Happy. Healthy. Rich. The smart mom's guide to living your best life
Preview of the introduction chapter.
This book is about learning to live your best life, by reducing stress in typical problem areas. This includes our health, our relationships, and our finances. When we are stressed, we are unhappy, and we be- come short tempered, making those around us unhappy as well.
Many of us are so stressed out at times that we inadvertently make choices that, while aimed at reducing our stress level, can increase our stress. This can include overindulging in things like fast food, coffee,
and alcohol. Or, staying up late to catch up on work or schoolwork. Or we may engage in “retail therapy” by shopping excessively to cope with stress and find that our budget is suffering.
Learning better coping mechanisms, including good health behav- iors, better communication and financial planning can help us to re- duce our stress levels. Some of these same habits can help us go from barely surviving to thriving.
Something you will see about me as you go through this book is that I am a mystical soul with an analytical mind. You will notice threads of spirituality and mysticism interwoven with facts. Life is made up of both.
We experience life both in the mind and in the world.
The intent of this book is to help you improve both aspects of your life. When we improve something in either our inner world or our outer world, it ends up improving both.
I am happier now because of a combination of improving my mind- set, my health, my relationships, and my financial situation. It is hard to say which had the biggest impact, but I believe they all flow together.
As you address your own goals, focus on your personal priorities and realize that improving one aspect of your life will improve them all. It is just a matter of deciding what you will work on first.
How I got here.
Are you unhappy and struggling to admit it to yourself? Or does your life feel stagnant, like you are living on autopilot? I felt that way too. Outwardly, everything in my life was fine. But ‘fine’ didn’t feel like it was enough. I wanted things to be good. I had needs swimming below the surface that were unfulfilled.
My family wasn’t exactly struggling, but we were just maintaining the status quo. Our income was just enough to pay our bills, but never enough to get ahead. My partner was working long hours at a job he didn’t like, just so we could pay some minimal bills and keep our toddler
in daycare. It felt like all we were doing was working, and not enjoying our time as a family enough because we were always too tired.
I felt like we were working too hard and sacrificing too much to be going nowhere. I felt like there had to be a better way to get through life, so I made the goal planner contained in this book for myself to take a deeper look at my life and what was important to me.
Using this goal setting process, I started to ask myself some hard questions. I asked myself:
What do I really want? What makes me happy?
What does my perfect life look like?
How can I downsize to stop worrying about money?
When I went through this process, I didn’t do it alone. I talked things through with my partner, at every step of the way. We tossed around ideas about how to change our lives for the better. We wanted to go from surviving to thriving.
Of course, the easiest thing to do would be just to wait, do nothing, and maintain a life that was fine.
Or we could take our daughter out of daycare and one of us could have stayed home with her, stretching our budget even thinner.
For a while, we also seriously debated selling everything and moving to the country on a farm. We looked at properties, priced it all out, and watched a bunch of videos about homesteading. Ultimately, we went in another direction, and were able to refinance our mortgage to get costs down.
Along the way, I did some therapy and took an intensive 12-week mindset coaching program. At the start of the program, my coach asked me my goals. I told her I wanted to find inner peace. I felt like, if I could get my mindset under control, I would then be able to fix everything else. She told me it sounded doable, and I found inner peace by week four. Mind you, inner peace doesn’t immediately fix all your problems, you must do that yourself.
Finding inner peace creates a space for happiness.
Both peace and happiness came to me through practicing yoga, mindfulness, and learning to slow down and appreciate the little things in life.
It seems difficult to find happiness when we are stuck in daily worries and stress.
The goal of this book is to help you reduce stress and find tools to create happiness. This can be done by building new habits to reduce stress and create happiness at the same time. It also involves breaking out of old habits that are not working. Sometimes, we get these habits from our parents, or do things because that is just the way it has always been done.
The problem with some of the habits formed that way, though, is that in our parent’s generation, success was more important than happi- ness. Our parents thought it was perfectly normal to work a 40-, 50- or 60-hour week every week, go out on the weekend to the bar on Friday nights to unwind, and then shamble back sadly to a job they hated on Monday morning.
Our generation craves work-life balance and wants to experience happiness in life as most countries have done in Europe for a long time now, instead of just surviving to face another day. We feel a hollowness in the lifestyle that we learned from our parents in some cases and yearn for something more.
It may seem that, as stress goes down, happiness will automatically go up. This isn’t really the case. We need to consciously build good habits to replace the bad, otherwise, we just end up empty.
Happiness is more than just the absence of pain.
Happiness comes from adding good things to our lives, not just tak- ing away the bad. You won’t be happy if you starve yourself to lose weight or if you stop spending any money on fun to pay down debt. Change like that just creates an emptiness of bad, not the presence of good.
When we try to change by just taking things away, our lives become empty. Then, typically we will go back to our old habits because they are all that we know.
To create lasting, positive change, we need to fill up the empty space with something good. That is why this book takes a twofold approach to both reduce stress and create happiness.
Happiness
All the aspects of our lives are interconnected, and when one of them isn’t going well, then it can put our whole life wildly out of balance. Cre- ating happiness is in large part about creating balance.
Happiness can mean many things to many different people. If you are happy you are typically living in the moment and enjoy what you are doing. This enjoyment can take many different forms. You may enjoy spending time with friends and loved ones, doing a hobby, practicing self-care, traveling, learning a new skill, or having a meaningful career. For most people, happiness is some combination of all these things.
Think about a time when you were the happiest. Remember it in detail. Who were you with? What were you doing? Think about all the sights, smells, and sounds around you. Immerse yourself in that moment. Then, think about which of those things truly makes you happy.
Change can be one of the hardest things for us to tackle because many of us are not programmed to do so. Entertain the possibility to try something new you never dared to do. For instance, try learning a new skill such as a foreign language, cooking for example or simply change things up by going for a daily walk or reading a book. You never know what talents might be hidden inside you that can bring out happiness.
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