Can you Love Your Life More?
If you are like many people today, you may think your life isn’t exactly like you’d want it to be, but there’s a good chance you can love the life you have more than you currently do.
We have a strong ability to make ourselves unhappier then we need to be. We have this thing called the negativity bias that once was a wonderful internal tool to keep us safe, but has it become a problem in modern society? If you look at the data, it seems depression has been on the rise for some time and the Pandemic may just be boosting the numbers.
We’re also a little slow to implement the improvements that would make our lives more enjoyable. We’re focused on the bad things, fail to see the good things, and tolerate more than we should.
You can love your life with just a few small changes, such as:
1. Get rid of the things that annoy you.
Life is pretty good if you don’t have anything that bothers you. You don’t need an amazing car to be happy, but it’s hard to be happy if your car is unreliable. Sadly, if you have an unreliable car, this could be because of money situations. If this is the case, this can sometimes be bigger than… just changing a job, making more money and getting a new car. Rarely are suggestions like this quick or easy so maybe we need a different approach.
A better example would be looking at how you are spending your time. Are you working long hours? Are you not getting proper sleep? Are you putting yourself in bad situations or bad relationships? All of these can be hard as well, depending upon your situation, but you may be able to cut back on your work hours. You may be able to build a better sleep routine which could help things in life, be less annoying. You can certainly cut negative people out of your life and create a more healthy lifestyle.
So take some time and reflect on what is annoying in your life and see if there aren’t ways to minimize annoyances.
Make a list of everything that gets on your nerves. It might be an overflowing kitchen junk drawer, a squeaky bed, leaky faucet, insufficient income, or weeds in the yard.
Start working on this list and eliminate them one at a time. It could be a small thing like cleaning your dishes. You’ll be amazed how much more you like your life as the list gets smaller. Being productive can help. Plus you might be amazed at how much fixing one annoying thing fills you with joy and who knows… this new found win might create a snowball effect helping you rid yourself of more and more annoying things in your life.
Suffering is a natural part of life so you’ll never remove all annoying things from your life, however this is why finding ways to love your current life is so important.
2. Reach out to your friends
Life can get so busy that we lose touch with the people we enjoy the most. Loving your life is largely about removing the negative and adding the positive. Add your friends back into your life.
As an adult it can be hard to maintain relationships especially if you are a parent. I’ve moved across country in the early 2000’s and am self-employed so I have an odd situation related to friends. My wife is my best friend, but I have groups of friends – business contacts (although I do not mix personal life and business too much especially in the past), church friends (we never really hang out or do things together), and since I moved here, I have my wife’s friends as sort of my friends.
Now I am a parent and don’t do too much outside of family. So trust me, I understand how friendships can be tough. I did a few things to try to remedy my own struggles here. I joined some groups. I joined business groups online and made some new friends. I joined Toastmasters and made some different friends. I joined an accountability group and made some friends. Most recently I created a Book Club and joined a Sangha meditation group.
Anyhow, you might be surprised how reaching our to one of these friends or connections can help cheer you up and how much joy hanging out or even just talking to them could bring. Reach out and grab a coffee together or go to lunch or take your kids to a playdate in the park. Don’t neglect the importance of the community and relationships you already have but may be laying dormant as you got too busy with life.
Although I’ve had my own struggles in this space, connections are what makes life so joyous. I believe we need a solid circle of friends and this is a main part of what life is all about.
3. Set Goals, Give yourself something to look forward to and Work towards, but enjoy this moment while you do it.
One of the things we all need in life is something to look forward to. Plan something in the future that excites you and your life will be more enjoyable.
Be aware that it is good to have ongoing goals and projects or hobbies to work on, but do not get too hung up on living in the future. This takes us away from the present moment so try to find a healthy balance.
So for example some of my favorite things are what I call Success Habits. One of them is reading. I read regularly and try to read roughly 30 hours a month or an hour a day. In doing so, I can often hit my bigger goal of reading 100 books a year.
So I set a big goal, and I track books read, but try to more importantly enjoy the book I am reading in this very moment.
Another Success Habit is meditating. I meditate daily and have been for nearly a decade at this point. I have not however been able to meditate daily for 365 days straight. Somehow I miss a day from time to time. I use the Insight Timer app currently and I use it to track my daily meditations. So again, I set a big goal of sorts wanting to meditate every day for a year. From there it’ll be 2 years, then 5, then the rest of my life.
It used to upset me whenever I missed a day and had to go back to zero days and start all over again. I hit 220 days straight and had to start over. It was kind of devastating. So this is why I say be cautious of being too much in the future or too tied to the outcome of the “goal” without enjoying the journey to get there.
Now I still have a goal of practicing daily meditation and documenting my journey, but after a few difficult struggles I noticed how attached I was to the goal and the future and in reality I had to ask myself… “why am I doing this?”. The answer was to reap the rewards of the practice which I was, whether I ever reached a beautifully documented 365 days of meditation or not.
As of today I am on my longest continued stretch of 320 days. So I have 25 days to go to potentially hit a goal I set many years ago. Nearly hitting the goal is exciting and gives me joy every day as I get one day closer, but this future goal is for my ego. So set big goals for yourself and work towards them, just don’t let them take over your life or hinder the beauty of right now.
4. Focus on making regular small improvements to your life.
Another thing we all enjoy is the feeling of making progress in life. Whether it’s losing five pounds, learning a new scale on the piano, or adding another $100 to our bank account, we enjoy seeing improvement.
Pick a few things in your life and focus on making a little progress each week.
So this ties in to the goal setting and habits I mentioned above. Seeing regular incremental progress on a goal you set is healthy and will help you enjoy your consistent progress.
I personally am committed understanding what causes suffering what causes happiness and how we can build a thriving life. I have been on this journey for twenty-plus years most of which I was using my business to learn these lessons.
Over the last 5 years or so I started seeking how to apply more healthy ideas in my personal life. Learning things like letting go of anger, making peace with things not going as I thought they should, seeing the good in others and that they may be doing the best they can instead seeing them missing the expectations I may of had for them.
These are all difficult life beliefs and practices but with ongoing work I am seeing I can do them. So whatever you have going on in your life find ways to grow and evolve over time. Find joy in your progress, your success, and even in your failures.
There is an old saying that states “what gets measured, gets done.” I tend to like a variation on this saying… “What gets measured gets improved.” and so in this tip, I want you to not only do things, but see small incremental improvements over time. This gives everyday something to be celebrated and helps us enjoy the little things.
5. Let go of the past.
Spending time and energy reliving negative experiences from the past only degrades your mood and your life. Let it go.
Early on, I mentioned negativity bias where we focus all of our attention on the negative or bad thing that happened in our day (or life) when there were dozens of really great things that have happened. If our focus is so intent on that bad thing, we are unable to find the joy in the many wonderful things in our life.
Sometimes we want to recapture a time that was great in our life. Clinging to the past keeps us from seeing the beauty of today. Yes, this can be challenging at times, but it becomes easier if we are able to find the joy, again, in this present moment. For me this came from meditation, but in all honesty that wasn’t my intent when I started nor did I know this would be the outcome.
I was dealing with depression and that is what lead me, desperately, to try meditation. But through trying to get better and better at meditation or building a meditation practice, it lead me to these ideas. The more I practiced, the more I read the Tao Te Ching or psychology books, or wellness books or eventually Buddhist books, the more I realized I was working on more than just “sitting”. I was working on the self and part of that was learning to “Let Go” of the past.
This may take time, but you can do it too. Depending upon your background, it may happen quicker for you or maybe it’ll take more time. Sadly we are often conditioned to these beliefs and actions and sometimes, as in my case, we need to do a bit of work to reprogram our “conditioning” to be healthy conditioning.
6. Keep a gratitude log.
List the things that make you feel grateful. This is a great way to recognize the positive things that already exist in your life. Make a habit of writing down at least five things each day or maybe just from time to time as daily gratitude practice may hinder the power of this practice. There are mixed reviews on if daily practice is best or if maybe a handful of times a month would be better. Either way, in my eyes, this is one of the power tips for finding happiness in our current life.
This doesn’t have to be formal, and could be as easy as taking a few moments to write things down on a scrap paper. That said… having a formal journal for just gratitude offers other wins, like being able to go back a read what you were grateful for in the past. It becomes a journal that tells a very interesting story and may paint a picture of how you overcame difficult times.
If you have an interest in trying to add gratitude to your life and do not have a formal practice currently or it feels a bit overwhelming, then by all means try my GRATEFUL LIVING: 5-Day Gratitude Challenge.
In this challenge I provide 1 easy and quick gratitude lesson each day for 5 days. I also offer 1 to-do task each day for 5 days to take the lesson ideas and start applying them each day. This might take 10-15 minutes a day so it is very easy to practice and each lesson builds on the next so in as little as 5 days you could have a bit of a transformation in finding joy in your life and some new life skills to apply on an ongoing basis.
One of the lessons is about using a Gratitude Journal so give it a try if you’d like.
7. Keep your eyes open for opportunities.
Opportunities to enhance your life are all around you. There are people to date, jobs that pay better and are more enjoyable, potential friends, activities you’ve never considered, educational opportunities, and many other opportunities right in front of you.
Some times it is tough to see all the opportunities all around you, but with some training and practice the world will open up to you. Try to find one thing today that could be a great opportunity that you often overlook seeing the value of. Do this again tomorrow and before you know it you’ll be seeing opportunities offering a more positive path just be becoming aware of their availability or abundance in everyday life.
8. Take care of yourself.
Get some sleep, hit the gym or sign up for a workout course, eat better, and buy some new clothes. Be nicer to yourself and notice how much more you enjoy your life.
If you’ve been following me for any time or even if this is the first of my articles you’ve read, you might know how important self-care is to me. I practice and continually recommend that you find self-care routines that better serve you.
We are in a world that pushes us to work longer hours and seek happiness from external things. Basically the Hellagood Life brand is all about disrupting those ideas. Your life is too valuable to not take care of yourself. You have a lot of greatness to bring to this world and you are already doing it just by being you.
9. Participate in a hobby that you love.
There’s more to life than work and maintaining your life. A hobby is a great way to explore your interests and have some fun.
So I am a music fan and I put my music passion on hold for about a decade and this may be one reason I found myself with depression. Since then I started getting back into buying records and going out and digging for gems in new an interesting record shops that I never explored in Texas (where I now live and the place I stopped my music exploration for a bit).
I recently bout an adult coloring book on tattoos. I wanted to get back to just mindless coloring as another positive outlet for finding fun even on rainy days when I am stuck inside. I thought maybe I could color in my book and plant the sides for more creativity and joy of both coloring and drawing within my kids. So it’s been fun seeing where this will lead.
Find a new joy or rekindle and old one you let go of for whatever reason. There are a million different hobbies you could start doing so don’t limit yourself. One of the beautiful things about a hobby is it helps you get in the zone or be in a state of “flow” where you lose track of time and just BE in the present moment. The more you can get into that flow state, the more you will find joy in your life.
10. Remove distractions.
Distractions rob you of time and inhibit your progress. You can’t make your life completely free of distractions, but you can come close. You’ll be in a position to love your life more if you’re not distracted. You’ll also be happier if you find a way to cope with the distractions you’re unable to remove.
Distractions could be things like…
- Clutter – we are brought up thinking more is better and the next thing we know we are hoarders. Beware of accumulating stuff for happiness. An old friend called this “retail therapy”. Yikes!
- Perfectionism – We can waste a lot of time trying to make things perfect. This took me a long time to learn how to just make progress and move things forward instead of making things perfect.
- Desire for Wealth or Fame – If you get these things, that is great, but only shooting for these things can cause a lot of harm in your life and in your relationships.
- Seeking Pleasure – As I’ve mentioned before, life includes suffering. It is best to learn to deal and cope with suffering instead of pushing things we suffer with aside and only chasing pleasurable items or experiences.
There are other distractions as well. Just try to start becoming aware of what distractions you have in your life and see if you cannot let go of some of them. Our life truly is better than we often think. Try to notice this as well. We can make our lives significantly better with just a few small changes.
Happiness is not just a place, but also a process.
Happiness is a skill we can hone, not just a particular set of circumstances. When you do the right things and have the right perspective, your life will be much more enjoyable to you. You can love the life you have without doing anything drastic or winning the lottery (which actually doesn’t bring lasting happiness.
I love this Ed Diener quote – “Happiness is not just a place, but also a process. I once thought that when I had my “ducks in a row,” the right wife, kids, house, and job, that I would then be happy. And of course those things all helped a lot. But I learned that happiness is an ongoing process of fresh challenges, and that even when everything is in place it takes the right attitudes and activities to continue to be happy.”
I’ll end with this… the Lyubomirsky Happiness Pie and Lyubomirsky’s research show that 50% of our happiness is based on our DNA and has a set point that doesn’t change. Then we have 10% of our happiness or lack there of that is created by the situations and circumstances that happen to us each day. The exciting news though is 40% of our happiness is created based on our attitude and how we respond to things. So all the things “we can control” are the 40% that can deliver happiness, or not.
If you’d like to learn more about the science of this stuff you can read a previous article where I discuss Hedonic Treadmill, Hedonic Adaptation, more details on the Lyubomirsky Happiness Pie research and more ideas on how to deal with all of this stuff from a different perspective than I took in this article. You can read it in the article titled – WHAT IS THE HEDONIC TREADMILL?
I hope some of these ideas resonated with you and I wish you much more happiness right now in this very moment.
Want to try adding mindfulness to your self-care routine to find more happiness? Click below to get details about my latest mindfulness course.