576 - The Anti-System: For When Normal Habits, Productivity, and Wellness Practices Aren’t Working

Andy J. Pizza (0:00)

Is your approach to life not working as well as you hoped it would, or as well as you would like it to? You've tried everything, you've got the habit system, the meditation app, the box breathing, the things that supposedly work for most people. You've tried all of them, and they're just not quite cutting it for you. I have been there more times than I'd like to count or admit, I am a neurodivergent creative chaos muppet, and I have become a self-help addict, a junkie at times in my life, trying to figure out how to keep all of this together. But in this episode, I wanna share the big shift that really started to help, and it wasn't a gratitude journal, it was something very, very different, and it has helped me to do better at email, sure, and also health, and also work, and allowed me to do the projects and books that I wanted to make. And I'm calling it the hunting journal, okay? And it's very, very different to a gratitude journal, and we'll get to that. But first, we gotta talk about the three needs that you have that you need to take seriously, and how to approach them in a way that might actually be successful.

When we moved to a new house, I decided to bring my illustration work to my home studio, and that meant moving all the stuff out of my studio. And one item we had to move was this green bubbly looking couch that I love, that I got from Wayfair. And when my kids found out that it wouldn't fit in my home studio, they were constantly arguing over who was gonna get it, because it just honestly looks so fresh. And so, the only thing to do to save them from this argument was to keep it for myself and put it in me and Sophie's room. Sorry, kids, the green, key, high-love, modern, boucle, loveseat, wavy, tufted cloud sofa stays with me. I found a few pieces like that for our home from Wayfair, and it makes sense because they have options for every style and every budget. They have reviews from users and even have Wayfair verified products that are hand vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection. Find pieces made for real life and get even more value with Wayfair rewards. Join Wayfair rewards today to get 5% back on every purchase. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's wayfair.com.

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We would all like to survive. We would love and.

I love it if we could thrive. I know I feel like that. And we've all heard the same advice about how to do that. You gotta have habits. You gotta have a routine. You gotta stay calm. Don't get too stressed. You gotta be grateful. You gotta know that eight out of 10 people are happier with the gratitude journal. And six out of 10 people found that box breathing saved their marriage. You've heard all of this stuff before, right? And when I was in my late teens, early twenties, I became a self-help junkie because things weren't going well for me. I was struggling to become an adult and do that in any way that felt like it was working. And so I was just desperately consuming as much self-help information as I could find. And I found that a lot of it, I couldn't do. It just wasn't taking for me. And when I got my ADHD diagnosis, initially I felt like maybe I'm just a different kind of animal and that means I can't be trained and I'm going to be doomed to being feral and just scrape by for the rest of my existence. And speaking of feral, we just got a puppy, a new puppy who is at times very feral and completely like a demon and then other times a complete angel that we are just obsessed with. Her name is Zelda after the video game, of course. We love her and she's adorable, but she's a little bit different than the dogs we've had in the past because the dogs we've had in the past were small dogs and she is 50% great Pyrenees. Now it looks like she's not going to be like mega, mega huge, but she's going to be bigger than any dog we've ever had. And so this time around we're afraid and we're taking training so much more seriously. We're taking her to puppy preschool on Saturdays. And sometimes I think that the teacher can see that we're a little bit anxious and she encourages us like at one point Zelda at the end of class didn't want to do the playtime with all the other puppies and just hit under a chair and started sleeping. And the teacher must have noticed that we're like worried like come on Zelda, come on Zelda. And she was like, yeah, like Zelda is going to be a big dog. She is a different animal. And what she didn't say was, therefore, she can't be trained. She's doomed to be feral and just scrape by. No, she didn't say that. She said that Zelda is a different animal and will need different training. You'll have to have a different approach. You'll have to have different concessions.