Making life simple part I

So you wound up reading this blog even though you should be paying the bills, cooking a meal for the family, doing the laundry or some other mundane but mandatory chore? Well if you feel like you should be doing something productive but you don’t actually want to do it right now is suggest you stick around for a minute. What I’m about to tell you just might change your life for the better.

The thing is – adult human beings are damn good at making their lives unbearably stressful by making chores way too complicated and stuffing their calendar full of them. When you think about what we truly have to achieve in a single day to survive the demands of life and enjoy it the list is quite short:

• We need a safe place to sleep and rest, a home.
• We need enough food and water to meet our body’s nutritional demands
• In a modern western society we need some form of income to meet the costs of living and the demands of the society
• We need some form of exercise to keep our body and mind healthy, this can be through work or recreation
•  If you have children everything above for them except naturally they won’t have an income so you need to provide
• Most people need some meaningful relationships; significant other, friends, children
• A job or a hobby (or hobbies) that feel meaningful to you and make life interesting; a true passion if you’re lucky

So eat, sleep, make money. Simple right? As always the devil’s in the details and it’s the stuff you need to do to achieve all that and this is where many if not most people grossly overestimate what they can achieve in a day and what is reasonable to demand from yourself and you loved ones. Since you are reading a blog about stress, in all likelihood you are on of those people and what I’m trying to tell you is you should strive to make your life simple.

If your average day goes on by going to work and doing chores with little to no time to enjoy activities that bring you joy you can’t be too happy. And this one of the biggest reasons why you feel constantly stressed, your life is not in balance and you resent all the work you have to put up with.

What you need to do, is to make the time it takes to do all the nasty stuff as short as possible, while simultaneously making the time to do the enjoyable stuff as long as possible. You need to optimize your life by making all the things that don’t give you any enjoyment or add to your happiness as simple and straight forward as possible.

Now what this exactly means in your life I unfortunately can’t know, but in the next part I will provide examples from my own life that I have found to make my life more simple, more enjoyable and less stressful.