We are fortunate to live in a time when our brains are becoming increasingly comprehensible. You can learn to feel good by turning on your happy chemicals in new ways. No one can do this for you and you cannot do this for anyone else. This article outlines concrete suggestions for new paths to happiness by increasing dopamine, endorphin, oxytocin and serotonin.
Implementing the following habits are small ways to feel good in the short and long term with regular practice.
Celebrate small victories
Every day you achieve some success, so try to notice them and say: “I did it!” To feel good on a regular basis, don't set your expectations too high so you can be happy with what you actually do.
Celebrating small victories produces more dopamine than anticipating a big achievement. Big achievements don't make you feel happy forever, so if you always attach happiness to a distant goal, you may end up disappointed. Instead, learn to be happy with your progress. You won't celebrate with champagne and caviar every day. You will give yourself permission to feel a sense of accomplishment. This feeling is better than external rewards. It's free, has no calories, and won't interfere with your driving. You have a small victory every day. Why not enjoy it and feel good in the process?
Make sure you do it regardless of whether it's good or not. You can decide whether you deserve your own applause and enjoy the feeling, even if only for a split second.
Create your own celebration traditions at work
Chances are, you're not the only person in your company who works on New Year's Day. You may not be able to be with your family this night, but you can create your own small pleasant traditions that will help maintain the festive mood. Prepare gifts, the best game for this is “Secret Santa”. Organize a small holiday dinner if work allows it. Decorate the space in which you will spend this night. Tell each other stories about the brightest New Year's celebration, your family traditions or favorite recipes. Use New Year's Eve at work as a way to get closer to your colleagues, get to know them better, and still get into the holiday spirit.
Take small steps towards a new goal
It doesn't take much time or money to reach your goal. Just take ten minutes a day and you'll feel the boost. Ten minutes is not enough to move mountains, but it is enough to approach a mountain and see it accurately. Instead of dreaming about your goal from afar, you can gather the information you need to plan realistically.
Your goals may change as your information grows. You may even find out that your fantasy goal won't make you feel happy. This ten-minute investment can free you from unnecessary regret and help you find a hill you can actually climb and feel good about in the process. Your ten-minute efforts can define manageable steps, so you're not just waiting for huge leaps that will never happen.
If you think you can't spend ten minutes a day, think about how much time you already spend daydreaming about what you'd rather be doing. You can use this time to research the necessary steps. You will feel dopamine every day when these steps appear. You will begin to expect and look forward to that dopamine feeling. You will learn to feel that with constant effort you can turn your dream into reality. When your ten minutes are up, return to living in the present, which is another technique for feeling good and happy. Don't get into the habit of constantly focusing on the future.
Take action, don't just dream. Spend your time on specific actions. Don't waste it fantasizing about quitting your job or forcing others to help you. This is not their goal. Instead, immerse yourself in practical realities. Do this faithfully for forty-five days and you will begin to feel better and get into the habit of moving forward.
How to achieve optimism in everyday life in order to enjoy life: recommendations
Everything is easy in words. But how can you attract positivity and become an optimist? Try the following recommendations:
- smile more often. When you smile at people, they smile back. This way you will see that the majority are friendly;
- ask for help. If you need advice or a hint, don’t hesitate to ask about it. You will find that most people are willing to help in times of need. We are used to not asking, simply guided by our personal internal complexes;
- just communicate. Talk more often on any topic with people who have a positive attitude. Spend more time with them, we tend to become infected by the emotions of our surroundings;
- treat everything with humor. In life you need to treat everything with irony, slightly lowering the bar of your ideals. Don’t be afraid to seem funny, sometimes it’s a good boost to both self-esteem and mood;
- let the negativity pass through you and don’t get hung up on it. Try not to watch, for example, terrifying news, but to look for a suitable way out of any adversity;
- attend trainings. If you have the desire and opportunity, take psychological training. Choose a variety of topics related to positivity, joy in life, motivation, etc.;
- and of course, believe in your success and never doubt your abilities!
Learn to maintain a golden mean in everything, and it will naturally happen that you will stop leaning towards bad thoughts and moods.
Divide an unpleasant task into small parts
Everyone has a terrible task that is better to forget about. This could be clutter in your closets or clutter in important relationships. One way to feel happier is to dedicate yourself to spending ten minutes a day on your dreaded task. You don't need to have a decision when you start, just a willingness to move on.
You might think it's impossible to clean out your closets or redefine your relationship in ten minutes. But if you wait for big decisions, you will languish for quite a long time. Instead, go to that closet and spend ten minutes clearing it out, tidying up one shelf.
Go into your frustrating relationship riddled with frustration and instill goodwill for ten minutes. You may not feel happier right away, but don't let a day go by without picking up another piece. Continue in this manner for forty-five days, and you will be comfortable dealing with the troubles that are preventing you from improving your life.
Of course, you can't control other people the way you can control the contents of your closet. But you will replace the bad feeling with a good one if you keep trying. And you will keep trying because your positive expectations trigger dopamine, which is one of the neurochemicals for feeling good.
How to feel better: three reliable ways
In the Mindf*ck Monday newsletter, I choose three ideas each week that could change your life and make you a little less of a terrible person. This week I talk about three popular ways to “feel better”—therapy, journaling, and meditation—and why they all actually do the same thing.
Therapy
Why do we feel better when we tell someone about our problems?
The therapy overall has worked very well. Most people who stay in therapy for longer than a few months experience reliably improved well-being and a reduction in symptoms of anxiety or depression. Moreover, the longer people use therapy, the more benefits it provides. Research overwhelmingly favors therapy. She works. She helps people.
But here's the twist: we still don't know why it works.
There are countless forms of therapy in psychology. CBT, UODP, DPT, MP, TPO, CPP, REBT. Gestalt, existential, Jungian, interpersonal, Rogerian, humanistic, regression therapy, psychoanalysis and, of course, everyone's favorite family therapy.
Each of these techniques offers a specific framework and its own philosophy. Each offers a unique perspective on the human mind and its own approach to combating pathology and mental illness.
Given that there are so many approaches to therapy, several decades ago researchers became rightly interested in which treatments were most effective and which ones worked. So they conducted hundreds of experiments to determine which treatments gave the best results. And the answer will probably surprise you.
All.
They all work to one degree or another. Almost all methods give on average similar results. All of them bring noticeable, but not ideal results. Some work a little better for certain problems than others (CBT seems to work a little better for anxiety, for example). But overall, the fact that you are in therapy has a much greater impact than the type of treatment you choose.
And it's amazing. This means that no matter how many theories we have put forward over the past 150 years, the content of the therapy itself is not that important. And many studies show that communicating with amateurs is no less useful than with professionals. Thus, it is possible that not only the technique, but even the qualifications of the therapist are not of great importance.
What is important is simply to give a person the opportunity to regularly come somewhere and talk about his problems to someone else who will listen carefully. The value of therapy is not in the therapy itself. This is the context. This is the environment. You're paying for a place to work through your problems with someone who is trustworthy and won't judge you. Everything else seems just an excuse to get you into this room and into this social context.
Journaling
Why do we feel better writing down all our crazy thoughts?
So, if much of the value of therapy is simply walking into a room and critically discussing your own thoughts, ideas, and emotions, couldn't this be done in other ways? Can't you just call a friend?
Of course, many people do this. But there is another way that may not be so obvious.
Keeping a diary.
For most of human history, recording was not done for the sake of mental health or self-care. Educated people did this to help themselves think. Psychologists did not begin to consider the idea that journaling might have therapeutic benefits until the 1960s and 1970s. Many began experimenting with their patients. Research has shown that journaling is indeed very effective in improving mental health and well-being. Today, many therapists and counselors actively encourage their clients to journal in addition to their sessions.
The mental health benefits of journaling likely mirror the benefits of talk therapy—there's something powerful about verbalizing your thoughts and feelings. This somehow undermines their power over you.
But let's dig a little deeper. Why does verbalizing our thoughts and feelings somehow reduce their impact on us? If you've been reading me for a long time, you've probably already guessed what I'm going to say. I have a theory.
Meditation
Why do we feel better sitting on the floor and counting our breaths?
I remember my first meditation. It was a strange “eastern spiritual” contraption that the school teacher decided to demonstrate to us. It was the late 90s, and then meditation was still exotic, a strange thing, intended only for hippies and mystics. No one I knew took her seriously.
Twenty years later, meditation has become mainstream. It is now regularly practiced in boardrooms, conferences, seminars, prisons, schools and churches. Meditation apps have proliferated and become a multi-billion dollar industry. Today, meditation is not only normal, but also fashionable. It's something you brag about to others, just like you used to brag about going to the gym.
So far, we've talked about how therapy works because you verbalize your thoughts and feelings (thus loosening their grip) and receive non-judgmental feedback from the other person. Journaling works in a similar way—it allows you to express your thoughts and feelings to yourself and then respond to them without judgment.
I would say meditation is effective because it does the same thing, minus the verbalization.
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that consciousness consists of two parts: subject and object. Think of the subject as the “seeer” and the object as the “seen.” Both aspects are necessary in consciousness - there is always something "seeing" and always something "seen".
As a rule, we are the subject of our consciousness, and the object is some external thing. This keyboard on which I am now typing is the object of my consciousness. The food I will eat for dinner tonight is also an object of my consciousness. The telephone signal is the object of my consciousness.
As long as “I” is the subject and some external thing is the object, all my thoughts, feelings, impulses and desires are combined into some intangible subjectivity known as “I”, which is not analyzed or considered. This unexplored entity is often called the “ego.”
Only by focusing on ourselves and making our thoughts and feelings the object of consciousness can we differentiate them and put them into perspective.
“Hmm, I’m sad today and I didn’t realize it.” What was once a subject (my feeling of sadness) has now become an object of my consciousness and is therefore separated from me. Now I can view my sadness as if it were not me. I can ask why it exists, for what purpose, is it useful to me? This is how self-awareness is formed.
So what do therapy, journaling and meditation have in common?
These are all techniques that help us transform what would normally be the subject of our consciousness into an object of consciousness.
That's all.
These are three tools for developing self-awareness and getting rid of the ego. Therapy does this by having someone who is thoughtful and invites us to express our thoughts and feelings. The diary encourages you to write about your thoughts and feelings. Meditation teaches us to observe our thoughts and feelings as if they were separate from ourselves.
Here's how to feel better. Transform a subject into an object. Make the implicit explicit. Move the internal to the external. Move from subjective to objective.
And then, when our thoughts, feelings and impulses are separated from our self - from our ego - we can decide whether we want to keep them, reconnect with them, or simply separate.
Source
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Do different exercises
Your body has three layers of muscles. When you change the exercise, you give more attention to the neglected, constricted layers. Because they're weak, they have to work harder, so you encourage development where it's needed instead of overloading parts that you overuse. Chasing high endorphin levels is not worth the risk of wear and tear on your body. The variety is a great alternative and one of the best ways to feel better.
If you are a person who doesn't exercise at all, everything you do should also be something else and you will be fine. If you're already into exercise, you may hate the inconsistent feeling that comes with trying something new. You can see it as failure when it strengthens your weakest link. Free yourself from performance anxiety for forty-five days. You may like it so much that you want to try another option for another forty-five days, and you can keep switching, finding new ways to be happy.
Plan your next holidays in advance
If none of these methods can console you, think about the next holidays in advance. Remind your boss that you already worked on your day off and want to avoid it next time. If you absolutely don’t want to ruin your mood by working on holidays, think about a vacation.
Be proud of what you've done
Pride is complicated. Seeking applause can have bad side effects, but when you don't get recognition from others, something doesn't feel right. You can applaud yourself, but the brain is not so easily fooled. He wants others to think well of you because it matters for survival. Alas, public recognition is unpredictable and fleeting. But you can stimulate your serotonin simply by feeling proud of something you've accomplished once a day.
Pride is the rudder that helps you find opportunities to gain social recognition. It helps keep you between the opposite extremes of constantly seeking approval and cynical despondency, which can actually help you feel quite happy and content. Being proud of yourself means more than just thinking silently.
- 7 super simple tricks to keep you happy all day
Give yourself pleasant emotions
What can bring you joy in the morning, think in advance. You can read a page of your favorite book, play with the cat, say a few useful affirmations.
This event should take a little time and lift your spirits. Spend a few minutes on cosmetic procedures, and then move on to a tasty and healthy breakfast that will give you the necessary energy supply. A light salad with yogurt, oatmeal, avocado and eggs, fresh berries, and muesli will have a beneficial effect on your health.
Go to the sauna sometimes - your mood will improve
This is a good way to cleanse the body (due to this, many toxic substances are released from it). Other benefits of a sauna include oxygenation of the body (when it is hot, you breathe faster) and strengthening of the immune system (as a result of water loss, the blood thickens and increased production of immune organs begins).
Under the influence of heat, tense muscles relax. In addition, during one stay in the sauna you burn about 300 kcal (the same amount is lost after running 4 km). All this means that when you leave the sauna, you feel lighter and more relaxed.
However, it should not be used by people who suffer from rosacea or juvenile acne, with respiratory failure, bleeding, pregnant women and during menstruation. People with heart problems can go to the sauna.
Ways to feel good: swim, dance, take out your bike...
Swimming relaxes, loses weight, shapes the body, and creates a flow of movement. Immersion in water is already relaxing. And when you combine the relaxing effects of water with effort, you effectively relieve tension and improve your well-being. However, the intensity of the workout should be tailored to your abilities. If you are tired, stand under a cascade of water (this shoulder massage is relaxing).
Swimming provides a variety of exercises in the water. Dive into your neck and try running or marching with your knees high. Or maybe you signed up for water aerobics? This very popular water gymnastics usually ends with relaxation to gentle music or among the bubbles in a jacuzzi.
Cycling is a sport for everyone: it develops all muscle groups, relaxes and oxygenates the body and strengthens the heart.
You can also get energy from dancing. Try bending at home in front of a mirror to the rhythm of fiery music, such as salsa or flamenco. And if you have always dreamed of learning to dance, now is the time to sign up for a course.
If you want to strengthen your muscles and improve your figure, start going to the gym. Exercises with instruments require efficiency, so it is better to perform them under the supervision of a specialist to avoid any injuries.
Any sport is useful for improving physical fitness if it is practiced systematically. do not receive any injury. Any sport is useful for improving physical fitness if it is practiced systematically.
Ask for help
I know that feeling helpless and vulnerable is unlikely to help you become happier.
Asking another person for help expresses respect and trust. This is how you admit that you lack experience or knowledge. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. This is a sign of strength and the ability to think rationally.
Try it! Ask for help. The people you reach out to will likely feel needed by you. They will feel better, and this will rub off on you. Only strong people are able to admit their imperfections.
