5 Simple Ways To Be Happier
Learn how you work and what makes you tick; you’re productivity and happiness will thank you.
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If you live in the hyper-sharing, media-saturated world of the US or similar first-world countries, then chances are you feel like you aren’t as productive as you should be or that you wish you were more successful or lived a healthier life.
The key to unlocking internal health, happiness, and success is not a college degree or a ‘great job’ or being slim. Those are all symptoms of people who know what they want and know who they are. The key to being successful in every area of life is self-reflection, or in other words, understanding, truly understanding, how your mind and body work and how to get the most out of what you have.
Here are some dead-simple techniques you can employ to improve your health, happiness, and productivity. Building a better life is often individual , but sometimes, all we need is a simple shift in mindset.
1. Start the day off right.
By far the hardest tip on this list, but also by far the most effective, ensuring you start your day off right is critical to the rest of the day.
Find a morning routine that gets you in the mood to do something today. Everyone is different, but that routine must not contain social media, video games, or any form of entertainment really. I can tell you from experience that how you start the day is the single most important factor in the day’s productivity.
Some good ideas:
- Morning walk/run
- Read the newspaper (yea, a physical one)
- Read some great articles on Medium (I like to do this in the morning)
- Meditation or yoga if you’re into that sort of thing.
- If you do something creative as either work or a hobby, that’s often a great candidate for the morning’s routine. I like writing in the morning when I have the most motivation.
Reflect on your experience and find a morning routine that works for you. Just trust me on this one. It works.
2. Understand your eating habits and how food affects you.
This is something most people never try to learn in their life, but it’s critical to maximizing your life. Every piece of advice you find on the internet or in diet books about how X, Y, or Z tip/diet/food can improve this or that part of your life is not telling you the full truth.
Food affects everyone differently, but you can find out, with some experimentation, what habits and foods affect you and how.
I’ll give you some examples. I’m an overweight guy, so naturally I pay a lot of attention to food. I’ve noticed that eating late tends to decrease the quality of my sleep (thus making me want to sleep longer), induce acid-reflux (sometimes) the next day, and make me really groggy in the morning. It also, ironically, seems to make me hungrier in the morning.
Speaking of eating in the morning, if I skip breakfast, I find that I have a generally more productive day, because it’s easier for me to focus and work in the morning. We often don’t realize it, but when we eat, we’re usually also taking resources away from the brain and putting them into digestion. Digestion uses a lot of calories, so it makes sense that when you’re in digestion mode, there is less energy available for other parts of functioning.
Those are just a couple examples, but you should experiment with your eating routine and pay attention to how it affects you. Change how many meals you have in a day, when you eat, and how much you eat at a time. You can experiment with different diets as well, but I find that to be more difficult than just messing around with parameters like timing and portion-size.
3. Allow yourself to be blissfully happy sometimes.
Take one day a week (at least one day a month) to just be happy and in the moment. Do something that makes you happy and don’t feel bad about it. Turn off all work and do what you want to do, for a day. Just be careful not to spend too much money.
We’re taught from a young age that America is the country of hard-working people making it to the top. What we aren’t told is that this fetishization of work, and indeed over-working, is actually extremely harmful to our health.
We all need a break from time-to-time, but even more important than taking a break is not feeling bad about it. If you take a break but then also feel bad about it, you’re ruining all the good the break did for you. Don’t expect yourself to be at 110% productivity all the time; all you’ll do is kill yourself decades earlier than you could have lived. And even if you don’t die early, you still lose precious time that you could have spent bonding with friends and family, enjoying the world, travelling, and whatever else you’re interested in.
4. If you have a bad (unproductive) day, don’t beat yourself up.
While I encourage you to purposefully take time off, we’ll all have some days where we get nothing done by accident. Even if you’re very aware of yourself and how you work (like I am), it’s very easy to be hyper-critical of yourself when this happens. Consciously remind yourself that it’s alright to have unproductive days, that what’s done is done, and all you can do is learn from it and move on.
And work on determining what things tend to derail your plans or productivity. For me, it’s entertainment, particularly TV shows with entire seasons available to view (binge watching can literally ruin an entire week of my productivity if I’m not careful). I also have to be vigilant when it comes to gaming, and if I want to play a particular single-player game with a heavy story component, I have to plan to lose a couple days to it.
When it comes to the things that destroy your productivity, avoid them as much as you can, but learn to work in and manage a little from time to time. Sometimes, finishing an 8-hour video game in one day can be refreshing (just make sure to get up and stretch a lot), but don’t expect to get anything done that day.
Now all of that said, it’s important to not get complacent. If you find yourself losing a significant amount of time to procrastination, then you may need to get harder on yourself to get out of the rut.
5. Remind yourself that social media =/= life.
I am not the first person to claim that social media is ruining your life and your mental health. People claim it’s harmful and addictive. You’re probably addicted to social media without knowing it.
It’s really easy for our minds to concede that our friends’ and family’s social media presence is their everyday life. Our brains aren’t trained to know that people are just posting the good parts. We all have moments where we feel alone, depressed, stupid, and not good enough. We never share those moments.
Instead we share that rare day when we feel on top of the world. And really, that’s how social media should work; just don’t over-indulge. The first step is to just check it less. I check Facebook, at most, three times a day and never in the morning (for about 5 minutes each time). Try something similar; it’s not just a time-saver, but it’ll probably make you feel better about your life in general.
Remember that life sucks sometimes. Take it in the best stride you can, don’t be afraid to share with someone you trust, and keep on moving. It’s all you can do.
If you reflect on your own habits and quirks, and the things that affect your life everyday (like food, social media, and entertainment), you’ll be able to find a healthy balance and unlock new potential you didn’t know you had.
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