10 simple steps to be a happier person
How to train yourself to be happy? Is it possible to make us happy? Why some people are happier than others and why it is happening?
You know that happiness is good for you but that thought won’t make you happier. There are periods in our lives when it is normal to feel sad.
It is happening when something bad happens in our lives. It can be losing a job, break up, losing someone who we love, or something else that is important for us.
Being sad all the time is a problem that you should take care of. Happiness is a habit that we should cultivate. The human brain is designed to stimulate and pay attention to negative thoughts rather than positive ones.
It is important to learn how to pay attention to positive thoughts because that is the crucial thing that makes us happier. Happiness can be taught, triggered, and self-induced.
How To Train Yourself To Be Happy
1. Memorize a list of happy words
When you force your brain to use positive words frequently, you make these words (and their basic meaning) more accessible, more connected, and more easily activated in your brain.
So when you go to retrieve a word or idea from your memory, positive ones can come to the top more easily.
There are plenty of words that you can use for your happiness list. Some of the best and with the higher numbers signaling positivity are love, joy, baby.
2. Ask yourself if you are thinking positive
How much of a positive thinker you are or you aren’t. By simply asking yourself this question you will start thinking more positive thoughts more often.
The reason for this is a phenomenon called metacognition. it means thinking about thinking. Asking yourself frequently whether you are thinking positively will help you remember to focus on the positive.
3. Write about something that made you happy
It is recommended to spend a couple of minutes every day and write about something that made you truly happy.
In a fascinating experiment, subjects were asked to spend 20 minutes every day writing about an “intensely positive” experience.
A control group was simply asked to write about a neutral topic. The group who wrote about positive experiences reported greater levels of happiness–and made fewer trips to the doctor over the next three months.
4. Practice gratitude
There are plenty of studies and evidence that being grateful even for small things in our life can make us happier people.
Make your morning habit. Every morning before you get out of bed name three things that you are grateful for. There is also a good traditional habit where every family member before dinner says something that it’s thankful for.
5. Add a “But” to turn unhappiness to happiness
If you could just add a harmless “but” to every negative thought you produced, you could transform all negative thoughts into positive ones.
The result? You could transform all your unhappiness into happiness!
A few examples:
“I feel like will never lose weight” becomes “I feel like I will never lose weight, but I know there are other people who used to be exactly like me and made it happen!”
“I will never find love” becomes “I will never find love if I keep staying at home just like I am right now. But if I start going out more, my luck might change.”
“I will never pay off this debt” becomes “I will never pay off this debt, but I could pay some of it if I start saving $100 more every month.”
See how powerful the word “but” is? It’s like having a happiness magic wand!
6. Stop Making Meaningless Affirmations
Many people try to jump to the happy thought directly from unhappy thoughts. So instead of thinking “I’m so unfit, but I am now exercising and I’m getting fitter every day,” they’ll think “I’m fit”. They jumped from “I’m so unfit” to “I’m fit”.
The problem is that usually those affirmations and “happy thoughts” are not happy thoughts. They instead make you unhappy. Why? Because you don’t believe them.
If you believe you’re unfit, you cannot fool yourself into believing you are fit. However, you can believe that you can get fit.
Read More: The Most Powerful Positive Affirmations for Woman
7. Exercise to release endorphins
One of the most powerful benefits of working out is that it affects attitude. Besides the chemical changes in our brain, it also helps to change the view of our world. We are happier so the way we see our life is more positive.
8. Helping people
Knowing you made a difference in someone’s life is a huge mood booster. Service, connecting with another human being on that level also gets the chemicals flowing (not to mention the fact that we feel happier when we’re productive). Again, it perpetuates a cycle of happiness.
9. Celebrate your successes, even the small ones
If you’ve started practicing gratitude daily you’ve made a small step and you’ve done something. Started a new better thing in your life. It is so small but worth celebrating.
We tend to minimize our accomplishments (I know I do), and that we should fight that tendency by going out of our way to congratulate ourselves when we do something right.
Say you decided to write about a positive experience every day last week. But then you only did it on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Our human tendency is to berate ourselves over the three days we missed instead of congratulating ourselves for the four days we met our goal.
So fight that tendency by congratulating and even rewarding yourself for the four days you did do the exercise rather than focusing on the three days you didn’t.
This is the nature of success. There will be detours and missed opportunities, and I can pretty much guarantee that you will fail to meet your expectations. It’s rarely a straight line from where you are to where you want to be.
Making sure you enjoy the small achievements along the way is one of the surest ways to make yourself as happy as you can be.
10. You Choose How Happy You Are
How? By the type of thoughts you make. Positive thoughts make you happy, while negative thoughts make you unhappy.
“I’m so fat.” – That’s a negative thought that makes you feel helpless.
“I will never achieve this.” – Another negative thought.
“I like spending time with my spouse.” – A positive thought brings you good feelings.
“Let’s go on vacation, babe!” – Now that’s excitement! Happiness is here!
So far so good. But how can you produce more positive thoughts so that you’re happier?
Final thoughts about happiness and how to be a happier person
It is easy to say but hard to be done. You can’t make your brain think positively overnight. It takes time. But you must start from somewhere. You’ve already started by clicking on the title and reading this article.
Start with your training to be happier today, start by changing something in your daily habits and the way you see things.
It is your time now, it is time to be happier.