A Month Without- Finding Happiness by Being Miserable

I recently went on the personal vision quest where I went a month without alcohol. It was less fun than you might imagine. But, having that month in the rear-view has made me reflect fondly on the lessons it taught me. The most important lesson being not to commit to being sober for a month when you’re three drinks into the night.

Now that I’m allowed to drink again I think the month of sobriety was good stoicism training. The whole thing got me thinking: What else makes me happy that I can cut out for a month at a time?

The idea behind this endeavor is not to purposefully make myself miserable but to increase my overall happiness by forcing myself out of the comfort zone of my daily routines. It’s all very impressive. I know, stop. You’re embarrassing me.

Anyway.

So what are some of the things we do every day that we just sort of take for granted? What are some things that aren’t increasing our overall happiness?

What would it look like to live a month without them?

A Month Without Alcohol

For January we cut out alcohol. By cutting it out for a month I broke my habit of having a drink each night. Going forward I’d like to have a drink every other night or so. Psychologically I thought a drink helped me relax and I wouldn’t be able to sleep as well without one. I slept fine. I don’t need a drink every day.

The month was long and awful, mostly because it was January, but partly because I wanted a beer. But, I’m really happy I forced myself to find a new nightly routine. I drank more kombucha and tea, and I had fun just sitting there solemnly waiting for the minutes to pass so I could go to bed. It was great. Well, it was great stoicism training.

February: A Month Without Missing a Workout.

It doesn’t have to be something you’re cutting out. You can add something beneficial. For February we’re concentrating on getting back in a routine of working out. I guess we’re cutting out missing workouts. That’s kind of a double negative.

Basically, for the month of February, we have to do some type of workout every day. The idea is to get back in the habit of making time for the actual gym. If that’s not possible we have to do an in-home workout with a minimum of 100 reps. 100 reps seem to be the point where your body is warmed up. The idea being I can’t just do ten pushups at 11 pm and call it a workout.

A Month Without TV

We’re also in the habit of turning Netflix on and watching an episode of whatever show we’re currently working our way through. One month this year we’ll cut out TV. This will force us to be more thoughtful about how we spend our evenings. Maybe we’ll read books, or listen to podcasts together. Maybe we’ll just visit. The point is, we won’t be able to fall back on that old habit of just turning on the TV.

A Month of Limited Phone Time

I’m annoyingly addicted to my phone. Phones drive me crazy and I hate how I’ll be watching a show and find myself mindlessly scrolling nonsense instead of paying attention. I thought about doing a month with no phone, but that seemed unreasonable. The idea for this month will be to limit my screen time to 30 minutes per day. That should be enough time to allow me to use maps, text people, and even send out a Tweet or two about how brave I’m being by not staring at my phone that month. If 30 minutes is too easy I’ll cut it down to 15 minutes.

I’d like to get to the point where I just set my phone down and forget it exists. Over the weekend I purposefully left my phone in the bedroom all morning. It felt great. This is the inspiration behind doing all these dumb challenges. A month without phone scrolling goes hand in hand with…

A Month Without Social Media

Much like my cell phone use, social media is an annoying time-wasting habit. Most of my social media scrolling happens on the phone, so by cutting down my screen time I should be automatically limiting my social media use. But, because humans are slimy, I probably need to make a rule that I can’t be on social media that month—other than the occasional Tweet to share how brave and unique I’m being for not using social media. If I don’t make this rule I’ll find myself mindlessly scrolling my computer. I’ve done a month without social media before. Here’s what I thought about the whole thing.

A Month Without Hot Showers

I feel like I’ll probably lose a lot of people with this one, but taking cold showers has a lot of health benefits. I end all my showers with 30-seconds or so of cold water and it always makes me feel pretty good. This is one of those that sounds good in theory but when it comes time to shower I’ll probably really hate the idea. I can still do lukewarm water at first, but not hot. The idea would be to work my way through the month getting more and more comfortable with longer cold showers.

Putting up with being really cold for short bursts of time is great stoicism training and it’s very healthy. It also changes your body’s idea of what cold is. My wife is constantly cold and she refuses to do the cold showers. It’s counter-intuitive, but by trading 30-seconds of being cold, I get to walk around feeling pretty warm all day. Normally I would say you should do what my wife does, not what I do. But, in this case, you should turn that shower water cold for a few seconds.

If jumping into a month with no hot showers sounds like the worst thing in the world try doing a month of ending your showers with a burst of cold. Take a hot shower, just like normal, but do a few seconds of cold water right before you get out. You’ll feel great afterward.

A Month of Having a Strict Diet

This one is still rolling around in my mind. I’d like to do a month without some of my favorite comfort foods. I could do just a month with no ice cream, or a month with no pizza, but I’m not sure how beneficial it would be to just cut out one, or both, of those. For sure I would immediately find a different form of junk food to replace it.

“No ice cream? Great. Donuts. Every. Day.” -Humans

So, I’m thinking a month of very strict dieting would be a good goal. Maybe doing the carnivore diet for a month or just a strict keto diet. The idea would be to cut out almost all sugar. Not sure exactly what to do about this one yet.

A Month of Warrior Diet

This one isn’t so much WHAT you eat but WHEN you eat. There are a ton of benefits to intermittent fasting. The warrior diet is just shortening your eating window from eight hours to four hours. During your eating window, you can eat whatever you want. This is good mental training for breaking the habit of just mindlessly snacking. Giving your body up to 20 hours to fast is also really good for your organs and waistline.

I already do intermittent fasting so going to the warrior diet for a month just kicks up the intensity. If you’ve never done intermittent fasting you could start there.

A Month of Multi-Day Fasts

Fasting for multiple days is apparently really great for your body, mostly because it sounds like a horrendous experience. I’d like to work my way into fasting for longer and longer periods of time. This might have to be a multi-month thing. Maybe one month I practice fasting for 24-hours once per week then the next month do a 48-hour fast once every two weeks. This could culminate in doing one five-day fast.

This is one of those that I internally hope I just forget about doing. Apparently, once you get passed the 48-hour stage you start feeling pretty good doing these multi-day fasts. I would be fine if that feeling of elation remained a mystery to me. But, that’s why we’re doing this whole thing, to get out of our comfort zones.

A Month of One-Minute Meditations

Meditating is like being vegan, if you’re into it everybody knows. I don’t know why sitting silently for a few minutes compels people to tell everyone all about how great it feels to sit silently for a few minutes, but I plan on finding out. For one month I want to work on meditating. I’ll start with one minute and increase my session one minute per day. By the end of the month, I should be sitting there for half an hour most likely glowing with an aura of smug enlightenment.

Ideas.

So those are a few of my ideas. I think it’s tempting to want to do all the things all at once but when your focus is too spread out you end up not doing anything. Yeah, we’d all like to eat healthy, workout every day, meditate, read this blog, and take cold showers, but by focusing on only one per month the likelihood of success is greatly increased. At least that’s how my brain and motivation works.

Once the month ends you can go back to doing whatever you were doing before. Ideally, this helps me cut back on things that are bad for me IE alcohol, excessive phone use, ice cream, etc., makes me appreciate things like hot showers, and get me in a habit of doing positive things like exercising regularly.

Some other ideas from people on Twitter are: A month without sugar, a month of purposeful volunteering, a month of no caffeine, a month of no meat, a month of no complaining and Dollar Revolution agreed to give up Super Bowls for the rest of the year.

For February we’re doing the workout thing. That gives me the rest of the month to come up with my next challenge. Do you want to join me? We could start a movement of stoicism! I’m not really a movement starting person though, so it’s fine if only I do it.

What are some things that you’d cut out for the month? Comment or hit me up on Twitter with your great ideas.

If you enjoyed this article you can share it. But, let’s not overshare this one. If it turns out I change my mind about this whole thing that would be super annoying if this was the article that everyone knew me for instead of this one, this one, or this one.

Also, read these while you’re here.

How to be Willfully Ignorant and DESTROY Your Opponents

Doing the Things- How to Get Going When You’ve Lost Motivation

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