Happiness and success isn’t derived from tangible things.
It’s a state of mind that allows you to further your progress in both your personal and professional life so that every day, you’re achieving goals and reaching new milestones toward a better life.
To get yourself into this state of mind, you need to develop daily habits for happiness and success that don’t hold you back, but instead help you get more done during the day, meet obligations with ease, and lie down at night with a smile on your face because everything’s headed in the right direction.
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Daily Habits for Happiness and Success
Account for Your Future
Your life is happening. It’s being lived whether or not you’re in control. Every day that you wake up and go to bed is 24 hours of time that’s passed. For some people, those 24 hours really didn’t amount to anything special except the passage of time.
Every day that you have to live is a day that you can control whether or not you’re happy – whether or not you’re going to be successful. It begins with a plan. What are you going to do today to take steps that create happiness?
What steps are you going to take to be successful? If you don’t know what steps to take, then you have no course of action. If that sounds like something you’ve struggled with, you can learn how to account for your future.
By doing this, you’ll start planning ahead for what you want – and making it happen. You can plan ahead each day for how you’re going to spend your time. Even your free time (and you should have free time) can be planned so that you’re living a life that’s full of happiness.
Planning ahead is one thing that the world’s most successful people have in common. They don’t fly by the seat of their pants and let things just occur – they craft the kind of life that they want to live.
You might plan for something you want to achieve for happiness and success next month or the next day. But have an idea of how you want your day to unfold. Be specific, not vague – that way, you have a way to measure whether or not the day was a “win.”
For even more habits to boost success in your business and your life, check out my Path to Making Millions checklist. Click the image below to grab your FREE copy!
Find a Daily Challenge
When you challenge yourself in any area of your life, you end up growing. If you stick to what you already know and you only do the things you know you’re good at, you stay stagnant
Choose an area of your life to challenge yourself in (and make sure that you cover each of them). For example, in the area of exercise, challenge yourself to do more than you thought you could with your exercise program.
Maybe instead of doing 30 minutes of walking each day, you shoot for 45 minutes. You’ll gain a sense of accomplishment that will make you feel both happy and successful.
Learn something new. People that continually grow in knowledge challenge their brain. This can be a new language, book, or skill. It could be something like taking a dance lesson or visiting a place that moves you, shakes up your life and gives you a deeper perspective.
Resurrect a failure. Every single person in the world has a failure of some kind in their life. They tried something and it didn’t work. Look back over something that you tried and really wanted but gave up on. Sometimes the passing of time can add fresh ideas and a better understanding of why the failure happened.
When you look back over your life at something that failed, it could be that you just weren’t prepared for that success. When you challenge yourself to be an “overcomer,” you’ll find a sense of happiness because of the completion of each task.
Finishing something contributes to success. It’s especially rewarding when you go back to something you previously failed at. Remember, it took many tries before the lightbulb finally worked!
Make It a Point to Give Every Day Your All
We all have areas of life that we hold back in. Maybe it comes out of fear of looking stupid, or fear of failure. But working hard every single day is the key to success.
In everything that you put your hand to, you have to give it your all. But remember – there is a difference in doing a task right and being a perfectionist. You can give your all with work and in personal relationships, and when you see the difference between doing enough and doing as much as you can, it will shock you at how better things are when you try hard.
Be fully present in everything you do every single day. Refuse to let yourself go through life on autopilot. You can tell if you’re on autopilot if you finish doing something, but you can’t remember parts about doing the task.
Your body was there working, but your mind was already off on something else. When you’re fully present, it can give you an appreciation for what you’re doing and for what you have.
Some people call this mindfulness. You leave multi-tasking behind and focus on one thing at a time – one conversation, one meal, one project, etc. It helps you maximize your effort and emerge with better results than if you didn’t try as hard.
Stop Working When It’s Time to Stop
Remember that your life is a series of seconds, minutes, and hours each day. It’s important to work hard because this contributes to your happiness and success. But if you’re working so many hours and you have such big projects on your shoulders that the line between work and your free time is blurred, it’s time to take a step back.
There’s a reason that taking time off work is important. This helps you recharge your batteries and helps you relax and not lose sight of the big picture of your life. Work is only a portion of your life. There are other aspects to it.
When you allow work to take over, it throws everything else out of balance.
You’ll be happier if you set work boundaries. People that have a definitive line between their work and off-time are far more successful. When you take time off, you can actually improve your work performance.
Protect Your Sleep Time
Striving to find personal satisfaction – especially if you’re trying to build a business – can impact your sleep. You might already know the importance of getting the sleep that your body needs.
But what you might not know is that when you skip out on getting enough sleep, you can sabotage yourself. Losing sleep leads to feelings of unhappiness, anxiety, and irritability.
Plus, when you don’t get the sleep that your body needs, it leads to a loss of productivity. You will begin to slow down physically and cognitively because your body just can’t function at top performance when it doesn’t have the right amount of sleep.
Sometimes the unhappiness in our personal lives or the work stress will prevent a good night’s sleep. It’s a vicious circle because a lack of sleep contributes to the same issues.
If you’re not sleeping enough, start by examining your sleep habits. At you getting to bed early enough? Are you sleeping in a cool room with no distractions? Is your bedding comfortable?
Make sure you get to the root of the issue because sleep is one health habit that will interfere in every part of your life, making you miserable – and possibly making you take out your frustrations on others.
Make Exercise and Eating Right a Priority
Having a daily habit of exercising can create happiness. When you exercise, your body releases endorphins or the feel-good hormones that can lift your mood. When you exercise every day – even if it’s just going for a walk around the block at work or at home – you help improve the way your organs can do their jobs.
You make it easier for them to function. You also create more mental alertness in your brain when you exercise, because you increase the way that your organs can get the oxygen that they need.
Not getting enough oxygen can negatively affect your organs – and that includes your brain. Without the right amount of oxygen, it can impair your ability to think and to work through ideas, attain goals, and get done what you want to get done each day.
But when you exercise, you create a way for your whole body to benefit – and this produces a sense of happiness. Making sure that you eat right can go a long way toward creating happiness and success in your life, too.
When you eat the wrong kinds of food, it can have an impact on how you feel physically and how you feel mentally.
Don’t try to implement a bunch of new daily habits all at once. Build slowly. It takes a while for a new habit to take root, so don’t beat yourself up if you’re slow to implement them on a routine basis. It takes a few weeks to get with the program, but you’ll start to notice positive changes and that will motivate you to continue each and every day.
How can you begin to implement these daily habits for happiness and success? I would love to hear in the comments!
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Great list of tips. I really enjoy reading these kind of articles. Our lives would be much better if we’d try to follow these guidelines.
I have extensive experience with the effects of a lack of sleep on happiness. I’ve analysed over 3 years of my sleep and happiness data, and wrote the most in-depth analysis about it here: https://www.trackinghappiness.com/effect-sleep-happiness/
It might be a good addition to this article, since it further proves the points you present.
Cheers!