Becoming more self sufficient will seriously improve your wellbeing in ways you never even dreamed of.
The #1 mistaken conclusion I see people jumping to when they think about self sufficiency is that it's only about growing food and ‘getting off grid'.
But it's not. At least, not here on bournebright it's not. Here, it's about nourishing your life on a deeper, more fundamental, spiritual level through the teaching, practice and application of simple, meaningful and purposeful tasks.
Simple, meaningful and purposeful tasks that have the added bonus of helping you withdraw your life energy from the parasitic ‘system' and redirect it into endeavours that enrich your own life, on your own terms.
I'm talking about taking simple, iterative steps that you can follow to reclaim your life energy in meaningful ways, no matter where you are or how much land you have, such as:
- Growing your own food
- Earning your own income
- Taking care of your own health
- Building/improving your own shelter
- Generating your own energy
- Becoming part of a group of friends who share your values
The practice of these actions is what I deem the natural state of [well]being and in finding your way back to this point; you will begin to remember what it feels like to be self sufficient and strong; confident in your being and successful on your journey.
And this, you'll be happy to hear, is something you can do no matter where you are or how much land you own.
You can take your first tentative steps on this brave new journey by completing our 10 steps to building your self sufficient life challenge.
In what does it mean to be self sufficient, we asked 7 people who were actively living their self sufficient life to tell us what they felt being self sufficient meant to them. The answers will surprise you.
For the rest of this article though, I'm going to share 9 reasons why becoming more self sufficient will seriously improve your wellbeing, nourish your soul and fill your life with purpose and meaning regardless of what is happening in the world around you.
The Connection Between Self Sufficiency & Wellbeing
There is no sense of accomplishment so grand as that of revelling in the fruits of one's own labour; the reaping of what you yourself hath sown.
When you do something you're proud of; like completing a tough session at the gym, finishing a tricky project at work or buying something you've been saving up for for a while, you feel good. Accomplished.
Yet, when you complete the small chores in life; like preparing your own meal, washing the dishes or tidying a messy room, you don't feel that same sense of achievement. Why not?
It's because society has duped you into equating accomplishment with big victories; like earning money, winning a race, getting a top mark in an exam or owning a material possession. Those kinds of things.
You've been tricked into being so pre-occupied with the ‘big things' in life that you fail to recognise the accomplishment in completing the small things.
But the truth is that the completion of even the smallest of tasks rewards you with a sense of achievement; of accomplishment, if only you'd pay attention enough to feel it.
If you could give yourself enough headspace to pay attention to the completion of your ‘menial' task instead of jumping straight onto the next thing that steals your attention, you'd notice you actually felt better for completing it.
You feel better because when you recognise the completion of a task; ie. you cross it off a list or put a checkmark next to it, your brain releases dopamine.
1. Dopamine: The Self Sufficient Man's (or Woman's) Natural High
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is created in your brain and acts as a chemical messenger, communicating messages between nerve cells in your brain and the rest of your body.
It is known as the “feel-good” hormone because it gives you a sense of pleasure when it is released. It also gives you the motivation to do something when you’re feeling that pleasure.
Therefore, the self sufficient man (or woman) who practices the regular completion of small tasks and recognises their own participation within that task, is destined to feel better about one's self simply by virtue of being self sufficient.
2. Develop Discipline & Clarity
It might seem like becoming more self sufficient life is going to overcomplicate your day beyond your ability to cope but the truth is, once you make the decision and start becoming more self sufficient, you will find yourself organising your day in a much more efficient manner through necessity.
You will grow consciously aware of natural deadlines; of tasks that need doing, of the best times to do them and you will quickly realise that in order to get them all done in the time you need them done by, you'll need to be more disciplined.
Your new-found discipline by necessity will force you to create new habits in your life and, as a beneficial by-product, you'll start to notice both a physical and mental improvement in your health.
3. Learn How To Create Positive Habits
Through the repetitive practice of daily tasks and the motivation to stay disciplined in doing them, you'll unlock the secret to rewiring your brain to create positive habits in your life.
Habits are the product of conscisous or unconscious actions in your life that result in a feeling of ‘reward' or ‘satisfaction'. If you do the action enough times to release the ‘reward' feeling (see dopamine above), your brain will file that away in the ‘do this thing to get rewards' section of your brain.
This mechanism is also why bad habits are so hard to break. If you enjoy the taste of potato chips for example; your brain files that away in the pleasure/reward zone of your brain and subconsciously encourages you to do that thing again to seek the pleasure of the action.
Healthline do a good job of explaining it, “Just like in our ancestors, our brains chase that dopamine high. So when a behaviour comes along that results in a reward, the brain builds a connection between that behaviour and pleasure that can be hard to shake.
This linking of cue, action, and reward is how a habit is born.”
When we apply this same principle to the daily practice of our small self sufficient habits, and we get that dopamine kick from completing our long list of micro tasks, our brains start rewiring themselves to seek out more of the same.
In understanding this complex mechanic of the brain, and the reason behind it, you can begin to rewire your brain positively through the daily practice of self sufficient tasks that become habits.
4. Improve Your Self Esteem
As a consequence of completing many small tasks and receiving that constant hit of dopamine combined with the disciplined rewiring of your brain to create new habits, you'll notice an overall improvement in your self confidence.
Becoming more self sufficient teaches you that you can stand on your own two feet, if only for one particular vegetable, or 1000kw of free energy from the sun, or the freedom to start living more meaningfully, without being tied to a ‘boss'.
All of this will contribute to helping you feel better about yourself, your place in the world and will improve your self esteem.
Steve Taylor wrote a good summary of this relationship on Psychology Today if you want to explore this particular aspect in more detail.
5. Sleep Easier
Nothing makes you sleep easier than a hard day's meaningful graft and a clear conscience.
When practicing self sufficiency, you'll usually end the day tired, having had a full, meaningful day of tasks. You may even have been able to take a moment or two throughout the day to harvest some produce and say thanks for your experiences.
With a full belly, clear conscience and the life-affirming aches of a busy man, you'll be ready for bed at a reasonable time and you'll sleep easy.
And we all know how sleeping easy can improve our wellbeing. If you don't, here's a link to a 20-year study into the wellbeing and life satisfaction of Australians that shows a relationship between better sleep and better wellbeing.
6. Get Fit
Making an effort to carry out the daily chores with intention and purpose also happens to be a great way to stay fit and healthy.
Everything from planting the seeds to building the shed to chopping wood for the first time to taking time out for yourself to think and do nothing will all contribute to you becoming fitter. The trick is discipline and routine and being an active participant in the task at hand.
Keeping busy is keeping fit.
Couple that with a healthier, more natural, seasonal diet eating produce that you grow yourself and you'll see your health take a massive turn for the better.
You'll find yourself with more energy, a sharper mind, better memory and an overall boost in your general mood; not to mention the obvious physical changes that will take place.
7. Re-establish Your Connection With Nature
Once you start to practice self sufficiency, you quickly become re-acquainted with the awesome power of nature and your place in the great cycle of things.
Here are just a few things you'll appreciate more:
- Seasonal variations in weather
- Sunrise and sunset
- Seeds
- Fresh air
- Water and where it comes from
- Daylight hours
- The food you eat
- The animals you keep
- Waste and where it goes
- And many more…
You'll no longer limit yourself to believing food is something that grows on supermarket shelves but rather, you'll become intimately familiar with what it takes to grow your own food and work within the laws of nature in order to make it happen.
In the midst of all that, you'll also begin to feel a sense of appreciation and amazement at simple thoughts; like how much life can you fit into a carrot seed no more than 4mm long?
Becoming more self sufficient in your life gives your head space to ponder such things and enjoy the simplicity in them. This simple appreciation with small things will help pull you into the present moment and snap you out of the matrix that seeks to capture your attention.
8. Self Sufficiency Gives You Roots
One of the major wellbeing benefits of becoming more self sufficient is that you will begin to stick your fingers in the soil.
That may not sound like much at first, but when you start to explore the idea of how grounding effects your health, you'll soon see a correlation between how ‘grounded' you are – as in, physically connected to the electrons on the earth's surface – and your general wellbeing.
In the study, Health Implications of Reconnecting the Human Body to the Earth's Surface Electrons, 60 subjects (22 males and 28 females) who suffered from self-described sleep disturbances and chronic muscle and joint pain for at least six months, were randomly divided for the month-long study in which both groups slept on conductive carbon fiber mattress pads.
Half the pads were connected to a dedicated Earth ground outside each subject's bedroom window, while the other half were “sham” grounded—not connected to the Earth. The results were quite fascinating:
| Test Subjects | Control Subjects | |||
| Categories | Same | Improved | Same | Improved |
| Time to fall asleep | 4 = 15% | 23 = 85% | 20 = 87% | 3 = 13% |
| Quality of sleep | 2 = 7% | 25 = 93% | 20 = 87% | 3 = 13% |
| Wake feeling rested | 0 = 0% | 27 = 100% | 20 = 87% | 3 = 13% |
| Muscles stiffness and pain | 5 = 18% | 22 = 82% | 23 = 100% | 0 = 0% |
| Chronic back and/or joint pain | 7 = 26% | 20 = 74% | 23 = 100% | 0 = 0% |
| General well-being | 6 = 22% | 21 = 78% | 20 = 87% | 3 = 13% |
Almost every participant in almost all tests who slept on the grounded mattress described an improvement in physical wellbeing after a month of doing so.
Maybe the earth is just a giant battery and we all need a recharge now and then?
9. It Teaches You The Path To Freedom & Liberation
Becoming more self sufficient forces you to exist on a daily basis in the real world; and in the real, physical world, much of the world's man-made ills can be forgotten in the daily tasks of looking after one's self.
The Buddha speaks of The Middle Way as the “path to freedom and liberation.”
The key tenet of this thought is that too much of any one thing is simply the chains to another cage. For example, the relentless pursuit of ‘freedom' or ‘truth' at the cost of all else neither makes you free nor in truth because you'll spend eternity looking for what you seek and never find it.
The destination will never arrive and you'll never get off the road.
The middle way then, is neither attachment nor aversion, but of being conscious of opposing ideas and able to live in the middle. Finding contentment with what is.
Self sufficiency forces you to do this. It forces you to face the reality of the things you can see with your own eyes and the soild you can dig with your own fingers.
It makes you present in the world which, really, when you think about it, is the only place you can ever truly be.
I didn’t agree with the philosophy or tactics of XR rebellion, but one of their number coined the phrase “Deep adaptation” to describe pretty much the middle ground of both self sufficiency and prepping. That middle way is fertile ground for seeds of an alternative society, autonomous within the system that we cant truly escape from.
This is the thing; we don’t need to escape from it. It’s going to destroy itself within the next 10 years anyway.
As it falls apart, people will, organically, take things into their own hands and you will see a migration from the old, fallen system to the new. It is inevitable at this point; but it is going to be painful until we get there.
In the article I discuss the idea that chasing too much of one thing is destined to fail because perfection is impossible and you’ll get stuck in your own loop chasing it.
The ‘system’ is chasing control at the expense of all else and it will not work. It will get lost in it’s own ambition and collapse of it’s own corruption.
Nothing that comes out of XR is beneficial to society. XR is a distraction, a scam funded by scammers in the shadows. It has no bearing or benefit to the betterment of your life.
I don’t have a twitter account so I can’t respond to your tweets, but I read them everyday. I read many others, though I save yours for last because at the end of all the heartache and hysteria for having taken “the road not taken”, your content is the only one that makes me take a deep breath. I know that even if everything is not OK, we are OK. You speak from the heart, to our hearts, and for that I am truly grateful.
What a beautiful, kind comment, Rachel.
Thank you for taking the time to share that.
I’ll post that to twitter because it’s a beautiful thought…. even if everything is not OK, you are OK.
This is so true. We will get through this, like we have every tyranny before this one.
In the meantime, we keep creating, keep imagining a brighter future than the one they would like for us and do the small things we can each and every day to make it happen.