14 Oct Top tips to create more joy in life
Although I’m sometimes known as “Dr Happy”, and although I’m the Founder and Chief Happiness Officer of The Happiness Institute, I’m actually less interested in happiness per se and more interested in thriving and flourishing; that is, in living and helping others to live their best lives (that’s really what’s at the heart of Positive Psychology).
That being said, happiness is great, and more broadly, positive emotions are great, but within the range of positive emotions there is joy and contentment, satisfaction and calm, and many many more pleasurable emotions.
This post is not about differentiating between those positive emotions, so whether your focus is on joy or happiness or anything else for that matter, this post is really just about how you can bring more positive feels into your life more often.
Sound interesting? Well, if you’re a regular reader of this blog much of this will be familiar to you but here are some of my top tips to remind and/or reassure you:
- practice gratitude – set aside time, regularly, to focus on all that’s good in your life and all that’s going well
- connect – foster and develop positive relationships, at all levels, with family, friends, colleagues and … anyone!
- make time for you passions – be it learning or lunging (exercise), creating or cooking, spend time doing things you love and things that energise you
- set and work towards meaningful goals – as good as fun and pleasure are, so too is satisfaction a great form of positive emotion. Achieving goals can take hard work, but that feeling you get when you “cross that finish line” or “tick off that box” is hugely beneficial
- work on your mindset – and within mindset, is a collection of fantastically important constructs including optimism, hope and gratitude. Make it a point to work on this, to build these “muscles”, and as well as boosting your happiness you’ll also be boosting your resilience and, indeed, so much more
I could also add taking care of your physical health, working on utilising your strengths, playing and a range of other worthwhile happiness tips but I wanted to keep this list relatively short and manageable. Because happiness should seem manageable, so it then seems achievable!