10 Tips To Start Your Day With Happiness

April 4, 2011 By 9 Comments

By Remez Sasson

Here are 10 tips to help you start your day with happiness:

1. Wake up 20 minutes earlier than usual. This will give you some free time in the morning, and reduce rush and stress.

2. After waking up, sit on your bed, and repeat in your mind several times the following sentences, “Today is a wonderful day. Today is a great day. There is a lot of happiness today”.

3. Begin your day with the expectation of a great and wonderful day. For at least a little while, don’t focus on your problems. Just forget your problems, and enjoy the feeling of having a wonderful day, even if you cannot see how this can happen. Most people let their circumstances dictate to them what to think, feel and expect. You can reverse this process. Choose your own thoughts and feelings, irrespective of what is happening in your life. Eventually, if you persevere, your life will change accordingly.

4. Find a few minutes in the morning to stretch and exercise your body.

5. Smile more often, even for no apparent reason. Smiling will make you feel better.

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Learning Happiness: Everyday Activities to Increase Your Happiness

March 14, 2011 By 5 Comments

By Sara B. Healy

Happy CloudWhile cleaning my bookshelf the other day, I found a book, 14,000 things to be happy about. It looked brand new, but the date inside was from years ago. This book sat beside my collection of self-help books, which in contrast were dog-eared, highlighted and clearly used. Holding the happiness book, I wondered why I hadn’t used it. Then I realized I always thought happiness was something fleeting and incapable of improving my life.

Recently, my beliefs have changed as a result of what I’ve learned. I’ve discovered that being happy, contented, and positive are skills, which can be learned with practice and determination. Therefore, I made the decision to start my own journey to learn happiness and have been happily rewarded. Here are a couple of things that I’ve learned on my journey as well activities that have helped teach me more about happiness:

Recognize the hidden happy moments in a day.

When something wonderful happens to us, we usually know we’re happy. It’s the common, everyday moments of happiness that often elude us. One way to change this is by becoming deliberately aware of when we’re feeling happy during the day. I found an activity that helped me, and it might also help you. It’s very simple: Get a notebook or a tape recorder and keep track of any happy moments you notice during your day. By writing them down or recording them, you become aware of these moments that might otherwise have passed by unnoticed.

One such moment occurred for me when I was very late for an appointment and frustrated at getting every red light. As I sat fuming at the latest stop, I noticed a little boy in the school bus next me making silly faces at people. Watching him made me feel happy. I wrote this moment down in my notebook. It became one of many. Now, I look forward to finding happy moments in my day. I even challenge myself to see how many I can find. How many happy moments are you missing in your day? Try noticing them and see if you find your day is better for it.

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Less Than Perfect – 5 Ways that Perfectionism Prevents Happiness and Achievement

January 14, 2011 By 2 Comments

By Andrew Leigh

Would anyone seriously argue with the saying nobody’s perfect ? Of course not. And yet throughout the world millions of otherwise sane and intelligent people saddle themselves with a life principle that dooms them to frustration and constant disappointment – the desire to do things perfectly.

You could argue that setting such high standards is good for you, leading naturally to always being at your best. Many people do just that with proud statements like: oh yes, I’m a bit of a perfectionist – achieving anything but the absolute best is failure in my book.

But here’s the perfectionist paradox – as a perfectionist you can simultaneously hold feelings of moral superiority because of the high standards you’ve set yourself, and inferiority because you never meet those standards. Far from leading to happiness and achievement such attitudes are instead deeply negative.

Here are five reasons why:

1. It leads to a constant sense of failure.

Perfection is a vanishingly rare occurrence and perfectionists tend to focus on the flaws rather than the achievement. So no matter how well a task is done, there is always a sense of failure that it wasn’t done even better. An example is the golfer who hits a stunning shot to within a few feet of the pin but feels disappointed with himself for not getting it even closer.

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Pleasure and Happiness

November 3, 2009 By 2 Comments

By Remez Sasson

Pleasure is a state, in which you feel good and enjoy what you are doing. Usually, it does not last long, as the attention moves to other subjects, and because life is such that you have always other things to do, like work, cleaning the house, driving somewhere, interacting with other people, etc.

When you eat some delicious food you derive pleasure from it, but the pleasure doesn’t last for long, since you cannot go on eating indefinitely, you finish eating the food on your plate and the sensation of pleasure wears off after a while. You may enjoy watching a movie, but the movie lasts for a certain amount of minutes. When you read a book that you enjoy reading, ultimately, you reach the last page.

As you see, all pleasure is time limited.

Pleasure is usually awakened by external stimuli, and is largely physical, involving the five senses, like the smell of good food or its taste, a pleasant breeze, or of the sight and physical contact of a certain person. You can also derive pleasure from reading a book or daydreaming.

Pleasure is emotional in nature, while happiness is a state beyond the emotions and even beyond the mind. In pleasure the emotions and feelings are active. While in a state of happiness there is calmness and peace.

Though happiness is similar to pleasure in some respects, yet it is different.

Happiness does not depend on external stimuli, since it comes from within, though quite often, it seems as if the source is external.

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Doing Small Things to Make Your Life Happier

April 20, 2009 By 3 Comments

By Remez Sasson

You can add more happiness and light to your life, by doing some small, simple acts everyday. Though small and simple, these acts will improve your feeling and make your day more enjoyable. Even if you are under pressure and strain, or if you have problems and difficulties, there are many little, and sometimes not so significant actions that can make you feel happy. This happiness might not be strong and deep, and often is of short duration, but it certainly can improve the way you feel.

Below you will find a few suggestions for bringing small moments of happiness into your daily life. With some creative thinking you can find more ideas, which might be more suitable to your life and circumstances.

1. Wake up 10 minutes earlier in the morning, and go stand by the window or go out to the yard or garden, if you have one. Look around you, and enjoy the quietness and splendor of the morning.

2. Get up 10 minutes earlier, and make yourself a cup of coffee. Even if you drink coffee each morning, by getting up earlier you will be able to sip it leisurely.

3. Eat something you enjoy eating.

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