Happiness takes on many forms throughout life. What brings one person delight and joy can be challenging or even frustrating to another. Your happiness can only be defined by yourself, and don’t expect that it’ll be the same from year to year. It all depends on your unique situation and what you expect from life. With that in mind, there are several things that anyone can do to bring more happiness into their lives. Here are 5 tips that you can easily incorporate into your life to invite that feeling of pure happiness into your day.
Make Time for Exercise
Staying healthy while working full time can feel like a real challenge for people who find themselves sitting at a desk all day. A quick run to the gym rarely seems to fit into our already overloaded schedules. But surprisingly enough, you don’t need to spend an hour doing cross-fit to make a big improvement in your health and happiness. Something as simple as a 5-minute walk can do you a world of good. From there, you can scale up. If you are comfortable with a 30-minute walk, try incorporating some jogging in. Once you’ve found your pace with a jog, step it up to a run. Before you know it, you’ll be marathon-ready.
Practice Gratitude
Find one thing about every day that makes you grateful for how your life is going. Positivity and gratitude can have a powerful impact on your overall happiness. While overloading on positivity to the point of ignoring big problems won’t work in your favor, remembering that not everything is terrible will put you in a much better frame of mind. So take the time at some point in your day, every day, to think of something that makes you happy. That little reminder that there is good in even tough situations can help you maintain a happy and healthy mind.
Take Care of Your Health
Good food and water have a dramatic impact on our emotions and stress levels. If you skipped lunch, your brainpower will suffer. Food is fuel. Make sure you are giving your body and mind the fuel you need to do the work you are asking from it. Make sure it’s good food. Healthy foods and beverages provide your body with the nutrients you need to do your job to the best of your ability. You wouldn’t try to drive a car when it’s running on empty. Why do you expect yourself to power through long days without the fuel you need to keep doing your best.
Invest in Positive Relationships
A well-balanced life is one that is supported emotionally by positive relationships. Maintaining trust and connection with our loved ones takes time and effort to build. Don’t let those critical friendships and family ties fall by the wayside, forgotten in a rush to get the job done every day. They can be our biggest source of comfort and support when life gets hard, including at work. Make time to focus on growing in your relationships with your family. Hold on to friendships that keep you happy and help you grow. Take time to foster new relationships, with coworkers, with friends, and with people who will help you be a better person. Sometimes that means having tough conversations around expectations and capabilities, but the long-term support and comfort of positive relationships will far outweigh any discomfort you may feel in building that support network.
Take a Balanced Approach
The boundaries between work and life have become substantially blurrier in recent years. Even more so given the massive shift to remote work for those who are able to. Working from home more often means that those boundaries set by a commute into and home from the office are no longer there. Home is now also your office in many cases. What that means for the fabled “work-life balance” is that it is now harder than ever to turn off work when you are outside of work hours. But that balance is still important to individual’s health and wellbeing. So now it’s up to you to set firmer boundaries in the ways that you can control, to make sure that you are taking care of yourself and setting yourself up for long term, sustainable professional success.
The fact of the matter is that only you have control of your time and focus. Managing burnout is no one’s responsibility but your own. Depending on what the right mix is for you, finding ways to compartmentalize your work life and your personal life can be helpful in making sure you’re not letting one take over the other. For different people, and arguably different generations, work, and life balance looks very different. Millennials are considered to take work-life balance more seriously into their measurements of happiness and success on the job. They have seen generations before them struggle with preventing burnout and managing chronic stress, and their physical consequences, and are committed to not letting that happen to themselves as they navigate the professional landscape.
