Wanna Be Happy? Don’t Do These 10 Things
07/11/2012
We are often our own happiness hindrance. We make ourselves unhappy because it’s not the way life treats you that impacts your happiness, but how to you react to it. When you can learn to ride the waves of life rather than getting caught up in the drama, you end up full of happiness and vibrancy.
If you looking for happiness, here's how NOT to find it:
1. Live on Fear
So many of us live on fear of what will happen tomorrow. But you cannot control tomorrow, all you can control is how you live in the present moment. Give up your fears of what will come and learn to love this moment because there will never be one exactly like it ever again.
2. Judge Others
Compassion is where true happiness stems--learning to understand those around you even when it’s the most difficult, rather than judging, makes life easier. Compassion and love for all living beings is one of the easiest ways to find true and lasting happiness in your life. Compassion is the key to connection and that connection is what makes us feel engaged in our lives rather than isolated.
3. Complain
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Who wants to hear someone complain all day? And when you find yourself doing the complaining, how does it make you feel afterwards? Likely not that good. Life is much more enjoyable if you look at the glass half full rather than half empty and awareness is half the battle.
4. Take Life For Granted
Spend time being thankful for this life you’ve been given every day. I wrote this week that one of the ways to do this is by meditating on death. Contemplation and meditation on death and impermanence are regarded as very important in Buddhism and one of the main reasons is recognizing how precious this life you've been given truly is instead of taking it for granted.
5. Beat Yourself Up
I read yesterday that 1 in 8 women don’t love their bodies. This is so sad to hear. Start by filtering the negativity from yourself. That doesn’t mean that your ego is oversized, rather, it means that you’ve accepted yourself for who you are, not for who you want to be. In the end, we're often hardest on ourselves and that’s when we lash out at others. Start by loving yourself and then expand that love out to those around you.
6. Go to Bed Too Late
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Not getting enough sleep is likely one of the easiest ways to hinder happiness. It means we can’t get up early enough for morning meditation, yoga, or exercise and it means that we load up on caffeine which causes anxiety and fear.
7. Drink Too Much
If you hit happy hour too often to unwind, you’re doing your body a disservice. Try and minimize the amount of alcohol that you take in to one drink per day for women and two drinks per day for men. Control the size of your drinks and have a water between cocktails. Drinking is a depressant and too much of it does just that.
8. Obsess With Perfection
Stop trying to be perfect, know that you are doing great just the way you are. Life is short so do your best to enjoy every minute of it and try to do some good along the way.
9. Blame the Time Crunch
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Don’t blame a lack of time for not doing what you love. Find time or give up the “time sucks” that are loading up your planner with things you’d rather not be doing.
10. Avoid Change
Change is part of life and those that can learn to surf the wave of change rather than trying to dam the river end up much happier. Love what you have and realize that change could come at any time.
Photo: Stockbyte
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