Do You Enjoy Your Life?
Do you enjoy your life? It’s a deep question… and one very much worth asking. Enjoying life is one of the great antidotes for anxiety so figuring out how to enjoy your life more can transform your life in many ways.
Consider these related questions:
• Do you believe life is meant to be enjoyed?
• Do you believe you are meant to be happy, and deserve to be happy?
• Is there really time to enjoy your life?
• What is life really about anyway? Enjoying it?
What Gets in Your Way?
If you’re not enjoying your life as much as you’d like, consider whether any of these factors are keeping you from the happiness you seek.
1. Time.
Are you too busy to enjoy your life, and if so, why? Crazy busy is a common mode of operating these days, and even seems like a badge of honor at times. But without enjoyment, what’s the purpose of all the crazy busy?
All the time management strategies in the world will not create more time. Only you can create more time for yourself through conscious (albeit sometimes difficult) choices.
Become the master of your time instead of the victim of “not enough time.”
2. Beliefs about life and your purpose.
One of my clients finds herself busy at work, and then busy with more work that needs to be done at home. She’s got lists of work, work, work which leave her unfulfilled.
We discovered an underlying belief… she doesn’t really believe that life is meant to be enjoyed. It’s full of work and responsibilities and the expectations of others. So, she asked: “Who says that it’s okay for me to just enjoy my life?”
Maybe there’s a better question: Who says it’s not okay to enjoy your life?
Perhaps people in your life have expectations of you. Perhaps you “should on yourself” and feel guilty if you’re not doing for others. Perhaps you feel bad about yourself if you’re not busy being “productive.” Perhaps enjoyment seems frivolous.
You can give yourself permission to enjoy your life!
3. Not knowing what makes you happy.
Sometimes what stops us from making the time to enjoy life is that we don’t really know what would make us happy. So, we fill our time with To Do’s and distractions…at least we get some satisfaction from checking off a To-Do list.
Figuring out what it would take to enjoy your life is actually harder than just keeping busy. It is completely worth the effort! Create a better picture of your own version of happiness/enjoyment. Then you will naturally find motivation and the ways to make the time for it.
4. Too much of a good thing = a bad thing.
I have another client who is a great planner and also a very social person, so she’s very good at filling any empty spaces with seemingly fun social activities.
Each one is fun in the moment. But add them all up and she is running around too much, saying yes to everything, and feeling stress and anxiety. She winds up feeling like she is not really IN her life in order to enjoy it.
Mindfulness and conscious choices can help us all enjoy life more. However, the call to make conscious choices invites you to know yourself well and to know what truly makes you happy.
5. I’ll enjoy my life after I get my work done.
Get everything done first, check the list twice and then you can enjoy life. What a trap. Inherited midwestern work ethics may play into this, as well as inherited family values.
Are those inherited values really the values YOU want to choose?
6. Autopilot.
There could be MANY different things that keep enjoyment elusive: subconscious thoughts, beliefs, feelings, habits, inherited values, past experiences, and more. Left unquestioned and unexamined, those things can create a life on autopilot with little sense of meaning, purpose and enjoyment.
[pullquote]Don’t let those things run your life on autopilot. Explore your inner world, and you’ll find out if limiting beliefs and assumptions about life are keeping you from your joy.[/pullquote]7. Anxiety
Anxiety is often connected to the feeling that there’s too much to do, never enough time, and never an end in sight. There is a way out of that endless loop of anxiety. Check out my holistic approach HERE.