in the morning.

During my rail trip, which I did in August, I discovered, that showering in the morning instead or in addition to showering before going to bed in the evening has a really positive affect to my mood and makes the coffee, that other people need to drink in the morning to wake up, useless. And I don’t like coffee, so…

After getting up, taking a small snack (like a banana), doing the run, showering and eating the rest of the breakfast, I’ll go to work, hopefully top motivated and not a little bit tired.

When the time has come, that I made myself completely adopt this habit, I might add some more things to my morning run, like starting with doing something for the other muscles in my body, like push-ups.

Cooking

But there’s another change which will physically affect me…

There was a time at the beginning of high school, where I did cooking as extracurricular activity. I actually liked it and did it with passion. My family got some awesome meals, created by me, and I even wanted to become a cook back then.

As I got more lessons to attend, I wasn’t able to take part at the extracurricular activity anymore. So I also neglected cooking more and more, eating the things my mother did, or which I was able to buy in the school. And so I forgot how to cook myself.

But I can and will change that. I’ll look for old receipts (which I still have a lot) or some tutorials on the internet and start making my food myself again. Not only will this be cheaper compared to ordering lunch, but I guess, it’ll also be healthier, because I’ll mostly use organic food and no artificial additives. And not to ignore, cooking can actually be fun and your meal is hundred times more delicious, when you cooked it yourself.

Stop consuming, start creating

When you spend much time with computers, there’s a high risk to waste a lot of time with things like YouTube etc. Of course the internet, and also YouTube, offers a lot of content, where you actually learn useful things, but to be true, most of the time goes away for trash videos or click-bait articles.

So instead of watching this stupid videos, I’ll start creating. Not videos for YouTube, because I’m to bad at it, but blog posts for my fellow Medium followers or just some things, nobody needs to read. I don’t set myself the goal to publish a post daily, because that could be contra productive too. It can cause stress or steal time from focusing on my studies. But using almost every minute you have and don’t know what to do, for either real relaxing (without doing anything — also no pointless Facebook or Twitter scrolling), writing, learning or something other useful, is what I want to achieve.

I also stopped playing games some time ago. There was no time, where I was really interested in any game, but from time to time, I spent many hours playing some things on my phone. But spending your spare time on virtual games, is in my honest opinion one of the worst ideas. Do you want to achieve goals in this game or real life goals?

And I count social networks like Facebook, WhatsApp or Snapchat to this category of time-stealing-consume-activities too, which need to be strictly limited to a minimal amount of time each day. I’ll just use these to make my existing friendships stronger, build new one or do necessary communication. But no sending snaps anymore, when I’m bored or think I’m bored. I could just open the Medium or any other notes app and start writing a post…

Stop procrastinating

Who isn’t like that, trying to procrastinate as long as possible, always doing things short, before the deadline ends. Doing homework, cleaning your home or whatever. Everything, we don’t really like to do now, gets done in the last possible moment, bringing us in difficult situations and often making us to feel stressed. I need to stop that as good as possible.

Maybe Todoist, an app, which I used a lot during the learning for my final exams, will help me or I’ll need to find other methods changing this bad habit.

Meeting up with people more often

People in my age normally meet up, to drink a lot of alcohol, taking drugs or just wasting time, but I’m not like them. I don’t understand, why they destroy all their brain cells, with consuming these harmful things.

Not that I also took part in those parties to meet them (with just consuming a moderate amount of beer — I have a strong will and know, what I will NEVER do), but I would like to meet people, who either share my mindset of having a meaningful life or are interesting in other ways and it’s one of my goals, to spend more time with these people and build new worthy friendships.

Be more thankful

In the last year, I realized how much worth every day and even every hour in your life is. You never know when it’ll end, it could be as soon as tomorrow.

That’s why I not only want to use my time more efficiently, but I’ll also try to change my behavior in general. When you are more thankful for the things you get, the good things, that happen to you, you enjoy your life more. You realize, that it’s worth living and it’s great that you are here on earth.

Also will I try to be more understanding, listening to other opinions, without directly thinking, I’m right about everything.

Conclusion

I’m sure, not everything, what I planned to change, will work completely. There will be things, where I’ll fail, there will be many downs, but hopefully also a lot of ups. And maybe there will be more things that change due to the other changes or which I just realize, that I need to change them too, at a later point.

But without optimism, it won’t work anyway, so let’s stay with this positive expectations and hope to succeed. Because everything starts with your will; your self-discipline and dedication are the things you need to achieve your final goal, changing your life.

Usually I don’t like changes that much, but this time, they are necessary and I really want them to happen. It may mean breaking out of the comfort zone, doing new or not yet experienced things, but that are building your personality, so let them occur.

I’ll keep writing about my progress and how things are going…

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