I spend 3 hours (2x(1h subway + 0.5h electric bike)) commuting and 9 hours at work everyday. Should I move to reduce my commuting time?
It's Fucking Impossible to Stay Healthy
21–30 of 30 posts
Re: It's Fucking Impossible to Stay Healthy
#22I spend 3 hours (2x(1h subway + 0.5h electric bike)) commuting and 9 hours at work everyday. Should I move to reduce my commuting time?
For the longest time I had a similar commute. Eventually I had to move cities due to life and my commute went down to 40 mins total. The added leisure time indeed helped me mentally. Just having that extra hour or two away from the commute is a big plus for your brain.
Re: It's Fucking Impossible to Stay Healthy
#23It sometimes does feel like a challenge. Including dimensions other than the work/life balance causing stresses. I'm 37 years old. Last weekend, I found out cooking with and drinking tap water set to hot mode is hella bad for you! Leeches heavy metals, brews bacteria, the works. I've been doing that every day for coffee, tea, pasta etc my whole adult life. Oops?
Depending on how your tap water is made hot, drinking it may be ok: if you have an electrically heated tube-coil that warms the water just as it is flowing, or if you have an heat-pump system also with a last-second water-heating flow through the heat-buffer. Then you are ok.
Any hot water that is kept a while before it goes out the tap, you should not drink. Also of course it must then be kept above 50C, or you've got a serious bacteria risk.
This is assuming the plumbing is not lead, but who the hell has leaded plumbing still?
Re: It's Fucking Impossible to Stay Healthy
#24Food is dopamine. If you’re struggling with cravings that’s your brain telling you it needs a reward to feel good, and if you need to take something to feel good, it’s because you don’t feel good.
Consider therapy. With so many distracting sources of easy dopamine in the modern world it’s easy to become emotional disconnected from oneself without realizing it.
Read Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke. She explains cravings like these and why they happen.
Re: It's Fucking Impossible to Stay Healthy
#25> The work-life balance isn’t terrible, but not great either. I generally get in around 7:30 AM and leave by 6-7.
How is this not terrible? It is absolutely terrible. Whoever brainwashed you into thinking this is not terrible needs to be disciplined.
Re: It's Fucking Impossible to Stay Healthy
#26> The work-life balance isn’t terrible, but not great either. I generally get in around 7:30 AM and leave by 6-7. How is this not terrible? It is absolutely terrible. Whoever brainwashed you into thinking this is not terrible needs to be disciplined.
Agreed. I find 9-5 terrible, but I do it because it's expected. 8-6 or more is inhumane
Re: It's Fucking Impossible to Stay Healthy
#27I found the book "the glucose revolution" to be super helpful with respect to diet for keeping myself sharp with constant energy levels.
The idea is to prevent glucose spikes.
if you prevent them your body will do much better. It will release less insulin and that means less damage and less food converted to fat.
And spikes are followed by a crash, which is when energy plummets, attention wanders and cravings kick in.
found this ppt with some of the ideas summarized (not by author):
https://www.believebig.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Glucos...
examples: - eat foods in order: first fiber, then proteins/fats, last carbs
- walk 10 minutes after eating
...
Re: It's Fucking Impossible to Stay Healthy
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've been drinking hot water from the tap your whole life?
as opposed to...? Are you meaning just "hot" without heating it up further somehow (kettle, microwave, etc)?
I'm not GP but what I do is
cold tap water -> filter pitcher --> kettle
`-> drinking glass
Of course, there's the issue that most kettles are made of plastic or at least have some plastic components so how do you keep it microplastics-free?
There's no winning, I guess. :D
Re: It's Fucking Impossible to Stay Healthy
#29The only advice I have to offer is to work out in the morning, before work. It seems like an insane task when you first consider it, but you quickly find you can establish a routine where you wake up, have some water or coffee, and then get down to it. After that morning workout is done, I feel incredibly energized for the day. More importantly, I find that it usually delays when I start to feel hungry by an addition…
Doing this is really challenging if you don't fix your sleep schedule to accommodate this or if you have a social life that happens later at night.
It took me half a year to get to a point where I can wake up at 0600 without an alarm. I used to wake up at all sorts of times before, usually 0900-1000.
I had to do CBTi and wake up at 0600 every day, even on weekends, no matter what time I went to bed. It was rough.
Once I got there, staying up and being social past 2200 became challenging. I'm being extremely selective about when I hang out late now, which is fine for me since I don't have many friends, but I can see this not working at all for someone more social than me.
Re: It's Fucking Impossible to Stay Healthy
#30It’s hardest to stay healthy when you’re trying to jam it into an unhealthy life. Are you sure you need that job? You’re suggesting 11-12 hours at the office every day, plus whatever your commute is. And apparently this job insists on you being continuously deskbound during that time. Your upper middle class peers may be doing the same thing, and you may feel obliged to that job because of some fantasies about where…
> You’re making an explicit choice to be an ambitious young urban professional (for an exploitative employer) rather than a healthy person.
More explicitly, you only have room for so much in your life. You're letting your job take all of it, then complaining that you don't have room for what you need to do to stay healthy. Choose a less exploitative job, then choose to put time for you (including your health) in the space that's freed up.
That may mean making less money. But "What will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?" (Yeah, Jesus was explicitly talking about spiritual things, not physical. But what does it profit you, if you make tons of money but drop dead at 50 because you had no time for your own health?)