March 24, 2014

Happiness Today: Tips to Start Enjoying Your Life Even in the Tough Times

If you type “more happiness” into Google, you will find over 500 million hits. To say we are interested in finding happiness in our lives is an understatement. But what does it mean to be happy and more importantly, how can we begin enjoying more happiness in our lives?

happiness_stead

Photo Credit: Jessica Stead

This post is the first in a series I will be sharing with you called Happiness Today. In this series I will share with you tips that will help you move from feeling stuck, anxious, stressed and unhappy, to feeling more in control, optimistic and motivated. Tips that have proven to have worked in my life..tips that I come back to time and time again.

What I have learnt about happiness I have learnt the hard way, through my experiences of illness, anxiety, depression and grief. The most important thing I have learnt about happiness I will share with you today;

Happiness is not a result of having a perfect and problem free life. Happiness comes from knowing how to find inner peace, no matter what is happening in your life.

If you are striving to remove all problems in your life, I think you are fighting a losing battle. Experiencing challenges in life is the price we pay for living. We also learn the most from the challenges we face, so we shouldn’t aim to live a ‘problem free’ life.

But at times the challenges we face in life do rob us of our happiness. We seek happiness when we are unhappy, and we are unhappy when we feel we can’t find a way through our problems. We feel unhappy when we are overwhelmed, or simply too tired to put into practice the things we know we should be doing.

So how do we get through these tough times and find happiness again?

Instead of trying to ‘problem proof’ our lives, we need to develop an inner resource that is solid and stable. An inner resource which allows us to navigate our challenges without going under, getting stuck or losing our hope and happiness.

By developing a firm foundation of inner peace, we can move away from the ups and downs associated with inner turmoil, the feeling of being consumed day in day out by worry, fear and anxiety.

If you are struggling to find happiness and hope, then you aren’t alone. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In the Happiness Today series I will outline how you can develop inner peace in a step-by-step sequence, starting with acceptance which I will share in my next post.

Finding happiness is about learning how to successfully manage the tough times in life and building up your confidence to know that you have all the resources you need to get through, to ‘hang in there’ and to rise above.

The first step in this series is to take some time out to get your ‘life bearings.’ To discover how you are feeling about your life and what you think might need to change. The following questions will allow you to get started today on your path to greater happiness and provide the foundation for the weeks to come.

Start Today

1. How happy are you with your life currently?

2. What would you rate your happiness from 1-10, if 10 is ‘extremely happy’ and 1 is ‘not at all’?

3. Can you identify the top 3 things which might be holding you back from feeling happier?

4. Next month, what score would you like to achieve?

5. What is one thing you would like to change about your life?

Even when life changes in ways that are challenging and difficult, we always have the ability to think and act our way towards greater peace and happiness.

Positive change begins with knowing better then doing betterit all starts with one step.

I look forward to you joining me for this series. If you don’t want to miss out on the Happiness Today series, make sure you sign up to receive email notification when new content appears on my blog.

P.S. Don’t forget to leave a comment in the section below, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Love and Gratitude,

xxx Jess xxx

1 comment:

  1. Simply in life we are facing both good and bad and it decide our patience and courage to face everything. During tough times we just forget to smile and put our whole concentration on the problem only; so that we just skip our happiness and smile for the particular reason. But we should be more practical while dealing with tough times and shouldn't be forgetting happiness and smile.
    Life Coaching

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