If you had to, what percentage would you put on the amount of happiness in your life in the last 30-days?
Would you rate it something like this:
Happy – 20% of the time
Unhappy – 40% of the time
Neither Happy or Unhappy – 40% of the time
OR-
Would you rate your happiness as more like 40-50%?
What if you could get over the hump and get to a point in your life where you were happy the majority of the time?
Isn’t that what we would all shoot for?
I know in my case, that’s where it started…trying to make the majority of each day be a happy one. Right from the time I woke up until I closed my eyes at night I consciously worked on being more happy more of the time.
5 Techniques To Improve Your Happiness
1. Living With Gratitude
It’s funny, some of the happiest, most successful people I know live a life of gratitude without really knowing it. They typically love what they do, are thankful for having the opportunity to live each day and have automatically built gratitude into their daily thought pattern.
Whether they were children of misfortune, of immigrants who had it tough or people that were lucky enough to know their place in life early on and now enjoy living up to that dream each day…their life is built around gratitude.
For others, who haven’t figured this out yet, you can live with gratitude too, start with building a list of things you are grateful for. This can be past experiences, opportunities, skills, qualities or just nature – things around you every day. Start each day and end each day by reviewing your list and feel full gratitude – this will automatically erase negativity, anxiety, anger and other negative feelings substituting positive energy and happiness
2. Doing More Than Thinking
People that are “doers” tend to be happier than people who over-think and procrastinate. Get out and walk, try new things, take different paths to work, try different tasks, talk to new people – all of this will keep you doing things rather than thinking and your happiness will increase as a result
3. Commit to Eating Better
I don’t expect anyone to instantly change from unhealthy eating to 100% healthy eating – but what you can do is slowly change your habits and substitute some unhealthy habits for healthy ones. For example, I started by erasing soft drinks from my diet and instead substituted water. Then I limited my white bread intake substituting gluten free alternatives. I was addicted to potato chips, instead of eliminating them altogether, I simply cut them down to once a week and a very limited number (where I used to eat them each night). Make these subtle changes and you will feel your health, energy and emotional health improve
4. Meditation
Can’t stress this one enough, meditation allows you to lower stress, remove the exaggerated view of negativity and live a happier, healthier life. In this blog post we reviewed some of the recent science supporting the benefits of meditation – amazing stuff and well worth the read.
5. Have a Life Plan and Purpose
So many people lack an overall purpose or vision for where they want to go in life and have really no sense of where they fit in life today…I liken this to being stranded in the middle of the ocean on a tiny raft with no idea where there is land or if you will ever see civilization again. Now, in that scenario, could you be happy?
Having a purpose in life is like a beacon toward which you can live your life journey giving you purpose, direction and a reason for being driven and engaged each day or your life. Without purpose, there is little hope that you can improve your happiness in life.
You control each of these factors and that means you control your level of happiness.
It’s up to you to use these powerful tools and change your life – start right away, there’s no reason to wait – post your comments and progress as you tackle the task of being happier in your life
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