How To Hold Onto Joy When Life Feels Heavy
As sure as the sun rises and sets each day, you will have periods in your life when things are just not going your way. In reality, life is basically a constant fluctuation of emotional highs and lows.
While most of our time is spent in the fairly even, mundane state of emotional normalcy, this is broken up by the peaks of the best of times and unfortunately, the valleys when nothing is going right.
While hardly anyone ever seeks information on how to deal with the best moments of their lives, handling the lows can be a difficult task. Today we live in very troubled times, a pandemic has taken over most of the world, and people are being affected in many profound and very real ways.
Everything that surrounds getting through this pandemic is based in suffering and pain, its just the nature of the beast. Death, isolation, fear, facing the unknown and grief and loss can strip of us our joy and may lead to depression.
While you cannot control what happens outside your door, you CAN control yourself. There are things you can do to maintain a positive and even joyful mindset.
In this article, we are going to talk about three tips for doing just that.
1. Surround Yourself With The Right People
It is often said that we are the sum total of the five people we surround ourselves with most often. If that is the case, making sure you get the right people around you, especially when going through a difficult period, is critical to hold on to your joy. Often times when life is really beating us up, we retreat into the solitude of our home, wanting to throw the covers of our heads and be left alone with our thoughts.
Make no mistake; sometimes periods of solitude are healthy and necessary. Right now, isolation is the norm as we fight a health crisis. However, when you find yourself in a really low spot, robbed of your joy, connecting with those who make you happy is mandatory.
Although it may seem obvious in concept, avoiding people who have the opposite effect can sometimes be the real battle. Negative individuals are especially important to keep out of your life when you are already struggling to find joy in your current situation.
There is an old saying: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
And it’s true.
We’re influenced by those around us. For better or worse, we mirror those who we spend our time with.
We can choose to be surrounded by people who are kind and willing to help others. Or we can choose to be surrounded by those who have a negative outlook on life and never offer any help unless it’s something they want from us in return.
The choice is ours!
2. Remember That Nothing Is Permanent
“But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold,” Job 23:10.
Nothing in life is permanent. Fortunately, nothing in life is permanent! Let’s state that again, this will pass.
In the world that we live in, this is a constant truth. We see it all too often in the physical world with things like natural disasters and climate change.
In our lives, we see it all too often. People move on from our lives to pursue their own goals and dreams. They get married, have children, or even have a family of their own to take care of. Sometimes people die and leave us alone to deal with life by ourselves.
But there is also permanence in this world that we live in – the things that never change are just as important as those that do. Nothing can ever be permanent but what matters to you should not be temporary either!
During periods of extreme happiness and joy, thinking about the temporary nature of each season in life is not something we like to dwell on.
On the contrary, keeping this truth in mind during the low times can be very beneficial. Whatever you are going through, no matter how bad it may be, it WILL pass.
In fact, most of the difficult times you experience in life will end without any extra effort on your part. It is so easy to get into the mentality that we have to put forth an immense amount of effort to make something bad go away.
Even though this is sometimes the case, most of the time, TIME is the only remedy for tough situations. If you want to maximize your joy during difficult times, remember that your situation is not the way things are, only the way they are RIGHT NOW.
3. Base Your Happiness On Yourself
Since we have discussed how life is divided into highs and lows and the fact that nothing will lasts forever, this leads to another thing to keep in mind during the best AND the worst periods.
If you want to have joy on a consistent basis, your joy absolutely cannot be dictated by your circumstances.
Many people rely on external sources of happiness.
For example, people might get their happiness from the approval of others, the opinions of others, money, material items, or even social media likes.
What is not being recognized is that these things are fleeting and temporary. Happiness should be based on what you can control – your inner self.
Happiness can be achieved by focusing on what you can control, such as your thoughts and attitudes.
Happiness is not the result of any external event. It is an inside job. We can’t control everything that happens to us, but we can control our thoughts and attitudes, which are the direct cause of how we feel about anything that happens to us.
If you let every good thing that happens to you leave you soaring on cloud nine and every negative situation send you crashing to earth, you will go through life in a state of emotional exhaustion! Stable, consistent, sustainable joy can only be created and found within yourself.
Life is far less about what happens to you than it is how you react to it. You are in charge of how you feel. Don’t fall into the routine of letting happiness get to your head and failure to your heart.