Staying Mindful Is Less Stressful

As people are constantly on the go, lots of things can be triggers for stress. The holidays are an excellent time to release some of it, but if you just take the time to constantly be remove stress-inducing problems daily, your life could be a lot better.

How can we do that?

By learning from the ancient philosophers of course! I picked up a few books the year before last, all about stoicism. Admittedly, they weren’t super exciting, and I can’t say I could ever be a full on stoic philosopher. However, I did take away one major thing that has drastically improved my own life. That is the ability to separate the things we can control from the things we cannot, or:

“We have the power to hold no opinion about a thing and to not let it upset our state of mind—for things have no natural power to shape our judgments.”- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.52

Stoicism is often associated with stone-cold, emotionless people. That is not what I’m suggesting you become. Actually, the stoics were probably the happiest people to have lived. And that’s what I want you to become: Happier.

So how do we become happier? It’s simple! Mindfulness. It is the ability to check your thoughts and feelings by asking whether something is in your control or not, and letting go of negativity towards what isn’t and fixing what is in your control. On a smaller scale, why should you get upset over someone posting a somewhat offensive picture on Facebook when in the end you won’t get them to take it down, and harping about it won’t get you any farther in life. A larger scale example could be that you shouldn’t get upset because someone else got a promotion over you. You should realize it was an outcome of many different factors, and the only factor you probably could control was how hard you worked to prove your worth to the committee. Most of that situation is outside of your control.

Let's get more serious.

Pushing that example further, why do you care about that promotion in the first place? Do you even like the current job you have? You should be happy doing the job you have. If you’re unhappy with the job you have, you’ve got to acknowledge that you are in control of whether you stick with that crap job, or quit and pursue what you want actually want to do.

The problem with the majority of the society we live in is that we don’t take the time to realize why we actually do things. Or we have the wrong why for doing something, and then it frustrates us. Why should you pretend to care if you don’t? It’s not getting you anywhere other than sad.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a motivational speaker. His content is very to the point and he cuts the crap to speak the truth. Why I subscribe to him so much is because what he preaches every day is that happiness is what you should be living for. He doesn’t explicitly say the word mindfulness, but he comes pretty close. He says you only get to happiness by being self-aware. You get happiness by realizing you don’t actually care about the latest celebrity gossip. You get happiness by doing what you actually want to do.

The way I approach life, and you should too, is that it doesn’t matter what you do, you’re going to die. Now I’d rather be speaking my last words as: “Damn, I had a blast on that adventure.” As opposed to: “I wish I’d spent less time commenting on Facebook posts because they annoyed me, ‘cause with that time I could have been creating a whole new social media platform that’s all about positivity.” Spend your life working towards what you love, and be happy doing it.

In your everyday there are easily hundreds of tiny things we give attention to. Having the power to shift your focus from what’s distracting you and giving you no real benefit to your life is, well, life-changing. It can be as big as a job promotion or as small as a meme, but controlling your focus to what actually pertains to your life is crucial to self-improvement. The only way to get happiness is by doing what makes you happy. So be mindful of the big and small things you do, and ask yourself why you do them.

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