Phoenix Education

Finding Happiness in a Sea Of Sadness or Overwhelm

“Happiness, Happiness, the greatest gift that I possess. I thank the lord that I’ve been blessed with more than my share of Happiness”. Happiness, by Ken Dodd.

We all go through tough times. There are periods in our lives where it is hard to find much joy and happiness amid a sea of sadness and overwhelm. We have times when we feel like we are in way over our head and cannot think straight. That causes lots of stress and as we have talked about in a previous blog post, stress kills happiness.

There are also incredibly sad times in our lives. Relationships end and we lose loved ones. There is certainly a time to grieve and we need to process that loss. We also need these sad moments in life to contrast the happier ones. Without sadness, happiness would be very meaningless. Think about that for a moment. If you are never sad, always happy, happiness becomes the new normal, not something to appreciate and strive toward.

There are things you can do to find a little happiness during these tough times. Often that is all it takes to help you make it through that period in your life. You cannot expect to flip a switch and suddenly everything is rainbows and roses. And why would you want that? We need time to process and grieve when we lose someone, and the overwhelm and stress help us stay on our toes and get stuff done. What we need is to see a small light at the end of the tunnel. We need that little bit of happiness to give us hope.

Let us talk about how you can go about creating that little bit of happiness to get you through the demanding times. The first thing you may want to focus on is gratitude. Whenever you feel particularly bad, sad, or overwhelmed and do not know where to turn, think about the many people and things in your life that you can be grateful for. If you have recently lost a loved one, be grateful for the time you have had with them and the things you have learned from this special person. If you are stressed out at work or in your own business, be grateful that you are growing and making progress. It may not be easy, but this overwhelm and stress usually means that much better things are ahead.

It is also extremely helpful to find the joy in the little things. Maybe you are not ready to be grateful and that is ok. Instead, pay attention to your surroundings and find a little joy in what is around you. Let that toddler playing in the park put a smile on your face. Enjoy the first warm rays of sunshine in the spring, or notice how beautiful that flower in your garden is. In other words, look around and find a little joy and happiness where you can. Above all, remember that even during challenging times, it is ok to find and appreciate these little moments of happiness.

Do not Sweat The Small Stuff – Savour It

Continuing with our pursuit of happiness – a great movie by the way!

“Don’t sweat the small stuff” they say. And they – whoever “they” are, have a good point. It is easy to get caught up in all the petty things that stress us out and ruin our day. Frankly, it is not worth wasting a lot of energy on a lot of things that happen daily that we do not like. Sure, we could get upset over the fact that someone else took the last good parking spot, or that the grocery store is out of our favourite brand of cereal. Or we can choose to not make a big deal out of it and use that small, insignificant stuff to practice seeing the positive side of things. Having to park further away means we get to exercise a little and enjoy the fresh air and sunshine for a couple of minutes while we stroll into the office. Not being able to find our favourite cereal, means we get a chance to try something new that we may like even better.

There are often two sides to any situation and as human beings we have a choice in how we look at it. Make it a goal to look on the bright side and watch your happiness and contentment go up. Then take it a step further and start to really pay attention to all the good stuff around you. Slow down and appreciate life if you will.

There is a lot of value in noticing all the positive things around you. There are a lot of tiny trivial things around you that will put a smile on your face, it you take the time to notice them. Make it a habit to spend some of your downtime this week to savour the small stuff. Notice how your cup of coffee smells, how it warms your hands on a cool morning, and how it tastes. Pay attention to the birds outside your window and notice how watching them and their antics around the birdfeeder makes you smile. Appreciate the hug your little one gives you after you pick her up from school. In other words, savour all the small stuff that makes you happy. It may not be much, but it all adds up to an incredibly happy life. You just must make the time to notice it.

Over the coming weeks, practice noticing and savouring the small things in life. Do not let the harmful stuff bring you down. Instead, make it a goal to find something positive about everything that happens to you throughout the day. Pay particular attention to all the things that make you smile. Acknowledge them and it will not take long before you feel this simple little exercise making a significant difference in your overall outlook on life.

We Crave Human Connections

I currently live by myself in a beautiful place called Southport. I am quite happy though I do miss having people around. And yet too many of the people I know are too busy to spend time together. Why is this a problem?

Like it or not, we are social creatures who crave human connections. It is hardwired into our brains because we need to work together to ensure the survival of our species. We must work together to make this happen. It only makes sense then that forming and maintaining those connections has an internal reward built in. On the other side, when we spent too much time isolated and alone we start to feel sad, depressed and if that isolation lasts too long, we can go mad.

And it is our interaction with other people more than anything else that brings us happiness. It is not the amount of money we make or have stashed away in a bank account. It is not the big house, the fancy car, and all the stuff we accumulate over the years. What makes us happy is spending time and sharing experiences with other people.

Of course not every single person makes us happy. We all must deal with plenty of people we do not particularly enjoy spending time with. We do it to work together on a project at the office because they are our colleagues, or because they happen to work out next to us at the gym. Some people we are ambivalent about, others we would rather not spend time with given the choice. Yet, there are still benefits to these relationships. We work well together, challenge each other, and become better people, and better contributors to society at large when we collaborate. This has its own rewards.

When we are with people we love and whose company we enjoy on the other hand, we get a lot of joy, satisfaction, and happiness out of those interactions. We have evolved into beings who crave the mental, social, and physical connections. There is a reason almost everyone appreciates a heart-felt hug.

Spending time with people who love and encourage us, and those that challenge us, and make us push harder, help us grow as human beings. We get better when we have cheerleaders and mentors around us. There is a reason people say that you are or will become the average of the five people you spent the most time around. Pick those around you wisely if you want to grow as a person and if your goal is happiness, spend as much time as you can with happy, positive people.

Above all, make sure you nurture those important close relationships with family and friends. Those connections will help boost your happiness and make you feel like you are part of something bigger that gives meaning to your life.

Happiness and Exercise

Are you a member of a gym? Do you run every morning? Do you have some free weights at home?

When you are having a difficult day, or are feeling down, the best way to increase your happiness, may be to exercise. There is a strong link between exercise and an improvement in mood and well-being. Give it a try. Go for a 30-minute walk whenever you are feeling depressed and unhappy. You will notice your mood starting to increase throughout the walk. As you get back, you may notice that you’ve feeling even happier.

This increase of happiness and wellbeing after exercise is caused by two different mechanisms in our body. The first is that exercise causes the release of brain chemicals like endorphins and other mood enhancers. This happens just a few minutes after you work out and the effect can last for a good 12 hours. The second part to the equation is that exercise also helps reduce the levels of stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline in the body. That means you will instantly feel less stressed. This one-two punch can have a powerful effect on how you feel. Something as simple as a brisk walk can help you feel better almost immediately.

For best results you want to exercise a few times per week. Take some time during your lunch break to go for a walk, or work a quick workout in before you head to work in the morning. It does not matter what you do if you start moving around and get that blood pumping. Pick activities you enjoy that you will stick with.

Photo by The Lazy Artist Gallery on Pexels.com

In addition to the everyday mood booster you get from exercising regularly, there are quite a few additional long-term benefits. Exercise is good for your health and you will start to get fitter and even slimmer and more toned if you stick with it. This in turn will improve how you feel and how you feel about yourself. That added confidence can be a great additional mood booster.

For best results, try to get as much exercise as you can outside. Fresh air and sunshine add to a feeling of wellbeing. Produce some simple things you can start doing right now. Maybe it is going for a walk each afternoon. Maybe it is taking up jogging. Maybe it is signing up for a yoga or Pilate’s class at your local community centre, or maybe it is joining a basketball team. It does not matter what you choose to do if you make it a goal to get more active and move around. Switch it up and plan a group hike for the weekend, or dust off your bike. There is a lot of fun ways to move around and enjoy the world around you.

Stress Kills Happiness – Easy Ways To Destress

It is hard to be happy when you are stressed. I do not have to tell you that. I am sure you have experienced it yourself. Think back on high stress situations like missing a flight to go on holiday, or when you were planning your wedding and things got overwhelming and started to fall apart. Hopefully, you were able to recover and enjoy your time away or your wedding day, but chances are that you were not too happy while you were stressed out. Stress sucks the happiness and joy right out of us.

It only make sense then that one way to increase our happiness and our quality of life is to distress. Not only is it good for our soul, it is also good for our overall health and wellbeing to reduce the stress in our lives. Here are some simple things you can do to distress.

Get Enough Sleep

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

A straightforward way to stress less is to make sure you get a good seven to eight hours of sleep at night. When we do not sleep well, and do not sleep enough, our bodies are in a constant state of stress, trying to make up for the lack of sleep. Sleep helps us relax and gives our mind time to process everything that has been happening. Stop burning the midnight oil and get some sleep. You will get more done when you are fresh and rested and you will be less stressed out.

Move Around And Get Some Exercise

Without doubt, the best stress reliever is exercise. Start moving around and burn that stress right out of your system. If you can get outside to workout, even better. The fresh air and sunshine will do wonders. Go for a run, or even just a short walk whenever you are feeling stressed. For best results, work out regularly.

Take Some “Me” Time

There are times in our lives when we must spend a lot of focus and attention on others. Maybe you are raising a toddler, or you are working hard to get a new company off the ground. At busy times like these that take a lot of our attention and time, it is easy to forget about ourselves, or put our own personal needs last. Make an effort to spend at least a little bit of “me” time each day. It does not have to be much. Even ten minutes spent relaxing and doing something completely selfish can be a fantastic way to decompress and distress.

Practice Meditation

Let us wrap this up with one last technique that can keep stress at bay. Try meditating. Again, you do not have to spend a lot of time on this. Sitting quietly going through a guided meditation once a day can do wonders. Once you get in the habit of practicing meditation daily, and get better at it, you can draw on the techniques you have learned whenever you encounter a particularly stressful situation. You can spend a minute or two in meditation, even at the most stressful time and allow your mind to relax. Trust me, this will come in very handy when life throws you a curveball, or when you are feeling completely overwhelmed.

The Connection Between Doing Stuff And Happiness

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We are hard wired for acting and getting stuff done. It only makes sense, doesn’t it? Our survival as a society depends on the actions of lots of different people. We each do our part and everything runs smoothly. It only makes sense then that we have an internal mechanism hard wired into our brain that rewards us for getting things done.

I am sure you have seen this in action in your own life. You feel proud, accomplished, and happy when you wrap up a big work project, or finish reorganizing your closet. It is a great feeling and it is what drives us to get things done on a regular basis. It is motivation to get to work and act.

On the other hand, when we do not have anything meaningful to do and we do not feel like we are contributing, we get depressed. People who do not have a fulfilling job, or feel like the work they do is useless, are much more likely to feel down, tired, sad, and depressed.

The best way to turn that around is to find something, anything we can do to make us feel productive. If we feel like we are contributing to others, having a positive impact on their lives, all the better.

Give it a try.

The next time you feel down, force yourself to do one little productive thing. Go clean the bathroom, organize your bookshelf, or do a load of laundry. Then use the accomplishment from that to motivate yourself to get something else done. Keep building on it, and before you know it you will notice your mood changing for the better

If you want to supercharge this experience, go out and do something productive that helps others. Go work at a soup kitchen for a couple of hours, or help at your local animal shelter. Offer to baby sit for a friend with little kids who has not been out all week. Do something that benefits someone else and you will feel even better than before.

For the long run, make it a goal to work at a job, or build a business that helps fuel this feeling of contributing and giving back. Wouldn’t it be great if the hours you spent earning a living each week, also contributed to your overall happiness and a feeling of fulfilment? What can you do this week or this month to work towards this goal? That is where you want to start and in the meantime, keep volunteering, keep acting, and do things that make you feel happy and accomplished.

Dreams and Goals…

Another good one from Daily Motivation. Some of them tie in with the posts I am working on about happiness and having a good life.

“Spend a few minutes a day visualizing your best possible version. Think about how you would spend your time.

Try to imagine how it would feel to accomplish all your goals.

This exercise can make you more optimistic and improve the quality of the decisions you make every day.

It will motivate you to take the necessary steps to achieve all that you want.

Don’t lose hope yet.

If things are not going your way now, doesn’t mean that it will never get better.

Don’t limit your possibilities.

You always have the ability to grow.

Start Your Day With Gratefulness

Let us talk about Gratefulness.

Gratefulness is all about appreciating the good things in our lives. Starting our day by thinking about all the things we must be grateful for is a fantastic way to set the tone. Practicing gratefulness makes us focus on all the good and pleasant things in our lives and that, in turn, improves our overall happiness.

In other words, spending a few minutes early in the morning thinking about what we are grateful for, can improve our mood and our feeling of being happy for the entire day. That is something well worth checking and you do not have to spend a lot of time on it.

As you are waking up, or while you are sitting at your kitchen table sipping your first cup of tea or coffee, think about all the things and people you are thankful and grateful for. Focus your mind on anything positive that has happened the day before, or that you anticipate happening today. You can be grateful for the smallest of things. I wake up grateful that I have a warm and comfortable bed to sleep in and grateful that I am still alive! Think about the people in your life that you are grateful for including your parents, grandparents, significant other, children, friends, colleagues, a boss that gives you a job. Try to find something good about all important people in your life.

Another option is to just look around you. Look at your sunny kitchen, or the trees and birds that you can see outside your window. No matter what your living situation is right now, I am sure you can think of things about it you are grateful for, even if it is not your ideal living space.

Make this grateful exercise part of your morning ritual. Focusing on it, and practicing it at the same time each morning and, if possible, in a similar setting, will help you form a habit. And that is the goal for the long run. You want to be able to practice being grateful effortlessly and without having to think about it. Getting to that point alone will have a significant impact on how happy and content you feel. Try it for a few weeks and take note of how your mental outlook changes by simply adding this little exercise of gratitude in the mornings. Before long, you will do it automatically and will not want to miss this opportunity to acknowledge all the good things in your life.

What Makes You Happy?

Make sure you do this!

In the last post we started talking about happiness and you started thinking about what makes you happy. It was part of our commitment to happiness. Today we’re going to dig a little deeper. There are a lot of things that make us happy on a regular basis. Think about the simple little things that put a smile on your face. It could be a person, a thing, an experience, an action, a song… the list goes on and on.

An easy way to increase our overall happiness and contentment is to simply do something that makes us happy every single day. During this challenge that’s something you should work on. To make it easier for the remainder of this challenge, let’s come up with a list of what makes us happy. This will obviously be different for each one of us. Let me give you a few ideas and some things to think about. Then I want you to grab a pen and a notebook, or a piece of paper, or if you prefer, open your laptop and start typing away. I want you to make a list of things that make you happy.

Don’t overthink this. Don’t try to come up with an organized and categorized list. Instead, simply start brainstorming and jot things down. Don’t feel pressured to come up with everything all at once. Feel free to add to the list as time goes by and get in the habit of noticing things that make you happy and then adding them to the list throughout this challenge and beyond.

Let’s start with the big ones that make us happy. What people in your life make you happy? What things that you own bring you joy? What activities and hobbies that you have bring you lots of happiness? Think big here and pick what has the biggest impact on your mood. This could also include things like what gestures or actions put a big smile on your face. Places are another great addition. Maybe you’re happiest at the beach.

For me I like building models for my railway and playing wargames. I also love sitting in a bar or restaurant with friends and family. If I really want to be happy I would visit Istanbul or Casablanca or Almaty, places where I have been happiest!

Then think about the little things that make you happy. Maybe it’s sipping that first cup of coffee in the morning, a pretty flower in your garden, or having five minutes to yourself. From there just become more aware of what makes you happy, or what brings a smile to your face. Stop and take notice anytime that happens, and keep adding to your list of things that make you happy. It will be a great resource to have throughout this challenge. As a bonus it will make you grateful and content, just looking at this long list of people and things that bring you happiness

Make A Commitment To Cultivating Happiness

Happiness and habits!

What does it mean to be totally committed to something? It often means that you set a goal and then dedicate yourself to do what it takes to reach that goal. We commit to a relationship when we get married, we commit to a job or a career, and we may be committed to a hobby. But today I want to focus on committing to cultivating happiness.

I shared how at least part of how happy we are is related to a choice we make. I also shared my goal of running this Challenge to help us make a conscious decision to be happier and create a new habit of having a more positive outlook. The first step to make that happen is to make a commitment to this challenge and to happiness. This holds true for any new habit you want to engrain in yourself. The first step is always to commit to it. From there, it is a matter of daily practice until the new behaviour or action has become a true habit. A habit is something you do without any conscious thought or effort.

Our journey toward a happier version of ourselves is no different. We must commit to happiness. Of course it is not as easy as saying to yourself that you will be happier from here on out. While that is certainly helpful, it is not as simple as that. Before we can commit to happiness we have to define what makes us happy.

Spend some time today to reflect on what makes you happy and what does not make you happy. Dig deep. For example, if curling up on the couch with a good book makes you happy, think about why that is. Is it because it gives you a chance to escape and forget about your own life for a while? If so, try to pin-point what you are hiding from when you dive into a book and what you can do about that. If getting up at 6am to go to work makes you unhappy, and changing to a later schedule is not an option, think about the positive things about getting up early. You get to see the sun rise, you get to come home at a decent hour and have time to relax before bedtime. Something as simple as implementing a relaxing bed-time routine and going to bed a little earlier may make it much easier to get up at 6am and improve your whole outlook on workday mornings.

We will dig a little deeper into what makes us happy and how we can go about cultivating more happiness in future posts. For now, find your own personal definition of happiness and produce at least ten different things or people that make you happy. Then commit to using the coming days to work on becoming happier. You will not regret it.