How I Live a Content Life
By: Patricia Vilchez
Tags: Life Lessons, Life Advice, Peace Of Mind, Happy, Let Go

How I Live a Content Life

Photo by Gian Cescon on Unsplash

I got tired of my own shit and started to form new habits, thoughts, and behaviors that would take me to the next version of myself. Growing is one of the hardest things to do, but staying the same hurts so much more. — BossBabe

All it takes is a change of mindset.

After consistently applying these next habits in my everyday life, I live with more ease, in other words, a content life.

1. Be grateful.

Comparison is the thief of joy. — Theodore Roosevelt

We have this habit of comparing what we have with what others have. And what we have is never enough.

If you intend to live with more ease and be happier, then you need to start being grateful for what you already have.

As for me, I wake up every single day grateful as fuck, no matter what situation I am in.

I am grateful for having the fundamental: a roof over my head and food on the table, because in reality that all I actually need.

2. Try journaling.

Journaling is simply the act of thinking about your life and writing it down. That’s it.

Is one of the more effective acts of self-care. Journaling delivers surprisingly powerful benefits. It is therapeutic. It can help us manage better our emotions and improve our mental health.

With journaling, you can liberate all your thoughts, the good and the bad ones, on a piece of paper. You can freely vent about absolutely everything in there.

Is a place to confess our fears, struggles, and worries wild openly, without anyone making us feel our concerns are unimportant or invalidating our emotions.

Source:kalbo

So for me, journaling has been life-changing: it has helped me accept my feelings as valid. I journal daily. In fact, the title of my journal is “The Everyday Reflection”.

You can try it right now. Go ahead. Open a word document and write about your day. It doesn't matter if your day was trivial or the opposite, just write about it. Remember to add in some gratitude.

Experiment with this for a week or a month and let me know what are your thoughts on journaling afterward.

3. Live in the present moment.

According to a Harvard study, our mind wanders 47 percent of the time.

I don’t think I am breaking the news when I say that the majority of the time our attention is drifting and isn’t focused on what we’re doing at the moment.

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, psychologists and conductors of the research, wrote.

“Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people’s happiness. In fact, how often our minds leave the present is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we’re engaged,” Killingsworth, added.

Staying present is not an easy task. It’s forming a habit and it does take time.

As for me, I learned to be present through mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation is about being intensely aware of what you’re sensing and feeling in the moment, without trying to judge it or change it, simply being aware of it.

It's about being the observer, the witness, the watcher of our thoughts. Merely that.

I also learned to be more present when I read the book: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. This is a book that I highly recommend you to read.

Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. — The power of now.

This is a saying that helps me stay present in the moment:

When thinking about life, remember this; no amount of guilt can change the past and no amount of anxiety can change the future.

4. Accept everything as it is.

I must make an important differentiation here. Accepting everything as it is isn’t about settling or giving up, it's about acknowledging we dont have control over other people's actions or on how they react and making peace with that.

Control is an illusion. The only thing we are in charge of is our actions. Everything else — from how someone feels about us to the success of our stories in Medium — is out of our hands.

Accept everything as it is it's about letting things be.

And it's about letting go too. Letting go of the “should have, could have, would have” and live in what is happening.

I assure you life gets so much better when you stop holding on to things or people that don’t longer belong to your present.

To conclude

Remember, most of your stress comes from the way you respond, not the way life is. Adjust your attitude. Change how you see things. Look for the good in all situations. Take the lesson and find new opportunities to grow. Let all the extra stress, worrying, and overthinking go.