This post is a formula for creating and maintaining happiness.
Happiness for me is an underlying feeling of contentment with life, punctuated by moments of profound and consuming joy.
Creating Happiness
I was not a happy person as a young adult. My life was full of fun and adventure, but I was also empty inside. Life seemed to be utterly pointless and no amount of hedonism or spiritual-seeking could compensate for that fact.
I also had long periods of unhappiness, where I stayed in situations where I wasn’t happy. And that’s going to be the first tip in the tool box :
Leave bad situations
When something is wrong for you, be it a job or a partner or anything, you know it somewhere inside yourself that it’s wrong and it slowly eats you up.
I’m not talking about a situation where your ego isn’t happy with how you are not being treated fairly — those situations are excellent opportunities for growth. And while it can be tricky to tell the difference between your intuition and your ego, you can do it if you know what to look for and are honest with yourself.
When you know a situation is wrong for you, you must leave it in order to be happy. This can (and most times I believe should) be done in a sensible and pragmatic way. Unless we are talking about actual abuse, you can take the time to make sure that you are moving into a better situation, not just leaving a bad one.
Every single time I have made the choice to leave a bad situation I feel better the moment I make the choice. Once you make the choice to leave, you can have the clarity to consider what your best next move is, and then take the time to create the steps to move there.
Make space
This one I haven’t seen from someone else before, and I think it is my biggest advice to anyone who wants to really transform their lives;
Find the space (and by “space” I mostly mean “time”, but also “head space”) to allow yourself to take a break and look around and get proper clarity, and then set intentions, about how you would like your life to look.
This might mean going part time in your job, and moving onto a friends couch to decrease your expenses. If you are fortunate enough to have savings, it might mean taking those savings and spending them to support a sabbatical. Make radical, but sustainable, change which will give you space in your life to think deeply about your life.
It is so easy to get caught in the rut of the rat race, so much so that you don’t even have the time to think about thinking about getting out of it.
Transform tragedy
When I was younger I remember realising that all of the people that were most interesting to be around were always those that had been through some great loss — the death of a parent or best friend as a child, for example.
In Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet it says :
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
When tragedy strikes your life it is the biggest opportunity for the greatest personal development and profound life change. If you make the choice to transmute it. You need to properly and appropriately grieve loss, of course. But facing the adversity following loss, the choice is to sink into sorrow and self-pity, or to transform yourself.
The worst tragedy in my life — having my first born taken by her mother and kept from seeing me — was also where I learned the most lessons and grew the most as a person. I made the decision over and over again during the many years while the family courts slowly increased the time my daughter could be with me, and in the face of all manner of hatred and attacks, that I would grow bigger and stronger as a person through that journey.
Practice gratitude and perspective
Everyone knows this one, right?
But it needs to be said because it is so fundamental. Whatever you have going on, you have so much to be thankful for, and you have so much more than so many others. Be grateful for what you have, and feel blessed for having won the lottery of being alive and educated and living in this time.
The more genuine appreciation you have for the circumstances of your life, the better your life is. That’s the whole equation. Everything else is just tools to help find enjoyment and to realise potential.
Maintaining Happiness
These are almost reminders to myself, these are some of the tools that I use to maintain a healthy level of joy and appreciation in my life.
Have some “me” time (space in the morning)
First of all, my secret, and it’s a continuation of the Making Space secret for creating happiness, is to have some time to myself to do some of these activities that I’m about to list. I have five children (aged 4 to 19) whose lives I am involved in, and I run a business to support our family financially — my point is that I have a full and busy life. But I need to have “me” time, and the time when that makes the most sense is in the morning.
I can wake at 5 am and have a comfortable couple of hours that are just for me, before I even need to start on getting children ready for school.
— I need to right here too acknowledge my wife — who supports me in having this time, and encourages me in always pursuing happiness for myself and for our family. There is no question that a supportive partner (in particular as compared with having a crappy partner) makes happiness a lot easier — but the reason this article is not about that, is because the old adage that you need to find happiness in yourself and not in others, is absolutely true — if a good relationship is what you want, you first need a good relationship with yourself, and that is what these tips are for —
Activities for a happy, healthy life
And with that morning space there is so much good stuff that can be done.
Writing
Just between you and me, I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, and now, at 42, I’ve finally started writing and publishing some stuff. I’ve been managing to do an article a day and that feels awesome.
But writing articles for the public is my way of practicing my writing skills, much more valuable on a personal level is journalling. I write in a physical diary, or in my Google Drive folder called ‘“Daily” diary / thoughts’. Doing a journal entry to dump out what’s in my head, creates calm, clarity, and sometimes insight.
Another thing I’ve done a bunch of times in the past couple of months is to write a letter to someone, expressing everything that I’m feeling, and then not send it. These are unpleasant feelings that I’m feeling, and sending it to the other person was not going to improve their life, nor a situation, but it let me dump out the emotions and get the clarity I needed, so that when I then spoke with the person (or wrote the email I did send) I was far more succinct and effective than I otherwise would have been.
Finally, for really big and complicated emotions; writing something down, in that free-form dump-my-thoughts-get-it-all-out kind of way, and then burning that afterwards, is super powerful for getting past big hurts and challenges.
Swimming
We live a 1/2 hour from the beach. Swimming in the ocean, if it is an option for you, is just wonderful in so many ways. Swimming in a local pool or creek or other watering hole is also awesome.
Meditation
I find meditation really difficult, but so wonderful when I manage to do it.
I highly recommend doing a Vipassana course — a 10 day silent meditation retreat, all expenses paid — it can absolutely completely transform your life.
I’m fortunate enough to have a Vipassana group that meets near me on Sundays and does an hour sit together — meditating with others provides a peer-pressure effect which makes it much easier for me to complete a one hour sit.
There are many kinds of meditation. It’s good to find one that works for you. One of the first ones I used to use, and a good way to start you day is Wayne Dyer’s Getting into the Gap meditation. (You need to do a little toning with this, so it’s good to find somewhere to do it where you won’t disturb anyone).
Going for a walk or jog
A walk around while listening to a podcast, or a jog while listening to music, is a great way to start the day.
I also walk with friends some mornings, other dads, and that is an opportunity for sharing as well as exercise.
Ice man breathing
OK — I’ve just recently come across The Ice Man, on a Russell Brand podcast episode, and for the first time this morning I tried the technique.
This is something I think will have benefits in my life, and writing this article today and including this entry in it is a reminder for me to practice this.
Improving memory
This one I haven’t really started doing yet, but want to start.
Memory Craft is a book I’ve recently purchased — I am going to being practicing the techniques it describes. A friend of mine has demonstrated incredible feats of memory over the past few years — memorising the population of every country in the world for example — and he attributes that ability to the techniques in this book.
Workout routine
A colleague in my office this year invited me to join him in his Monday workout session with a personal trainer. It’s not something I ever imagined I would do — but I’ve been doing it every Monday for just about a year now and it is awesome! A personal trainer forces the discipline of both sticking to a routine, and sticking with each exercise past where I would otherwise quit.
Choose your own
If the previous list seems large to you, well, I agree that it is. All of the things in that list are things that I love to do, and that makes it easy for me to stick with doing them.
When I started making the time in my life I wouldn’t have imagined I would have had time for all of these activities. I started with just the swimming — I figured I’d do that every day, and I did for a long while, but now I do these other activities too. I alternate as I feel to do so each day, and it feels like a healthy balance.
Choose the one thing you wish that you were doing in/with your life, and make that the first activity that you do with your “me” time. You will find it easy and natural to add other alternate activities as time goes on.
Abstaining
Another way I made space in my life was by cutting out the activities that I’d previously used to distract myself.
It’s been 11 months I’ve been doing this abstinence, with only one to go. I’ve found it much easier to do than I imagined it would be.
The Summary
Creating Happiness
- Leave bad situations
- Make space
- Transform tragedy
- Practice gratitude and perspective
Maintaining Happiness
- Have some “me” time (space in the morning)
- Activities for a happy, healthy life :
Writing, Swimming, Meditation, Walk or Jog, Ice man breathing, Improving memory, Workout routine, Choose your own - Abstaining
This post is for me, to help me remember these tricks in my toolkit.
And it is for you too.
I hope you find it useful.
Wishing you every happiness.
