Happy People Have a Healthy Lifestyle

People who look after themselves and who take pride in their personal hygiene and grooming, without being obsessive, give a message to others that they like and respect themselves. The more you behave in a certain way, the more you will feel that way.

So to be healthier and to feel healthier, start to do what healthier people do. The most important lifestyle factors for a long and healthy life are: healthy eating, exercise, no smoking and moderate alcohol consumption.

To be both healthier and happier you need to achieve a balance between satisfying work, leisure time, and good-quality rest and sleep. If you feel a rumbling discontent with your life, stand back and see if the balance is right. Determine what activities stimulate each of your five senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, and make you feel good. This can give you immediate, daily access to lots of activities that can stimulate your own opiate system to make you feel immediately healthier and happier. In this way you can have regular time-out for pleasure throughout the busiest days.

Stress is your reaction to emotional or physical changes in your life. But changes can be good or bad. If you had no stress in your life, you would be very bored, and in fact under-stimulation could be stressful itself. Athletes talk about being “in the zone”, where the demands and level of stress they create in their bodies is at optimal level for peak performance. The same can happen with our everyday lives. It’s important to believe and understand that not all stress is bad, and that good stressors can make us happy and healthy.

Placebos are a fascinating phenomenon that illustrates how the mind and body influence each other. A placebo can be anything that a patient believes will relieve their symptoms or even induce symptoms. Our beliefs influence what we feel about health and disease. Our feeling depends on the meaning that we attach to what happens to us. In everyday life the meaning you attach to illness will also affect how sick you feel and can influence the length of your recovery and ultimate prognosis.

You don’t have to be afraid of unhappiness or uncontrolled feelings. Rather you need to realize how useful they can be. Before you run away from those feelings, you may stop and ask yourself where the feelings are coming from. This can get you to stop, re-assess the situation, change your thinking and behavior, and act in a way that is more constructive. Discomfort is a message telling you something is wrong in your life or with your way of handling things that happen. If you blindly run away from discomfort, you can never feel contentment or peace of mind because you never confront what is going wrong.

You will be healthier if you behave as healthy people do. Those people who work, who socialize, who are involved with family life and who are needed by others stay healthier longer. Focusing on what you can do rather than on what you can’t do, and doing it.

 

Happy People like People

Happy people like other people. People who seek the company of other people tend to be happier than those who don’t or who deliberately avoid contact with others. A supportive network of family, friends and workmates is related to the degree of happiness and health.

People who are shy tend to avoid many situations and opportunities for enjoying happiness. Shyness is a social disadvantage only if you worry about it or it prevents you from doing things you want to do. Many shy people are very contented and happy about being shy. Because they don’t attract or demand attention, they are free to be truly themselves. Quiet, self-contained reserve has its advantages if you are prepared to explore the possibilities.

However, for those who don’t like being shy, whose self-consciousness compels them to sit on the sidelines when they would rather participate, who do feel lonely rather than merely alone, overcoming that shyness can make a huge difference to their enjoyment of life. Focusing too much or exclusively on yourself tends to dramatically distort your perceptions of what is actually happening. You just don’t see or hear anything but yourself.

To confront and overcome shyness, you need to identify any fears you have about mixing with people. Be specific, and then deal with them. Look at each link of the chain reaction – perceptions, beliefs, feelings and so on – in terms of your shyness. When you’ve identified each of them, tackle them one by one. Furthermore, decide how much you really want to change. May be shy suits you and don’t try to change only to please someone else.

Enjoy the Doing

Happy people enjoy the doing. Their greatest feelings of happiness were derived from the actual doing of the task, of being “in the flow”. They enjoy themselves most when they are caught up in and totally absorbed with the “flow” of an activity. When we use a high level of skill to do highly challenging tasks, we can experience the total absorption and satisfaction of “flow”.

Susan was forty when diagnosed with motor neurone disease. She had one of the most severe forms, one which usually results in death within two years. But at forty-five she was still alive, and although severely disabled, she was very much part of her loving family of five sons. Susan had been a keen gardener, and every time you saw her she had pots of bulbs coming up, in full bloom or dying off in her room. Just before becoming ill she had started experimenting with creating new varieties of daffodils, and watching how each new experimental flower would turn out had become a passion.

She would enthusiastically whisper to you in a voice almost gone with the disease about the colors and shapes she was aiming for. Her whole conversation was focused on future blooms which she had to be alive to see. Her husband and sons looked after the pots but she was in charge as only she knew how to care for them.

Susan’s garden was on a very small scale but her commitment to it and her curiosity about what would bloom next season gave her a powerful reason to live, which for many years slowed the progress of her disease.

So, plan high points in your life to look forward to, but don’t let yourself become obsessed by the future or with reaching goals.