🌻4 Habits for a Happier Mind

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#2: Realistic expectations

Beyond a minimum of material wealth and personal safety, happiness is largely a matter of mindset.

And while many a self-help guru has tried to package this idea as simple and easy, it’s anything but:

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  • It takes patience and perseverance.
  • It takes flexibility and open-mindedness.
  • It takes humility and self-awareness
  • But most of all, it takes courage.

Yes, cultivating a healthier mindset will make you happier. But there are no quick fixes.

A happier mind depends on healthier habits

Over the years working as a psychologist, these four habits seem the most important for cultivating a happier, healtheir mind.

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Read also: How to be more confident

1. Be curious about your emotions

By nature, most of us are judgmental with our emotions — especially the difficult ones:

  • You feel anxious and afraid and then immediately criticize yourself for being weak.
  • You feel sad and instantly start worrying about getting depressed.
  • You feel frustrated and angry and then beat yourself up for not keeping your cool.

This is understandable if you grew up being taught that it’s not okay to show — or even feel — strong emotion. It also makes sense because, in a crude way, we tend to assume that when something’s painful, it should be fixed or avoided.

But here’s the thing:

Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad.

In much of life, pain is actually a good thing:

  • When your muscles are sore and painful after a good workout, your pain is a sign of growth and health.
  • When your finger feels pain after touching a hot stove, that pain is helping you move your hand and avoid a serious burn.
  • When you feel a jolt of anxiety after noticing your low fuel light blink on, that jolt of fear helps you remember to get gas.

Not only is pain often helpful, by avoiding it or trying to eliminate it, you could be making things worse on yourself. Think about it:

  • It wouldn’t be very smart to stick a piece of tape over your low fuel light just because you didn’t want it to make you feel anxious anymore!

There’s a more general principle here that’s essential if you want to create a healthier, happier mind:

When you try to avoid painful emotions, you only make things worse in the end.

When you get in the habit of running away from or trying to “fix” painful emotions, you teach your brain that your emotions are bad and dangerous.This means that the next time you feel bad, you’re going to feel bad about feeling bad because your brain thinks emotions are dangerous.

This is why it’s so important to stop being judgmental with your emotions, no matter how difficult or painful they are.

Feeling bad is hard enough without feeling bad about feeling bad.

Instead of a judgmental and combative relationship with your emotions, strive to be curious about them instead. Rather than enemies to be avoided, try thinking about your emotions as friends to be consoled and understood.

“Feelings are something you have; not something you are.”
― Shannon L. Alder

2. Be realistic with your expectations

The trouble with expectations is that we assume they’re doing one job when really they’re doing a very different one.

See, most people assume that expectations are a way to foster growth and achievement:

  • Having high expectations for our children academically encourages them to do well in school and be successful at work.
  • Having high expectations for our employees encourages them to work hard and do high-quality work.
  • And of course, setting big expectations for ourselves leads to personal growth and self-improvement.

But often, we end up using high expectations as a way to soothe our own anxieties and insecurities.

Here’s how it works:

  • Most people hate uncertainty. The idea that their kids won’t be successful and happy or that their employees won’t do their jobs without constant supervision, for example, fills them with anxiety and dread.
  • But, because they can’t actually control their kid’s academic success or their employee’s performance, they settle for the next best thing:expecting those things to happen.
  • When you create an expectation in your head — which is really just you imagining the thing you want to be true — it temporarily alleviates some of that anxiety and uncertainty. It makes you feel just a little more in control and a little more certain that things will go well.
  • But in reality, your expectations are merely fictions you’ve spun up in your own mind. And often, they’re not based on much evidence. Which means, these expectations are likely to be violated frequently — the result being a lot of stress and frustration on your part plus a lot of shame and resentment on the part of the people you’re expecting things of.

Expectations are often unconscious defense mechanisms we use to make ourselves feel better.

Not only is this a recipe for chronic stress and disappointment on your part, but eventually people in your life catch on that your rigid expectations aren’t really about their wellbeing and that they ultimately are selfish — a lazy way for you to make yourself feel a little better without addressing the real root of your insecurities.

  • If you’re afraid that your kids won’t be successful in life, maybe you should work through that fear on your own instead of slamming them with unrealistically high expectations?
  • If you’re afraid that your employees won’t work hard enough, maybe you should actually run some experiments and see how they do under different management styles and systems?
  • If you’re afraid that your spouse won’t be as intimate and loving as you want, maybe you should try being assertive and asking for what you want instead of continually expecting them to read your mind and then getting upset when they don’t.

Expectations have their place. But they very easily run wild and start causing hugely unnecessary stress and unhappiness unless you’re vigilant of them.

If you want a calmer, more peaceful mind, get in the habit of checking in on your expectations regularly and making sure they aren’t too far outside of reality.

“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”
― Bruce Lee

3. Be compassionate in your self-talk

I’m always shocked at how brutal and mean people are to themselves with their self-talk:

  • They criticize and berate themselves anytime they make a mistake.
  • They compare themselves to everyone around them, usually in the worst possible light.
  • And they devalue and minimize their many positive qualities too.

And while there are many reasons people develop such harsh, negative self-talk, the result is always the same — you end up feeling awful about yourself.

Because here’s the deal:

Things don’t cause us to feel bad; it’s our thoughts about things that determines how we feel.

For example:

Suppose you’re in a meeting at work. A coworker makes a rude comment about your presentation as you’re walking out the door. Now, imagine two different stories or sets of self-talk and what the emotional consequence might be:

  • OPTION 1: Ugh, I knew I screwed up that last slide. Why do I have to be so awkward all the time!
  • OPTION 2: Well, I guess that last slide didn’t go as well as it could have, but he often makes rude comments to people… Probably says more about him than me.

In option 1, on top of feeling embarrassed, you’re probably going to feel ashamed about yourself and even depressed since you’ve told yourself you’re awkward “all the time.”

But in option 2, while you might still feel that initial embarrassment (we all do when someone says something mean!), you won’t be adding any other painful emotions on top of your embarrassment because your story changed.

Negative self-talk compounds your emotions. And not in a good way.

When you’re overly negative and critical about yourself, you turn normal embarrassment into intense shame; everyday frustration into anger or rage; ordinary sadness into depression or despair.

If you want to start being kinder toward yourself, follow The Other Golden Rule:

Treat yourself like you would treat a good friend.

The next time you feel bad, imagine a good friend felt the same way and came to you for support and advice… What would you say to them?

If they had made a mistake at work, would you tell them how stupid that was and how they’ll never make anything of themselves? Of course not! You’d be compassionate. You’d help them take a balanced perspective and tell a realistic story about the mistake.

Chances are, you’re pretty compassionate with other people in your life, so why not be that way with yourself?

“We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

Read also: How to transform your life in one year

4. Be assertive in your relationships

The concept of assertiveness is usually misunderstood. Most people hear assertive and they associate it with mean, rude, or even manipulative.

In truth, assertiveness is the healthy middle ground between passivity and aggression. When we learn to communicate assertively it means that we are able to communicate in a way that is honest to our own wants and needs but also respectful of the rights of other people.

Basically, assertiveness boils down to this:

The ability to ask for what you want — or say no to what you don’t want — confidently and respectfully.

Unfortunately, this is a difficult thing for many of us to do — mostly because we’re afraid of conflict:

  • We worry about others getting bad or angry with us.
  • We worry that people will think badly of us or not approve.
  • We worry that we’ll look dumb or foolish if we express ourselves honestly.

But here’s the deal:

You will never have true peace of mind if you can’t communicate honestly with the most important people in your life — your spouse, your boss, your parents, etc.

If you constantly feel afraid to express yourself, your mind will be filled with worries and insecurities, or frustrations and resentments — or more than likely, both!

One of the best ways to cultivate a happier, more content attitude and outlook on life is to cultivate the courage to communicate assertively.

It takes practice and patience, but anyone can learn to be more assertive.

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
— J. K. Rowling

Contributed by NICK WIGNALI

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