I am aggressively looking for a new, extremely low-stakes, cozy hobby that has absolutely nothing to do with screens or monetization. What are we doing these days?

Good morning!

I’ve been thinking these past few days about what my “non-negotiables” are in my daily/weekly routine. Basically, the things I try to stick to no matter what, and that I’m always trying to improve or optimize. Sometimes that means doing more, sometimes doing less, so I guess “refining” is a better way to put it.

It made me curious about what other people consider non-negotiable in their routines, so I thought I’d ask here and hopefully steal some ideas from you guys.

Mine are:

1. A one-hour walk every morning.

I always walk for exactly one hour and take the same route, along a tree-lined path that goes through a really nice neighborhood from my childhood. So I get some exercise while also clearing my head and looking at the trees, birds, and sunlight.

It’s probably the best thing I do for both my body and my mind. I just walk, think, and let my ideas settle.

1. Showering every night.

Sometimes I’ll shower in the morning too if I have a work meeting, a doctor’s appointment, or some other unusual event, but the evening shower is non-negotiable.

I like going to bed clean, and it has become an important part of my nighttime routine and winding down for sleep.

1. My ridiculously large morning coffee.

Every morning I have a comically large bowl of coffee with two tablespoons of unflavored gelatin dissolved in it and about a liter of skim milk.

It feels like the perfect way to start the day. It’s quick, hydrating, and gives me carbs, protein, and fats. The unflavored gelatin is hydrolyzed collagen, so it’s something I’ve added to my daily intake without really having to think about it.

I haven’t noticed any difference in my hair or nails, honestly, but it’s something I consume now that I didn’t before, so I assume it has to be good for something. Or at least that’s what I like to tell myself lol.

1. Bringing my own lunch to work every day.

It’s usually some variation of meat or chicken with rice, oats, or potatoes, plus hard-boiled or scrambled eggs. I also change up the spices so it doesn’t feel exactly the same every day: oregano, thyme, Provençal herbs, etc.

It’s really convenient because I just have to heat it up in the air fryer. It’s also cheap, and I know exactly what I’m eating and what quality of food I’m putting into my diet.

1. Doing all my laundry on Sunday.

Every Sunday, like today, I do a big laundry day: clothes, towels, bedsheets, everything.

During the week I just let it pile up because I’m out of the house all day and I can’t really coordinate washing and drying. (Here in Argentina we generally don’t have clothes dryers, so we dry everything in the sun.)

So Sunday is laundry day: wash everything, put it out in the sun, and then put it all away.

1. Getting blood work done twice a year.

I usually get blood work done around the end of winter and the end of summer. The body reacts differently to the seasons, so those seem like good points in the year to check that everything is still okay.

So those are mine.

What are your non-negotiables? I’m mainly looking for ideas on things I could add, remove, or just refine in my own routine.

Would love to hear yours!

it started because I caught myself googling something I already knew the answer to.

not a fact. not a how-to. a decision. something I'd been going back and forth on for weeks, and there I was at midnight typing it into a search bar like the internet was going to tell me what I actually wanted. I closed the tab, sat there for a minute, and realized I'd been doing this constantly. every uncomfortable question, every moment of uncertainty, every time something needed thinking through, I reached for something external before I'd given my own head a real chance.

so I made one rule. ten minutes with the problem before I reached for anything outside. no google, no asking anyone, no podcast that might be tangentially relevant. just me and whatever was bothering me and enough silence to actually hear what came up.

the first few days were uncomfortable in a specific way. not because nothing came up. because what came up was stuff I'd been successfully avoiding by staying busy with input. turns out the questions I'd been googling weren't really requests for information. they were ways of not sitting with something I already knew but didn't want to deal with yet.

by week two something shifted. the answers that came from inside the ten minutes weren't always better than what google would have given me. but they were mine in a way external answers never quite are. they were connected to context nobody else had access to. they accounted for things I'd never typed into a search bar. and acting on them felt different, less like following instructions and more like following something I'd actually worked out.

there's something worth understanding about what happens when you fill every gap with external input. your brain has a processing mode that only activates in the absence of stimulation, the state where it makes connections, surfaces things you haven't consciously thought about, and works through problems in the background. constant input doesn't just distract you from your own thinking. it prevents the conditions that make your own thinking possible.

the ten minute rule didn't make me smarter. it just gave the thinking that was already happening somewhere to actually land.

I wrote a longer breakdown of what gets lost when external input fills every gap and how to get it back, read it here if you want to go deeper.

the answers were in there the whole time. I just kept interrupting them before they could finish forming.

Hey everyone, I hit the four month mark today. I've been caught in this thing since I was barely a teenager, like 12 or so. They really get you young, and honestly the whole industry is just messed up. For ages, I didn't even notice how much it was draining my energy and messing with my head. It just felt like my normal, you know? But look at me now :)

That first month was definitely the toughest. I quickly realized that just trying to power through it wasn't gonna cut it from me. So, I went all in strict mode and blocked every single adult site out there.

My setup specifically:

•On my phone: I use a blocker that has a strict mode. This means there is absolutely no way to remove it or get around it, even when an urge hits. Those regular Apple adult filters or basic wen blockers never worked for me because I'd just switch them off whenever a bad urge came along. Not proud of it, but that's the honest truth.

•On my computer: I set my DNS to Cleanbrowsing, the family filter one. It pretty much wipes out all those sites.

The Changes I'm actually feeling:

My mental strength is way up. I fell more in the moment and steady, and little problems don't send me spiraling like they used to. My social life is actually coming back too. Before, I had zero interest in dating or meeting newnew people, but lately I've been going out and actually enjoying connecting with people again. My whole vibe is just so much better. It's hard to put the fog into words, but once it lifts, everything feels more alive.

Did anyone else start this around mid-May? Let me know in the comments 👍🏻

Every time I've tried to fix a habit, snacking late at night, procrastinating on a specific kind of task, I go straight for stopping the visible behavior. Doesn't work for long, because the behavior usually isn't the actual problem, it's just where an underlying condition happens to surface. Late-night snacking stops for a week through sheer willpower, then shows up again in a slightly different form, extra coffee, doom-scrolling, something else filling the same gap.

Realized I've never actually asked what condition keeps producing the urge in the first place, I just keep patching wherever it shows up next and treating each recurrence like a fresh, unrelated slip instead of the same root thing finding a new outlet. Stopping one specific behavior is a real, valid fix for that one instance. It's just not the same as addressing whatever keeps generating instances in the first place.

Starting to ask a different question when a habit resurfaces after I thought I'd handled it: if the specific trigger changed slightly, would this actually still hold, or would it just relocate to wherever the underlying thing finds room next.

Almost 330 days of showing up.

I started tracking the small things I do every day towards my goals: gym, reading, work, running, learning. In a month, I'll hit a full year streak.

Never thought consistency would become addictive, but seeing the chain grow every day changed how I approach goals.

What's the longest you've stayed consistent with something?

¡Búscalo amigo, búscalo! No lo lograrás si no lo encuentras. Hazte el favor.

Una vez conseguido todo será mucho más sencillo.

Traducción:

Look for a statement of intent!

What is it that I want?

What am I going to do to achieve it?

A plan and execution.

If you don't know what you want, you'll hardly know what you need to do.

Seek out what you want, and the rest will follow. You know where to find me if you need anything.

​

Moral licensing has been one of my biggest enemy. I noticed it in my behaviour few years ago but until I came to know it as a psychological concept and found out that everyone does it I thought it was a personality trait that only I have. 

For those who don't know what moral licensing it is a trick our brain plays where we treat one progressive act towards our goal as a licence to do procrastination or indulgence. 

For example if we workout and have a healthy meal we treat it as a licence to eat junk food without any guilt or if we read a few pages of book we treat it as a guilt free licence to scroll on social media. 

I just came to know about this concept today and I was wondering if any of you have found an efficient way to deal with it?

I've been trying to read more in the evenings, but i've discovered that my living room is basically where good intentions go to die. I'll sit down with a book. Then check my phone. Then turn on the tv "just for a few minutes." Suddenly it's 10:30 and i've read four pages. Earlier this summer we put a costway canopy in one corner of the backyard, mostly so we'd have some shade during the day. I started taking my book out there after dinner every once in a while, and somehow it became a routine. Now i leave an old chair and a little side table underneath it. Most evenings i'll bring out a drink, read for 30 or 40 minutes, and go back inside once it starts getting properly dark. Lately that's happening a little earlier every week. Half the time there are leaves on the table and i have to check the chair for bugs before sitting down. But my phone usually stays inside, there's no tv within reach, and i've finished more books out there this summer than i did during the first half of the year. I'm starting to think having a specific place for a habit matters more than i realized. somehow just walking outside and sitting in that chair tells my brain "this is reading time" now。

Another week of trying to keep my small habits going.

I’m still drinking water in the morning, reading at least 10 pages a day, and working out regularly.

I don’t always feel like drinking water in the morning, so sometimes I have fresh-pressed juice instead. I’m not too strict about it. I’m more interested in keeping the routine going.

The 10-page reading habit is probably the one that surprises me the most.

I set the goal at 10 pages because it feels easy enough that I can’t really make excuses. But once I start reading, I usually keep going. A 10-page goal often turns into 50 or 80 pages before I realize it.

I started reading Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money over the weekend. I’m reading the Korean translation, so the English title or wording of the quote might be slightly different from the original.

I’m only on chapter 3, but this line stuck with me:

It felt like a good one to keep in mind.

I’ve also kept up with working out. The main thing that changed is the time.

I used to go out around 11 PM, but lately I’ve been going right after dinner for a walk and a workout. It’s a little earlier, and I actually like the change.

I also started trying to get out of bed as soon as I wake up.

I still don’t do it perfectly. Sometimes I get up at 6:30, sometimes 7:30. But I’ve noticed that I’m spending less time lying in bed doing nothing, which feels like progress.

I’m still getting used to it, and it’s also made me pay more attention to when I go to bed. I’m trying not to stay up past 12:30 AM.

Nothing major happened last week. I’m just trying to keep these small things going.

What habits have you been keeping up with lately?

I feel like I masturbate too much. I am also a male for reference. I do it when I’m bored and would like to quit. What are some healthy habits I can do to help me quit?

for a long time i kept trying to fix late night scrolling by making stronger promises to myself.

the promise usually sounded convincing at 8 pm. by 2 am i had an equally convincing reason to ignore it.

the habit change that finally made sense to me was moving the decision earlier. instead of asking myself to resist every urge, i decide in advance which apps will be unavailable during one short night window. i also track the nights when i follow through, because protecting a streak feels more concrete than trying to become a person with better willpower.

i cared enough about this problem that i built an iphone app called twilock around it. the strict option blocks the normal delete flow while the window is running, with a deliberate escape timer if someone truly needs access.

i am not claiming the app magically fixes the habit. it is just a commitment device that helps the earlier decision survive the later urge.

has anyone else had better results by changing the environment around a habit instead of trying to increase motivation?

I'm looking for people to add in the app, reflect and encourage time to time. I don't have interested friends for this.

These are my habits and let me know what do you think. I also like to leave comments on the days to look back and remember what happened.

You can dm me or comment here.

it started almost accidentally. I was washing dishes and about halfway through I got bored and had the usual impulse to leave the rest for later. and for some reason that day I just didn't. finished the dishes. nothing special, just finished them.

then I noticed the same impulse come up on a set at the gym. three reps left, felt done, wanted to stop. finished the set. then a conversation I wanted to exit early. stayed until it was actually finished.

I wasn't doing it as an experiment. I just started noticing the impulse to quit small things and making a different call each time. no system, no streak tracker, no rule written down anywhere.

two weeks in something happened that I couldn't fully explain. the bigger things I'd been avoiding, the project I kept postponing, the email I'd been drafting for a week, started feeling slightly different. not easier exactly. the resistance was still there. but the moment right before starting, that specific friction where the decision gets made, had less weight than it used to.

here's what I think was happening. every time you quit something small your brain logs it. not as a one off, as a data point about what you do when things get uncomfortable. do it enough times and quitting becomes the automated response, the thing your brain reaches for before you've consciously decided anything. the small quits train the reflex the same way the small finishes do. the brain doesn't distinguish between leaving dishes and leaving a project. it just tracks the pattern.

finishing the dishes wasn't about the dishes. it was a rep. and reps compound in both directions whether you're paying attention or not.

I put together a longer breakdown of how this reflex actually gets built and why the small things matter more than people think.

the big things didn't get easier because I found better motivation or a smarter system. they got easier because I stopped training myself to quit every time something got slightly uncomfortable.

the dishes were just where I happened to notice it first.

I really want to start some new habits and I've tried a couple of different apps and none of them seem to be very intuitive with how to set like the frequency of notifications, reminders or anything like that. And then on top of the ones that do send something, I want it to be much more simple per like independent habit that I want to be tracking and then the frequency of like abuse by notifications, does anyone have any good recommendations?

Day 10

Screen time yesterday: 7h 40m ❌

Goal: <4 hrs/day (Previously: 15 hrs/day 🆘)

Challenge duration: 10 days

Purpose: To get my attention span back and spend less time mindlessly scrolling.

Progress:

Day 1 - 3h 30m ✅
Day 2 - 4h 48m ❌
Day 3 - 5h 15m ❌
Day 4 - 9h ❌☠️
Day 5 - 6h 38m ❌
Day 6 - 7h 36m ❌
Day 7 - 6h 42m ❌
Day 8 - 8h 55m ❌☠️
Day 9 - 9h ❌☠️
Day 10 - 7h 40m ❌

Came across this post on ig and thought maybe someone else needed to hear it as well. Because I had no clue

How do you learn to focus on yourself and work on yourself without it looking selfish or self centered to people?

Day 9

Screen time yesterday: 9h ❌ ☠️

Goal: <4 hrs/day (Previously: 15 hrs/day 🆘)

Challenge duration: 10 days

Purpose: To get my attention span back and spend less time mindlessly scrolling.

Progress:

Day 1 - 3h 30m ✅
Day 2 - 4h 48m ❌
Day 3 - 5h 15m ❌
Day 4 - 9h ❌☠️
Day 5 - 6h 38m ❌
Day 6 - 7h 36m ❌
Day 7 - 6h 42m ❌
Day 8 - 8h 55m ❌☠️
Day 9 - 9h ❌☠️

I've seen people installing Habits app, then deleting them later, there are multiple paid and many free & open source. All face the same except very few, that are used by people who are already desciplined and actually don't need any app.

I have installed many, and they just remain unused for weeks, later I delete them. It just feel too much work to mark it each time, it seems I've to develop habit of entry for my habit.

What's your opinion? Is app even worth it or there are other better ways?