By 
Ever feel like you’re sleepwalking through your own life?
I spent most of my mid-twenties that way. Had the degree, ticked all the boxes society told me to tick, yet I’d wake up each morning with this gnawing emptiness.
The anxiety was constant, like background static I couldn’t turn off, then I found myself in a warehouse in Melbourne and shifting TVs for eight hours a day.
Talk about a reality check! Here I was with my psychology degree, loading boxes and wondering where everything went sideways, but that warehouse job became my unlikely monastery.
With nothing but time and repetitive work, I started experimenting with Buddhist principles I’d been reading about, like practical stuff I could apply while stacking boxes and dealing with difficult coworkers.
What happened over the next few months surprised me: The practices I stumbled upon didn’t just help me cope with the warehouse work.
They fundamentally rewired how I showed up in the world.
These are grounded in Buddhist psychology, which has studied the mechanics of human suffering and transformation for over 2,500 years, and—unlike most self-help advice—they actually work because they target the root causes of our dissatisfaction, not just the symptoms.
Ready to become someone you actually respect when you look in the mirror?
1) Start each day with intentional silence
Your phone alarm goes off, what’s the first thing you do?
If you’re like most people, you’re scrolling through notifications before your feet hit the floor.
Email, news, social media, all flooding your brain before you’ve even had a chance to think your own thoughts.
Buddhist psychology calls this “monkey mind,” or the restless, unsettled state where your attention jumps from branch to branch without ever finding stillness.
Here’s what changed everything for me: I started giving myself 15 minutes of complete silence every morning.
No phone, no podcast, and no music, just me and my thoughts.
At first, it was torture. My mind would race through my to-do list, replay arguments, worry about money.
However, after about two weeks, something shifted and the mental noise started settling, like sediment in water when you stop stirring it.
This practice is rooted in the Buddhist concept of “noble silence.”
It’s about creating space between you and your thoughts; you start seeing them as weather patterns passing through, not permanent fixtures of who you are.
Try this tomorrow: Set your alarm 15 minutes earlier, sit with your coffee or tea in complete silence, son’t meditate if that feels forced. Just be present with whatever arises, and watch your thoughts without engaging them.
Within 30 days, you’ll notice you’re less reactive to stress. By day 90, you’ll wonder how you ever functioned without this mental reset.
2) Practice “response pause” before every reaction
Someone cuts you off in traffic, your boss sends a passive-aggressive email, and your partner brings up that thing you did wrong three months ago; what happens next usually determines whether your day improves or spirals.
In my book, Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego, I explore the Buddhist teaching of the “sacred pause,” or that microscopic moment between stimulus and response where your freedom lives.
Most of us are on autopilot. Something happens, we react—rinse and repeat—but Buddhist psychology teaches that this gap between trigger and reaction is where transformation happens.
I learned this the hard way during my warehouse days as I had a supervisor who seemed to enjoy making my life difficult.
Every interaction left me seething, until I started implementing a simple practice: counting to three before responding to anything he said.
Those three seconds changed everything. Instead of matching his energy, I could choose my response.
Sometimes that meant staying quiet or asking a clarifying question, but it was always my choice and not my conditioning running the show.
The neuroscience backs this up: That pause activates your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for rational decision-making—instead of letting your amygdala (your fight-or-flight center) run wild.
The next time someone texts you something that triggers you, wait one full minute before responding.
When someone says something that annoys you, take one deep breath before speaking.
This is about becoming intentional. After 90 days, you’ll find yourself responding from wisdom rather than wound.
3) End the day with radical honesty
How often do you actually examine your own behavior?
I’m talking about the uncomfortable questions, like did you act from ego today? Did you cause unnecessary suffering? Did you live according to your values or just drift through on default mode?
Buddhist psychology has a practice called “reviewing the day” that most Western self-help completely misses; it’s about honest self-examination without the emotional drama.
Every night before bed, I spend ten minutes reviewing my day through three questions:
- Where did I act from fear instead of love?
- Where did I create suffering (for myself or others)?
- Where did I miss an opportunity to be present?
No judgment or shame spiral, just and observation like a scientist studying their own behavior.
This practice is grounded in the Buddhist principle of “right mindfulness,” or maintaining clear awareness of your actions and their consequences.
It’s how you develop what Buddhists call “moral sensitivity,” which is the ability to feel the impact of your choices in real-time.
The first week will be uncomfortable because you’ll see patterns you’d rather ignore, such as that tendency to interrupt people, the way you check out during conversations, or how often you choose comfort over growth.
But, here’s the magic: Awareness without judgment creates change without force.
By day 90, you’ll find yourself catching these patterns in the moment, not hours later.
4) Replace consuming with creating
What did you create today? What did you actually bring into existence that wasn’t there before?
Buddhist psychology recognizes two fundamental modes of being: The hungry ghost realm (constant consumption, never satisfied) and the creative realm (generating value, finding fulfillment through contribution).
Guess which one most of us live in?
We scroll through other people’s lives, consume their content, and react to their creations, but we rarely flip the script and become creators ourselves.
When I started Hack Spirit in 2016, it wasn’t because I had all the answers—far from it, I’m still very much a student of these practices—but I realized that documenting my journey, creating something from my struggles, and transformed my relationship with those struggles.
Pick one form of creation and commit to it daily for 90 days: Write 200 words, draw one sketch, record one video, build something with your hands, and cook a meal from scratch.
Quality doesn’t matter, consistency does. This is about shifting from passive consumption to active participation in your own life.
Creation requires presence, intention, and courage; all qualities that Buddhist psychology identifies as antidotes to suffering.
Moreover, by day 30, you’ll feel the difference and, by day 90, you’ll have tangible proof of your growth.
5) Practice “difficult person” meditation
Think of someone who drives you absolutely crazy.
Got them in mind? Good, they’re about to become your greatest teacher.
Buddhist loving-kindness meditation usually starts with sending good wishes to yourself, then loved ones, then neutral people, then difficult people.
Most people skip straight to trying to love everyone and wonder why it feels fake.
Here’s a different approach that actually works: Each day, spend five minutes thinking about your “difficult person” with curiosity instead of judgment, just genuine curiosity.
What shaped them? What are they afraid of? What are they protecting?
This is about recognizing that your reaction to difficult people reveals more about your own internal state than it does about them.
During my warehouse period, I used my challenging supervisor as my daily practice.
Instead of mentally rehearsing arguments with him, I started getting curious about what made him tick.
Well, it turned out he was going through a divorce, worried about losing his job, and taking it out on everyone around him.
Did that make his behavior okay? No, but understanding it freed me from taking it personally.
This practice targets what Buddhists call “the second arrow,” and the first arrow is what happens to you while the second arrow is your reaction to it.
You can’t always control the first arrow, but the second one? That’s entirely optional.
After 90 days of this practice, you’ll notice something remarkable: The people who used to trigger you most barely register on your emotional radar.
Final words
These five practices are more like compound interest for your character.
Day one feels pointless, day seven feels forced, and day thirty feels different, but day ninety? You’ll barely recognize the anxious, reactive person you used to be.
The beauty of grounding these practices in Buddhist psychology is that they’re battle-tested; they’re insights into the nature of human suffering and freedom that have been refined over millennia.
You don’t need to become a Buddhist or even particularly spiritual to benefit from them because you just need to show up consistently and pay attention to what changes.
That version of yourself you’ve been wanting to become? He’s available right now, one practice at a time.
The question is whether you’ll stick around long enough to let them work on you.