Can you relate to this scenario: you wake up exhausted, work for more than eight hours, and when you come back home – you pick up the phone or turn on Netflix to waste your time? You know that hitting the gym, reading a book, writing a book, or going for a simple walk will be much more beneficial for you—but you simply cannot do the things that you should be doing because you are tired.
Following this routine, you go to bed without relieving the stress and wake up the next day to repeat what you did yesterday.
Can You Find Fulfillment in Life?
It is hard to find fulfillment in life when you do the same things on repeat. You might have had moments where you started to question why you were alive in the first place. Everything in life might start to seem boring and meaningless where hours, days, weeks, and months are passing by and nothing seems satisfying.
You come to this world just to die some random day. We all have the same amount of time every day, and assuming that you get eight hours of sleep every night, you only have sixteen hours to experience life. Your general happiness in life depends on how you use your available time because, irrespective of what your occupation is, you will have to do things that you don’t really enjoy, and you will also have moments where life starts to get monotonous and boring.
No matter how successful you are, if you don’t know how to enjoy life, it will always be boring because the default setting for life is boring. You need to take action if you want to change the default settings.
The question is whether you have something that gets you up from the bed every morning and gives you so much joy after each time doing it healthily? If the answer is no, you need to take action to have a healthy approach to life.
Understanding the Scientific Mechanism of Having Fun
To escape from the downward spiral of a boring life and establish a healthy approach to life, you need to first understand the scientific mechanism of having fun. In fact, fun factors can optimize your productivity, success, and general happiness in life.
According to neuroscience, if you know how to use dopamine in your favor, you can get true satisfaction, happiness, and motivation from it. Even when you accomplish something small, such as completing the outline of your book and ticking a box in your to-do list, it can make you release dopamine.
So, you might want to start giving yourself small rewards to release dopamine and feel happiness. For instance, if your goal is to publish your first novel, then every day, as you work on the chapters and complete a certain number of words that you can tick off from your to-do list, you will feel accomplished.
Speaking of writing a novel, while you are at it, you might as well want to check out this novel editor for hire, as an editor is another fresh pair of eyes who can point out plot holes and mistakes that you might have overlooked. Having an editor by your side is a sure way to create a good impression on the literary agent and publishers at the time of handing in your manuscript.
Also, don’t forget to reward yourself for each accomplished task, such as eating a healthy dish, drinking something you like, or hitting the gym – all of these things can help you release dopamine. It is important to mention here that dopamine plays a crucial role as a reward center in many physical functions. When dopamine is released in your body, it rejuvenates your mind and increases your motivation and memory.
Skip the Hustle Culture
To inject happiness into your life, you will want to escape the hustle culture, which is essentially about establishing a notion that working harder is the only way. The thing about the hustle culture is that it actually emphasizes forcing oneself to do something that they don’t enjoy, which essentially does no good except for increasing the primary stress hormone.
The primary stress hormone is also known as cortisol, and the long-term activation of the cortisol and the stress response system caused by overall exposure to cortisol – can almost impact all of your physical functions, which subsequently puts you at an increased risk of depression, anxiety, heart disease, weight gain, insomnia, and headaches.
This aspect indicates the importance of learning healthy ways to cope with your life stressors. So, if your cortisol levels are increasing while you are working, you can decrease your cortisol levels when you are free. Even twenty minutes of walking or low-intensity cardio can decrease your cortisol levels quite a lot.
Have Fun Outside Your Job
To enjoy life and integrate happiness into your life, you need to find ways to have fun outside of your job. In order to increase the fun factor in your life, you might want to pick up a hobby. There are four factors that your hobby should fulfill – at least one of them and the factors include the fun factor, relaxation, mental stimulation, and stress relief.
When it comes to picking a hobby, you want to pick something that you truly and genuinely enjoy. You might want to think about scrolling on your phone and watching some YouTube videos without any purpose. After scrolling for an hour, what are your thoughts? Do you think that you just spent an hour productively and happily and that you would like to do it again?
The answer is more likely to be in the negative. There is nothing wrong with using social media as a form of entertainment; however, if you feel guilty about it later, then the worst thing you can do is to keep doing it. So, you will need to find a hobby that will make you feel better afterward instead of guilty.
This aspect is also known as the fun factor. You will want to choose an activity that you can combine with self-growth as a way to maximize the results.
