The Importance of Happiness

One of the things that many traders and investors take for granted is their happiness. Investing, and especially daytrading, can be extremely stressful and emotionally demanding. Thus as silly as it may seem, your success in this business is vitally dependent upon your health and your happiness.

Recently I found myself falling into a depression-like state of chronic boredom and general blasé. Of course I wasn't actually depressed, but if you know me you know that normally I'm a very upbeat person. I have a dry, sarcastic sense of humor, am full of energy and love to, for lack of better terminology, give people crap. That all started to change because I was working so hard at trading and at my full time job and trying to tackle a million things at once. I had stopped going to the gym, stopped eating healthy food, started staying up way too late and reduced the amount of time I spent doing things I am really passionate about, like playing keyboard and singing karaoke.

I found myself constantly listening to slow, ambient music when I got home from work, simply dimming the lights down and settling into a chair to read or review my trades for the day. I would keep telling myself, "I'm dead tired, I need to crash at like 8pm tonight" but I never would. Instead I would sit up reading or browsing Facebook or Twitter, or watching mindless TV shows on Netflix, until the next thing I knew it was 2am and I realized I needed to go to bed because I had to wake up at 7am for work the next day. I'd do this all week long until the weekend when all I'd want to do is sleep.

I live ten minutes from the ocean and I didn't even want to go to the beach. 

Instead I'd sleep until 12 or 1pm because I was so exhausted from the week and when I got up, I'd literally walk around the apartment in my underwear all day putting off doing laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning my apartment and exercising. I would just sit around and read about trading or waste time on Twitter, Facebook or Netflix, using "I'm 100% focused on my desire to become a professional trader" as an excuse.

Then one of my good friends did something that started a chain reaction of rapid change - a return to the way I used to be - for me: he decided to boycott social networking for 30 days and committed himself to doing it by posting his farewell on Facebook, to his 100,000 Twitter followers, and on his blog.

Of course it seems like this would be completely unrelated to investing, but it wasn't. At least not for me. I had become a zombie. It's not that this is necessarily a bad thing sometimes. Sometimes you do need to cut everything out and focus 100% of your energy on one thing, but that lifestyle is not sustainable if you want to maintain happiness and good health over the long term. I decided to join my buddy in his crusade to exile the social networking scene from his life and I cut Facebook and Twitter out of my life entirely.

With the extra free time, I now suddenly had time to read all I wanted about trading and investing but still accomplish other things. Things as simple as cleaning my apartment regularly so I wasn't annoyed by having to wash a plate just to eat dinner since I had put off doing the dishes for 4 days (that is, if I actually had any decent food as I would have if I hadn't put off grocery shopping too). I had time to go to the gym. I could still go to bed at a reasonable hour and wake up feeling well-rested, strong and ready for work.

The point is that I had no idea how much time I was wasting and just how much I had neglected my physical health and my happiness and how it was affecting my ability to accomplish the things I really cared about in life (my career, my goal of going pro as a trader, spending time with my best friends, and generally being happy). My trading suffered because of it: I pushed through a period where almost every single trade I made was a complete failure. I would get annoyed at my failures because I was tired and overly irritable and caught myself overtrading in an attempt to recover losses, and this would only lead to more losses which would make me more irritable and give me an excuse to go home and fill my brain with new things to try the next day. It was an unhealthy path of destruction leading only to ultimate failure of my major goals if I had continued.

What I really needed to do was take a step back and fix myself. 

I started going to the gym again. I went grocery shopping and bought healthy food. I bought tons of fresh produce and red meats. I cooked amazing dinners from recipes I had or new ones I found online. I started coming home for lunch to make fresh food instead of going to eat at Subway. I made a pact with myself to stop putting things off - stupid things like doing the laundry, doing the dishes and cleaning my apartment - until the last minute when I had to do them under stressful conditions since I had to do them all at once.  I started doing karaoke again on Thursday nights with another good friend of mine, going out to grab a beer or two, and started jamming on the keyboard again with a buddy who plays guitar. All of this and I still managed to get to bed earlier so I would be well-rested the next day. Most importantly, I spent some money on me. I signed up for a daytrading bootcamp and bought myself a brand new laptop that will allow me to use all the expensive recording equipment I have to record some new music and throw it up on YouTube.

I can't tell you how much of a difference it has made. 

Over the last month or so, my trading has improved exponentially. Lately I feel confident, strong and knowledgeable in all aspects of life. Because of this my trading and investing performance has improved greatly, which means money in the bank for me, the ultimate goal of any investor.

So be healthy. Be happy. Exercise. Eat well. If you are a newer investor, don't fall into the trap of becoming "over-educated." It's easy to do in this fast-paced world, so put yourself first. Don't become consumed by the chase of the almighty dollar. Benjamin Franklin said that the only things that are certain in this world are death and taxes. I disagree - I think there are three things: death, taxes, and the existence of the stock market. It will be here tomorrow if you need to take a break and go to the gym or go for a jog, so go do it. You'll be surprised how much being healthy and happy will benefit your investing performance.