The #1 Thing Holding You Back From Happiness

“There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.”

— Albert Einstein

My worst moments of anxiety seep into my thinking like an undetectable gas leak. By the time I'm aware of what's going on, I already feel nauseous and want to jump out of my skin. It skyrockets as I get closer to bed because I know there's no avoiding it in the darkness. I'll be forced to confront the sobering reality that my life feels out of control. That was until I learned how to feel happier — it’s a choice that you make and a plan that you follow.

My car doesn't get much action these days. The mechanic must be used to hearing creaky sounding cars as he shares that I need an alignment. He points out that my tires are starting to wear on the inside. The car only gets out a couple of times a month so I didn't even notice. He said it doesn't take much to become dangerous if we ignore the wear and tear.

And here's where so many of us find ourselves in trouble — we don't have someone to point out when we need an alignment change in our lives.

You'll keep driving around, wearing out your tires and wonder why your gas mileage is dropping and why it feels like you're driving a dump truck. You'll pass it off as just another thing you don't have time for right now. But much like anything you ignore in life, the signal only gets louder.

One day you'll be ripping down the highway when you hear a shotgun explosion tear your tire apart. If you're lucky, you'll be able to white-knuckle the steering wheel to safety. The problem you said you'd get around to fixing "someday" has now become a reality you can't ignore.

You'd love to call this a freak accident. You'd love to blame it on being just your luck. You'd love to say it must be a sign that the world is conspiring against you. Except you know this could have been avoided if you had just listened and got an alignment adjustment.

That anxiety you're feeling is like an overloaded car where you see the hubcaps about to pop off.

There's the multiple projects you're juggling, there's the family that is counting on you, the relationship that feels at a boiling point, the side hustle you can't keep up with, the uncertain future for your finances, the day that feels like a grind as you go through the motions like a robot, the reality that you can't even remember the last time you had fun, the emotional rollercoaster that is life and oh, a fucking pandemic.

If you have any hopes of moving forward in the direction of a happier, healthier, more fulfilling life, you can't ignore alignment issues – whether it's stress, you're sleeping like shit, your anxiety is pulsing or even if you feel lost about what your next steps should be. 

Pushing on without fixing what's not working means you'll keep getting extra servings of what you don't want in your life.

An alignment for a car sounds straight forward. You want the wheels balanced so they give you a smooth ride. If your tires aren't making solid contact with the road, you're going to get friction and find yourself replacing tires when you shouldn't have to. A car won't get very far if each wheel is angled in a different direction.

Your mind won't feel at ease unless you have the confidence that your car is driving in the direction you're aiming. In the same way that when you have alignment with everything you're doing, it gives you peace of mind and saves you from waking up in a fog.

You're probably wondering how to align the life you want with what you do every day?

You need to learn how to do your own tune-ups if you want to stay aligned with what's most important. This exercise will take you out of reactive mode when it comes to dealing with the stressors in your life. Instead, you'll have a preventative plan that keeps you running with a reliable vehicle that's ready for adventure.

The first step to doing your own tune-up is clarity in the ten areas of life. I highly recommend going back and reading Is Happiness A Choice? before you start this exercise. That article includes prompts to help you breathe life into each of these areas. You want a couple of sentences that give you clear direction and help guide your decisions each day.

1. Health

2. Family

3. Friends

4. Relationship

5. Mission/Career/Business

6. Finances

7. Adventure

8. Hobby

9. Spirituality

10. Emotion

E.g., Health - Nothing I want to accomplish in life is possible without making my health a priority. It's the lifeblood to my energy and keeps my mental health manageable without medication. My bare minimum is 3 fifteen minute walks a day. My ideal week is 2-3 hour-long bike rides, 5 ten minute HIIT workouts and 3 daily half-hour walks. I meal plan each week using the app MealLime so all my dinners and lunches are taken care of in less than five minutes. We're flexitarians (eat mainly vegetarian, but will still eat meat). My aim is to meditate 3-5 times a week. I will drink a minimum of 3 litres of water a day. My aim is to get at least 7.5 hours of sleep a night. If my mind is racing and I struggle to stay asleep, it's usually a sign that I'm not taking enough downtime.

Step two is to look at what you wrote for each of these areas and take a moment to reflect. 

Then go down the list and ask yourself the following question for each area.

On a scale of 1-10, how aligned do you feel with what you wrote?

Step three is to tally up your score. 

What did you get out of 100?

The only person to compare yourself to is who you were yesterday.

This exercise isn't about getting a huge score for bragging rights. It's about giving you clarity on why you feel the way you do. It tells you which areas of your life you need to focus on based on what you said was important.

Whenever I feel overwhelmed, this exercise is the antidote. Every Sunday I sit down for ten minutes and do a check-in to see where I'm at. It's like doing a pit stop to make sure your fluids are topped up, and you're not driving on any wobbly wheels.

This ritual has changed my life. I no longer end up stuck in a ditch because a tire blew out. I realized that it was impossible to move towards the life I want if I didn't start taking care of the vehicle that was going to get me there. You have a lot of moving parts that need to work in unison. The mind, body and spirit are capable of incredible things when they have a healthy relationship with each other.

This is why it's so damn useful to do this exercise with a partner. You can help each other stay aligned and on track. It's like having a radar detector to tell you that you're going too fast, and you're about to get pinched if you don't slow down.

Do these ten areas of life matter to you? You don't need to prove it to me, but you do need to prove it to yourself.

No one can thrive by only taking care of one or two areas. It's like a five-year-old who would be all too happy to crush birthday cake and Cheetos all day long. You can have all the "success" in the world but feel unfulfilled. This feeling of failure overshadows any success because it’s the equivalent of junk food when it's the only thing you consume.

Social psychologist Erich Fromm writes, this is because “man misses the only satisfaction that can give him real happiness—the experience of the activity in the present moment—and chases after a phantom that leaves him disappointed as soon as he believes he has caught it—the illusory happiness called success.”

Life is fucking hard. I've been haunted by nightmares where I wanted my life to end. I was trapped in darkness, except I was wide awake. I chased things that made me feel alive but ate my soul like a starving dog in search of scraps. Using drugs, booze and food is a shitty escape plan for your problems. All they did was amplify everything I hated about myself. It took me a long time to change my relationship with how I treated vices that I used as an escape hatch from reality.

Struggling with mental health can often feel like you're strapped into a rollercoaster you can't get off of. Your life gets tossed around like a rag doll. The lack of control swallows you up like a sinkhole after an earthquake. It tricks you into thinking you've lost the power to direct your life.

This. Ends. Now.

Remember the three rules of happiness from last week? Something to do, something to love and something to hope for.

You started with something to do. You brought the ten areas to life with words that mean something to you. You defined success by what gives you a rich and fulfilling life. This is personal power because it gives you direction for your life and intention for your day.

There is no trick to being happy. Happiness is a choice that you make and a plan that you follow. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it.

Which is why today you gave yourself the gift of awareness.

A simple exercise like scaling yourself on a 1-10 in each area, and tallying up your total, gives you a baseline for happiness. It lets you live your best life because you know exactly what needs your attention to move closer to the life you want.

Something to love comes from living a life aligned with what you value — prioritizing above all else the things that you said were important. Life will give us challenges that feel impossible to overcome. But it's in these moments, as author Carlos Castaneda reminds us, "We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”