This list of unhealthy habits is simple, boring, and profound all at the same time.
You’ll recognize some of them because they’re common bad habits.
But this might be the first time you understand the full depth of their implications.
If you want to ditch these unhealthy habits, you’ll need to leave behind the version of yourself that’s plugged into the world, and instead reconnect with your soul.
Let’s start with the lynchpin of bad habits (IMO) and why taking control of this tendency will have massive ripple effects on every area of your life.
1. I’m begging you to put down your phone
It’s the most common bad habit (and exceptionally difficult to overcome in the modern world), which is why removing it needs to be stressed over and over again. The cheap dopamine you get from checking your smartphone is one of the most damaging drugs on earth.
The physiological and psychological damage alone is brutal:
- Decreased attention span
- Disrupted sleep from blue light
- Elevated cortisol (stress)
- Chronic anxiety
- Poor posture
But the social, cultural, and spiritual consequences are worse.
People used to live in a world where all you knew was your immediate environment. They were connected to reality. Part of a community. Attended third spaces.
Now you have the entire world broadcasting at you nonstop.
Sure, without the smartphone, you’d compare yourself to people around you.
But now you compare yourself with everyone—from your “friends” posting curated versions of their lives to actual celebrities to airbrushed influencers.
Without the smartphone, you’d stay informed with a newspaper or the local channel. Now you consume a nonstop feed of “if it bleeds, it leads” news designed to make you sad, scared, and angry.
Without the smartphone, you’d meet someone at a coffee shop or church potluck. Now you’re reduced to a six-second glance and a swipe.
Without the smartphone, you’d sit with your own thoughts. Now you can’t stand in line for 30 seconds without reaching for your pocket.
Without the smartphone, you’d be fully present with people you love. Now you’re half-listening while scrolling, giving your friends the top of your head instead of your eyes.
Without the smartphone, you’d experience boredom where creativity, reflection, and prayer live. Now your soul never gets a moment of silence.
I realized that checking my phone was so much more than a common bad habit.
It was eroding the quality of my life. It reached a boiling point. I could feel my brain fragmenting, and I realized being terminally online was making me terminally ill. So I resolved to be done with it.
Now I don’t check my phone for the first four hours of my day. I don’t check it when I’m with people I care about. I don’t check it while doing anything else.
Once I ditched the device, life opened up.
I started having real conversations face to face, eye to eye. I got back in tune with my own thoughts. I built a spiritual practice and started talking to God again. And my business grew because I could finally give it my full, unfragmented attention.
The phone promises you the world and delivers a cage.
Put it down and watch what opens up.
2. Eliminate this (for the love of your mental health)
We don’t talk about this enough.
I’ve spent the past decade trying to solve the riddle of self-improvement, peak performance, and the human condition in general.
I looked into so many corners. Willpower. Tactics. Habits. Tools. Methods. But my most interesting realization was that so many problems in life can be solved by some of the areas we neglect the most.
Go back to the basics.
Start with your own body and one of the most well-known bad habits.
I’m talking about putting toxic stuff in your body, from alcohol to processed foods to sugar and to basically anything that’s not:
- Meat
- Fish
- Eggs
- Fruit
- Vegetables
- Simple carbs
- Coffee, tea, water
I’m not a doctor. But I am convinced that nutrition is the skeleton key to unlocking human potential.
Here’s what happens when you fuel your body with anything else:
- Chronic inflammation
- Brain fog
- Energy crashes and constant fatigue
- Gut issues and digestive problems
- Depression and anxiety
- Poor sleep quality
- Poor focus and concentration
Just to name a few. I could put 100 bullets on that list.
There’s a reason they call the gut the “second brain.” Studies like the ones linked above show a direct relationship between your gut microbiome, the functioning of your nervous system, and the quality of your mental health.
Of course, I don’t want to over-simplify the complicated nature of mental health. But it’s not hard to argue that nutrition plays an important role in our cognitive and emotional well-being.
If you have chronic inflammation running through your body, how are you not going to feel a sense of anxiety and low-grade depression?
If you’re living with constant brain fog, how are you supposed to execute your strategy to its MAX potential?
If you’re getting crappy sleep every night because your body is working overtime to process all the junk food you consumed, how can you achieve emotional stability?
You can’t.
We’re out here looking for complex solutions when the foundation is rotting underneath us. So why don’t more people start here?
I can answer that with my own story.
Personally, I had to wait until conditions got terrible before I wanted to change. I was always so focused on my goal (business growth) that I spent almost zero time taking care of myself. Super ironic.
For the past two years, I’ve been dealing with all sorts of health problems. I was getting sick all of the time. I was habitually sleep-deprived. I had chronic inflammation all over my body and some days felt like the entire surface of my body was on fire.
I decided to keep ignoring my health and just keep trying to “thug it out,” with the business because I was afraid to stall my progress by taking time to focus on my health.
I thought I didn’t have time. Foolish.
I wasted countless hours, days, weeks, even full months when you add it all up, operating well below my full potential. This actually cost me far more cash in missed revenue than taking the time to focus on my health would have.
It got to the point where some days it was just unenjoyable to be alive. All I could think about all day was going to bed and trying to get some sleep. I finally had enough and decided to fix it.
I hired a functional medicine practitioner to run labs, analyze my blood work, and build me a personalized protocol. She looked at my gut health, my digestion, my cellular hydration and nearly every issue traced back to what I was putting in my body and whether my body could actually use it.
The foundation was broken.
No amount of optimization on top of a broken foundation was going to fix it.
Do I miss eating takeout, drinking soda, and boozing it up?
Honestly, no.
Because I traded those guilty pleasures for the pleasure of being able to exist in my body without pain, illness, and fog. To be able to experience the joy of presence because I’m no longer distracted by feeling like garbage.
I’m pretty sure fixing my health is going to be a bigger contributor to my business growth than any marketing funnel ever will. I’m not saying nutrition solves everything. But I am saying it solves way more than we give it credit for.
3. Stop robbing yourself of your own thoughts
The next unhealthy habit is one almost no one talks about.
I call it noise pollution.
Earbuds at the gym. Podcast on the commute. Music while you work. Background noise while you eat. Something playing while you fall asleep.
Step outside and observe most people. They have noise in the background all. the. time. We have lost the ability to sit with our own thoughts.
Sound isn’t just “sound.” It’s information that reshapes matter.
Look up cymatics: Put sand on a metal plate, play different frequencies, and the sand instantly forms geometric patterns. Change the frequency, and the pattern changes. Higher frequencies create beauty and order. Lower, chaotic ones create a mess.
Your body—70% water—is no different. Your cells, tissues, and brain are vibrating matter. Every sound you take in is rearranging you at a physical level.
The ancients understood this. Pythagoras called it the Music of the Spheres—the idea that reality itself is vibration. Modern physics ended up in the same place with string theory. Mystics and scientists, oddly enough, agreeing.
So when you blast low-frequency, chaotic, lyric-heavy noise all day, you’re not just “listening to music.” You’re shaping the architecture of your inner world.
And here’s where it gets uncomfortable: the music you “choose” usually isn’t a choice at all. It’s your nervous system medicating itself. Low dopamine? You reach for EDM, hip-hop, anything with heavy bass to stimulate you. Anxious? You reach for something to numb. Depressed? You pick the sad songs that deepen the mood.
It looks like preference. It’s actually physiology.
What you’re feeding your ears is doing more to your mind and mood than most people ever realize.
When my functional medicine practitioner built my protocol, she told me to replace all secular music and podcasts with healing frequencies for the first week.
She explained that constant audio stimulation keeps your nervous system locked in a low-grade stress state. You never get silence. Your brain never rests. Your thoughts never fully form. The fragmented mind cannot access its deeper intelligence because there’s always noise drowning out the signal.
Kant, Newton, Nietzsche all advised listening to music less often. None of them hated music. But they knew profound thought demands profound quiet. The mind aborts valuable thoughts in gestation when constantly disturbed by noise. Their greatest revelations didn’t occur with earbuds in:
“I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think. After a time it always seems as if they want to banish myself from myself and rob me of my soul.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
I’ve learned to love the sound of silence. I can hear myself again. I can feel my mind again. I can sense my soul again. It’s vital even though most people write it off, even licensed professionals.
There’s a woman I’m friendly with at the gym. She’s a therapist. She noticed I wasn’t wearing any headphones and said I was “crazy,” for not listening to music as I worked out.
I explained my whole philosophy on noise pollution. I also said I’m working on present moment awareness, the kind that’s been taught in Eastern philosophy as a cure for not just anxiety, but the eternal restlessness of the soul.
She laughed at me.
A licensed therapist, someone who spends their days helping people manage anxiety, depression, and mental chaos, laughed at the idea of simply being present without noise.
She dismissed thousands of years of Eastern wisdom. Wrote off the very practice that monks, mystics, and the greatest thinkers in human history used to access the deepest levels of the mind.
This is the disease of modernity.
We have an entire culture of people medicating their nervous systems with constant stimulation, wondering why they can’t think clearly, why they’re always anxious, why they feel disconnected from themselves. And the “experts” are just as lost in the noise as everyone else.
I always think back to one of the quotes that sparked a mediation habit a decade ago:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
—Blaise Pascal
Silence is where magic lives.
It’s where you get your best ideas, your creative breakthroughs, your life changing epiphanies—not from the borrowed thoughts of podcasters, gurus, influencers, and artists.
4. Axe this common bad habit and return to yourself
Everything I’ve accomplished over the past decade—making millions of dollars in my business, writing words that reached tens of millions of people, and publishing three books—was fueled by a deep-seated insecurity.
A void.
A quiet, persistent fear that if I wasn’t seen, I didn’t exist.
I called it “drive” but really I needed constant and external proof that I was real, valuable, and exceptional.
So I built a life that could prove it. Work, relationships, writing, even self-reflection, existed to stabilize my fragile self-image.
The Last Psychiatrist (TLP) talks about the idea of the “man in the box,” someone who does not experience life directly, but as a performance being watched.
That was me.
I didn’t live in my life. I managed it, staged it, edited it in real time for an imagined audience. Other humans were just extras in my movie.
This is how TLP defines narcissism. Not grandiosity in the cartoon sense, but vigilance. The constant monitoring of perception. The low-grade anxiety of always being on stage, even when no one is watching.
You might recognize this in yourself:
- Checking likes on social media
- Dropping hints about your success
- Steering conversations back to yourself
- Feeling invisible when you speak and no one reacts
- Curating your life for how it looks rather than how it feels
- Feeling behind when you see other people winning publicly
- Struggling to enjoy a moment without documenting or sharing it
- Name-dropping, status-signaling, or casually mentioning credentials
- Over-explaining your decisions to people who don’t require an explanation
- Mentally rehearsing how you’ll tell people about something before it even happens
- Feeling like your accomplishments don’t count unless someone else acknowledges them
I can’t tell you how many times I would check to see how many claps I got on my Medium posts or how many likes I got on social media.
I love writing, but building the writing empire itself was partially due to the fact that I wanted to become so big and so undeniable that…nobody could deny me. I figured if I could create this giant architecture on top of my real self I could avoid what I was afraid of most: people seeing the real me, naked and without the mask.
Not liking what they see.
Not loving what they see.
Seeing and rejecting the actual me.
This form of narcissism is another modern plague of society and there is a simple antidote:
Set aside an extended period of time where you allow yourself to appear like a loser to everyone else.
I need to be clear about what I mean here because some people will misread this as “go dark while you secretly grind, then surprise everyone with your success.”
I mean actually stop performing. Permanently.
You’re not building toward a moment when everyone finally realizes how great you are. You’re done curating how you appear to the outside world.
Let people think whatever they want. Redirect all that mental energy toward what you actually want to do. For its own sake. Because you enjoy it. Because it matters to you. Not because anyone is watching.
The wins still come. Maybe even bigger ones. But they hit differently when they’re not being staged for an audience. When you’re not immediately calculating how to leverage them for status. When you can just… have them. Quietly. For yourself.
That’s freedom.
5. Quit sitting on the sidelines (the unhealthiest habit of all)
There’s one final habit that ties all of this together.
Stop engaging in the unhealthy habit of being a spectator of your own life.
Look at everything I’ve described.
Your phone keeps you watching other people’s lives instead of living yours.
Junk food gives you a fleeting dopamine rush, but at what cost?
Constant noise fills your head with other people’s thoughts instead of your own.
People pleasing turns your entire existence into a performance for an audience that isn’t even paying attention.
The common thread of these bad habits is that modern life has made it terrifyingly easy to live adjacent to your own existence. To hover above it. To manage it, curate it, optimize it, document it.
Everything except actually living it.
The cruelest part is that it feels like engagement. But it’s nothing more than living out this quote until you die:
‘‘I have led a toothless life’, he thought. ‘ A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on—and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.”
—Jean Paul Satre, “The Age of Reason”
Get in the arena. Say the awkward thing. Start before you’re ready. Have the conversation in person. Eat the meal without photographing it. Take the trip without posting it. Build something without announcing it. Sit in silence without filling it. Feel the feeling without numbing it.
Be in your life so fully that there’s no one left to watch it.
