💭 Who Am I?
Self-Discipline ~ the ability to control oneself and overcome ones feelings
Discipline ~ train oneself to do something in a controlled or habitual way
Who am I?
Hey 👋🏻 I am Ewan & Welcome to the Level Up Labs!
On this website I will be documenting my self improvement journey, my interests in science and some of my coding and engineering projects in the future. Mainly, I will post about self improvement content, sharing tips or ideas I have tried in the past and how they have or have not worked for me. I will also be sharing what self improvement endeavours I will be pursuing in the future.
The main goal of this blog is really to build a community of like minded people in the self improvement and science respect and basically just see where it can go, it will also be a means for me to build a second brain, an idea which I will cover in a future blog.
For a bit of background about myself, Science has always been a passion of mine and something I have been interested in since I was young. I have always enjoyed Science as a subject during school and now am pursuing a degree in Science at University.
The science section of the blog will cover areas such as biology, neuroscience, exercise science, physics, maths and whatever else I find interesting. There will also be a lot of crossover in the science blogs with what projects I will be documenting, explaining some concepts of what I am doing as well.
As for how I got started on my self improvement journey, well that is a bit more a of a longer story. To cut the story short, I was in my teens scrolling TikTok, YouTube & Instagram and came across countless videos of people such as David Goggins, Joe Rogan, Dr. Andrew Huberman and many more. But, these were the main three, especially Joe Rogan and one word I kept on hearing them say was ‘Discipline’. This buzzword floated around in my head a lot. In a way all of these people above have inspired me and influenced my life in such a way that has had a good effect on me for the most part, and I’ll come back to the “for the most part” reason in a short while.
Like every young person nowadays most of their time is spent with their heads in their phones and throughout my teens I was no different. These people kept on popping up on my phone screen and in the beginning, like everyone, I would see what they had to say and then move on with my day not really taking on board what ideas or lessons they were speaking about in these videos.
I was about 16 and was skiing on a school trip, it was my first trip away skiing and I loved every minute of it. Every evening after coming back from the slopes I would be absolutely roasting, which might seem a bit counterintuitive as I was skiing in a very cold climate, however with all of the ski gear on me the heat sticks with you throughout the day.
It was on this ski trip that I decided to take my first cold shower and everything kind of started from there.
After this first cold shower the relief I got was amazing. There is no point in lying because I always started off with hot water and then maybe put the water down half way before turning it freezing to slowly acclimatise (and still do sometimes). However, the feeling of relief I got from the cold made me want do it at the end of every day on the trip. It didn’t feel like an effort, it was just great being able to cool myself down.
Just after the trip had ended COVID began and I was stuck at home. I had heard about the benefits of doing cold showers and knew they were good for you so I said I would try and stick with doing them after I got back from my trip and have done now for quite some while. While it was not easy and at times, especially in the beginning I really wanted to quit and take a warm shower, to this day in fact, I have not stopped taking cold showers. The hit of dopamine you get after them can be addictive and is one of the main factors which get me through it every time, the thought of how I will feel after it.
Since it was lockdown at the time and I had nothing to do, I still scrolled and scrolled TikTok and watched countless YouTube Videos. Again I kept on seeing these videos of David Goggins, Joe Rogan and Dr. Andrew Huberman and I basically just said to myself why don’t I try and do what these guys are telling me to? Why don’t I try and become disciplined and do the things that will improve myself every day, even when I don’t feel like doing them or lack the motivation to do them. I began to take in what these people were saying to me and it became clear to me that in the long run, building discipline will improve my life in some way at least. So I decided to try and be a better me and stay consistent with workouts as well as sticking to a good diet with high protein and these are habits I have built since then and have not looked back. It wasn’t easy in the beginning and I wanted to quit many times.I would also be lying in saying if it was easy today, because some days it is not. However, once you accept that this is who you are and working out or eating well becomes part of your daily routine, I’ve found you get an itch to workout. Also with regards to eating well, once you compare how you feel after a good meal compared to a bad meal, although it might be an effort to cook the good meal and do the washing up in some cases, the thought that you have given your body the right fuel and became 1% better in that way, is a very good one. This is real dopamine chasing (which I will write more about in the future), the struggle is worth the reward.
From the start of COVID I became hooked on trying to improve myself and here I am wanting to share that journey with you, if you want to follow along.
Now, taking a step back to earlier to touch on the “for the most part” comment I made. Self improvement and building good habits is all well and good but there have been times where I for one have fallen into a rabbit hole and not allowed myself to enjoy myself. Or, maybe went a little too far with it sometimes, taking things wayyy too seriously. Like for example, one thing used to be that if I didn’t manage my time to 100% effectiveness and make use of 100% of my time in the day, it would put me in a bad mood and make me feel so behind and guilty. Which, just isn’t the right way to live one’s life. At all. I started to make unrealistic demands from myself, which was not good for me or my mental health and is something I have had to manage and realised that I had to change. And so, I did change those expectations from myself. So if you do embark on a self improvement journey, just remember to not take life all that seriously and at the end of the day, it’s the people in your life that make it worth while in my opinion, not the things or being 100% optimal every day. Enjoy life and be sure to take some things seriously at times, but remember, we all end up in the same hole in the ground in the end.
So this is a bit about me and how I started and now after this while I have decided to start this blog. I don’t really know where this blog might go, I am just happy that I have finally written my first one and hopefully this is the first of many 😄 I will be posting my blog every Sunday evening weekly, so if there is even anyone reading this other than my mother, I hope it was a good read, I see you and thank you (and I hope you will come back for more) 😉
