The reason why your life is so boring and how to change it
You wake up tired. You work for long hours. You come back home and rather doing something you truly enjoy, you either pick up your phone and turn on Netflix and simply waste your time. You already know hitting the gym, reading a book, or going for a simple walk will be much beneficial for you in the long run, but you don't do it because you're tired. You go to bed without relieving the stress you got, without taking a proper rest for your mind, body, and soul. You wake up next day to just repeat the same routine you did today. Your tiredness never goes away; it only gets worse. You have nothing you particularly enjoy in life. When people ask about your hobby, you just lie. Life itself seems like a downward spiral if you don't know how to enjoy it.
But how to break the downward spiral, or is it even possible to break the cycle and have a life that actually you enjoy? It seems quite hard to find fulfillment in life when you do the same stuff again and again. Have you ever had moments where you started to question why you were alive in the first place? Everything starts to seem boring and meaningless. Hours, days, months are passing by, but it's just simply not satisfying. It's like you come to this world just to die someday.
We all have 24 hours in a day. Assuming that you get eight hours of sleep each night, we only have 16 hours to experience life. Sure, depending on your position, these 16 hours can vary quite significantly, but it also means that depending on the 16 hours and how you use these 16 hours, your general happiness in life is determined. Because no matter what your occupation is, we all need to do things that we don't enjoy, and we all have moments where life starts to get monotone and simply boring. No matter how successful you are, if you don't know how to enjoy life itself, it will always be boring because the default setting for life is just boring.
If you want to change it, you need to take action. It's not going to happen naturally. It might be quite sudden, but do you have something that gets you up from the bed every morning and gives you so much joy after each time doing it in a healthy way? If your answer was no, if you don't have something you particularly enjoy in life, then this video is for you.
Who am I to teach you how to actually enjoy your life, right? So, I read a book called "Mindset of People Who Have Fun Every Day" from a Japanese psychiatrist. This book doesn't have an English translation; it's in Japanese. So, the only way you can learn what's written is by watching this video. In order to escape from the downward spiral of a boring life and have a healthy approach to it, we need to first understand the mechanism of having fun in a scientific way.
In the book cover, Sebastian explains how fun factors can maximize your productivity, success, and general happiness in life. But why is that? According to neuroscience, if you know how to use dopamine in your favor, you can get true satisfaction, motivation, and happiness from it. Even when you accomplish something small, like ticking your box in your to-do list, can make you release dopamine. Eating something delicious, drinking something you like, hitting the gym can all make you release dopamine.
Dopamine plays a role as a reward center in many body functions. When dopamine is released in your body, it rejuvenates your mind, gives you motivation, and also increases your memory. So, if you know how to control your dopamine levels in a healthy way, we can escape from the downward spiral of life. If you're a firm believer in hustle culture and thinking working harder is the only way, I have bad news for you. If you constantly force yourself to do something you don't enjoy, you increase your primary stress hormone called cortisol.
The long-term activation of the stress response system and the overall exposure to cortisol can disturb almost all your body's functions. This puts you at an increased risk of many health problems—basically everything we want to avoid in order to escape from the downward spiral. That's why it's so important to learn healthy ways to cope with your life stressors.
But what if you hate your job? What if a huge chunk of your day is just making you stressed? If you would follow the popular advice in our society, the answer will be, "Follow Your Passion." Do what you want and keep continuing chewing it; you will be 60. As if following your passion would be all flowers and rainbows and shiny every day. If you were able to do it in the first place, you wouldn't keep watching this video. If you can't enjoy your job and if you can change it, then find something you enjoy outside of your job.
If you get stressed in your workplace, relieve it once you get back home. If your cortisol levels are increasing when you're working, decrease it once you are free. By the way, 20 to 30 minutes of low-intensity cardio can decrease your cortisol levels quite a lot, so it's actually not that hard to achieve this. But what exactly do we need to do if we want to have fun outside of our job? In order to increase our fun factor in our lives, Kawasaba recommends picking a hobby according to the four factors that make a perfect hobby.
Your perfect hobby has to fulfill at least one of the four factors. Those four factors are fun factor, relaxation, stress relief, and brain stimulation. Just by hearing those, they probably don't make any sense, so let me explain. If you follow some of your favorite creators on social media, you might have heard the occasional story of a channel getting hacked—basically a creator losing access after a successful attack or leaking passwords while constantly bombarded by emails that appear to be YouTube or bank or our social media accounts but are, in fact, just an attempt at stealing your passwords. It's called phishing.
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When choosing a hobby, you want to pick something that you truly and genuinely enjoy. Think about scrolling on your phone, watching some readables, and watching some YouTube videos without any purpose. After scrolling for three hours, do you tend to think, "That was an amazing three hours! I want to do it again! I'm so satisfied!"? Or do you think to say, "Ah, I did it again!" If you genuinely enjoy it after each time you scroll on social media or watch a random TV show and if you're satisfied with it, there is nothing wrong with that. Use it as entertainment!
But if you keep feeling guilty about it, and if you don't even enjoy it, do you think keeping continuing doing it will make you happy in the long run? I don't think so. So we need to find a hobby that will make you feel better afterwards—not guilty or ashamed. That's the fun factor! When picking an activity according to the fun factor, we also want to combine it with self-growth to maximize the results we get because humans love growth and change.
Think about an anime character that doesn't get strong or evolve. No matter how many episodes you watch, you'll probably get bored really quickly and stop watching. One of the best hobbies you can pursue is investing in yourself. This can be reading a book, watching a movie or documentary, reading a manga, or even playing games if you know how to turn it into a self-growth activity. Any hobby you pick can make you grow as a person.
Kawasaba recommends a simple approach to it: if you output each time you input something and give feedback, everything can make you grow as a person. That's why reading is so popular when it comes to self-growth because it's so easy to follow this process. It's not that reading itself is so beneficial. If you're reading 100 books a year, and if you're not learning anything, if you're not applying anything you learned from the book, nothing will change in your life.
Trying the tips, testing it out, and giving yourself honest feedback is what will make you grow. Watch the movie, discuss it with someone, exchange your opinions, travel somewhere, write your thoughts on an Instagram story or post, or maybe to your journal if you don't want to share. Read a book, write a summary, write a review, discuss with people, verbalize your thoughts, give feedback. Don't become just a consumer.
What even relaxation means according to Kawasaba in medicine? When your sympathetic system deactivates and the parasympathetic system gets activated, it's called relaxation. Some of the best ways to turn on your parasympathetic systems are meditating, bathing, yoga, stretching, sauna, diffusing various aromas, spending time with your pet, getting a massage, listening to soothing music, journaling, burning a candle, reading. These can all switch your sympathetic system to parasympathetic system.
It's so hard to say one of the best ways to make a hobby of yours more stress-relieving is doing it with someone else. You can join various groups, maybe take classes, or simply invite someone to do the thing. The great thing about sharing an activity with someone else is the oxytocin. Oxytocin is called one of the love hormones; it makes you feel connected to someone else, and also, you feel the bond between that person. Oxytocin acts like an anti-stressor, and it reduces blood pressure and also the cortisol levels. Invite someone else to join you!
If you don't have anyone around that's interested in what you're doing, you can also join online groups. There are tons of them, and they can also keep you accountable. The last factor is brain stimulation. We want to pick something that can stimulate our brain so that we can maybe become smarter, more creative, and active. The ultimate brain-boosting hobby is exercising regularly. BDNF levels are increased two to threefold after exercise when compared to resting conditions and correlate positively with improvements in cognitive function in humans.
An increase in BDNF concentration is associated with an increase in improvement in memory and learning and decreases the chances of depression. I'm pretty sure you have tried to build some habits that are beneficial for you, but you probably failed—because if not, why are you watching this in here? If you want to find the perfect hobby for yourself, the most important thing is consistency. Just because you hit the gym once, it's not going to change your life completely.
Yes, you might feel a bit better afterwards, but if you want long-term results, you need to perform the act for a longer period of time. Just doing it for a month and never doing it again is not going to change your life. You need to do it for at least three months. According to Kawasaba, and also you need to keep doing the things too. It's crucial that you enjoy the hobby you pick—that's for sure.
But don't forget, in order to start enjoying something, it actually takes time. I feel like this is something really underrated. When I hit the gym, I felt so anxious and so stressed when I lifted weights. I felt like everyone was watching me because there is this beginner factor. You don't know what you're doing; you don't know how to do it; you feel very self-conscious. But in reality, nobody cares about you as much as you care about yourself, because everyone is focused on themselves.
Yes, there might be some people who will laugh at you, but why would you let those insecure people control your happiness? If you pick something, stick with it for at least a month. If you absolutely hate it for the whole month, maybe pick something different, but just don't give up quickly because it takes time for you to enjoy that thing. If you don't try to actively make time for yourself, your schedule will take control over you, and you will never find the time for yourself.
If falling back into your old habits and lifestyle is something you want to avoid, every week, every month, schedule ahead a time for yourself. Decide what you're going to be doing in that time. If you're going to hit the gym, block a time in your calendar. If you're going to watch a movie or anime, decide which one and how many episodes. If you're going to the cinema, decide when you're going to do that. If you're going to read, pick up a book.
Time for yourself is not something to find; it's something you create because we are all so busy. So you need to make actively time for yourself if you want to have a sustainable productivity and if you want to prevent yourself from burning out and actually enjoy life. I will put a link down in the description below if you want to read this book just in case if you're understanding Japanese. I highly recommend reading this book, and I hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you.