Starr's Keys to Happiness: Care About What You Do

lesliestarrohara (64)in #life • 6 years ago

Recently, I've been contemplating the subject of happiness, asking myself how I manage to maintain my good feeling about life when it seems so many others have such a hard time doing so.

After a lot of thought, I've boiled it down to a few factors, which I'll be sharing with you over the next few days on Steemit. These are my "keys to happiness". Try them out and see if they resonate with you, too.

This is Part 2 of a series. In Part 1, I discussed how to increase your overall happiness by consciously choosing your relationships.

My second key to happiness is to put more care into your life, by doing things you care about and caring about the things you do.

Let's face it: for most adults, life is about work. We work to live today, we work to secure our future, we work to pay off debts, we work for our kids, we work from nine to five, we work til we die.

When we're not working, most of us are decompressing or recovering from work.

And the worst part of it is, we don't really care about any of it--the work we're performing or whatever activities we're filling our "leisure time" with.

This pattern does not make for a very happy life. In fact, it makes for a goddamn depressing life. So many of us suffer from a deep lack of fulfillment. But most of us can't just stop working. We need the money!

So what can we do about it?

Do what you care about.

If you are working a soul-sucking job, filing widget claims for the man, find a way to transition into a new career; one that fuels your fire, that gives you a sense of fulfillment. This will probably not be easy, but worthwhile pursuits rarely are.

The first problem you might run up on is that you don't know exactly what it is you do care about. Maybe you've devoted so many years of your life to widget claim filing, and watching TV on the weekends, that you can't remember a time you ever really cared about something, apart from your family. Here's my advice to you: cut down your hours at work, or find another meaningless position that places lower demands on your time and energy. Even if you have to take a pay cut. Reduce your expenses and use the extra time to do some serious soul searching. Try to remember a time when you were excited to get out of bed in the morning. What drove you then? Can you rekindle that flame? What topics does your mind drift to when you're not working or filling your head with entertainment? What do your hands itch to do? Figure it out, and then figure out a way to get more of it in your life.

Some people will find ways to monetize their passion, but you don't have to. You can keep it as a hobby, and just arrange your work life to give you more time and focus to devote to it. Or you can learn investment strategies that can eventually make it so you don't have to work for money at all, allowing you to devote all of your time to something you care about.

When you do what you care about, time seems to stretch. You get more out of every minute that you spend engrossed in your chosen occupation, and you feel relaxed and content the rest of the time, too. Stressful situations are easier to handle. Your mood is more balanced and generally positive. You begin to attract wonderful people into your life who are similarly engaged and in pursuit of fulfillment.

But let's say you're not ready to make that kind of transition yet. There are still small changes you can make to increase your overall level of happiness.

Care about what you do.

There's a subtle difference between doing what you care about and caring about what you do. Can you discern it?

When you choose to have a career that is based on your passions, or find a way to reduce your workload in order to focus more time and energy on your interests, you are doing what you care about.

Caring about what you do is a little different. It's immersing yourself in the task at hand--whatever it might be--in order to make it meaningful and extract a sense of fulfillment out of it.

We all have tasks on our to-do list that don't inspire feelings of excitement or passion. Things like washing the dishes, helping the kids with homework, or driving to work. Sometimes this kind of stuff piles up and fills your day until it feels like constant drudgery. But if you can shake off that feeling of suckiness and get yourself to care--even a little bit--about what you are doing in the present moment, your stress levels will decline. You'll get things done faster. You'll do a better job. You'll do a little extra. And best of all, your overall happiness level will shoot upwards.

There are a couple of tricks to caring about what you do. One is to start by just getting to a neutral emotional place about it. Try this with a task that you particularly can't stand. If your least favorite chore is vacuuming, pick that one to experiment with. First, tell yourself "Now I am going to vacuum." Then listen to your inner voice and feel what emotions come up. If a negative emotion arises, study it for a moment. Don't judge it. Don't ask "why". Don't chastise yourself for feeling that way. Simply identify the emotion and allow it to be the center of attention for a moment. If the emotion is overwhelm, note to yourself in a detached way, "I am feeling overwhelmed about vacuuming." After a few moments of meditating on that feeling of overwhelm, you'll find that it dissipates. It might not be immediately replaced with vacuum joy, but at the very least you should feel neutral about the task. Once you feel this neutrality, get started with the task right away. If you let yourself get distracted, the negative emotion will probably come back twice as strong.

The second trick is to combine a task that usually bores or frustrates you with something else that you enjoy. Listen to an audiobook while driving to work. Crank up your favorite music while washing the dishes. Make a tasty snack to share while helping your kids with their math homework. Plan your creative project while cooking dinner. Any small, unobtrusive source of enjoyment can turn a hated task into an tolerable one--and maybe even help you care about it.

The final trick for caring about what you do is to give yourself an important reason for doing it--one that makes you smile. Don't say to yourself, "I need to wash these dishes so the kitchen doesn't start to stink." Instead, say, "I love it when the kitchen is neat and clean and all the dishes are put away. It makes me feel happy to live in an uncluttered space." And focus on that thought while you perform the task.

Doing what you care about and caring about what you do are major pieces in the happiness puzzle.

And luckily, you can get started with both of these with relatively little effort. Start small, implementing care into your life in little ways. These little ways will build up, and pay big dividends into the future.