What happiness habits do you have to keep your spirits lifted? This is an important question to answer. To clarify, I’m defining happiness as a state of mind that produces positive thinking, light heartedness, gratitude, and perhaps even laughter. According to the popular site, Very Well Mind, happiness is defined as:
“An emotional state characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. While happiness has many different definitions, it is often described as involving positive emotions and life satisfaction.”
Then why are so many people unhappy although they have all the things that signal success? A good career, people who care about them whether they be family or friends, a nice roof over their heads, reliable transportation, and health.
And why are so many people happy that on the surface should in theory be unhappy? Perhaps, they are experiencing severe health challenges or have disabilities along with other challenging life circumstances.
This is where the power of happiness habits can benefit you.
First understand that your happiness is caused by your thoughts about what you experience. How you choose to label and think about your experiences will determine if you will be happy or not.
Here are 8 happiness habits you can integrate into your life to increase positive emotions presented in no particular order.
Look for the opportunity in situations: Whomever said that life isn’t about what happens to us, but how we respond was spot on. There are always opportunities to learn and grow from situations if we look for it.
Embrace challenges as opportunities: When situations get tough, again, it’s an opportunity to examine our thinking, strengthen our resilience muscles, and push through despite our fears. This is where the real work happens.
Assume good intentions: This habit helps you to pause before assuming that a person has malicious intent.
Memorize a key part of the Serenity Prayer and repeat it often: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Pray: For those with a religious or spiritual outlook ask for help from your higher power.
Practice self-compassion: You are part of a shared humanity, whether you feel this way or not. Suffering can feel isolating, but remembering that everything that you are experiencing someone else has also experienced. While you are unique, your problems are not, so be kind and gentle with yourself. Treat yourself as tenderly as you would treat someone else.
Embrace a growth mindset: You can improve in anything with practice overtime. Be patient while you’re learning. With a growth mindset you can embrace new experiences and challenges to excite your life.
Practice gratitude: The reason you hear this all the time is because it is true. Gratitude focuses your mind off worries and onto better feeling thoughts through appreciation.
Have you ever felt grumpy in a beautiful and fun place? What about being with friends and family and still feeling alone? Whether you experience happiness or not in any circumstance is a function of your thoughts about what you are experiencing. How we think about what we do determines how happy we are at any given moment.
Feeling happy all the time is not a goal that I desire or promote, but it sure feels good and we all can create more of it. The power is in our hands, or rather our heads.
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Cheering you on,
Asia
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