We want to help find happiness or become happier. Science has provided us with certified ways in which we can increase our happiness. 

Since the beginning of time, human beings have been resorting to the ancient to understand how to live a happy life. Modern science has decided to take these practices and put them to the test, in order to identify the practical actions you can adopt to increase your happiness. 

Although our happiness levels are in part a result of our genes and circumstances, happiness also depends on our choices and activities. Happiness can be cultivated and increased through specific behaviours. We have the power to alter our happiness levels by changing our approach to life, and how we deal with challenging times. 

Ten Keys to Happier Living

Will be sharing with you the ten keys to happier living and how you can apply them to your life today. 

1. Giving: Putting others before us is fundamental for our happiness. Helping others helps us. Giving makes us happier and improves our overall health. It strengthens the connections between people and helps build a happier society for everyone. When it comes to giving, it is not reduced to money. We can also give other precious resources such as our time, ideas and energy. When we do good we feel good.
    
2. Relating: Our relationships with others are our biggest contributing factor for our happiness. People with strong relationships are happier, healthier and live longer. Our close relationships provide love, meaning, support and increase our feeling of self worth. Our broader social setting provides us with a sense of belonging. It is vital that we strengthen our relationships and make new connections.
   
   
3. Exercise: Our bodies and minds are connected. Moving our bodies not only benefits our physical body but makes us happier as well. It instantly lifts our mood and can lift us out of a depression. We do not have to be athletes, but finding simple ways to move our body makes the difference. Spending time outdoors, improving our nutrition, limiting our use of technology and having good sleep quality all boost our wellbeing.
    
4. Awareness: Have you ever questioned if life was just this, or if there is more to it? The good news is that there is. We just have to take a moment to stop and notice it. Becoming more mindful, whether it is during our walk to work, during our meals or even at work does wonders for our well being. Awareness enables us to get in tune with our feelings, prevents us from dwelling on the past or anticipating the future. It enables us to get more out of the day-to-day. 
   
   
5. Trying out: Learning helps us to stay curious and engaged. It gives us a sense of accomplishment and helps us boost our self-confidence and resilience. There are many ways of incorporating learning into our life. Whether it is through reading a book, talking to friends or having new experiences. 
   
   
6. Direction: Feeling confident and positive about our future is vital for our happiness. We all need goals to motivate us and something to look forward to. These goals have to be challenging enough to excite us but also be achievable. Choosing meaningful and realistic goals gives our lives direction and brings a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when we achieve them. 
   
   
7. Resilience: All of us have times of stress, loss, failure or trauma in our life. How we respond to these events has a big effect on our well-being. We often cannot choose what happens to us, but we can become mindful of how to respond. It is not always easy, but recent research shows that resilience is a skill that can be learned. 
   
   
8. Emotions: Positive emotions not only feel good, they help us perform better, broaden our perception, increase our resilience and improve our physical health. Although we have to be realistic about life’s ups and downs, it helps us focus on the good aspects of any situation.
    
9. Acceptance: We often compare a negative view of ourselves with an unrealistic view of other people. Dwelling on our flaws makes it harder to be happy. Learning to accept ourselves with our imperfections, and being kinder to ourselves when things go wrong, increases our enjoyment for life, our resilience and our well-being. It also helps us accept others as they are.
    
10. Meaning: People who have meaning and purpose in their lives are happier, feel more in control and get more out of what they do. They also experience less anxiety, stress and depression. How do we find meaning and purpose? It might come from doing a job that makes a difference and contributes positively to society, our religious and spiritual beliefs, or our family. The answers may vary but the common factor remains. We all seek to be a part of something greater than ourselves. 

 

HOW TO BOUNCE BACK

 “Everything can be taken from a [person] but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”  - Victor Frankl

Being resilient isn’t the absence of pain, difficulty, hurt, sadness, fear or anger during difficult times. It means that in the moment or over time we find ways to constructively cope with it, accept what has happened, adapt, and eventually move forward. Resilience is a dynamic characteristic which can be built and developed within us. Psychology and neuroscience has shown that we can learn skills, practices and habits of thinking that can help boost and build our resilience. 

Although life may have unexpected twists and turns, we can develop our skill set and nurture our internal and external resources to help us deal with the challenge effectively, recover more quickly and learn as a result. This response reduces the risk of anxiety, depression and enables us to age successfully. This same set of skill sets can also help us to manage the fear of risk taking and accepting new challenges, which help us to grow and develop in other ways too. 

• Active coping

This involves recognising the difficulties we are experiencing and identifying something constructive we can try to make today or tomorrow slightly better. This provides us with a sense of control, even if the action seems inconsequential. Having a sense of control is essential for our wellbeing. Active coping doesn’t involve ignoring our problems. It challenges us to take constructive action despite them. 

Try it: Reflect back on a challenging or difficult time in your life. What helped you cope and come through it? How could that help you today?

• Investing in our resilience

Consciously taking action to boost and maintain our happiness and wellbeing is also an investment on our resilience. It prepares you to deal with more stressful situations when they happen, because of the self-discipline you have developed. The ten keys to happier living all provide us with ways in which we can actively do this. 

Reflection: What actions help you maintain and build your resilience? Who are people you can turn to when you are struggling? How do you maintain and nurture your connections to them?

• Resilient Thinking - Our thoughts drive our emotions

The way we think has a significant impact on how we feel. How we feel impacts what we say and do as a result. This affects our relationships and how happy and resilient we are. When an event triggers an emotional reaction within us, it is our underlying thoughts that trigger our emotions. This happens so fast we often fail to acknowledge we have had these thoughts. However, we can learn to tune into these thoughts. These trigger thoughts are normally false. They are not facts although we respond to them as if they were. As a result, we reinforce them in ourselves. 

Learning to check in with these thoughts and challenge them, helps us to manage our emotions and the reactions that follow. We can have more conscious control over our reaction as opposed to following ar instinctual, inaccurate impulses. 

When something triggers an unpleasant reaction within you, the first step would be to take a brief pause, breathe and check into your instant interpretations. 

Reflection: Think back to a time when you jumped to an instant negative conclusion about someone or something that happened (keep it to a small example)? What were your in-the-moment thoughts about why it happened?  How did that cause you to feel and what did you do as a result? What might have been an alternative, less negative, interpretation at that time? How would that have led you to feel and act?

• Resilient Thinking- Watch out for thinking traps

Once we become more aware of our instant thoughts and interpretations that trigger our emotional reactions, we might begin to notice themes. It is common for many of us to have habitual patterns of interpretation that can lead us into anxiety and depression especially when we are tired, stressed or overwhelmed. These are thinking traps as they cause us to interpret the situation in a particular negative way. Once we jump on the negativity wagon we begin looking for evidence to reinforce it and reject any evidence which is counter to it, in this case we favor the negative scenarios and reject the positive ones. 

The first step to remove these thinking traps is to begin by noticing them, so that we may challenge these thoughts. For example by asking ourselves questions like:

“What is the evidence that this is true?” “What evidence is there that suggests it might not be true?” “What is a different way of thinking about this situation?”.

Try it: Looking at the list of common thinking traps below, do you recognise one you have a tendency at times to fall into? How can you challenge those thoughts next time you do? 

Blaming ourselves – believing we’re at the root cause of anything that goes wrong.

Believing it’s permanent – when something bad happens we think “That’s it – it will always be like this, there’s nothing I can do”.

Believing it will ripple out – when something difficult happens in one part of our life we instantly think that other aspects of our life will go wrong too.

Blaming others – believing that our difficulties and problems are all caused by others.

All or nothing thinking (sometimes called black and white thinking) - Interpreting something or someone as all bad or all good instead of seeing possible shades of in-between.

Mind-reading – assuming you know what others are thinking or expecting.

Mis-labeling – judging yourself or others on the basis of a single or narrow situation.

Shoulds – having fixed beliefs about what we or others should/ought to/must do.

Magnification or Minimisation – over- or underplaying the meaning, importance or likelihood of things.

Emotions as facts – believing that if we feel something it’s true.

Catastrophization – spiraling to the worst possible scenario, even if this is extremely unlikely.

Try this now!

We want to share a simple practice with you which can help make the world a happier and kinder world together. 

You can use these three simple steps anytime and anywhere to give yourself a boost and increase your compassion for yourself and others. When we focus on our emotions, looking for what is good and cultivating kindness, you can help yourself feel better day by day. 

Step 1: Be mindful. Close your eyes, deepen your breath and notice your body and its physical sensations. Ask yourself, “how am I feeling right now?”

Step 2: Be grateful. Take a moment to look around you and soak in the environment you are in. What are you thankful for? Even the smallest thing counts.

Step 3: Be kind. Ask yourself to cultivate a sense of fullness and positivity, ask yourself. Who do I want to send love to?

Although we may not always be able to change what is happening around us and to us, we can cultivate a conscious response and train our minds to adopt a joyful and hopeful outlook on life. 

Give this exercise a try and if you find it helpful share it with others too.