You’re reading 7 Philosophies to Move You in The Right Direction, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

It’s easy to wonder if you’re going to get everything you want out of life. Perhaps you want the ideal income, the recognition you deserve, or else. But instead of focusing on what you want, you can experience far more happiness by cultivating the right philosophies.

1. Stay in Touch With your Family

We don’t choose our parents, or our brothers and sisters. But if you’re lucky enough to have a family, let that love flow into your life regularly. They’re not going to be here forever, so reconnect in some small way if it’s been awhile since you last spoke. Make it a routine to keep in touch.

Your family may not be perfect, but maintaining your connection with some of, or all of your family will give you the gift of a greater sense of belonging. If there’s anything you can do to heal the past, be patient — and do your best to move through it.

They’ll be thankful for it. And so will you.

2. Meet Friends Every Week

Based on the longest study on happiness by a group of Harvard researchers, the major finding was that the quality of your relationships — determine the quality of your happiness.

And yet, it’s so easy to let your social life slide down into a small corner of your life. But by continually nurturing it, you’ll be taking care of one the most important parts of your happiness. According to positive psychology, that means you’re likelier to move in the right direction in all the other areas of your life too.

Strong relationships have been shown in numerous studies, to be the strongest predictors of life satisfaction. When you express yourself with a couple of different friends every week (something so simple), you give yourself the best chance of being happy. Life then doesn’t seem like it’s all about the pursuit, but more like an experience, you share in common with everyone else.

3. Laugh Every Day

Some of us live under the idea that we need to be serious to achieve big things. Based on a whole library of research documented by Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, people who laugh more are happier, and also counter-intuitively likelier to achieve more. As children, we used to laugh hundreds of times per day. As adults, that number gets whittled down significantly.

Humour is our primordial philosophy, but we only cultivate it through being mindful of the looking-glass we navigate our lives with. Dr Wayne Dyer once famously said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”.

If you’re usually feeling tense and pressured because of the way you look at life, your character is going to eventually, permanently reflect that. But if you’re usually feeling amused, despite whatever’s going on, you’ll help shape your long-term character and life for more happiness.

4. Do what you Love Daily

Since your whole life will always be live within the confines of a single day, you do what you can to enjoy each one. While you may have goals, you realize that you only move closer towards them by fully embracing your present.

Thomas Carlyle once said, “Our main business not to see what lies at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.” In the myriad responsibilities of work and life, you realize it’s important to keep your sense of play.

Sometimes doing what you love is a struggle. Sometimes you feel like procrastinating. But you still do your best make the time for what you love each day. Your love could be anything from practicing an instrument, drawing, writing, painting, playing basketball, reading, or else.

5. Make Yourself Feel Good Each Morning

Your daily morning routine is the foundation for your life. If you start off each day with an arbitrary script, then you’re going to get random results. And while it’s good to take chances in life, gambling on being intentional with your life isn’t a chance you take.

So, start your day by consistently doing whatever it is that makes you feel good; making it likelier you’ll make good things happen.

With a morning routine, you cultivate the mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional areas of your life. You head into your day already feeling fulfilled. Whether you read, exercise, journal, meditate, take a cold shower, or else — a sign that you’re moving in the right direction is that you know exactly what puts you in peak mental and physical state each day.

6. Travel to Different Countries Every Year

While life may partly be about the hustle, it’s also about having a holistic life that makes you feel energized to be the best person you can be. Going abroad allows you to come back home renewed, ready to fire on all cylinders. When you look back on your time on this planet, you’ll savour every opportunity you took to push yourself out into different realms.

Traveling is about much more than taking the time to have some fun and relax. It’s about going on adventures that disconnect you from your existing culture — so that you see yourself with a little more clarity.

It’s about enriching your life, with unique, memorable experiences.

7. Realize That Everyone is your Teacher

Everyone you meet knows something you don’t. Every person you come across is a potential teacher or mentor. Since you know this truth, you’re more open to building new growth based relationships. But only some people can offer you advice and wisdom that’s truly life changing — so you look for people wiser than you in the right places.

Marcus Aurelius, the famous Roman Emperor, in his book, Meditations wrote: “the span we live is small — small as the corner of the earth in which we live it.” To make your view of the world clearer, and life larger, all you need to do is to: be open, ask the right questions, and continually test out new ideas. You need to reach out to potential teachers, as you look for the gems in what they share with you.

With time and application, the different components of your life will start clicking into place.

My Last Words

If you’re a creative and interested in learning how to improve the way you live your week, read my free book on Spiritual Productivity.

• You’ll learn about how to split up your day into four chunks, so you worry less about external influences.
• You’ll discover the small hacks that will take your creative work on your PC to the next level.
• And much more…

 Samy Felice is a writer who brings meaning to words. His Free Book explores ways people can make success easier. 

You’ve read 7 Philosophies to Move You in The Right Direction, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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You’re reading This Is How Childhood Bullying Affects Your Adult Life, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Bullying is a serious problem and it’s effects are going to be seen in a couple of decades, as today’s kids will grow into adults, bearing the scars. There are people who still try to find excuses for this behavior, saying that kids will be kids and so on, but the reality is childhood bullying does leave a mark on the adult to be, which is not a pretty picture.

From cyberbullying to gang stalking, there are many forms of bullying out there and all of them have consequences for the traumatized child. Parents can try to protect their kids from this phenomenon, as you can yet they can prevent bullying completely .

If we look at the numbers, we can see that bullying is more frequent than one would think: up to 28% of all US students were bullyed in school. The victims are usually told to toughen up and get over it, but bullying does leave a mark on the future adult, being more than a funny rite of passage.

Victims of bullying are prone to developing both anxiety and depression.

A study conducted in 2013 proved something already suspected by all the bullyed people: the phenomenon increases your risk of developing depression and anxiety. Victims of bullying are at high risk of developing mental disorders as adults, while the bullies are at high risk of developing antisocial personality disorders.

The  victim can suffer from toxic stress

Harvard University researches showed that bullying is one of the causes of toxic stress in kids. Other causes are violence, poverty and a parent’s mental illness, which shows just how severe bullying can be. Toxic stress has a huge negative impact on the child and when it’s not addressed properly, it can leave a mark on the future adult, such as high risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and developmental delays.

Bullying changes the brain’s structure

Bullying has clear physical effects on a teen’s brain structure, according to a study conducted at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles and the University of Southern California.

In boys, the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that deals with fear and anxiety, becomes enlarged in victims of bullying. Girls, on the other hand, experience a thinning of the temporal and prefrontal cortexes, which control the social behavior and emotional reactions.

Both of these changes are linked to anxiety in adults and dangerous behavior.

Victims of bullying are more likely to smoke

If you are a smoker, your behavior could be traced back to childhood bullying, according to a study from King’s College London. The same study found that former victims of bullying experienced lower levels of satisfaction, had higher risk of dropping out of college and they are socially isolated.

Bullying can alter your DNA

When you are stressed, the body releases cortisol in the bloodstream, which is one of the stress hormones that triggers the stress reactions of the body. Bullying makes your body produce less and less cortisol, leading to a change in the genes that control the serotonin (happiness hormone) production. In other words, bullying makes your brain prone to depression.

All in one, bullying is not a child’s game, as it can lead to severe consequences for the future adult.

You’ve read This Is How Childhood Bullying Affects Your Adult Life, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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You’re reading How To Deal With Rejection, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

I was just denied entry into another much anticipated exhibit – very last minute, completely unexpected. I spent all this time advertising it through various media, as well as with my friends and current clients. Now that it isn’t happening, I was at a complete loss as to how to proceed. Rejection is terrible. So I rushed to the studio to medicate myself, to pour my negative energy into a piece that has long held my thoughts. Here’s what went through my head as I was processing the very last stages of its completion. Here’s how the process helped me heal.

It’s a stage when topography no longer matters. It’s when I can simply revel in the color relationships, in contrast building, in texture nuances. I want to soar, to be free as a bird, to feel like a teenager overseas discovering new worlds. I want absolute freedom. But there’s always something holding me back, something gravitational that does not let this ecstasy to fully play out. I need an anchor, a reference to reality, a thread to hold onto. It’s an ultimate struggle. Part of me wants to violently slash the canvas with my palette knife, create energy and raw emotion. Another part really wants to look back on the watercolor sketch and keep referencing it, keep to a plan.

Maybe I’ll always be stuck in this paradox. How do I stay true to myself, yet operate fully in this world? Perhaps it’s what my work is about – the push and pull of a struggle between an inner reality vs the outside world? It could be that it’ll never turn abstract because that is just not me. It’ll always hover over a precipice of a gorgeous cliff. This might not get me anywhere, but you can’t jump over your head, can you?

Maybe people will at some point understand this struggle being depicted in my work. Perhaps they never will. But that’s not what it’s all about. It’s about me keeping up a good fight, navigating this course called life with the most dignity I can muster, keeping sane on my tightrope. To view some of my artwork and process videos, feel free to browse to http://ift.tt/2tbPsSp

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