A relaxing and serene everyday life, complete with restful nights, energetic mornings, and a sense of well-being and fulfilment that flows from moment to moment.
This beautiful vision is the kind of thing that many of us long for – and it’s also the kind of thing that many people explicitly envision for themselves after reaching retirement, or hitting some other milestone in their lives.
Although it’s questionable whether it’s actually possible to reach a point in your life where you are completely serene and positive all the time, there are certainly a wide variety of different habits and practices that you can implement today that can help you to have a much more serene experience of everyday life – and you don’t even have to wait to hit a certain point in your career, to retire, or to achieve a personal goal.
Here are a handful of habits and practices that can help you to enjoy a more serene experience of everyday life.
Implement systems to help account for unforeseen issues
A lot of the stress and uncertainty that we typically end up facing over the course of our everyday lives, is rooted in a sense of fear or concern about what the future may hold – and what steps we can take today in order to try to mitigate potential future issues.
While it’s not possible to perfectly predict and plan for every future eventuality, one great way of having a more serene everyday experience is to take steps to implement systems that can help to account for various unforeseen events and issues.
If you have a good home warranty, for example, that will grant you a lot more room to relax and step back, rather than feeling the same heightened sense of anxiety whenever you are going away for a vacation, and imagining something happening to your belongings.
Various other forms of insurance can also certainly help in this regard. Ultimately, you want to do what you can to create systems that help to make you a bit more prepared for potential future eventualities, so that you don’t have to be consciously preoccupied by them in the same way on a daily basis.
Spend less of your free time consuming information
Throughout all of human history up until the present day, the average person would have a relatively small amount of information coming away at any given point in their lives.
Mostly, they would be focused on happenings in their immediate surroundings; their town or village, or maybe their city. They would hear news occasionally through relatively roundabout means, and even in the case of highly dramatic events and social upheavals, there would be relatively little information to parse out, analyse, and incorporate, much of the time.
These days, the entire situation is completely transformed, and we are now bombarded by more information on a daily basis than anyone could have imagined even just a few years ago.
The average person today is confronted by scores of adverts ranging from billboards to brochures to spam emails and more, in addition to all sorts of national and global events presented by the news – and often with competing narratives being provided by different outlets.
On top of all that, social media means that we are all now highly aware of what our friends, relatives, and associates are doing or thinking at any given time (or at least, what they want to present to us).
Then, of course, there’s the fact that so much information is available on the web, with many of us spending significant portions of our days consuming facts and opinions on a wide range of different subjects, and trying to figure out what to make of it all.
As certain psychologists and public commentators have noted, all of this information overload can be deeply stressful, and can fuel an ongoing sense of tension and unease, as well as making it very difficult – if not impossible – for us to take a step back and relax.
While a lot of the information out there is potentially very helpful, a lot of it is also gratuitous. By spending less of your free time each day absorbing torrents of information from different sources (and on different topics) you may be much better able to take a step back, relax, and feel present in your own life as opposed to being totally distracted.
Base your day around habits and routines that help you to thrive
Certain routines and habits that you might engage in on a daily basis will tend to help you to thrive and feel your best, whereas others will tend to have a negative overall effect.
Taking steps to base your day around those habits and routines that help you to thrive can be a great way of allowing you to have a more serene experience of everyday life, particularly because these routines – once established – typically end up carrying their own momentum.
In his book, “The Power of Habit,” the writer Charles Duhigg talks about the idea of “keystone habits,” by which he means certain habits that cause a “cascade effect,” either by naturally promoting and supporting other positive habits in your life, or other negative ones.
An example of a keystone habit could be something like going to bed each night at a set time – which can then lead to waking up earlier and feeling more fresh, which could in turn lead to you being more in control of your temper during the day, and so on.
When structuring your daily habits and routines, looking for positive keystone habits to establish and to base things off can be a very helpful idea.
Stop trying to do too much – minimise your to-do list and focus on the essentials
Sometimes, life is naturally quite hectic and there are just a lot of things to do and focus on at any given moment.
At the same time, however, it’s also often the case that we create extra work for ourselves by simply trying to do too much, and to cram too many things onto our to-do lists.
One of the clearest ways of helping to create a more serene experience of everyday life for yourself, is to simply stop trying to do too much. Instead, shorten your to-do list, focus mainly on the essentials, and give yourself permission to not try to do dozens of different things that aren’t necessarily that important or fulfilling.
Do things each day that get you into a flow state, and that help to quiet your mind a bit
On an everyday basis, a significant portion of the stress and anxiety you are likely to feel will tend to come down to your thoughts, more than the actual events you are confronted by.
For example, maybe you’ve got a particular project that you need to work on and complete by a certain deadline, and you’re spending a lot of your time thinking about how frustrating, miserable, stressful, and difficult that project will be to work on. But then, when you actually get started on the project, you just settle into a routine and it turns out to be quite manageable.
Doing things each day to help to quiet your mind a bit, and to get you into a flow state where you feel highly immersed in what you’re doing, can work wonders when it comes to making your experience of everyday life more serene and positive.
For some people, a good example of such activity might be a daily yoga routine. For others, it might be regular walks in nature, or taking up painting.
What ways do you utilize to maintain a more serene life?
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