5 Ingredients To Live A Happy Life In The Modern World
Happiness is a state of activity!
It’s pretty challenging to live a happy life in modern times because everything seems to be happening really fast.
Your life is changing unexpectedly fast, and that’s overwhelming you. You feel left out of things, and that’s making you sad and depressed.
You badly want to figure out a way to make your life better and happy in general.
What can we do to live a happier and more fulfilling life?
There are certain principles or what I refer to as ingredients you need to include in the recipe of your life; if you do so, you will be happier than ever.
1. Having reliable People behind your back.
It can be tough to get through a challenging phase in life alone. You need people to help you; you need back support.
You need people with who you can share a sad or happy part of your life.
Strive to make connections and find people you can rely on and trust upon. They don’t necessarily need to be your friends; they can be your parents, your brother or even your therapist.
Try to get to know people more and put in the effort to deepen your connection with people who encourage you and make you feel better about yourself when you are around them.
It’s equally important to cut out contact with toxic and harmful people.
2. Living a challenging Life
In modern times, everything is becoming easier to get. With growing technology, It’s easier than ever to be lazy.
You don’t have to work for happiness as you can scroll through Instagram or watch YouTube videos to achieve it.
But let me tell you, that’s not real happiness; it lasts only for a while and ends up making you lazy and guilty about yourself.
We think living an easy life will make us happy as we will be in our comfort zone, but it’s the very opposite.
It’s when you do hard things then you feel satisfaction and a sense of achievement.
Do you realize how in our school days we used to be happier than ever? Although it felt miserable at times to go through assignments. But in general, we were busy but happy.
Start filling your day with activities that push you off your couch. Start cooking meals, learning new things, exercising. Just simple things that keep you busy with your life.
3. Having something to look forward to.
Dad-day activities, jobs, project and life, in general, gets repetitive after few days. It becomes very difficult to go through heavy workdays.
But when you have exciting things waiting for you in the future, you somehow find the strength to go through hefty days.
Having something to look forward to in future is very important. Something that excites you and makes you check your calendar frequently.
It could be a vacation with family or friends or eating out on weekends, or watching movies.
It could also be small things like waiting for an episode of a show, or if you are a football fan like me, it’s weekend matches of big clubs.
No matter how busy you are, make room for exciting things to look forward to in life.
4. Creating more than consuming.
Everyone is constantly on their phones nowadays. But it’s not our mistake, to be honest; I mean, there are soo many apps, games and content to consume.
These apps are created in a way that triggers our brain to keep using them, and they become hard to resist. There is always something new, and our brain gets a dopamine rush while we use them.
It has messed up our brain’s chemistry. When there are no notifications or new content, we feel unhappy because our mind desires that dopamine rush.
It’s impossible to stop using our smartphones all at once, but you have to gradually reduce your phone usage if you want your mind to regain its normal state.
Start by deleting unimportant apps. Remove the junk as much as possible.
Fill your days with activities that distract you from picking up your phone. Activities like cooking, reading, meditating or go for a walk without your phone.
You must have noticed how we check our phones less when busy with our lives; we feel fulfilled and satisfied with ourselves.
5. A balance of social and alone time
Happiness is about finding a balance between things. Overdoing or underdoing things leads to unhappiness.
When we stay at our home every day, we feel caught up in our mind, and we start over analyzing our lives, which leads to anxiety and hopelessness.
Similarly, spending too much time outside of our homes with friends and people leaves us very little time to journal our thoughts, and we feel like we don’t have control over our lives.
I am usually busy with work on weekdays, and so I often stay at my home. But on weekends I try to go out, meet friends and even if I have no one to go out with, I go exploring the city by myself.
You have to find a way to balance things out and separate the days you will go out with friends and days where you spend alone time with yourself.
Definition of a Happy Life
What exactly does someone mean when they say they want to live a happy life?
Is there any particular cheat sheet we could all follow to achieve happiness?
The answer to all these questions is “No”.
A happy life does not have a particular way of living or meaning in general. It depends upon person- person and what makes them happy.
Some people want to live a life where they can afford expensive things and go to expensive restaurants.
Others want to live a simple life where they get to spend their time with family and kids and do the things they love.
Ask yourself these questions:-
- What kind of life do you want to live?
- What are the things that make you truly happy?
- What are things you need to do to be able to live that kind of life?
Answering these questions will give you a clear view of what a happy life will look like for you.
#KeyTakeaways
- Having supportive people by your side makes it much easier to go through difficult times
- Living a challenging life is vital for your mental health, and you feel true happiness when you push out of your comfort zone.
- Making room for exciting things in the future gives us hope that better days are coming, and that’s helpful when you go through difficult times.
- The more you use your smartphone, the more unhappy you feel. Fill your days with activities that make you check your phone less.
- Balance your social time and alone time. The unbalance is what leads to unhappiness.
- Happy life, in general, does not have a particular way of living. It’s about living a life that gives you freedom to do the things you like doing.
