03 Mar Simple, research-backed ways to boost your wellbeing
For several decades now, I’ve been saying that … “achieving happiness requires little more than practising a few simple disciplines, each and every day”.
This has, in essence, been the heart and soul of The Happiness Institute and pretty much all I’ve done as “Dr Happy”.
More recently, I’ve written a whole series of Audible audiobooks based on the idea of … habits. There’s “Habits for Happiness”, “Habits for Happiness at Work” and even “Habits for Mastering Anxiety” and “Habits for Mastering Depression”.
I guess one of my key messages is that the principles that create happiness and wellbeing are not overly complicated.
But what I also know is that “simple” is not always “easy”.
As such, we all need help and we all need reminders and, well, here’s another reminder of some of the more useful evidence-based strategies to boost your happiness and wellbeing …
via Science Focus by Dr Radha Modgil
If you ask anyone on this planet what they want from life, I am sure the vast majority of people would say that they wanted to be happy. However, happiness is a feeling that can be difficult to put into words. We know we want to feel it, but we don’t always find it easy to get specific about what that means. But even though happiness looks different to every single one of us, it does have several common themes.
So, what are they and can science help us to hack happiness?
It may seem obvious that smiling, the outward expression of happiness, makes us feel happy but what does the science say? The definitive answer came in in 2019 when researchers from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville decided to look back at 138 studies carried out around the world involving more than 11,000 volunteers and covering a period of 50 years.
They concluded that our facial expressions do indeed impact our mood and our emotions: frowning makes us feel sadder, scowling makes us feel angrier and smiling makes us happier. As the researchers pointed out this doesn’t mean we can literally smile our way to happiness, but it is evidence that our minds and bodies are intimately linked when we experience emotions.
What about money? Keep reading the full & original article HERE