How to be happy is one of life’s age-old questions and conundrums. We all want to be happier, but we very very rarely know how to do it.
Happiness is a huge thing and everybody needs to do a lot of their own deep personal work before they can achieve long-lasting happiness. And even then, happiness will always come in peaks and troughs rather than being a permanent fixture.
And that is ok.
Because when we are truly in touch with ourselves and our moods, we can accept that happiness isn’t permanent while still consistently, proactively encouraging it to stick around. It is a fine balance between accepting that we can’t force happiness and knowing that it still needs a little helping hand from our side too.
If you want to increase your chances of being happier, there are lots of things that you can do to help it along.
At the end of the day, it is our responsibility to make ourselves happy more than it is anyone else’s. No one is ever going to swoop in and make us endlessly happy.
That’s our job, and here are some easy ways to do it.
Exercise more
Exercise is key to happiness. Regular exercise helps us to regulate our emotions and release positive hormones and chemicals. It also helps us to regulate our stress and anxiety hormones so that we can deal with them in a more balanced way.
If you regularly exercise, even for a short period of time, you definitely will feel happier, healthier, and lighter in mood.
You might not always feel like it, especially when you are down. But that is exactly when you do need to do it. We need to push ourselves to make ourselves happy because, as we said, no one else is going to do for us.
It doesn’t have to be heavy gym sessions or anything excessive. It can be as simple as daily walks or yoga.
Whatever it is that works for you.
Cut out alcohol, processed sugar, and junk food
Our brains function on what we feed them, and happiness comes from both our brains and our bodies.
If we feed ourselves things that fuel neither our brains or bodies, it will be much harder for us to organically feel happy.
We need to view happiness as a multi-modal thing that includes effort from each area of our lives, and diet is just one of these areas we need to focus on.
Cutting out alcohol, processed sugar, and junk food are the best cuts we can make to make the quickest difference. You will see the difference in yourself after only a couple of weeks without these things.
Connect more
One of the best possible things we can do to increase our levels of happiness is to connect more with other people.
Our generation is more isolated and individual than ever before and we need to reconnect.
Reach out, connect, talk.
You will feel all the better for it, I promise.
