The Easy Way To Live a Better Life

Sneak Peek:

Kristin:    00:00:00    As human beings, we are designed to thrive. We're designed for health and happiness, but often what society gives us is sickness and misery. And that is why a lot of the times you want to leave. 

Introduction: Welcome to Badass Digital Nomads, where we're pushing the boundaries of remote work and travel, all while staying grounded with a little bit of old school philosophy, self-development, and business advice from our guests.  

Kristin Wilson, Host:    00:00:39    Hey there, Kristin, from Traveling with Kristin here and welcome to episode 215 of Badass Digital Nomads. Now depending on what time you're listening to this episode on Tuesday, you still have time to tune in today, two of the Go Overseas Summit that I'm hosting with International Living. We had a lot of great speakers for day one and day two is just as great. We have Amelia and JP, who you might know from their YouTube channel. We have Chase Warrington, our friend from About Abroad podcast who has also been a guest on Badass Digital Nomads. And there are lots of international livings expert correspondence from around the world. We have Jessica coming to you from Panama, Ronan McMahon, talking about real estate. Glenda, who is going to share with you how she moved to Portugal. So you definitely want to catch that. It is free to attend and you can register using the link in the show notes. 

Kristin:    00:01:50    There's also an option to tune in on Wednesday for a bonus live Q and A panel. So really excited to be posting with so many great speakers from around the world. Now today I want to approach a very important topic from a different angle than I've ever talked about before on this podcast. This might be what we would consider philosophy with Kristin as one of our listeners, Anna Meredith <laugh> said the other day in the Facebook group. But we talk a lot about quality of life and happiness on the podcast and also in my YouTube videos because living a location, independent lifestyle, living a life of freedom where you can travel and live anywhere you want. For a lot of us it's about enjoying life. It's about being happy and it's about raising your standard of living and just having freedom. Freedom and flexibility. But finding happiness in life.  

Kristin:    00:02:58    It goes beyond just moving to a place with a low cost of living or a nice climate. And as many of you have commented on my videos throughout the years, wherever you go in the world, there you are. And what I mean by that is that you can't separate yourself from all of your problems when you leave a physical location. And some of them, yes, of course we can like a bad relationship, a toxic work environment, winter <laugh>, there's a lot of things that you can resolve if you just leave. Um, and this is this idea of leaving a place or escaping for a vacation or to just get away from it all. There's a reason that we have these sayings and this concept of leaving to find yourself or leaving to solve things is as old as philosophy. We have records from Seneca and other philosophers who were talking about the downsides of travel in excess because anything in excess can be bad.  

Kristin:    00:04:13    You can drink too much water, you know things that are good for you if you consume too much of them can be bad. And that goes for foods and drinks and substances and, and also activities. You can work out too much. You can work too much for humans. We want to stay in balance, right? Um, but in the modern day lifestyle, there are so many things that are pulling us in different directions. So although going overseas or having the flexibility to live anywhere in the world, let's say you have unlimited passive income and you're just jet-setting around the world, that is all great. But physical and mental health are things that you must take care of from the inside. And if having unlimited money and unlimited freedom to travel solved everything, then a lot of very wealthy people would be completely happy. And that's just not the case, right?  

Kristin:    00:05:15    You could be a billionaire with a private jet and a yacht and still not be happy. So yes, moving to a place that fits your lifestyle and has a better climate, more sunshine, fresh air where you can walk around and bike and be outside more or moving to a place that is known for longevity, like a blue zone where people live to be 100 years old, where there's more centenarians than any other places in the world. And these are places like the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, the Mediterranean. These are some things that you can do to increase your happiness and longevity and wellbeing by locating yourself in a place where your environment supports that. But traveling and living around the world doesn't solve all of our problems. And I've talked about burnout on the podcast before because I've experienced that a few times. The first time was when I was 20 years old and I have a podcast about that.  

Kristin:    00:06:27    I've talked about health insurance and travel insurance. I've talked about loneliness and making friends, but I haven't talked so much about physical health or addiction. I actually have an episode at the beginning of the year back in January about moving to support your physical health. But in general, it's not a topic that we've covered so often because this is a travel and careers and lifestyle podcast and not a health and wellness podcast. But as I have traveled around the world myself over the decades, I've experienced the ups and downs and struggles of life. And the more I travel, the more I learn about how these dynamics are playing out and the more I meet other people and learn from their experiences. And, and if I think back to before I started living overseas, when I graduated from high school and went into college, I didn't know what I didn't know.  

Kristin:    00:07:34    And I was just following this very traditional path from high school into college, into corporate America. And I was a product of my environment at that time. These were the days of that movie American Pie. So you know, it was the traditional college lifestyle of going out and partying and drinking. And I thought it was healthy to stay up all night playing beer pong with my friends and then drink coffee and sugar-free Red Bull in the morning to try to stay awake during my classes. It was also a time I think of very flawed nutritional advice where instead of keto and intermittent fasting, I thought it was healthy to eat a really low fat diet of processed foods and things like that. And now we know that fat is good for you. But anyway, things change. The science around nutrition changes, the status quo in society changes and that that was my normal back in the first couple years of college.  

Kristin:    00:08:44    And it didn't work out very well for me 'cause I wasn't feeling my best. But, but when I moved to Costa Rica, especially when I moved there after graduating from business school and I had years to live there, and I spent my first three years living in Guanacaste in the Northwest Province in the Nicoya Peninsula, which is one of those blue zones where there's a lot of health and wellness retreats and there's beaches, there's fresh organic food. That was when things really changed for me. I started learning about raw food cleansing, detoxing juice, fasting. I tried all kinds of different healing modalities from the very interesting people that I met while living in Costa Rica from Reiki to homeopathic remedies to sound healing and kinesiology. And if you don't know what any of those things are, <laugh>, you are not alone. Because when I first got to Costa Rica and my friend was telling me about juice fasting, I thought she meant just drinking bottles of apple juice from the store.  

Kristin:    00:09:57    <laugh>, you know, I had no idea. And when I met somebody who was a kinesiology practitioner and he told me he worked with energy, I thought he meant oil and gas <laugh>, I didn't think that he meant the body's energy. And so, you know, we all start somewhere when we're learning about these things and going to other countries can really, uh, expose you to not just the different cultures and in ways of living, but also, you know, if you went to, uh, China or Malaysia, you, you'd be around different types of eastern medicines and acupuncture and you know, things that are becoming mainstream now in Western countries as well. But everywhere you go you have an opportunity to learn about local medicines and things like that. So anyway, that was my starting my journey with health and wellness and healing from the burnout that I experienced as a 21 year old in grad school.  

Kristin:    00:11:06    And so that was very significant for me. And then later on, years later, when I was a digital nomad living in Bulgaria, so this is probably like 10 or 12 years later, that was really the first time that I ever experienced the taste of fresh fruit coming from a tree <laugh>, the taste of fresh plums, apples, cherries. I mean, in Florida we have oranges, grapefruits, we have a lot of citrus trees and that tastes good, but it's not a big difference from the, the produce I would buy in the store because all of the oranges and produce that we had in my hometown of Vero Beach pretty much came from Vero Beach. And so it all kind of tasted the same. But when I went to Bulgaria, which has a very, they have a lot of seasonal produce and you're just walking down the sidewalk in Bansko and there's literally apple trees and plums and nectarines and things like that, just growing on the side of the road.  

Kristin:    00:12:10    I mean, that was the first time I ever saw that in real life. And I did also see in Canada where I went hiking and wildberry picking. So if you're from a place in the northeast or the northwest where you have that kind of thing in your environment, then you know what that's about. Um, and then it's also mental health that I started to focus on and started to learn about and explore. And so when I was in Canada right before the pandemic, I did a Vipassana course, which I also made a podcast about, and I meditated in silence for 10 days straight. And I've been meditating now for probably 10 years. I've been eating pretty healthy. I've, you know, learned all of this over the past two decades. But nothing that I've ever done has been, you know, a perfect solution. There's always that sense that something is off or like nagging issues in your life, whether it's anxiety or yo-yo dieting or addiction to substances, burnout.  

Kristin:    00:13:22    There's so many things that can affect humans because we're animals <laugh>. And so I've struggled with a few different things over the years. Uh, you know, nothing very serious, but during the times that I was traveling a lot, it would be just exhaustion, jet lag, my sleep schedule would be off. I would gain and lose weight depending on where I was living and how fast I was traveling. And you know, what my diet was at the time. I've had more bad hangovers than I can count. And I've also had a love-hate relationship with caffeine. I once quit caffeine back in 2000, probably 2008, 2010, and quit for about a year or so, and then started drinking coffee again. And, you know, loved my coffee, but also I'm very sensitive to caffeine, alcohol, like really anything. And so, you know, it could be hard to know if I had too much coffee or not enough.  

Kristin:    00:14:30    But anyway, in January of last year when I was writing my book Digital Nomads for Dummies, I discovered something unexpectedly that has really changed my life ever since. And it's something that you can also access from anywhere in the world. And it's apparently something that 50 million people already knew about, but I had never heard of before. And what I discovered was this series of books that no one has ever mentioned to me. No one's ever recommended them. I've never seen ads for them, I've just never heard of them, didn't know that they existed. And I stumbled across these books because while I was writing Digital Nomads for Dummies, I felt like I needed to be my best self. I needed to have the maximum mental clarity to be able to show up every morning and write. And I noticed that like having a glass of wine at dinner or drinks with friends on the weekends was interfering with that because I was writing seven days per week.  

Kristin:    00:15:41    And so I decided to stop drinking while I was writing my book. But then a month or so later from just poking around on Google and blogs and seeing, you know, are there other people out there <laugh> that don't drink because, you know, sometimes it can seem like everybody is because of marketing and because of a societal signals and things like that. And so I ended up finding, um, these books called The Easy Way Books. And the one that I read was actually from a different author. It's called Kick the Drink, but it's somebody who worked with Alan Carr, who's the author of the Easy Way books. And they have a book for pretty much anything. And I do recommend the Kick the Drink book if you're looking to quit alcohol or reduce your alcohol intake. But what really changed things was finding these easy way books.  

Kristin:    00:16:40    And even though I didn't read the Easy Way to Quit Drinking or the Easy Way to Stop Alcohol, I have read a couple other ones. I read the book on Quitting Sugar. It's called Good Sugar, bad Sugar. I read the book on quitting caffeine and I was able to quit drinking coffee in one day, just cold Turkey and haven't had coffee in like a month now. And I'm also reading the one on the Easy Way to get a Better Sleep. And then there's another one that I wanna read, I haven't started it yet, which is called Smartphone Dumb Phone, and it's about device addiction. And so as a result of reading these books, I've been able to quit coffee for the first time in more than 10 years. I've also stopped eating sugar and empty carbs and most processed food. And hopefully soon I'll be able to sleep better and I'll also break up more with my phone.  

Kristin:    00:17:38    Um, that's something that I've written about on blogs, on Medium, about how to break up with your phone because especially in this era of remote work, it's so easy to be tied to your devices day and night, especially when you work online and especially when you're traveling. So it, it's not my place to explain this method or how these books work. This podcast is not sponsored. They don't even know, you know, the publisher of this book won't even know that I'm talking about this book, but I wanted to dedicate an entire episode of the podcast to bringing these books to your attention so that you can check them out and see if any of them resonate with you. It seems like it started with the easy way to quit smoking, but there's so many different books now. There's the easy way to lose weight, the easy way to control alcohol or stop drinking The easy way to quit emotional eating, quit vaping, the easy way to enjoy flying.  

Kristin:    00:18:45    So if you have a fear of flying, you could check that book out, quit caffeine, get better sleep, quit sugar, stop gambling. I mean any sort of like quote unquote vices that we, that we have as human beings, the easy way to stop worrying, no more worrying, get out of debt. Uh, there's a whole host of of books here in this library and apparently 50 million people have used this method to stop doing lots of things, <laugh>, lots of things that are kind of imprinted on us by our surroundings and by society. But since I had never heard of them and I really wish I knew about these books like 10 or 15 years ago, I wanted to share them with you and see if any of them appeal to you. This is very related to what we talk about as far as travel, living abroad and cultural integration because one of the things I have noticed so much through my travels is how influential your environment is to your behaviors, your habits, your activities, and your belief patterns.  

Kristin:    00:20:04    Part of our personality is who we were when we were born, but then part of it is how we were raised our parents, our, our surroundings. And I have talked about in my book and on the podcast and in YouTube videos on how you can really leverage this lifestyle as a tool to change your behaviors. So if you've ever read books like Atomic Habits by James Clear or Willpower Doesn't Work by Ben Hardy, then you've probably tried to change your habits before and you're familiar with some of those strategies, but it still takes a lot of work. And the, the reason I like the Easy Way books is that after a couple hours of reading or listening to these books, like you can just stop doing something and change your behaviors literally overnight. And that is not something that I even knew was possible. Um, but I have talked about in my content how you can go to another country that supports your personal goals.  

Kristin:    00:21:11    You can put yourself in an environment that is preparing you to succeed in your career, or that's giving you the opportunity to learn a hobby or practice a sport that is completely true and you can also get out of a rutt by doing that, and that's very effective. But there's certain things that we carry with us around. And I have met a lot of other, uh, digital nomads and expats that have struggled with mental health, with drinking too much, with all sorts of different things. And that's because we're humans <laugh> and, and we are influenced by our surroundings. But if you really think about it, I think our surroundings play such a huge part in our beliefs, not just your language. You know, if you are born in the US or Canada or the UK, then you speak English. And if you are born in many parts of Latin America, then you speak Spanish.  

Kristin:    00:22:19    And that's where it starts on the surface. But it also goes so much deeper Where you were born and the environment that you were raised in affects so many different things from religion to daily activities. Like if you were born in Italy or Brazil, then you probably like soccer or football. But if you're born in the US then you're partial to American football. If you're born in Japan, then you probably like to eat rice and sushi and savory foods for breakfast. Whereas if you're born in the US you might have grown up on cereal. Uh, if you were born in Spain, you might be used to having some siestas and eating dinner really late. Whereas if you were born in Costa Rica, you might eat dinner really early because the sun goes down early and people wake up really early. If you're born in a certain state in the US like in the South, you might identify more with the Christian religion.  

Kristin:    00:23:23    Whereas if you're from Bali, you might practice Hinduism. And if you are born in the US you might very well have a driver's license. But if you were born in Berlin, you might not and you might have never owned a car or never driven in your life. So it, it really does depend where you're from. And of course you might be raised in a family or an environment that tries to imprint certain things on you and then you go in a different direction and that's totally normal as well. But the decision to live your life in a different way than society is suggesting to you or flat out tells you and recommends to you in a way it's a form of protest, but it's also important and empowering to know where our habits and beliefs come from and decide if you want to change them.  

Kristin:    00:24:29    I just published a video about things that I don't miss about living in the US and maybe I'll share that on the podcast as well. But there's things that you're going to like and dislike about different places, but it's just so helpful to understand why we do the things that we do and to be able to feel empowered to change them should you want to. Now you might think, Kristin, you're crazy. I drink two flat whites a day and I love it and I'm never gonna stop. And that's totally fine. My grandma drank coffee every day until she was 93. And there's like nothing wrong with that. But if there's anything going on in your life that you feel like, oh, I would, you know, I would really like to cut back on that, or I would like to stop doing that, or it's just like a recurring thing that's bothering you, then take a look and maybe there's something there that can help you.  

Kristin:    00:25:27    You can change whatever you want about yourself. And the biggest takeaway for me from reading these books is thinking that change is hard and realizing that change isn't necessarily hard. We think change is hard because that's what everyone says and that's the narrative. And also the strategies that so-called experts give us to change. Things are not effective. And so we start to embody that as personal failure when we're unable to change behaviors that we want to change because those behaviors that we've acquired are from our environment and then the experts around us are giving us bad advice for how to change those things. That's a lot <laugh>, but hopefully I'm making sense here. There is a line in the easy way to better sleep in chapter 12 where he says, we know more choose these behaviors than we do the language we speak. It's part of the culture we were brought up in.  

Kristin:    00:26:42    If you were born into a tribe in the Amazon, you probably get very good sleep that starts at sunset and ends with the sunrise. But if you are born in New York, you might get five or six hours of sleep and your mornings and evenings are taken up with a commute to work. That is not the natural way that we were built to live. And a lot of the stresses of modern day society are reasons for why we want to find a better life in other countries. And I just believe that this is another extra piece that can help you unlock more happiness and wellbeing wherever you are in the world. Because as human beings, we are designed to thrive. We're designed for health and happiness, but often what society gives us is sickness and misery. And that is why a lot of the times you want to leave.  

Kristin:    00:27:46    For me, this method was a key to unlocking a sense of well-being that I really haven't felt before. And it's also made travel more enjoyable. I'm sure I'm saving money and I'm just generally feeling better and more at peace. My mind has been opened to what appears to be an infinite reservoir of health and happiness through changing some of the things in my life that I previously perceived as fixed and normal. And the key to that is through these books. And so I wanted to share that key with you so you can choose to open that door if you see fit. So check them out if there's anything that you're struggling with and I hope that they help you as much as they helped me. They're in audio book format as well, and I've, I've done both. I've read some, I've listened to some, and I'll link to them in the show notes. This was a little philosophy with Kristin for you here today. I hope that it was helpful. You can check the show notes for those resources that I mentioned and you can also join me today live for day two of International Living's Go Overseas Summit that I'll also link for you in the show notes. Have a great day, have a great week, and I'll see you again next week.