By: Taylor May
It is easy to say that everyone wants to be happy with their life. No matter where the road takes us we all want to be happy with life at the end of it. But being happy is easier said than done. You have to put effort into achieving your own happiness. To live a happy and healthy life, it is not taking the easy route. When you take the easy route in life, you are surrendering to the vices of it. These might be spending an extreme amount of time on social media throughout the day, using grubhub for a meal instead of cooking, watching drama videos, or using social media in a negative way. In today’s society it has become easier to be lazy but there has been more pressure than ever to succeed by huge amounts. It is important to find things or activities in life that make us feel happy and healthy. Here are things that are necessary to have a happy life.
1. Continue to have challenges in your life.
When you have challenges placed in your life, you get a sense of feeling accomplished whenever you complete it afterwards. Right now the easiest challenge to find is school. It can be hard to find another challenge than school so make it a goal to finish all your homework by a certain time everyday. My form of challenge in life is baking. Sometimes when I bake, it doesn’t turn out the way I want to throughout it or I keep messing up on a step. It is when I finish and it turns out great I feel so accomplished and it boosts my self-esteem. It is important to find your challenge. Some people have the mindset that they want to work hard to succeed in life so they can remove all challenges. When someone doesn’t have challenges, it makes them put their energy somewhere else that is negative. They start to lose their groundness and become unhappy. Having a challenge and completing it helps keep us grounded.
2. Controlling your social media and internet usage.
When you spend an excessive amount of time on the internet especially around negative content, your mental health can just plummet. Try to find things that will distract you from being on your phone as much as you can. This can be cooking meals for yourself, exercising, or hanging out with people that you generally enjoy having a conversation with. I have noticed that the days I do not spend a lot of time on my phone, I am more happy than other days. You can also delete apps that negatively affect your mental health. You come to realize pretty quickly after unfollowing someone or deleting the app that your mind forgets that you even had it beforehand. It can feel like you are missing out on lot but I promise you that you are not and you will feel so much better afterwards.
3. Having balance with social life and alone time.
We all need to have time to reflect and be alone. The issue with this is that it is really hard to find that balance. Without the balance, you can self reflect too little or too much and that can hurt you. Finding your personal and healthy balance is the key to everything. It takes a lot of reflection and self awareness to understand what that balance is. When you socialize too much you lose that time to yourself to decompress. Being alone all the time will lead your mind to be cruel on yourself. It can be hard to keep the balance at certain moments in life but when you do the outcome is amazing.
4. Practicing gentle self reflection.
The key word to this one is the word gentle. If you do not self reflect on yourself gently, you are just bullying yourself and nothing is going to come out of it. Find the method in your life that encourages and promotes healthy self reflection. Some methods might be journaling, mediating, manifestation, or simply staring at your ceiling. It needs to be a you time moment to do it. One of my favorites is journaling and manifesting. When I write in my journal, my thoughts become more tangible and not as crazy as what I thought they were in my head. I also enjoy writing positive affirmations of things I want to have in my life every morning. You can take positive affirmations with you on the go with the app called “I AM”. It will tell you different kinds of positive affirmations all throughout the day.
It is important to always be kind to yourself in these moments. It is not always easy to do but you need to treat yourself with kindness in order to let yourself grow, heal, and be happy.