Five Key Practices for a Positive and Happy Life
Life Sucks!
The disappointments keep piling up. You broke your phone, your work project is running into problems and making you feel ignorant, and you’re still angry about the way your friend treated you last week. You are tired of the same old arguments at home, and still you have to once again choose dinner selections to please the whole family.
When life feels like one giant letdown, it’s easy to think that everything is going wrong. In all likelihood, while you are probably experiencing plenty of challenges, life isn’t all bad. You’ve probably fallen victim to negativity bias, the very human tendency toward noticing and emphasizing hard experiences while writing off positive ones.
There’s good in your life, and you can take steps to recognize it more easily, as well as make changes to increase your positivity. If you’re tired of the constant negativity and ready to actively seek the good, here are five key practices to add happiness to your life.
#1 Self-acceptance provides relief from shame and stress
We are all human. We all have faults, quirks, strengths, preferences, and needs. That said, we aren’t always shown by others that our humanness is okay. Sometimes we’re taught that “perfect” and “normal” are the only options, and anything else will lead to being excluded, shamed, rejected, or punished. It can feel impossible to be happy or positive when you feel like you’re always failing.
But perfect isn’t possible! So how do we shake off these unrealistic expectations and the stress that comes with them?
Get to know yourself, get to like yourself
Accepting yourself as a human being can help you outgrow harsh assumptions and beliefs about what you’re worth as a person. The best starting point for self-acceptance is getting to know yourself. Ask yourself the following questions, be honest without being critical, and try to take a curious, non-judgmental approach.
What are my values? What’s important to me?
What am I good at? What are my weaknesses?
What do I like about myself? Do I downplay my positive qualities?
What do I dislike about myself? Am I realistic about the standards I hold myself to?
What do I respect about myself?
What do I hope to learn, or change about myself?
As you get to know yourself, you can begin to like yourself. You definitely have positive attributes, and they’ll become easier to notice if you go looking for them. Your shortcomings are also totally human and plenty of people have some weaknesses. You’re just a person, like everyone else, and just as worthy of kindness and happiness as everyone else.
Self-acceptance can replace external validation
When you rely on the opinions and validation of others to judge whether things are okay, or to determine whether you’re a good or worthy person, you can get stuck scrambling for approval and end up feeling lost, hopeless, and upset when you don’t have access to that validation.
Look at the standards you live by and consider whether you are relying too much on external expectations to guide yourself. By understanding your values and living by them, you can build self-respect and let go of the need for the approval of others to know how to feel or what to do. You can stop scrambling for validation and instead embrace living based on what really matters to you.
#2 When your inner voice is critical, consider mindful pushback
When we internalize lessons from others about how we are somehow “wrong”, we may develop a harsh internal critic, a little devil on our shoulder telling us that everything is awful, we are the worst, this will never work out, why even bother trying?
That inner critic is a leftover from a time when you were criticized too harshly, neglected, or even abused. Internalizing that negative voice was an attempt to keep safe when nothing felt safe, but now, it’s hurting you and holding you back.
Mindfulness helps you quiet your inner critic
When that little devil pipes up, consider being your own angel on your shoulder and push back against your inner critic. You don’t have to argue about the negative thought itself. Instead, try a mindful approach. First, notice that your mind is trying to keep you safe through criticism. Next, try to guide your mind—little devil and all—toward a more supportive and realistic thought process.
Here are some questions the angel on your shoulder can ask your inner critic, to defuse that harsh voice and point your mind toward more positive thoughts:
Is this negative thought true or just a thought? Do I need to take this seriously?
Can you prove this?
Is this helpful right now? Is it necessary?
What are some positives or silver linings, here and now?
Can I think of times when I did a good job?
Whose side are you on?
What would the people who care about me say?
#3 Gratitude is a mindset shift toward positivity
While there’s no need to only think happy thoughts, deliberately searching for things in your life that are positive and happy, and expressing thankfulness for them, can shift your mindset toward the positive.
Anxiety and depression push you to only focus on the negative. They also distract you from the present moment through worry about the past and fear of problems arising in the future. Gratitude stops anxious and depressed thought cycles immediately by asking you to look solely at the present moment, look for the positives, and recognize that you appreciate those good things.
A regular gratitude practice can help you see the brighter side of life
While in-the-moment gratitude is always worthwhile, it can help you to make gratitude a habit by sticking to a structured gratitude practice.
How can you start a gratitude practice? Set aside time 3 days a week (your lunch break or right before bed are both great options), and sit quietly and think about things you’re grateful for. They can be things that happened that day, how you feel, or what you notice in that moment, or the big things in life you appreciate. Write these things down, and if you feel like it, you can also read previous gratitude lists to enjoy more positive thoughts.
If you feel like practicing gratitude more often, go for it! But 3 days a week gives you a balance of both appreciating the good in your life, and going out and experiencing it. After you’ve participated in your gratitude practice for a month or two, reflect and see whether you’ve found yourself looking for things you’re grateful for more often, even outside of your formal gratitude practice. Are you more positive in your outlook? Do you feel happier, or at least have an easier time noticing happiness?
#4 Give your life purpose to create lasting satisfaction
Research shows that having a direction in life and goals to work toward is associated with better mental health. When stress, anxiety, or depression make it harder to see the positive side of life, and are impacting your happiness, finding something that gives your life meaning can help you recover a positive outlook.
Not sure where to start in giving your life purpose? Consider:
Volunteering
Joining community groups
Finding a job that aligns with your values
Leading work initiatives that matter to you
Spending time with loved ones
A hobby that adds meaning to your life
Learning new skills and abilities
#5 Self-forgiveness is crucial to happiness
It’s all too easy to beat yourself up for small mistakes or your very human shortcomings, let alone large mistakes or causing real harm. Whether the mistake is big or small, self-forgiveness can help you learn and change without the added stress of staying emotionally stuck.
You might hesitate; if you forgive yourself for causing real harm, how will you make amends? Shouldn’t you be held accountable? If you forgive yourself, does that make you a terrible, uncaring person?
What does self-forgiveness look like?
Self-forgiveness is choosing to experience, then release hard feelings like anger, fear, and shame over your actions, your thoughts, your perceived flaws, etc. It is choosing to say to yourself, “This feels bad, I am upset with myself over it, and I choose to forgive myself and let go of these feelings.”
This doesn’t mean you’re ignoring your impact or “getting away” with something. If you deliberately choose to forgive yourself for mistakes or harm and you can successfully put aside the difficult feelings of anger, shame, fear, or sadness, you’ll be in a much better mindset for looking honestly at what you need to do, and then doing it. Anger and shame can make you defensive, holding you back from taking accountability and perpetuating self-criticism.
Sometimes, you’ll need to offer apologies and change. Sometimes, you’ll realize the only thing you need to change is the unrealistic expectations you hold yourself to. Either way, with self-forgiveness, you gain the clarity to take responsibility for your emotions and also give yourself emotional space to do the work to repair.
Forgiveness isn’t forgetting
Alongside self-forgiveness, forgiving others can make space for more positivity. That said, when you read the header for this section, how did the word “forgiveness” make you feel? Many of us are taught that forgiveness is something we give to other people, not something we do for our own benefit. We are often taught that to forgive someone is to wipe the slate clean, acting as if an offense or harm never happened. This can feel insulting or impossible when we are hurt badly or repeatedly mistreated, especially when the other person doesn’t change their behavior or apologize.
Forgiveness is for you, not them
Forgiveness isn’t something you offer someone else, it’s something you give to yourself. Forgiveness is letting go of your emotional attachment to the offense or harm, recognizing that you don’t need to stay angry or hurt.
You don’t have to spend mental energy on “why” or on getting justice. You don’t have to ever speak to them again if you don’t want to, and you can choose actions that protect you, while also embracing forgiveness. Forgiveness is simply saying to yourself “I know what happened, I did not like it, it hurt me, and I’m choosing to let go of these feelings.”
Once you’ve felt the initial anger, fear, or sadness, you can honor your feelings and choose to let them go. You may find the feelings arise again when you’re reminded of the harm, so remember, forgiveness is a process, not an event. You’ll likely have to choose forgiveness over and over to create peace for yourself, but you’re definitely worth that effort.
Therapy in Coral Springs can help you make positivity practices part of your everyday life
As you have read these positivity practices for a happier life, how do you feel? Do you feel invigorated, ready to go, and know where to start? Or do you feel like you could use someone to talk to, to see how you can put these ideas into action, and to talk over the biases, expectations, and underlying self-judgment that you know you’ll have to tackle to live a happier life?
You never have to face changing your life alone. I can help you work through your roadblocks, use approaches like EMDR to challenge negative self-beliefs, and work with you to put into motion meaningful strategies that help you live a happier, more fulfilling life. Reach out when you’re ready, and schedule a free 15-minute call to get started on living with more positivity!
