[60 – 30/12]. When was the last time you felt truly alive? Free of the constant thoughts cluttering your mind. Focused and confident that as you move through life everything is coming together for you. You’re achieving your goals, radiating positive energy, and doing it all with a smile on your face.
It’s easy to get bogged down by the routine of everyday life. Sure, you need a routine and some structure. But when that routine gets too repetitive or mundane, you start moving away from who you want to be and the life you want to live. People feel alive at different times throughout their lives. But more often than not, it’s a fleeting brief moment, before the drudgery of daily life returns.
Feeling alive and enthusiastic about your life takes work. It’s a process of designing your life in a way that excites you and conditioning your mind by creating new neural pathways in your brain. When those new neural pathways become strengthened and solidified, the new state becomes your default mode of consciousness.
Does it mean you’ll never have a bad day again? No.
Will you bounce out of bed every morning and be your best self? No.
Can your new emotional benchmark be raised so that more often than not, you feel alive with purpose and optimistic? Absolutely.
Feeling alive isn’t a fake attempt to ‘be positive’. It’s an attitude and a paradigm through which you view your life and the world around you. Gained 5kg per run. OMG.
How to Feel Alive Again
One of the reasons so many people have lost their sense of aliveness is because the modern sedentary lifestyle allows it. Sitting all day at work. Eating foods high in sugar and fats. Minimal physical exercise. Sitting in a chair watching Netflix for hours at a time. It’s no wonder depression levels are rising and people feel dissatisfied with their lives.
When you’re not living as your best self, and you know it, you’ll never be happy. You’ll never feel alive. If life’s become dull or repetitive, you’re feeling sluggish, or your motivation levels are low, it’s time to shake things up.
The first step to feeling alive again is to make the decision. Acknowledge where you are and make a commitment to make your life better. To feel alive and inspired you need to move, be proactive, and take action.
12 Ways to Feel More Alive
1. Travel
Travel to new places and explore the world. When you get out of your regular environment, you leave behind your conditioned personality and the ‘real you’ comes out. You meet new people that don’t have a past reference for you. You can be who you want to be. When you travel you have to deal with uncertainty. You break out of your everyday routine and you have to respond to different events around you.
Most importantly you get to see the world through new eyes. Experiencing a new culture and learning how they see the world changes your perspective. Traveling snaps you out of the trance-like state you usually live in. waking you up and bringing you back to life.
2. Start a New Hobby
Starting a new hobby ignites excitement and interest which gives you an emotional lift. When you are engaged in something you find interesting and fully focused on the task at hand you feel alive. The human brain is designed to seek its objectives. From the most primitive desires generated in the reptilian brain to your more humanised limbic system activity, ‘seeking’ and ‘moving towards’ stimulates the pleasure centres in your brain.
When you have a hobby or interest and you’re working towards excellence in that area, your pleasure centres are activated and you experience feelings of enthusiasm and aliveness. You also learn new skills and expand your knowledge base, which increases the probability of success.
3. Have Fun
Snap yourself out of lethargy and boredom by doing something fun. Laugh and enjoy yourself. Life is meant to be enjoyed so what are you waiting for?
A healthy dose of it is a necessity for living a meaningful and joyous life. Do something unexpected and spontaneous. Don’t make it a one-off experience. Fun should be a regular occurrence in your life. As obvious as that sounds, take a look around and notice how many people’s lives are devoid of pure, genuine fun.
That’s no way to live. Incorporate joyful, fun experiences into your life. Feel alive!
4. Set New Goals and Take Action
Goals are essential to feeling alive and enthusiastic. It’s not so much about finally achieving the goal. That’s where a lot of people get it wrong. The sense of achievement is sweet, but it’s short-lived.
It’s about actively working towards a goal, making progress, and finally experiencing the unmatchable feeling of accomplishment that comes as a result of your hard work. Write a list of goals then put them in order. Choose (carefully) the top three goals on your list and cross out the others. Your sole focus from this point forward will be the working towards, and the attainment, of your top three goals.
5. Avoid Pettiness
Petty disputes are all too common. They drain you of your positive energy and make you focus, for the most part, on irrelevant things. Avoiding petty disputes means changing a) the importance of what you feel is worth disputing and b) how you respond to pettiness when directed at you.
The book “Reality Transurfing” by Vadim Zeland, talks about the source of virtually all our discontent being the over importance we give to objects and events in our lives. This line of thought is similar to the Buddhist doctrine that the main source of our suffering is attachment.
Don’t invest too much emotional energy into small stuff, that at the end of the day doesn’t matter.
If someone is trying to pull you into a petty dispute, stay calm and present.
You don’t need to explain yourself or argue to prove your point. Say a simple “ok” or “you might be right”, smile to yourself and go and do something else.
The less negative energy you indulge in the more alive you feel.
6. Say “YES” For 30 Days
For the next 30 days, your job is not to say ‘why’, ‘how’ or ‘what if’. Your job is to say yes. Accept every offer and opportunity that comes along, unless it puts your life in danger. Spontaneity and uncertainty create magic moments.
Saying yes to one small thing can lead to another small thing, that can then lead to a big thing. Too much predictability and a mundane routine are soul-crushing. If you want to bring more aliveness into your life, embrace uncertainty.
7. Say What You Mean
Hiding your true personality from the world is a barrier to success and fulfilment. Saying what you think is the ‘right’ thing to say will only get you so far. The more robust your self-expression the more alive you feel.
When you’re in a conversation and you have an opinion that runs counter to the consensus, say it. If there’s something you know you should say to a friend or partner but you haven’t because you didn’t want to make it awkward, say it. That person you’re attracted to and want to meet but haven’t, go and say hi.
When you say what you mean you feel better about yourself. Provided what you have to say isn’t overly negative, arrogant or rude, say what’s on your mind.
8. Take Care of Your Mind and Body
Your mind and body are inextricably linked. What affects one affects the other. When you partake in physical exercise you immediately feel better. Your state changes from slow and heavy to light, alert, and alive. Feeling alive is the result of motion, movement, and action.
It’s a simple equation: Move more and do more, and you feel better.
If you make a conscious decision to eat cleaner food, the very act of making the effort and following through will make you feel more alive. You have your objective (better health), you’re taking action (eating better), and you’re making progress ( you look and feel better). Taking care of your body is more than just going to the gym or eating less sugar (though that’s a great start).
Physical health is a lifestyle. How often you move and to what intensity, your dietary intake, even your thoughts and outlook on life contribute to your health. Nothing will make you feel more alive than a thriving state of physical health.
9. Spend Time in Nature
Fresh air. Sunshine. The sound of the waves and birds singing in the trees. It’s so refreshing and energising to get out and relax in nature for a while. Aside from being awestruck at the sheer beauty of nature and its various life forms around you, it also allows you to clear your mind and reset.
However convenient city life might be, leaving it all behind and going into nature has a miraculous effect. You feel a sense of calm. Things that previously bothered you take on a new perspective. You clear your mind and renew your sense of purpose. Spending time in nature regularly gives you a sense of aliveness you just can’t get by sitting indoors.
10. Challenge Yourself
You’re always more than you think you are. Challenge yourself to be more, do more and have more. Breaking out of your dreaded comfort zone is invigorating because you’re doing something new which sparks excitement and mental focus.
There are many things we want to do but don’t believe we can. The idea is too daunting. “I’m not able to do that”, “Where would I even begin?”, “What if it doesn’t work out and I fail?”. Don’t let that voice inside your head stop you.
Once you’ve done something you thought you couldn’t do, your self-image starts to change. You become a slightly different person having now had the experience. You thought you couldn’t do it, but now you’ve done it. Imagine how much more you’re capable of?
11. Contribute
The need to contribute to something meaningful is fundamental to human nature. Contributing your time is the ultimate contribution. Why? Because time is your most valuable asset. Anyone can put a few dollars in an envelope and send it to a worthy cause. But taking time out of your life and volunteering that to someone or something else is what makes a real difference.
Volunteering your time doesn’t mean you have to pack up your life and move to a third world country to work in a non-profit (though you could, and I know people who have). It simply means giving your time to something outside of your immediate personal needs. It doesn’t have to be a global initiative either, it could be local or even within your family circle.
Contribute and show more kindness to people and worthy causes, it’ll change your life.
12. Fall in love
If you do not already have a lovely person to call your beloved, learn to love another human being. To let yourself be vulnerable and sensibly aware of the sensory feelings and an ocean of emotions while engaging with a significant other. You are only true to being alive when you feel with your heart 100% and your actions speaking louder than your words.
And then there’s the self love. Are you in love yet? Not romantically, but in love with yourself, life, waking up in the morning, smiling, laughing, crying, growing through life one second at a time. You are going through hardships. And still loving life.
Change Your Life
The ultimate way to feel alive is to make your life awesome. If your life’s going well, you might only need to make a few small changes. There’s always some area you can improve on. But if your life’s not where it could be, or should be, then change it. Change everything about it you don’t like.
One of the greatest things about being a human is our ability to reinvent ourselves. If there’s something you don’t like about yourself, change it. Have an image in your mind of the ideal you. What would you look like, act like, and what characteristics and skills would you have?
Develop and implement a plan to start moving who you are to who you want to be. The words “change your life” are so overused they can sound like cheap click-bait. But the truth is that you can change your life. Step by step, piece by piece.
Nothing will make you feel more alive than being the person you want to be, living the type of life you want to live.
So the moral of the story is, you do you. How you want to live life. Period. No questions. Forget about the past. Numb out the pain. Make new alliances. Find a new love. Show up. Be honest. Stay present. Take one day at a time. Let’s get high on life till the day we die.
Quotes About How to Feel More Alive
“Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive” – Elbert Hubbard
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love” – Marcus Aurelius
“Happiness is what matters, feeling alive-not art or knowledge or money” – Marty Rubin
“Meeting people in a genuine way and feeling like there is a vital and meaningful connection going on makes me come alive” – Sharon Salzberg
“To me, life is a gift, and it’s a blessing to just be alive. And each person should learn what a gift it is to be alive no matter how tough things get”. – Tony Bennett
