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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Total health and wellness consists of:

  • Your total physical health including your lifespan, body fat %, strength, and mobility;
  • Your total mental health including your brain power, brain speed, memory, and focus;
  • Your total emotional health including your ability to manage emotions, your connections with others, and your happiness;
  • Your success-based health including how closely you are living your purpose, achieving your definition of success, and your mastery over the systems and habits that will get you there. 

The formula for total health is simple:

Mental Health + Physical Health + Emotional Health + Purpose & Goals = Happiness, Total Health, & Success = Your Best Life.

We make it extremely simple to build a custom routine for total health and to reach your specific goals in 3 easy steps.

1) Start by evaluating yourself honestly to identify your goals and time constraints with our 10 second quiz. Through evaluating your assessment we will create a personalized daily routine made up of small habits that make you incrementally better everyday in the areas you want it the most (1% better everyday, with compound interest, is over 3,678% better per year

2) Employ behavioral psychology (habit science) techniques to keep your routine consistent, eliminate the need for willpower, and turn your routine into a lifelong habit.

3) Use evidence-based learning materials  and skill progressions to reach heights you never dreamed of including creating your ideal body, eliminating unwanted behaviors like procrastination and addiction, creating a system, timeline, and plan that practically force you to reach your goals, overcoming emotional baggage that you had no idea how to manage before now, and being happier than you ever thought possible, all in just minutes a day.

By consistently engaging in habits proven to bring more health, happiness, and success into your life everyday you start to build unstoppable momentum toward your best life and ideal self.

Stress, distractions, and ease of access to unhealthy behaviors & entertainment are at all-time highs leading to an overstressed, unhealthy, emotionally frail, lethargic, frustrated, and mentally under-stimulated population paralyzed by information overload or fear of failure. The sad truth is that you can’t be happy just staying stagnant in your life, body, mind, and relationships, by just following the patterns ingrained since childhood, by constantly reacting instead of proactively creating your reality. You can’t live your purpose and achieve your goals. You can’t have the most rewarding relationships and connections that you deserve. You can’t be the person you dreamed of being as a child. You deserve to be your best self and live your ideal lifestyle daily.

Today more than ever, we need a way to organize our physical health, mental health, emotional health, and our highest aspirations into one efficient and time-saving system to combat the extreme levels of stress and the malaise of unhealthy behaviors that have become the default option for many people. We need a truly integrated program for total health, not just one small portion of your total health. We need to break away from the traditional piecemeal model, that is so common today, of only focusing on one small aspect of yourself such as just your physical health, mental health, emotional health, or only focusing on financial goals at the expense of the other aspects of yourself.

Going to the gym alone is simply not enough for total health. We can’t just get really buff with no emotional regulation and mental development or we might as well be gorillas. Who cares if you’re physically fit if you’re not living a fulfilled life or if emotional trauma is wreaking havoc on your life with no solution in sight? Going to a therapist while (sometimes) immensely helpful is also notoriously expensive. Not to mention, focusing only on emotions can make us happy but neglecting our physical health can cause early death and poor quality of life. Focusing on our financial goals can provide security, freedom, and fun, but money without purpose can lead to depression and as we’ve seen in many high-profile celebrity cases, suicide. Focusing on concentration and mental mastery can lead to more happiness, more enjoyment in life, and more success, but it is a recipe for disease and poor physical health if training our bodies is neglected completely. 

 

Living your purpose and mastering your physical, mental, and emotional health are all noble goals that will lead to immense benefits if pursued separately. When you pursue these goals together, they feed off of each other creating a sum of benefits greater than its parts.

Here are the 2 easiest ways to get started right now:

1) Year of Thriving– If you want to change your whole life for the better in an easy way choose the Year of Thriving program where you will learn all of the 12 core Thriving habits by focusing on incorporating one habit into your total health routine each month of the year.  The Year of Thriving also makes a great gift.

2) Custom total health routine– Create your personalized total health routine based on your health goals in just 10 seconds and get a free routine journal with beginner exercises to jumpstart your total health journey!

Over 500 Peer Reviewed Studies… 

The habits taught by the Thriving Institute are designed to improve your mental, emotional, and physical health as well as help you live your definition of success and purpose. Below you can find some of the benefits you can achieve with regular use of the habits in the Thriving Routines. Click the links next to each benefit to be taken to the source verifying the benefit of the habit. The over 500 sources can also be used as a jumping off point to further investigate techniques to improve your total health.

 

Mental Health Benefits:

 

Physical Health Benefits:

 

Emotional Health Benefits:

 

Success & Purpose Benefits:

The 4 Categories of Total Health

The habits taught by Thriving.org can be broken down into four broad categories of Mental, Physical, Emotional, and Purpose which can be further broken down into habits. These can be broken down further into individual techniques. These habits serve as the keys to unlocking happiness, total health, and success. 

Mental Health Habits

For our purposes mental health can be defined as the quality of your cognition and manipulation of brain states. Cognition being the functioning of the brain, including brain speed and memory. Manipulation of brain states is defined as your ability to observe your inner world objectively, calm yourself, focus, and enjoy each moment as well as your ability to actively train your brain to do certain tasks or respond in a desired way automatically. 

Breathing Habit

In the Breathing Module you will learn to control your stress and energization responses through breathing to make stress your lapdog and evoke a calm, focused demeanor on command. Increase your lung capacity, gain control over your autonomic nervous system, and even learn proven techniques to breathe your way to more happiness.

Visualization Habit

In the Visualization Module you will learn how to increase your motivation, get physically stronger, reprogram your automatic responses to stimuli (such as stimuli that typically make you sad, mad or stressed), and get better at any skill through the art of imagination, or mental rehearsal.

Mindfulness Habit

In the Mindfulness Module you will learn what mindfulness really means without any mysticism to gain the benefits of increased focus, increased self control, and increased enjoyment in all things you do.

Physical Health Habits

Physical health is by far the easiest of the four aspects of total health to grasp. It is defined as the health of your body generally including your muscles, body fat %, mobility, longevity, immunity, and sexual health.

Movement Habit

In the Movement Module, you will use natural movement to get all your movement for general health without ever doing any actual “exercise” or if you want to exercise we will automatically create a customized exercise and mobility plan based on your current fitness, your goals, and the amount of time you want to spend working out (as little as 30 seconds, 1 time a week). Whether your goal is general wellness, losing weight, gaining muscle, or a combination of goals we have a plan for you that is easy, effective, and personally tailored to your body and preferences.

Diet Habit

In the Diet Module, you will learn simple habits that make getting to and maintaining your ideal weight natural and normal without ever counting calories.

Cold Exposure Habit

In the Cold Module, we will go beyond your outward appearance and focus on the immune system. We will learn how to boost our immune systems, decrease stress, and increase focus and willpower greatly by exposing our bodies to cold temperatures starting with mere seconds of cold water at the end of a shower.

Sexual Health Habit 

Optional: In the Sexual Module we will focus on the pubococcygeus muscles that support sexual health. Strengthening these muscles can be done while lounging on the couch but can lead to giving and receiving more sexual pleasure, faster time to orgasm for women, delayed ejaculation for men (advanced users can control ejaculation), more orgasms for women, and “mythical” multiple orgasms for men.

Emotional Health Habits

Emotional health for our purposes can be defined as your happiness, your ability to deal with difficult emotions, thoughts, and situations, and the quality of your relationships (which have been recently found to be paramount to health and happiness).

Emotional Regulation (ER) Habit

In the Emotional Regulation Module, you will learn techniques rooted in cognitive behavioral psychology (CBT), the most evidence-based form of psychotherapy and the current gold standard. Our easy-to-use material will allow you to understand and control your emotions (anxiety, depression, anger, etc.) and resulting actions to a degree you most likely never thought possible. This increased emotional regulation and understanding can permeate your whole life leading to better relationships, more happiness, and more control over your life.

Connection Habit

In the Connection Module, you will build fulfilling relationships, expand your network, and inject more happiness and meaning into your life every day through connecting with others. You will learn how to grow your feelings of connection, which can significantly lower your chances of death and drastically increase your happiness while enjoying yourself thoroughly.

Gratitude Habit

In the Gratitude Module, you will reprogram your brain to give and receive more gratitude leading to more happiness. You will be able to experience the same reality as others but you will more easily be able to reframe the situation in a positive light. Real and authentic gratitude leads to real and authentic joy. When you give a gift in authentic gratitude like volunteering your time you are making an investment in yourself and your own happiness that will pay itself back many times over.

Purpose & Success Habits

Living a life without purpose can damn you to a life of decreased mental and physical health, not to mention spending your last moments on earth in regret. Living your purpose, however, can boost happiness and health significantly, even helping you live longer.

Besides avoiding the #1 rated dying regret, finding purpose is worthwhile to pursue because it’s a key factor in happiness, longevity, mental health, wealth, and even physical health. A 27 year study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found a positive relationship between purpose and many positive attributes, most notably increased happiness, longevity, and productivity. There is growing evidence that suggests that having a strong sense of purpose is linked to less mortality from many causes, better physical and mental health, increased overall quality of life, and increased happiness.

Goals Habit

In the Goals & Values Module, we dive deep into your dreams in all aspects of your life. We guide you to flesh out every detail of your core values, highest aspirations, deepest motivations, and ideal future self including your financial situation, and your relationships to those around you. We then help you build a personalized system to realize your highest aspirations and teach you to incorporate behavioral design to make each activity in your system a habit that you will execute daily without fail. 

By the time you are done with this part of the program, you will have not only clarified your values, your goals, and your deepest motivations, but you will also have a timeline to achieve your goals, a roadmap to achieving your goals, and a custom system to work towards your goals daily. 

Planning & Productivity Habit

In the Planning & Productivity Module, we dive into short-term planning, productivity, and deep work. You will always know what the next actionable steps are for your highest priority and most important projects and when exactly you will carry those steps out. When you are executing your tasks you will have numerous productivity tools at your disposal to encourage deep work and maximize productivity.

Behavioral Design Habit

In the Behavioral Design portion of the module, we get into very important and interesting territory, habit science. Using the latest research in the field of behavioral psychology we can confidently create, eliminate, replace, or modify any habit for the long-term. We can also use these same strategies to decrease or increase the likelihood of performing almost any activity. We refer to this process as “designing a path of least resistance” and we will learn to use this process daily to drastically change and shape our lives to the forms of our choosing.

Great minds like:

  • Albert Einstein
  • Nikola Tesla

 

Elite athletes like:

  • 70-90% of Olympians
  • Michael Phelps
  • Michael Jordan

 

Billionaires like:

  • Warren Buffet
  • Elon Musk
  • Oprah

 

Special populations across the earth like:

  • The longest-living people on the planet identified in the Blue Zones studies 
  • The happiest and most content individuals identified in an over 80-year-long Harvard study 

 

These are just some of the extremely successful people who swear by some of the techniques we provide on thriving.org. We rely on the power of experts and heavy hitters in their respective fields to validate and flesh out the most useful techniques. Once a technique has been validated with scientific evidence we validate it further by examining who is using the technique and what results they are receiving. When we notice the highest achievers using these techniques such as Olympic athletes, world record holders, world leaders, CEOs, self-made billionaires, and extremely happy people we know we are on the right path.

Low Time Commitment

Most beginner practices can be done in ten seconds or less. After a habit is built time can be added as needed and desired for faster progression. We also incorporate numerous inbuilt time-saving strategies to utilize your downtime, maximize your free time, and minimize distractions to get more done at a higher quality in less time.  

 

No Equipment or Gym Needed

The practices cover a wide range of activities ranging from physical exercises to mental exercises to planning yet none require any more equipment than a normal person has at hand (Some may require a piece of paper or a phone). No gym, no yoga mat, no specialized notebooks, and no products necessary whatsoever. This allows you to do the exercises anywhere and at any time you desire.

 

Never Get Stuck

Our learning material and exercises are designed with clear progressions from beginner to advanced.  You will always know your next actionable step forward to allow you to keep growing and never stagnate. Practically, this means our materials are accessible to anyone from absolute beginners to experts and will always provide methods for advancement no matter how (un) skilled you are. We take the guesswork out of advancing and give you the exact steps to take to move forward at any level.

 

We Set You Up for Lifelong Success

The ultimate goal of these routines is for you to take ownership of your total health. We strive to give you the evidence-based skills, techniques, and knowledge necessary to own your routine for total health. Through this knowledge and experience, you will gain an understanding of how to customize each aspect of your routine in the most effective and time-efficient manner for you personally. Take ownership of your own health, purpose, and happiness. No more being a victim of your circumstances. No more excuses about not having a trainer, therapist, life coach, dietician, etc. This program gives you the basic information to take ownership of your health. You’ll be able to understand and advance without relying on anyone or paying anyone. The best part is with this knowledge you have the power to create custom programs and hone in on the areas that are most important to you. You also have the ability to advance to the next level in so many areas of your total health and explore the immense amount of practices worldwide that have transformative power. Our way isn’t the only way. It’s just one interpretation of the evidence. What’s important, is that you gain an understanding of the various components of total health, some of the most effective ways of improving them, and in some small way implement them into your life in a way that works for you. 

 

Customizable & Substitutable

This is not a one-trick pony type of program, but a fully customizable system for anyone in any walk of life. Each portion of this program is essential, but our method is not the only method. Feel free to substitute CrossFit, playing sports, or your qualified personal trainer’s workout for the workouts and natural movement substitures we provide. If you go to a local Buddhist temple or yoga class feel free to substitute their breathing exercises for our own. If you are super organized and have a to-do list format that you have used for years substitute it for ours. We don’t try to dominate your life but fit into it smoothly to make your life easier and better. You can use this program to optimize your physical, emotional, and mental health all at once or focus on just one area. You can even customize this program to reach any type of goal whether you want to become the best golfer, chef, husband, mother, best-selling author, or business magnate, or simply have the most stress-free life possible.

 

Eliminate the Need for Willpower

How can we bypass willpower and get straight to the doing? By integrating cognitive behavioral therapy, neuroscience, and behavioral science we use the modern understanding of the human brain and human thinking patterns to outwit our bad habits of procrastination, laziness, and lack of focus. By using behavioral science we can eliminate the need for willpower by designing our environments and structuring our lives so the best decision is the easiest and most natural decision to make. Imagine if all your good habits were actually easy to do (and difficult NOT to do) so you did them without even thinking about them. After one year where would you be? Your finances, your body, your relationships, your happiness? How many years have you wasted not moving forward? Take the first step now and create your total health routine here.