All The Things I'm Doing To Live An Energised Life

Hello friend! If you’re new here, welcome to The Energised Life! A little bit about me - I created this publication to share the things I’m doing to feel energised and live a life with less fear, more compassion, more optimism and more mental clarity.

I’m not here to sell a course or teach you how to write better. I’m just here to hopefully share good vibes and hopefully inspire. I’ll also draw things (like this fox looking for mental clarity) and even write a few poems along the way to express what I’m thinking :)

If you’re currently on your own journey of self-discovery, I’d love to hear what you’re doing to live an energised life in the comments.

The reason I felt a pull to start writing online about personal growth (more than 8 years ago!) is that I have experienced several bouts of depression in my young-ish life. It felt like the only thing I could do to get things off my chest, and eventually, I ended up sharing what was helping me and hoped that in the process, I might be able to inspire a few people along the way.

I don’t think I’ll ever find true enlightenment, but that’s okay. We’re all a work in progress, after all.

The main thing for me is that I’m being intentional and working on myself, so not only am I able to become the best version of myself I can be for my own happiness, but so I can also be a kinder, more present person for the people around me.

The first bouts of depression were between the ages of 16 - 28. To be completely honest, I was probably always a “glass-half-empty” type of person ever since I can remember. I was always anxious and awkward, and it really bothered me that I wasn’t able to just be happy…

I think everyone experiences depression differently. For me, it felt like a grey filter was put over my eyes. It felt like there was no hope at the end of the tunnel. No matter what I did, I was never good enough.

I just had a really hard time seeing the good in things.

The worst bout of depression came at the age of 28, however. That was when it felt like there was no hope left. I had little money, a young family and a job I felt trapped in. Then there was the added weight of never really knowing what I wanted to do with my life.

How did I not know by that age?

I used to look around at other people my age and wonder how they had it all figured out. Take my friend Simon, for example - ever since we were kids, he knew he wanted to be a composer. All through primary and secondary school, he kept on playing that cello.

Now, he’s living that dream he always wanted, composing awesome music for TV shows.

I felt like a loser, destined to drift from meaningless job to the next.

I wanted to be someone my son could look up to, the kind of strong father figure who looks like they know what they’re doing. I wanted to be happy. But nothing seemed to make any sense anymore.

I wondered what the point of it all was if everything was so difficult. Everything was dark, and the walls were closing in.

I had no sense of direction.

Over the years, I would fall into deeper holes, and it became a solidified pattern.

And I wondered why I was destined to feel so down and hopeless. Nothing tragic had happened in my life, and that made me feel selfish for being so down. After all, there are some terrible things that happen to people, and it’s understandable that they would become depressed.

Along with depression, I’ve also experienced anxiety, depersonalisation, and I’m without doubt OCD - something I have hidden for a long, long time.

I used medication to try and ease my anxiety and depression. It just made me feel numb. I was no longer depressed, but I no longer had anything - I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t experiencing love or joy. Nothing. And I’ve heard a few other people say the same thing.

I don’t want to knock medication. I believe it can get you from A to B, and therefore, it can be very useful. But I knew it wasn’t for me. I felt like a band-aid, rather than fixing the root cause. And that’s what I was determined to do because I’m stubborn. Even though I felt hopeless, seeing other people be happy made me think there was a chance for me to be happier, even if it was a tiny chance.

And so began a long journey of “trying to find myself”.

Sounds cliche, I know. But I had to learn to understand myself. I had to try and understand what made me fall into funky moods and eventually, weeks of depression.

I’m able to admit now that for a very long time, I was an emotional mess. I would react to anything in the most emotional way, whether that was anger, envy or sadness.

I was led by my emotions. They were the grand puppeteer, and I was the hopeless puppet.

I tried to force myself to be happy many times. It never worked.

I would get angry at myself for not being in a good mood or because I wasn’t able to allow myself to enjoy something.

People talk about mindfulness as a throwaway thing these days, but I’m completely honest when I say adopting a mindful attitude saved my life in so many ways.

Maybe not literally, but in terms of allowing myself not to get so wrapped up in thoughts. It’s allowed me to slow down and notice how I am reacting and feeling to something, which gave me a little space between my emotions and me.

Because here’s the thing - it always starts with thoughts. Those thoughts become other thoughts. You then convince yourself you’re a loser. You convince yourself, “there I go again, why did I ever think I could be happy? That’s not me!”

I don’t believe everything I think these days.

I don’t think I’ll ever get to a place where I always talk to myself nicely. But I think that’s okay.

I’m no longer my thoughts. I allow myself a little bit of distance from them. I see them for what they are - visitors. They do not define what I am. They are not “good” or “bad”, they simply “are”.

Of course, this attitude is not so simple to invite at first. It can take a long time to be able to embrace it, and I am still on that forever journey.

But it’s a worthy one, oh boy, it’s a worthy one…

When I was depressed and pulled around by my emotions, I was fatigued. That’s why this publication is called The Energised Life. I want to feel energetic and excited about life, and a mindful attitude and mindful habits are allowing me to do that.

I can now say…

I’m done with feeling sorry for myself!

I’m done with focusing on negativity!

I want to feel energetic and ALIVE!

I want to wake up every day and scream, “hell yeah! I’m so grateful to be alive!”

Because at the end of the day, I think we all deserve to find some sense of happiness.

And so here are the things that are making me feel more alive as I adopt a mindful attitude into daily life. These are mostly based on the 9 mindful attitudes.

I write about this a lot. And it’s something that I try to practise as much as I can. Admittedly, it’s not easy. I do my best not to judge other people, and I try my best not to judge myself. For a long time, I held myself to an impossible standard, and I also held others to it.

Everyone has had a different starting point in life, different experiences. There’s usually a reason why people act the way they do. No one is perfect. We’re all going through something. This is something I keep at the front of my mind.

I try not to judge my thoughts, and this has been a real game-changer for me. Again, it gives me space to see them from a different vantage point.

As soon as I start labelling them as “bad”, it can very easily trigger a downward spiral that reinforces itself.

If you’re anything like me, you try to grab at things, even things you clearly can’t have. I’m learning to accept the way things are. When you do this, you’re able to take a pause and assess them in their current state. It then makes it much easier to plan what you want to do next, whether you want to try and change them or let them go.

There’s so much out of our control. Accepting things the way they are has become important for me. It doesn’t mean I accept everything, of course. But it’s always the first step with anything.

When you do want to change something or have something you can’t quite get yet, you have to have patience. I wanted to have a better job, a better home. But those things only unfold in time. There’s a great deal of self-torment from being impatient. Patience is the thing that helps you accept how things are right now.

I think we suffer in modern times more than we need to because we’ve become trained to want things right away. So many things are instant these days, like fast food, next-day deliveries, and feedback in the form of likes and comments.

We see people online with all the things we desire, and it hurts us. We start to ask ourselves why we don’t have those things.

Patience is a virtue because it’s not easy. It’s something you have to be mindful of. You have to intentionally become mindful of the times when you feel that yearning for the things you can’t have right now.

You have to pause and see the bigger picture.

A beginner’s mind is a beautiful thing. I don’t know about you, but as I got older and began to understand things more and more, the world felt smaller. I felt like I knew everything, and there was nothing new to feel excited about.

But embracing the attitude of a beginner’s mind reminds you to slow down and observe all the small things, all the little things that we overlook but are amazing in their own right.

I allow myself to get excited about things like my first coffee in the morning, as if I’m pouring a cup of joe for the first time, taking in the smells and savouring the taste. Because we rush so much, it’s incredibly useful to slow down and appreciate the smaller details.

It reminds us how much beauty there is to be found if we pay attention.

I remember being a child and observing everything with so many questions. These days, I try and ask as many questions as I can. Learning more about something is exciting and can open you up to new ideas you didn’t have a clue existed.

Depression told me I was a loser and wasn’t okay to be happy and enjoy myself. These days, I don’t indulge in that conversation if it pops up. I allow myself to enjoy myself as much as I can. And this starts with trusting yourself.

This is a process I have worked through for many years internally.

Trusting yourself means trusting in your own abilities. It is not blind trust, but it is giving yourself the benefit of the doubt.

Sure, something might go wrong, but it also might go right.

I not only trust myself to make progress, but I also trust myself to learn from my mistakes. I trust that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I trust that the grey filter that I used to walk around with was just a filter, not reality.

I trust that I am kind to myself and to other people. I trust in my own intuition and that I am capable.

I will make mistakes, but that’s part of being human, isn’t it?

Striving for more also makes us human. But I’m learning I don’t always need to strive for more. That shouldn’t be my default setting. And for a long time it was. Because I felt like a complete loser, I was panicked, like I should always be doing something, something meaningful and rewarding, so I was getting somewhere in life.

It was exhausting. And I can see now how that fed into the depression I felt.

I think it’s healthy to want more, but again, it shouldn’t be a constant thing that never allows you to see the bigger picture. When I was constantly striving for more, I was never able to enjoy the present moment.

I couldn’t relax. Much of my son’s early years are a blur because I was so fixated on other things I wanted to get done and the way I was feeling. And I feel bad about that.

There is a time and a place for working more, and there is a time and a place for relaxing, resetting, and just enjoying today.

Being able to “let go” is probably the most important thing I am working on. The reason for this is that I believe we spend so much of our energy on not only things that are out of our control right now, but also on memories of the past.

We cling to things, and they steal our ability to be present and enjoy today. Letting go isn’t easy, and in my experience, it takes a great deal of self-compassion and being gentle with yourself.

I’m very mindful of what I cannot control now, and I allow myself to let those things float away because I know that when I cling to them in my mind, there’s no way I can enjoy the present.

And I treat “today” as sacred. It’s worth enjoying for what it is because it’s all we have. You deserve to be present and enjoy it. One day, you might wish you could come back to today. You’ll miss today.

I don’t want to be distracted. I think one of the reasons my memory is so bad is that I was distracted most of my life. I was inside my head the whole time thinking about past events. I could never let them go.

Now I feel more energised when I let things go.

Gratitude is something I keep at the front of my mind. I don’t write lists of what I’m grateful for (even though that is helpful), but instead, I am always thinking about how grateful I am for the people in my life. It’s becoming a part of my personality as I become more and more mindful of being appreciative of what I have.

There are so many little acts that go unnoticed, and these are the ones I am becoming more aware of. Things like;

• The random phone call from a loved one to see how you are

• Your partner bringing you a drink in the morning

• A friend asking if you’d like help moving your things

• Your colleague buying you your favourite chocolate for no reason

These are the kind of things we can take for granted. But I think about how less rich my life would be without these people and these acts.

It reminds me how lucky I am to have these things.

And whilst I don’t meditate conventionally, I do meditate on how grateful I am to be able to have a roof over my head, healthy food and the ability to move around how I’d like.

For me, gratitude is the antidote to so many negative feelings.

Generosity means a lot more than just giving or sharing things with other people. It also means sharing your time with them or even being a pair of ears for them to talk to. All I know is, I feel better when I do things for people without expecting anything back. I like being useful and helpful to other people.

Being this way helps me to get out of my own head and into the world. It helps me to be present.

When I began to try to understand myself better, I realised I was a big complainer. I always looked at the things that were “wrong”. I focused on things I didn’t like. If something happened that I didn’t like, I took it personally, and this fed into my feeling of being a loser.

And it took a long time for me to learn not to complain so much. It took years for me to take a pause and look for the positives in all situations.

What I have come to learn is, when you focus on the negatives, you not only reinforce negative feelings but also invite more negativity, negativity that doesn’t even need to exist. When you focus on the positives, you end up inviting more positivity into your life.

It’s like a personal algorithm. And whilst I’m not sure about “manifestation”, focusing on the positives and getting more back certainly feels like it.

If you want to live an energised life, you don’t really have a choice but to limit your complaining and instead look for ways to improve things.

I’ve always been interested in movement, but it’s not been until the last 4 or 5 years that I’ve really been mindful of being more active. I don’t do exercise to keep in shape, although that’s a nice little bonus. I do it because it makes me feel good - it energises me.

In my experience, a body that is in good shape is able to think more clearly. It’s more optimised. It doesn’t get tired as easily as one that is out of shape. This is important to me because I have seen how fatigued and foggy I am when I get out of shape. It’s one of those things that you kind of have to do, and that’s why I like it.

It’s very black and white - you do it or you don’t. You get the benefits or you don’t.

Exercise doesn’t lie.

All I know is, when I’ve been running around, I feel amazing, even if it is painful at first. I like to think of my body as the “hardware” and my thoughts as the “software”. When the hardware is doing good, it creates a better environment for the software to operate as best it can.

I treat my meals as rituals. But it never used to be that way. I was a human vacuum cleaner. I used to suck up all the food around me and eat it in a mindless rush. These days, I make sure I try and cook most of my food with fresh meat and vegetables. I limit the things that make me feel rubbish.

This, I’ve noticed, makes me feel way better than when I eat junk.

I still eat a bit of junk every now and again, but 90% of my food is “real” food. I try and eat this way as cheaply as I can. I buy fruit and vegetables every other day and look for the best yet cheapest meat. I keep my meals basic yet tasty by adding stocks, herbs and spices.

I don’t think cooking should be complicated, and I’ve found a lot of inspiration online to keep me eating well without much hassle.

The good diet feeds into the movement and vice versa. They go hand in hand, and I’ve found it becomes much easier to eat well when you’ve been exercising because you want to keep that roll going.

These days, I cook mindfully and take my time. I try and think about how grateful I am to eat the food I eat because not everyone can. Taking my time helps me to appreciate it more.

I think we all have many different parts to ourselves, and sometimes we suppress them. Maybe it’s because we think those parts are silly or serve no purpose. I’m kind of a typical guy, and I think many people I know would be surprised to know that I love to draw. I have neglected that part of me for many years because it seemed like a pointless thing to do.

But now I’m drawing again more regularly, I feel like I’m expressing something that I was missing. It feels good to do it, even if it doesn’t come to anything. It just feels like a needed release.

I love to create, and I’m doing my best to do that whenever I can.

I think we can all improve our lives and our sense of calm by adopting mindful habits. If you’d like to follow along with my journey, please feel free to subscribe :)

If this post resonated with you or you are going on a similar journey yourself, I’d love to read your comments. I want to create a newsletter that helps people and builds a community that helps each other one post at a time.

Download your own mindful flashcards for less than the price of a coffee here. Thank you!

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