Simple Yet Highly Effective Ways to Experience a Fuller Life

You don’t have to get rich, find the love of your life, hang out with the right people, travel the world, or live in the best places on earth to experience a fuller life. There’s a simpler, less strenuous, less demanding way: Enhance your senses, stretch your mind, and befriend your body.

The best way to explain this concept is through some examples.

Enhance Your Senses

You probably have an excellent sense of sight, hearing, and touch. But how much time have you spent deepening your appreciation for your sense of taste and smell?

One of the easiest ways to stimulate these neglected senses is through food.

Here are three examples to clarify this idea.

1. If you love throwing small cocktail parties for your friends, serve them up something that will take them by surprise. Search online for “alcohol freeze pops near me” and order some. When they arrive, save them for your next cocktail party and surprise everyone with your new treat.
2.  If you love to cook, don’t just try out new dishes, but enroll in a cooking school that will teach you new culinary skills or introduce you to unfamiliar cuisines.
3. If you love coffee, find simple, clever ways to enhance your daily brew. A few small tweaks to your favorite brew will renew your love affair with this cognitive-boosting bean.

Stretch Your Mind

Even if you have an advanced degree in some intellectually demanding field or have a reputation as a well-read person, you probably have denied yourself the joy of stretching your mind. The way to stretch your mind is to pick something that you have little experience with and devote some time to getting better at it.

Here are two more examples:

• If you love to read, but write little, learn how to become a better writer. Conversely, if you are a professional writer, but read little, or only read things related to your niche, broaden your selection of reading material.
• If you’re an intensely logical person, you excel at picking up new ideas and describing them clearly and lucidly. You appreciate the depth and nuances of anything you turn your mind to learning. Think of delving into your neglected creative side and take up art. Conversely, you might be an excellent artist but have paid little attention to the world of ideas. Consider ways that you can improve this neglected aspect of your mind.

Make Friends With Your Body

Most people default to being overcritical of their bodies. Even remarkably good-looking people feel incomplete. They are experts at noticing small blemishes invisible to everyone else. If you don’t love and appreciate your body just as it is then you are not focusing on what a marvelous piece of biological engineering evolution has created. While it’s fine to find ways to enhance your beauty, why not also focus on something more fundamental: improving how your body works. In other words, make it more functional and adaptable.

Make an inventory of some things that your body needs that you have neglected. For instance, you might be a highly ambitious person, someone determined to make it in the world. You get up early in the morning, work conscientiously all day long, and then go to bed late at night. Because of your busy lifestyle, you are sleep-deprived. Since sleep is an essential biological function, you are depriving your body of the time it needs to recuperate enough from one day to the next. Learn about sleep hygiene to get back your natural vitality.

Make a list of the many ways that you have not been a good friend to your body. Seek to address these in the same way you would try to make amends with a friend that you have unwittingly next elected or sometimes. We often think of living a fuller life as having more or doing more. Try these suggested exercises to enhance being more.

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