how to upgrade your life this summer 🌻 habits, hacks, and simple changes

if you're anything like me and the vast majority of teens and young adults today your life is kind of off track maybe because of the global pandemic that ruined everything about our daily routines or maybe that's just how it is for you and that's completely fine and normal in today's video though i'll be giving you advice on how to upgrade your life get it all together this summer or maybe you're watching this in another season it's not really seasonally specific so let's get started with advice on how to create and maintain your habits because habits and systems are the real way you're going to upgrade your life in the long term a lot of what i discuss in this video might be a one-time quick fix action that will ultimately have ripple effects and improve the rest of your life but for the majority of things you might want to change about your life like exercise or skin care or studying the small actions that build upon themselves that you do every single day are what's actually going to improve your life my first and best tip for habit building is to incorporate it into an existing routine for me that usually means tacking on everything to my massive long morning routine let me know if you'd want a video about that by the way and it's also very important to be highly specific in how you're adding this extra habit in don't just be wishy-washy like oh i'll do this in the morning because the way habits work psychologically is that they require a cue in order to result in a particular action so what i recommend you do is write down the highly specific order in which you're going to be doing all your habits that way you can commit to particular cues if that seems a bit unclear here's like a specific example of what worked for me one habit i was trying to incorporate into my life specifically into my morning routine is a mindfulness taking deep breaths checking in with my self-habit and i found it really difficult but then i decided that i would do that while brushing my teeth because brushing my teeth is such a solidified part of my morning routine that it's a reliable cue i will always do that in the morning and therefore i will always do my mindfulness habit in the morning as well it's taken me a while to train my brain to actually associate these things together but it's been working out well so far and hopefully by the time you're watching this video it will be as solidified as my need to brush my teeth my second tip is to be nice to yourself you can't willpower your way through everything if you are bullying yourself into having no energy and therefore no willpower additionally trying to force perfection onto yourself can really derail all of your habits having that sort of all or nothing mindset will result in you picking nothing as soon as you mess up the first time which is completely unnecessary because honestly and you know you tell me what's better but i think we'll agree is it better to do your habit consistently for about 80 of your life or to do it perfectly for 10 days in a row and then quit forever we're all human and sometimes we're forgetful or we're tired and lack willpower so those are the two tips that work best for me and besides those there are a lot more tips in the millions of books i've read about habit building if you don't have time to read like 30 books like i have here are my top two recommendations the first one is better than before by gretchen rubin and the second is atomic habits by james clear i highly recommend reading those they're great for anybody who's interested in self-improvement and now let's move on to the specific things that i recommend doing to upgrade your life and how you can do them [Music] the first one which is related to how i learned literally everything that i'm telling you in this video is to read more i'm not even exaggerating to you reading both fiction and non-fiction have changed my life and definitely for the better and the great thing about being able to read is that it allows you to learn pretty much anything that has ever been written down and printed assuming it's in your language but like you can probably find translated versions too i don't know that's not relevant at the moment and you don't just have to limit reading to like sophisticated textbooks and non-fiction literally anything that's a source of informative content is a valid thing to be reading or even listening to from books to magazines to news articles to podcasts and audiobooks there's so many ways you can learn and what i think is most helpful to actually get into the habit of reading often is to make it as convenient as you possibly can i love paper bound books as much as the next person but sometimes for convenience sake switching to a digital format is a lot easier you can put books on your phone using the libby app which is an app that allows you to check out ebooks from your local library or you can try audiobooks or podcasts which are like native to the phone and you know if you take your phone with you everywhere and it's the default device you pull out when you want to kill time so having reading and learning there as a more productive helpful alternative to scrolling on social media is the perfect substitute additionally don't be afraid to break down reading into chunks to match your attention span i know that tick tock has absolutely wrecked my attention span over the past year and even as a lifelong avid reader it's taking me a while to readjust to actually reading long things it's nothing to be ashamed of and it doesn't mean that you're limited for life i personally believe everyone has the capacity to be a avid reader like i am and it just takes a little bit of work in order to expand your attention span to be hours long for an entire book the second thing we're gonna do this summer is find the exercise habit that works for you notice how i said find the one that works for you not force yourself strong arm yourself into something you don't actually like culturally we tend to think of exercise as forcing yourself to struggle with heavy things or sweating it out panting while you go on a run but the thing is it doesn't just have to be these things that seem like suffering you can play frisbee with your friends or go out on walks in your neighborhood any way you get yourself to move around and be active is a great way to have exercise and even though exercise is always associated with losing weight or making yourself look more buff it really isn't supposed to be like that in my opinion it's good for your health because it keeps your body moving which is what it evolves to do and you know you don't want to get heart disease or anything in the future from just sitting around all day and i'm not going to lie the first couple of times you try to exercise nothing will be fun everything will hurt it's gonna take a couple weeks of just being absolutely miserable to get from being completely out of shape up to a baseline level of fitness where moving your body will actually be fun trust me i have been there in my freshman year of high school i was pretty sedentary and unactive until i joined the track team and oh boy i could not run for like more than five to ten minutes in a row without just completely giving up but within a couple weeks i worked my way up to being able to run 20 minutes in a row and then 30. and by the end of my high school experience i was a recruited athlete for track and field and cross country so uh so trust me there is always hope for everybody you just have to find what works for you i'm again partial to running if you'd like a video about my whole running process and how you can get into running as well also let me know in the description i mean you can't edit the description i'm at the comments please let me know in the comments the next step in our little seven-step program is to learn something new about yourself we all want that indie movie coming-of-age experience and uh it's not going to happen for most of us because uh most of us don't have several thousand dollars worth of camera lenses through which to romanticize our life experience but there are still many small attainable things you can do to discover yourself this summer one thing i highly recommend is to try something new something you've never done before you can pick literally anything from going to a new restaurant down the street to like literal skydiving it's all valid it's all good as a new experience and from trying this new thing you can reflect on it and identify new traits about yourself think about how you actually felt about that experience did you like it not really like it somewhere in between and why why do you feel that way about it and then what do all of these thoughts and feelings say about you your likes and dislikes your personality your interests all that sort of stuff you also don't necessarily have to react to something new in order to discover yourself simply reflecting on your thoughts feelings interests personality again all that sort of stuff can be extremely valuable in my opinion the best way to do this is to just find good journaling prompts you can find a lot on pinterest or just throughout the internet in general you could even try buzzfeed quizzes or like the mbti personality test or astrology anything that will prompt you to reflect on who you are what you like maybe what you want to do in the future because young adulthood is a pretty long process of discovering your identity and being a little bit more solidified in knowing who you are is definitely beneficial as you move forward through college and early career and the rest of your life next up i highly recommend that you declutter your entire life while decluttering is like literally the act of getting rid of things you don't want the real purpose of it is to make enough space for everything that you do care about because that way you won't be spending so much mental energy and like literal physical cleaning things up energy on things you actually don't really like and not only can you declutter your physical belongings by you know cleaning your room getting rid of old clothes you don't like i also in this day and age highly recommend cleaning up your digital space as well this includes things like the photos on your phone or files on your laptop or people you follow on social media everything you come in contact with day to day it's helpful to start reflecting on what is actually adding value to my life what actually brings me joy and what is kind of just a time suck energy suck that i can get rid of and move on from decluttering takes like a couple of days to a week and honestly the most important part of it to me is the mindset shift of it all and to that aspect out of again the tens to hundreds of self-help minimalism books i've read the two i recommend the most are the life-changing magic of tidying up by marie kondo for your physical space and digital minimalism by cal newport for your digital space and once you've decluttered everything it's a lot easier to clean and organize and to make your space the pinterest aesthetic of your dreams because everything that you don't actually like has now disappeared to make room for things you actually do like [Music] with the extra free time you might have during the summer break i also recommend learning a new skill maybe if you're like me there's a million things you want to learn and you reasonably do not have time to do them all or maybe you just haven't thought about what you might want to learn about and either way what i recommend you ask yourself in order to identify the first thing you want to tackle is if you knew you couldn't fail what would be the one thing you would want to try to do i find the biggest obstacle in learning these new things is fear it's being afraid that you're not good enough so you might as well just not try and you know saying it out loud it clearly doesn't make that much sense you might as well try it even if you think you'll mess up because honestly you probably won't some ideas that might inspire you from my long long laundry list of things i want to learn this summer i will not be able to accomplish all or even most of these things but my list includes learning languages specifically i want to focus on spanish but also i want to learn every language in the world getting more familiar with adobe editing softwares especially after effects and illustrator learning how to swim learning how to rollerblade and how to style my hair especially my always be a little curtain bangs that are growing out it might be good to pick something that's a like practical investment in your career but honestly anything works especially if it's your first time teaching yourself a brand new skill learning the skill of teaching yourself new skills is a skill on its own please do not play any sort of drinking game with the word skill because you will die but anyways learning how to teach yourself is something incredibly valuable that you'll learn alongside teaching yourself pretty much anything of course now that we've thought about the fancy amazing things you want to get done with our lives the hardest thing is actually figuring out how to do it some resources i recommend checking out are online courses for instance there's edx and coursera which are both free and you can check out skillshare which is not free this video is not sponsored by them you can pay an instructor or just have a friend who's pretty good with the skill teach you how to do it make sure you compensate them in some way whether it just be like free food you can also just try to obsessively google and read everything you find on the internet and watch a million tutorial videos because that's how i learned how to crochet something else that i think not a lot of people have heard about are groups and classes at your library or community center they're usually either free or very cheap and you know they're a great way to have a social group to hold you accountable and a teacher who can instruct you we're almost at the end my second to last recommendation is to rework your break time think about what you usually do if you have a five-minute break in a pomodoro session or you're just standing in line somewhere and you need to kill time it's completely natural to want to do something mindless and relaxing and not force yourself to be 100 productive all the time including during your break time like that's completely normal not here to shame you for that but the quote unquote relaxing and mindless things that most of us gravitate towards are not actually all that relaxing for instance i usually end up scrolling through either instagram or tick tock and once i started actually being more mindful and observing how those apps made me feel the feeling was not relaxed it was usually some sort of heightened emotion whether that be positive or negative of course what i observe in my life is not necessarily going to be true for everyone maybe social media really does help you unwind it's just something you want to stop and observe within yourself and if social media doesn't help you maybe try new things and see what actually does help you relax out of all the specific changes i mentioned in this video this one is definitely the most difficult habit to change but i definitely think it's worth it to make small shifts towards actually being more relaxed even if it's only very small shifts [Music] last but not least i want you to do one thing just one thing no matter how small to improve your personal finances no matter what stage of life you're in there's definitely at least one thing you can do or one system you can set up that will set you up for success in the future for instance you can open a high-yield savings account and set up automatic transfers so that a little bit of your paycheck will be deducted and put into savings without you even thinking about it or maybe you can open your retirement account research the funds that work for you and set up automatic investing it's never too young to do this i personally started my retirement account the day i turned 18. i was so excited um i'm also just kind of a nerd about personal finance i did a lot of research about it last summer and then i made a whole video about personal finance for students so if a lot of the words i'm saying are like completely foreign to you definitely check out that video to learn like what a highly savings account is or what retirement account funds are you know just in case you need that another idea might be to get your first credit card and set up automatic full payments so that you can start building up your credit score if you're under 18 and most of these like accounts and credit cards don't really apply to you you can also just try to work a few odd jobs like walking dogs or mowing your neighbor's lawn over the summer and try to get a little bit in the bank that way maybe even just selling some of your old clothes on depop or putting your birthday money in a checking account instead of spending it immediately like there's always at least a little bit of something and please do find that thing and do it anyways that is the end of today's video i know i said a lot of things about ways that you can upgrade your life but watching this video is not actually how you are going to upgrade your life you actually need to do these things so once you hit the end of this video click the x on one of these sides and go do one of these things please anyways thank you so much for watching i upload new videos about student life every week and over the summer i'm going to be trying to upload two videos a week instead wish me luck on that you can also check out my instagram tick tock and second channel for some other usually not studying related content see you next time [Music] you

Channel: studyquill

Views: 267,466

Rating: 4.9892006 out of 5

Keywords: studying, college, school

Id: sYoBaNnMobQ

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021