Outsmarting Life

Outsmarting Life is about optimizing every aspect of your life and making you the best you that you can possibly be. Topics include personal finance, health and happiness, and smart shopping tips.

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Hypnobirthing: A 5-Step Process to Painless Birth

#Hypnobirthing: A 5-Step Process to Painless Birth

I want to challenge the stigma that giving birth is painful. For thousands of years women have been having birth without the intervention of modern medications. If it were really as bad as everyone says now a days, then how would we have survived as a species? As a nurse, I am the first to admit that medical intervention has its time and place during the labor and delivery process. In most cases…

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4 Ways Meditation Can Improve Your Sex Life

4 Ways #Meditation Can Improve Your Sex Life

When you enter your twenties, your sex drive has the potential to hit rock bottom, often due to stress and a busy work schedule. The wild-animal drive you once had in your adolescence can come to radical halt. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, sex is one of our primal needs. This means that it’s critical to pay attention to whether your sex drive is high or low. Luckily, if your sex drive…

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5 Ways to Instantly Increase Your Happiness

5 Ways to Instantly Increase Your #Happiness

Happiness is arguably one of the most misunderstood concepts in our society. People think that having money, fame, big houses, and nice cars will bring them happiness…but that is FAR from the truth. Today, I want to give you 5 things that you can do instantly to increase your happiness. And guess what. None of them have to do with making more money, furthering your business, or getting further…

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Mindfulness Bells

What are Mindfulness Bells?

Mindfulness bells are simply bells that ring at a regular interval (in this case every 20 minutes). The bells are there to remind you to be present in the moment and take a second to appreciate your life.

How to Use Mindfulness Bells

Every time you hear the bell, I encourage you to take a minute or so to be mindful of the present moment. Notice your environment. Is…

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4 Thought Questions You Must Ask Yourself

Let’s have some fun today :) I was listening to an episode of Chalene Johnson’s podcast, and one of the things that she said was essential to building success was to map out your ideal life, which totallymakes sense because how can you get somewhere if you don’t know where you want to go!   So I put together 4 thought questions for myself that I wanted to share with you guys. I found this…

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5 Simple Tips for Getting Started With Meditation

5 Simple Tips for Getting Started With #Meditation

Hey guys. Sorry, but it’s time for a wake-up call: if you don’t have a meditation routine yet, you HAVE to get one!

Here’s why.

5 Major Benefits of Meditation:

Helps reduce stress levels

Increases positive emotions & life satisfaction

Reduces loneliness and increases connectedness

Increases memory, focus, and attention span

Decreases feelings of anxiety and depression

And SO much more!

The crazy…

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Meditation Timer Playlist

I made you some #meditation timers :) Enjoy!

Hi all! I put together a meditation timer playlist on YouTube and wanted to share it with you. Each video is unguided (silent) and has a bell to signal the start and end of the practice. You may use them however you’d like, and please comment below if you have any feedback. I’d love to hear from you. Enjoy! 30-minute meditation timer:…

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Meditation for Beginners: Two-Minutes of Mindfulness

Hey guys! This is my FIRST EVER guided meditation! What a great start to 2016 :)

How to: Mindfulness Meditation for Beginners

The point of a mindfulness meditation is to be mindful of the present moment (I know, big surprise ;) ).

Sit in a quiet, comfortable place with a straight back and your head held high. Close your eyes, and…

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Pomodoro Timer with Sound

Pomodoro Timer with Binaural Beats for Hyper Focus and #Productivity

Guys, you’ve GOT to check out this video I put together! I was having trouble focusing over the holidays, so I started using the pomodoro technique. Since I like to work with music, and I’ve also been studying binaural beats, I decided to put together this nifty little timer that brings two amazing things together into one EVEN…

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How To Simplify Fractions with Square Roots

How To Simplify Fractions with Square Roots

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How to Simplify Fractions with Square Roots:

In this video, I explain how to simplify fractions with square roots in the…

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It's growing! Apparently you're supposed to wait until it has full on leaves before putting it in soil. #excited

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It's growing! Apparently you're supposed to wait until it has full on leaves before putting it in soil. #excited #avocado #tree #plants #garden

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How and Why to Let Go of the Past

How and Why to Let Go of the Past

This is a very interesting post because it is something I wrote for a blog I wanted to create my senior year of college (fall 2012). I never actually made the blog, but I wanted it to be a personal development blog titled “Health, Happiness, and Handstands.” I had discovered Steve Pavlina’s blog, Personal Development for Smart People, and decided that I wanted to help people as much as he had…

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It's blooming 😃 #succulent #bloom #blooming #flowerstagram #plants #nature

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Fresh tomatoes are the best tomatoes! 😀 #fruit #snack #foodstagram #food #foodie #fresh #healthy #cleaneating #eating #healthyfood #health #healthychoices #happy

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Reusable produce bags ftw! Had a whole conversation about them with a lady today at the farmers market, who told me there's an entire island full of plastic near where she's from in the Philippines. I got mine on amazon, just search reusable produce bags 😃 #produce #shopping #gogreen #ecofriendly #outsmartinglife #vegetables #veggies #green #world #community #hippie #farmersmarket #santamonica

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Homemade Vanilla Almond Milk Recipe

Homemade Vanilla Almond Milk Recipe

Why Homemade Almond Milk?

1) It tastes better! 

Homemade almond milk is delicious. Enough said.

2) You can soak the almonds. 

Almonds, along with other nuts, grains, and legumes, have phytic acid.  Phytic acid binds to the minerals (such as iron, calcium, copper, zinc, and magnesium) in the gastrointestinal tract, disabling the body from absorbing them. They are often referred to as…

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