Live Happily
Our modern culture can be a confusing mess sometimes. If you're getting tired of the high highs and the low lows that our media seems to encourage and are looking for something more stable and fulfilling, you can find this true happiness (and wikiHow can help!).
Contents
Steps
Loving Yourself
- Embrace yourself as you are. Accept yourself just as you are because you're already amazing! You can, of course, change as a person but you should never feel like there's something wrong with you just as you are now. Stop demanding perfection and embrace your faults!
- Increase your confidence. You will be better able to pursue the things you want if you have the confidence it takes to go and take those things for yourself. Improve your confidence so that you feel better and take life by the horns.
- Build your self-esteem. Learn to love yourself and care for yourself. This is one of the most important parts of living a happy life. Even if you have very few material possessions, you can be happy if you love yourself and are happy with who you are and where you're at. Remember how wonderful you are and all of the things you accomplished, and keep in mind all of the things you're going to accomplish. Embrace your faults and avoid holding yourself to an unattainable standard of perfection. Nobody is perfect!
- Change for yourself. Never change for anyone but yourself. If you have things that you don't like about yourself because you don't like them, then you can always work to change. But if people put conditions on whether or not they like you, then they're never going to really like you and you won't be able to change anyone. It's hard for people to change, and you'll only be able to do it at all if you really, really want to.
- Ignore the haters. Haters gonna hate. There are always going to be people that are just so miserable in their own lives that they feel the need to pick on you. But don't let their misery spoil things for you or get you down about yourself. Basically, they suck and they aren't worth your time. Ignore them and hope that their lives get happier someday.
- Give yourself what you need. Do things to make yourself happy. Let yourself have something special every now and again. Focus on your physical, spiritual, and emotional sides. Don't get so focused on one that you ignore another. Try to get in touch with the things that make you happy and then do those things!
Loving Others
- Respect people. When you respect others and treat them the way that you would want to be treated, then they in turn treat you better and you get to feel better about yourself at the end of the day. Remember: humans are social creatures. We need each other to survive and be happy. Don't drive people away by being a jerk.
- Give as much as you get. In your relationships, whether they're friendships or romantic relationships, you need to offer as much of yourself to others as you ask from them. You will only get out of relationships what you're willing to put in. Love people, make sacrifices, work for the good of everyone, and don't be selfish.
- Recognize, however, when someone is abusing you. If someone does things that show that they don't care about you, such as insulting you or hurting you, then cut them out of your life. They will only destroy your happiness.
- Help others. One of the greatest senses of fulfillment that you can get comes from helping other people in a significant, tangible way. If you want to increase your own happiness, try helping others. You can make it a point to be more helpful to people in your life, or you can do something like volunteer in your community.
- Celebrate positives. Don't be jealous of people. All that does is make you unhappy. Instead, be happy for people when things go well! Be genuinely happy for them and try to focus on living vicariously or learning from their success, rather than letting yourself think that they never earned it and you never get anything nice.
- Accept faults. People are different and absolutely everyone on Earth has faults. Focusing on someone's faults and letting it make you angry or unhappy is only going to make everyone's life worse. Embrace the idea that their differences make life more interesting and move on with your life.
- Communicate. Communication is key to social happiness. When someone hurts you or lets you down, it's usually because of a miscommunication. When you feel ignored or your friendships suffer, it's because there isn't enough communication going on. Make a point of talking to people more and encouraging more open, honest dialogue.
Enjoying What You Do
- Open yourself up to experiences. If you want to find the career for you, a good first step is to find out what makes you happy. But sometimes we don't know what makes us really happy because we've never tried it before. Open yourself up to new experiences and you might surprise yourself.
- Break down why you enjoy what you do. Identify the jobs that you like and what it is exactly about your dream career that you find so captivating. Really break it down to its key element. Not everyone can be something like a rock star or a famous artist, but there is more than one job that let's you enjoy the fun part of it.
- For example, if you want to be a rock star, is it that you enjoy being the center of attention? Maybe you enjoy creating things. Or maybe it's getting to listen to music. There are more accessible careers that let you do these things!
- Follow that passion. Once you find out what specific thing it is that makes you feel happy and fulfilled, follow that passion until you have a career that's focused on doing that thing. If you're doing work that caters to your passion, then you'll love getting up every morning and you won't feel awful when you go to bed at night.
- Find out how to succeed. Find out what you need to do in order to get the career you want and then work to do that. Look for advertisements for your ideal job and look at the requirements they want. Don't feel restricted by what you see: there are ways to go back to school, even if money is a problem.
- Keep moving forward. Keep going, keep working your way up, and never, ever give up. Keep giving yourself new goals. The second you stop working to be better is the second you feel unfulfilled and bored.
Getting Out There
- Learn a new skill. Maximize your enjoyment of your life by learning to do something that you enjoy and that you can be proud of. Everyone has something that they've always wanted to learn how to do. You're alive...so why aren't you doing it? Make time and pursue the things that you want to do.
- Spend time outside. Get outside. When we spend too much time inside, we begin to feel trapped in our repetitive lives. We also tend to forget just how amazing the world is. Did you know that there's a tree in Utah that's 80,000 years old? Or that Blue Whales have a heart the size of a mini-van? Embrace feelings of amazement about the natural world, rather than letting yourself get all jaded.
- Exercise more. Forget about getting thin and hot: that's not important. What is important is that you feel healthy and strong, and you build the habits that lead to a long life. Being out of shape or unhealthy may make you feel only a bit gross during the day, but when you start getting in shape you'll be surprised just how much better you feel.
- Travel, anywhere. Traveling will open you up to a wealth of experiences and people that you would never have even known about if you just stay at home on the Internet all day. Get out and go places, even if they're not very far away. Ditch the tourist routine for a local experience if you want to gain even more incredible experiences.
- Take risks. If you keep your life safe and same-y, you'll never get anything really wonderful or new. You can't wait for amazing things to fall into your lap because they most likely never will. Getting real rewards means taking risks in life. Just make sure that you weight the risk vs the reward and make sure that it's worth it to you (but sometimes you're just going to have to push that boundary a bit).
Feeding Joy, Starving Sadness
- Seize the moment. Take an active role in your life, taking initiative and opportunities. This will give you the chance to explore everything that life has to offer. Hesitate too much, and you'll just watch life pass you by.
- Accept change. Change is going to happen, whether you want it to or not. If you spend a lot of energy and build a lot of stress trying to fight changes, you're never going to be happy. Accept changes, even if they're bad ones. If something's really bad, you can always find a way to fix the problem or make it better. But you don't want to fight a blessing in disguise.
- Prioritize. Unhappy people tend to have their priorities completely out of order. Check yours. If you value your car more than your children, you're going to live an unhappy life. A wise man once said of material wealth: "You can't take it with you".
- Appreciate the good things. When good things happen to you, you should celebrate them and enjoy every moment of them, instead of worrying about when you'll lose them or just wanting more. This will maximize the enjoyment that you get out of life.
- Don't sweat the tough things. When bad things happen, don't let it get you down. The situation is only temporary, because all things in life are temporary. Work to improve your situation and just keep telling yourself: this too shall pass.
- Let yourself enjoy the world. Never hold back on your happiness. We learn, as we get older, to mute our emotions or be ashamed of them. Stop worrying about what someone will think about your joyful glee that there's going to be another season of Almost Human and just be happy. Your happiness should never be muted by the stupid opinion of someone else. Let them go and be miserable, you just have a good time.
Tips
- Don't become friends with people who don't like you because then you will make things more difficult for you, always trying to impress that person.
- Love others and you'll be loved.
- No matter what you are doing it can be fun. Whether you are doing your homework or cleaning up the bathroom. Make a joke about it. If you think about it homework can be fun and funny.
- Dance and even if you're no good for some reason you can't dance and stay uptight.
Warnings
- Take some things in life seriously like if a friend is having a hard time listen to her/him, don't just let it go because it's bad morale. Try to make her/him feel good too.
- Some people might get mad at you for being so happy and living a stress-free life and will try to rain on your parade. Just remember it's always fun to dance in the rain. In other words, don't let that person get what they want or else you might end up sad and depressed just like them.
Related Articles
- Make Positivity a Lifestyle
- Laugh at Nothing and Everything
- Find Fun in Everything
- Be in Your Happy Place