Super Simple Lists for a Happier Life

 

Lists can change your happiness, change your thoughts and positively affect your behaviors …

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer “ William S. Burroughs

A list of questions for your mind. To prompt your mind to answer questions for you, you need to be asking it questions. Create a list of questions for your mind to be working on in the background. Your questions could be ‘how do I improve communications with my partner?’ or ‘how can I make self-care easy and enjoyable?”

There is something magical about a night’s sleep. Your mind is working for you while you sleep. So asking yourself a question before you go to sleep is the best way to get it working in the background. Go to your list of questions before you sleep. Pick a question. You might even want to look up information related to that question and really give your brain some material to work with and then sleep on that question.

Don’t expect an immediate answer. You might wake up the next morning with a serious answer to your question or it might come to you next week when you’re taking a long drive or the day after when you’re taking a long shower. It’s important to let your mind relax with the question and make sure that you have a list of questions in the first place.

You might want to store this list at your bedside table so it’s easy access at night. You could also store it next to your daily planner if you’re someone who does daily planning at night.

Questions to help you reframe your thoughts. There is a quote that says, ‘ if you have problems, change their names to challenges and find solutions’. That is a good example of a reframe. It’s just a better way to look at things.

There are lot of commonly known ‘reframes’:

• problems = challenges
• nervousness = excitement
• failures = learning.

But sometimes you need to dig for an alternative reframe that really works for you in whatever circumstance you’re going through.

To help you reframe your thinking, create a list of reframe questions that help you to come up with a bunch of reframes until you come up with one that feels right.

You can take your questions and ask yourself the following:

• How would a 7 year old look at this situation?
• How would someone who really enjoys being in this situation look at it?
• What would you be missing out on if you didn’t have this situation in your life?
• What advice would you give to someone else who is going through this situation?
• How would a person that you love or a person that you admire reframe this situation in their mind?

Having a list of questions like this handy is helpful for whenever you have a problem in your life and you have a really negative framing of it and really need to reshuffle the way that you look at it.

Store this list somewhere easy to access, such as on your phone where you can quickly find it with a click of a button every time your are struggling with a negative mindset or frame.

Create a list of topics to journal on. Journaling is a tool that can help you to clarify your thinking and help you process your emotions. There are many benefits if you do it the right way. A lot of people sit down to journal but can’t think of what to journal on. Although there may be many things to think on more, they can’t just bring anything to mind.

One way is to jot down on your phone or on a piece of paper as things come up during the day. You can journal on routines or habits that haven’t been working for you. You might want to jot down some things that you want to dive deeper into.

A list of things to do in your free time (that aren’t Netflix or social media). This is a list that you can refer to when you get home from work or on weekends. Or whenever you happen to have free time. You can even use it when you have a break from work. If you work from home, you have a bit more freedom in what you can do on your breaks. Try to keep it to things that will make you feel good in the moment as well as later on.

If you’re saying things like ‘I don’t have time for that’, it’s very often that you are choosing not to make time for that thing.

Make a list of affirmations. This can be an audio list- maybe something you want to listen to in the car. Or it can be a written or digital list. Affirmations will be beneficial for you if you feel good about them when you say them, but they will not be helpful if you don’t feel confident when you’re saying them. In your list, put affirmations that feel in line with you, maybe using wording that you would actually use in real life. They could be things that you already know but you feel are nice reminders for your mind. You may need to hunt down different creators and find words that really align with you.

Make a gratitude list. I’ve been keeping a gratitude journal for a long time. It’s been a part of my routine for years. I’ve always done it on it’s own, but lately I’ve decided to kick it up a notch. Whenever, I write that I’m grateful for something that someone else did, I contact them (via, phone, text or email) and express my gratitude to them. Doing this makes me feel extra happy and extra grateful for things that I’d already written down days prior. It feels like a really nice interaction and you get to make someone else happy as well.

Create a list of favors for your future self. Doing favors for your future self feels like an act of self-love. While I’m doing the list of ‘self favors’, I think about how much I’m going to appreciate this in the future and how happy I’m going to be that I did this. I’m just thinking all these nice things about ‘future me’.

It’s similar to how doing a favor for someone else makes you feel, but this is about you. Just like there is a good feeling about checking off a ‘to-do’ but with the mind frame of ‘this is something she’s gonna appreciate so much, she’s gonna be so happy’.

I like doing favors for my future self when I’m feeling really ‘blah’…

Having a little list ready to go can turn into another act of self-love.