The bad habits that are destroying your happiness
Feel as though you’ll never be happy? These are some of the bad habits that could be keeping you in the dark.
by: E.B. Johnson
There are many people out there who promise to provide us with the secret to happiness. The problem there, however, is that we are the only person who holds that answer. Happiness looks different to everyone. We all want different things from our lives. But if happiness is within our own personal definition, that also means it’s within our control. Are you stuck? Miserable? Looking for meaning? You might be the one standing in your own way with your bad habits and patterns.
Happiness isn’t something that’s reserved for other people. It can be yours and it can come from within. Before you can move forward, though, you have to find the honesty to admit where you’re at. Admit where you’re selling yourself short and admit that action is the only way to get what you want. Then, focus on rebuilding yourself from the ground up and cultivating an undeniable sense of self. Hold yourself to higher expectations and do what it takes to meet them.
We are the source of our own joy.
There isn’t a magic you can wave or any amount of manifesting that will make you happy. Happiness takes work, and it takes the hardest kind of work — inside-out-refurbishment. You have to get used to looking inward and relying on your strengths and abilities to provide your intrinsic sense of joy. We alone are the source of our happiness. While our externals can impact this, they can’t change it. You have to want to be happy and work for it.
Are you getting in your own way? Where are you dropping the ball, or taking a passive place when you should be taking action? Happiness isn’t an accident. It doesn’t land in your lap by happenstance, and it doesn’t stay forever once it’s arrived. We have to nourish this feeling, like a precious plant, and love it for the seasons that we hold it.
Life is challenging. Don’t make it even more challenging by keeping yourself miserable. If you’re not where you want to be, figure out where that place is and get going. You have all the time you need to reach your goals, but you don’t always have all the time that you want to enjoy your success. Strive now and stop putting your needs on the back-burner for someone else’s idea of happiness.
The bad habits that are destroying your happiness.
If you’re miserable, you have the power to change that. Doing this, though, requires that we first fess up to the patterns of thinking and behavior that keep us frozen in our anger and our pain. Are these bad habits destroying your happiness? The answer might be more surprising than you think.
Putting yourself last
Where do you sit on the Tower of Power in your relationship or family unit? Do your needs take an equal seat with that of your partner’s or your children? Do you always make sure that you’re at 100% charge before reaching out for others? This is a common cause of absolute misery (and a loss of self) in life. It’s easily corrected, however, by getting proactive about meeting your own needs and committing to personal space.
Numbing with tech
When modern tech and social media landed in our laps oh-so-long ago, we were promised a dream of connectivity and communication. Now, that dream has become a nightmare and we are living in a digital hell-scape of miscommunication and disconnection. Do you channel your feelings through Instagram? Have you forgotten how to have a life in the real world? When you numb yourself with technology, you forget to nourish your physical and emotional body.
Avoiding change
Change is an inevitable part of life, yet we humans seem convinced that we can outrun it or turn back the clock. We love our habits and our routines. We love the comfort they provide and the stability of knowing what comes next. The problem with getting too comfortable in these systems, however, is that we stop allowing ourselves to grow and improve as people, partners, and friends.
Expecting the worst
Are you a pessimist who only sees the negative side to life? When it comes to relationships, are you always looking for the betrayal? Or trying to get one over on them before they can do the same to you? This dire pessimism makes it hard for us to see any light at the end of the tunnel. Stuck in these negative considerations, we act out and bring back even more negative feedback from our friends and loved ones. This serves to exasperate the situation.
Waiting until it’s too late
Procrastination is a form of self-sabotage that serves to undermine our level of happiness. This means that we leave things undone, or otherwise ignore them until we come to a point of conflict or complete collapse. The pressure makes us cave in and we wind up with a bigger mess than if just addressed our issues and needs in the first instance. Getting what we want isn’t about waiting around. It requires us to act before it’s too late.
Complaining without action
The longer you carry on complaining about everything that’s going on in your life (without taking action) the more unhappy you will become. You’re confronting yourself with the bad over and over again, without any reframing of the positive possibilities. This keeps you stuck in a negative feedback loop and reinforces the idea that you’re powerless and the belief that you will forever trapped in a bad place.
Endless comparisons
Do you constantly compare yourself to others? How about where you are in life? Your career? Your relationships? This is one of the worst habits you can develop when it comes to being authentically happy. When you get stuck in the comparison pattern, you start to believe that you’ll never be good enough and you’ll never have enough. You can’t compare anything about your life to someone else. Look to them for guidance if you must, but understand that everyone’s journey is unique.
Losing sight of gratitude
It can be hard to keep sight of your gratitude in this world, but it’s necessary. Happiness is a feeling that feeds off of the good things in our life. It also happens to be a feeling we crave most when we’re unhappy or dealing with a lot of stress. In order for us to tap into this joy at will, we have to look around and find things we can appreciate around us. Perhaps you’re grateful for a friend, or your pet. There’s always something that’s good around us, and when we figure that out we can figure out our happiness path too.
Trying to control the world
Are you constantly in a battle to control the world around you? Do you micro-plan and spend a ton of time and energy going above and beyond to try to make things “perfect”. Life is chaotic, and it is incredibly random. The only thing you can control about it is how you respond to it. Take back power by refusing to spend all your power futile battle of control. Life is good, and it is bad. We have to roll with the punches and give ourselves a break from time-to-time.
How to put a stop to all the bad habits.
It’s time for you to put the bad habits to bed and get back in touch with your happiness. You don’t have to stay miserable or angry forever. Pull yourself back into the light by boosting your confidence and embracing your right to live peacefully fulfilled and in joy.
1. Boost your self-confidence
If you were asked to describe yourself in 5 words — what words would you use? Would you use words like “strong…loyal…beautiful…” or would you use phrases like, “sad…anxious…afraid…” Though both are perfectly valid, one indicates a strong disconnect with our self-confidence. It’s impossible for us to move forward in this life if we don’t believe in ourselves. It’s impossible to tap into our ultimate happiness when we have no self-confidence to build on.
Put all the pressure and all the expectations to the side for a moment. Spend some time looking inward and embracing how you really feel. Confront your insecurities, rediscover those things you think might be shortcoming or weaknesses. Then find a way to love them or let them go.
You also need to spend some time celebrating your strengths, however. Look in the mirror each day and find 3 things you love about your body. If you don’t have 3, pick them anyway and fake it until you fall in love. When you come home from work each day, write down. 3–5 things you did well. Refer back to these lists whenever you are feeling low. Use the pages to remind yourself that you are a strong, capable, and worthy person who is going to thrive.
2. Get clear on what you want
A lot of people stomp around, disappointed in their inability to be happy in life. When you ask them what would make them happy, however. They rarely have more than a nebulous answer. That’s because most of us just expect happiness to happen, without ever giving much thought to what this idea really means to us. You need to know (precisely) what constitutes your happiness in order to achieve. To do that, you need to be clear on what you want.
What do you want from your life? What do you need to achieve in order to feel as though your life has been a worthwhile one? Do you want a serious relationship? A multi-million dollar career? There aren’t any right or wrong things to want for yourself. You’ll never find direction, though, until you nail those things down.
Be honest with yourself, about yourself. Don’t build up hopes that you have no business achieving. Don’t go jumping into the deep end without a clear picture of the direction you need to take. You don’t need to chase things that other people chased. You don’t have to meet their standards or their definitions of life and love in order to feel as though you’ve “made it”. Spend some time considering what happiness really means to you and be brutally honest with yourself.
3. Identify your weak spots
There are a lot of weak spots in our behaviors, our decision-making skills, and even in our personalities. Failing to address these weak spots is what leads to the bad habits that keep us inhibited and small. From painful moments in our childhood, to defining moments in our present — we have to embrace them and acknowledge them for what they are, so that we can find better ways to counteract them and embrace our joy once more.
Identify your weak spots, or the things you need to improve on in order to be happy. This could be your sense of self. It could be your confidence, or your insecurities. It could also be your mental health, however. Or, reaching out to someone who can help you resolve the past pains that are making it too difficult to thrive.
We are our own keepers. If there’s something you want to be able to do, you have to teach yourself how to do it. Want to be stronger? Work your mind and your body. Want to be more resilient? Flex your mind. Find some way to center your body and your spirit so that you can tap into breakthroughs that allow you to touch base with your future. See your weak spots as growth points, and the whole game changes.
4. Reinforce by removing triggers
No matter how hard we work internally to reach happiness, it’s hard to stay that way when our lives remained packed full of negative triggers. These triggers are the people and the things that bring us back to that place of low emotional awareness or pain. They make us forget where we’re going and keep us trapped in the darkest places that we’ve been. Remove them, and you make being happy that much easier for yourself.
Clean up your life. Cut out the dead weight and all those things which no longer align with who you are and where you’re going. Say goodbye to the people who hurt you, and the dead ends that hold you back. Nourish your spirit and give your body good food and plenty of sleep.
When you cut out those things which no longer suit, you allow the things that bring you joy to enter. There’s only so much room in our lives. Make room for happiness in your life consciously and mindfully. Do it every day. Remove the triggers that you can and surround yourself with people, places, and things that make you feel confident, comfortable, and secure.
5. Form higher expectations
What level of expectations or standards do you hold for yourself? Do you aim high and strive to be a better version of whatever person you want to be? Or do you hang your head low and your hopes even lower? We need to hold ourselves up to higher standards if we want to be happy. We have to expect as much from ourselves as we would any leader or loved one. Form high expectations and you will develop a bigger picture of happiness.
Expect more out of yourself and the people around you. Hold yourself to a higher standard and constantly strive to achieve something better than you did the day before. Don’t settle for being unhappy because you think it’s expected, or you think it’s what you deserve.
You deserve to achieve all the things you want. You deserve to be successful, and you deserve to live in a world that is secure. To make all those things happen, though, you’re going to have to embrace your nature-given right to exist in the same state as everyone else. Expect to be loved for who you are. Expect to be respected, no matter what. Expect to lead a life that is happy and your actions will follow suit; helping you to manifest a life you never thought possible before.
Putting it all together…
There are many people out there who make a lot of promises when it comes to happiness. They promise to make us happy, and they promise to tell us what happiness really is. Only we know what true happiness looks like, though, and only we can achieve it for ourselves. This process begins by getting out of our own way and confessing to the habits that are keeping us small. Followed by intentional action and the knowledge that we deserve to thrive.
Boost your self-confidence and use this renewed sense of self to guide you toward the actions and people that bring you joy. Get clear on what you want and use that knowledge to guide yourself faithfully forward into a future that’s aligned to your needs. Identify your weak spots, and in that process address and sore points that make it hard for you to speak up or step outside of your comfort zone. Don’t just expect that this is enough, though. You still have to remove triggers to retain your happiness, and you have to hold yourself to a higher standard than you ever have before. If you truly want to be happy, stop looking to everything and everyone else. Look within and break the bad habits that are stopping you short.
