Finer Life: Behave as You Want To Feel - You Can Quickly Feel Better in Your Own Skin With a Little Willpower!
How you behave has a great deal of influence on how you feel. By behaving yourself the way you want to feel, you can quickly feel better in your own skin with a little willpower!
Your behavior is shaped by your feeling
How you behave often results from your feeling. You do not feel happy, so you like to sit on the couch with a bag of chips. You feel lousy, so you stay in bed longer. You have a disappointment to process, so pull yourself back.
By psychological issues you start to show behavior that often does not help you. For example, people who are not good at themselves are more likely to become addicted to gaming, sex, gambling, drinking, smoking and so on.
How you feel often has a lot of influence on how you behave. And although it seems like you can not change much about this, you have more control over it than you might think. You can change your behavior, even if it does not match the feeling you are experiencing now.
Form your feelings with your behavior
In the earlier article ' How to Feel Immediately Energetic ' I explain that you can feel more energetic by behaving like an energetic person. If your lack of energy has a psychological cause, you can get your energy back quickly by changing your behavior.
This does not only work when you want more energy . It works throughout your life, with a whole range of feelings.
By showing behavior that fits in with how you want to feel, you can positively influence your happiness experience. You do not have to be a victim of your own feelings and behavior. You decide how you behave, and ultimately how you feel.
How do you want to feel?
Consider the feeling that you are actually striving for. How do you want to feel? Free, happy, cheerful, energetic? Do you want to be loving or calm, funny or surprising?
The feeling you want to experience determines how you would like to behave. It makes clear how you could respond to different situations. As an energetic person you would immediately clean up the living room if it is a mess, as a free person you would realize that you can decide for yourself when you want to clean up the mess.
The first action is a relief for the lifeless slodder fox that tries to improve itself. The second situation brings peace for the perfectionist control freak.
Once you know how you want to feel, you can make choices in everyday life that fit this feeling. In this way you will evoke the feeling within yourself through the things you do.
Be aware of your own behavior
There are people who go through life as a robot. They do not seem to have any control over their own behavior or thinking. With statements such as: "That's how I am", they block every form of self-improvement.
If you want to influence your own state of mind, you should be aware of your own behavior. Stand still before you want to snub your partner, and consider whether you can make a better choice. What do you achieve by snarling? Does that bring you closer to a feeling you are aiming for, or further away from there?
You can annoy yourself with a mistake from a colleague or you can accept it , depending on how you want to feel (assertive or calm). You can walk past the dirty dishes in the living room, or take them directly to the kitchen.
Be aware of your own behavior, and try to connect it as well as possible with the feeling you want to experience. Ask yourself: "How would I deal with this if I felt ...?"
Behave as you want to feel
By behaving as you want to feel, you can experience the matching feeling. By behaving calmer and accepting more you will experience more rest. By behaving like an energetic person who handles things quickly, you will start to feel more energetic.
Be aware of the feeling you want to experience, and ensure that your behavior is in line with this. In this way you can get nicer in your skin in a very practical way.
From my own experience I can say that the above is true. I tried it several times and noticed that I started to feel different by behaving differently.
I wonder if that is not one of the reasons that yoga and tai ji can work so restful (after all, the exercises are generally performed calmly).
Yes, this is indeed very true. Often enough I notice that I immediately become happier when I behave happier. Retaining is an art in itself, especially because many people think I tend to exhibit certain behavior unconsciously. But that will also become easier as you practice it more often.
Since I meditate (and follow a mindfulness training) I have much more vision in my thoughts and feelings. I am a long-time worrier and of course you can not change it from one day to the next. But the fact that I now understand my thoughts and feelings makes you aware of the fact that you can make a choice. A few times a day I scan my emotions and discover how I feel at that moment. I agree that you can now behave differently to feel different. But I also want to give the tip sometimes to lay down your feelings and just experience it as it is. Just discover how you feel without attaching a label to it whether you want to feel it or not. Gloomy emotions are also part of our lives and do not arise for nothing.
Good that you start thinking about mindfulness, because it reminds me of what I once read in a book about mindfulness