I practice yoga and go for a long walk every day. I meditate every day. I go to the mountains to hike the countless trails through the Cascades once the snow melts out and only stop hiking once it returns. I see a counselor every week. I hug my wife at least a couple times a day. I read a lot. I try to keep a gratitude journal (been slipping lately, okay a ton). I generally go to bed and get up at the same time each day. I schedule regular times to talk with good friends. I hang upside down on my inversion table when I am feeling anxious. I take medicine. I minimize social media. I eat good food with minimal refined sugar and carbs. I’ve eliminated caffeine and reduced alcohol. I do all this, deploying the breadth of my tool kit on a daily basis. No single activity or item from my kit eliminates or even effectively manages my depression and anxiety. But, collectively, my multi-pronged attack keeps me as safe and happy as possible.
This approach works well for nearly every situation or aspect of life. Cities or regions that rely on tourism or steel production alone are not very stable. Retirement plans predicated on social security and winning the lottery are bound to end poorly. We need to have multiple sources of income, support, and enjoyment to succeed. Sometimes we need it just to survive.
How does one lose weight? Do you rely on diet alone or exercise alone? Do you walk continuously on a treadmill until you reach your ideal weight? Do you eat only bananas? Do you focus only on improving your sleep hygiene? You could always shave off all your hair and stop drinking water.
How does a household, or a nation for that matter, balance its finances? Do you rely on simply eliminating eating out and hope that alone will fix everything? Do we just stop paying the interest on our debt and see what happens? Do we sell all our belongings? Do we throw away the overdue notices and stop answering the phone and door hoping that the problem magically goes away? Do we monkey around with the calculational basis underlying future cost of living adjustments to “extend” social security? Do we extend the retirement age or disband one of the branches of the military? Do we have a bake sale? Do we hope that if we simply reduce our spending in one small category or even in all the small categories without addressing the big ones like housing (or entitlements) and tell ourselves we have done the best we can? Do we cheat or steal?
One of the benefits of using many approaches is that one can slip pretty badly (journal writing or exercising) and the ship still moves forward. Also, often one positive action reinforces another. Eating healthy leads to weight loss and reduced inflammation which reduces joint problems helping make exercise more available. At some point several of these activities become such habit that something simply feels off when we forget to do one of them. And, we hopefully love to meditate or eat healthy or walk to the lake at sunrise. Hopefully we would be doing most if not all of these things even if we did not feel we “needed to”.
Don’t try to get in shape by simply doing pushups nor try to reign in your finances by only eliminating potato chips, even if you eat a lot of potato chips! We got to where we are by a million steps. How can we hope to get to a better me or a happier place without a similarly numerous number of steps and tools?
