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What's getting in the way of your happiness?
By Susan Shearer Young — Written on Mar 07, 2019
Your happiness and stress levels are innately linked. So if you want to learn how to be happier, figuring how to reduce stress in your life is a critical first step.
It all boils down to the Law of Attraction, which is defined as "the belief that positive or negative thoughts bring positive or negative experiences into a person's life."
When you understand how energy works to attract things into your life, both wanted and unwanted, you also realize the importance of your mood or your vibration. You want your mood, your vibe, to be high and at the level of the things you want — not in the lower range, which only attracts problems to be solved.
When you want to work on a "big issue" in your life or take steps toward tackling a "big goal" that will make you be happier, my first suggestion is not to identify any goal as "big." Not because it's not important to you, but because it subconsciously creates the expectation that achieving that goal is going to be difficult and stressful.
Often, when you set such an intention, you are generally clinging so tightly to that goal that you are constantly ruminating about the fact that it’s taking so long to make it happen. And that’s exactly the mood, the vibration, which keeps it from showing up for you.
While it might sound counter-intuitive, loosening your “death grip” on the important issue can not only help you learn how to reduce stress, but actually help you achieve it. So put it on the back burner for a bit.
Instead, decide to make small changes in other areas of your life that are affecting your mood in a negative way.
Start by working to eliminate your "tolerations” — those mood busters and vibrational drains, often in the form of stressful or wearisome tasks and to-do's, that are affecting your happiness level on a daily, or even hourly, basis.
Addressing these will immediately help improve your mood and also help you manifest the things that you really, really want to come into your life.
Think about the many areas of your life — work, relationships, health, home, family, and so on — and the little things in those areas that could be improved.
These minor, stressful things that you tolerate every day, perhaps multiple times per day, drain your energy. You need to plug those vibrational drains.
When you realize that these daily, minor annoyances are affecting the energy you put out into the world on a regular basis, doesn’t it feel ridiculous to keep tolerating them?
Before you can learn how to be happier and reduce stress by eliminating tolerations that drain your happiness, you first have to identify them.
Start by making a list of things that dampen your enthusiasm. We’re not talking major life moves here.
For example:
- Do you think "yuck!" every time you look in the mirror and need a haircut or style change?
- Do you have a pile of things sitting in a room in your house that need a new home?
- Is your email box so full that you dread logging onto your computer each day?
- Do you have clothes that can’t be worn because they need to be mended, dry-cleaned or ironed?
- Do you need a new photo on your site or on FB?
- Do you need to update your website?
- Is your desk, your workspace, so cluttered that you can’t put your hands on what you need?
- Do you need to write that thank you note that makes you wince every time you remember that you haven’t handled it?
Once you have a well-defined list of tolerations that constantly drain your energy and happiness, it's time to take action and eliminate them.
You have a few options here, and the idea is to make it as easy as possible. The feeling of knocking these tolerations off the list is going to be palpable.
Here are 3 ways to eliminate everyday tolerations and stressors that ruin your mood, so you can learn how to be happier every day:
1. Delegate it.
Perhaps you’ve been avoiding a specific toleration because it’s something you really don’t like to do.
If it’s a work matter, you may have an assistant or associate who can handle it. There are also sites you can use, like Fiverr and TaskRabbit, to hire some help. Can you actually afford not to spend $5 or $20 to get this task done when it’s draining your energy and your mood?
You may have a friend or family member who doesn’t have the same aversion to this task and would be happy to handle it for you. You could trade your toleration with theirs and help one another out.
2. Let it go.
After thinking about your toleration more, you might decide that it’s actually not such a big deal and you’re going to let it go and move on. You’re no longer going to allow it to annoy you. You’d rather focus upon the goals that make you feel good, so you cross it off the list entirely.
3. Do it.
When it comes to eliminating a toleration, you can also just do it. There are some things that just simply need to be taken care of and you know you will feel so much better once you just do them!
Instead of thinking of it as a big chore, think of it as, “I’m taking charge of my life. I’m no longer just putting up with things that are sub-par and drain my happiness."
You may be surprised how taking care of these little tolerations will lead to making bigger changes in your life as a whole. Improving your mood and the energy you emit causes movement in the bigger things in your life, too.
You’ll also likely find that taking action to eliminate these stressors can be motivating and make you unwilling to tolerate other, bigger issues in your life — like not having the magical relationship you want or the financial freedom you desire.
By eliminating the tolerations, the minor annoyances that affect your mood every day, you’ll soon find yourself crossing your "big goals" off your list, as well.
Susan helps strong women who are feeling stuck or unfulfilled by their jobs and/or personal lives to create the confidence and clarity they need to move forward into the abundant lifestyle they deserve. Visit Susan’s website to learn more about creating the life you want, or schedule a free exploratory coaching session with Susan to jumpstart the changes you’d like to make today.
This article was originally published at How To Allow. Reprinted with permission from the author.