Sometimes there’s that nagging sensation that we’re not feeling quite right. It’s absolutely normal in this day and age to feel like with so much information out there, we can feel like we’re on the wrong path. We make goals in life and think that once we’ve achieved those, we’ll be happy, but what happens is that we set the bar higher again. Learning to feel happier in ourselves can be an obsession, and it may seem that we’re not particularly good at being happy. But what can we do now to feel some semblance of happiness?
Give to Others
Being compassionate and caring towards other people helps us feel happier in ourselves. There is a belief that anxiety or depression can stem from being too inwardly preoccupied with our own needs, therefore, distraction by helping others can take the focus off ourselves, and the great thing is that there’s a wide variety of ways to do this. You can give to a charity such as EAA (Emergency Action Alliance), who are focusing their efforts on the earthquake that has impacted Turkey and Syria, and you can also volunteer, mentor, or just help someone out. There are many ways to help others, and when we start to focus on others, we can feel the benefits of doing something without expecting anything in return.
Practice Gratitude
Gratitude has been a major buzzword in recent years because it helps us shift our focus to the things that are right, not the things that are missing. A gratitude journal is a very simple thing that we can set up, and when you take the opportunity to write down five things every single day, no matter how basic they are, it helps you switch off your negativity stream. It’s a very simple way to help us focus on the positives.
Stop Judging
It can be easy to judge others, especially when we see so much of other people’s posts on social media. When we become more critical of others, it contributes to our unhappiness and dissatisfaction with our lives. We could be criticizing others because they’ve been on four vacations this year, but is this because we actually want to go on vacation ourselves? When we switch off being judgmental and focus more on ourselves, we are not just doing our utmost to minimize negativity, but it’s reinforcing the positives that we have in our lives. We can spend a lot of time looking at what others do, and this can fuel our sense of dissatisfaction, or we can make a choice now and focus on the things that we can achieve.
See the World
There’s many times where being a tourist helps us to gain a sense of perspective. Traveling broadens the mind, but it can also make us happier because it makes us realize how privileged we are. When we see others struggling and we’ve had the finances to fund a vacation, no matter how short it is, it can help us remember that while life isn’t always rosy, it is infinitely rosier than many others.
