Absence of happiness brings immense sadness and misery, leading to emotional numbness, apathy or lack of motivation affecting our everyday lives and productivity.
This motivates the celebration of World Happiness Day, celebrated on March 20. The United Nations General Assembly called for “a more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth that promotes the happiness and well-being of all peoples.”
Also see: Why feeling younger than your age could boost your health and happiness
World Happiness Day is there to remind people to strive to be happy and prioritise their happiness, as happiness is seen as a fundamental human goal.
Here is how to prioritise your happiness, according to Medium:
Stop doing the things that drain your happiness
If you don’t patch the holes first, there is no point in draining the water from the boat. The boat is going to sink. In a similar way, we never take time to reflect on the habits that aren’t working for us.
Some of the habits might be physical, such as bad diet, negative people or excessive engagement with social media, while some of them might be negative attitudes such as blaming, personalising or procrastinating. It’d help so much if we just stop letting our actions or thoughts sabotage our life.
To-Do: Make a list of all the habits and attitudes that drain your happiness.
Also see: Selena Gomez Opens Up About Why Happiness Feels ‘Too Good to Be True’
Start doing the things that bring more happiness
Once we have some space, we can start replacing the bad habits with the good ones. For example, instead of spending all weekend binge-watching Netflix, we can get a head start on our exercise goals by simply going for a walk.
Instead of ordering a pizza, we can decide to either cook at home (or at least order something healthy that’s delicious but won’t make you feel bad afterwards).
To-Do: Make a list of all things that you want to invite in your life to feel happier.
If you can’t avoid it, find an interesting way of doing it
We often have particular ways of doing things that make the tasks boring, difficult or highly tedious. Sometimes even the thought of working on them seems appalling. But what if we could do things differently? In a more interesting way?
For example, we can study or get work done at a beautiful cafe. We can also set up an exercise habit by starting a running routine with a friend through the scenic parts of the city.
To-Do: Write down ways of making different tasks less boring
Also see: 5 Tips on finding happiness at work
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