Living Better

15 Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Sleep

August 28, 2020 by Steven Ray Marks 1 Comment

Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Sleep - Sleeping Cat — ^{_{Photo by Kate Stone Matheson on Unsplash}}

Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Sleep continues the series on Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Life.

See here for what this series is about, and scroll to the bottom or click here for a list of other entries in the series. Also see the end of the post for details on submitting your own incredibly easy life-improvements.

Note: Some links here are affiliate links, meaning I get a small commission when you purchase them, at no additional charge to you. I only suggest things I honestly believe in.

Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Sleep

Sleep is one of the most important factors in your happiness. And there are a lot of incredibly easy things you can do to improve your sleep.

Being well-rested will make you more cheerful, more productive, more efficient, more resilient, and able to do more.

You’ve no doubt seen plenty of hard suggestions about improving sleep.… Read more

11 Incredibly Easy Things to Stop Doing to Be Happier

August 21, 2020 by Steven Ray Marks 4 Comments

Incredibly Easy Things to Stop Doing to Be Happier continues the series on Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Life.

Incredibly easy things to stop doing to be happier

Last week’s article discussed incredibly easy things you could do to increase your happiness.

But there are likely things you’re doing that make you unhappy.

Simply stopping them would be another incredibly easy win.

It’s always great when you can make your life better by not doing something instead of doing something.

You get extra energy, time, and effort back, on top of all the other benefits.

There are many bad habits that are hard to break, such as quitting smoking.… Read more

10 Incredibly Easy Ways to Be Happier

August 14, 2020 by Steven Ray Marks 3 Comments

Incredibly Easy Ways to Be Happier continues the series on Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Life.

Note: Some links here are affiliate links, meaning I get a small commission when you purchase them, at no additional charge to you. I only suggest things I honestly believe in.

Incredibly Easy Ways to Be Happier

Happiness is the single most important aspect of self-improvement.

Every other self-help endeavor – productivity, health, finances, relationships, and achieving your goals – they’re ultimately in service to making you happy. If that’s not the end result, what’s the point?

But a lot of self-help advice, especially that coming from super-achievers, ignores this.… Read more

10 Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Health

August 7, 2020 by Steven Ray Marks 4 Comments

_{^{Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels}}

Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Health is the first in a series of incredibly easy ways to improve your life.

Watch for upcoming entries including “Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Mental Health,” “Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Sleep,” “Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Finances,” and more.

Incredibly easy ways to improve your life

Incredibly easy ways to make your life better are the best ways to improve your life.

Because, well, they’re incredibly easy.

Many gurus and motivational posters insist only difficult things are worth doing.

If it's easy it's not worth it. If It's worth it, it won't be easy.

For Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Yourself. — _{^{This sounds cool, but makes no sense when you think about it.}}

That’s ridiculous. It’s easy to breathe, and you wouldn’t stop doing that to seek out a greater challenge.

There are some challenging life-improvements worth pursuing. But if they’re hard, that means you won’t succeed at all of them. And you can only do a few hard things at any one time.… Read more

Incredibly Simple, One Sentence Guide to Investing

July 31, 2020 by Steven Ray Marks 7 Comments

Incredibly Simple Investing - Compass on stock pages — _{^{Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash}}

Investing is incredibly simple.

At least, it is if you do it the right way.

In fact, the best investing strategy can be explained in one sentence:

Once you’ve paid off all your credit card debt, invest as much as you can in your 401k, and park your money in an index fund without paying any attention to the market.

Once you’ve paid off all your credit card debt, invest as much as you can in your 401k, and park your money in an index fund without paying any attention to the market.

That’s it.

That’s all you need to know about investing.

If you want more detail, or you don’t know what an index fund is, keep reading.

Otherwise, thanks for stopping by.

I’m glad I could drastically improve your life and retirement in 30 seconds.

Be sure to subscribe to the Five Boosts newsletter for five weekly suggestions of articles on easy ways to make your life better.… Read more

How to Make Twitter Pleasant in 10 Minutes or Less

July 28, 2020 by Steven Ray Marks Leave a Comment

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How to Make Twitter Pleasant in Ten Minutes or Less

A guide to removing arguments, politics, and hate from your Twitter feed

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Would you like to make Twitter pleasant?

Enjoy all the benefits of Twitter without any of the downsides?

That may seem like a pipe dream, but it’s actually easy to do.

This guide gives a simple 4 step process to taking control of your own Twitter experience.

Including:

How to avoid politics, hate, and anger.
How to handle accounts that post a mix of enjoyable and unpleasant content.
How to avoid annoying retweets while still seeing the retweets you do want to read.

And all this can be done with less than ten minutes of effort on your part. The guide gives step-by-step instructions with screenshots on exactly what to do.

Guaranteed to dramatically improve your Twitter experience within two weeks, or your money back.… Read more

Stop Giraffe Punching to Be More Tolerant, Less Stressed, Have a Better Outlook, and Be Happier Overall

July 24, 2020 by Steven Ray Marks 2 Comments

Giraffe punching is something that has become more and more common lately, which has led to a lot of unnecessary anger and strained friendships.

You’re probably confused by that last sentence. You’ve never heard of anyone punching a giraffe. Who does that?

Nobody does. Not literally. Which is kind of the point.

Giraffe punching describes the practice of repeatedly lecturing an audience who already agrees with you in an insulting and condescending way, while pretending like they need to be told something that everyone in the audience already knows. In particular, repeatedly telling them to stop doing something that none of them are doing.

It’s an extreme version of preaching to the choir, only more patronizing and vitriolic.

Why do I call it giraffe punching? It comes from this:

1) Pick a destructive behavior that none of your friends engage in.

Accepting Your Memory is Unreliable Will Make You Happier

July 17, 2020 by Steven Ray Marks 2 Comments

Your memory is unreliable.

Let me repeat that with added emphasis. Your memory is unreliable. I’m talking about you. The person reading this article right now.

Please don’t take that as an insult.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone’s memory is unreliable. My memory is unreliable too.

In fact, to show you we’re in this together, if you read to the end, I’ll share an embarrassing story about my own unreliable memory.

Cognitive Flaws Apply to Everyone, Including You

Most well-educated people know that memory is unreliable in general. But they exclude themselves from this basic fact of human biology.

They think they can trust their own memories. That their recollection of events is always correct.

But this just isn’t the case.

You are a human. Human memories are unreliable. Hence, your memory is unreliable.

This false belief in one’s own infallibility leads to a lot of unnecessary fights, strained relationships, and misery.… Read more

Sometimes Good Advice Isn’t Good For You

July 8, 2020 by Steven Ray Marks 1 Comment

Good Advice Isn't Good - Lucy advice booth

Sometimes good advice isn’t good for you.

I criticize advice from super-achievers that won’t work for normal people. Advice that assumes you have infinite willpower, time, energy, confidence, skill, etc.

If advice is impossible for normal people to follow, that’s not a problem with normal people. It’s the advice that’s bad.

But what about good advice?

Advice that takes into account human limitations, and explains strategies for how to best achieve your goals given that you are a flawed human?

There can still be times when this generally good advice isn’t good for you.

Every Individual is Different

Humans are all individuals. We’re all different. We all have our foibles, and unique quirks.

The problem with one-size-fits-all advice is that there are seven billion incredibly complex individuals who are all unique in incredibly complicated ways.

There could be strategies for improving your life that work quite well for most people.… Read more

Eight Things to Consider When Evaluating Risks

July 3, 2020 by Steven Ray Marks 2 Comments

Evaluating risks in our life is something we all have to do, but aren’t very good at.

The human brain is just not set up to understand risks.

People can’t intuitively grasp the difference between a 1/10,000 chance and a 1/Billion chance.

We base decisions around fear of the lurid and strange, even when they’re incredibly unlikely, such as shark attacks, plane crashes, and children getting abducted by strangers.

We often fear even things that have literally never happened, such as Halloween candy with poison/razor blades in it, or Satanic ritual abuse. (Though people have had their lives destroyed over false accusations of Satanic abuse.)

Meanwhile we have no fear of mundane things that are much more dangerous, such as ladders, swimming pools, or the deadliest item we encounter in our lives, cars.

This gets even harder when we have major life decisions that center around unknowable risks. We don’t know how to evaluate them.… Read more