5 Mistakes to Avoid When Trying to Become a Minimalist > Lifestyle

You’d think that throwing a few things away and adopting a simpler lifestyle would be easy. How hard can it really be to do less and buy less?

The reality is that this is actually much harder than it looks. We have become so used to being stressed, so used to being jealous and so used to wanting more that it is very hard to let go when we decide to try. Here are five mistakes that people often make and how you can avoid making the very same errors…

Using Technology too Much

Technology is in many ways the antithesis of a minimalist lifestyle. While no one is asking you to turn off your phone permanently, what you should avoid is the kind of ‘mindless browsing’ that leads many of us to end up making purchases of things we don’t need. Take some time off your tech!

Not Finding Fulfilment Elsewhere

If you just remove things from your life, then you’ll find that it can quickly seem quite empty. Instead, you need to find new things to fill your life just as you take things away.

The best way to do this is to think about what makes you happy and how you can get more from what you already own. Keep yourself busy with things that don’t require ‘more’.

Not Keeping it Up

A big mistake is to go all-out creating a minimalist lifestyle and then to give up only a few weeks later. The key here is consistency and introducing a few simple rules can help a great deal. For example, make a rule that you have to get rid of something in your home each time you buy something new!

Being too Strict

A lot of people act as though being minimal is a binary choice. You’re either minimal or you aren’t. And thus the only way to go minimal is to throw everything out and live entirely off the land.

Not so! You can become a ‘little more minimal’ and reap many of the benefits without making it too hard on yourself.

Missing the Point

Many of the issues people have with minimalism come from missing the point. The point isn’t to be mightier-than-thou and it’s not to shun society. The point is just to scale back a little so that life becomes more manageable again! And it is to reap a few of the rewards that just so happen to come as a by-product of that.

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Embracing Systems Can Help You Free Up More Down Time > Working From Home

As a work at home entrepreneur, your ultimate goal is to work the least amount of time, with the maximum return possible. This way, you are free to explore your passions and enjoy time with your family and friends.

Unfortunately, what often happens is that your task list piles up and leaves you feeling as if you are drowning in your duties. Over time, you will become faster at what you do. You will master certain tasks and be able to slide through them compared to when you first started a task and had to learn the ropes.

You will also find better and easier ways of doing things than you originally did them. These two developments will certainly help you free up more time and allow you to enjoy a sense of personal satisfaction.

But if you want to go one step further, then you can create systems and templates to assist you in cutting down on your task list and working fewer hours. Start by developing templates for any area of your business where it makes sense.

This might be a blog post, an email autoresponder, a social media post, a sales page, etc. If you have a template to work off of, then it becomes a plug-in situation that moves much faster and more smoothly.

You also want to create a systematic response for how you conduct your business. This could be anything from your daily routine, such as checking your email first thing in the morning and responding to customers, followed by engaging on social media to a step-by-step system you prefer for handling large tasks such as an info product launch.

Everyone has their own way that they like to do things. When you start looking at your routines and habits on paper, you can often spot ways to combine tasks, simplify them, or help them make more sense.

You might re-organize the order in which things are done. Another thing you may want to do when creating systems to run your business is to see where it makes sense for you to delegate or outsource to another individual.

Whether you hire someone to be on your staff as an administrative assistant, or outsource to a freelance service provider for certain tasks, this is a part of your system that can benefit you in many ways.

Not only will you no longer have to spend time on certain things that you don’t like to do, or don’t have the talent to do, but the more you can hand over to someone else, the more free time you’ll have to enjoy everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve.

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Stress Can Worsen Diabetes Symptoms > Managing Stress

Diabetes is the kind of disease that requires careful monitoring. When diabetes is under control, you can live a normal life. But when you have stress to deal with, then this can worsen the symptoms that come along with the disease.

Stress can be so damaging for those with diabetes because it interferes with your ability to keep glucose levels within a healthy range. Any time you feel stress, your body releases hormones in response and this raises your glucose.

Because this kind of reactional glucose isn’t used by you during the stress, it remains in the bloodstream. Whenever you have glucose in the bloodstream, you get a blood sugar spike.

What some diabetics don’t realize is that this kind of spike has nothing to do with food. So you can end up out of a healthy range even when you’re not eating food that raises the levels.

In fact, you don’t even have to eat at all to get higher levels. It’s all happening because of the stress. When your body is under a constant battle of blood sugar spikes, this can affect you physically as well as emotionally.

It can become difficult to control your diabetes. You won’t be able to do it by tightening up your eating habits, since that’s not the root cause. When your body releases cortisol in response to stress and it pushes your levels up, the only way to get it to back down is to deal with the stress head on.

What you may not realize is that a stress response for people with diabetes also affects how your body is using and storing fat. When you get stressed, you can gain more visceral fat.

That’s because there’s a molecule in the body that will trigger the fat cells and prompt them to multiply – all thanks to stress. You can struggle to control your glucose levels, and you can gain more fat – but you can also enter a stage of deeper level of insulin resistance, which will further impair your ability to fight back against and control your diabetes.

You may end up needing more medication – or diminish your health to the point where you’re having to take insulin injections. Stress can affect your diet and make you want to eat more as well as eat more of the wrong kinds of food.

This can contribute to glucose spikes and worsen your diabetes symptoms. But stress can also cause insomnia, which worsens how your body fares with having diabetes. This can cause you to feel tired, affect you emotionally and contribute to your stress levels.

The best thing that you can do for your diabetes is to get your stress under control. Learn healthy ways to cope so that when a stressor occurs, it doesn’t have to impact your disease.

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How to Keep Your Testosterone Levels Higher As You Age > Anti-Aging

Testosterone is the male sex hormone and is responsible for many of the traits that we consider to be typically masculine. That includes muscle mass, low body fat, a big jaw, thick brow, aggression, confidence, body hair and a deep voice.

Testosterone also makes us feel great. The top athletes produce lots of testosterone because it makes them stronger, more energetic and better at recovering. It also makes us happier (low testosterone is associated with depression), more virile, better in bed and generally more alpha.

But a huge proportion of men in the Western world have chronically low testosterone. And this only gets worse and worse, the older we get.

The question is: how can you slow down the effects of old age by keeping testosterone where it should be?

Why is Testosterone Low?

This is not just a problem for elderly pensioners. Rather, it is just as much an issue for guys in their 40s and 50s and it’s a MUCH bigger problem now than it was even 30 years ago. Why? Several reasons:
* We spend less time outdoors
* We spend more time on the computer
* Our water and many of our products contain estrogenic compounds
* We are often encouraged to pursue less classically ‘manly’ activities
* We are less active
* We are malnourished

This then right away highlights some of the things we can do to get our T levels back to normal. Spend more time outside, exercise more (using compound movements), drink water from a filter and avoid shampoos filled with chemicals and make sure you eat well.

Some Powerful Tips

There are also a few powerful tips you can employ to give yourself an instant testosterone boost. For example, eating more saturated fats will make a big difference. That’s because these contain cholesterol and cholesterol is what the body actually uses to make testosterone. Eat this just before bed because you produce maximum testosterone at 4am in the morning.

Another tip is to get more sleep then! Deeper sleep leads to more T, so make sure you do everything you can to prioritize good sleep.

Also: get more vitamin D. Vitamin D is the reason that time outdoors is related to testosterone – it acts like a master controller for your hormones and we produce more when we get exposure to sunlight. If you can’t be outside more, then take a supplement to get your fill!

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How to Keep Your Teeth Healthy Into Old Age > Seniors

One of the most upsetting things that tend to change or deteriorate as we get older is our teeth. As we age, our teeth will often start to become discolored and wonky. Some will fall out and our gums will recede. Often we’ll have some plaque and decay during our younger years too, which can lead to fillings and extractions.

In fact, our teeth and our age are so closely related psychologically, that this has given rise to expressions like ‘long in the tooth’. Dream analysis also tells us that dreams of losing our teeth are normally really dreams about getting older…

So the question then becomes: how can you keep your teeth for longer, so that you may stay looking younger? Here are some tips that can help out…

Go Easy On Them

Your impulse when planning on keeping your teeth younger and healthier may be to start brushing more regularly and vigorously and perhaps to use expensive toothpastes with whitening properties.
The problem is that this can actually be quite misguided and end up doing more harm than good. The reason for this, is that brushing too hard can actually wear away your gums and the enamel that actually protects your teeth.
Likewise, if you use whitening toothpastes, they will often cause damage to the enamel too which will then expose your teeth to more damage.

Even fluoride – found in the majority of toothpastes – can actually cause discoloration and other issues. Choose something gentle and natural and brush gently too – you don’t need to push against your teeth to clean them thoroughly!

Follow Advice

Then again, being conscientious is definitely a plus in other regards. In particular, you need to make sure you are brushing your teeth regularly and more importantly that you’re eating the right diet. That right diet means avoiding simple sugars (candies in particular) and it means eating lots of nutrients like calcium and like magnesium that will strengthen your teeth.

Floss!

Flossing is something else important you need to do, that will help to remove lodged bits of food that can lead to tooth decay and other issues too. Flossing regularly is also good for your general health and although it might seem fiddly, it’s massively important.

And remember too – you can always use cosmetic dental surgery if you need it to turn back the clock on stained or crooked teeth.

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How to Keep Your Brain Young and Nimble as You Reach Old Age > Seniors

Watching our bodies fail us as we get older can very often be a painful and depressing. Over time, we can find ourselves becoming less able bodied, slower and older in our appearance as well.

But what is actually much worse than this, is noticing your brain start to fail you. Our brain is what houses who we are. Our brain is what gives rise to all of our subjective experiences… and seeing that start to deteriorate is very frightening indeed.

So the question is: how can you protect your brain into old age? Here are some strategies and suggestions that may be able to help…

Keep Learning

One of the very most important things you can do for your brain is to keep learning and to keep subjecting yourself to novel experiences. Our brains operate on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis, just like every part of our biology. So if you are going through the exact same motions day in, day out, then you will find that your brain loses the ability to learn and adapt to changes the way it once did.

The problem is that so many of us do stop subjecting ourselves to new experiences as we age. Partly this is due to simple societal pressures: when we age, we tend to become less active and less social and this means we lose our opportunities for learning.

The key is to keep trying new things. Many blogs will tell you that playing chess is a good way to keep your brain healthy but in fact this isn’t necessarily the best option: playing chess is just one activity and involves relatively little learning.

Instead, try computer games. Why? Because each time you try a new computer game, you are forced to take up new skills and new abilities. Each time you learn a new game, you need new controls, which will incorporate new neural pathways. Each new game has an entirely new set of skills and that means you are continually learning.

Keep Socializing

One of the very best things for our brains is to keep socializing. This is highly important, as social stimulation stimulates positive hormones and keeps our brain active and challenged. As we get older, often we start to keep ourselves locked away and stop going out so much. This means less social stimulation, which means rapid deterioration. Again, this is something to avoid.

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3 Tips on How You Can Adopt a Minimalist Lifestyle Today > Lifestyle

Do you find yourself full of respect for those people who live truly minimalist lifestyles? The people who go for long walks during the day, come home to small homes and cook simple meals so that they can enjoy a quiet evening together?

Sounds kind of ideal doesn’t it! And presumably, it must have taken a lot of time and work on their part to get to that point.

Well… not necessarily! Actually, few things could be simpler than adopting a minimalist lifestyle. In this post, we’re going to look at exactly how you can go about doing just that and start enjoying a more minimal life today!

The Mindshift

The first thing you need is a mindshift. You need to change your mindset and learn that you don’t always have to push harder and further to be happy. What you need to be happy is right there in front of you and if you don’t agree, that’s because you’ve been misled by clever marketing.

You don’t need beautiful clothes, a sports car or a huge mansion to be happy. You just need your family and friends and some spare time. And that doesn’t cost anything.

The more you chase after promotions so you can have more shiny things, the less time you’ll have to actually enjoy said shiny things…

Simpler is Easier

This of course extends to your décor and this is a very tangible expression of a minimalist outlook. A good thing you can do today to start being more minimal then, is to take your belongings and reduce what’s on display by 60%. Sounds extreme? It may well be but once you do that, you’ll find that what’s left is only the most beautiful and most important to you – meaning your entire home will look much better.

Better yet, it will now be very easy to clean and tidy. See how simpler is easier?

Scale Back

From there, you can begin to scale back. Cancel subscriptions to services you don’t need, address whether you really need the latest phone. Learn to appreciate the things you already have and try making the most of free time with your family and friends without necessarily having to spend a huge amount.

All this will move you closer to a minimalist lifestyle. As soon as it ‘clicks’, you can count yourself a member of the club!

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