Reaching for the stars might make your miserable. Read here what to do instead
We’ve long been told that we should chase our dreams, push ourselves out of our comfort zones, and place achieving our goals above all else.
But what if that approach is making us unhappy?
Constantly reaching for the stars makes you anxious, miserable, and unable to actually act, says Anna Tomkins, founder of Handbook For Today.
She believes that having undefined big goals can cause us a constant stress to achieve, that ‘actually paralyses us instead of being an accelerator for our action’.
‘You could also call it FOMOGA, fear of missing out on goal achieving,’ Anna tells Metro.co.uk. ‘Reaching for the stars is well-meant advice to not settle with a life that you might find boring or frustrating.
‘However, we often don’t even know what this big life goal is and this might make us anxious.
‘While there is nothing wrong with wanting a lot for yourself, you need to start with self-care and tackle your worries first, step by step.’
Makes sense to us. But what does that actually look like? How can we avoid FOMOGA, but still achieve – and be happier as a result?
Anna has some suggestions.
Express gratitude for what you have
‘One step to being more ready for working on a goal is appreciating what is great in our lives and what we have achieved already,’ says Anna.
Take a moment to appreciate what you’ve accomplished so far, and reflect on whether this is making you happy.
Do you genuinely want something more, or do you just feel a strange pressure to always be moving on to the next big thing?
Ask yourself why you want to achieve a goal
Get real with yourself about why you want to tick off certain things on your lifetime to-do list.
Do you really enjoy writing so much that you want to publish a book? Or are you just keen to have that ‘author’ label so you can impress people you don’t really know or care about online?
‘It will be easier to achieve anything when you have a clear view on why you want to achieve a certain goal,’ Anna tells us. ‘It takes great honesty to admit that some big goals are not so much set to make us feel great about the outcome, but the hope impressing other people.