How to Live Your Best Life
What type of life are you living?
Living our best life enables us to feel good about ourselves, leading to increased energy and reduced fatigue. This heightened state of being gives us greater productivity and a stronger sense of achievement. As a result, we experience lower stress levels, smile and laugh more, and foster positive brain activity. This cycle perpetuates a consistent feeling of wellness and vitality day after day.
Types of Living
For most Midlifers there are 3 types of living:
Survival – This level is characterised by simply getting through one day at a time, often due to health or financial issues, a traumatic event, or a major disruption to one’s usual daily routine. For some, this is an everyday struggle, while for others, it's a temporary challenge.
Living – The majority of people fall into this category, where they constantly navigate through life, work to sustain their lifestyle, fulfil all necessary responsibilities, and generally find enjoyment amidst occasional difficulties.
Alive (the ideal state we all aspire to) - This level involves loving life, feeling energetic, and being fully engaged in absorbing and enjoyable activities. Stress fades away, and time seems to fly by. While this state may be temporary for many, such as an amasing evening out or achieving a personal feat, some are fortunate enough to experience it regularly, waking up each day with excitement and a positive outlook. They just want to jump out of bed and get on with life because they feel so good and excited about what the day might bring.
"Embracing happiness and striving to be the best version of yourself brings a sense of truly feeling alive."
To live your best life you need to:
Focus solely on activities that bring you joy and happiness, engaging in at least one such activity daily.
Efficiently manage mundane tasks to create space in your day and mind for enjoyable pursuits.
Ensure you are not exhausted and have the energy to engage in activities that bring you joy.
The Good News: Midlifers can ‘Reset’ their lives every day
It’s acknowledged that life can be challenging at times for us all and for some people life can seem unfair. Dwelling on past mistakes or anticipating future challenges is a natural tendency, as humans often fixate on the negative aspects of life, but it's crucial to let go of negativity.
So my advice is, when you get up in the morning, take a moment to sit on the bed and tell yourself that yesterday's events, no matter how stressful or negative, do not define today. Even if nothing went right, or you weren’t the nicest person to your partner or family, it doesn’t matter. You can start again.
In your mind, press the ‘Reset’ button. Today is a new day and a new opportunity for you to start afresh and be positive. Set out your plans and goals, either for today or the future, and strive for happiness and to make yourself a better person and give yourself that amazing feeling of being ‘alive’.
Only Focus on what you enjoy
As Midlifers we know what we like and what we don’t like.
Living your best life is easy - only focus on the positive things you enjoy. Create habits and routines to live your best life and find the time to always do something you want to.
If you love doing yoga, work out when it best suits you and do it. If you decide it’s 6:00 in the evening, make sure everyone knows you will be doing yoga for 30 minutes every day at 6:00. Make it a routine.
Have routines for the rubbish chores
We all have house chores and family responsibilities, that’s life, but don’t make chores your focus. Get them done efficiently so you can then do what you enjoy afterwards.
Have simple routines for everything you need to do. This will help you become efficient with them. Don’t wait for everything to pile up around you so you are overwhelmed and then feel like you are never on top of life. Aim to get into a position where as soon as something needs doing, you do it straight away. This will give you such satisfaction and help you feel in total control of your life.
Keep life simple – Have a minimalist life
Tired and no energy!
When we are living our best life, we feel good about ourselves. This in turn gives us energy and we forget about feeling tired. Our productivity is high and we can achieve so much. We feel less stressed, smile and laugh more, which helps our brains pump positively around our bodies. All of this gives us a high and thus makes us feel good again the next day, and the next, and so on.
However, we are not going to achieve this level of living if we are not looking after ourselves.
Life is busy with running a home, working, having children etc. and it's easy to always feel tired and have no energy.
Thus, keeping yourself healthy by eating well, doing exercise, and getting a good sleep is so important. We all know this and help is available online if you're struggling.
The problem with feeling tired is we cannot be bothered to do exercise when we just want to sit and have some comfort food or a glass of wine.
But you have to make time for yourself. Even when you’re at a crazy busy time. After you have done it, you will feel so much better and when you start to get into a routine and do it regularly, it just becomes something you do automatically.
Remember, you are not aiming to look like a twenty-year-old version of yourself again, all bodies age, our skin wrinkles, and we have a few bits of loose flesh here and there, just aim to be the best version of yourself at the age you are. You are only trying to boost your own self-esteem, to give you the positive energy to live the life to want.
Some big wins for me are:
Non-alcoholic drinks – It's very easy to go over the amount of alcohol units recommended to drink each week. But it’s not good for you and will make you feel tired. So sometimes having a non-alcoholic, beer or gin instead, helps keep your units down to a reasonable level.
HIIT workouts – Even if you feel tired or only have a few minutes at home to spare, you can do a HITT workout. Go onto YouTube, find one you fancy and hit play. You can even get 4-minute workouts on @Tabata songs, so there is no excuse! If you do them regularly, at least 3 times a week, ideally 5, you will feel better about yourself in both your body and mind. Try to get into a routine to make it a habit, so it’s just something you do on autopilot.
Final thoughts
How to live your best life is totally up to you. It doesn’t matter where you start from, but if you really want to achieve something or to change how you live, set out a plan and follow it. Don’t wait until the kids leave, or you retire.
It might be a journey, but if you want to live your best life it's going to be worth it. Most importantly, enjoy the process of getting there. Remember you can press the ‘reset’ button whenever you want if it goes off course.
So why not try it when you wake up tomorrow?