9 Clear Ways to Get Even-Keeled
Let’s keep this thing short. There’s a bunch of bad advice out there. I could go on a whole rant about self-help books and how they’re inane. That’s not me. I’m not going to tell you to follow your childhood dreams. I doubt you still want to become a paleontologist anyway.
What follows is a list of mostly practical advice I have followed to become calm. It may help you become calm as well.
1. Run miles.
Go out there and do it. Run in the rain and in the snow. Get winded. Push yourself past exhaustion. Then come home. You’ll feel better than you did before unless you’ve been eating a lot of junk food. Why? It’s endorphins. It’s feel-good hormones pumping through your brain. The runner’s high will be worth the pain.
2. Eat real meals with real food.
Simple biryani, tikka masala, pork lo mein with vegetables, grilled Greek cucumber salad with pita bread, crab cakes with asparagus, recipes you follow from a cookbook. The food you eat is fuel for your body. That includes your brain. So keeping a healthy diet will make it easier for you to do pretty much anything.
3. Go to bed.
Try to fall asleep and wake up as consistently as you can. Put your phone away. Get rid of screens three hours before bedtime. Dim the lights a few hours before you go to bed. That will make it easier for you to fall asleep.
4. Put your phone away.
Limit the time you spend using the Internet and digital technology. We’re social animals, but we didn’t evolve to wait three days for a reply or interact anonymously. We were made to tell stories and jokes to people face-to-face.
5. Tell stories and jokes to people.
The more people learn about you and the more you learn about others the harder it becomes for prejudice to take root.
6. Tell yourself what you did well today.
Write down three great things you did today. Three great things can be as mundane as:
- I did the laundry
- I made spaghetti
- I really didn’t want to, but I went for a run anyway
In doing this, you might discover how brave or persistent or kind you are or anything else. Those are great qualities to have!
7. Reflect on how you affect others.
Sometimes we unintentionally hurt others and sometimes the people we hurt don’t tell us that.
8. Let yourself lose.
If you can learn how to accept losing lots of things, it will be easier for you to accept the end of your life. As the poet Elizabeth Bishop once wrote, “So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”
9. Practice gratitude.
Think of three great things that happened to you today. These things can again be pretty mundane. Like:
- Someone smiled at me.
- I got to pet a dog today.
- I caught my phone before it fell into the toilet. Hooray, reflexes!
The more you choose to recognize the wonderful things in this world, the more positive your assumptions will be about things unfamiliar to you. And positive assumptions will make it easier for you to talk to people, not just strangers.
