Your outlook on life has a great impact on everything from your own perceived happiness to your physical and mental health. It could even influence how long you live! Yet it can be difficult to have a positive outlook if you feel lonely and depressed. Fortunately, with a little practice, it’s possible to change how positive you feel! Here are some useful tips on staying happy.

Meditate

If you’ve never tried to meditate, it may seem like a foreign concept, but meditation has been shown to improve your overall well-being and help you regulate your emotions. That’s important, because we can choose to be happy, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. 

Meditating helps you bring your mind back to the present moment, along with calming your physical responses to stress, like your heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure. If you’ve never tried meditating before, it may be helpful to take a class. You could find one at your local senior center, or look online for a virtual course. 

Don’t be afraid of trying different techniques if the first one doesn’t work for you. For example, some seniors find guided imagery or prayer to be helpful, while others may get better results by focusing on how their body feels or repeating a word over and over as a mantra.

Change Your Perspective

It’s easy to see the negatives, especially when times are challenging. But changing your perspective can help you to feel happy again. 

Next time you’re feeling down, look for the silver lining. Will this difficulty bring a new opportunity? Will you gain wisdom from it? Can you use that wisdom to help others cope with similar trials? Changing our perspective from the negative to the positive helps us feel less overwhelmed and allows us to move toward happiness once again.

Smile

Did you know that just smiling can help you feel more positive? It’s true! Research has found that physically making yourself smile is enough to give you a little boost of positivity. That’s because our body releases endorphins when we smile. 

So even if you don’t feel like smiling, going through the physical motion of smiling can make you feel better! Give it a try!

Stay Connected

Relationships are important at all stages of life, but they’re especially critical as we age. It’s not easy to face the challenges of things like retiring, new health conditions, and the loss of loved ones without social support.

Make time to reach out to friends and family. Set regular times to talk or meet up. And don’t be afraid to meet new friends or join new groups. Remaining socially connected is vital to staying happy.

Achieve Your Goals

A sense of accomplishment goes a long way to helping us stay positive. So set realistic goals and achieve them. Don’t undermine yourself by creating grandiose goals. While it’s  wonderful to dream, and you may very well achieve lofty goals, when it comes to staying positive, regularly achieving smaller goals is probably more helpful.

So what can you achieve today? Would you like to try for 15 minutes of exercise? Introducing yourself to a new person? Putting your laundry away? Your goals can be anything that’s important to you. What matters most is the satisfaction and confidence you’ll feel when you achieve them. 

At Normandy Living, we offer a variety of social and recreational activities, so you’ll always have something fun to do and friends to enjoy.