7 Ways to Get the Most Out of Life

You only get so many days on earth, and everyone wants to make those days count. You want to spend your life feeling happy and believe your time on earth really means something. You want your life to be both joyful and meaningful. You want to believe that the world will miss you when you are gone, and you want to enjoy each day that you are here. So, how do you go about creating a life that keeps you, and those around you, smiling?

The first thing to do is to think about how you measure a meaningful life. One of the most common measures of success is money, but people with all the financial luck in the world do not necessarily find more meaning in their lives than those who are struggling. Money, then, is not an accurate measure of a meaningful life. Truthfully, there is no handy scale that will tell you when you have reached a certain level of happiness. You have to decide that for yourself. If most days you feel hollow, drained of energy and apathetic, you probably are not feeling like your life is meaningful. If you feel warm, joyful and peaceful at the end of each day, you are probably leading a meaningful life. Regardless of how close or far you think you are from a life of joy, here are seven ways to get the most out of your life.

Be Grateful

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Stress eats away at your days. It leaves you irritable and anxious, rung out and exhausted. You cannot make the most of each day if you spend it stressed. Removing stressors from your life will help lower your stress to a point, but it is very easy for the mind to keep finding and focusing on new stressors. The cure for constant stress is a grateful mindset. This is because it is actually impossible to feel both truly grateful and stressed at the same time.

As well as reducing your stress levels, a grateful mindset requires you to appreciate the little things in life. This appreciation allows you to make the most of each day, not necessarily by doing more but by taking advantage of what you already possess. Some of the greatest joys in life are simple moments that can get lost in the hustle and stress of the day. Taking a few minutes to be grateful for a warm cup of coffee in the winter or enjoying the sound of birdsong in the summer can help keep you calm and thankful all day.

Laugh Often

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“A sense of humor” is one of the most commonly listed “requirements” for a significant other, and a person’s smile is often seen as one of their best features. This is in part because human beings like to be happy, and we like to see other people being happy. Smiles and laughter are the most universal forms of communication on the planet and perhaps the easiest way of disarming a tense situation.

Laughter itself tends to make us happy. If you fake a laugh for 30 seconds to a minute, you will find yourself feeling happier. A funny comic strip or amusing anecdote can turn a bad day around by making you laugh. Laughing together can bring you closer to someone, and laughing at yourself can help keep frustration and anxiety away. To get the most out of each day, make sure you have a good laugh at least once daily. Read a comic strip on your lunch break, or make it a point to share the funniest stories of the day with your spouse at dinner. Find something that makes you laugh, and enjoy it.

Change Instead of Complain

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The internet has made it almost painfully easy to talk trash about anything and everything or anyone and everyone. Facebook regularly erupts into arguments over everything from tax reform to whether a celebrity’s dress was navy blue or black, and no one goes looking for sanity in the YouTube comments. The odds are good you have added your two cents to an internet debate or jumped on a hashtag bandwagon. However, how much is your cyber-rage really doing to help feed children in Africa or stop a tax increase?

To get the most out of life, stop joining the complain train online or in your real life. Stop standing around the water cooler with your coworkers and complaining about the parking lot repairs. Sometimes you need to vent and let off some steam, but complaining about something that is bothering you can actually make you more irritated which then makes you complain even more. Life is too short to be trapped in such a negative feedback loop. Instead, take a bit of advice from the famous serenity prayer: “Give me...the courage to change the things I can” If something truly bothers you, change it. Join a rally or protest against a policy change you disagree with instead of ranting about it on social media. Seize the day and work to enact the changes you wish to see rather than waiting for someone else to change things for you.

Give Back

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People like to feel like they are making a difference in the world. Giving back allows you to really see the impact your life has on the lives of those around you. This makes volunteer work an incredibly rewarding experience. Take some time to investigate volunteer opportunities in your area. Does your church run a soup kitchen? Is there a homeless shelter nearby? Also think about the causes you are passionate about. If you love children, look into Big Brothers, Big Sisters or other mentoring opportunities. If you are crazy about science, see if you can help at a planetarium or act as an aquarium tour guide. Find a way to pursue both your passion and the greater good for your wider community.

Volunteering will also help you meet new people and form new connections. You may become friends with those you volunteer with or become close with the people you are helping. These connections will help reinforce the good you are doing and make volunteering even more rewarding.

Learn Something New

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You cannot take advantage of each day if you are stuck in a rut. An unfortunately large number of people live their lives on automatic pilot and simply go through the motions each day. Learning something new can help break this cycle. Think about what you enjoy doing and expand in those areas. If you love music, learn to play an instrument. If you enjoy reading poetry, take a creative writing class and learn how to craft your own sestinas.

You can also jump off and try something entirely new. Take a ballroom dance class or join a white-water rafting group. Expanding your horizons ensures that you spend each day doing what you truly enjoy rather than keeping to a routine because it is what you have always done.

Learning new skills also gives you new opportunities to meet other people or experience new perspectives. Becoming bilingual requires interacting with people of a different culture, and a white-water rafting trip is likely to involve people you have never met or visiting places you have never been. These new experiences act like a shock to your system and wrench you out of your rut.

Refuse to Fear Failure

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You will fail at something in life. That is inevitable. One mistake or failure, however, does not mean that you are a failure. As Henry Ford said, ”Failure is the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” When you fail, reflect on what went wrong and try to correct the mistake. Then, try again.

Failure can actually be a good thing. Samuel Smiles was correct when he said that “We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success.” Look at your mistakes as teachers and failure as a learning moment.

Fearing failure will also do more damage than just keeping you down in the dumps. If you are afraid to fail, you will become afraid to try, and it is far better to try and fail, than refuse to try in the first place. If you are afraid to take risks or to try, you will never be able to live life to the fullest. You will be trapped in your life, and you still will not be free of failure. Refusing to take risks will not enable you to be perfect. Think of what you could and would do if you were unafraid to fail. Then, go do it.

Spend Your Time Wisely

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What do you truly love? What lights your fire? What do you look forward to doing? Think about those questions, and then consider how you are spending your time each day. Are you spending time on what you are passionate about, or are you mindlessly scrolling through Twitter and watching funny cat videos? Now, if you truly love Twitter, by all means keep scrolling through those Tweets. The odds are, however, that what you love is to paint, hike, read or dance. Use the time you have wisely, and join your local chapter of USA Dance instead of spending all weekend reading Tweets you will have forgotten by Monday.

Using your time wisely also applies to people. Life is too short to spend all your time with people you dislike. Inevitably you will not like everyone you have to interact with, but there is no reason to invite your annoying coworker to join you for drinks on Friday night. Spend your time with the people you truly care about instead.