Five simple ideas to apply to everyday life
Happiness might be considered as the most elusive yet greatest achievement a human being can accomplish. It’s misunderstood, thrown away carelessly, and often found in the last place you’d look for. It is the ultimate underlying and unconscious goal of every human being. So, how do we achieve it? Here are a few simple ideas to start being happier right now.
Compete Only With Yourself
The first thing we can do to start being happier is to deal with the most common and negative emotions we experience: envy and jealousy. They stem from the misled belief that we are competing with others around us. Logically if someone was to go through life that way, they would always meet disappointment, because there would always be at least one person better at it than them. It is more productive to focus on yourself and push yourself to do better than you did yesterday, rather than to think constantly about someone who might have gotten half a point greater than you on a paper. This mentality also helps bring joy into anything you do.
Master Your Relationships
What essentially makes us human, is our ability to communicate, and form emotional connections with others. In other words, our ability to have relationships. While this may seem easy, the truth is, having meaningful and deep bonds with someone is difficult. It takes time, effort and is often very frustrating, to the point where sometimes it seems easier to let a relationship fade away rather than put in the energy to make it work. Relationships which are hard and in which you are allowed to be you, are the ones worth keeping. Because self-love is a key to happiness, and there is no better way to learn to love yourself than be around those who love and respect you for who you are.
Have A Goal & Be Ambitious
While it serves well to be content with what you have, life becomes meaningless if you are not constantly striving toward a grand goal or dream. For some it could be to visit every country in the world, while for others it might be getting a medical degree. Wherever you are in life, there must always be a goal you are reaching for and pushing yourself for. It is the lack of this goal, that make many of us feel repetitive, and unimportant in our own lives.
Be Grateful
Many well-known names swear by the benefits of gratitude to not only making them successful, but happy. As it turns out, gratitude correlates positively with happiness, where one cannot exist without the other. No matter how happy you feel, without gratitude, it will always feel superficial, as well as fleeting. Gratitude is what keeps us humble and grounded, which leads to happiness and success. Do not underestimate the power of taking five minutes everyday after waking up to be thankful that you’re breathing.
Take Care Of Your Health
Health is composed of three key elements; eating, sleeping and exercising. Strive to treat your body as a machine. A machine requires good fuel to keep running well for a long time. It needs to be used or it gathers rust. Finally, if it’s not powered off, it will overheat and collapse. So, if you are going to push your body everyday, make sure to put it in a state where that is possible. Keep in mind, that while machines can be replaced, we only get one body.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gurleen Kaur Bajwa is a student of Fraser Heights Secondary. She is athletic and considers herself an outdoors person. She loves journalism and travelling.
