As long as we’re alive, they’ll be no shortage of days that disappoint. Our circumstances can lead to feelings of discontentment.
Those realisations then lead to an emotional response. Maybe we’re angry, hurt, frustrated, lonely, jealous, happy, or bored.
When the emotion gets triggered, we can either have a healthy response to it or an unhealthy response.
In this series, we will discover 5 ways to be more content with life.
1. Stop Filling Emotional Needs with Stuff
We have been brainwashed into believing that if you’re unhappy, go shopping, and it will make everything better.
Your restless heart can never be satisfied by material possessions. Instead, you must look at the cause of your discontent. You must sit with your emotions and try and figure out what is making you unhappy.
Once you understand the cause of your emotional discontentment, you can begin to find healthier ways to fill your unmet emotional needs in a manner that does not require money.
If you’re at all in the wrong state of mind, this can lead to feelings of envy and spawn your desire to attempt to keep up with people you don’t even know. Before you know it you’re at the mall wracking up serious credit card debt. Months later when looking at your growing credit balance, you wonder what on earth did you buy.
If this cycle continues for too long, you could easily find yourself with serious credit card debt in the hundreds of thousands.
It can be especially true if you’re resistant to uncovering your issues. But the truth of the matter is most of us are tiring to fill our unmet need for one of four basic things: love and belonging; value and significance; recognition and respect; and status and validation.
So no matter where you are with your debt and spending, whether it be extreme or still somewhat manageable, if you can figure out what makes you tick – your emotional side of money – and how to fill the void in a healthier way so that you can have a balanced relationship with the almighty dollar, you can permanently free yourself from the endless cycle of buying just to make yourself feel better.
Related: How to be more CONTENT series : Part 2