2022 will be my happiest year ever! #BlueMonday
Today is officially #BlueMonday, purported to be the saddest day of the year with a multitude of factors converging to create the perfect breeding-ground for wallowing in our own misery. "It's cold! It's dark! I've broken my new years resolution already - I'm such a disappointment". The list goes on...
I decided going into 2022 that I was going to do everything I could to bolster my mental health and help stop myself from feeling the lows that many of us have felt in recent years, particularly the last 2. And it's working! So with that in mind, here are some things I've found have helped me - hopefully they can be of use to others too.
1) YOU'VE GOT YOUR OWN PROBLEMS TO BE WORRYING ABOUT, so be careful what additional problems you're exposing yourself to. As an individual you're not designed to take on the weight of THE WHOLE WORLD'S problems. Climate change, Covid-19, global inequality, government corruption, North Korea's latest and greatest missile test... it's a lot for one individual person to worry about. I'm not saying we shouldn't be worrying about these important issues, however perhaps we should be more aware of how taking on personal responsibility for every major GLOBAL issue could be effecting our mental health on an individual level. Our brains are not designed to do that.
2) WHAT YOU SEE ONLINE DOES NOT REFLECT OVERALL REALITY. Much of the news these days unfortunately highlights the negative over the positive. With every passing year we seem to be inundated with more and more shocking headlines at every turn, which can make it seem that the world is going from bad to worse. But remember, the world today is the kindest, fairest and most pleasant it's ever been - and becomes more so with every passing day. Also, stop thinking Instagram is representative of other people's real life. Nobody's that good-looking / happy all that time!
3) DON'T COMPARE YOURSELF TO OTHERS. You should always be comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who others are today. Obviously you can learn from others, and apply that to your own life, but we are all on our own unique path through life. If you're better than who YOU were yesterday, that's a real win.
4) GOALS ARE IMPORTANT - BUT SET THEM IN THE RIGHT WAY! I've got countless goals I've set myself. Learn the guitar, learn to dance, learn to code... and I used to get really annoyed when I'd wake up and I'd not "achieved"any of them. Then I added "improve my Spanish" to the list and realised... goals shouldn't be about completion but improvement. So now I set all my goals in that context. "Improve my guitar skills", improve my dancing" (this one is much needed!), "improve my coding skills". They are now an ongoing part of my life where any improvement gives me a sense of achievement.
5) DON'T TAKE LIFE TOO SERIOUSLY. When I joined the "real-world" and got a "real job" I thought I had to really start taking things seriously. But I quickly realised, if you take it all too seriously you can find yourself in serious trouble. The gravity of anything going wrong would leave me paralysed. For someone who up until that point would describe themselves as "care-free" and "happy go lucky" this was really troubling. So this year I'm making sure I remember that things do tend to have a way of working themselves out. Today's problems often lead to tomorrow's solutions and successes.
6) BE SILLY SOMETIMES. Being silly is fun, and it's not actually illegal. In the same way you shouldn't take life too seriously, you shouldn't take yourself too seriously. Some of my happiest moments looking back also happen to be some of the silliest, and I don't think that's a coincidence. This one may be the most important one on the list!
I could go on and on about all the things I'm trying to do to make 2022 my "happiest year ever", but I don't want to take up your whole evening! But my pm's are open to anyone who wants to talk about this at greater length. All I can say is that so far I'm having a great 2022 - and I hope you are too!
Peace out for now 👊