Being happy has a lot of benefits. It improves your work performance, makes you healthier, increases your chances of having successful relationships, and may even help you live longer. Plus, if you’ve ever tried being happy and unhappy, you know that being happy is far more enjoyable.
Of course, knowing that happiness is beneficial to your health will not make you happier. If you’re already unhappy, worrying that you’re losing out on all of happiness’s perks might make you feel much worse.
It’s natural to feel melancholy at times in our life, and we shouldn’t attempt to convince ourselves otherwise. Feeling sad is natural and healthy after losing a loved one, going through a breakup, losing your job, or experiencing any traumatic life event. If, on the other hand, you’ve been miserable for a long time and don’t know why, or you suspect you’re suffering from depression, it’s a good idea to seek the aid of a professional therapist or counselor.
Happiness, on the other hand, may be cultivated for many of us. Because the human brain evolved to give greater attention to negative ideas and stimuli than good ones, this is the case.
Because our natural tendency is to minimize good ideas and stimuli in our lives, it’s important knowing how to pay greater attention to them in our lives. As a result, we are less content than we should be.
Here are some easy strategies for getting you thinking positively and increasing your overall happiness in a thought. Some of my personal favorites are as follows:
Examine your thoughts to see if you’re thinking positively.
It’s an essential topic to think about, and Davis has a simple self-assessment on her website that might help you find out how much of a positive thinker you are (or aren’t). But, more importantly, simply asking the question will encourage you to generate more optimistic ideas. This is due to a process known as metacognition, which is a strong memory enhancer. Metacognition is a fancy name for thinking about thinking. Asking yourself whether you’re thinking positively on a frequent basis will help you remember to do so. That is an excellent beginning step.
Make a list of pleasant words in your head.
It may appear improbable that merely reciting lists of words linked with joy will make you better, but it can.
I’m sure you can think of a few phrases that spring to mind when you think about happy, but if not, here’s a long list of terms that psychologists have rated on the “valence” scale, with higher numbers indicating greater positivity. Love, joy, and baby are some of the best ranking, which is expected.
Make use of connections.
You may train yourself in the same manner, forming associations that you can utilize to your benefit.
Here’s a quick test I gave myself: I wanted to offer myself occasional reminders to live in the now and enjoy the environment around me after a weekend meditation program. So I ascribed that job to crows, partly because I see them frequently in my rural/suburban neighborhood, and partly because they are really special, highly clever birds. I’m left-brained and analytical, and I’m terrible at simply enjoying the moment.
Practice gratitude.
There’s plenty of evidence that being grateful for the good things in your life, even very simple things, will make you happier. So every morning before getting out of bed, I mentally list three things I’m thankful for. Some friends of ours ask each family member to say something they’re grateful for before eating dinner every evening. There are all kinds of ways to give yourself a daily reminder to focus on something you have to be grateful for. Pick one that works for you.
Even little victories should be celebrated.
Starting with the items on this list is a good place to start. Take it as a victory and an event worth celebrating if you’ve begun practicing thankfulness on a regular basis (even if it’s not every day) or if you’ve spent some time writing about happy events. For instance winning a case as a lawyer makes you feel happy for the hard work and victory. We have a propensity (I know I do) to downplay our own successes and we should combat this by going out of our way to applaud ourselves when we do anything correctly.
Letting go of all-or-nothing thinking, which is a wonderful way to unnecessarily make ourselves miserable. Assume you determined last week to write about a pleasant event every day. But only on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays did you do it. Instead of applauding ourselves on the four days we reached our objective, we have a human propensity to chastise ourselves for missing 3 days.
So, rather of concentrating on the three days you didn’t perform the exercise, combat that inclination by applauding and even rewarding yourself for the four days you did. This is how success works. There will be diversions and chances missed, and I can almost assure that you will fall short of your own expectations.
From where you are to where you want to go, it’s nearly not a smooth road. One of the surefire methods to make yourself as happy as possible is to ensure you relish the minor victories along the journey.