11 Tips to Improve Your Mental Well-Being and Living a Happier Life
You are your most valuable asset; you need to take care of yourself.
“Happiness, not gold or prestige, is the ultimate currency.”
— Tal Ben-Shahar
The number of people who spend their lives chasing money is incredibly high. You’re probably one of those people who always want more money. You have very ambitious goals, but they all aim at the same thing: making more and more money.
Being rich seems to have become a life goal for most young people who finish school. I do not deny that money is important to lead the life you dream of.
Nevertheless, this unbridled quest to earn more and more money will never really come to an end. You will have earned $1 million, but you will always be looking for a way to earn $10 million afterwards.
As you exhaust yourself in this never-ending quest, you may end up falling into depression and realize that your life is meaningless. You will probably be unhappy and mentally ill.
Then you will realize that your priorities were clearly wrong from the beginning of your life. Money is important but what you really need is to be happy in your life.
In order to be happy in your life, you need enough money but most of all you need complete mental well-being. In the following, I will give you 11 tips that will help you lead a happier life by putting your well-being back at the centre of your priorities.
1. Making Your Sleep a Top Priority
You’re an ambitious person. I’m exactly like you. You’re a creative person and every time you have a new idea, you launch a new project that you want to bring to fruition.
You feel like your 24-hour days are too short.
You have followed various tips to increase your productivity but in the end, your days still seem too short.
In order to address this problem, you have taken the unconscious decision to sleep less.
You work late at night and still get up early in the morning.
You’re working way too hard but you tell yourself that you have no choice and that this is the price you have to pay to achieve great things.
I will disappoint you, but this behavior will never lead you to achieve great and lasting success.
Life is a marathon, not a sprint.
People who achieve great things over the long term are those who make their sleep a top priority.
Sleep allows you to rest your brain and play for the long term.
You are your most valuable asset for success in life. So you need to act accordingly by getting at least 7 hours of sleep a night.
If you want to get up early to take advantage of your peak productivity in the morning, you’ll need to adjust your schedule to get to bed early in the evening.
In any case, you should never neglect your sleep because your body and mind will not keep up.
You will necessarily pay the price some day.
2. Making Regular Physical Activity
I just explained to you that you need to make your sleep a top priority. That means you need to sleep between seven and nine hours a night. For you as a hard worker, this is already a delicate thing to put in place.
Now, I’m going to tell you the second secret that will make you happier in life.
You will need to make physical activity on a regular basis.
This means that you will need to find at least two one-hour exercise slots per week.
I can already hear you say that your schedule is overloaded and that when you have free time, you prefer to relax by watching Netflix.
Well, you’re going to have to make the effort to go out and run in the park or go to the gym near you.
At first, you’ll have to force yourself.
And then, little by little, you will feel so good after your sports sessions that you will wonder how you could have done without it so far.
The sport will allow you to clear your mind and relieve all the stress from your body.
With a more relaxed body, your mind will follow and you will feel much better.
3. Healthy Eating
When you’re young, you tend to eat a little bit of anything. This has almost no influence on your body because you are young and your body can take it all.
As you get older, your body will no longer forgive you for not eating healthy and it will make you pay for it.
If you keep eating junk food, you’re going to gain weight.
You will probably be disappointed with your physical change and you may lose self-confidence little by little.
This negative physical change will be a first problem to deal with. But it won’t be your biggest problem to deal with.
If you eat anything and everything, you’ll always be tired.
This permanent tiredness will prevent you from working properly, which will certainly affect your mental well-being.
It is therefore essential that you take care of yourself and follow the recommendations for healthy eating.
Eat more vegetables and fewer hamburgers or pizzas.
You can even get into the kitchen by preparing healthy dishes yourself.
This is a very relaxing activity that will also bring you a sense of well-being.
Better still, by taking care of yourself on a dietary level, you will lead a happier life too.
4. Meditate
I must confess that I never considered meditation as something that could bring real well-being to my life. Of course, just like you, I had already heard friends praising it.
Nevertheless, I remained circumspect as to the value of practicing meditation.
I imagined it would be a waste of my time.
And then one day, with my stressful life, I decided to give it a try just in case.
I started by following tutorials found on the Internet and I learned one essential thing: there is no right or wrong way to meditate.
Just taking the time to calm down and then focus properly on your breathing while meditating is already making a huge difference.
Meditation really calms anxiety and reduces stress.
The important thing in meditating is to allow yourself a quiet time centered solely on yourself and your well-being.
As such, I now consider meditation to be an essential practice for leading a happier life.
Try it and you will see the difference.
5. Surround Yourself With Positive People
Jim Rohn is a very famous American writer and speaker who once said the following:
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
— Jim Rohn
If you surround yourself with unhappy people with negative thoughts, you will have no chance of being happy in your life.
Their negative thoughts will rub off on you.
You absolutely must surround yourself with positive people who, like you, want to lead a rewarding, action-oriented life.
It’s not always easy because you’re going to have to make choices in the people around you.
From experience, I know that this can be difficult to manage.
However, I also know that by making this selection and making the right choices in your relationships, you will be able to be happier in the medium and long term in your life.
It is up to you to decide what you want.
6. Give More Than You Receive
In the Bible, it says:
“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
— Biblia - Acts 20:35
Whether you are a believer or not, you must consider this sentence for what it is.
This sentence is a fundamental truth.
In life, you will have more happiness to give to the people you love rather than systematically seeking to receive.
Since life is well done, you will also notice that those who give generously without ulterior motives are often those who are most rewarded.
The wheel turns, and there is always a fair return.
In the meantime, I advise you to give more than you receive because it will give you a sense of fullness that is essential to lead a happy and fulfilling life.
7. Practice Gratitude
At first glance, you will probably think that this seventh tip is very simple to put into practice. If it is for you, it’s a great thing.
However, many people find it hard to say even a simple thank you.
Saying thank you to someone who does you even an insignificant service costs you nothing.
Yet do you really do it?
I come across a lot of people who don’t even take the time to say a simple thank you.
People who do not know how to show gratitude to others are often unhappy.
I come across so many of them and it makes me despair because it would only take a simple thank you to get their life going again.
In the area of gratitude, I have only one piece of advice to give you: start today and you will be surprised at the power of gratitude over you and others.
You will make others happier and the simple expression of a smile on the other’s face will, in turn, make you happy.
8. Being Patient
You want to achieve great things. It’s a good thing to be ambitious in life. On the other hand, you seem to be in a hurry to succeed. You want it all, right now.
Great and lasting successes are not built overnight.
In reality, the greatest successes are achieved after years of relentless effort.
Very often, you will let yourself be blinded only by the immense success of some, forgetting that it is only the result of a long process.
If you don’t understand that patience makes a difference, you may lose motivation because your success doesn’t happen overnight.
You’ll be miserable and you may give up.
You must understand that patience is an essential virtue to achieve great things, but even more so to be happy in life.
Be patient and your work will be rewarded sooner or later.
9. Being Optimistic
Faced with a half-filled glass, you have the choice between two reactions:
You can decide to see a half-empty glass
You can decide to see a glass half full
Experiment and you’ll see what your first reaction is when you see such a glass.
This simple reaction will say a lot about your mentality.
To be happy in life, you must absolutely choose the second option.
By seeing a glass that is half full while others see a glass that is half empty, you will be more likely to appreciate what life has to offer.
Every little positive thing in life will make you happy and you can savor the chance to still be alive and healthy.
Aren’t you rich?
It doesn’t matter because you have ambitious plans and you will become rich some day.
What you have already built and your daily efforts should already make you proud of yourself.
10. Practice Self-Compassion
Your thirst for success is such that you’ve become your harshest judge. You are constantly rethinking every action you take and you are very hard on yourself.
You always feel you could have done better in every situation.
Rather than being so hard on yourself, give yourself the right not to be perfect.
Perfection is something subjective that doesn’t exist.
You have to accept that you can half succeed, fail or be rejected.
This is all part of the process leading to success.
Take a step back and be less hard on yourself. This will give you the opportunity to better analyze the reasons for your failures.
By learning from each situation in your life, you will be better able to do better the next time.
This mentality will bring you closer to success day after day and will free you mentally because you will have the right to fail.
11. Know When Asking for Help
“If you want to go fast, walk alone but if you want to go far, let’s walk together.”
— African proverb
This African proverb sums up this eleventh tip perfectly.
In life, some people make it their duty to go forward alone and try to succeed on their own.
You do this out of pride or because you think you are the only one who can do it right.
It doesn’t matter why you always act alone and never ask for help.
You simply need to understand that in life, lasting success cannot be achieved alone.
You are bound to need help at some point in your life.
Rather than being unhappy and seeing this as a failure, you need to understand that knowing when to ask others for help is an essential quality.
Don’t be proud or overly self-absorbed, and never forget that you are not alone in the world.
In some situations, asking for help is the best thing to do.
On the other hand, you should never hesitate to ask others to do the same whenever possible.
Reciprocity, when someone helped you, is important and it will help you feel better mentally because you will understand that you are not alone in the world.
Far from it.
Conclusion
In today’s world, money has become something essential. Becoming rich seems to be the ultimate goal of a majority of people. Whether or not you achieve your money goals, you will eventually realize that it is not an end in itself and that you are still missing something.
That something is being happy and well in your head.
Mental well-being is essential for leading a happy and fulfilling life. And you can’t buy that. Being happy and well in your own skin is something that is built day after day by adopting a number of good practices.
By following the eleven tips I’ve revealed to you in this story, you’ll be moving in the right direction to take lasting care of your most precious asset: yourself.