Happy Free Thoughts Thursday, people.

If you're new, you can find previous FTTs here and you can reply directly to this email with any thoughts, questions or ideas sparked by what's below.

Thanks for joining—let's get right into it!

3 Things I’ve Learned:

1. Less social media = less loneliness and depression.

Researchers at UPenn monitored 143 students for a week to establish their baseline social media usage.

Then, the students were randomly assigned to either limit social media usage to 10 minutes per platform, per day or to continue their usage as normal for three weeks.

The group that limited their usage showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over the three weeks compared to the control group.

To me, this didn't come as a surprise. Social media can be toxic and pretty much everyone intuitively knows it.

What did come as a surprise was that both groups showed significant reductions in anxiety and FOMO (fear of missing out) over the three weeks, suggesting that simply being aware of your social media usage can be beneficial.

This is a topic I'll come back to time and time again, because a) I need the reminder b) it's not going away any time soon and c) it's up to us to take control of our own well-being.

Credit: https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751

2. More balanced time perspective = more satisfied life.

Time perspective refers to our view of the past, present and future and the weight we attribute to each.

An example of an imbalanced time perspective would be focusing too much on something that happened in the past at the expense of your present experience.

Or focusing too much on your present experience at the expense of your future.

There are a number of different ways in which an imbalance can occur and they all have their own negative consequence(s).

Like in so many other cases, awareness serves as an effective and easily accessible solution when this becomes a problem.

When we're aware of how our past, present and future each relate to one another then we're less likely to focus on one at the expense of another. In other words, we're more likely to find balance.

Credit: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sense-time/202203/past-present-future-don-t-get-stuck-in-single-time-dimension

3. Men and women's height preferences don't align.

Women are most satisfied with a partner who is 8 inches taller than them while men are most satisfied with a partner who is 3 inches shorter.

48.9% of women prefer to date only men taller than them while 13.5% of men prefer to date only women shorter than them.

Finally, on average, the shortest man a woman would date is 5'9" and the shortest woman a man would date is 5'1".

How true is this in the real world? I have no idea. But I do know that Zac Efron is 5'8" and you'd be hard pressed to find a woman who wouldn't date him.

And by the way—I'd love to date a woman taller than me because... ya know... taller kids.

Credit: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201909/5-reasons-why-women-and-men-care-about-height

2 Questions for You:

1. What activities make you feel the most fulfilled? How often do you do them?
2. Do the five people that you spend the most time with lift you up or bring you down? Be honest.

1 Quote:

"The problems we face today eventually turn into blessings in the rear view mirror of life."—Matthew McConaughey

A lot of things on my mind this week. One of them is how motivation shows up in every day life.

Motivation is unreliable.

It comes and goes and when we lack it we usually try to find it externally from videos, music, pictures, friends, etc.

Discipline is much more reliable.

It stays with us every day and when we lack it all we have to do is remember that we made a promise to ourselves that we are committed to keeping.

A few years ago I read a book called The River of Doubt by Candice Millard about Theodore Roosevelt's trip to South America to explore an uncharted tributary of the Amazon river.

During the trip, Roosevelt's guide, Cândido Rondon, went for a swim every morning before they set off for the day.

He went for a swim, in the Amazon rainforest, every morning before hiking for miles... in the Amazon rainforest.

Obviously that's a little extreme.

But can you imagine how good he felt keeping a promise he made to himself every day despite the endless number of excuses he had not to?

Live your life to the fullest,

Chris

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