My friends, many of you would think my life is incredibly boring, and yet it's full of massive joy. I do almost the exact same thing every single day, and yet I can't think of a time when I was happier or more fulfilled or more conscious of my place among all my fellow human beings, feeling that I'm fulfilling my life's purpose and helping others. If you want to get your life to a place where it is fulfilling and meaningful and joyful, this will help, and if you don't want your life to be exciting in a way that's stressful, this will be useful for you too.
If you're new to me, I'm Jerry Banfield. I've been sober now 3,202 days or something like that in Alcoholics Anonymous. I am a full-time YouTuber, online creator, mastermind leader, crypto investor, et cetera. I've been a full-time creator online for 10, going on 11 years now, and I try to help you however I can each day. Today, I'm going to tell you about my life, and I'm interested to know if it helps you or not.
A day that starts with rest and gratitude
So here's what I do almost every day. It's the same. I wake up at about 7 with my kids if it's a school day, and if it's a school day, I take them to school. Most days are school days, so we'll start with that. Today, I woke up with my kids about 7. I sleep in the room with them because they like me being there in case anything happens. They have bunk beds, and then I sleep in another bed, and my wife sleeps in our bedroom. For now, they're 7 and 4. This works out the best. If one of them wakes up or needs help at night, then I'm right there.
So I get up with my kids every day about 7. They've gone to bed about 10 p.m. the night before, meaning I'm very well rested and I got a great night of sleep. The windows are blacked out, so I don't get any light, which helps me sleep. I can't stand hotels where there are all these flashing lights and it's bright in the room. So I start almost every day with a great night of sleep, and having done a meditation, either when I fell asleep the night before, or I wake up at 3 in the morning sometimes and just have an hour of meditation, laying right in bed, just thinking about how great I am, letting any thoughts come, enjoying the emptiness of thoughts, and being appreciative of my life. This morning, I woke up maybe 5:30 or 6 and just thought about how thankful I am that everything is exactly the way it is today. It's really nice.
I get up, and I usually have a peanut butter chocolate chip Larabar first thing in the morning because, God, those are so good. I just want to eat one as soon as I get up. It's just four ingredients: peanut butter, dates, chocolate chips, and something else. It's delicious. I often will also have some fruit, like a banana or an apple or strawberries or blueberries or something. If I'm not going to eat for a while longer, I may eat some hummus or something else at that time in the morning.
Filming for five channels
I then will take my daughter to school, which is about a 20-minute drive each way, drop her off at school, then generally come home and get set up in my office. I walk in here and just start filming video ideas right off the top of my head. I have five YouTube channels, and I film whatever I can think of each day for those channels to try and help someone, to try and make your life better. So I come in and I often film my crypto video first because that seems to be what people are watching the most of what I'm creating. Then I'll throw videos up on all my other channels: my recovery channel — this is a video for that channel — a gaming channel, a video for that channel, a business channel, and then my original main channel. I put up a video on each one of those, and it usually takes about three hours to film one video for each channel. So in three hours I filmed five videos and done other things online.
Yoga as preventative health
Then I will usually go to a noon yoga class. I find yoga is extremely helpful for my mental and physical health. It helps me be strong, helps me enjoy my body, helps me enjoy my life. I love it, and I consistently show up and do yoga because it leaves me feeling much better. I'm proud of how I look, I'm proud of how I feel, and yoga is very great for a preventative health practice. So I do my yoga, and often sometimes I feel a little bit uncomfortable in the body or in the mind, and I almost always feel better after an hour of yoga. In my experience, you could even think of not doing yoga or some other type of daily exercise as high-risk behavior for your health. It's merely logical. One reason kids are so healthy is because they're often very active, running around and using their bodies, and generally adults that are the most unhealthy are also the least active — or way too overactive and working constantly, burning themselves out.
So I do that hour of yoga to give my body a good stretch, and I love that I'm able to do it in community with other people. I love being with a group of people who are there for the same reason I am. That creates a mastermind. A mastermind is a group of people gathered for a common purpose, and everyone tends to do better because of that.
Lunch, the garden, and chores
So I do yoga, then I generally go home and we'll have some kind of a whole plant-based lunch. Often I'll just eat a bunch of hummus and carrots and celery, or I'll make myself a salad with lettuce from my garden, homemade dressing with a bunch of spices in it and vinegar and olive oil. And I'll use Tostitos chips as croutons, just smashed up. Then I often will round out any more work I need to do. If there are any other videos I want to get done in the studio here, I'll get those uploaded. Then I will pick up whichever kid needs to be picked up from school, do some things around the house, like I generally do dishes every day for about 30 minutes. Fold up laundry if there's laundry to fold up, go back and work in my garden. I love growing food in my garden. We just got garden grow boxes and cages put up to keep all the pests out. I go back there and maintain the garden.
Staying accountable in Alcoholics Anonymous
Then at around 5:30 — or depending on what day it is these can be at slightly different times — I often go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting either at 5:30 or 7 p.m. Sometimes I go to ones earlier in the day, like depending on what day it is; Saturday I often go to one in the morning at 8:30 or so. But I'll go to my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and that's a time where I am again in another mastermind, a group of people gathered for the purpose of staying sober and helping each other. I go there, and I've got almost nine years sober, and I try to help someone else to either stay sober if they already are, or to figure out whether they want to get sober and actually do the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I'm accountable there also. I have people that see me most days when I do yoga, and I'm accountable to them; if I'm not there they wonder where I'm at. Same at my AA meetings — I'm accountable, I check on others, they check on me, we see how each other is doing, and if I'm ever feeling bad I consistently feel better going to AA meetings. Going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings most days is also, for me, very preventative. I go to AA meetings when I already feel good to help me keep feeling good. I could easily, maybe one or two days a week, not go to a meeting just to enjoy the space and the difference of having one of my days without a meeting. By going to AA meetings almost every day, I ensure that the odds of me drinking today are almost zero, and tomorrow almost zero, whereas if I skip a meeting the odds in the day may get a little lower and maybe even in the present day start to go up.
Evenings with family
So I then come home from a meeting and I will do more things around the house, hang out, play with the kids a little bit. If my wife's out, like once a week I'll get the kids ready and put them to bed, and other than that my wife puts the kids to bed most nights. And while I'm around doing things around the house, that's so much time I spend doing dishes, kids' food, or any little house chores. Any little work things too — putting out an extra tweet, doing some research. I often spend about an hour a day just doing research online, looking at what people are saying, what people are talking about, getting inspired for what things I could create the next day.
Then at around eight o'clock, a lot of nights when my wife does bedtime, I'll go over and watch an episode of usually something sci-fi with my mom. Right now we're watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I hang out with her. I'm glad she lives next door. I take her trash out, do anything she needs done like that, move a box for her or something. Then I come back home and take a shower and go to bed with my wife about 9:30 or 10, more towards 10, I guess. We generally have sex every other day, which I find is also fantastic for my own mental and physical health, and it's good for her too. We generally do that at night, but it can be done sometimes — we're finding that if the kids are in school, that's a better time to do that than at night when we're both ready to go to bed. I go to bed, and that's my life. Almost every single day is almost the exact same routine.
Discipline that creates freedom
Now, at previous points in my life, I probably would have found this lifestyle miserably boring, because you might look at my life and say, well, how do you do that every day? You'd look and say I'm rigorously disciplined. And yet I have freedom within my life. I could make a different life if I wanted to. My life in my 20s, as is the case with many of us, was much more chaotic. I was a police officer. I didn't have as regular of routines. I'd drink and totally do different things off duty than I did on duty. I used to have a very kind of bipolar life, where what I did on a workday and what I did on the weekends were drastically different. Today, what I do on a school day and a weekend is almost exactly the same. The only difference is I don't take the kids to school. I might spend a little bit more time with the family and do something like go to the park with the kids, or go out to lunch, or go to the market.
A quiet life that I love
Other days, I'll just take some extra time to play, do a live stream on Twitch, especially for gaming. I'll take some extra time to work or some extra time to exercise or do things around the house like mow the lawn. Pretty typical there. And there's almost no difference, except taking the kids to school, between a weekday and a weekend. I have what you would think of as almost no excitement. I don't go to parties. I'm sober and I don't do anything else you'd think of as addictive. I don't gamble. I'm monogamous. I'm with the same woman all the time. And I have almost no drama in my life. There's almost never somebody or something that's all exciting and needs to be talked about. From many of your points of view, you would think my life is absolutely devoid of interest. And yet I love it.
What I do to keep myself interested is I'm relentlessly pushing forward in my business. To me, trying to figure out what to do in my business, what videos to upload and create, is very stimulating. That's where a big area of interest lives in my mind. What's the most useful video I could put out for somebody today? How can I help somebody with what I'm creating? I also read books and watch YouTube videos and listen to podcasts. If I get a bit too comfortable, sometimes I'll read a very difficult book. I read a book about a girl getting kidnapped when she was a kid and held as a captive for 20-something years. I'd had a month or two before that of total stability and what you might think of as boredom. For the couple of days I listened to that book, my mind was very interesting. It was a strange, horrible world to be in. I cried a whole bunch, especially seeing that my kids are getting close to the age she was.
At the same time, understanding the bigger picture of the world we're in and how something like that could happen matters to me. People are left isolated and mistreated and not told how to have basic desires fulfilled, like sex, either by self love or just being a little bit of a kid, or finding someone else and communicating. For a couple of days, my mind was much more interesting than usual, filled with all these awful thoughts and so distracted I felt like I could barely focus. It felt like her life was so horrible that my life wasn't even real. How is this too good to be true? And then I get a long period, it's been over a month since I listened to that book, of just really appreciating my own stability.
Loving what other people call boring
So I take my stability and I see what other people are doing in their lives. People in Alcoholics Anonymous often have very interesting lives. They're in some kind of a drama. One girl punched her dad in the face at a holiday, and I enjoy hearing about that stuff. It really drives home to me that I love what so many people think of as a boring existence. No excitement, no drama, no chaos. I love it.
I love to laugh when people say that they should just have no expectations and expect the worst. In my experience, I expect things to go a certain way and almost all the time they do. I expect to have great conversations with people. I expect to get where I'm going safely. I expect to make videos that people watch and enjoy. Almost all the time what I expect to happen happens. So I'll say, okay, I'd like to get where I'm going safely, and I'm very clear about that before I go somewhere. That allows me to have some curiosity and enjoyment when things don't go quite as planned, because now my life is more interesting. Didn't see that one coming.
I poked myself in the finger with my mom's knife last night. While it was a bit annoying, I thought, hmm, didn't see that one coming. I was trying to cut a box open. I stuck the finger, it went in a millimeter or two and was bleeding all over. Instead of being upset, I was kind of curious. I thought, this is interesting, I haven't seen any of my own blood in a while. The benefit of a boring life is it makes it easier to embrace the discomfort of anything unexpected. The things that are unexpected, you might argue that I'm so bored that even bad things, even things that are happening, are actually interesting, as long as I don't try to create them.
No more needless drama
What I refuse to do any longer is create needless drama in my life to keep things interesting and exciting. I figure the world offers enough chances for things like recessions and authoritative governments locking people in their homes. There are enough opportunities that life presents to make things interesting without me trying to cause chaos. So I'm grateful this is how my life is today. And I'm grateful I've grown up so much in the last 15 years. I remember my fellow police officers who were 10, 15 years older than me telling me how much I was going to grow up, and I'm glad I've done that successfully. I hope we collectively can empower more people to do that.
I really appreciate you making it all the way through this on my Jerry Banfield Recovery channel, and I'll keep putting a video out here for you every day. If you consider yourself really hardcore and you want to keep going deeper with this work, the best way to do that today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we walk through this recovery and growth together. Over the years I've filmed daily motivation series with a video every day for months at a time, and I have my autobiography and my autobiography in recovery, which I filmed six years ago, talking through all of my addictions and how crazy my life used to be in graphic detail, as honest as it needed to be. That's what my life was like before, and it's kind of amazing how far it has come.
If you'd like to follow the fuller story of how I got here, you can watch my Life playlist. Every day I'm creating something that I hope will make a positive difference in your life, and I really appreciate you being one of the people who's experienced that.