For changing your life, change your life style!!

 Dear IIM Students,

Till now you were following a lifestyle adapting to your place of living, organisation of working, the kind of work you did from waking up to sleep, meeting your wants and needs and the expectations of all the significant people around you at home, organisation, institution, and society.

Now your place is different. Organisation/institution is different. Your wants and needs are different. The expectations of your parents, your professors, your friends, and all others around you are different.

So, if you have to be physically healthy, mentally peaceful and happy, socially healthy, and meet your wants and needs, then you have to change the lifestyle. If you continue to follow the same lifestyle then you can’t meet your own needs, wants and expectations, forget about that of meeting the expectations of others in your life.

We all know that with the change in one independent variable, the dependent variables also have to change. The independent variable is what you change, and the dependent variable is what changes as a result of that. So, allow it to change. Don’t resist. You only chose IIM study and changed your place of living and studying. So, all factors related to the new place and its demands have to change commensurately. Otherwise, you will experience stress. The stressors will damage your physical, mental, and social well-being. They will push you back to the old previous state of life to regain the stability of the system and also to ensure you are without stress. But the truth is if you go back to previous state you will be more stressed. So, there is no other way other than to change the dependent variables. That means your lifestyle has to change!!...No escape. If you want your life to change, then your lifestyle has to change!!

But that new lifestyle should be health enhancing and not health compromising. Otherwise, you will end up with some other serious problems in life.

Therefore, the first and foremost is to realise that you have to change your lifestyle in health enhancing ways, sustainable ways, and in tune with the needs of the present new life!!...you have to change yourself…The New YOU with the changed personality traits, changed ways of doing things you have been doing from waking up to sleep (as morning to night does not hold good at IIM), leaving some old habits, creating some new habits and developing them, unlearning some old learning, learning something new….all these to adapt to the new place, new life, new beginning of an entirely different future life!!

So, take the first step today for a big leap tomorrow!!

Start now….

Peacefully yours…Dr M Ramasubramanian.