Tips: Do the things that make you happy.

At some points in life people don't have any advice to give you. Your friends, your mum and your dad, your boyfriend or girlfriend, even your grandparent's, who seem to have an opinion or advice about everything in life, due to a combination of both years of experience and nosiness, will sometimes not have a pearl of wisdom for you. They will not have a comforting direction to point you in sometimes because as you grow up, more and more, there are some decisions you need to make for yourself.

Your friends, parent, boyfriends, girlfriends, teachers, school office ladies, favourite Starbuck's man, brothers or sisters are never going to be the ones to decide the important things in your life. They are not always going to be able to deal with your stuff for you no mater how many times they've done it before, and there comes a time where you're making a decision, struggling and way in over your head and all they can offer you is "do what makes you happy".

The majority of the time, most people find this response wholly unhelpful and can be really irritated by it. Sometimes you feel like you are in desperate need of some guidance, but truth be told, if you're at the stage where the people in your life are telling you simply to do what makes you happy, then you need to be the one to take control of your own situation.

Doing what makes you happy does not always mean you are a selfish person. Doing what makes you happy all the time or at the expense of others makes you a selfish person. 

Some people are capable of living their lives in an entirely self-centred bubble of indulgence, where they act purely in their own interests for the purposes of furthering their own ends and interests. Some people live in a selfish way because they do only what makes them happy with no consideration for those around them. You will probably know people like this and will also know that these people tend to be destructive in that although they can be fun and spontaneous and wild that they will not pick up the pieces of you if they break you along the way. It is unsustainable to try and live doing only things that make you happy because sometimes you need to be a grown up and take on the responsibilities you have.

However, equally living to make others happy is also not sustainable. The term 'people-pleasing' is entirely apt here: living purely to accommodate the needs of others will tire you in such a way that you can deteriorate mentally as well as physically and sometimes its important to bare in mind your own health in more ways than one in order to create a life for yourself that is not selfish but sustainable. It's all about balance. The balance between the interests of ones self and the interests of what we love.

When dealing with things like anxiety and depression it is so so important to allow yourself room to breathe and do the things that make you happy, because often when you're in a place where anxiety or depression or generally consuming negativity overwhelms you, it can only really be you that can pull yourself out of that state of mind. When dealing with those issues people can feel really isolated and alone in their issues and in their life in general- which of course is not the case at all as globally, more than 350 million people of all ages suffer from depression and recent research suggests that as many as 1 in 6 young people will experience an anxiety condition at some point in their lives. This is the thing: you are not alone.

Often people dealing with their own issues feel like something is going to come and save them, whether that be a person or medication, a spiritual calling etc etc. Sometimes this really does happen. Due to the fact that more and more in modern society, mental health is being more widely addressed and discussed, there have been huge advances in medical fields within therapy and the pharmaceutical industry to try and combat such wide spread issues like depression and anxiety. But here's the thing, even with the drugs or the therapy or the calming oils and anything like that, you have to want to feel better- and within this wanting to feel better you have to be active in trying to recover or maintain a level of functionality and happiness in your life. Hence why personally I feel that doing things that makes you happy, or once made you happy, if you're stuck in a cycle of depression or overwhelming anxiety. The things that made you happy once made you happy for a reason, embrace those reasons and try to reach what you felt before.

It is very easy to feel isolated and alone, it is very easy to avoid people or social situations because of the complications that may arise. It is easy to resist love and affection which is shocking because it may be what you need the most, but you don't realise it. It is easy through learned behaviour to do what allows us to feel numb or to feel nothing at all for fear of falling to something stronger like anger or sadness. But you shouldn't- life is not a case of surviving 75 years of your own mind! Life is for  LIVING and loving and finding who you are, and then maybe in the lives of very few or possibly in the lives of many, making a positive difference and mark on the world before we leave. Doing the things we love and that make us happy allows us to more fully live our lives, rather than survive.

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If you need any more persuasion to love yourself then, here, some reasons why you should do the things that make you happy:

Doing what makes you happy does not have to be a big deal. When I say do what makes you happy it does not always mean make huge life choices that are tailored specifically to a direction of interest in your life, it can be very small things. For example, taking time out of your day to listen to music away from people, read, take a bath and use all of those hugely overpriced bath bombs you bought on a whim and never touched. Condition the crap out of your hair, read a crappy romantic book you enjoy- little things that you do can make so much difference to your overall mood.

Doing what makes you happy can help you repair yourself. This process can work in two ways. Firstly, if you are making decisions based upon what makes you happy in life, decision making is often made much easier because you know what will make you personally happy and what will not. Often for people who suffer with anxiety or depression decision making can be hard- because you second guess yourself and your decisions often not focussing on your own needs or interests instead worrying about 100 different consequences or people's opinions, imagining yourself into absurd and negative scenarios. But if you need to make a fast decisions that will in no way infringe the freedom of other's then focussing your decision making around what makes you happy will allow you to make faster and more defined decisions.

After a long day or a hard day where it was difficult to ground yourself in your own thoughts, doing what makes you happy can lift your mood again and repair your for the next day. Involving yourself entirely in something that will make you happy kind of anchors you, emotionally, mentally- it puts you in a state where your focus is yourself, which can allow you to focus on healing yourself too.

Doing what makes you happy can allow you to develop as a person. Doing what makes you happy allows you to realise what it is that you enjoy, what it is that you're good at so that you can then go on to pursue it. Doing what makes you happy allows you to realise what brings you down so that you can identify with and distance whatever or whoever it is from yourself so that you can live feeling as free and happy as you possibly can.

Doing what makes you happy is healthy. Going on from what I previously mentioned about doing what makes you happy allowing you to identify what makes you unhappy, this process of creating distance between yourself and negative energy can bring a great deal of calm and balance to your life. I'm not entirely sure about the whole ying and yang cycle of the world but what I have gathered from it is that the concept of balance is central to the world. Balance leads to health, it's simple.

Some people believe that on an ecological level, in the ideas of biocentric equality etc, some people subscribe to a kind of holism (an idea that every living thing in the universe is intrinsically linked to each other, and stresses the importance of studying relationships between organisms rather than individuals in a really atomistic view of society). Whatever reason people have for believing in balance, it seems to create the greatest happiness. Balance allows for harmony, for natural processes to sync and become one whole system that allows individuals to thrive and it is so important to create balance within our own lives, within a work or education and home life, or even within our own minds between our positive and negative thoughts, the selfless and the selfish etc.

This whole thing brings me back to my original idea in this post- the idea that sometimes you have to make decisions that no one else can help you with and that will require you, however scary or infuriating or saddening, to make choices by yourself. In many situations it is obviously important to consider the thoughts of others, however: if a decisions is going to affect you deeply and not really have an impact on those around you, if you are not harming anyone then it is important to do what makes you happy- because this life is too damn short to exist and not live.

Years pass quicker and quicker as we get older and it is easy to fall into a trap of monotonous existence. Why are the best years of your life only a period of time? Why not extend happiness across your whole existence and really live it? I don't know about how to achieve self realisation, nor do I have a quick fix to provide a person with happiness, but I do know that it is important to foster happiness and feed it in the same way we feed negativity or consumerism, love or hate or any big emotion. If you have the capacity to do what makes you happy and live your life to its very fullest potential, as every single person on this earth does... then why not?

Hello there!

Well hi there people of the internet!

This is a just a quick little introduction post to start up this little blog that I've been thinking about for a while now. I figured as I am putting myself out there on the internet I may as well offer an explanation as to why, and give a little background about it.

My name's Fatima, and this is just a little blog of posts about lifestyle, positivity and general happiness. It's a little space I wanted to create for myself and other people that is exclusively about living life as the best and happiest person you can be, because I think that there isn't very much space in, my life at least, for an area that exclusively dedicated to building a positive mindset. I've had a couple of other smaller blogs over the last few years, more personal ones where I would post about things like beauty products I loved or items I was massive fan of. However, I never really had that much of a theme to my blogs and tended to gravitate towards writing random posts about things I enjoyed, things that inspired me or things that were particularly relevant in my life. I ended up writing a product or beauty review once in a blue moon and writing slightly more personal things instead, so I figured if that's what I enjoy and what I'm best at, that why not fine tune that and create a space for myself that is devoted to that alone.

Over the last couple of years I have grown up much more than I ever thought I would, I've hit the highest and the lowest parts of my life, and, as everyone else does, worked through them and figured things out for myself. I am not in any way a finished product, I really don't think anyone ever is. But I wanted to start this little blog after looking over my old ones with that glorious thing we like to call hindsight: this funny little thing where you are older and wiser with more experience, capable of making better decisions (and mistakes). I looked back at a lot of what I used to write and realised that blogging was such a creative outlet for me to put out some kind of message or feeling that I had going on, and really helped me to sort through my own head by putting things into words

So, I decided to continue doing that this summer and really use this blog to create a space of my own and have a little voice in the world. Even if 2 people see this, and one of those is my mum I still really enjoy putting down what I think and feel (I'm a narcissist like that). So, here we have it: a collection of my thoughts and feelings about life, sprinkled with advice I want to give, or have been given and want to share, to try and put out there into the world for people who need it.

I think it's normal for people's teenage years to be the "best years of your life" in hindsight. You grow and you flourish and you become your own person, your own identity- and you're young enough to enjoy it with relatively little responsibility. But the people who look back at their teenage years with a beautiful nostalgia do not understand. In this world teenagers face very different challenges to the ones our parents faced in their youth- we live in different ages. Our parents never worried about how many likes they got on instagram or if the cute guy they're talking to is a catfish (hell, my mother still doesn't know why the show is called Catfish, and I've explained about 40 times). Our parents did not have the kind of exposure we do to the outside world in this digital age, that is both a blessing and a curse in this world. We have this incredible capacity to be interconnected and surrounded by people all the time, we have a space to express ourselves and be heard, but equally a space to be judged or brought down, or hurt. We have all had our own struggles and I think it's important for people to address them, but rather than using them to feed a negativity and a mindset that could hurt us, to instead address an issue and deal with it.

I guess the reasons I wanted to start writing this blog was to promote a happy mindset and lifestyle for myself and other people without sugar coating life, without painting everything like a rainbow and baking brownies of joy (and no, I don't mean weed). I think it's important to identify issues, I think it;s damaging for people to ignore things and internalise pain or suffering or struggle, but I think its also damaging to wholly express it on a constant basis rather than dealing with it. The thing about energy, negative of positive is that we create it and it can either consume us and lift us up or consume us and drag us down, with this in mind, that's how this little blog came about, to help fine-tune the good energy.

SO after the longest introduction post in the history of life, here it is: my little blog of positivity. I hope you find help or comfort or encouragement in it, because I know it helps to see things like this sometimes.

I hope you enjoy it!

Love, Fatima x