Your three things can be seemingly small a beautiful flower you saw during a walk or big the fact that you're healthy. In fact, science shows that it's the small everyday experiences that make us happier, compared to big life events. Happiness is contagious. Research has shown that spending money on others makes us happier than spending money on ourselves and doing small acts of kindness increases life satisfaction.
Here are a few easy ways to show kindness :. Friendships can be one of the keys to longevity. In fact, one study found that low social interaction—and in turn, loneliness—can be as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and is twice as bad for your health as obesity.
Use your lunch break as an opportunity to call a friend or, if possible, take a walk together. If you're busy during the week, consider inviting your friend to do some errands together on the weekend.
Research shows people report feeling happier when they spend their money on experiences rather than objects. So instead of that new pair of jeans consider trying a new yoga class or inviting a friend to the movies with you. While these ways to increase happiness may come easily to some people, if you're coping with depression , chronic stress , or other psychological illnesses, it can be difficult to see the bright side.
Remember that every day is different and that these are practices to work on daily. If you continue to have difficulty coping, consider talking to a friend or family member for support, or contact your doctor for advice on next steps. Learn the best ways to manage stress and negativity in your life.
Gratitude and well-being: a review and theoretical integration. Your attitude about life and the things that happen to you each day can also greatly impact your overall level of happiness and life satisfaction. Cultivating the mind of an optimist can not only mean cultivating happiness, regardless of your circumstance, but it can actually bring more things into your life to be happy about.
In addition to optimism , happy people tend to have an internal locus of control. Simply put, they tend to believe that they are the masters of their fate rather than the victims of circumstance. When you view the stressors of your life as a challenge rather than a threat, you tend to come up with more effective solutions.
You also feel more exhilarated rather than drained as you tackle these circumstances. In order to make yourself happy, you need to find balance. A good job and financial stability can be important for happiness, but you must also balance those things with other factors that promote happiness including your health, your relationships, and other meaningful pursuits.
There's no happiness quick fix. As you set your goals, remember all of the areas of life that are important to you. Map out a detailed description of how you would like your whole life to look, or set goals and develop healthy habits for a different area of your life each month. For example, many people expect to immediately change their habits out of sheer willpower; any slip-ups are experienced as "failures" and too often contribute to an abandonment of the goal and feelings of defeat.
Like everything else, making yourself happier is a process, so give yourself time to make the changes and see the changes. While it is important to pursue long-term solutions to promote your happiness, there are also small things you can do that can make you happier in the present moment. Some of these include:.
If you are struggling to find happiness and coping with feelings of low mood, consider talking to your doctor or mental health professional. Feelings of unhappiness may be a symptom of depression.
Talking to a professional can help you get the treatment you need to feel better, which may involve psychotherapy , medication, or a combination of both. Finding ways to make yourself happy often starts with small steps that help you work toward long-term goals. So spend some time thinking about the things that will help you feel happy and satisfied in your life and consider some of the ways that you can work toward some of those goals. Just remember that happiness isn't a destination.
Good relationships are one of the best ways to enjoy happiness, health, and well-being. Developing certain emotional skills can help us form and keep good relationships. When we are there for the people in our lives — and when they're there for us — we are more resilient, resourceful, and successful.
Our lives can be busy with day-to-day activities and responsibilities. Many of us multi-task, so we might race ahead, thinking about the next place we need to be.
But slowing down to pay attention to what we're doing and why builds happiness. Pay attention to the effects of your actions. Notice the ways big or small that you make a difference. Live life based on the values that are important to you.
Take time to think of what really matters to you like helping others or protecting the planet. In what way do you want to make the world a better place? Notice any small daily actions that point you in that direction. They help give your life a sense of meaning and increase happiness. When our lives are rich with positive emotions, great relationships, strengths to practice, and a sense of purpose, we are ready to accomplish things.
Setting and achieving goals gives us something to put our energy into. It lets us see how we make a difference. Put effort into things that matter to you. Do your best at whatever you try, without a need to be perfect. If things don't work out at first, keep an optimistic mindset and try again.
Believe in yourself and your dreams. Set realistic goals and small action steps to turn dreams into realities. To make a success even sweeter, celebrate it with people you care about.
They could remember 81 percent of the words with a negative connotation, like cancer. But they could remember only 31 percent of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like sunshine or basket. The BPS Research Digest explores another study that proves sleep affects our sensitivity to negative emotions. Using a facial recognition task throughout the course of a day, researchers studied how sensitive participants were to positive and negative emotions.
Those who worked through the afternoon without taking a nap became more sensitive to negative emotions like fear and anger. However, an intervening nap blocked and even reversed this negative emotional reactivity to anger and fear while conversely enhancing ratings of positive happy expressions.
Of course, how well and how long you sleep will probably affect how you feel when you wake up, which can make a difference to your whole day. Another study tested how employees' moods when they started work in the morning affected their entire workday. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to customers' moods. And, most important to managers, employee mood had a clear impact on performance, including both how much work employees performed and how well they performed it.
Not staying in touch with friends and family is one of the top five regrets of the dying. If you want more evidence that time with friends is beneficial for you, research proves it can make you happier right now, too. Social time is highly valuable when it comes to improving our happiness, even for introverts.
Several studies have found that time spent with friends and family makes a big difference in how happy we feel. I love the way Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert explains it:. He shared insights of the study with Joshua Wolf Shenk at The Atlantic on how men's social connections made a difference to their overall happiness:. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger.
Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness. I think that last line is especially fascinating: "Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness. The Terman study, covered in The Longevity Project , found that relationships and how we help others were important factors in living long, happy lives:. Those who felt very loved and cared for, we predicted, would live the longest. Beyond social network size, the clearest benefit of social relationships came from helping others.
Those who helped their friends and neighbors, advising and caring for others, tended to live to old age. In The Happiness Advantage , Shawn Achor recommends spending time in the fresh air to improve your happiness:. This is good news for those of us who worry about fitting new habits into already busy schedules. Twenty minutes is a short enough time to spend outside that you could fit it into your commute or even your lunch break.
In fact, participants were found to be substantially happier outdoors in all natural environments than they were in urban environments. The American Meteorological Society published research in that found current temperature has a bigger effect on our happiness than variables like wind speed and humidity, or even the average temperature over the course of a day.
It also found that happiness is maximized at 57 degrees
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