1. You try to maintain control over life.
Life is a wild ride. One minute everything is calm and going as planned. The next minute you’re sliding all over the place, trying to get everything under control.
Life can change on a dime in an instant. All it takes is one bad decision, one wrong action, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time for everything to get upended.
That becomes far less scary when you accept it as a possibility and plan for it.
A life journey can be mapped out with milestones, but it may not be possible to see what’s on the road that connects them.
There may be important things for you to do in your life later, but you need to get through some life experiences now to prepare for them.
There may be pit stops and detours you need to take while you’re on your path.
Plan, but don’t cling too tightly to the plan. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow and see where the flow takes you.
2. You are needlessly competing with other people.
Competition can be healthy in limited circumstances. It’s not healthy when it starts crossing lines that create adverse emotional outcomes.
So, you want to be the best. You invest hours of your life into practicing, training, and practicing more. You step out onto the big stage to take a shot at the top spot and find out that all of your practicing and training didn’t provide the outcome you hoped for you.
You’re not the best. Maybe you came in second place, maybe you didn’t even make the top five.
That applies across the entire game of life. It doesn’t matter what you do, there will always be someone better, or success may be a fluke of luck.
There will always be someone wealthier, better looking, smarter, happier, or doing better things.
Looking at those people as competition to be knocked off and overcome is not healthy because you’re comparing yourself to their life experience.
An excellent way to counter competitive thinking toward life is to develop an appreciation for differences. It’s much easier to maintain your own happiness when your primary concern is building yourself up, not knocking other people down.
Appreciate other people for their blessings and gifts. Ask questions. Many people will be more than happy to tell you how they accomplished what they did.
3. You attach happiness to experiences or material things.
The pursuit of stuff is a guaranteed way to keep yourself on a happiness treadmill that gets you nowhere.
There will always be someone putting out new and better stuff that will make your old stuff seem worthless and obsolete.
Yeah, that stuff might have made you happy before, but is it something that will keep making you happy? Probably not. Things get old after a while.
But then there is also the belief that one should pursue experiences, not stuff! That’s what will make you happy!
Yeah, it will, for a while. But what happens when life happens, and you can’t afford experiences anymore?
Love to travel? Great! Experience new things, see other cultures, look for that stimulation out there right up until your job falls through, or travel options get cut off.
What then?
Deriving happiness from external sources may work for some time. It can certainly help to provide a temporary boost of excitement and something to look forward to.
But is that going to keep you happy when you don’t have access to those experiences or material stuff anymore?
4. You’re a perfectionist.
Perfectionism often masks some difficult feelings. It can stem from anxiety about oneself and their environment.
A person who experiences anxiety may use perfectionism as a tool to try to maintain an ideal image to keep their anxiety under control.
The problem is that people aren’t perfect. And trying to impose that perfectionism on other people is a surefire way to cause conflict, resentment, and unhappiness.
Even if the person complies now, sooner or later, they will want their freedom, which means they will rebel and seek to blaze their own path.
Perfectionism may also mask low self-esteem and self-image. The perfectionist doesn’t complete projects because a completed project can’t be judged. It gives the perfectionist an easy out by saying, “Well, it’s just a work in progress. I’m not done with it yet.”
In reality, most reasonable people aren’t expecting you or your work to be perfect. Most work isn’t.
Perfect is the enemy of progress. Embracing imperfection empowers happiness.
You can foster greater self-love by looking at your flaws as unique things of beauty that help make you who you are.
And while it’s true that those flaws may be significant and some are more severe than others, these are always things that can be worked on and polished.
5. You place blame or avoid responsibility for your own happiness.
How can you be happy when you continually make the wrong choices in life?
How can you be happy if you put the burden of that responsibility on the shoulders of others?
It’s your responsibility to make the right decisions that will help you improve your life and preserve your peace of mind.
The people that you date and love can’t do it. Your boss at work can’t do it. The friends you surround yourself can’t do it.
It’s so very easy to try to put that responsibility on others. If only they would act right! Or do the right thing! Or make better choices! Then their choices wouldn’t negatively affect my happiness or well-being!
But that’s not the way people work.
Most people are making their decisions to bolster their own happiness or way of life. They’re working to improve what they have – find love, find happiness, find some peace of mind in this chaotic world.
You can’t spend your time blaming other people for your choices. If you’re unhappy with a situation in your life, change it.
If someone is mistreating you, erect boundaries and don’t let them do that.
If you’re unhappy with who you are as a person, stop making excuses and shoving blame out on everyone else.
It’s yours to deal with.
6. You let fear dictate your life and choices.
It’s natural to be afraid of change and the unknown. This is an entirely human response to something that you’re unfamiliar with.
The problem is that the unknown is where you will experience the greatest growth and new experiences.
You don’t really get anywhere interesting by rehashing the things you already know and the places you’ve already been to. They can be a great comfort, even if they are terrible or ugly, but they’re not where you’re going to find any happiness.
You have to be willing to challenge yourself, think outside of the box, and pursue something new.
You have to be willing to take a leap of faith and have confidence in yourself that whatever you may face – you can handle it.
You’ll always be trapped in your own bubble if you let fear dictate your life and choices.
7. You don’t live and focus on the present.
Happiness can only be found in the present moment. The past is gone, and the future isn’t here yet. Everything you feel and experience is right here, right now.
You’re robbing yourself of happiness if you spend your time reminiscing and pining for a past that no longer exists.
That isn’t all that much different from spending your time fantasizing about a future that may or may not come to pass. No future is guaranteed, no matter how much we want it, plan for it, or work for it.
That doesn’t mean that you should NEVER consider the past or the future. Some people focus so much on the present that they neglect to plan for the future at all. But there does come a point where it becomes unhealthy to daydream about what could be or pine for what should have been.
The present is where everything is happening right now. Suppose you can find a way to make the best of your present situation and appreciate it, whatever it may be. In that case, you’ll have an easier time preserving your happiness.
8. You’re passive and procrastinate.
Procrastination can eat up happiness. By accepting a passive role in life and procrastinating, you are effectively handing off control over important decisions in your life.
If you do not make a choice, other people and circumstances will make a choice for you.
And other people are not going to advocate or fight for your happiness as you will. Most of the time, they are generally more concerned with solving their own problems and building up their happiness.
Procrastination creates new problems with your lack of input and action. Small problems that could have been resolved with just a few minutes of effort can cause much more significant, costlier problems when you don’t address them.
There is a simple, time-saving technique called, “The Five Minute Rule,” which can help you fight procrastination and make a big difference in your life.
It’s simple. If an activity would take under 5 minutes to accomplish, just do it and get it over with. Don’t put it off until later, don’t bundle it together with a bunch of other things, don’t shrug your shoulders and walk away from it… just do it.
You’ll be surprised at how much it helps with everything from cleanliness to staying organized at work.
9. You don’t learn and grow from your mistakes.
Mistakes are an essential part of growing as a person. It’s only by making mistakes and sometimes screwing things up do we realize what is not right for us.
What would happen if everything went well and correctly all the time? You’d probably get complacent. You’d probably get used to things going well and develop an expectation that whatever you did would go well.
But that’s not how life works.
There are very few people that succeed immediately at what they set out to do. It doesn’t matter how much research or planning you do, sometimes things just happen, and all you can do is react to it to minimize the damage.
Some people treat mistakes and setbacks as a catastrophe, mainly if they haven’t made many mistakes of their own.
Helicopter parents set their children up for failure by not allowing them to experience mistakes, so their children don’t know what to do when it happens or think it’s a poor reflection of their character.
But it’s not. Mistakes happen to everyone. It’s what you do with your mistakes that matter.
Learn and grow from them, don’t hide from them.
10. You don’t have enough patience.
Patience is a virtue. It’s a common cliché for a reason.
Patience is a virtue because few things of merit happen quickly or easily. It takes time, regular work, failing, and trying again to build things of value.
The most experienced artists and creators know that you can’t just whip something out on a whim and have it be amazing.
To create something amazing in your life, create happiness, land the dream job, and find the right person to take on life with will take a great deal of patience.
We live in a very instant society where many consumables are on-demand and immediate. Happiness is neither of these things.
No matter how much patience you have, you could probably use a little more of it.
But patience has to balance with goal-setting. There is a point where a line is crossed from patience to ‘this goal probably isn’t working out, so I need a new plan.’
11. You spend too much time looking at screens.
Having too much screen time just isn’t healthy. It also deprives us of our ability to interact with life, grow, and change.
Yeah, binging a series on Netflix while laying on the couch does sound like a great way to spend a day off, but you sacrifice a valuable resource that you cannot reclaim – time. You only get 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, just like everyone else in the world.
How you spend the limited amount of time you are given for this life changes how you develop as a person and where your life will lead.
Not many people want to get up and exercise, study, or do the hard work they have to do to maintain and build their lives. It gets exhausting, and the couch is mighty comfortable.
Watching television or videos, doom-scrolling through social media, or losing yourself in video games don’t build a happier, better life for you. They’re time wasters that will set you back if you let them claim too much of your time.
Rest and relaxation are important. Just make sure you’re not sacrificing too much of your limited time on these time sinks of infinite depth.
