The pursuit of happiness

Greetings to you all this fine day, I am over the moon to be sat writing another exciting blog for your reading pleasure today, and hopefully, this one can open a few people’s eyes, as its not just strictly nutrition or fitness, but can apply to so many different areas of our lives. As always, I’m writing from personal experience, and I’ll be calling on a lot of work I’ve done whilst in education myself, I’ve touched briefly on these topics in either step videos or some of my short videos through our Instagram page, you’ve had voice notes discussing it also, so it’s been a long time in the making. I really like to take my time with blogs, as you can tell, so I’m really hoping to do the subject of making yourself happy a lot of justice here, my PT hat is being put to one side, my life coach hat is placed firmly upon my massive head.

Nothing in life, nothing at all, is more important to us, then being happy. It’s the reason we do everything, and although I’ve discussed the chemicals that make this happen in blogs such as ‘Dopamine Machine’ I want to kind of take a step back from the science a little bit and look at happiness in a broader sense. As we are very familiar with at GGFF the way we look and the way we view ourselves is so important to our happiness, most of you will have joined us because you were unhappy with the way you look, and each lb we lose takes us closer to our target weight and in our minds, that will bring ourselves closer to being happy. I 100% have to agree that this is a very good place to start, our weight and our external appearance is probably the easiest thing to change in our lives, we know exactly what we need to do to achieve it, and each step in the right direction towards that goal will bring us a level of fulfilment and longer term happiness, but this is just one small aspect of your life. Relationships, work, money, day to day interactions, all play a huge part in how we feel and therefore the decisions we make, whether it be for the bad or for the better. You could be having the best day ever, then an argument or perhaps an unexpected bill can blindside us at any moment and change the mood completely, we’ll call this, short term happiness. On the flip side we have long term happiness, and this is ultimately what we need to focus on, and our decisions that we make day to day have to be towards achieving this goal, regardless of the things that happen to us at any moment.

Its easy to lose sight of a long-term goal when emotions take over, we turn to food, alcohol or cigarettes when shit hits the fan to bring us short term happiness, and although they may temporarily make us feel better, they move us further away from the ultimate goal of long-term happiness. It took me a long time to be able to be mature enough to see past the bullshit in the moment and start to look at my life more objectively. An argument would knock me for 6, I was no longer in the mood to exercise, I wouldn’t want to eat anything, specially not the same boring food I eat everyday to stay on my food plan, and the easiest escape from the feelings I was having was to drink. Now I’m not saying your all alcoholics like myself, but I do want you to be aware of the fact short term decisions effect long time happiness. Waking up the next day with a hangover and feeling bloated from the 14” pizza that I still had remnants of down my chest is not a nice feeling, it created a cycle of despair that ultimately leads down a very dark path. My other choice in light of a disagreement was to do the things that I’m SUPPOSED to do, not just what I want to do. I would have woken up the next day feeling sore from the previous day’s gym session, and I’d be clear headed from a better night’s sleep, this allows me to properly deal with my problems and resolve them quicker, therefore ending the short-term unhappiness sooner and allowing me to continue towards my goal of long term happiness. Boredom is another form of short-term unhappiness, it’s something that we in modern society don’t deal with very well at all, so even a whiff of a night out with friends or having a drink at home with your husband is likely to send us running to the nearest off licence, but once again the long-term effects are the same. Muhammed Ali was once asked what’s the hardest part about becoming world champion, the interviewer very much expecting a response such as the long runs, the dieting or the hours of training, his answer however was dodging the night clubs, saying no to friends, being alone in bed by yourself at 9pm every night, the monotony of doing this each night when there was so much more on offer was even enough to tempt the world champion, but by showing the discipline to say no, and embrace the boredom, he achieved his ultimate goal, just as we hope to achieve ours of being happy. This is my first piece of advice to you today, don’t give up what you want now for what you want most. For years you have chosen the easy options, going out with friends, eating that chocolate bar, having endless days off from exercise, and where has that led you? Right to us, feeling shit about yourself and needing to make a change!

Let us move on, and I want to discuss something that we spend a third of our life doing, work! If you love your job and you dance out of bed on a Monday morning, then this section is not for you, someone who loves their job is one of the luckiest people in the world, sadly this is not a very common occurrence. Most people put up with a lot of shit to get their monthly pay packet, whether it’s a boss they don’t like, co-workers who don’t treat them well, high levels of stress that’s enough to make your hair fall out, work massively effects our day-to-day mood. These people absolutely live for the weekends, and as it gets later through the day on a Sunday, the feeling of dread starts to set in as they stare at another working week. Ask yourselves, why are you so willing to put yourself through such torment? Is the money good? Are you just blindly hoping it will get better? Did you spend years trying to work up to the position you’re in only to find it wasn’t what you hoped it would be? If a friend was telling you all this, what would your advice to them be? We’ll discuss the money part first, because I understand we all need it, and you all probably have a standard of living that your job allows you to keep, but are your truly enjoying that standard of living when a third of the time your miserable at work, because you’ll also spend a good chunk worrying about going back to work, and a third of your life you’ll spend asleep, so that’s no use! Would an easier job at the expense of one less holiday a year make your life happier overall? What first made me think about this was when I was walking through town on my dinner from Hull college, going back to teaching maths to a load of little bastards who had no interest in learning, and in the middle of Queens gardens there was a bunch of lads, lets just say then didn’t look like they had jobs at all, and they was all sat around drinking, laughing, dancing whilst I miserably strolled back to work. Now I’m not saying they was happy in the long run, but it did make me think, am I working my arse off doing something I don’t enjoy just so I can have a higher standard of living, but ultimately being unhappy? They certainly looked happier than me in that moment, and it made me reflect on previous jobs I’ve had in my life. After school I started an apprenticeship, and it took me around 7 years to become a fully qualified Engineer, I tried a few different jobs in the same field, but no matter what I did, I would still get the same feeling of dread on a Sunday as my Monday morning start got closer, but I just wasn’t willing to give up on something that I’d spent so much time in my life to achieve, this is called the sunk-cost fallacy. The Oxford dictionary defines this as “the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial”. I once had a consultation with a client who was a nurse, and I’d given her a very basic exercise plan to follow, I was given 10 million excuses as to why this was impossible for her to follow, most of which was because of her work, it didn’t allow her time to meal prep, she was always too tired after work, and her feet would hurt so much she couldn’t even go out with her kids when she finished never mind exercise. My suggestion to her, was to find a different job if it’s making her so miserable, this was not at all received well. What proceeded was an uninterrupted 10-minute surge of what can only be called word vomit and I was a terrible human for even suggesting such a thing! This woman was stuck in a job she hated, hoping for things to suddenly change without taking any action to change it, pretty close to what Albert Einstein labelled as the definition of insanity. Its never too late to make a change in your life, just because things are a certain way and have been for a long time, doesn’t mean they have to stay that way. You might only have 10 years left in your job before retirement, so why spend 3 of them in higher education finding a new career path? I’ll tell you why, because you’ve only got 1 fucking life, and 7 years is a very long time to spend unhappy, living for the weekend or booking holidays and just enjoying that 1 week you get abroad each year, happiness is not cocktails on a beach, happiness is what you find sitting around the dinner table each night with your family, and if your head is stuck worrying about how some dickhead is going to treat you at work the next day, you not only affect your happiness, you effect your family’s as well, and you owe it to them and to yourself to be the best version of yourself.

Finally, then lets quickly close on our family, or at least the relationships we have. You know my feelings on unsupportive friends and partners, a true friend is someone you can tell anything to, and they’ll be supportive, not tell you how stupid you are for making a certain decision. We are meant to build a support network of people who build us up and you build them up, if a friend or a partner is constantly dragging you down, you need to reconsider that relationship, again, just because you’ve been friends or in a relationship with someone for a long time, doesn’t mean you owe it to anyone to keep that going at the expense of your own happiness. Breaking the relationship off might hurt a lot in the short term, but we must consider out long term happiness, things might turn out better then you ever could have hoped, but only if you take the action to make that happen. Stop sitting around and saying it might get better, because it hasn’t got better yet and you might waste the rest of your life, or leave it till its too later to make the change yourself.

That’s a lot to take in isn’t it! The main takeaway from this however is don’t just rest on your laurels, if something isn’t right, make a change, don’t just take the path of least resistance, don’t just choose the easy options to bring yourself happiness, happiness is found when you take the hard paths in life, and you can’t heal yourself in the same environment that made you sick!

Make the change now…

Big Love,

Az

Ps. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” -Albert Einstein