
1. The only problem with your life is the way you think about it. Objectively, you have everything you could ever want or need, yet your unhappiness simply comes from a lack of appreciation (which is a cultivated trait, if not a practice).
2. The solution to most of your problems is just changing the way you think about them. For example, learning that peopleâs opinions of you are largely projections of how they see themselves would solve your problem which is evaluating your life through the idea of how other people could perceive it.
3. Youâre mentally lazy. You know you should be more present, but you wonât put in the effort to practice it. You know you should meditate and learn to train your brain to focus so it doesnât become engulfed by negativity, but you head to the gym instead. Youâre lazy in the way it matters most, and thatâs your biggest problem.
4. Youâve accomplished things you thought would make you happy and immediately shifted them from âgoalsâ to ânotches on the belt.â Once you achieved something, you immediately started to think of it as âanother thing done,â rather than âanother thing in my life to enjoy.â
5. You havenât practiced holding the emotion of happiness. We all have a tolerance for how âgoodâ weâll let ourselves feel, our âupper limit.â To go past it, we have to actually practice letting ourselves feel â otherwise, weâll self-sabotage to bring ourselves back to our comfort zones.
6. You care more about comfort than you do about change. Youâd rather remain moderately uncomfortable than deal with the unknownness that is making a real change in your life.
7. You consciously choose to spend time with people who arenât âgoodâ for you. Meaning: they donât really care about you, or they inspire you to behave in a way that is counter to what youâre trying to achieve. In other words, they bring out the worst in you, yet you continue to see them anyway.
8. You wonât let your idea of yourself evolve. Youâre stuck in only being comfortable thinking of yourself the way you were 3, 5, 10 years ago, because thatâs how other people are comfortable seeing you.
9. You choose what you think should be right rather than what actually is. Youâre more loyal to the ideas you have about things than the honest reality you know them to be.
10. You wonât apologize. To yourself nor to others. Youâre not open to being wrong, and certainly not to taking the ego-hit that is admitting you didnât always do your best. Yet, doing this is the first step in changing that.
11. You havenât fully taken responsibility for your life â youâre still waiting for something to come and change how you feel. Often, people choose to suffer loudly because they believe it is a âcry to the Universe,â as in, if they are transparent enough about how bad things are, something or someone else will eventually have to fix or change them.
12. Youâve ascribed happiness to a level of accomplishment rather than a state of being. You think that only some people can be happy because their life circumstances are ideal, rather than choosing seek happiness in the moment and realizing that has nothing to do with it.
13. You think that âhappinessâ is a sustained state of feeling âgood.â What it really is is a higher âbaselineâ for perception. You are better able to process every emotion, and because you do so healthfully, you return to your general state of contentment quickly.
14. You accept what youâre taught even if it doesnât feel right. Youâre more trusting of dogma, teaching or religion simply because you knew it first, not because it resonates or helps you in a real way.
15. You have a good life, and you know you have a good life. At the end of the day, you know itâs just about choosing to focus on it more.