To heal, the conditions must change and for conditions to change, habits must change because habit is the root cause.

To change habits, you must be exceptionally clear about what to change, and exceptionally clear about how.

Except for accidents and illnesses that we’re born with, the causes of illness and health problems are always sub-optimal lifestyle over a long time frame. And lifestyle has many factors.

To be well, to heal, there is no true cure other than to live right and think right, to put the conditions in place that your genes expect because genetics and environment are exquisitely balanced. And because the root cause is your habits, to stop getting worse, to turn things around and get happy and healthy, you have to change your habits.

All the best,

Mike Kinnaird
Habit Guide: How to be Happy & Healthy

“I’m plagued by unwanted thoughts every day all the time… My brain constantly sees stories and things that never happened but they’re very vivid… like having a movie in the background with the volume way up… I’m constantly in fear of getting hurt and fear of pain. Now I’ll admit this could have to do with some events in my life but long story short I am constantly on a hair trigger to snap because I’m afraid of getting hurt… but this always ends up firing off at the wrong people… Help me.”

Weed your garden

Basic info — you’ve got a weedy garden. Actually it’s well overgrown, more like a jungle :-) The analogy of mind to garden is very accurate. Thoughts are like seeds and you unwittingly plant and nurture weeds, before long you’ve got a jungle. This is the basic problem, good to know…

The dream of ego… or nightmare

Now thinking becomes over-dominant. As children we didn’t think much, our experience was mainly of being, not thinking. But then we think more and more and are encouraged by schools and so-on. And worse, we begin to identify with all this thinking, making a self out of it. After a while, there is hardly any being left, only thinking, rapidly firing thought habits that we identify with.

Thinking as a habit — don’t go there, go here

So thinking becomes habit and habits effortlessly repeat. And the more busy our lives get, the more stressful, the more we need to think in order to sort out the mess and stay on top. Playfulness goes out the window because that is spontaneous and relies on being. So the remedy is to go back to being and make that a habit. A habit to exit habit and get back to being. Habit Guide has the simple ways to do this.

Meaning dictates response

Now the maze of madness (yes that’s what it is although it’s very “normal”) grows out of control, we get lost in all this thinking, it gets more and more confusing and we give meaning to stuff that really has no meaning. Meaning dictates how your mind responds and the greatest meaning you can give is fear…

What you fear, you notice everywhere

Fear means “danger” to your mind, and so it appears vividly in your experience, you notice it everywhere, look out for it, associate it with lots of things — sights, sounds, events.

Re-frame your fear

You can re-frame fear using logic, you look at the fear coldly, in the cold light of day and look at the facts. No one else is constantly fearing pain, that’s curious, maybe it’s dysfunctional? So, what is a better way to be? What if this fear just was not there? Would that be better? So you have a thought process that deconstructs whatever belief you have that supports the idea that you need to fear pain and get to a place where you are ready to let go. And that means being really clear about your new truth, thereby removing all meaning it has and then ignoring every thought or feeling to do with it — why would you give a second thought to something that has no meaning?

Mind is complex, but running it is simple

As I say, Habit Guide has all the tools for getting back to sanity, simple stuff actually but it’s really missing information that we could all do with learning when we’re about 5 years old. It’s basically all about returning to being, and then being able to think consciously, so that you never again get a weedy garden or confuse your self with mere thoughts.

Stay calm and carry on

If you’re on a hair-trigger, then you’re bound to be hyper-reactive but all the tools I’ve talked about will affect you positively so that you will gradually return to a natural state of relaxation, no hair-trigger. In fact you can get so masterful over your mind, that nothing disturbs your peace at all and so that you always have choice. So you become nonreactive… cool. If you think about all those cool movie heroes, that’s the quality they all have… nonreactive, always able to choose.

Everything affects everything else

Ultimately every problem has many causes because everything affects everything else. To get to happiness, to always feel good, you need to address all factors that are playing into the problem. It turns out that every problem has the same causes — not living right and not thinking right.

So, the Habit Guide way is to correct the causes of problems and put the causes of happiness in place every day, to learn to live right and to think right. That’s what’s going to get the job done, and not only will it solve this problem but will prevent other problems popping up in future.

Please leave a comment if you need more clarity :-)

All the best,

Mike Kinnaird
Habit Guide: How to be Happy & Healthy

© wine me up

One of the BIG obstacles to successful change is FEAR.

It’s the fear of being forced into the unknown where there could be misery. Who knows what will happen if you take this path? It can be scary to even look…

We’d often much rather stick with the devil we know. We’d rather stick to our comfort zones where we know what to expect, where there won’t be any unpleasant surprises. We want to stay in control.

We have ideas about what healthy living means… punishing workouts, sweat, toil, denial…

Healthy living sucks right?

And we know, because we tried it and it hurt! “I’d rather be fat and happy”… “I’m going to do whatever I want and whatever happens… so be it!” we say.

Many many people resign themselves to stay as they are, because they tried and tried and failed. It hurt. It sucked! And finally they resolved to stop trying…

It’s true that change can be painful if done in the WRONG way. And that’s because we attempt too much. Easily solved — attempt less, take easy steps.

The BIG thing to remember is that healthy living is a JOY. It’s only the change part that needs to be carefully managed.

You can have it all! You deserve the best and the true solutions are there waiting for you to dare a peak.

When you’ve finished reading Habit Guide you won’t be scared to change… you’ll be RELIEVED, INSPIRED, CLEAR, DECISIVE.

The end is clearly mapped out for you, the path is straight and easy to navigate. And the rewards are delightful…

Go for it!

Mike Kinnaird
Habit Guide: How to be Happy & Healthy

© St Stev

Shock horror! Look at the top two definitions for “nature” at dictionary.com;

1. The material world esp. as surrounding humankind and existing independently of human activities.

2. The natural world as it exists without human beings or civilization.

Is it right to think of humans as separate from nature?

Don’t you think it’s interesting that we see nature as being separate? Even so, we put the words “nature” and “mother” together in common language. We know instinctively that our relationship to nature is like that of a child and mother.

A mother nurtures and cares for her child, but also exercises control, influence and authority. A child doesn’t understand the world fully so the mother protects it by means of rules. Nature did that for us. There were definite rules and controls. We had to obey the rules. There was no other way. So, nature is a mother in the sense that there are rules, and that the rules exist to maintain harmony and balance…

We depend on natural resources for our life. Food, water, air, sunshine. How long would life on earth last without the sun? Yet in general we give mother nature about as much thought and respect as something we just trod in.

We do a lot of taking and not much giving in this relationship with our mother. Why? I think partly this has to do with our extremely complex social structures in which we all do different jobs. Most of us have play no part in the supply of our food, other than a weekly trip to the supermarket. Naturally then, we give it little thought.

Natural controls keep everything balanced

I’ve always loved nature. Study wild animals and you learn that their fate is totally tied to the natural world;

• They eat what is locally available, in season. In nature there’s no choice. They eat what’s there or they don’t eat.
• They eat fresh, organic, wild food in it’s raw natural state.
• They generally eat only foods that they’re adapted to.
• They get up with the sun and go to bed when it’s dark (at least the ones like us that are active in the daytime)
• Their numbers are in direct proportion to the amount of available food.
• The strong survive and the weak die out (natural selection)

We find the last one on the list particularly disturbing especially if it’s applies to us but it has a vital role in the health of individual species. It’s nature’s way of keeping the gene pool of a species strong and well-adapted.

These natural controls were the same for humans, as they are to a large extent for hunter-gatherer populations alive today. These controls allow harmony and balance to exist in and between different species and with the environment.

If the environment changes as it always does over time, the best adapted individuals are more likely to pass on their genes and so the biology of a species also changes over time and balance is maintained.

Humans left “home” — but why?

We left the protection of our mother between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago when many humans gave up hunter-gatherer lifestyles and started farming. This happened all over the world in different cultures. In genetic terms, this is the blink of an eye. We are pretty much the same today as we were then.

Farming allowed us to have control over our food supply. As our ancestors moved into more northern climates, the food supply became very seasonal compared to the tropics. Farming allowed us to be sure we always had food. Grains can be stored over the winter. And instead of following herds of wild game around, farming allowed us to domesticate animals for our own purposes.

The effects of leaving home

The farming strategy was amazingly successful and saw the birth of a human population explosion. This is the start of our separation from the controls of nature. It’s easy to see how now we can now see nature as separate from us, an untamed wilderness for our use and pleasure.

The human population has been growing steadily since the birth of farming and since the industrial revolution is spiralling out of control. 10,000 years ago the human population was 4 million and now it’s over 6,000 million. The future population predictions are frightening and many believe, unsustainable.

Our success is also a problem. We have the intelligence to cheat nature. Starting from the simplest tools, we passed on knowledge from generation to generation until today we have the power to destroy ourselves and our planet.

Now our cheating abilities know no bounds. We can even travel to the moon and build weapons that could destroy whole countries. We have power, without question. But without natural controls, things are getting out of hand.

I can’t help but think Agent Smith in The Matrix has an extremely insightful and poignant point…

“I’d like to share with you a revelation I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed.

The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we… are the cure.”

Well I wouldn’t describe humanity as a plague or a disease! I have a much greater love of my fellow homo-sapiens than Agent Smith :-)

The point is that without natural controls, things can easily get unbalanced. The further we stray from our genetic inheritance, the worse things get. Genetically we are adapted to eat what comes from nature directly. It’s impossible to describe or even imagine the millions upon millions of tiny little changes that must have happened in our biology and behavior to adapt to a slowly changing world over millions of years.

The last 10,000 years have been a big shock to our system in genetic terms. Modern and unnatural foods, designed for profit and better shelf-life have appeared only in the last 200 years and they’re killing us. Heart disease, diabetes, stokes, cancer, depression, arthritis… the tip of the iceberg. Virtually non-existent in wild animals and tribal peoples.

Not only that, they are reducing our quality of life. Even more recently began the use of pesticides and fungicides. Your great-grandparents and possibly your grandparents ate organic food. There was no other kind.

One of the more obvious results of our modern lifestyle is lack of sunlight for many people. When our genes evolved, they did so in line with our outdoor lives. We need the sun in so many ways to maintain health, from making vitamin D, to regulating hormones and bodily rhythms to making the “feel good” chemicals in our bodies when sunlight hits the backs of our eyes.

This simple example shows how acutely and exquisitely we are adapted to the natural world. If we want exceptional health, we need to re-create natural conditions in our lives as best we can.

The modern world throws up many other challenges associated with our maladapted genes to such radical changes. The flight or fight response that served us as we evolved, does not work so well in “civilization,” where more often we’re faced with situations where neither flight OR fight is a suitable response.

Our natural food instincts don’t serve so well now either. They only work in a natural setting, not in McDonalds or KFC. Our love of fat served us well when fatty, high calorie food was scarce and the food supply uncertain. In modern times, it’s a problem.

When we lived in nature, our bodies were the perfect fit for our lives. And we were adapted to physically meet the demands of that life — exercise to you and me. These days, we must hit the gym if we’re to give our bodies what they’re truly adapted for… a life of exercise.

Although a better option is to get out into nature, fresh air and sunlight. The exercise needs of our bodies is another example of how our ancient genetic coding is maladapted to “civilization” or rather, civilization is maladapted to our genes.

Natural food is far superior

The first of the natural controls listed above are quick to say and easy to forget — animals in nature eat what is locally available, in season. They eat what’s there or they don’t eat. They eat food in it’s raw natural state. They eat only foods that they’re adapted to. The consequences of moving away from these natural controls are massive.

Eating foods that we’re not adapted to causes a massive amount of suffering in terms of poor health and vitality. I’ve seen papers comparing modern diets with both primate diets and those of our paleolithic ancestors. In both cases the modern diet is nutritionally bankrupt by comparison. Non-organic methods of farming compound this problem.

You only have to look at the teeth of tribal peoples and compare those to those from “civilized” people to see the massive error. Find someone you know without crooked teeth if you can. Chances are they’ve had surgery to have teeth removed, braces fitted and so on.

Wild animals don’t suffer chronic illnesses to the extent we do, if at all. The major disaster in modern diets is refined carbohydrates. Our biology is not at all suited to the quick-release sugars found in modern foods and grains in general have many health problems associated with their use.

It’s also unnatural to consume milk after weaning, let alone the milk of another species. Dairy foods are another group that have many health problems associated with their use.

Further divergence comes in the form of manipulating wild foods to suit our preferences. From the more minor problems of selective breeding to the outrageous “playing God” of inserting genes from one species into other species (GM). Seems like madness to me. I even read that scorpion genes were being inserted into tomatoes!

Fruit picked straight off the tree and eaten straight away is a lot different nutritionally to a fruit that’s picked unripe, shipped across the world and then sits in your fruit bowl for a week. The more we mess, the worse it gets.

Nature’s way v modern farming

Whether you choose to eat meat or not, there’s little doubt that pre-agriculture, we ate a lot of animal foods. In fact animal foods have always been a big part of the homo genus diet since it’s birth approximately 2.5 million years ago. But there’s a massive difference between hunting wild game and the barbaric practices of modern farming and butchery, both from a humanitarian viewpoint and a nutritional one.

If you look at wild animals hunting, it’s generally the weak ones that become victims and so natural selection is at work. Wild animals are part of the game of life, and they live their life fully and naturally until, if they are the unfortunate ones, it ends brutally but extremely quickly. There’s very little suffering involved.

Compare and contrast that to much of modern farming where the animals have no quality of life and suffer and suffer until the blessed day when they are released from all that suffering. Male calves kept in crates and hardly able to move the whole of their short lives. Chickens crammed into tiny cages that become their life-long prisons. That’s not nature and there’s a world of difference between the two scenarios.

And what drives all this cruelty? Competition and profit. As well as lack of consumer knowledge of the realities of what goes on. I believe if the truth was truly and firmly in the public consciousness, we would not allow it. And let’s not blame not farmers either. It’s no one persons individual “fault.” It’s the entire system.

The old farming ways were much kinder to animals I believe. Even today in Greece, you can see small holdings with chickens running around as they please. These chickens are free to eat the wild purslane which has omega 3 fats which get into their eggs. You just don’t get this with battery farmed eggs. It’s a world of difference.

Mono-culture or bio-diversity?

Endless fields of cereal crops are an abomination in terms of the health of our planet. Fragile eco-systems laid to waste in order to fill the landscape with cereals. As well as a lot of top soil simply being washed into the rivers, the vital mineral content of top-soil diminishes over time with constant farming. You just can’t keep taking and taking and expect things to stay the same.

In the old days, at least the goodness was put back in the form of organic fertilizers but these days the widespread use of NPK fertilizers is leaving both the soil and us, mineral deficient. And to add insult to injury, millions of tons of chemicals in the form of pesticides and fungicides eventually get into the water table and pollute everything. The sheer population of humans is incompatible with nature. In nature, numbers are controlled by the availability of food.

Human dominance over nature…

(A partial list…) Thousands of eco-systems destroyed by mass river damming. The pouring millions of tons of chemicals into the atmosphere. Melting of the polar ice-caps. Mono-cultures – masses of farm land devoted to one crop, rather than diversity. Disappearing rain forests – the lungs of the earth. Extinct species with many others on the verge of extinction. Our own closest primate relative – the bonobo chimpanzee is threatened with extinction as well as the orang-utans and gorillas.

Introduction of foreign species destroying fragile eco-systems. GM foods. Inhumane treatment of animals. Drinking the milk of other mammals. Suffering on an unimaginable scale due to unnatural lifestyles – the modern diseases of heart disease and cancer are just the tip of the suffering iceberg. Malformed dental arches endemic in the western world – a clear sign of malnutrition.

Erosion and demineralisation of top-soil. Mass pollution of ground water and seas with chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides. Acid rain. High concentrations of PCB’s in sea fish. Behavioural problems and psychoses in our children. Growing rates of cancer and adult-onset diabetes in our children… the list is endless…

The law is the law

I heard a theory that our super intelligence could have been caused by a gene mutation. Whatever, the reality is that we’re a product of nature and the law applies: What works will survive, what doesn’t will die out.

Humanity is on the verge of self destructing. If it does, our numbers will either drastically reduce or we will disappear altogether. It’s unlikely to be in my lifetime. Maybe my sons, or his children’s. Global warming is a real and present danger to our survival and the survival of many other species.

A human own-goal?

When I see films of chimps lazing in the sun, grooming each other, the infants playing and having fun, I wonder if we haven’t “shot ourselves in the foot.” There are human tribal groups existing today that parallel the lives of primates in many ways. Lives closely bound to nature. Their kids play in and around the forest edges. The jungles are their schools and are filled with thousands of wonders waiting to be explored. It’s unheard of for these kids to fight with one another. They are naturally kind and work together, not compete.

Why have we given up nature for the stresses and strains of the modern world? I don’t think it was a choice we made. It just happened as a consequence of farming and this is where we ended up. Tribal people don’t have mortgages! How bizarre when you really think about it that we must spend most of our lives working just to pay for shelter and food when every other animal gets it totally for free!

I’m not saying we could or should go back, I love a lot of what the “free” human mind has created — great works of science, art and literature. But we need to find ways of fitting into the bigger picture of earth functioning as a whole. Now that we’ve sidestepped the controls of nature we must have responsibility to act in the best interests of the whole. Both on an individual level, a governmental level and a global level.

What are we going to do? Score an even bigger own goal and destroy ourselves through global warming or unsustainable population spiralling out of control?

Or will we gather all our resources and help each other to overcome the problems the whole world now faces?

We should take heed of the fate of the Mayan civilization. If we don’t, the result of our meddling could be far more catastrophic.

Big thanks to Rob and Nadia Koh Bukar for allowing us to feature their beautiful photography in this article.

All the best,

Mike Kinnaird
Habit Guide: How to be Happy & Healthy

“My brother is suffering from v v  dangerous, negative, evil, wicked thoughts which come in thousands in one second. Please tell me what would be the solution for it — even doctors remedies like psychiatrist haven’t helped and neurologist as well, please do reply.”

The FASTEST way for your brother to be well again is to read and do Habit Guide. Both of you read it and then you can help him, and you can talk about plans etc together — how to set the goal and step towards it.

The truth is that there are MULTIPLE causes for your brother’s condition, and so the solution is to address all these causes. Here’s some articles that explain what I mean…

The importance of lifestyle
I want to be healthy and happy again…
Your lifestyle blueprint
Getting rid of unwanted thoughts
How to stop thinking so much

Habit Guide has EVERYTHING your brother needs. The reason that doctors have not been able to help is because doctors specialize in just one area, and that won’t get the job done — ALL factors must be addressed, the way to live, the way to think. And that means knowing WHAT to do, and HOW.

HOW means how to get into good habits and how to break bad habits.

Habit Guide only takes around one hour to read, but it took me 20 years to write it. Then you’ll be in no doubt whatsoever about what your brother needs to do and how you can help him.

Click here to order Habit Guide

And if you need any help with how to put it into practice, or any special info on how it applies in your brother’s case, then please use our contact form. I won’t lie to you, it’s going to take commitment. The solutions are very SIMPLE, but not easy at first. But once the change phase is over, it’s very easy to keep on doing what it takes to be healthy, happy and clear minded.

Make no mistake; the true solutions will always be the true solutions and there’s no way around that. And the true solutions are living right and thinking right.

All the best,

Mike Kinnaird
Habit Guide: How to be Happy & Healthy