How to Start Living Today
In order to make the most out of your life, you need to break your old habits and make new ones.
Disclaimer: I’m not a therapist.
It’s easy to live each day thinking the next will be different. Better somehow.
Tomorrow I’ll feel more confident. Tomorrow I’ll look sexier. But here’s why we need to start loving ourselves right now.
The thing is, there’s no promise of a tomorrow, and the longer we prolong our happiness, the less likely we are of ever reaching it.
This is because we are merely products of our habits.
And if our habits are self-hatred and repression, why would our conditions change unless we — or someone else — seriously intervened?
The Great American Myth is that we’re all individuals who deserve the world. But this thinking is dangerous.
We’re taught from an early age through advertisements, political rhetoric, passed-down family trauma, and competition that somehow we’re special, yet — paradoxically — unworthy.
Unworthy of loving ourselves and unworthy of receiving love from others. That is, unless we compromise our morals and values and step in line by signing up for that miserable nine to five job so that we can buy the newest Apple products.
Or we drain our savings on breast enhancements or penis enlargements because we equate sex with love.
But the truth that Buddha was so desperately trying to teach us is that this type of thinking is egotistical, and we will all remain slaves to our egos until we have the strength to detach.
Don’t be fooled: detachment isn’t an easy feat. Humans have been trying to let go of their egos and embrace their imperfections for millennia. Where they fail is in trying to be people they’re not.
Trying to be someone other than yourself will never make you happy. The critical shift in finding and maintaining happiness is believing that you are worth happiness.
Believing you’re worth happiness requires hard work on your part. The hard work in this case is experiencing gut-wrenching self-doubt and even self-hatred on a daily basis, and actively working through these feelings in the moment by reminding yourself that whether you believe it or not, you’re worth respect, love, kindness, and honesty just because you’re human.
Once you’ve practiced believing that you’re worth happiness for long enough, you’ll begin to notice a fundamental change in your thinking patterns. Instead of allowing yourself to become sad or angry because of other people, you’ll start to actively work on finding silver linings in order to maintain your feelings of self-worth. This is you building resilience to your Negative Unhealthy Thoughts (NUTS), which are almost always based on negative core beliefs you have about yourself.
Don’t feel ashamed — we all have them. Here’s a few examples of my negative core beliefs. Maybe you can relate to some.
- I’m not good enough
- I’m not smart enough
- I’m not attractive enough
- If people find out who I really am, they won’t like me
The most important thing to understand here is that at this stage in securing your happiness, you now know that you’re worth being happy, which means you’ll find ways to be happy. As someone who has struggled for most of my life to find happiness, I speak from experience.
To recap: if you want to actually become a happy person (and not just experience fleeting positive emotions), you need to believe you’re worth happiness. You don’t have to look far to find reasons — existing on this planet as a sentient being is sufficient. But I encourage you to make a list of your own. These should all be in line with who you are at your core, not who you think you should be or who you want to be.
The way to make happiness sustainable and thus become a happy person is to genuinely love yourself for who you are.
Once you begin to really accept yourself, you can begin to love the characteristics that make you you. It won’t take you long to notice that you genuinely love who you are — and in turn, you’ll find more things you like about other people.
This last piece is the most exciting: once you’ve put in the difficult up-front work of loving yourself, and you’ve started actively liking others more, spreading this happiness and love becomes a positive feedback loop. Other people want to be around you because you’re secure, and therefore you make them feel safe. When friends, family, and even strangers know that it’s safe for them to love themselves around you, you’ve successfully spread love.
And this love comes right back to you, because what’s more meaningful than helping others love themselves? That’s something to really be happy about.
