Baselines

You already know what you need

Over the past few years I have developed a mental framework for my own personal happiness and wellbeing. It’s not exactly an innovative concept but it has helped me achieve consistent happiness and a better understanding of what I need to flourish. I refer to it as baselines.

The concept actually came off the back of a period in my life where I generally wasn’t very happy. I was overwhelmed with the markets, I had just moved internationally and I had constant loops of feeling like I could have achieved better things followed by the guilt of not being grateful of all I have. There wasn’t just one thing that was causing my anxiousness so I couldn’t figure out what changes I needed to make in order to improve upon my life. Sometimes bad days happen and that’s okay but I was having too many bad days and I wanted to try and solve the riddle of why.

On one particularly dark day, I turned to writing. Writing has so often been the right decision for me during difficult times, hence why I’m grateful for all of you reading right now. To put down my thoughts coherently on a page and then read them somehow improves my understanding of the world around me. It makes me feel like I can be more objective about the situation, like I am giving advice to a friend and not myself. On this day I decided to express exactly how I was feeling and how I was spending my time, then I reflected on the times I was consistently happy and wrote about what I was doing. Once I wrote the two down, I compared them and began to map out the differences between the two scenarios - which again felt like I was an observer of these two worlds and was able to make easy conclusions.

My realisation was very simple, obvious, yet personally profound; I was simply not doing the things that I knew made me happy. At the end of the day, we usually know exactly what it is we ‘should’ be doing and simply pretend that we don’t. When I was struggling with spending too much time on screens, the answer was clearly to spend less time on screens and more time outside. The start of change is very obvious, what we do not know how to do is make consistent lifestyle change until we become the ideal-self we wish to be.

One of my favourite metaphors for happiness is one by Laurie Santos where she says our ‘happiness tyres’ are constantly deflating and it is up to us to pump them up each day. Most of us know that happiness is not an end-goal or a final state of being, but I think we don’t consider that it is an active battle which will be lost if we aren’t proactive each day.

What I decided that day is that I was going to change my life by adhering to a list of activities and habits that were non-negotiable—my baseline. I started small. Before looking at my phone in the morning I would drink water, go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. That was it. Non-negotiable. On days where I had more in me I’d add a ten minute meditation and eat breakfast. On the best days, an hour walk or journal before anything else.

The lowest baseline was just about keeping my tyres inflated. Everything above that was a bonus, which made some days feel incredible while also ensuring the worst days were manageable. Based on how I felt on any given day and what my schedule looked like, I had bigger or harder tasks that I could reach for that I’d refer to as my ‘good day’ and ‘ideal day’ baselines.

Over time as habits set in, my good day baseline became my non-negotiable, then my great and ideal also increased as I normalised the process. I take the same approach with language learning and exercise, an absolute minimum of time commitment per day, and then two higher goals depending on how I’m feeling on that day.

One thing that I found very empowering was that after being so consistent with this framework, it allowed me to have ‘cheat days’ without feeling guilty. Knowing that I have become a person that will show up every day and do what I need to do in order to be happy, allows me to give myself guilt-free permission to take a day off when I need it - knowing that it will be just one day off and not become habitual. I used to really struggle with being ill and staying inside all day, the idea of me being ‘lazy’ was something that caused sadness. Now I am confident enough in my own baselines that if for whatever reason I want to wake up and look at my phone straight away, that is okay because it is an exception and not the norm.

If my baselines are all in place, I know that I am giving myself the best possible opportunity to live a happy life. The other thing I know is that I am keeping myself in a mental state that is most-capable of handling adversity should it appear, and knowing that I can handle that with a sound mind also helps alleviate the pressure of overthinking worst case scenarios.

I think it is an extremely valuable mental exercise to think about the gaps in your happiness and what healthy or unhealthy routines you have made habit in your life. If you are to acknowledge your happiness tyres are consistently deflating each day at a similar rate, what is it that you are consistently doing to match that rate of deflation? In trading terms, it makes me feel good knowing that my happiness portfolio is ‘sustainable’ with the current rate of daily profit/loss.

I also really enjoy acknowledging that I am not my best self each day, I will not always wake up feeling like I can take on the world and that’s okay, I just need to do a few things so that I give myself the best chance of being my best self. On the other hand, sometimes I wake up and feel great, and on those days it feels exceptional to strive towards my ideal baselines and end the day with a feeling of happiness surplus that no doubt carries forward in my week.

If you are to take anything from this piece of writing, it is my recommendation that you should make a personal commitment to do one or two things a day, consistently, that you know for sure will increase your likelihood of having a good day. The easiest baseline to implement in my opinion is a morning routine of doing literally anything before looking at your phone in the morning. It can start as simple as drink a glass of water or brush your teeth first, but it will have an impact and it will be a positive change. If the first thing you do in the morning is look at your phone, you are simply handing the keys to your first impressions of the day to someone else.

-Jords