10 Tools for the Body | 10 Concepts for the Mind
Last Updated: June 2023
By Anna Franziska Hunger ****and Martin Rajcan at KAYA VC
Table of Contents
none of this was written by ChatGPT
Context Setting
Our purpose is to help the reader better orient themselves in the complex topic of personal growth and wellbeing. There exists an overload of information of varying quality and this document is an attempt to alleviate this problem.
We believe that designing a lifestyle for optimal health is, from a long-term perspective, the best thing you can do for yourself and for those who care about you and rely on you. Put another way, if you don’t prioritise your health, you may be short-changing yourself and those who love you, which often only becomes apparent once your own health and wellbeing is compromised.
The great news is that most of the habits that generate high wellbeing are no cutting-edge innovations but rather things that have stood the test of time for many generations past and their wide-spread adoption around the world is a testament to their effectiveness and robustness. So we’re really just trying to help the reader re-discover simple practices that work reliably.
Main Objective
We attempt to synthesise the existing fact base on which readers can build individualised self-development approaches and resilience protocols. Each reader will likely develop a different version of what works for them and the intensity and discipline with which you pursue any new practice will likely be directly proportional to the level of imbalance you’re experiencing in your life, in the form of negative mental states (too much anger, poor sleep, overwhelm, etc.), physical challenges (too much back pain, exhaustion, headaches, etc.), or a combination thereof.
We provide extensive references to in-depth analysis and expert commentary for further study. Even if already long at ~20k words of primary text, this document is more of an 80-20 resource guide rather than a comprehensive “health encyclopaedia.” We tried to not overwhelm the reader with choice, and presented as few topics as was sensible; there are dozens more we could have included but dropped mainly because of what we believed is ambiguous factual support or strong overlap with what we already addressed.
We strongly believe that “less is more.” Even a subset of these tools and concepts has the potential to be make a meaningful impact on your wellbeing. **We prefer you to go a mile deep rather than a mile wide in your own practice, while leaving some room for experimentation, trial & error, and playfulness along the way. “**Balance” the way we refer to it doesn’t mean perfect balance or work-life balance maintaining a 40 hour work week; it means, implicitly, less extreme imbalance and a more sensible prioritisation of one’s time. “Building for Balance” therefore is about embracing the chaos of our lives in a more long-term orientated, sustainable, and ultimately more productive way.
We feel we succeeded if we even just slightly nudged you towards prioritising a couple of the suggested tools and concepts and you had begun feeling the benefit of them subsequently. Please let us know if that happens — you’ll make our day!
Personal Motivation