So, I went through a very rough time last year where I suffered with depression and to overcome that I had to adjust a lot of things in my life, mainly with focusing on being happy because a year ago I was the least happy person you'd ever met. I'm not going to go to much into detail about my depression but basically it all came from my hatred of college which resulted in me leaving and having time to regain my happiness and get back to the old me again, now I have started at a new college and doing all the things I love and I am very happy there. So, I thought I'd do a post on some of things that made me happy again and the things that I had to stop doing in order to be happy. Now this is not at all saying "you must do these things in order to be happy" they're just the things I did that personally helped me.
Firstly "delete" all the people that make you unhappy, just like deleting a facebook friend or unfollowing someone on twitter, remove them out of your life because you need to surround yourself with happy positive people to make you happy. If you surround yourself all the time with people that get you down or who are always negative that's going to have an effect on you and change your mood, nobody got time for that! My tip from this is: surround yourself with happy, positive people that love to be around you and vice versa you enjoy being around.
Secondly, do things that make YOU happy, this was a massive one for me because I was trying to please everyone else and do things that society deem as acceptable. For instance I love Drama, and performing arts and all things like that however I was so low that I thought to myself "these aren't going to get me anywhere in life" despite the fact that I love them and performing makes me the happiest, so I stopped studying all those subjects at college and changed to all the subjects which are seen as "intelligent" however this is when my depression really kicked in, I was unhappy all the time because I hated the subjects with a passion, I had no passion and drive for them and then I started to fail, that's when I realised I need to do the things I love. I'd rather be happy doing something I enjoy than something that, yes, may have a lot of money involved but would make me unhappy. I have now moved college doing all the subjects I love and I am more than happy.
There's a lot of things I needed to stop doing in order to be happy too. Stop trying to impress people, especially people who don't give a s**t about you. At the end of the day no-one is going to genuinely like you for your clothes or your things or the way you look, genuine relationships are formed from the person liking you for who you are, genuine relationships will make you 100% more happier than materialistic relationships and friendships only down to popularity. All in all the only person you should try to impress is yourself.
STOP, STOP, STOP criticising everything an anyone just because you're not happy with yourself it's like a quote from mean girls "Calling somebody else fat won't make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn't make you any smarter" you need to remove yourself from all that negativity. It's not going to make you any happier in the long run.
Comparing yourself to other people is what a lot of girls go through on a daily basis "she's prettier, skinnier, more funny, more intelligent, has nicer hair than me" it can make you so self conscious. I still compare myself to every other girl and it needs to stop because YOU are YOU and that's not going to change, you can get plastic surgery if you want, hair extensions, lose weight but at the end of the day it's your body and no matter how much you compare yourself to anyone else it's not going to change who you are. Instead of looking in the mirror and pointing out all your imperfections, look in the mirror and mention something you like about yourself. It's all about positivity!
This last one was definitely the biggest problem for me and still is, dwelling on the past. I used to look at everything wrong that has happened in the past as a bad thing, I regretted things and used to sit there at night thinking about these things "if I had dealt with it like this than that wouldn't have happened" "why did I do that" "why did I let you go" silly things like that. Putting it bluntly, things do happen for a reason and you have to take things that happen in the past as a chance to learn from them and to not do them again. Humans aren't perfect, we're going to get things wrong, doing things wrong and making mistakes is what shapes you into the person you are. The past is training, it doesn't define you!
I'm still trying to do all these things to make myself happier, it doesn't come easy it takes time and time is key. I hope these tips can help at least one person as they're definitely helping me.
Izzy
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