How To Find Joy in Your Life During Tough Times

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Do you feel mentally unstable and irritated? Even the small mistakes you make get you all hyper and frustrated?

Have you lost happiness in life? It happens with everyone, so here’s an article to help you tackle this problem and bring joy and happiness in your life.

It’s a fact that if you’re happy and your moods are all lifted, you can perform better in whatever it is you do to achieve your goals. 

You work so hard every day but seem to find no joy in your life? Life can get quite frustrating and hectic especially if you do the same things every day for months or even years. You lose all happiness, you forget what a smile is and things get pretty monotonous. 

Read the article and start making these changes in your life, I’m sure the missing joy behind the red curtains will come out all happy and enthusiastic. 

Joy can be harnessed in really simple ways so here are 20 ways you can use to start bringing joy in your life.

How To Find Joy in Your Life During Tough Times

1. Learn to Live Alone

Are you a person who always seeks attention? Who always wants to be around someone? Always! Even when you plan on going for an evening walk, you want a person otherwise you won’t go. Only you can bring joy to yourself, not your neighbor or your best friends. They give temporary happiness but that’s it!

If you’re this person, you will find joy when there are people around you, when nobody is with you – trying to find happiness will be tough, practically impossible as you’ve always been around one person at least. 

The only way you’re ever going to find joy, peace, and happiness is if you learn to be happy all alone. How to find joy all alone? – Read a book (Something that interests you), or learn to cook or learn to sing. 

Go for a walk all alone and just look around, there are so many people around you, the sky, the green trees are so amazing. Do this and you’ll slowly learn to live alone.

2. Live in the Present

Chris is always trying to achieve success, he dreams all day about being a billionaire in 10 years. Leandra keeps thinking about her childhood friends and how they don’t talk to her anymore. 

You see the mistake Chris and Leandra are doing? They are thinking about their future and their past, doing so they aren’t living the present and making the most of the current situation. 

Chris dreams all day about getting rich instead of doing the hard work to get rich and Leandra is mourning about losing her old friends whereas she should either mend things with them or make new friends who appreciate her presence. 

You can think of the future or the past, just don’t overdo it; learn what you can from it and get working on the Now. Now is what you have, that’s all you have!

3. Indulge in Lame Things (Get The Inner Child Screaming)

As we get older, we tend to act more mature and hide our inner kiddo feelings. It’s important to be mature and to act like one but sometimes you need a break from all this Mature Being. 

You need to go out there and act like a fool, do dumb things, go crazy and start acting like a maniac – A little too far? Of course, do it with caution and don’t hurt others. Haven’t been to a sleepover in a long time and danced till the sunrises, do it now. 

As a kid, you always rolled over on grass for hours? Now’s the time to do it but make sure you don’t cause havoc or any disturbance to people around you. Whatever it is that makes you think – This is so lame, I’m not a 10-year-old kid anymore, It was fun though. Yea go ahead do it (not all the time).

4. Declutter Everything Unimportant 

Why declutter? There are a lot of benefits to decluttering, we’re not going to be discussing that. I’ll give you my take on the matter. Every day I used to spend at least 15 minutes trying to figure out what to wear to college or to meet my friends. 

It was always time-consuming and a complete waste of time. One day my mom told me to stack my clothes properly (so that they look neat) and I realized that I didn’t wear 40% of my clothes in a month or two and wore the same clothes again and again and yet wasted so much time on deciding what to wear. 

That’s when I saw the video by Matt D’Avella on How he wore the same t-shirt every day for 3 years. Can you believe it? So I started decluttering and now I wear lesser clothes.

5. Do a Fearful Task

When was the last time you took a leap of faith not knowing what the outcome might be, all afraid and tensed but at the same time excited and pumped? Yea, it’s scary but it’s fun. 

The feeling of joy that comes knowing you could have messed up pretty bad but didn’t makes you feel awesome, doesn’t it! 

This task will be scary at first, you’ll get all tense up before you go (if you go) but once you get started, it’s the best feeling, you’re happy which makes people around you happy and joy levels certainly crash the roof. Every time you push through fear, you learn something about yourself that you didn’t know before. 

6. Keep your Spidey Sense ON

Taste, sight, smell, touch, and sound are your five primary human senses. To have a fulfilled life, you need to use all these senses to the max just like our friendly neighborhood spiderman. 

Right from seeing the sunset to eating a double chocolate brownie cake, our senses are spiked and our joy levels are beyond normal levels. 

So an easy way to ‘Joy Up’ your life is by eating that brownie or touching a new gadget to seeing Spiderman on an 8k TV if it satisfies you, it calms you down, here’s your joy in all its essence.

7. Find Joy in the Little Things

The best moments in life are the little things you do or someone does to you in a day. When we stress too much about the future, we likely forget about the little things we have now at this moment with us, our ignorance might take those things away from us too (if we don’t appreciate it enough). 

These little things can be easily overlooked but don’t let that happen, appreciate it and you’ll see the rewards you receive. It can be as little as a flower blossom or a good morning text from your long-lost friend. Being aware, finding these little moments, and appreciating them can bring joy to your life.

8. Start Deep Thinking

Are you always on the go? From Point A to Point B to Point C, from one meeting to another, you never stop – while this is good, it has negative effects too as your health gets affected, your stress levels increase, and so on. 

All this sucks out the joy in your life. So take some time of the day, it can be the first thing in the morning or the last thing you do at night or even in the middle of the day (if possible), try sitting in a quiet place and thinking. 

What to think about? Anything except work or something that stresses you out. You can think about your surroundings or your life or just don’t think about anything – just look. This is an effective way to break your daily hectic life and cools you down. 

9. Stop Socializing on Social Media

Do you practice Social Media breaks every day? It’s something you need to start right now. Social media does an extremely good job at ensuring the person using it does not be productive (unless your work is related to social media). 

Seeing other people’s stories and posts and tweets can demotivate you in a flash. What a person shows on social media is not the true identity of that person. Have you ever seen your friend putting a sad photo in their post or stories? 

That’s because no one likes to be vulnerable, everyone wants to show their best face on social media. This affects the ones who want to achieve success in life – like you and me!

10. Jumble your Routine

Do you think your life is like a rat race running in circles doing the same thing, again and again, every single day! Even the smallest problems seem so difficult. Wow that’s irritating, isn’t it? 

A quick fix is to mix up your routine; if you used to drive by car, try public transportation, if you used to head to the gym in the evening, try mornings now. 

Jumble up your routine and you’ll see the rat race breaking up, monotony vanishing, and new things popping up. It can be tougher than the previous routine but it won’t be boring and stagnant like before. Try it out.

11. Treats are a Must

Eat the cheesy pizza, buy that hoodie, those shoes too, and get a massage. All the things you feel like spending your money on every day, do it once in a while. 

But that doesn’t mean spend all you can, budget well and keep a fixed amount to spend on such things each month. That way you don’t waste a fortune and still enjoy it. 

This works best when you’re extremely upset and frustrated – go and spend some money to cool you down. It’s worth every penny!

12. Help The Ones That Need It The Most

Volunteering can boost your joy levels fast. Spend some time in the week to help those people that need it the most. It doesn’t have to be monetary, you can also teach or donate old clothes. 

Get creative and start helping others. You learn that you aren’t the only one with problems, everyone has problems and everyone needs help. By helping them, you’re making their life easier and that will bring joy in your life.

13. Song It Out

Release those nasty emotions by playing your favorite songs. Repeat them if that makes you happier. 

Songs are considered the best way to relax and to calm down instantly. Are you a person who likes soft songs or loud songs, do you like to dance on the beats or sing it in your head or both? 

Relax your mind and body by singing, dancing, and screaming on top of your voice. This can get you tired but will also reduce tension and bring joy.

14. Give 15 Minutes For Exercise

You don’t need to exercise for hours just to have a Greek god-like body. Even 15 minutes can benefit you a lot. 

The great thing about exercising is that you can see immediate benefits, not in physical terms but in emotional terms. 

Your body will be more active, your brain will want you to be more productive, you’ll be more confident, the list is endless but your time is not.

Don’t wait for New Year to start working out, today is a good day and I’m sure 15 minutes (at least) is something you can easily dedicate towards a more productive you.

15. Prohibit Indoor Walking

Are you friends with Nature yet? I know I am. He’s a great friend, he helps me to reduce my anger, control stress, and learn to talk to my inner self. 

Yea, with the help of nature, I talk to my inner self and it’s soothing I must say. I suggest 2 days a week, 1 hour or 3 days a week 30 minutes should be sufficient. 

You can enhance this by going for treks and camps with your friends, another great way to detox yourself. 

By being friends with Nature, you’re opening new doors in your life. Always walk outdoors not indoors.

16. Laugh at that Old You

Do You remember the mistake you made 5 years ago? Wasn’t that dumb? But at that time it made sense right! 

You don’t need to be disheartened by the fact that you committed a mistake long ago. Instead, look at those old mistakes and laugh at them. 

I laugh at myself all the time. I’ve done so many dumb things that I wish I never did but I can’t change the past and I definitely don’t want to be sad about it, so I laugh, and its fun. 

Do you laugh at your old mishaps too? If you don’t, just try it. I’m sure you won’t regret the expressions on your face.

17. Groom Yourself (Change Your Entire Makeover) 

An effective strategy to combat sadness is to completely change the way you look. I suggest you start with a haircut, do a haircut you wouldn’t normally do. 

Then try mix-matching your clothes, wear new combinations, this will be fun, a bit weird depending on how crazy you get in the makeover process, but it will be interesting. 

Groom yourself well, cut your nails, comb your hair, polish your shoes. When you look sharp, you feel sharp which is an extremely good way to find joy in your life, isn’t it!

18. Gift Someone Something

Do you feel delighted when someone gives you a gift, out of the blue? Of course, you do! 

Just like you feel awesome getting a gift, make the other person feel awesome too, doing that will make the person happy but will also make you happy. 

It’s a known fact that seeing others happy in turn makes us happy. Don’t give to others if you don’t want to be happy! 

And a gift doesn’t need to be an expensive item as such. It can be as simple as a handmade card. 

19. Always Start With Why

This point doesn’t need to be explained too much. 

I’m sure you’ve heard of Simon Sinek, the author of Start With Why which is the perfect book for you to understand your Why in life. 

This book is a ‘Have to Read the Book’. It’s packed with so much information that I’m sure Simon Sinek will do a better job explaining. 

Purchase Start With Why by Simon Sinek

20. Friends & Chill > Netflix & Chill

If you’re thinking I’m talking about the TV series F.R.I.E.N.D.S, you’re so wrong. I am trying to say that meeting your friends and hanging out with them, spending some time at the park or someone’s house or the movies is so much better than watching Netflix all alone.

Meet up once a week for an hour with your friends, talk about your week, ups and downs, old memories. It’s the perfect way to find joy in your life.

How Do You Find Joy In Everyday Life?

It all starts with being more aware of enjoying life one small moment at a time. 

You need to learn to cherish the bad moments too as they teach you how to be a better version of yourself. Be humble, kind towards others and you’ll receive the same. 

Stop worrying about everything and start focusing on getting work done. Most often we focus on our problems and that’s all we do.

What we need to do is be more productive and get work done. That’s the only way to put an end to sorrows and be happy in the long run. 

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