5 Steps I've Taken to Become Happier in the Last 30 Days

A lot can happen when you invest in yourself for an entire month.

Aug 27, 2021

The first 7 months of 2021 took it out of me.

I competed in Jiu-Jitsu all over the country, my dad almost died from Covid, and I had really crappy ends to several great relationships. The highs, lows, and constant anxieties of the year completely drained me to the point where I was barely sleeping, constantly overworking, and my body was literally falling apart.

That’s why I’ve used the end of July and all of August as a chance for a mental reset. It’s the first time all year where I’ve had an extended period with no travel, no anxiety-inducing fights on the horizon, and no commitments to anyone or anything besides my work.

I’m addressing my future and working on everything that I’ve neglected for the past 7 months. These are the 5 steps I’ve taken to confront my fears of the future head-on, and they’ve drastically improved my happiness during the past 30 days.

My experiment has been so successful that I might even extend this “regiment” for another month.

First, I took care of my body. (or at least, I’m trying to)

I’m 24, but I feel like I’m 65.

Before you laugh or tell me how I’m ungrateful for my youth, let me tell you about my injuries.

My jaw pops on command, my shoulders slide out of place in my sleep, and there’s something wrong with my spine. On an X-Ray, I look several times my age. I know this. I feel it every day, and if I’m not careful, it’s going to destroy my longevity in Jiu-Jitsu.

I’ve had to make a change for the sake of my physical health, and not surprisingly, it’s helping my mental health.

The first thing I did was finally take my friend up on her offer to help me with yoga and physical rehab. She and I get together once a week and design a yoga practice that’s based on whatever my physical ailments are that week. It’s been a godsend.

I also lucked out and connected with a massage therapist who’s helping me attempt to undo the years and years of abuse I’ve put myself through on the mat. Usually, I’m hesitant about massages, but this guy told me he’d help me feel my age for free. I’m a sucker for a deal, and I was sold instantly.

Physical health and mental health are closely correlated, but we often forget that when we get caught up in the stress of life. Most people’s physical and mental health are out of sync. If you can reconnect them, your growth is almost guaranteed.

Then, I deleted all of my social media.

I’m going to write more about this experiment in the next few weeks, but deleting social media has been incredible for my mental health.

I’ve been on social media pretty much daily since I turned 13, and I honestly never realized how much time I was spending on it until I removed it from my day-to-day existence. Originally, I deleted my apps and froze my accounts so that I could improve my productivity for the ebook I’m writing, but I noticed the positive mental health benefits long before I became a productivity wizard.

I was scared at first to delete the apps because I thought I’d miss out on work opportunities, news, and my friends, and though this is partially true, not using social media has helped me immensely to regain focus and reconnect to my priorities and goals.

See, with my ADHD, I want to be everywhere at once. Social media is a hyperactive kid’s worst nightmare. When I redownload my apps in a week or so, I’m going to permanently implement some sort of restriction to maintain my discipline, sanity, and happiness.

I became an active participant in my relationships.

In life, we often get caught up in the daily hustle and bustle. Many of us move through the day on autopilot. We see the same friends every week even when we don’t like them. We date people out of convenience. We stay in toxic relationships out of fear of the unknown.

Maybe I’m the only one, but I know I’ve done all of the above.

That’s why I made a significant effort this month to address relationships that were dying and fading. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done socially because I’m already super anxious in social situations. I had to face one of my biggest fears: confrontation.

I made an effort to end bad friendships, and I also started talking to new people, which is my second biggest social fear. I’m trying to build new, healthy relationships and block out the old, unhealthy ones, and it’s so freakin’ uncomfortable in the short term.

But that’s life. Bad friends are worse than no friends, and I’m just starting to realize that.

Against my will, I addressed one of my biggest flaws.

My default mood is introspective, curious, and anxious.

But here’s the problem: I spend a lot of time thinking about my flaws, but not a lot of time actually addressing them. That’s why I’ve focused a lot this month on one of my biggest flaws: following through.

See, in martial arts, following through has never been a problem for me. It’s easy for me to show up to the gym every day, but it’s really hard for me to do just about everything else. The reality is, I’m a kind of crappy employee, often a mediocre friend, and most of the time, I’m a pretty crappy son.

For me, growth has never been comfortable and natural. All of my personal growth has kind of hurt a bit. My growth has always been awkward, uncomfortable, and made me question everything. But these past 30 days, I’ve run straight toward those uncomfortable feelings and confronted them head-on, just like Nietzsche would have wanted me to.

So far, the feelings have always faded and I’ve always improved my life by following through with pursuits I deeply desire.

Finally, I stopped putting major decisions off until tomorrow.

For the past 3 months, my life has felt like a constant state of limbo.

I’ve been preparing for a possible move, building a new but unstable career, and my personal relationships have as a result felt fleeting and temporary. It’s quite uncomfortable.

But I’ve realized that the reason that everything felt like it was in a state of limbo wasn’t that I was actually in limbo. Everything felt like limbo because I was avoiding the hard decisions and obsessing over easy decisions.

“Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.” — Jerzy Gregorek

I’ll be honest, I love running away from the struggle. In fact, I’d rather run away than confront it, even if I identify as a fighter. The short term is more fun than the long term and it hurts less. But for the first time in my adult life, I’m actually making long-term decisions about where I’m going to live, what I’m going to do, and who I’m going to surround myself with.

It’s exciting, eye-opening, and absolutely terrifying. It’s the most important thing I’ve done this month — maybe ever.

Closing Thoughts

A close friend once told me that “smart people were miserable”. For some reason, I believed them. I liked having an excuse to be unhappy because it temporarily freed me of the responsibility of my own life.

But the truth is, smart people aren’t miserable. Smart people are the opposite of miserable because they are able to construct a reality in which they are able to both succeed and achieve the optimal human experience. Ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s just ignorance. Your intelligence doesn’t dictate your happiness, your actions do.

None of us are too smart to be happy.

I’m still a work in progress, but I’ve come a long way in the last year. I’ve made significant improvement in the last 30 days especially because I committed to the program of the 5 ideas I explained above. I hope they can help you as much as they’ve helped me.

Originally published August 23, 2021, in Mind Cafe

5 Quotes on Creativity Because My eBook is STRESSING ME OUT

“The sure sign of an amateur is he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow.”― Steven Pressfield

“You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” ― Maya Angelou

"The creative adult is the child who survived." — Ursula Leguin

"Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun." — Mary Lou Cook

“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.”― Osho

As always, if you enjoyed what you read, please share, tell your friends, or reshare the article from Medium. It helps me more than you know.

Wishing you the best,

—Chris

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