How are you feeling today? Do you love what you’re doing? Do you enjoy every moment? Are you looking forward to what’s coming up next? ARE YOU LIVING YOUR BEST LIFE?
It is time to finally start taking care of yourself, challenge yourself, and take risks. When if not now?
I strongly believe that we are the ones who are in control of our own lives and only we can decide how to react to certain things that might not go as we planned them.
Sometimes when you think that you are completely powerless over a situation, just because it feels scary and overwhelming, you’re not. What you feel is normal and you are still in control.
Today I want to share with you 20 easy ways that will help you start living your best life because once they helped me!
1. Make Every New Day A Fresh Start
Stop being held back by what happened yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or a week, or a month ago. Life is too short for complaining and overthinking. Make it a habit to solve the conflict that you had the same day before going to sleep. You will see how fast you will start progressing, as you can focus on yourself and the ones you love.
2. Be Thankful For What You Already Have
What if I tell you that if you stop thinking about negative things and concentrate on the positive things you already have, you will be halfway there, living your best life?
It’s the power of positive thinking at its best!
Check out this experiment by Barbara Fredrickson, who is a positive psychology researcher at the University of North Carolina.
During this experiment, she divided her research subjects into 5 groups and showed each group different film clips.
The first two groups watched clips that created feelings of joy and contentment. Group 3 was shown neutral images that produced no significant emotions.
The last 2 groups watched clips that created negative emotions such as feelings of fear and anger.
Afterward, she asked each participant to imagine themselves in a situation where similar feelings would arise and write down what they would do. Each participant was handed a piece of paper with 20 blank lines that started with the phrase, “I would like to…”
Participants who saw images of fear and anger wrote down the fewest responses. Meanwhile, the participants who saw images of joy and contentment, wrote down a significantly higher number of actions that they would take, even when compared to the neutral group.
In other words, when you are experiencing positive emotions like joy, contentment, and love, you will see more possibilities in your life. These findings proved that positive emotions broaden your sense of possibility and open your mind up to more options.
3. Create your Bucket List
If you still don’t have a Bucket List, I would recommend you create one.
A Bucket List is where you list your major goals, things you want to do in life, and places you want to visit.
It gave me a kind of sense of direction and motivation to get out there to achieve them. And it always gives me a nice sense of fulfillment when I cross them off of my list.
4. Start Exercising Or Exercise More
Exercising is not only good for your body, it’s also good for your mental health.
It will make you feel more confident, and healthier, your mind will be clearer and more focused afterward. Exercising will make you happier. It’s already been proven by scientists.
It produces changes in the parts of the brain that regulate stress and anxiety. Also, it can increase brain sensitivity for the hormones serotonin and norepinephrine, which relieve feelings of depression.
I exercise regularly, it personally helps me clear my mind and makes me feel good about myself.
Even short workouts, like stretching every day, are going to make you feel so much better!
5. Start Saving Money
If you already started saving money, look for more ways to do that, simply because saving enough money for the future brings you a sense of financial freedom and peace.
No one can ever tell you how much you should save. Seriously, the more you save, the better!
Money is one of the most important components of a happy and successful life and everybody knows that. Maybe it’s not the most important thing in life but that’s how we measure a great deal of our success.
Sometimes it can be challenging to stay motivated about saving more and spending less, that’s why it is essential to know what you are saving for. Whether it’s for paying off your debt or buying a new flat-screen TV.
Read more about how to save money at 10 Best Tips On How To Save Money Fast
6. Start Eating Healthy
If you ever wanted to go on a diet, it’s the perfect time! If you want to start eating healthy it’s the time! Besides, eating healthy is not only good for your body, but it also has a huge impact on your mental health.
As I mentioned, you are responsible for your life and its outcomes. Get a nice, healthy body, it will make you feel more confident and will open up more opportunities.
7. Be Committed To Your Growth
Start taking courses. Self-reflect. Help yourself to build on your strengths. Don’t rely on the feeling of familiarity but focus on what will enable you to grow the most.
You have only one life and you choose if you want to invest in yourself as much as you can or you don’t.
Read more about what you enjoy. It will help you:
- Gain more knowledge
- Train your memory
- Bring out your creativity
- Be more interesting to talk to
- Open up your mind
8. Stop Procrastinating
Stop leaving everything for tomorrow, for the next week, or next month. Procrastination is something that I am still struggling with from time to time, and it makes me feel so bad afterward, that I decided to share what works for me and what helps me stop procrastinating.
It honestly made me so much happier and gave me a sense of productivity and fulfillment.
- Find out the reasons that make you procrastinate in a certain situation. For me, it was a lack of motivation, disorganization, the complexity of the task I had to do, low energy level (that led to general tiredness), and distractions. Writing them down will help you focus and identify them more clearly.
- Accept responsibility. Nobody is going to do it for you. That’s what I learned. Eventually, you will have to tackle it, but how many days, months, or even years will be wasted?
- Face your fear and do it anyway. This is another thing that I had to learn myself. Sometimes we have to force ourselves to do the things we fear. A great thing about it is that if you fear but do it anyway, it will boost your confidence.
- Create a plan. I love writing them down, it helps me be more organized and gives me a great sense of fulfillment as I cross tasks off of my list. Schedule the most difficult task for the time of the day when your energy is the highest.
- Be enthusiastic. This is probably the most important weapon against procrastination. It’s better to be enthusiastic and positive when doing something you will have to do anyway. Once you master the skill of making things happen, your enthusiasm will grow through the roof.
Related article: 10 Best FREE Tools To Boost Your Productivity
9. Travel More
Travel to the places you’ve never been to. The internet and TV will never be able to replace traveling itself.
Visiting beautiful places, meeting new people, learning about another culture and language it’s worth your time and money.
It will open up your mind and broaden your horizons!
10. Get Rid Of Your Debt If You Have One
What can feel better than getting rid of your debt?
It lessens your stress level and opens up more opportunities as you can invest more money in the things you love.
As a result, it allows you to save more for your retirement account, frees you from interest rates, and so on.
These are some ways that can help you to get rid of your debt:
- Pay more than the minimum payment
- Find a side hustle ( TaskRabbit, Upwork). Note: earnings from that job should be only used to pay off your debt/loan.
- Get rid of stuff you don’t need ( Craiglist, eBay)
- Drop your expensive habits
Question for you: What do you need to do to live your best life?
