Your phone buzzes and you look at it. We’re conditioned to immediately look any time we get a notification. Why? Because we get a little dopamine release from it.

Why is that a bad thing? Because when you look at a notification the moment your phone buzzes, you are giving away your power over your own time. You are allowing a person, or an app, to decide for you how you will spend your time. Do you really want other people, or apps, to be deciding for you how your day progresses?

Step 1 is to turn off notifications for email, because how many emails are actually urgent and need you to respond right away? Probably none.

Step 2 is to look through your apps, and decide which ones are worth interrupting your time. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat; how many of the notifications that you get are urgent? If they’re not urgent, then why is your phone interrupting you for them? Do you have rain alerts? Do you need them?

Once you’ve got the notifications turned off, you can decide for yourself when you want to open Snapchat and see what your friends have been up to. You can take control of your time. I think you’ll feel a lot better choosing for yourself how you spend your time.

It’s great to be passionate about something, or to try your hardest at something, but it’s important to make sure that your success in one area doesn’t come at the expense of another area. It’s all about keeping a balance in life.

There are lots of people who are extremely successful in business, but at the expense of their family and relationships. There are people who are great athletes, but at the expense of their own personal lives.

Go ahead and strive for greatness in whatever you want. Just remember that there are other parts to your life as well. Don’t be great at one thing and terrible at everything else. Think about the balance, and you’ll be much happier.

We all have stress in our lives, and we all have to figure out how to process it in the healthiest way possible. But sometimes what we are calling stress is actually fear.

When you find yourself stressed out, stop and think about what it is that you are really feeling. Is it actually stress, or are you afraid of what the outcome might be, so you’re feeling fear?

Stress is a normal response to change and uncertainty. Our lives are constantly changing due to things we can’t control, and feeling some stress in response to that is okay.

Fear has a place in life, but fear in response to change creates symptoms that are bad for you. And living in a prolonged state of fear is definitely bad for you.

So before you call something stress, try to really think about what it is that you’re feeling. If it’s fear of the unknown outcome, try to work through some scenarios in your mind of positive outcomes, and let the fear go.

James Clear said, “We don’t rise to the levels of our goals, we sink to the levels of our systems.” He wrote a book called Atomic Habits, about how the small things we do add up to huge things in our lives.

For example, if you want to watch less tv, you make small changes to your “systems” to make it less convenient. You can move your couch so it doesn’t face the tv, or take the batteries out of the remote, or keep the tv in the closet, so you actually have to make an effort to watch it.

So many of the things we do in life, we do out of habit, or routine, not because we are living our lives on purpose. If there is something that you want to change, or improve, or do better or differently, think about what small, intentional change you can make that will alter your routine.

Don’t try to change everything in one shot. That’s why new year’s resolutions fail. Think instead about changing a small aspect of your habits or routines, which can help lead to a larger change.