Author:Insight· Elm
Choose the life you want, not be chosen by it.
Dong Yuhui once said during the live broadcast:
"Of course, playing games and brushing short videos is very cool, but after cooling, it is extremely empty; Of course, getting up early to run and nibbling on professional books is very tiring, but after being tired, it is full of happiness. ”
The difference between the two pleasures he talks about is actually the difference between dopamine and endorphins.
Whenever we indulge in low-grade pleasures, the cerebral cortex secretes dopamine, making us feel guilty and unable to stop.
And when we overcome our instinctive desires and harvest physical and mental growth, the pituitary gland produces endorphins, which bring us lasting and solid satisfaction.
Whether a person's happiness stems from dopamine, or endorphins, determines his quality of life later in middle age.
And how to pursue endorphins, the answer lies in your daily, monthly and even annual life.
01
Get up early every morning
Franklin once said: I have never seen an early riser complain about bad fate.
Compared with the moment of satisfaction brought by sleeping in, the process of overcoming tiredness is painful, but it is a spiritual endless return.
Bathing in the morning sun, breathing fresh air, and a period of time of your own is the best healing for middle-aged life.
After Wu Jun joined Google at the age of 35, he often worked overtime until late at night in the face of complex and heavy business.
To relieve stress, he often invites colleagues to bars after work.
In less than half a year, his physical indicators turned red, and his work condition was also sluggish.
Later, he followed the advice of his friends to go to the bar after work, but went straight home to sleep, and woke up an hour earlier the next day.
For the first few days, whenever he was woken up by the alarm clock, Wu Jun would feel tired.
But because his boss and colleagues weren't at work yet, he was able to concentrate on a lot of work without email interruptions.
With the improvement of work efficiency, Wu Jun worked less and less overtime, and the time to get up was constantly advanced.
Later, he came to the company half an hour early every day, and while there was no one in the office, he turned on the computer and wrote a few pages of articles.
In the following 8 years, Wu Jun wrote many best-selling books in his spare time, and grew up to become a vice president of Tencent.
The book "The Miracle of Early Rising" says: The miracle of life often happens before 8 am.
When a person has his own morning, it is easier to control his life.
02
Read a book every week
In March last year, a delivery worker was put on the hot search for squatting on the side of the road reading a book.
To make ends meet, he leaves work every day at 8 a.m. and delivers orders home at 10 p.m.
The gap between waiting to pick up your meal is a rare break of the day.
Other delivery workers usually pull out their phones to kill time, but he always pulls out the books he carries with him and flips through a few pages.
Below the video, there is a comment that summarizes it accurately:
Busyness is to maintain the present life; Reading is to pursue the life you want.
There is a set of data on the Internet: the average time spent by mainland adult citizens on reading is only 20.04 minutes a day.
Especially when people are middle-aged, there are old, there are young, there is a mortgage in the middle, and when they get home from work every day, they can't get out of bed and sleep.
But if we are busy with work and life, we are completely away from reading, and we are easily imprisoned by the world in front of us.
Reading is like opening a window to a closed room, which not only broadens your vision and cognition, but also helps you see more possibilities in life.
As Zhihu Answer @Xiaoyi said:
"Reading books at the age of 30, I came up with a time management plan that suits me, and my work efficiency doubled;
Reading books at the age of 32, I gradually learned to share my experience by writing articles, and gained my first readers;
Reading books at the age of 36, I learned about the struggle experience of many entrepreneurs and felt that entrepreneurship was not far away from me.
From the age of 30 to 40, every step I took up, there were books making steps under my feet. ”
In this impetuous era, reading is the best provision for middle-aged people.
If you can't squeeze out the whole time, you can take advantage of the gap between taking the subway and queuing;
If you can't read a book every day, encourage yourself to read at least one book a week.
The time spent reading little by little, accumulated up, becomes our way to a distant place.
03
Make a habit every month
It is mentioned in "Can't Stop Wanting": It is the nature of the brain to tempt us to indulge in low-level entertainment, and a person cannot fight nature, but can find something to replace low-level entertainment.
It also means that we can't expect an overnight metamorphosis, nor can we reject dopamine one size fits all.
We can gradually let endorphins penetrate into our daily lives through good habits.
Stephen, author of Microhabits, suffered from obesity and once lost his job due to health problems.
Again and again he made up his mind to quit sweets and determined to exercise for two hours a day, but he couldn't resist the temptation and interrupted his plan.
It wasn't until his 37th birthday that Stephen suddenly thought: If you only do one push-up every day, there is no reason not to stick to it.
A month later, he only increased the number of push-ups per day to 5, but managed to develop a habit of exercise.
Three years later, he is able to exercise for half an hour a day and his weight is under control.
Stephen applied the same approach to writing, stipulating himself to write 100 words a day.
Today, he not only has a body that is the envy of his peers, but also a best-selling author in the United States.
William James, an American professor of behavioral psychology, once pointed out:
Habit is the inertia of behavior, a seemingly difficult thing, as long as it is repeated for 21 days, it can also be initially internalized into a habit.
That's why a very practical way is to use one month as a habit cultivation cycle
In the process of cultivating habits, you will go from deliberate and unnatural at the beginning, to deliberate and natural, to unintentional and natural, and finally to the inside out.
Replace blind obsession with planned busyness, and you will gain the freedom to be reborn.
04
Achieve a goal every year
The French writer Hubbert said: "For a sailing ship without a goal, all winds are headwinds." ”
In the face of an increasingly trivial life, a person has no place to go, only the busier and more confused.
In contrast, moving towards a goal also requires the torment of the process. But the sense of accomplishment after each achievement of a goal can motivate you to keep moving closer to the life you want.
Fang Qi once shared on Weibo that he used to always be unable to help but look at his mobile phone, resulting in many arrangements being delayed again and again, and finally failed.
Until the Spring Festival one year, she set herself a goal: she must write a book this year.
To achieve this goal, she takes 4 hours a day to write and uninstalls games and social apps from her phone before each start.
In addition, she refused all visits and locked herself in a room with a disconnected Internet to avoid all interference from the outside world.
A year later, Fang Qi successfully completed her writing plan and devoted herself to other goals in life and career with the same focus.
Today, she has grown from the student who graduated from three colleges to a CCTV host and a writer with more than 10 million fans on the Internet.
All goals that can make life better always have a lengthy and tedious process of quantitative change.
Only by delaying gratification and giving ourselves enough time to accumulate can we finally break through the bottleneck and achieve qualitative changes in life.
As Liu Run said:
"When your efforts are measured in days, you think that success depends on luck; In years, you can see the competition, trends, and opportunities behind your success. ”
Focus on a small goal every year, and ten years later you will be grateful for the self you are now quietly working on.
▽
I love the saying: "Choose the life you want, not be chosen by life." ”
The true happiness of life is in the process of pursuing endorphins, experiencing the achievement and fulfillment of bitterness before sweetness.
If you are in pain and tired and crying because you are struggling to move forward.
Believe that you are about to meet a better version of yourself.
Give it a thumbs up and encourage your friends.