Feel Better NOW: Four actions to immediately improve your mood and life
We want instant access to people, information, services, and results, regardless of the time of day or our location.
Faster is better (allegedly).
Instant status updates.
Quick-serve restaurants.
2-day shipping (even that seems long).
I want it now.
There’s only one problem with this kind of instantaneous mentality:
It’s unsustainable.
What we need is a mindset shift.
While there are immediate things we can do to make improvements in our day, what we also need are incremental changes to alter the course we’re on.
Think of it as being on a ship. To change where you want to go, you don’t jerk the rudder violently to the side to head that way instantly — that’s a recipe for capsizing the entire boat.
Instead, you make a slight change in degrees to your current direction. It may not seem like much at first, but that trajectory difference creates an arc that directs you to a very different place than you were headed initially.
That that end, I often advocate for my clients to NOT make major life changes. Seems counter-intuitive, but the idea is that they will begin incorporating small habitual moves in their daily living that will add up to big gains over time.
Amazingly, doing some of the following things can do both: give you some relief today and add up incrementally over time.
- Smile.
This might seem silly, but smiling triggers a release of chemicals that make us start feeling better in a matter of minutes.
Remember those family pictures where no one wanted to take the photo and forced the smiles flash after flash? After a minute of doing this where your cheeks hurt, and it was finally over, the mood seemed to lighten a bit and people joked around.
That wasn’t just family tension lifting briefly!
One article in Forbes talks about how even faking a smile can help elevate mood and reduce stress. Another study monitored patients with depressive symptoms who smiled at themselves in the mirror for 15 minutes per day. Over the course of 8 weeks, they felt just as well if not better as those taking an antidepressant.
So try smiling for 45–60 seconds every morning to set the tone for the day.
2. Practice gratitude.
There’s a lot behind the idea of counting your blessings.
Cultivating the practice of gratitude can be as simple as writing down 3–5 things you’re grateful for each morning. These should be small things, like being able to wake up, breathe, having another day ahead of you, the bed you woke up in, etc.
The science behind this is engaging your reticular activating system, the portal through which nearly all information enters your brain. By choosing to focus on positive things that you appreciate, you automatically set yourself up to continue looking for those very things throughout the day.
Remember that time you bought that new white car and suddenly saw white cars wherever you were? Or got a new dress and started seeing so many other people wearing it? It wasn’t that they suddenly appeared, it’s just that you didn’t notice them before. By focusing your attention on it, it brought it into your awareness all around you.
By practicing gratitude, you will naturally begin to think about things throughout the day that you are thankful for.
3. Take a deep breath.
Practicing diaphragmatic breathing has been shown to bring about a sense of calm and reduce overall stress level. This can be as easy as breathing in through your nose for 4 counts, holding for a few counts, and exhaling through your mouth.
If you want to compound this effect, try it while you…
4. Practice meditation.
Obviously this is a popular topic in the world of mental health and wellness, and rightly so. At last count, there were over 1100 studies showing the benefits of maintaining a regular practice of meditation, which include
- Stress reduction
- Improves concentration
- Increases feelings of calm
- Increases self-awareness
- Benefits the cardiovascular system
- Decreases anxiety
- Builds a sense of connectivity with others and the world
The list goes on. At this point, many of us know we should be meditating but aren’t sure where to start.
An easy 7–10 minute routine can be to sit comfortably in a chair, focus on your breath (noticing what it feels like as it comes in your nose and goes out your mouth, the rise and fall of your chest, etc.), and gently return your focus to your breath when it inevitably wanders off. As meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg wrote, “Beginning again and again is the actual practice, not a problem to overcome so that one day we can come to ‘real’ meditation.”
That’s it.
If you feel like this has helped, please share the love with a few claps. Also, connect with me on LinkedIn for fun or if you think you could benefit from some additional coaching on life adjustments!
