Here are two scientifically proven techniques to beautify your life!
Sometimes you feel like you’re missing out on your life. Tormented by our daily life, tired, we stick to the bare minimum regarding our own well-being. When you struggle to regain control of your own life path, you need a helping hand. Here are two effective methods to find a fulfilled and happy life. Both propose to rewrite our history to add meaning to it!
It is essential to get started by rethinking our life purpose. To do this, there are a few simple questions to always keep in mind: What do you want to accomplish in your life? Are you aligned with your values, your dreams? These objectives can concern areas such as romantic relationships, work, studies, health or leisure activities… It is high time to return to a full and fulfilled life.
The Life crafting, or the art of customizing your life
Life crafting : this expression is a hit on social networks. Behind this term hides a real philosophy which consists of finding the path of life that suits us through a few adjustments. THE life craftingis to embark on a personal development project aimed at finding the right positioning to live a more authentic and joyful life. This generally requires exploring one’s personal values, identifying interests that are meaningful to us, cultivating caring relationships, in short, regaining the courage to be oneself and self-confidence.
An article from Psychology Today reveals two ways to easily embark on such a life project. It is recommended to start with a list of key values: we each have favorite values, which particularly resonate with us. Thinking about what makes these values special and how we give them a central place in our daily lives can help us adjust our actions.
How to proceed with this self-customization?
By returning to our favorite values, we can move in the right direction in every area of our daily life. Let’s start by reevaluating our personal interests: Sometimes we make activities or choices for the wrong reasons. To find out, ask yourself this question: Are any of my daily activities motivated by intrinsic interest? Intrinsically motivated activities are those that are meaningful and enjoyable in their own right, as opposed to those performed solely under pressure or for external reward. Trying to integrate more intrinsically rewarding activities into our daily lives allows us to feel totally aligned with our values.
The same goes for our social relationships. THE life crafting involves taking a step back from our friendships and knowing how to improve or take care of our most important relationships. We can have different types of friends but asking ourselves the right questions allows us not to neglect the most important ones in our eyes. It may also happen that our actions do not have the right social impact. Thinking about the different ways in which our behavior, our attitudes, influence the happiness and well-being of others can also help us make some adjustments. So it’s all about direction: by taking the time to think about our life goals, we can easily change certain things and achieve a life filled with meaning for us.
Become the hero of your own story
In the same way, this second method allows you to beautify your life through an exercise full of meaning: It involves rewriting the scenario of your life to make a beautiful story that resembles us. In the media Psychology Todaywe find the analysis of a recent study carried out by two scientists on the effects of the perception of oneself as a main character, as opposed to a secondary character. Published in the Journal of Research in Personalitythis in-depth analysis reveals that people who have the feeling of being the main character in their life are more won over by the feeling of well-being, autonomy, competence and belonging.
Through several experiments, asking, for example, their participants to remember situations in which they felt like the hero of their life, the researchers have in fact identified that the position of the main character ensures increased well-being, a greater satisfaction of psychological needs, but also a better capacity to adapt action in the pursuit of its objectives. Thus, seeing oneself as a main character, capable of controlling external events through one’s actions and decisions, positively influences well-being and happiness; while perceiving oneself as a secondary character, at the mercy of external events or others, leads to a feeling of incompetence and the inability to satisfy one’s own psychological needs.
How to become the main character in your life again?
Based on this study, here is how to find this central place in your life. All you have to do is project yourself into a previously experienced moment where you felt like some kind of hero. Think about this moment and relive the context: it could be a meeting where you solved a problem, a job interview where you felt excellent and which led you to success, the organization of a satisfactory event for you like a surprise birthday… Any kind of situation can lead you to this feeling of full life.
By remembering this moment, relive the pride, the fulfillment that it gave you. Once you have refilled this feeling, keep it for a while, so as to regain possession of your daily life on the same basis. You will need to repeat the exercise as often as possible so that it can act as a projection and influence your next actions and reactions. Little by little, you will be able to get used to becoming the hero of your story again, to daring to take action in your daily life and feeling fully alive!