A fantastic sushi menu, a breathtaking opera, the best table in the restaurant with an ocean view – it could be a treat that everyone will envy. But flashes of thoughts are twitching in your head and won’t let you rest. Enjoyment needs a clear head.

This is how you succeed in enjoying.

Enjoyment has one important prerequisite: we must be in the here and now in order to enjoy. If we succeed, it doesn’t matter whether a lobster salad in a three-star restaurant lies on the plate in front of us or a fresh slice of bread with salty butter and chives. Both can mean perfect enjoyment, both can pass us by without us really noticing.

However, pleasure is good for our body and soul. In this way, it is possible to enjoy more and more intensively:

1 DAILY ENJOYMENT

As nice as the anticipation of a trip, the weekend or a nice celebration is. We can also enjoy these outstanding things only if we succeed in consciously enjoying them in everyday life. You should make it worth your while to think only of yourself several times a day and consciously enjoy yourself. Feeling the warmth of a cup of tea in your hand, taking in its scent and taste. Feeling a breeze or raindrops on your face. To look at a picture intensively. Eating a piece of fruit mindfully.

This requires not multitasking for a few minutes, but focusing entirely on one thing and consciously enjoying it.

2 LET GO AND BE

The famous head cinema usually has a script: people who have hurt us, people who have taken advantage of us, people by whom we feel unfairly treated. Over and over again, they pop up in our thoughts and keep us from enjoying the good things in life.

There is only one thing that helps here: letting go, by letting the other people be. It is never possible to change a person. That is, we have the choice to accept him as he is by simply letting go of our ideas, or we decide that the person who is not good for us no longer has a place in our lives. This can happen in different stages, in that we inwardly make sure that things don’t bother us anymore, or decide to go new ways in which we no longer encounter people who are not good for us.

3 DEVELOPMENT

Routine is dangerous. The more we proceed on well-worn paths, the deeper our track becomes and the less we succeed in looking to the right and to the left. Only when we allow spontaneity and unexpected things, we manage to enjoy more.

Life often consists of completely unexpected things, chaos and surprises. In most cases, the spontaneous reaction to this is a negative one, because this is not how we imagined it. Staying open and interested, expecting something good and better to come out of it, gives us the freedom in our minds to enjoy new situations.

4 ENJOYMENT BALANCE IN THE EVENING

Treat yourself to a balance of enjoyment each evening before sinking into sleep. What gave you particular pleasure during the day. In which moments were you completely with yourself and intensely enjoyed what you were doing or enjoyed doing nothing?

Perfectionists in particular tend to take on too many things, letting life pass them by. The enjoyment balance sheet in the evening is a good discipline to track whether this was a day of enjoyment, or whether it was a day when enjoyment came last.

5 SUFFICIENT SLEEP

Sufficient sleep is one of the most important conditions to enjoy. Too little sleep means enormous stress for the body. Often, we still manage to function and get an enormous daily workload behind us.

However, if you look back at these days, you will notice that there was no trace of enjoyment on these days. Without adequate sleep, we fail to experience pleasure.