7 Guidelines for a Happier Life
A lot of people assume happiness is something they will never quite reach. That assumption is wrong. You can build a life stocked with good memories once you understand what actually goes into feeling happy, and the mechanics of it are not complicated. What takes time is the practice. Really you are retraining how you interpret events and how you look at the world. Give it a few weeks and you will notice yourself becoming a more cheerful person without having to force it. Here are seven things to work on.
Let go of your past. Whatever happened back then belongs back then, and it has no claim on who you are today. Chewing over old wounds only sabotages the calmer, brighter future you are trying to reach. Put your attention on the present and on what tomorrow might bring. Stay fixated on what went wrong and you cheat yourself out of enjoying the good things sitting right in front of you.
Trust time to do its work. The things that hurt you become easier to carry as the months pass. This is not about forgetting; you never forget someone you lost. But the sharpness of that loss softens into something you can live alongside. For anyone who has lost a person they were close to, this is brutally hard, and there will be stretches where feeling better seems flat-out impossible. You will get there. Time is on your side even when it does not feel that way.
Stop over-thinking everything. This one is tough, because the human brain loves to chew on problems, and it chews hardest on the negative ones. When something happens, you are not required to have every answer. Nobody has every answer to everything. Take responsibility for the parts you can actually change, and let the rest go. The endless loop of analysis just pulls you away from being happy.
Quit worrying about other people's opinions of you. Frankly, what someone else thinks of you is their concern, not yours. If you are a decent person doing decent things, you have done your part. Everybody has at least one person who dislikes them for some reason or no reason, and no amount of effort will fix that. Accept it, keep walking, and spend your energy on the people who already love you.
You are the source of your own happiness. Stop hunting for the right moment, the right event, or the right person to hand it to you. There is no reason to load that responsibility onto someone else or to postpone it until some future date that may never come. Notice what is good in your life and choose to be happy now.
Stop measuring yourself against other people. Somebody out there will always be stronger, faster, or smarter. Pointless to compete with that. Pay attention to the qualities that make you worth knowing instead. Nobody has a flawless life, and you rarely have any idea what a person is really dealing with behind the polished surface. Appearances lie all the time. Keep your focus on the good parts of yourself and what you bring to the table.
Take a second to smile. A smile is one of the quickest ways to flip a sour mood. Feeling low? Walk to a mirror, look at yourself, and smile. Smile at a stranger while you are at it. Small as it sounds, it nudges your mind toward the positive and makes the next few minutes a little lighter.
Work these seven into your daily life. Do not wait for an overnight change, because that is not how it goes. Becoming a more content version of yourself is not as hard as it sounds, though, and these are the exact things to lean on when life gets rough. They matter most during the worst stretches. Being happy does not mean shutting out every other feeling. It is a question of balance, and following these keeps that balance within reach. (Rosemary Kitchen)