16 Oct Want To Live a Happier Life? Happiness Experts Say That These Are the Six Most Important Changes to Make
Some people find happiness easier to enjoy than others.
But we can ALL enjoy MORE happiness if we do certain things and make certain decisions.
Different strategies will work for different people but these six suggestions are a great place to start if you’re wanting to feel better more often …
via Parade magazine by Emily Lawrence
Sometimes, it can feel like happiness is right out of reach. If only you could get a new job, find the perfect partner or lose a little bit of weight, you’d be happier. Ready for a wake-up call? According to happiness experts, happiness is not about any of those things.
“Many times, we’re looking for external factors to make us happier rather than looking internally,” says Rochelle Gapere, a happiness coach and the author of One Happy Thought At a Time: 30 Days to a Happier You. She also says it’s something everyone can have. “Happiness is our birthright. Everyone deserves to have a life that they feel good about and are excited to live,” she says.
Six simple changes that can inspire a happier life
1. Establish a morning routine that sets a positive tone for the rest of the day
Gapere says that one important change people who wish to live a happier life can make is creating a joy-inducing morning routine. Instead of waking up and immediately reaching for your phone to read your work emails, she suggests starting the day with something that sets the tone in a more positive way, such as thinking of three things you’re grateful for.
“I’m such an advocate for starting the day with a gratitude practice because so often we wake up and think nothing good is going to happen that day or we start focusing on things that are negative, like how tired we are or how much we have to do,” Gapere says. She explains that each day could be filled with the same events, some good and some bad. If we start the day on a negative note, we’re more likely to focus on everything that goes wrong throughout the day, completely oblivious to what is going right. But if we start the day with a grateful mindset, we’re more likely to notice the good and ignore the bad.
2. Shift your perspective
On a similar note, Helen Russell, a journalist who studies happiness and the author of The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country, says that a shift in perspective can go a long way in terms of cultivating happiness. “Conventional wisdom tells us that happiness is about the fulfillment of our goals, because ‘goal-hunting activities’ stimulate the brain’s reward centers and deliver a sense of accomplishment. But once we get the thing we want? We feel…nothing,” Russell says.
This doesn’t mean that having goals gets in the way of a happier life. It’s more about shifting a mindset from thinking you’ll be happy once you accomplish your goal to one where you’re enjoying the journey of getting there. “I try to remember to enjoy the ride and find what the actor Richard E. Grant calls ‘pockets of happiness’ each day,” Russell says…
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