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Self-Improvement is My Passion

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Blog by AJ on 2 August 2024

There are a lot of things in life that are out of our control or require more work and effort than a single individual could reasonable produce. Focusing on this negativity has led me to feelings of hopelessness and resentment. While I can't force others to change, I can change myself for the better. I'm definitely not a perfect person and have many areas needing improvement. The goal is to have a positive impact in even a small way through self-improvement.

For me, self-improvement is the means to increasing my overall health and wellness. I'm not qualified to give health advice and won't be doing that in this post. I'll only be sharing my opinions about my own wellness journey that may (but most likely will not) be applicable to others. Personalized health advice should be consulted with your actually healthcare professional.

I've found my health to be too complicated for one-size-fits-all solutions. My overall health and wellness is multifaceted requiring improvement in all dimensions of health. I've built goals around 7 interdependent aspects of my health to try achieve optimal well-being:

  1. Financial health
  2. Physical health
  3. Societal health
  4. Intellectual health
  5. Emotional health
  6. Spiritual health
  7. Environmental health

These different dimensions being dependent on one another means improvements in one will also help improve the others, but this also applied to set backs.

Financial Health

Money isn't everything, but it can solve 50% - 90% of most my health problems since nothing in this life is free. Financial health is about resource security. Strong financial health is having the means to sustain my wellness.

Earning enough money and having downtime directly impacts all the other dimensions of health from being able to afford healthier foods for physical health to simply being one less thing to stress about for emotional health. My plan for improvement in this area is offering service based contracts for skilled work.

Physical Health

Diet and exercise are the cornerstone of my physical health. Physical health is about bodily functionality. Being vegetarian for the past 15 years has likely been a great help to my overall health, but even vegetarians can overeat and gain weight. Coupled with my mostly sedentary lifestyle due to recent times, weight-related health concerns could soon be an issue.

My plan for improvement is to incorporate more whole foods into my diet by growing them myself and to increase physical activity through home workouts. This is where the financial health goal works my physical health goals as more income would allow me to buy farmland to grow my own foods and workout with ample space.

Social Health

Forming new relationships has been hard as I've gotten older. Society health is about having satisfying interpersonal relationships. This is where I've neglected my health the most.

I've always had a negative perception of networking as shallow and transactional, but I've started to reevaluate this thinking. Networking can also be viewed as creating opportunities. Having more connections can mean greater possibilities with life's changes.

You can learn so much about the world just listening to other's thoughts and perspectives. I no longer feel that having acquaintances are meaningless. My plan for improvement in this area is to expand my online social network.

Intellectual Health

A learning mind is a growing mind. Intellectual health is about curiosity with objective analysis. Languages and becoming a polyglot is a great curiosity of mine. Communication is just incredibly fascinating to me.

I find learning languages to be very engaging and want to learn as many as I can. My plan for this is to learn new languages through creating machine learning language models. This should give me a good understanding of linguistics and be good practice for improving proficiency.

Emotional Health

Emotional health is about emotional regulation through self-efficacy. A philosophy I've recently been drawn to is stoicism. My previous understand of stoicism was heavily influenced by pop psychology to be simply the absence of emotions or removing removing emotions from your life.

But stoicism is about understanding your emotional responses and not allowing them to the driving factor in your actions or decisions. It is also very present-centric. My goal is to use this line of thinking more instead of regretting my past mistakes or becoming jaded about a future that's still to be determined.

Spiritual Health

Spiritual health is about having a sense of meaning or purpose in life. I've been fortunate that even from a young age I've known what I want to do in life. I want to help other and have always found great fulfillment in being able to useful in a meaningful way. My plan is to continue to find ways to this through upcoming projects and sharing knowledge in general.

Environmental Health

Environmental health is about connectivity with nature. This is something that I've lost living in a major metropolitan city. I've started to get it back through my small apartment garden, but I want my so much more. My plan is to buy a farm to start a homestead and give back to nature.

More to Come

Trying to do everything at once would be overwhelming, but I know which direction I want to head towards. Wellness is not something you do once and then you're done. It's continual effort to maintain optimal health and well-being. Looking forward to the upcoming exercises and projects along this journey!

Thank you for reading my post! I would love to know your thoughts on this subject. Hit me up on Bluesky @aiwithaj.bsky.social or the socials below!