7 Ways to Enjoy Life More

7 Ways to Enjoy Life More

You may not realize it yet, but if you are alive and reading this, you’re supposed to enjoy your life and be happy. Despite the dire outlook, you may experience on the evening news, life is not supposed to be a never-ending nightmare of bad news, tragedy, and hard knocks. However, sometimes it seems that’s all there is.

How can you start to enjoy your life, as if it’s your last one, right now, even when nothing is perfect?

Write a Life Mission Statement

The only way to make the right choices in life for yourself is to know what you stand for. What is it that you want to leave behind as your legacy? What about this life is important to you? What ideas, morals, and values are guiding you through this life?

If you can create a life mission statement or vision statement that spells you who you want to be at your very best, you can use that as a founding document to guide every choice you make from this day forth.

Become Mindful of The Power of Now

One of the problems with life is most of us are always thinking about the past or the future. However, your life is right now. Right now, it is truly all you can be certain of having. Because of this, you need to realize the power of now and become more mindful about truly and fully experiencing the moments in your life.

While, of course, you do have to take small steps today to take care of your future, you don’t need to live only for the future to genuinely enjoy your life. You need to live for now, while planning for the future.

Be Your Own Best Friend

So many times, we are nicer to our friends and family than we are to ourselves. The thing is each of us is truly alone. That isn’t to be depressing, but the idea that you need someone else to prop you up and make you feel good about life is not true. You can feel in love with life even when it’s just you because, ultimately, it’s always just you even when you enjoy fabulous companionship.

Making the right choices for your diet, exercise, education, career, and so forth are all things you need to do in a loving way. If you wouldn’t direct your best friend to do it, why would you do it to yourself?

Do Things That Bring You Joy

Many times, in our societies, the idea of experiencing things just for the joy of it seems foreign. But your value doesn’t only depend on how much you produce and how much energy you expend doing things. Your value also can be expressed through the joyful things that you do.

Every day do something that makes you smile, laugh, and cry with happiness. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hike in the woods, a bungee jump, or if you want to sit in a hammock and read a book for an hour – doing things that fill your heart and mind with joy is important for your happiness.

Help the Less Fortunate

It’s hard to be down about our own situation if we are actively involved with helping those who are less fortunate. And sadly, there is always someone less fortunate than you even if you don’t realize it. Make an action plan to involve yourself in empowering others and helping others, and you will experience a lot more joy in your life.

Stop Being a People Pleaser

Conversely, you don’t need to work so hard, making other people happy. For one thing, nothing is ever enough for some people. They don’t mean it, because they probably don’t even give it a thought that you’re just pleasing them by your actions or attitude. Because of this, it’s not their fault that you’re spending all your energy trying to please others. It’s okay to say no to things that you don’t want to do or don’t have time to do.

Practice Gratitude

Of course, always take the time each day to express in your mind, in a journal, or even to someone else what you are grateful for. The mind pays attention to what you focus on. If you focus on what’s not going right, you’ll start to feel nothing is right. If you focus on what is right, you’ll start to feel like more is right with the world.

You really can start to be joyful in your life right now. One way to prove this to yourself is to travel more. When you travel to other countries and see how happy some people are, even though they live in very different environments than most western nations people do, it starts to become more clear about what drives happiness, and it turns out it’s inside you and has been all along.