Habits of the Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

Intro

This is something of a journal to document the habits of those who are healthy, wealthy, and/or wise. The idea being that adopting a few habits can have a large impact, while not dedicating more energy than needed to reach this level of impact.

Once you've checked your boxes for the day, you've done all that you reasonable can for that area of wellness. It is best not to worry yourself outside of checking todays box.

I think that being a human is similar to taking care of a house plant. There is just a list of things that are fairly repetitive and boring stuff for maintance that helps them stay blooming. As well as a bit of chance that comes with the location of the pot, and conditions of the plant we don't have that much control over. I'm looking for the simple, boring repetitive stuff for taking care of humans.

Financial

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Basics

  1. Spend Less Than You Earn: Ensure your expenses always remain below your income. This basic principle is the cornerstone of financial stability.
  2. Insure Against Uncertainties: Protect yourself from unforeseen financial burdens by securing insurance for significant risks, like health issues or property damage.
  3. Save for the Future: Regularly set aside a portion of your income for future needs or emergencies, building a safety net that allows you peace of mind.
  1. Understanding Personal Finance - Begin your financial education by acknowledging that it's not about becoming wealthy or possessing advanced mathematical skills, but about achieving stability and reducing financial stress. [1]
  2. Budgeting - Start with simple budgeting techniques. Consider the 20/30/50 rule for dividing your income—20% for savings, 30% for wants, and 50% for needs—as a foundational budgeting framework. [1]
  3. Realistic Budgeting - Ensure your budget reflects your real expenses. Adjust it to include habitual spending to avoid the common pitfall of creating an idealistic budget that's hard to follow. [1]
  4. Emergency Fund Importance - Prioritize establishing an emergency fund equivalent to at least one month of expenses to protect against unforeseen financial needs and to prevent deeper financial strife. [1]
  5. Debt Management - Understand the distinction between 'acceptable' and 'bad' debt: acceptable debt includes low-interest borrowing for appreciating assets, while bad debt involves high-interest and depreciating assets. Strategize debt repayment by focusing either on high interest rates first or on clearing smaller debts for psychological wins. [1]
  6. Investing Fundamentals - Approach investing cautiously. Start with safer options like savings accounts and slowly explore other avenues like index funds, which provide diversified investment opportunities. Avoid high-risk, speculative strategies as a beginner. [1]
  7. Critical Assessment of Financial Advice - Be wary of financial advice that promises quick fixes or guaranteed returns. Always assess the credibility of the source and the feasibility of the advice given your personal financial situation. [1]

Health

See: Health

Basics

  1. Adopting a Circadian-aligned Schedule - Ensure exposure to natural light during the day, establish consistent meal times, engage in regular physical activity, and maintain a regular sleep schedule to reinforce your body’s natural rhythms. [2]

Circadian Rhytms

  1. Rise with the Sun - Begin your day by watching the sunrise to reset your master clock (SCN) and synchronize your body's circadian rhythms with natural light cycles, enhancing hormonal regulation and metabolic processes. [2]
  2. Outdoor Breaks - Regularly integrate short walks or outdoor breaks into your routine, regardless of the season, to ensure adequate exposure to natural light and support your circadian health. [2]
  3. Minimize Artificial Light - Reduce exposure to artificial light, particularly after sunset, to prevent disruptions to your circadian rhythm and reduce the risk of sleep disorders and certain cancers. [2]
  4. Regular Sleep Schedule - Maintain a consistent sleep-wake cycle, even on weekends, to avoid social jet lag, which disrupts circadian rhythms similar to traveling across time zones. [2]
  5. Optimal Timing for Daily Activities: - To harness your body's peak performance, schedule strenuous physical workouts and cognitively demanding tasks during early morning or late afternoon. These times align with your circadian rhythm when core body temperature is optimal, enhancing both physical and mental performance. [2]

Joy

See: Habits of Happiness

Wisdom

  1. Student Of Life/Play The Game of Life
  1. Recognize your decision points. Once you start a task, you run largely on autopilot, which makes it hard to change course. Maximize the power of those moments in between tasks—that's when you can choose what to take on next, and can therefore decide to tackle what matters most.
  2. Manage your mental energy. Tasks that need a lot of self-control or focused attention can be depleting, and tasks that make you highly emotional can throw you off your game. Schedule tasks based on their processing demand and recovery time.
  3. Stop fighting distractions. Learn to direct your attention. Your attention systems are designed to wander and refresh, not to focus indefinitely. Trying to fight that is like trying to fight the ocean tides. Understanding how your brain works will help you get back on track quickly and effectively when you get distracted.
  4. Leverage your mind-body connection. Move your body and eat in ways that set you up for success in the short term. (You can eat and physically do whatever you want on your downtime.)
  5. Make your workspace work for you. Learn what environmental factors help you be on top of your game—and how to adjust your environment accordingly. Once you know what distracts you or what primes your brain to be in creating or risk-taking modes, you can adjust your environment for productivity.

Questions and Ponderings

What qualitifies to be on this list?
What should not be on the list?
Does the level of detail in the advice matter?

When I was first thinking about this list, I was thinking about the general habits that are the most common of those who are healthy, wealthy, and wise.

I was thinking that this list would be made up of things like "Spend less than you earn", and less of things like "Stop buying takeout food" This seemed to just make sense at the time, but I am wondering if this is an overgeneralization.

I suppose I should study these tips and peices of advice in order to know what should qualify in the future, and what should not be included.

Heading

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Sub-heading under heading

  1. Habit - Explaination of the habit in more detail.

Footnotes:

  1. Answer In Progress: What school didn't teach you about money
  2. Circadian Science: Articles