Moderation in all things, especially moderation. This is my number one rule.
I read some life advice by a man who turned 100 recently. He said, “I have done everything in life in moderation… including sex.”
I’ve read hundreds of moderation quotes from all sorts of philosophers, but this guy just seems… real. Probably because he’s been alive during my lifetime as opposed to 100 or 2000 years ago. I aspire to be a role model just like him, living life sensibly by doing everything in moderation… including sex.
Unfortunately, however; it’s not as simple as it sounds, as I’m about to explain. Though don’t be worried, as it’s an easy kudos to live by if you action the correct items – which I will also highlight, because I’m a good guy like that.
Defining Moderation Scales
Everything can be done in moderation, but not everything is on the same moderation scale.
This goes for everything in life, whether that’s eating, justice, spending money or even speaking to people. Everything. Exciting isn’t it?
I am going to use food as an example, because it’s a dead easy moderation to scale, so let’s have a basic conscious brainstorm of how eating a fast food burger promotes certain values, other than bad health.
Clearly that burger is associated with a lot of unethical behaviour.
Now let’s look at a locally sourced burger.
Whether or not you think of any more pros or cons for either option, I’m sure you can agree there is a huge difference.
I suppose you could put everything on a scale of one to ten.
One is zero consumption (abstinence) and ten is over consumption (excessive).
Local healthy food is maybe a 2. You’ve still got 8 more points before you’re over moderation. (Keep in mind you need healthy food to live, so consuming a good moderate amount is probably advised)
But fast food is more like an 8 based on the heath values and lack of ethics.
So it’s a lot easy to over consume that fast food, but you can still eat it if you desire. Of course it is better to eliminate it from your diet altogether.
I still eat franchised fast food on occasion and I don’t have to worry much, because it’s rare and for the majority of the time I’ve spent a fair amount of time tuning my conscious decisions and creating habits that feed a relatively moderate healthy lifestyle.
Which leads me to the next section – habits.
Habits
Generally habits are seen as bad such as biting your fingernails or drinking too much coffee.
But there are good habits too, such as running every morning or reading consistently throughout the week.
So what are habits?
Well the simplest way to describe a habit is as a process. All habits can be broken, if you understand the process.
A process is made up of three segments: Start > Process > Result
So a habit looks like this: Trigger > Action > Reward.
A habit always has a trigger. What makes you think of the action to take. Walking past the gym, may make you feel like working out, or walking past a coffee shop may trigger the thought of a coffee.
Let’s go with coffee… What are the end results or reward?
Well I’m walking to work in the morning, therefore I’m tired and a coffee can wake me up. I also enjoy the taste. I’d say that’s a good reward.
So the Trigger is now walking past the shop.
The Action is purchasing and drinking the coffee.
And the Reward is me enjoying a warm tasty coffee that is going to give me energy for a super productive morning.
Now that we’ve explained that there is a Trigger > Action > Reward process, we can either disrupt bad habits or create new good habits.
This is how I deal with bad habits:
- I remove the option from my life. if the availability is non-existent, it’s simply not possible.
- Draw upon my willpower.
In fact I remember riding home from a techno party one night, incredibly drunk and I saw those Golden Arches on the horizon. Fortunately McDonald’s was closed and so I went home and took my chicken from the fridge, cut it up, chucked it in the frying pan with butter, lemon, ginger and raw honey.
That was one of my best drunk meals ever and it was healthy.
Using willpower can be incredibly draining of energy levels. This should be used as the second option so that you can use willpower and energy levels on more productive items.
Alcohol can also have a powerful influence on willpower and decision making, so it was fortunate that maccas was closed.
I’m also writing this section whilst eating Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream. What should be the moderation, perhaps a quarter of the cup would be sufficient?
I’m already halfway through, so that shows how reliant my willpower can be.
But let’s use more sensible scenarios and analyse them.
Disrupting Bad Habits
Scenario
There was a McDonald’s outside my train station that I commuted to and fro.
I would walk past McDonald’s, taking a quick look through the window to see if it was busy.
If it was quiet I was sure to buy some hash browns in the morning or a McFlurry on the way home, sometimes both on the same day.
So I started leaving the train station through a different exit. It would be stupid for me to draw upon my willpower twice a day, especially when I’d likely need the willpower to keep my self sane when dealing with twats in the office.
Analysation
Firstly, let’s note that I knew this was not good for my health and secondly, note that I was using willpower to stop myself from entering McDonald’s.
As I wrote in my two rules, I should be removing the opportunity, or in other words, breaking the habit.
The trigger was seeing McDonald’s outside the station. Knowing that removing the trigger is the easiest thing to break a habit, I did exactly that and used a different street to enter/exit the station.
Creating Good Habits
Good habits seem so much more difficult to create. I suppose because it’s changing something that has already become autonomous – meaning you’ve probably done it for a long time already.
And right there in the last sentence is the key. Repetitiveness and Autonomous.
1. Start Small
If you start small it’s not such a big change and it’s difficult to argue with yourself about doing it. When I need to get back into the consistent habit of writing, I make sure I write atleast one paragraph. It could be utter shite, but at least it’s something.
2. Repeat the habit for 31 days.
This may sound a long time, but you’ll start getting bored of the activity after about 14 days, so you need to push through. I often have a calendar on the wall and cross the days off to keep myself motivated.
3. Improve the habit
Once the simple habit has been established, you can then build upon it with the same process. So by this point I would have 31 shit paragraphs that I need to improve. I would build upon my habit by improving two paragraphs every day.
These three steps are a real basic good to promoting success in building good habits, although using my calendar technique I occasionally build a more complex habit or routine almost immediately.
Converting Habits
Now let’s look at how I convert bad habits into good habits.
It’s possible to convert a bad habit into a good habit. Simply, a trigger for a bad habit could be altered to produce a positive action.
Perhaps I just want to wake up “better”.
I would usually have my phone next to my bed with an alarm set and the first thing I would do in the morning would be to reach over and hit that glorious snooze button. So the trigger is the alarm going off, and I need to alternate the action, in order to be more productive.
Now I try to make sure my phone is across the room. That way I have to get up to silence the horrific noise.
But now I’m up and I probably need to pee.
At that point it’s then easy to roll into the morning routine, meditating, working out etc.
So I actually converted the same trigger in this scenario from one that just disturbed my beauty sleep to one that forced me to get up.
If I was truly unable to convert, remove or create a trigger, I would have to rely on willpower.
Willpower
People often talk about needing strong willpower and clearly some have stronger willpower than others, but what is better is to not use it at all.
Using Willpower, like anything else is draining. You only have so much energy in a day before you need to recharge, so why waste it on willpower when you can simply change the course of the day to avoid needing willpower.
There are items which will consistently need willpower, such as dealing with pestilent customers all day if you’re a waiter/ess or at a checkout till. Obviously as much as we’d probably like to, we can’t hide in the storeroom all day.
Complete Abstinence
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, each decision reflects your values.
Some items in life can affect your decision making, such as alcohol.
One thing I forgot to mention about moderating everything based upon the item, is your own tolerance to such items.
Depending on my brain activity, my tolerance of alcohol can be desperately low meaning I venture into the realms of excessiveness with extreme ease.
I have often mentioned my thoughts on alcohol in my memoirs. It’s something I think I would like to remove from my life, but culture demands participation, and so I drink on occasion, and therefore I must rely upon moderation and willpower.
There will be some that oppose the moderate way of life, especially food fanatics. Yes, I agree that health would be much better if fast food and other specific foods depending on the argument were removed completely… but I would suggest that life is about diversity and variety.
Everything in life should be enjoyed, and thus moderation allows such enjoyment. It’s not weak to give in to temptation on occasion. We are human and even though we have such a powerful cognitive power, we are still animals.
Moderation doesn’t need to be perfect.
Imperfections in the universe make the universe exactly that – perfect.
Conclusion of a Moderate Lifestyle
Everything in moderation can sound incredibly daunting, though it can be incredibly easy by setting up routines, good habits and improving your understanding of how our societal infrastructure works.
To do this effectively, one’s values must be worthy and concrete.
Once you have analysed an item, you will need to do very little analysation again. Utilising good habits, routines, values and willpower you can completely avoid excessive use of anything and sustain a consistent healthy lifestyle.
Though it can also sound incredibly beautiful, as this parable of The Mexican Fisherman shows.
Setting routines around your diet, for example Fish Fridays or Saturday night takeaway and grass fed liver once every three weeks, can keep your moderation of vitamins and minerals in check.
If alcohol or smoking dope is an issue, try an alternative to a drinking or smoking social, such as cooking for your friends at home instead.
Moderation can be incredibly easy once you take control of your influences and learn how to regain control when you occasionally go off the track once in a while. It happens. Life is chaotic and teeming with entropy.
Even adding quotes to this post I feel like I am close to excessively becoming a quote warrior.
And also, I haven’t had Ben & Jerry’s for a long bloody time, so what the heck.
