Everything around you is influencing your life so feed your senses wisely.
Having a high self-esteem or a positive attitude certainly counts towards living a super life but it isn’t only up to you to attain and maintain such an aspirational state. Everything that surrounds you in your home, your place of work, your mode of travel and the places you choose to go send conscious and subliminal messages to your mind, influencing your mental and emotional state.
Here’s a few examples:
- The Teen Trail: You know your fourteen-year-old son is home. You can follow the Hansel and Gretel evidence from the front door: school shoes, smelly socks, belt, bag (with rotting apples and unopened homework inside), shorts and shirt thrown on clean clothes pile that has been messed up in search of sloth clothes, empty bowl and spoon with spilled milk nearby, cookie jar MIA, blaring R & B upstairs competing with X-Box. The whole scenario ends with some charming language being yelled at the TV and you feel your left eye begin to twitch.
- Traffic Jam Tuesday: You promised yourself you wouldn’t leave after 7a.m. You even wrote it down. And now you are turning up the radio hoping the comedians on morning duty will be able to overcome the road rage building as yet another car cuts in to your non-moving lane. It’s okay. He probably doesn’t realise three other cars have done that in the past five minutes. You change lanes and the one you were in before starts to move twice as fast as your new one. You try to change back but no-one will let you. The morning radio is now full of ads about tyre checks and tax returns, both of which are overdue in your life. A man honks you for trying to change lanes again. Gnashing of teeth begins.
- Beach Visit: The breeze lifts your hair off your neck as soon as you step out of the car and it carries the salt. You’ve missed that scent more than you realized. The ocean comes into view, a curling silver and blue set of waves rolling in towards shore and, as it crashes and fans on the golden sand, you suddenly can’t wait to kick off your shoes and run down to feel it. It’s cool and the sand is soft as you wiggle your toes and breathe deeply of that air. A seagull climbs up ahead and you squint towards it, the sun warming your face as you smile at the sheer beauty of this place. The rest of the day simply melts away in that moment.
- Candles: It took two hours of scrubbing and washing and tidying up but your apartment is so beautiful right now you don’t mind anymore. You’d forgotten how much you love everything in here, well, after all, you chose most of the furnishings and knick knacks and the ones you didn’t were gifts from loved ones. Everything here is a trace of your life. A memory. You take out the expensive candle you got for your birthday and wonder if you dare light it, then you remember something you read somewhere once; something about using the good china and lighting the nice candles because life is ultimately short. You light it and it smells like a tropical cocktail. Then you pour a glass of wine and sit and gaze about your place feeling suddenly grateful. It’s wonderful to belong somewhere. This is your place in the world. Your home.
Actions vs reactions
You probably noticed that the first two scenarios caused immediate memories of stress, the second two feelings of calmness, serenity, gratitude and security. None of these scenarios involved thought processes so much as familiar reactions to such environments.
Scenario 1) Mess = stress for many people, especially when it isn’t yours and you’re forced to live in it or clean it up for someone else. First piece of advice: you’re not over-reacting so much as allowing that information to cause you unhappiness. Take a deep breath, do the parenting thing, try your best to train him and remember: repetition will breed success eventually. Hopefully, anyway. Another trick when the house/children/housemate overwhelm you is to simply walk outside and take some time out to readjust and re-prioritize what really matters. It’s all a matter of focusing on positives as much as you can.
Scenario 2) Traffic jams can literally cause rage. There aren’t many more frustrating things than being trapped, late and in danger of being abused, honked at or even having an accident. It is a particularly difficult environment because you can’t remove yourself from it immediately without ending up on the national news. Our advice is to have some soothing tunes on hand, call a friend who always makes you laugh (hands free of course) or replay the highlights of your week in your head. Once again, it’s all about that focus. You’re programming your mind all the time which means you’re programming your mood, or as we like to say, ‘programming fabulous’.
Scenario 3) Beautiful places in nature can act as instant balms to frayed nerves and feed your senses with serene messages. By adding these precious times into your life you’re doing amazing things for your mental and physical health because you are lowering your stress levels and being active at the same time. A clear relaxed mind can achieve great things so breath in that fresh air and feel the tension flow away. Ahhhh.
Scenario 4) One the nicest aspects of cleaning your home and making it aesthetically pleasing is that you are able to sit back and feel gratitude afterwards. It’s one our basic, most primal instincts to seek shelter and when that place is filled with objects that bring back memories of loved ones and happy moments in time it can increase that gratitude. Taking time out to feel that way is time extremely well spent.
So, live those special moments wisely by appreciating them and breathing them in. And remember in times of stress to lower their impact by lowering their actual priority via rationalization, removing yourself from the scenario or focusing on something more pleasant or amusing.
A super life means time well invested whenever possible. We’re loving that.