6 Tips For How to Live A Happy Life

We all want to live a more happy life. Sadly, for many of us, this seems impossible. In this post, I'm going to cover 6 tips for how to live a happy life. 

1. Make a list of all the reasons you are unhappy .

Write a list of reasons you aren't happy with your life. Read them out loud. Now try to evaluate why they bother you so much. Seeing these reasons on paper decreases their value and should help you start to feel better already. This is why some people keep journals.

2. Write down how you respond to things that make you unhappy.

When something bad happens to you, how do you respond to it? Write out a list of how you respond to things that make you unhappy. Many times the way we respond to the things that make us unhappy only reinforces the problem. Writing them down on paper will help us get a clear idea if the way we are reacting is beneficial or harmful to our happiness.

3.write out some ways you can respond better when bad things happen.

As mentioned in the previous section, many times the way we respond when bad things happen only makes the problem worse and leads to even more unhappiness. If we can figure out better ways to respond when bad things happen, many times it's easier to forget about it and move forward. Read my articles on forgiveness and the blame game for a better way to view these situations which will give you an idea on how you can respond better when bad things happen.

4. Create a plan to put these steps into action.

Now you need a plan to put this in action so you can stop telling yourself excuses for why you are unhappy. Write out your plan and keep it with you. Read it multiple times every day until you memorize it. 

5. Tell a close friend about your plan.

Tell one of your close friends that is around you often about your plan. I recommend choosing a friend that is generally happy most of the time and will hold you accountable if you slip up. Many times if we have someone else to hold us accountable to a goal, we are more likely to follow through and stick with the plan.

6. Don't beat up on yourself if you slip up.

This is the sole reason many people give up on their goals. It's hard to change the way we habitually react to situations. In the beginning, you will slip up. I can almost guarantee this. The trick is to stick with it. Eventually, you will build the habit of responding the right way when things happen that make you unhappy. Once this habit sticks, you are good to go.

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Remember, only you hold the keys to unlocking your fullest potential. Be great!

Is The Blame Game Holding You Back?

Is the Blame Game Holding You Back

Intro.

For years the blame game was keeping me down. I blamed my abusive father for my anxiety, depression, and drug addiction. I blamed my mother for staying with my father. Sometimes, I would even put the full blame for certain things on myself which always led to a major depressive state. I was always looking for a single cause to blame for every bad situation I found myself in.

One the most self-destructive things we do as humans is look for a single cause or person to blame every time we have a problem. While everything we experience in our life has an impact on us, we do have the power to determine how it will affect the person we become.

In this post, I'm going to talk about what the blame game is, how it can negatively impact our lives, and how to stop playing it.

What is the blame game?

There are two main types of blame; personalization, and the normal kind of blame we place on others. While it is normal to acknowledge fault in others and ourselves, the blame game occurs when something bad happens and we immediately put the full blame on ourselves or others and react with our emotions. There is no room for honest mistakes in the blame game and we use it to justify our reactions and how we feel. This is a common trait in people who suffered from child abuse, mental health issues such as anxiety and depression, and drug addiction.

How does the blame game affect our lives and others?

When we are playing this game, we use the blame as an excuse to justify the way we feel and react when something bad happens to us. It's a never-ending cycle of bad things happening and rationalizing the way we react by pointing the finger at ourselves and others. The more we do this the more it becomes a mental habit that we do subconsciously without even realizing it. It leads to self-destructive decision making and even ruins friendships in the process. It doesn't solve anything or get us anywhere. If all we're doing is pointing fingers, we never have the opportunity to learn from these situations and then the cycle continues.

If this is you, keep reading. I'm going to show you how to break the cycle and actually benefit from every bad situation that happens to you.

How to stop playing the blame game?

This is going to require you to look at things a bit different when something bad happens. We never get anywhere or learn anything when we let our emotional reactions take hold right away. Set your emotions aside and take a deep breath. Take some time to evaluate the entire situation and series of events that took place around it. Try to view things from a bird's eye view looking down from above. What went wrong? Many times there a lot of little events that took place that led to the bad thing happening. We all make mistakes in life. The important thing to do is not beat up on ourselves and others. We need to learn from these things so when similar little events happen, we can recall the previous time and either make a better decision for ourselves or advise someone else. Everything that happens in life is a lesson. We never learn anything that will improve our lives by reacting with to these lessons with our emotions.

Conclusion

Many of the problems that exist in society today are a direct result of people reacting to situations with their emotions without taking the time to evaluate things. Our emotions can drive us to do great things in life, but they can also be our downfall if not used properly. I'm not saying we shouldn't acknowledge when we or others make mistakes. What I am saying is there are lessons to be learned and we can't learn from them unless we take the time to evaluate the situation. We should take the time to learn from all of life's situations both good and bad. Learn what works and what doesn't. Learn what will improve our lives and what will hinder our progress. We should all constantly be looking for ways to improve ourselves so we can help others from the lessons we've learned. If we can all learn to do this just a little bit better, we can create a great atmosphere for not only ourselves and loved ones, but the world at large.

If there is one person on this planet that won't give up on you, it's me. I may not always tell you what you want to hear, but I will tell you what you need to hear.

Be Great,

Craig Daub

I hope you enjoyed this post and gained some value from it. Fell free to tell me what you think by commenting your thoughts below. Please share with anyone you feel it may help. I have a ton of stuff to cover coming up and will do my best to write more frequently.

Always remember, Only You Hold the Keys To Unlocking Your Fullest Potential!



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Forgiveness : Why it is The Most Important Step in Healing Your Mind

Nelson Mandela once said, "resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies."

I'm going to ask you to do something that is probably going to be the hardest thing you'll ever have to do in your life. I'm going to ask you to forgive the people in your life that do not deserve your forgiveness. But first, I'm going to give you a little back story so you understand why this is the single most important step you need to take in your path to healing.

In the last post, I spoke about my abusive alcoholic father and my first memory of him punching my mother in the face while she was holding me at age four. Today I'm going to go into a little more detail about some of the kinds of things I had to deal with growing up and how holding onto resentment led to my anxiety, depression and drug addiction.

If you've ever lived with an alcoholic, you know what I mean when I say that living with an alcoholic is like living with someone that has a personality disorder. One minute they could be the nicest person you've ever met, the next minute they're the meanest person in the world. One minute you feel like they love you, the next minute you feel like they hate your guts and wish you were dead.

Growing up, I was deathly afraid of being home alone with my father. He was always drunk and I never knew if he was going to be nice or mean at any given moment. I was afraid to walk near him at times. When I'd walk past him, he'd do things like punch me in the chest and knock the wind out of me. This wasn't just love-taps either. He would hit me like I was a grown man and say things like "I'm just trying to toughen up you up." When I'd cry he would mock me and say things like "you're a little girl, you should wear a skirt to school" and many other vulgar slurs I won't mention here. These types of situations usually led to him and my mother fighting which led to him getting even more violent.

My whole childhood I was either getting hit, made fun of, or listening to my parent's fight. I'm not going to lie and say there were no good times, but traumatic experiences tend to stick in your mind. It also sticks with you into your early adult life. I resented him for everything he put me through and this is what led to my anxiety, depression and eventually drug addiction and making some horrible choices.

People deal with their emotions in different ways. Some lash out and some try to escape. I chose the escape route. I started smoking marijuana at around age 12 and by age 16 I had moved on to narcotic pain medications. In my early to mid-20s, I was doing any drug I could get my hands on to escape reality. Sometimes I would stay clean, but when I was clean, I was a nervous wreck and depressed all the time. The only time I ever felt comfortable in social situations was when I was using drugs.

My drug addiction led to me making many terrible choices. One took away 17 months of my freedom. I went to the hospital and lied complaining of severe back pain. The lie worked. The doctor wrote me a prescription for Percocet and I decided to alter it to try to get more pills before taking it to the pharmacy. The pharmacy spotted the alteration and called the police as I was waiting for it to get filled. I was sentenced to 17 months in county jail and had nowhere to parole out to. I had to stay in there for the entire 17 months. Initially, I was angry, but getting locked up eventually turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

When I first arrived, all I could feel is anger and rage for everything my father had done to me over the years. How could the man I was supposed to look up to and model myself after treat me like a piece of trash? I had blamed him for everything that was going wrong in my life. Eventually, I realized, this was the line of thinking that got me into this mess to begin with. I had been using all I went through as an excuse for all the stupid things I was doing. Could the root cause of my problems lie within myself? This didn't become apparent until I started going to church.

Going to church is one of the few things you can do to get off the cell block in jail. I figured it couldn't hurt to listen to some positive messages. I'm still no devout Christian but I do believe Christianity teaches some valuable life lessons whether you believe in the spiritual side of it or not.

One sermon hit me hard and changed my life forever. It was about forgiveness. That night, I wrote my father a letter forgiving him for all he had done to me over the years. As soon as I was done writing the letter, it felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

Forgiving him allowed me to take control of my life. The reason I couldn't accept responsibility for my actions was that I had been holding onto all that negative energy for so long which only gave me excuses to do all the stupid things I was doing. It was also one of the main reasons for all my mental issues. I had finally cracked the code that would allow me to start moving in the right direction both mentally and physically.

I was now able to forgive my father as well as myself for all the mistakes I made and the people I hurt. We all make mistakes, but dwelling on them only leads to more problems.

You see, we are not defined by what happens to us and the mistakes we make. It's how we handle it afterward that matters. We can choose to beat ourselves up or we can treat it like a lesson to be learned from. If you treat it like a lesson, you tend to not keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Everything we experience in life should be treated as a lesson and we should use those lessons to improve our lives as well as others.

Hopefully, by hearing my story, you can understand a little better why forgiveness of yourself and others is the first and most important step you must take if you want to live a happy, productive life. Its something we do, not only for others but for ourselves as well. The gift of forgiveness is more beneficial to the one doing the forgiving than the one being forgiven. Hanging on to baggage only allows those who've harmed us to keep harming us. We can not make good decisions in our future dwelling on things that happened in the past. The past is already gone and no matter how we look at it, it can't be changed. So we may as well treat it like a lesson because it's the only thing that will help us make better choices in the future.

Start today by writing out a forgiveness letter for those who have harmed you. I promise, you will feel much better after doing this.

Be great and remember, you alone hold the keys to unlocking your fullest potential.

Thank you for reading.

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A Childs First Memory: A Story of Child Abuse, Anxiety, Depression and Drug Abuse

A Childs First Memory

It was a late summer night back in 1986. A woman was standing up the alley from her boyfriend's parents house clutching her 4 year old son crying. She and her violent drunk boyfriend wer fighting and she decided to leave the situation.

As they were waiting at the next road up from the alley, the boy peering over her shoulder noticed a man walking up the alley. The boy cried, "mommy mommy he's coming to get us." She looked and said "I think it's your uncle coming to check on us to see if were ok." It was not his uncle. By the time she realized it was the boys father, it was too late. He ran up on her, punched her in the face and both the boy and mother fell to the ground. They started screaming for help as the boys father ran off.

The lady that lived on the corner heard the screaming, came outside and helped them into her house and called the police.

That little boy was me and that is the story of my first memory as a child.

As Time Went On

My mother stayed with my father after that hoping things would change. They didnt. He made promise after promise each time he got drunk and violent. Both me and my mother were physically and verbally abused throughout my childhood.

My early childhood was filled with constant fear. I was  socially awkward in school. I was bullied and even jumped at age 16 by 22 kids after school one day.

Mental Health Problems Began

As you can imagine this all developed into severe panic disorder, social phobia, depression, as well as becoming a drug addict and making some poor life choices. This lasted until age 30 when I had finally had enough. This was not who I wanted to be.

Over the years I seen various counselors and been on multiple medications which only seemed to make the problem worse. I just knew there had to be something, anything I could do besides using drugs to escape, taking medications that made me worse, and talking to counselors who I felt didn't understand me. Something had to give. I decided I was going to figure out how to fix myself and I wouldn't quit until I succeeded.

Education and the Path to Healing

First I started by studying all about anxiety and depression. While I did learn some valuable exercises that helped to a point, it was only a minor improvement. Studying about these things only seemed to reinforce the idea that I was stuck this way and couldn't change.

Then I started studying psychology. Immediately I was bombarded with statistics and information that made me feel like all the cards were stacked against me in regards to changing.

Then through some more research I found out some things about the mind that I thought may be beneficial to me.

I learned with lots of persistence and internal work in combination with exposing myself to repetitive positive information while also avoiding exposing myself to negative influences, I could slowly start to change my thought patterns which would eventually change the way I think. After about 9 months of persistent exercise, It was like a putting a brand new light bulb in a lamp that I thought was broken. Finally, I was able to experience light in a room that was dark for so many years.


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