Making Yourself Happy
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 23, 2012
Off the merits of my last post titled Making Others Happy, I decided it was also time to see what I needed to do to make myself happy. I thought of it like being on an airplane and having that message telling you to put on your own oxygen mask first in an emergency before you try to help someone else out.
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Of course the funny thing is that most of us really don't do that. Even people who only think of themselves will try to help someone else out in an emergency before they'll take care of themselves; most of them anyway.
In my case I decided to ask myself the big question; what would make me happy. I came up with two answers that I believe most people wouldn't have a problem with: feeling better and moving in a positive direction.
Although these are broad visions, I think they're valid for everyone to start with to try to define just what their life is like at any particular moment.
For instance, let's take the first one. I stated that I wanted to feel better. Actually, I started on that goal a couple of weeks ago. I've gotten a bit more exercise than I did over the winter. I'm making sure I take my medication, which, even with alarms, I've sometimes missed. And I've changed my eating habits a bit after watching a documentary called Forks Over Knives. I'm not a fanatic, but I've lost 9 pounds in the last 2 weeks; not too shabby if you ask me. Here's the thing; I didn't say I wanted to feel perfect just better, and I do. There's still a long way to go but I tend to believe that progress is shown in stages because when we can see what we've already done, it encourages us to do even more.
On that second one... well, that one needs a lot more work. Even though I write more on this blog the truth of the matter is that I've stagnated, which isn't good for me or anyone else. I've had some specific goals over the last few years that I haven't come close to achieving. I have one big goal for this year that my mind says I should have already completed and yet I'm only about 60% of the way through. I need to focus more, which I think will come as I continue working on the feeling better part.
How are you seeing your life these days as it relates to making yourself happy? Share or not, but start today by thinking about what would really make you happy and how you can get there.
After you mentioning it, I’m a bit interested in watching that Forks over Knives movie, I also looked it up on wikipedia to see if it had any “propaganda”-stamps all over it. When it comes to health, you just can’t never be sure if someone has financial motives to sell you something that might suck (even if they believe it’s the best).
Watching a movie doesn’t cost you must, especially not if it’s free on Hulu 🙂 But if the content of it, or what it learns you, is faulty, then, well, not a good thing.
What’s your take on the movie, does it “make sense” what they explain in it or does some of it seem a bit too much “do this and you’ll die!!!”-scary tactics?
Some of it makes sense K. It’s been proven that a vegetarian diet can help control glucose levels and probably brings down levels of other things as well because it initially helps people lose weight. The thing the movie doesn’t tell you is what foods they recommend you eat and how; they tell you there’s a menu put together by the nutritionists and that’s about it. I wondered what people did when they didn’t have enough protein in their diet, or how they got certain vitamins, since many vegetarians end up taking supplements to replace what they don’t get through foods. It’s hard to ignore the results, but it’s also kind of hard sticking to it if you can’t find ways to make it taste fresh each time if you’re not used to eating a certain way. The movie’s not bad, but there’s a lot of stuff you might end up skipping over just the same.
I guess it is psychological, Mitch. In most cases everybody prefer to make others happy first. When I see close people to me smile, I feel happy too, but I am pretty much selfish guy, wow. I definitely prefer the scenario of sacrifice for people that I love.