Three Zero-Cost Routines That Are Universally Useful

I want to make a confession. I am a routine junkie. If I see something remotely interesting and helpful, I will probably try it. And I am like this for 20 years.

After trying almost everything under the sun, and after working with many people, I think I’ve found three routines that are universally useful for most people in most cases. By useful, I mean that they can improve their quality of life in almost every scenario.

1. Intense Physical Activity

Yeah, it’s banal. But it’s incredibly useful for so many things. It reduces anxiety, depression, and improves cognition, learning speed, focus, mood, lifespan, libido—you name it, intense physical activity probably improves it. Intense physical activity is also effective for addicts trying to stop their addiction because it releases similar chemicals—only without trying to kill you.

2. Meditation

There are many types of meditation, but even the most basic one—focusing on your breath for 10 to 15 minutes a day or even occasionally—tends to improve almost every aspect of your life. It enhances attention, improves mood, and helps with stress management. It improves focus, lowers cortisol levels, and has a wide range of benefits backed by large-scale studies. Meditation is risk-free, free of cost, accessible in almost every situation, and affects nearly every part of your life.

3. Journaling

As with intense physical activity and meditation, there are many different types of journaling you can explore. For now, I’ll focus on free journaling—writing down or using voice memos to externalize the content of your brain in a free-flow format. Personally, I used a fountain pen and paper for a long time (recommended by my coach), but now I use the speech-to-text function in ChatGPT for journaling.

The main benefit of journaling is externalizing your thoughts and gaining perspective. It’s like clearing a mental buffer. It brings clarity, quiets inner chatter, and helps you identify what’s important and what’s troubling. Journaling is also backed by science—what researchers call the Pennebaker Effect has shown that expressive writing can significantly improve mood, aid in healing trauma, and enhance mental well-being.

Digital Empathy

With LLM’s ability to reason, do math, calculate, and write growing every day, one of the areas that is still underdeveloped is emotional recognition and digital empathy. I tried their avatars and was generally impressed by the experience. A machine’s ability to not only understand human emotions but also express them or mimic them in effective ways is still in progress.

The ability to express and recognize emotions is incredibly important, especially in activities that are not based merely on facts, like in psychology, coaching, or just in human-to-human interaction.

But we are slowly moving towards more developed digital empathy and expression of emotions by machines themselves. Part of this shift is happening with a change of interface. The evolution is looking like text-to-text, voice-to-voice, and finally, digital avatar to a person.

One of the services that offer AI consultants or AI assistants is Soul Machines, a company betting on this last approach: human-to-computer avatar. I was genuinely impressed by the experience. The speech recognition is fast, and the emotions that the AI avatar produces are mostly appropriate, though still a little clunky. Nonetheless, it’s incredibly impressive.

Yet, I’m still curious to see a digital agent that I feel truly connected with, emotionally. Weirdly enough, I think this moment has already passed with the invention of Tamagotchi, but that was still quite a limited interaction.