5 Things I'm Doing to Improve Myself this Summer

Today I am going to discuss 5 of the long list of things I am going to be doing to improve my life this summer. Without further ado, let us begin! :)

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1. Doing Exercise Regularly
As a college student who has a lot on his plate all of the time, I often spend more time on an average day sitting than standing and being active. This is a big problem as it has been scientifically proven that sitting for long periods of time is very bad for one's heath.

My general routine is going to consist of body-weight exercises (calisthenics) such as push-ups and pull-ups. I am going to be training a mix of strength and endurance (as I am exercising to improve my condition in life rather than just to improve my physical condition.

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2. Eating an Optimal Diet
As I previously mentioned, my average day consists of a lot of work. By the time I finish my work I'm often too tired to cook up something healthy and nutritious so I just eat a cheap microwave burger or instant noodles. Doing this every once in a while isn't too bad for one's health but doing it regularly, as I do, is very bad - even if my teenage metabolism prevents me from gaining significant weight.

My plan to improve my diet is to drop all sugar and as much processed food as I can from my day-to-day life. This may be a difficult task in this day and age, where even bread has small amounts of sugar in it but I am going to try my best - even if I have to bake my own bread. I am also starting a routine of intermittent fasting after reading about the many benefits of doing so. This means I will not be able to eat until 12PM and I can eat only up until 8PM. While I'm sure this is going to be very difficult because I'm used to waking up and eating breakfast, the benefits that I will receive far outweigh the effort.

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3. Getting into a Good Sleep Pattern
You're probably very tired of hearing this about now, but I'm a college student. I stay up very late very often to complete an assignment I didn't manage my time very well on, or just because I didn't have enough time to do what I wanted to do during the day - even if that entails something as trivial as watching a movie or speaking to some friends.

However, getting a good amount of sleep is crucial to living as a healthy human being. For someone my age, it would be optimal to get around 8-9 hours of sleep per night. I reckon that I average about 6.5; and this is a problem. I feel the effects of getting such a small amount of sleep as soon as I wake and throughout the entire day. I am quick to be angered and irritable and my mind doesn't function as well as it could.

As such, I have discovered a brilliant website that calculates what time you should go to sleep in order to wake up at a given time feeling as refreshed as possible. The science behind this can also be found on the site itself, I will leave the link below. But when I entered that I wished to wake up at roughly 5AM (sunrise) and received the following result:

For an optimal amount of sleep I am, from now onwards, going to aim to be asleep by 21:30.

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4. Learning another Language
I learned recently that there are estimated to be more people in the world who can speak two languages than one language. As someone who can only speak English, I found this to be a fundamental problem. As such, I have decided that I would like to learn another language: although I am still stuck on which to learn. If anyone has any suggestions, please tell me! :)

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5. Cold Exposure Training
Finally, I am going to be partaking in cold exposure training and regular meditation. I was recently inspired to do this by Wim Hof - a Dutch man famous for his seeming immunity to extreme temperatures. I mean the man climbed Mt Everest in his shorts! That is very cool in my opinion. But that is not the reason I am doing this. I watched a documentary where he was interviewed, and he talking about how his wife committed suicide and left him with 3 kids to look after on his own. He said it was the cold that taught him to be truly happy, healthy and strong - which are the prerequisites to be able to truly love, according to Hof. This was very powerful to me and resonated with me. One quote in particular was very significant in inspiring me to do this, "we kill off the symptoms but never the causes". This made me realise many things about how society is fundamentally flawed and how humans are becoming lazier and lazier, relying on money and technology to be happy.

I wish to escape this, I wish to be happy no matter the circumstances. After all, my dream is to one day buy a forest in a Tundra somewhere and escape society, to live life at it's face-values. I feel that training myself against the cold and partaking in regular meditation would be very beneficial for me.

Wim Hof in some freezing cold water

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That is all for today, my friends, I hope you have found this somewhat useful :)

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Links
http://sleepyti.me/
The Wim Hof Video