Stop for a moment and ask yourself one important little question. When was the last time in your life you felt happy, and what was the reason? Many people's answer to this question is related to events such as a vacation, a big purchase, an important social event, a romantic activity with their spouse, etc. Of course, we would all like to feel happy more often, however, if we want this, the feelings of happiness need to be unrelated to specific events or occurrences. The benefits of being happy are clear, now all you have to do is implement the following 5 tips to help you be happier and make the most of your life.
If you’re reading these words it’s perfectly clear that you want your future to be as good and happy as possible. So, before you do anything else, you must truly understand the things that make you feel happy. We’re not talking about money, good food, gifts, trips or things like that - almost everyone enjoys these things and if the secret to achieving true happiness was so simple, then we wouldn’t see so many depressed people around us. To help you identify what it is that makes you feel true happiness, you can define true happiness as a sense of being able to enjoy a positive mood for a long time (as opposed to instant gratification), maintaining motivation and determination for goals that promote you, and as something that makes you much more resistant to anxiety and depression. True happiness, as you see, isn’t just a momentary feeling created by shopping, physical pleasures or a good movie, but rather it's a valuable tool you need in your life.
So how do you identify the things that make you feel real happiness? Unfortunately, there’s no definite answer to this, but there are definitely some tools that can help you find out what things help you feel real happiness. Your friends can be such a tool; If you just talk to them about the things that help them overcome motivational crises, you can get a glimpse into their inner world and things that make them feel something deeper than momentary gratification. The closer these friends are and the more similar they are to you, the more likely that the things that help them will help you as well. Another tool is your childhood because, despite all the changes you've made since then, the things you still remember as positive experiences from that period have remained steadfast memories in your brain for a reason. It may well be that these things can help make your life better, which is why you should look back at your past and see how you can reconstruct these memories, or at least part of them, in your life today. And finally, just try to incorporate a new experience of one kind or another in your life regularly every week. The actions and activities that you would like to do are probably related at some level to satisfying the needs that will ensure a happy future for you.
Most people don’t spend enough time thinking about their basic values, and this is true for people aged 20, 40 and even 60. Regardless of this fact, the values by which we conduct our lives can certainly change over the years, and not everything that we defined as important 10 years ago is as important to us today. Just as their name implies, these values are the basis of our progress in life, and if they aren’t defined and clear, then we behave like a car with no steering wheel - if we press on the accelerator we’ll certainly move forward, but it isn’t certain that we’ll be moving in the right direction for us. Experts estimate that many people who experience a midlife crisis come to these situations because they did not formulate basic values in their early years, and as mentioned above, it is also worth doing regularly from time to time.
So far all is well and well, but finding our base values is easy to talk about but difficult to do. One of the most surprising places where you can find them is in the past, and the meaning of this mysterious advice in practice is to write a short summary of your week at the end of it. In this summary, you must relate not to events, but to feelings about certain values. Such as a person who lied to a customer in your workplace which made you feel ashamed, a deep sense of satisfaction that you received from an entire day in the company of the family and the like. After doing this for a while, you’ll start seeing a pattern in the values your noticing, making these the values you hold dear. Of course, you can always just invest time and thought in neutral self-analysis to find the values which will help you move towards a happier future.
It’s important to know what areas of life will be difficult for us and what obstacles we don’t really need to worry about, because true happiness stems from, among other things, a persons ability to prepare for challenges and not dismiss them, while enjoying a sense of security and ability to do other things. As in the previous section, here, too, this is a topic that changes constantly because throughout life we constantly learn and change, and so does our environment. However, it’s important not to neglect this area when it comes to improving your life. Because when you have confidence in the accuracy of your strengths and weaknesses, life is much more satisfying and less disappointing, and this is true at all ages and stages of life.
To assess your strengths and weakness, you have to do a few simple things that require some perseverance. The first is to make a list of topics you feel insecure about, actions that are easy for you to perform, and those that are hard for you. Depending on this list you have to make certain decisions in life: in cases where you have the opportunity to take advantage of one of your strength, go for it, even if it means you need to step you of routine. For example, if you’re a person with a lot of knowledge about a particular sport, try to write about different events or games on different social networks and sites. On the other hand, if you feel that a task ahead of you requires skills that you classify as weaknesses, try to deal with it without any expectations from yourself. The stress that we experience in dealing with our weaknesses damages our functioning and makes us suffer for no reason. Instead of succumbing to the situation, explain to yourself and everyone involved that you are dealing with a challenge and accept that anything that gets done is better than not getting anything done at all. Keep in mind that facing these challenges will provide you with an experience that will improve your performance in the future.
The results of many psychological studies have proved over the years that a life without meaning is often an unhappy life, and before you begin to underestimate this fact, remember that meaning doesn’t have to be finding world peace, making a scientific breakthrough or protecting endangered animals. Despite the great importance of such aspirations, the meaning of your life can be something much more accessible. The meaning of life is something that can be characterized as your inner ability to define a general framework for your life that is not necessarily directly related to the actions you take on a daily basis. In order to understand the intention, imagine a person who works as an accountant for the for the police - he isn’t a police officer and his actions don’t directly promote public welfare, but he still contributes to it in one way or another and if he adopts this way of thinking, his work will be much more satisfying and his life will be happier. Like the same accountant, you too can and need to, find the ways to give meaning to your life.
Try to do one thing every day that matches the basic values that you have set for yourself with the tips mentioned, and also one that advances you or your environment towards an important goal or creates a process of positive change that you would like to see in the world. At the same time, try to think positively and understand how your actions improve the world one way or another. Perhaps you’ve taught your children about the importance of helping others through personal example. You may have responded to a provocative video on Facebook in a restrained way that promotes calm conversation, and you may have just sat down to dinner with your whole family and had an enjoyable conversation. All of these things have meaning and you need to know how to identify them and focus your life on meaningful actions related to things that make you happier.
Due to the pressures of the modern world and the changes that society has undergone in recent decades, most people sleep less, eat healthy foods less, exercise less and neglect themselves in many different ways. You may be 20-30 years old and therefore still not imagine a day where your body won’t take this treatment of it as well, and on the other hand, you may be 60 years old and accepting of your condition with no desire to change it or belief in the fact that it can even improve. Either way, it’s very important that you make sure to take care of yourself both physically and mentally: try to exercise for a few minutes every morning, listen to music more often, pack your lunch instead of eating fast food, share your problems with other people instead of being ashamed of them and try to live your life in general understanding that most people won’t take care of you as well as you can.
When you do this over time, you’ll discover how improving your health and mood brings you closer and helps you enjoy the true state of happiness described at the beginning of the article. Moreover, there’s a good chance that this behavior will inspire your friends and family, and slowly your joy of life, healthy habits and self-love will spread to those around you. We would all like to see this and therefore, in conclusion, you should adopt this tip and all the other tips outlined not only to improve your life but to make your whole environment happier.
