So, right now, more than ever before in human history, we've found that people are feeling lonely. There's actually been studies on this, and the studies have shown that people are getting lonelier and lonelier, even with social media out there and everybody feeling like maybe they're more connected than ever on the internet, they're actually feeling more and more alone in the real world. And so, you may be feeling lonely, you may be feeling disconnected, you may be feeling depressed, especially with what's going on right now in the world and all the turmoil and there's a lot of people who are scared and frightened and isolated. And so, today I'm going to be talking about how to make yourself happy and enjoy your life and feel good about yourself and what you should be doing every single day, even if you're isolated and feeling lonely right now. Hi, my name is Matthew Coast and welcome to Commitment Connection. So let's talk about the different things that you want to do. So if you're feeling isolated and you're feeling alone and you're at home, what's the best thing that you can do? The fastest way to change the way that you feel and what's going on in your body, let's say you're depressed or you're angry or you're just feeling down for whatever reason, the fastest way to change that is to interrupt the emotional pattern that's going on in your body at the moment. And the quickest way to do that is to change your environment. So what happens is we get into patterns and we get into a pattern of how we're sitting, we get into a pattern of the place that we are, the place that we're in can trigger kind of different types of emotions and then we get stuck in that. And so a really quick way to change that is to change your environment. So go for a walk, go into a different room, just go and spend some time in different types of environments and just change up how your mind is relating and associating to the things around you. That is the fastest way to change how you're feeling in the moment. The second thing you want to do is change your physical position, change how you're standing. If you're sitting, stand up. Like I said, you can go for a walk or do something which will change your body position as well. You can start dancing and singing and doing things that are fun, wherever it is that you are, you can do jumping jacks. Just change your actual physical position.  Dance around, move around, jump around. Do whatever you can to kind of shake up that emotional pattern that you're stuck in. So that's the first thing that you want to do. The second thing that you want to do is you'll want to change your focus. So most of the time, if you're feeling bad or something, it's because you're focusing on bad things.  And so what you want to change is you want to start focusing on the things that you do want. Our minds are like a garden. And if you don't tend to this garden, weeds will end up growing. And if they grow for long enough, they'll end up taking over your garden and you'll just have a garden full of weeds.  Our minds are actually designed for a time when it was important that we learned about what was going on that was wrong and that was dangerous and all that kind of stuff. And now that we have all of this media and information flying into our feces at our fingertips all the time, what we do is we still kind of get stuck and tunneled into what's wrong instead of what it is that we want. And so what's good in your life? Just ask yourself that question. Think about what's actually good in my life right now? What can I celebrate? What am I happy about? What could I celebrate if I really wanted to celebrate something? And what I think you'll find is that there's always something that you can be happy about. You can be happy that you have a heart that's breathing without you even telling it to. You can be happy that you have different senses that allow you to experience the world around you. You have the sense of touch. You have hearing. You can hear what's going on right now with what I'm talking about. You can see things. You can see friends. You can see people. You can see the world around you. You can taste things and all of these things can be great if you think about how they work and how great they are. You can think about the great environment that you live in, the great world that you live in, a world where you can get any kind of information that you want. You could ever want at your fingertips just by searching for it. And you can find just about anything you want out there. And it's pretty absolutely amazing right now. The other thing that you want to think about is what do you want in your life? What do you want to create in your life? What do you want to experience in your life? With most of the women that I work with, they usually tell me that they want some kind of relationship or they want to make money or they want a business or they want whatever. And in reality, what they're really searching for is a feeling, an emotion. So if I ask them, why do you want that? Usually it'll come down to something like, I want to feel loved. I want to feel cherished. I want to feel like I'm important to somebody. I want to be proud of who I am and what I've created in my life. And you can actually create those experiences if you want to. We'll get to that in a second here though. But first, you just want to focus on what it is, what do you want in your life? What do you want more of? What do you want to create? What do you want to be a part of? How do you want to help? How do you want to live your life? If you could choose how you lived your life and you could design your life from scratch, how would you design it? And so that's what you want to focus on first is what it is that you want and what is good in your life right now. The next thing that you want to do is change the way that you think. Habitually change the way that you think. Like I said, if you don't specifically think about things that you want, your mind will go to the things that you don't want or what's wrong or the problems of the world. And so you can do a lot of different things to change the way that you think. One of the things you can do is listen to inspirational music, listen to things that inspire you, that make you feel good, that make you think about good things. You can listen to inspirational programs or read inspirational books or however it is that you like to consume content. Do more of that and spend more time getting in a habit of doing that every single day. Even if it's for 10 minutes or 15 minutes or 30 minutes, just spend a little bit of time every single day. Carve out a little bit of time to read and learn about something that inspires you, that makes you want to be bigger and better and greater in your life.  So your environment that you're in actually determines a lot about how you feel.  It'll remind your subconscious mind what you're doing in your life and what you want to create. And so find different pictures and images that are symbols that make you feel alive and make you feel the things that you want to feel, that remind you of the things that you want to feel. And get rid of any kind of images or pictures or things that make you feel bad about yourself. Next thing that you want to do is shift your belief systems. And if you want to shift your belief systems, what you have to do is figure out what do you want to believe, right?  And so these are really important things that you experience and that you do on a consistent basis. So you want to change the way that you think and your belief systems and put things around you and inspirational music around you and read and go through programs all the time so that you can change the way that your mind works on a daily basis. And if you do that every single day, you'll start to get in a habit of it. And if you start to get into a habit of it, you'll start to build momentum. And it's amazing how you can shift your entire life if you're depressed, right? Like, so the next thing that I want to talk about is changing the way that you feel. This is the last one. If you really want to change your life, change the way that you feel on a consistent basis. Depression is really just it's just recognizing what's wrong in your life, recognizing what's wrong in the world and focusing on the things that are bad all the time and then getting into a habit of doing that over and over and over again. For most people that have depression, that's the reason for it is because they're constantly focusing on what's wrong, what's missing, what they don't have, what they should have, how the world should be, how, how politics should be, how life should be, how, how things aren't fair and how much they've lost. And if you do that, if you're constantly focusing on those things, no wonder you're going to be sad all the time.  And then you're wondering why you're depressed and then you're taking medicine for that. And it doesn't work any because you might be changing your physiology a little bit, but you're not actually changing your focus and changing what you think and feel on a consistent basis. And so you need to change the way that you feel on a consistent basis. And what's the fastest way to change the way that you feel? It's to change what you're focusing on. So your focus determines your emotions. And so if you're focusing on something, you're going to feel something based on that emotion.  Of course, you're going to be depressed.  Once you experience having the body that you want to have, all of a sudden you'll start to feel a completely different way. And if you do that over and over and over again, you'll eventually start to get into a habit of feeling a certain way. And then it'll be easy, right? The way that we feel is actually it's it's like a imagine a field. And in this field, there's like different trails that go into different directions. Well, some trails are really beaten down and they've been walked on over and over and over again, and it kind of creates this path, right? Maybe you've seen this in the real world and there's like a field and there's a path that goes through it and it's really beaten down. And it's really easy to walk through. Well, if that path goes somewhere that you don't want to go, but it's really easy to go down that way, it you might end up finding yourself walking down that path, even though you want to go in a different direction. And so what you have to do is start creating a new path, start creating a path towards the emotional experiences that you want to have on a consistent basis. And if you do that over and over and over again, eventually the old path will start growing, growing, growing grass and weeds and stuff and making it more and more difficult to go in that direction and the new direction that you want to go into the direction of feeling good and experiencing great emotions will start getting more and more beaten down so that it becomes easier and easier and easier to walk through until eventually it becomes like a street because it's so beaten down, it's so easy to walk through and you can just take anything through there if you need to. And so you want to spend time putting yourself into positive emotional states on a daily basis every single day you want to do this because the more that you do it, especially if you're feeling bad, like I said, go through all the things that we're talking about, specifically, interrupt the pattern, right? First, you want to interrupt the pattern, break things up, change your environment, change your physical positioning, whatever it is that you're doing, change what you're doing and then start putting yourself into positive emotional states. And so here are some positive emotional states that you might want to get into. The first one is getting excited, getting excited about your life, getting excited for what's coming, getting excited for for everything that that you've experienced and that you want to experience in your life, right? And just think about the things that you could get excited about. Even if you're not excited right now, what could you be excited about in your life and just spend some time thinking about that, spend some time visualizing yourself going through the process of getting to that point where you're experiencing the thing that you're excited about and what you'll start to notice is that you don't need that thing that you thought that you needed in order to feel excited about yourself or excited about life. All you need is yourself because those emotions, they don't come from the outside world, they don't come from the things that you think that are going to make you excited, they come from your heart, they come from inside. And you can make yourself feel that anytime you want to feel it. And all you have to do is think about the things that make you excited and just feel them and think about them and imagining yourself getting into them and having them and creating them. And that can make you excited in and of itself. Another thing that you want to feel is feeling your own love, right? Feeling the experience of love and a really easy way to do this is to just think about a time when you felt loved. Just think about a time in your life where you felt loved and really get into that experience, that time when you were feeling so loved. And what you want to do is get a hold of that feeling that you have and remember that feeling and remember how you can make yourself feel that way anytime you want to feel that way. And then what you can do is you can say you can start changing your questions up and start asking yourself things like, how can I experience more of the love that I already have for myself? And when you start thinking questions like that, all of a sudden what you'll do is you'll start coming up with answers and your answers will start coming out. Oh, I can recognize the fact that I'm taking care of myself. I can recognize the fact that I'm focusing on programs or watching YouTube videos that really make me feel alive and inspired and better about myself. And that's really part of the love that I have for myself. And you can start connecting to that and start realizing that you have a lot of love inside of you already and that you can experience that love any time you want to. And the last thing that you really want to spend time feeling is the feeling of gratitude, so being grateful. And so a lot of times I'll talk to people and they'll be like, oh, well, I'm not, you know, there's nothing to be grateful for.  Right. And that's fine. But what if you could be grateful? What's something that you could be grateful for? And we've already talked about some of the things like the richness of life, right, the senses, all the different senses that you have and whatever senses you do have and your ability to connect with the world. It's what allows us to connect with the world and connect with each other and connect with food and with drink and with friends and with the everything, right? Just the moment to moment basis that we have in our lives to connect to ourselves. And so what else can you be grateful for? You can be grateful for living in a time where you have all this amazing information at your fingertips. And a lot of times when I start talking about these things, sometimes women will start saying, oh, yeah, but this is going on. But that's going on. And all that is is your mind trying to hang on to what's wrong and what you don't want because it's got that clear path and you've got to just stop yourself at that path and create the new path, right?  And you can do that. And I'm just first, I want to go back over everything that we just talked about. So the first thing that you want to do, if you really want to be happy every day in your life, even when you're feeling isolated and lonely, what do you do? First thing you want to do is interrupt your pattern. So change your environment, go for a walk, get into a different room. Just change things up, create something different around you. That way you're not kind of stuck in this static pattern. And then the second thing you want to do is change your physical position. So stretch, dance, do some jumping jacks. Just get your body moving. Get everything flowing and moving. You can work out or do something like that that can completely change the way that you experience your life and change the pattern that you're in. And so the next thing you want to do is change your focus. Focus on what you want instead of what's wrong. Remember, our mind is like a garden. What is good in your life? What do you want in your life? Next is consistently change the way that you think. Listen to inspirational music, listen to or read inspirational programs. You can watch inspirational programs, too. Like I've got, put pictures, images and symbols all around you that inspire you and lift you up, shift your belief systems, change the way that you feel. Remember, depression is actually a habit for most people and you don't have to fall into that habit, start asking yourself questions that make you focus on positive things and the things that you want. Spend your time in positive emotional states. You can create those positive emotional states anytime you want to.   So think of the things that are right, not the things that are wrong.