How to feel better: 3 Shifts In Thinking That Lead To Happiness

"Beating yourself up for things you did or got wrong in the past is pointless, the way I see it you and I were doing our best with what we knew at the time"

It's the 4 year anniversary of the day I made a decision that would alter the course of my life.

For reasons very specific and personal to me, I decided that if I was ever going to feel good (or even okay) again and make something of my life.

I was going to have to draw a line in the sand and vow to never touch another drink again.

It was hard. I was a daily binge drinker at the time and it was spiralling out of control, but I haven't touched one since!

Here I am 4 years later, I have my hand on my pregnant wife's bump. We've been together for 2 years, blissfully married for 6 months with a baby on the way and I've just felt him kick...

My life is unrecognisable from the complete mess and self-loathing existence it once was.

It got me thinking, how is this all possible?

It couldn't have been just that single decision that got me here, although that was the turning point.

At the time I remember thinking: "How is it that people who are happy and content (most of the time) end up that way? Why can't I just feel better?".

Did I need more stuff, more money, more love, more followers, more fitness, more skills? No, none of those... Then I remembered a quote I'd read before:

"We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them"

- Albert Einstein That's when it hit me...

I didn't actually need more of anything! I already had everything I needed within me in order to feel better and become happy.

(You do too! So you can start feeling lighter already as you're reading this, because perspective shifts are on the way).

How then?

If I wanted to change how my life felt, I needed to change the way I think.

So I got to work on learning new ideas, considering new perspectives and quite literally changing the way my mind worked.

Here are 3 ideas that will shift your perspective and upgrade your thinking to make your life and the way you feel immeasurably better.

These ideas have helped me reduce anxiety, alleviate depression, motivate myself, become happy and forge an optimistic view of day to day life. Okay, let's get into them...

1. When you know better, you can do better

Beating yourself up for things you did or got wrong in the past is pointless, the way I see it you and I were doing our best with what we knew at the time.

Maybe you've been living from a place of feeling inadequate about yourself, feeling negative, guilty, hurt, hopeless or angry. I know I have.

You'll do things you regret or that don't align with who you want to be, just so you can feel better for a little while.

Then you feel like you've let yourself or others down and you relive those situations again and again in your head.

Carrying guilt and shame around with you.

Forgive yourself for what the past version of you did. You were trying to cope the best you could.

However, it's now time to step up and make some better choices. Knowing better and then choosing to do better is growth and that's exactly what Einstein was referring to in his quote.

2. You get whatever you focus on

There's a great metaphor that comes to mind.

If I asked you to count how many red cars you see the next time you drove somewhere, you'd notice all of the red cars on the road.

Now what if I asked you how many blue cars you saw? You wouldn't have a clue because you weren't looking for blue cars.

The red cars symbolise the things in your life that maybe you aren't that happy with, that you think are lacking or situations where you feel you're being hard done by. They could be described as a negative focus.

The blue cars are the things you love, that you look forward to and the things you feel grateful for. These are your positive focuses.

The more you look for the red cars, the more red cars you'll notice and the blue cars slip by without you noticing them. The result is that it makes you feel terrible and creates discontent and unhappiness in your life.

Basically, you'll be getting the feelings and the results associated with what you're focusing on.

The car analogy shows you something extremely important:

• Where you choose to point your focus, is what you are going to notice more of in your life. So it's your job to start pointing your focus where you want it rather than where you don't.

How do you do this, you ask?

• One example and something I do very often to keep my focus on 'the blue cars' is ask: "What am I looking forward to today, this afternoon, this evening, tomorrow etc."

It points my focus and attention to the things that make me feel good, rather than dwelling on the things that stress me out and put me in a bad mood.

Which are often the things we tend to overthink or that make us feel anxious.

3. When life gets hard, you can choose another perspective

I don't wish hard times on anyone and the world can be a harsh and unfair place at times.

But stress, overwhelm and difficult situations inevitably come to test all of us sooner or later.

We can't always prevent these things it's beyond our control, but we can choose how we deal with it and how we choose to interpret it.

I was chatting to a friend and client last week and she was telling me how angry she was about a job interview she'd had.

She prepared incredibly well and put her all into it, but felt that the interviewers had wasted her time and acted unprofessionally as the job was basically promised to someone else.

Long story short, she's been carrying this seething anger around for weeks now and she just hasn't been able to get past the feeling of being disrespected and cheated out of something.

The result... She's been short tempered at home and in a bad mood generally. So I asked her: "Why is it a good thing that it happened like it did? Can you think of one reason?".

She looked at me as if a Unicorn horn had just grown out of my forehead... "Not one" she said.

I repeated the question to encourage her to find something.

"I guess it showed me that I wouldn't feel comfortable working with these people anyway. They revealed their true colours during that interview process" she said. She realised that she was in fact much better off and that she's actually glad that it had happened that way now.

I'm not saying that you should put a 'positive spin' on all situations.

Sometimes tragic things happen and there's just no reason for it.

But most day to day things that tend to stress us out can be re-framed, which means to look at it from a different point of view that won't cause us as much suffering. It's about asking: "Does this viewpoint help me or cause me to suffer? Can I look at it differently or do anything about it?".

Final thoughts

When it comes to feeling better and being happy, it's very rarely because of outside circumstances or because the stars have suddenly aligned for us. Sure they play a part, but... It begins internally with our thinking and our perspectives (the way we view our circumstances and the world around us).

If we can go from looking to other people or 'things' to make us happy (external) and start creating that for ourselves by making internal shifts, our lives will change.

Did you make any shifts in thinking as a result of reading this post? Has it given you another point of view to consider?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment below and let me know :-)

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