3 Ways You are Sabotaging Your Happiness

You aren’t happy with your life but don’t know why? Are your days spent with frustration, emotional outbursts, boredom, or overwhelm? Do you want to be happier but just can’t get through a single day without something destroying it. I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve been sucked into that seemingly endless negative cycle. Life isn’t easy but here is the hard truth, you are sabotaging your happiness.

Your happiness has a lot to do with not having life goals, not having the right life goals, or maybe how you are managing the progress for your life goals. (that’s a lot to take in, so I’ll explain further down)

Life goals are so much more important than career goals, yet we put more emphasis on career goals. Why is that?

Why do we intentionally set out to advance our careers and leave our life to chance? Wandering around aimlessly trying to be happy but not really succeeding.

3 Ways You are Sabotaging Your Happiness

There are many ways you are sabotaging your happiness but most can be lumped into these 3 categories:

You are allowing yourself to feel overwhelmed with your life.
You are living life for someone else and aren’t being true to you.
You are constantly chasing the next big dream.

The first two ways you are sabotaging your happiness have a lot to do with your lack of work-life balance. Now there are a lot of experts screaming that “balance doesn’t exist”. Does work-life balance exist?

I disagree with them saying it is a myth. It does exist, but not in the sense that work and life need to be equal on either side of a balancing scale.

I think of work-life balance as a building that has all of these forces acting on it and it needs the combination of them to stay upright and steady. If one force is constantly too much for the building it will fall or start to break down.

Work/career, family, mental health, physical health, friendships, spiritual well-being are just some of the forces that keep you upright and steady. The combination of these over your day-to-day activity might change but finding that mix of life goals is what will give you work-life balance and help you create the life you love.

This brings me to the first two ways you are sabotaging your happiness, and they both have to do with a lack of work-life balance.

If we don’t take the time to include work-life balance in our life then we won’t be truly happy.

The first way you are sabotaging your happiness is by allowing yourself to be overwhelmed with life. It happens so easily! Life can be utterly chaotic and can consume you. You are constantly moving from one activity to another trying to get that long list done so you can finally go to bed. Just to start over tomorrow.

On the flip side, you may think you are happy because the chaos is under control, but you aren’t fulfilled with your life. This is the second way you are sabotaging your happiness. Something is missing in your life goals. You are aimlessly going through your day, with this mask on, pretending to be somebody else. You want more, but don’t know where to start.

In a nutshell:

1. too much life stuff and overwhelm = lack of happiness
2. no clear direction in life = lack of true happiness

I use the Seeking Simple Life Goal Setting and Tracking Bundle (free for you just fill in the form below and it will be sent to your email) to set my life goals. I personally make sure that I’m looking at my whole life (relationship with my husband, my kids, career, self-care, health, financial, personal development, and so on).

Then when life gets busy and the must-do’s are long, I re-adjust the priorities against my life goals and the guilt of not getting everything done today goes away. My life goals will look for ways to improve our lifestyle so we can create routines easier and make our day-to-day activities go smoother. We even created a kid-friendly morning routine that fixed our forgetful child and made the mornings less stressful.

Wait! Remember I mentioned a third way you could be sabotaging your happiness?

In my goal setting and tracking series, I talked about the importance of not only setting life goals but how tracking your success plan is extremely important as well. When you are breaking up the goals into actions and tracking your progress you can see your little wins easier.

If you already have goals and are busy working towards those goals, I have two questions for you:

1. Are you tracking your progress?
2. Are you celebrating the small wins?

If you aren’t answering yes to both of these then you are sabotaging your happiness.

If you are constantly chasing the next dream without living life and enjoying the moments now.

You are sabotaging your happiness.

If you aren’t recognizing how far you’ve come along your journey and taking the time to celebrate that success.

You are sabotaging your happiness.

Let’s recap:

Balance in life is important for happiness.
True happiness is achieved when we can balance life goals and truly enjoy the journey.
Life isn’t about chasing goals but learning to love the journey and enjoy life along the way.
If life is overwhelming then we need to figure out what needs improvement so balance is possible and this can be done by setting life goals.
If there feels like something is missing then life goals need to be reviewed.
Once life goals are set, enjoy the journey, celebrate the journey and start loving life.

Shawn Anchor did a video on happiness that I personally found inspiring and wanted to share his message with you. His message is about happiness at work, but I know you can bring it to your whole life when you can set life goals that help you create the life you love.