The following question was posted recently on a seduction community forum in a thread entitled “What are the best 10 tips to enjoy your life more?” (note that the spelling and grammar are the poster’s own):

You are ready to start enjoying your life? Do you feel like you constantly stressed about things and want something different you can do yourself?

What follows is the reply I posted, with some tidying and a couple of extra points added.

1) Fix posture (tuck chin). Here is some science behind why this is important.

2) Fix diet to remove allergens you may personally suffer from (trial and error, but dairy is a good place to start), and make sure you eat enough of the right foods to get the vitamins you need. Protein seems to be important in my experience.

3) Take measures to deal with any ill health as best you can. If you suspect a medical condition, just get it checked out by a doctor. Additionally, regular exercise, even just 15 minutes a day, will make many health- and mood-related issues disappear.

Physical health is the bedrock of happiness. Without it, all the psychological tricks and methods in the world won’t shift your baseline happiness in a positive direction. Yes, tucking your chin (particularly if you use computers all day) can fix what dozens of self-help books won’t even touch!

4) Cut ties with unsupportive people. Particularly for many younger guys, move out of your parents’ house if the situation is anything less than great.

5) Cultivate relationships with supportive people and mentors. Girlfriend(s) can be a powerful part of your support network, despite the various decrying of this as “neediness” you may experience in the seduction community. For young men, it is also extremely important that you find older male role models (mentors) to learn from and mimic.

Emotional health is the second most important part of happiness. Without this, your higher-level endeavours are pretty much doomed to failure. Emotional health comes from your social network. Sorry, you really can’t go it alone in life, despite our current culture of individualism and (faux) personal empowerment! This is encapsulated well in the phrase “no man is an island.”

6) Focus the mind on things which bring you personal fulfilment (you will figure these out as you go along). Simultaneously move attention away from things which do not bring fulfilment or which bring harm. The message here is move attention from bad to good, rather than fighting bad things (which just feeds them even more).

When you place your attention on something, you get more of it. Fed up with your job? That attention of “being fed up” will actually bring you more of “being fed up”. Instead, just leave things behind.

7) Balance idealism with acceptance of your current reality. This leads to the emergence of pragmatism — perhaps your most vital skill. Pragmatism means pursuing your dreams whilst still having grounding in the knowledge and acceptance of what can/cannot be done. This point is where many guys in the seduction community fail. They dream big (because they’ve been told “anything is possible” by the personal development industry; and because they spend too much time in their own imagination already) then get upset at anything which indicates the dream might not be attainable. They are not grounded in reality. Changing reality is a slow process. This leads to my final point…

8‌) Take your time! Chew your food more slowly. Wake up earlier. Enjoy your walk to work. Assign time (and lots of it) to each thing you do. Most endeavours take time to bear fruit. Yes, life is short, but by following this simple advice, you can create time (or at least the illusion of more time). Since learning to take my time over everything, via becoming mindful of myself, a year for me now seems to last ten years.

The studious among you may notice a similar structure to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (or even the Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness for the really avant-garde ) emerging. What I have written was not “designed” to follow either of these models, and is drawn entirely from my personal experience, but the fact it has ended up reflecting these structures does highlight the ubiquity of the human experience, in my eyes.

Finally, I wanted to add one more thing. If you are currently depressed, this may well negatively affect your motivation to the point whereby it is difficult to get any of these things done. In such cases, I fully endorse speaking to a doctor and being prescribed antidepressants for a short time, and using these drugs as a “springboard” off of which to get the other things done.

I am not endorsing being put on antidepressants so you can then sit at home and “feel good” all day (and then not bother doing anything else with your life). That would go against everything this website stands for. I am however recognizing that depression has the tendency to zap motivation completely. Antidepressants in this case may well give you the motivation you require to start exercising, fix your diet, and create new personal relationships — things which are going to serve you positively going forward.