Happiness
You can be happy, or at least happier than you are now, not matter how your life is going.
To be happy means to feel joy, gladness, contentment. Happiness is a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant.
Happiness in not just something that happens to us but is something we have direct control over.
Most of us postpone happiness telling ourselves we’ll be happy when—we get married/divorced, we are successful, get a better job/retire, win lotto, have a baby/when the kids leave home, lose weight, have plastic surgery, find true love, find ourselves, find the meaning of life, or some other distant event or circumstance. So we wait for something that might never happen, or if it does, prove not to be the solution we thought it would. We think being happy depends on something happening to us or on us deserving it. We need a reason to be happy.
And most of us sabotage our own happiness by:
- Expecting perfection
- Concentrating on externals to bring us happiness—other people, acquiring things, achieving things.
- Fretting and fuming over trivial irritations such as traffic jams, having to wait, being passed over for promotion, other peoples’ rudeness, a waiter getting our order wrong, or any of the countless other small ways in which the universe lets us know it does not care about our convenience.
So in this hurly, burly, competitive, demanding and unsympathetic world, how can we find contentment? We can choose to be happy, now, we can choose to think pleasant thoughts, now. We can:
- Make happiness a mental attitude, make it a habit.
- Be happy for no reason at all, simply because we want to be, because it feels good and we want to feel good.
- Break the habit of feeling annoyed every time anything goes wrong.
- Stop seeing setbacks as blows to our self-esteem (don’t take the traffic jam or the insults personally).
- Stop letting events and other people dictate what we think and do.
- Even if things are really bad and we cannot be happy, at least we don’t need to make things worse by thinking dramatically negative thoughts such as ‘this is a disaster, a catastrophe, I’m devastated, I’ll never get over this.’ Such thoughts are not facts, only opinions and therefore alterable.
- Human beings are goal oriented so it is much easier to be happy if we are striving for something. Working towards something focuses the mind on a positive, takes it off problems, and gives us the pleasant expectation of something to look forward to.
- When faced with a problem, don’t bemoan the misfortune but face it and act positively to solve it (a goal to work toward).
- Accept that happiness is not something that happens to us, it is something we can make happen.
- In times of distress and crisis use memories of happy times and successes to help get us through and to inspire us.
- Close our minds to negative thoughts and redirect our thinking toward positive and pleasant things.
- Focus on what is good and pleasing and ignore the rest.
- Choose to think about only happy past memories and never dwell on unhappy ones.
- Choose to think kindly and tolerantly about others and avoid criticizing and judging them.
- Choose not to see other peoples’ rudeness or thoughtless as a personal attack.
- Get rid of the unrealistic expectation that everything will always go our way.
- Believe life is still good even if we can’t have everything we want.
- Decide to focus on what we have rather than what we lack.
- Decide to give at least as much as we expect to receive.
In the words of Allen Chalmers:
The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Put the above changes into practice for a month and see how much better you feel.
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