Have you found yourself in a bit of a rut – living your life day to day without any real purpose or direction? You are not alone, so many of us in this modern-day and age find ourselves pretty much going through the motions like we’re on autopilot. The fact that you realise this is happening gives you a distinct advantage over others who are completely unaware of their situation.
In the following post, we are going to look at how you can take control of your life and start living enjoying living it again. Not just today, but tomorrow and far into the future.
Before we start looking at the solutions, it’s important to address how you got to this point in the first place. A lot has to do with the way you think.
What Causes Distraction?
The human mind is always working, thinking, whether it’s about a dream, a thought, a memory, or something else. More often than not, it’s not anything particularly productive or useful.
A common problem is being stuck in the past and having regrets about things we did and didn’t do, the way we did things and things that have happened to us. On the other side of things, many of us get fixated on the future, worrying, stressing, and fearing what might be.
It’s Best to Live in the Present
When you are either too focused on worrying about the past or the future, you lose sight of what is really important – the present. That is where you are in the stream of time and that is really what you should be focusing on. Think of the past and future as being states of mind, they aren’t the reality you are facing right now.
Our minds are incredibly powerful, they can create anything they want when they want. That means both the good and the bad, the positive and the negative. Unfortunately, as humans, we have developed this tendency to concentrate too much on the negative and that has conditioned our minds to think more about all the bad things.
Which, we’re sure you’ll agree, is not the best way to live life.
How can you get any joy out of the life you are leading now if you are upset, disappointed, or depressed about things that happened in the past or things that may or may not even happen in the future?
You can’t. That’s why it’s important to take control of your life. To do that, you need to start living in the present and controlling what’s happening in your life right now.
This can be a scary prospect, but to help motivate you, let’s look at some of the major benefits that can come from living in the present.
More Productive
Firstly, you will be more productive, because you are focusing your mind and energy on what’s happening right now. You need to ask yourself “What is happening right now? How can I handle the situation or complete the task I have best?” This will help you to push forward and have success.
Peace of Mind
Another great benefit of living and controlling your life in the present is that you will gain a real sense of peace of mind. As you are not spending all your waking hours worrying about the past or the future, you have a real inner calmness.
The upshot of all of this is that you will then be able to:
- Exercise greater control over your thoughts
- Have a clearer picture of the feelings you are experiencing
- Avoid attaching yourself to every feeling you get, good or bad
- Accept the current situation you find yourself in
Living in the Now – How to Do it
No one can change the past, as it’s already happened, gone and for better or worse, you have moved on. Therefore, there’s no real reason for wasting time, energy and space in your mind and thoughts on things that have already happened. Everything that happens to us in life should be seen as an opportunity to grow, by learning from the experiences. This will help you to develop.
As humans, we like to think we have a good grasp of who we are and what we will become. However, as hard as we try, we can’t really predict the future or even dictate it, not to the extent many of us would like, anyway.
Instead, we need to start living in the now.
One great way to achieve this is to take on each task or challenge in our lives like it was the first time we were doing it.
Take, for example, you are travelling somewhere and trying to find an address. It’s somewhere new, so you have no clue how to get there. You start becoming focused and very aware of all your surroundings, where you are going, the turns you are taking and the streets you are travelling along.
As you focus on your end goal – your destination, you are carefully working out what the wrong streets are that you need to avoid and what the right streets are that you need to head along.
With this technique, you will notice, you are not just rushing blindly into the task without any real direction, as if you were on autopilot. You don’t know where you are going, but you know what you need to do to get there.
This is less stressful because you are not worrying about the past or the future, you are focusing on the present. When you take this approach with any task or situation in life, you will feel relaxed and satisfied when you complete the task or overcome the challenge.
Conclusion
Living in the present so that you can start finding joy in life is not easy to achieve. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work. However, it is worth the perseverance and dedication when you start to enjoy living life again.