The new year is a great time to take stock of what worked and what didn’t from the last year of your life. 2021 was year two of COVID, so while we’re not back to how things were pre-COVID, expectations got more predictable and life settled into a new rhythm. Here are the changes I made in 2021 that led to the biggest improvements to my overall health, happiness, and personal fulfillment.
Doing psychedelic therapy on a regular basis. This supported literally every other thing on this list. I first started doing psychedelic therapy sporadically in 2019 and only made it consistent in 2021. As with going to the gym and working out, consistency is the key to results. I previously felt like I would often go 2 steps forward, 1.5 steps back, but now I’m seeing way more positive change. Thanks to it I’m now more secure, more focused, more in touch with my intuition, and happier on a daily basis.
Psychedelics have helped me truly know what I need, what my body needs, and what brings me joy. They’ve brought me clarity in difficult relationships, life decisions, work situations, family stuff, and more. They help me identify my own habits, patterns, and fears so I can defuse and change them. By establishing a cadence to my psychedelic work, I’ve been able to make more consistent progress and experience more persistent improvements that impact nearly all aspects of my life. (I’ll be writing more about this subject separately soon!)
Prioritizing sleep. If I’m not well-rested, nothing else matters. I can paper over that with caffeine to get work done if I absolutely need to, but I’ve found that caffeine has its own negative side effects for me. Which brings me to…
Cutting out caffeine and seeing its true impact on my body and mind. Caffeine is a crutch that helps me be productive when I need to be. Sometimes, work demands that, but I’ve found it’s not something I want to rely on consistently to just return me to baseline because of its negative side effects. It deadens me to what my body needs both physically and emotionally; I say yes to more things because my mind narrowly focuses on getting things done, rather than understanding what the right things are to get done; and, to boot, the crash at the end is horrible.
It’s like wearing blinders. This is a pattern I’ve found in stimulants as a general category. Eliminating them except where absolutely necessary has made me much happier on a daily basis.
Cutting out alcohol. I’ve never been a big drinker; I only really used to drink when I went out to nice dinners or for a friend’s birthday or similar celebration. But I’ve always found it leaves me sluggish, I sleep worse, and I’m mentally foggy — which leaves me primed to want to use caffeine. Alcohol and caffeine are like the yang to psychedelics’ yin: while I find that psychedelics generally give me greater clarity and sustainable, long-term life satisfaction, alcohol (or depressants generally) and caffeine (or stimulants generally) create short-lived, volatile peaks and troughs. On a whole, my baseline happiness and well-being is greater without alcohol and caffeine.
Spending more time in warm places. And warm doesn’t just mean Miami of Hawaii — it could be New York City in the summer for all it matters to me. Whether it’s the vitamin D, spending more time outside or in nature, or just the attitudes of people living in warm weather, it gives me energy and my baseline happiness improves. This means San Francisco, unfortunately, is not the optimal place for me from a weather perspective if I’m in only one city for 52 weeks. Thankfully, I’m not tethered to SF every week of the year. I enjoyed the 2 weeks I spent in NYC in July immensely, and no two week span in SF matched that. (That said, I still wouldn’t want to live through another NYC winter; and it’s supremely hard to replace the people I love in the Bay, so I’m content to continue to call SF my home base for now. It has plenty of other positives!)
Working with colleagues in person. I’m more productive, more motivated, and happier. Especially at an early-stage company, it’s critical to create team cohesion, enable communication, and build a felt sense that you’re all in it together. I’m planning much more of this in 2022.
Reducing news consumption. This includes news websites as well as Twitter and podcasts. Most information just isn’t that important. News creates its own addictive feedback loop: once you see how much you’re “missing”, you feel like you need to stay on top of it. But in reality, very little of it ever matters. I couldn’t tell you what was in the Axios newsletter I read a week ago; 95% of it wasn’t relevant to me. So, save yourself the time and mental space and focus your effort elsewhere. I hate to be that guy, but there’s something to be said for the Lindy effect.
Reading more books. Or, generally, engaging my long-form attention more. So: books, not Reddit or Twitter; movies, not YouTube. This is the flip side of cutting out news consumption: it created more time for me to act with intention on things I really valued. I plan on taking this a step further in 2022 by choosing creation over consumption. Everyone needs to balance information in with creation out, and right now my balance is too far on the side of consuming and integrating information and not enough on using it to create outputs (be they personal or professional).
Writing more. Smarter people than me have noted that writing helps you think by forcing you to articulate what’s going on inside your head. Once you put it down on paper, it’s easier to identify holes in your thought process. If you exercise that muscle more, you get better at rigorous thinking in general. I’m pleased with how much it helped me in 2021 and I’d like to keep pushing it forward in 2022 by being more public with the fruit of my labor. I’ve drafted a number of posts to 90% completion that I’d like to finish up and publish, which brings me to a 2022 goal: less overthinking, more creation, and being more okay with imperfection. (I’m way too concerned with wanting my end product to read like what it would be if I had been writing for years already, without realizing that if I don’t just put the reps in I’ll never get there in the first place!)
Prioritizing beauty and joy. I made a number of decisions this year that were impractical on the surface but gave me and the people who mattered in my life so much delight. I went on vacations with friends, I paid people surprise visits, I gave silly gifts, I wore fantastical clothes, I put new art in my home, I immersed myself in music, I danced unselfconsciously, I cried watching movies, I wrote people cards, I told friends I loved them, I gave a deeply meaningful toast at a friend’s wedding, and oh so much more. I chose what resonated with my heart, and it rewarded me so, so much. It’s an investment that compounds, and thanks to it I’m more excited than ever to embark on the new year.
Wishing everyone an exuberant 2022. There’s so much potential in a new year!