Jerseygirl, JESUS
Flowers make me happy.
It’s been a while since I’ve written — Holy cow have I been busy. And failing. Utterly failing at so many things I set out to do since the last time we chatted here on the blog. Do you have your coffee? I usually have my coffee when I write, or, on the rare occassion that I’m writing in the afternoon, a cup of blueberry tea. So grab your java or herbal and park a seat. Let’s talk about being happy.
Happy is elusive, isn’t it? It can be subject to so many things — things like hormones, what other people think of us, the weather, our perception of success. The truth is that happiness is fleeting — it simply won’t stick around, and that’s the one thing about happy you can be sure of.
But, the good news is that you can be content. And content is a really cool feeling. You might be familiar with it — it’s that feeling you have when — even if all the proverbial you know what is hitting the fan, you’re good. Maybe you wish that wasn’t happening, but you know you’ve done everything you can do and the rest you’re kissing up to God.
Content is the feeling that the dining room table might be sticky and your daughter might be using her fork the wrong way, but your whole family is sitting around the table and no one is yelling and everyone is allowed to just be themselves and wait….your kids….they’re laughing…because they’re…happy. They feel loved and accepted and comfortable and safe, and it’s totally ok that they are not using their fork the right way because there will be time to learn that. Right now, in this moment, let’s just be content. Let’s just be happy.
The world is full of people who call out our faults, right? Who judge us and let us know how we have failed them. Let the dining room table be a place of contented acceptance.
Happiness is a burst; contentedness is a flow. It’s the flow of intense, good work, of getting things done. It’s pushing the boulder up the hill without losing momentum. It’s good time management and self-care. It’s taking 100% responsibility for everything that happens in your life, because when you don’t do that, you decide to become a victim.
So how in the world do you achieve this flow of content? I’m not a counselor or a mental health professional. If you think you might be showing signs of depression, I encourage you to get help, because it’s out there and there’s no need to suffer. But I do want to share with you a few of the things I’ve learned over the years that help me battle the blues:
1. Indulge the Happy. We all have crappy things that happen to us, and we all have blue moods and dark thoughts. One thing I’ve noticed in myself, during periods of discontent, as well as in some of my friends, is that we can lick those thoughts like a Tootsie Roll lollipop. Seriously, we can just lay down and roll around in all the ways we’ve been hurt or wronged somehow. We’ll let our minds land on that friend who dumped us like a hot potato or the way our boss talked to us yesterday and we’ll just circle around and around that feeling, feeding it with more thought energy, creating conversations in our head that never happened and then actually getting angry about them (c’mon, you know you’ve done that. Probably in your car. Or the shower.).
INSTEAD OF INDULGING THE CRAPPY, INDULGE THE HAPPY.
Pay attention to your thoughts, and when the negatives ones come bursting through your brain-door, tell ’em to get the heck out. I’m not saying to stuff them down, where they can fester like an ant problem in your basement and cause all sorts of damage. I’m saying acknowlege them. Say, “Hi!, I see you!” and then say, “You can’t stay.” It takes practice, but with continued diligence you can control your thoughts this way.
2. Take 100% Responsibility. This is the very first success tenet in Jack Canfield’s The Success Principals. It might seem a little harsh, but ultimately, it’s freeing. When you play the blame-game, and hold everyone and everything else responsible for your problems, you are literally giving away your power, and with it, your ability to solve those problems.
If there is ever a time you find yourself saying, “It’s not fair!” that might be a really good time to stop and examine how your actions led to your current situation. Because you know who says “That’s not fair!”? Three year olds. Three year olds insist that life is not fair when they got the orange cup instead of the blue cup. Grown ups take responsibility for their decisions and their choices.
What choices did you make, behavior did you engage in, or thought process did you follow that led to your current circumstance? If you keep digging — and sometimes you will have to dig — you’ll eventually get to it. Once you get to it, you can change it. But if you’re placing blame somewhere else, you remain powerless to make positive changes in the future.
For example, let’s say you want to lose weight, but your husband keeps bringing home junk food. If you sit there and simply say, “It’s not fair! My husband keeps bringing home junk food and that’s why I can’t lose weight!”, you are giving all of your power away to a man who 1) seems just a tad insensitive if you ask me and 2) obviously doesn’t have the same goals as you do.
On the other hand, if you decide to take 100% responsibility for your weight loss, and say to yourself, “I can not be responsible for what my husband eats, but I CAN be responsible for what I eat,” you empower yourself to get off your butt, go to the store, buy yourself some kale and snack away.
Get where I’m going with this?
3. Implement easy strategies for success. I can’t stress it enough: simple things like food and exercise make a HUGE difference in the way you feel, including your mood. I can practically guarantee if you eat nothing but some protein, whole foods, and tons of green, leafy veggies for a week, your mood will improve (barring any mental illness, of course). If you don’t believe me, try it for a week. Then, after that, eat a nice big meal of mac and cheese and pay attention to your mood and it’s (not-so-happy) little swings.
If you regularly move your body and get your blood pumping, endorphins and other feel-good chemicals get distributed into your bloodstream. With such a simple-yet-powerful happy source right there not just at your fingertips, but literally already in your figngertips, why would you not do what you need to do to release them?
It’s not just food and exercise; it’s other little things that bring you pleasure and make you smile. Those flowers at the top of this post? I bought them for myself during the long, dreary winter, because they make me happy. They brighten my day. I’ll also light a smelly candle, take a bubble bath, go for a walk, or listen to music. These are all small but pleasurable things that brighten my mood, release the feel-good chemicals in my brain, and yes, make me content and happy.
I CAN CHOOSE TO ENGAGE IN ACTIVITIES THAT PROMOTE CONTENTEDNESS, OR I CAN CHOOSE NOT TO.
4. Remove annoyances. Okay, picture it: The lightbulb in your closet is in an entirely difficult place to reach, but without it, your closet is dark and it’s impossible to find anything. One Monday morning, the lightbulb burns out, but you’re too busy getting ready for work in that moment to do anything about it, so you say, “I’ll get to that this weekend.”
All week long, however, you cuss and stress your way through each morning because your life is made infinitely more difficult by not being able to find anything in your closet. You end up running late because it takes longer to find anything, and so you’re hungry at work because you didn’t have time for breakfast. Your whole day — and your whole mood — is sent spiraling out of control.
Saturday comes, and thank God because you have be so stressed out! You’ll head out to yoga class, maybe do the grocery shopping, and then when you get home you say, I’m not dealing with that light bulb now, because man, I have been so stressed out I totally deserve to sit here with this book and a nice cup of tea. Sunday is spent at a family gathering, and there you are: Monday morning, face to face with that same darn light bulb, staring down a week of stress.
TAKE A DAMN MINUTE AND FIX THE LIGHTBULB.
It’s an annoyance. An energy sapper. Something that triggers every bad mood in the book and does nothing to increase your flow or positive mood. And I guarantee if you have one, you have more.
The laundry pile. The stack of mail. That thing growing in the back of your refrigerator that may have been a meal in a distant history….take an hour a week to deal with these things quickly and efficiently, and your week will be set up for success.
5. Work in your zone of genius. It’s important to know not just what you’re great at, but what you absolutely love and comes so naturally for you that you could get lost for hours doing it. Once you know, do everything you can to arrange your life so that you are spending as much time doing that thing as possible.
For some people, that may mean small changes. For others, it’s a whole lifestyle overhaul. Don’t stress — we’re talking small, daily action items you can engage in that will help you move toward a life in your genius zone.
It’s important, too, to not get caught up in what you’re simply good at, and this is hard. It’s hard because other people will notice — they’ll stroke your ego and say, “Hey, you’re really good at that. How ’bout you come on over here and do that for me?” This could be a job that keeps your soul from singing, a committee you get roped into joining, or any other task that diverts you from your true purpose. Just because you are good at it, doesn’t mean you should be doing it, because when you start working in your zone of genius, the synchronicity starts to happen.
And even more important, you feel joy in your body, mind and spirit. The more you can work in and create from this space, the more content you’ll feel over longer periods of time.
This list is far from exhaustive. There are a host of other ways you can increase your contentedness quotient. We’d love to hear them! Let us know in the comments how YOU create your happy.
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