Do You Want to Be Happy? It Takes Some Work

People are seeking happiness. And yes, Virginia, there is a path, not one simple answer. Happiness is a state of mind, a state of being. If you are not happy, consider how you can improve your state of mind through optimum health, giving and receiving love, and becoming attuned to your own spirituality.

Be Healthy

There are lots of excuses when it comes to poor health. Most of them are self-defeating nonsense. Truly healthy choices reap immediate benefits. When we eat right, we feel better. Right then. In that moment. It’s hard to be happy when you don’t feel good.

What if you adopted a healthy lifestyle? What if you felt full of energy and vitality each and every day? Wouldn’t you be happier? It’s not that hard. It’s not a sacrifice. It’s a shift; one that’s well worth the change.

Diet

You argue about your lack of time, lack of money, lack of ability. You can’t cook. You can’t afford organic food. You don’t have time to shop carefully. Set aside the B.S. for a moment and consider the facts. Choosing and preparing a truly healthy diet can be easy and fast.

  • Organic – Organic foods are grown with far fewer pesticides, in healthier soil. They taste better and are better for you. It’s a no-brainer. Fill your body with poison and toxins and you are poisoning yourself.
  • Raw – Raw foods are full of enzymes and nutrients. A diet consisting of 80% (or more) fresh, raw, organic produce will nurture every cell in your body.
  • GMO-Free – Studies conducted by biotech companies suggest genetically modified foods are safe. Long-term studies conducted by unbiased scientists tell a different story, one of reproductive difficulties and cancerous tumors. Avoid GMO foods. Learn where hidden GMOs lurk in food. Better yet, don’t eat processed foods!
  • Stop Drinking – All that hype about alcohol being good for you. Come on. You know better. If may relax you a bit, but so does meditation.
  • Eliminate Caffeine – It’s just another addiction. An expensive one.
  • Additive Free Foods – Avoid all of the things that result in poor health! The list is long, but basically, avoid eating chemicals. Never eat MSG, artificial sweeteners (except stevia), artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives, trans fats, refined sugar, and high fructose corn syrup.
  • Gluten – Eliminate gluten if you suffer from any chronic disease, digestive disease, autoimmune issues, or allergies.
  • Top of Food Chain – If you choose to eat meat, seafood, and dairy, you must consider the source. If those animals were fed antibiotics, GMO foods, and garbage, what are you putting in your body when you eat them? If diary is not organic, chances are it contains rBGH, a genetically modified growth hormone. If you eat seafood, make sure your purchase is not on the list of those with the highest levels of mercury. Don’t eat farmed fish. They are fed GMO feed and garbage. When it comes to meat, dairy and eggs, choose organic.
  • Fresh – Check out your local farmer’s markets for the freshest foods.

So, let’s go back to the original pushback on healthy food – lack of time, lack of money, lack of ability…

Yes, organic food is more expensive. But when you stop eating processed foods, drinking coffee, drinking alcohol, and most of your diet consists of fresh, raw, organic produce, it’s very affordable. You will probably save money. Food prep is pretty fast and easy, too. Anybody can pick up an apple and eat it. Anybody can chop up veggies and make a salad. Anybody can throw stuff in a blender. Where you go from there is up to you; these three actions are the basics.

So why is a truly healthy diet so important? You put the nutrients in; you leave the toxins out. In addition, this kind of diet does two things: it continually detoxes the body and it builds a healthy gut.

A healthy gut is the key to a healthy body. Autoimmune diseases, allergies, and a poor immune system are all symptoms of poor gut health.

Detox and Build a Healthy Gut

Make sure your diet includes chelating foods. Eat lots of raw garlic and onions. Eat fresh cilantro and plenty of cruciferous veggies. In fact, a daily salad with 10-15 veggies is a great start. Not only will you be cleansing your gut, you will be aiding in the proliferation of healthy bacteria with a high fiber, veggie salad each day.

Fermented foods have been getting a lot of attention lately. Unfortunately, a lot of the probiotic benefit of fermented foods is neutralized by stomach acid. Yes, fermented foods help. Salads help more. So eat both! But focus on those daily salads. And skip the sugar filled yogurts.

You will never be healthy with a sick gut. It’s that simple. Learn about Candida, gluten, and leaky gut syndrome.

Exercise

Don’t have the time to go to the gym? Don’t have the money for a membership? Don’t know how to exercise on your own? Oh, come on! Walk!

Get outside and walk in the sun. A daily walk for a minimum of 15 minutes gets the body moving and provides a huge benefit – lymphatic circulation. Our lymphatic system is vitally important to our health. Lymph carries waste from the cells and is a basic part of our immune system. Lymphatic fluid has to circulate through our body to dump waste and for our immune system to find, identify, and eliminate viruses and bacteria. But the lymphatic system does not have a pump. Unlike the circulatory system that relies on the heart, the lymphatic system relies on physical movement, the contraction and relaxation of muscles in order to move through our bodies. So walk, run, dance, bounce on a trampoline. But move every day for your health.

Love

If you want to attract love into your life, give it, give it, give it. Stop focusing on what you don’t have and find a way to make the world a better place.

Whether you choose a cause or find a calling, make sure your choice involves positive change, not empty protest. You can denounce poverty or volunteer to teach literacy. You can rail against deforestation or plant trees. Find something positive and productive to do. If it is your passion, try to make it your work.

When you find a way to give to others or give to the world, you enrich your life and raise your self-esteem. You also meet like-minded people. It’s a win-win.

Spirituality

This is an area in which you need to be true to yourself. Whether you believe you should attend services every Sunday and Wednesday or believe your road to enlightenment is found through meditation, honor your beliefs.

Think Right

No one can deny the fact that we are creatures of habit. What we do and what we think are patterns of behavior. If you’re not happy, these are patterns crying out to be broken.

Vengeance and Forgiveness

Let it go. Holding on to hate or anger hurts one person – you. Well, to be perfectly honest it may hurt those around you as well. Forgiveness does not mean making yourself vulnerable. You can forgive someone and never speak to them again. But holding onto the anger and the pain hurts you.

Forgiveness can be difficult. Sometimes forgiveness is a process rather than an outcome. If someone has hurt you that deeply, violated you so horribly that forgiveness is ongoing even though you no longer have contact, it is still better to work at forgiveness that wallow in anger and pain. Let the hurt go.

Gratitude

If you are not grateful for what you have, what you have achieved, and the people in your life, how can you possibly be happy? Practice gratitude. Whether you say the words aloud each day in private, write in a journal, or share your gratitude with your friends and family around the dinner table, make the expression of gratitude a daily ritual. This one act will create the fundamental shift from a glass half empty to a glass half full mentality.

Right Your Mind

If you’ve never seen it before, watch the Bob Newhart skit called Stop It. The skit is so famous, if you google “stop it”, the video is Google’s first hit. But we’ll also give it to you here.

This is a simple, silly take on a very real phenomenon. Unhappy people tend to dwell on their failures, live in the past, and fear the future.

Stop worrying about the things you can’t change. Stop keeping a tally of everything that’s gone wrong. Shit happens. It happens all the time, to all of us. Life is full of disappointments and tragedy. Everyone faces pain and hardship, challenges that sometimes seem too huge, too overwhelming to survive. But we do.

Instead of dwelling on what has gone wrong in the past, instead of fearing the future, recognize that you control today. Plan for your future. Make goals and achieve them. But live in the now.

Last but not least, be good to yourself. When you become an adult, you become responsible for you. In other words, you become your own parent. Be kind. Be compassionate. Become your better self. How could you not be happy?

Related Reading:


How To Be Happy

“How to be happy” is googled 55,600,000 times a month in the United States. Happiness is something every business pretends to sell. Pharmaceuticals, soft drinks, clothing lines, and just about every product you can purchase claim to offer happiness for a price. But what if you don’t have the money? No problem. You can buy it with credit. But the truth is, if we were happy we wouldn’t be spending so much money on crap we don’t need.

open happinessHappiness VS. Pleasure

Understanding the difference between pleasure and happiness is paramount. And from what I see, hardly anyone in our society knows the difference.

Coke started a marketing campaign, “Open Happiness,” implying that happiness is inside their bottles and within their soda, dancing among the fizzy sweet goodness, waiting to start a party in your mouth. The first time I saw that commercial, I knew a new trend was starting. While Coke wasn’t the first, it seems that every large business marketing their brand is now promising some degree of a happy, more joyful life.

At most, these products that are pushed on us in every way possible, 24 hours a day, offer pleasure and nothing more. They certainly don’t offer happiness.

Pleasure is short term. It comes in spades with happiness, but it comes at a price with consumption. And often that price exceeds the number on the price tag.

Polls show that in countries where people have less–less cellular coverage, less television, less shopping, fewer automobiles–they are often much happier than we are in our modern societies with all our toys. It seems the more we attempt to satisfy our every eager impulse, the emptier we feel.

Recommended: Sugar Leads to Depression – World’s First Trial Proves Gut and Brain are Linked (Protocol Included)

socks memeFuck Convention, and Fuck Consumerism

Convention says you need to spend money to be happy. Convention says you need pharmaceuticals (or you will at some point) and a large home to be happy. Convention says you need to work your ass off for many years to achieve this. And convention says a lot of other stuff that doesn’t do us any good.

Convention produces marketing that is shoved down our throats to spur us on to stimulate an economy that will collapse if it doesn’t keep growing at an incredible rate. It’s all about selling us stuff: more vaccines, more cars, the newest phones, and bigger, higher resolution televisions. But the price we pay is a drive to work harder and harder and harder to keep up with the Joneses. All the while, we are bombarded with so much technology offering us convenience while it sucks up every spare moment we might have had. Most of us want this. Most of us need this, because when we stop and just sit still with our thoughts, we don’t like the massive void we feel. We think all that crap fills that void, when, in fact, it creates more and more of a void within us.

Let go of what you’re supposed to do, and do what’s best for you. Unplug for awhile. Unplug more often. Get away from the noise. Figure out what makes you happy, and start taking some time to do it. Make the time.

Related: Holistic Guide to Healing the Endocrine System and Balancing Our Hormones

Fuck What Other People Think

My life really started to change for the better when I began letting go of what other people think of me. I do things for me. I don’t do things for someone else unless it’s out of love and/or the desire to help someone. It’s no longer because I want to impress someone. I used to live for other people, working the job that I was supposed to work, driving a car that I thought other people liked to see me in, wearing the clothes that people told me I looked good in, and constantly worrying about what other people thought. It takes a lot of energy out of you.

I realize that many people aren’t going to like my use of language in the previous two titles, but I felt for the sake of authenticity, well, fuck it.

I see a lot of my friends trying to please their parents at the expense of their own happiness, for their whole lives. I see these people choosing careers and their whole life’s path based on a need for their parents’ approval. And these are people with parents who will never, no matter what their adult children do, tell their son or daughter that they are proud of them. Nothing their kids do will ever be enough. But if it were, it wouldn’t have been worth it.

I tell people to go do something embarrassing, to go into a store where no one knows them and pretend to trip and fall. Or yodel. Go for a walk with their headphones on and dance across every crosswalk. I tell them to practice not worrying what anyone thinks. It’s liberating and it feels better and better every time you do it.

Recommended: Best Supplements To Kill Candida and Everything Else You Ever Wanted To Know About Fungal Infections

Fitness

If you haven’t heard, exercise releases endorphins. Exercise has many benefits on our emotional state. It’s actually very difficult to be miserable about anything in life when you’re exercising, (except maybe the exercise itself.)

Exercise has a knack for putting us in the moment. Other worries fade away. Things shift into perspective. The whole day is better after a good workout.

Give it some time if you’re new to fitness. Those benefits don’t come immediately. At first it can feel like a drain, and the initial soreness can be very painful. But like everything else, the good stuff takes work.
Science of Happiness

Diet

Poor nutrition and toxic ingredients prevent the body from working right. This includes the brain. The brain doesn’t work right when we don’t get the right nutrition. When the brain doesn’t work right, we feel like shit. This goes for the body, too, but I find it surprising how many people think that the brain’s ability to function properly, including (but not limited to), dealing with stress, remaining objective, and controlling anger, has nothing to do with physical health. Studies show that chemical toxins, both in food and in our environment, have a direct correlation to our overall wellbeing.

B Vitamins, D, oils

B vitamins, vitamin D, and healthy fats are absolutely essential to our wellbeing. Anyone suffering from depression or any other mental health issue needs to consider taking high quality supplements and changing their diet.

Staying in the Moment

We spend so much time wishing to be in a different time. With phrases like, “I can’t wait until…” and, “Remember when things were…” But we so often fail to realize that the moment you are in now could very well be a time you long for later.

Learning to stay in the moment has been absolutely life changing for me. There are rarely any problems in the present. Putting yourself in the moment, and staying there, is difficult at first, but it puts things in perspective. Exercise is a great way to do this. Yoga and meditation are also very good at teaching us to stay in the moment. Whenever life gets overwhelming, consider that the problems at hand are in the future. Right now, at this very moment, we have everything we need.

Perspective

Have you ever had a day where you felt great, and then you had one or two little things happen to you and all of the sudden your life sucks? Life is all about perspective. Our perspective is our life. And that means that our life, no matter where we are in it, is our choice. A terrible situation for one person can be an incredible experience for another. It all depends on perspective.

I was in prison, after having lost my daughter, my friends, the business I had just started, and what felt like my whole life. I had lost everything I thought I cared about except for my mom who came to see me every single chance she could. And in that prison, when I got to see my mother, I was filled with joy. I spent all week looking forward to visitation. Hugging my mom meant everything to me. I was in prison, and every day I got to hug my mom was amazing. This was after a year of being in jail where I could only see my mom through glass. Prison was wonderful because I not only got to hug her, I got to go outside, walk in the grass, exercise, eat raw vegetables, and feel the sun on my skin. I got none of this in jail. A year deprived of all of these pleasures put things in a whole new perspective. And I never let go of that.

It really is the little things in life that you’ll remember, that you’ll laugh about, that you’ll hold in your heart. No one (or at least, very few people) lays on their death bed agonizing over a bad business decision. Stay in the moment with a fresh perspective and look at the joy you can feel. It’s there. Sometimes you just have to look harder for it.

I Am Happy

I have been through more crap than most people who read this article would ever know. I carry pain with me at all times. There is a sadness that may never go away, due to a major loss in my life. But I am still, really, very happy. I love life. I live in the smallest home I have ever lived in. I have less stuff than I have ever had. I am starting Green Lifestyle Market and it is very stressful. But still, I am not only happy, I am joyful. I keep my diet clean. I exercise. I don’t give a damn what other people think of me because it’s none of my business, and I love being me. If you are reading this article, looking for your own happiness, I wish you the very best and sincerely hope you find it. I am sure it is with you, that it has always been with you, waiting for you all along.

Recommended Supplements:
Further Reading: