As I am nearing the end of my 20s, I’ve been reflecting on this past decade – my habits, experiences, what I’ve learned, and what I’ve tried. I think our 20s are best used for learning about ourselves by experimenting and trying new things (different cities, countries, careers, habits, and social groups). From all these experiences, I’ve come up with the 5 best and worst habits I developed during my 20s. Going into my 30s, I want to keep the good ones and continue to stay away from the bad.
My 5 Best Positive Habits
- Daily journaling
- Daily exercise and movement
- Mindfulness, awareness, and meditation
- Intentional social life
- Reading books
Daily Journaling for Self-Reflection
I’ve journaled since I was a child, but in my 20s I developed journaling methods and strategies to strengthen my mindset, self-understanding, mental well-being, and future vision. Journaling for me is not about writing about what I have done today (e.g., “today I went to a café”), but rather about understanding my thoughts, emotions, and reactions better.
For example, if I experienced something that I had a strong emotional reaction to, I will journal about:
- What happened?
- What did I feel? Why do I think I had that reaction?
- How did I react or behave?
- Is that how I want to react in similar situations in the future? If not, what can I do to change my behavior?
- What methods and tools can I develop to handle my emotions, reactions, and behavior?
I have also developed a loose template for what to journal about daily, which includes:
- Gratitude journaling – reminding yourself of all the things you have to be grateful for. This really helps, especially during depressive periods.
- Intentions for the day – What do I want to achieve? It’s best to set 1-3 concrete goals that you know you can achieve. It will give you direction and motivation, and you will feel accomplished afterwards.
- Future visions – How does my dream or ideal future look? How do I want to be, act, live, and look in my 50s? What would 80-year-old me wish I had done during my life? This can be about specific career choices, taking chances with moving abroad or traveling alone, what type of social life or cultural experiences one wants to have, how you want to dress or show up in the world.
- Reflect on readings – I always read, and when I’ve read or learned something new that is relevant to my life, I take a moment to journal about how this theory, concept, or advice is relevant to my life and how I can learn from it.
Related: Journaling: What to Write? (20 Journaling Prompts)
Daily Exercise & Movement
It has taken me years to learn how to move my body daily in a way that is sustainable and feels good for me.
Exercise and movement do not need to feel forced or like a punishment. I used to force myself to go to the gym at 5 in the morning before work, push myself to run 20 km daily, and measure my success by the numbers on the scale or other quantifiable measures. These were not sustainable habits.
What I’ve learned is that daily movement and exercise are something you should do for yourself, for your well-being, to feel great in your own body and mind, and in a way that expands your wellness. Exercise is not a punishment.
For me, this means only doing exercises and movements that I feel inspired to do. Now, I walk daily, for at least 30 minutes, sometimes up to 2-3 hours a day with good music. I also do Pilates, stretching, and yoga 3-5 times per week, and blend in bodyweight exercises to feel stronger in my daily life. For me, this is sustainable.
Mindfulness, Awareness, and Meditation
There is so much we learn from our parents, society, and our life experiences that it’s so easy to lose ourselves.
When we are very young, we are too young to have developed the ability to see ourselves, reactions, and life from a larger perspective. Then, when we’re older, many traumatic things can happen. When I say traumatic event, I don’t put any criteria on which events are allowed to feel traumatic or not. A traumatic event can be different for each person; it can be a breakup, issues with body image, a period of isolation during the COVID pandemic, being in a physically abusive relationship, moving abroad and feeling lonely, falling into substance abuse, having unsupportive parents, and much more.
I think all these external factors are clouding our minds and our inner sense of well-being. It’s like we’re collecting debris from all these external inputs and experiences that swirl around our minds and cloud our visions.
I believe that by practicing awareness of our minds, thoughts, feelings, assumptions about the world, our past experiences, and so on, we can learn to gain a higher-level perspective of ourselves. We can’t remove anything that happened in the past, but we can make it less heavy on us today and in the future.
Related: What is Consciousness? Can it ever be scientifically explained?
Intentional Social Life
In my early 20s, I moved abroad alone and traveled a lot. I wanted to move; I wanted to change my life again and again, to experience new things. While I don’t regret it, since it was an amazing experience, I have learned how important our social lives are. Yes, we can make new friends and acquaintances wherever we are, but long-term supportive relationships are incredibly important for a stable sense of identity and belonging.
As our lives change, people move, and get busy pursuing careers, educations, meeting new partners, and navigating new financial realities, it’s easy to let friendships and acquaintances go.
I have realized that we can keep our friends and acquaintances, no matter where they or we live, as long as there’s an intention to keep the friendship alive.
To me, our intentions are like magic. Anything we have a strong intention toward will happen. This includes how we want our social lives to be.
Looking back, I am so grateful that I have intentionally kept up my social life. I think, in our modern world, the conversation is too heartless in pushing us to say goodbye to anything that “doesn’t serve us”. Not everything needs to have utility, be productive, or produce a materialistic or financial gain. Our friendships and social lives have other values: those of belonging, a sense of identity, of community, and the beauty of seeing each other develop throughout the years.
Reading Books
On my Goodreads account, I have close to 500 books marked as read. I have not had any goal for how many books to read, so I think this number is quite amazing. Reading compounds. I did not have a strategy when I started, but I now notice how my mind has developed an internal map of all the literature I’ve read.
I can see the similarities and differences between old and new literature from Russia, Central Europe, China, and the Nordics. It gives a depth of understanding about cultural history that I don’t think I could’ve gotten from reading about it. Literature, especially the classics, has to be experienced. It’s an experience to read classics from different cultures, across different times, because your mind will gain the material to start connecting the dots for you.
This has, for example, affected my experience with travel. When I travel, my mind automatically connects the cities I visit to stories I’ve read in books. Looking at old buildings and cafés, I can almost feel how time has changed. Now, when I travel, I always try to read a book that takes place in the city where I am staying. This adds depth to the experience.
People also say reading helps you build empathy and a larger vocabulary. I’m not sure if this has happened to me yet, but I hope so.
Related: Why you should reread books
5 Habits I Quit
- Weight loss goals
- Quantifying my life
- Alcohol and drugs
- Uprooting my life
- Focusing on end goals
Weight Loss Goals
Many young girls and women have probably had this habit. Our society has favored being skinny as a beauty ideal, and it results in weight loss being a very common goal for women. To be honest, I have still not yet been able to release this beauty ideal in my own mind. But I have decided to intentionally not focus on it.
When I was in my teens and early 20s, I used to weigh myself daily and focus on a specific number I wanted to see on the scale. I could count calories and exercise to burn a specific number of calories to reach my weight loss goal.
This, I realized, was harming me. It made me feel unhappy with how I am. It made me hyperfixate on my appearance and numbers on a scale. It made me overexercise and undereat. It caused an unhealthy relationship with myself and my body. So, this is a habit I decided to quit, and I have felt much freer and happier since.
Quantifying My Life
Quantifying life means measuring one’s life in terms of numbers. As a person who loves self-development, habit tracking, and goal achievement, measuring life activities has been a big part of my life. However, I have noticed that quantifying my life in terms of numbers is really not for me. By measuring everything in my life in numbers, I lose the beautiful and aesthetic qualities of life.
By quantifying life, we remove the values of beauty, aesthetics, and softness from life experiences – because those things cannot be measured in numbers.
We can count the number of cities and countries we’ve visited, but that will never translate to the quality of experiences we’ve had there. We can measure our bodies in terms of numbers on a scale or measures of our limbs, but that won’t say anything about how it feels to live in our bodies.
Setting the goal of walking 10.000 steps per day can remove the joy from walking, because you may become fixated on the number of steps on your watch or in your phone, instead of looking around your environment.
Alcohol and Drugs
Growing up, alcohol was a big part of my social life. In Sweden, many start drinking in their late teens, and it continues into adulthood as a normalized part of adult life. Even at workplaces, during events, and after work, alcohol is expected.
I’ve written more deeply about my experiences with alcohol and drugs in this article: 2 Years Sober: What I’ve Learned About Life, Fun, and Myself.
In short, I believe alcohol and drugs are negative forces in our society and that it harms us, even if it’s fun in the moment. If you prioritize your mental and physical well-being, quitting alcohol and drugs is key.
Uprooting life
I used to travel and move abroad often. I liked to meet new people, re-invent myself, my social environments, and my reality. It was an amazing experience for a few years, but I have learned that it’s also a habit that causes problems and challenges in one’s well-being.
Having stability, feeling safe in one’s home, having good and strong routines, and feeling a sense of belonging in communities and with others are essential for well-being. Those things are very hard to get if you are constantly uprooting your life.
I think all experiences have their own place and time. I am grateful that I got to move, travel, and experience so many things in my early 20s, but now, I want stability and to build where I am.
Focusing on End Goals
I have been too focused on end goals. I used to write lists of things I wanted to achieve, and I did achieve them, all of them. But what experience did that give me on the way to reaching those goals?
Now, I still live with intention, but my goals are not focused on the end state. It’s focused on how I want to live in the present moment, while moving towards my goals.
For example, I have always had a goal of reaching FIRE (financially independent, retire early). I used to set my goal on the end number. It caused me to do work I didn’t enjoy, just to earn more money, to invest, to reach my FIRE goal. I always managed to meet my goals within the timeframe I set for myself, but I really didn’t enjoy the way I did it.
Now, I still have the goal of reaching FI (financial independence), but I do not have the goal to retire early. I have instead pursued a life and occupation today that I am already happy with, and which I don’t want to quit. This shift of focus from the end number to how I want to live during my life – towards the goal – has made me much happier in my daily life.