How to be happy

"What would you change in your life to make you happy?"
This is a question that I often ask my face to face clients when they say they are unhappy. And the answer so often comes back as.
"I'd win the lottery"
Yet we know from research that having large sums of money has no significant effect on our happiness.
In fact in one experiment when a group of hugely financially successful people were compared with a random group from a phone book it was found that the only difference between them was that the richer group found it far harder to derive pleasure from the simpler things in life. Whereas enjoying a piece of music or even the smell of flowers was significantly easier for the average person.

So if we acknowledge that, unless we're living in a country with total, abject poverty, there is no reason why we can't pull ourselves together and make ourselves happier how do we do it?

I've collected some information based on modern, scientific research that shows exactly what to do to maximise your ability to improve your level of happiness.
  • Body Language
    Just as your mood can influence your body language, reversely the way that you use your body can influence your mood.
    We all know that being happy makes you smile, and feeling depressed makes you slump your shoulders, but can we actually work it the other way around?
    By sitting up straight and smiling can we really move from a miserable feeling into a happy one, well it certainly looks like it.
    In one piece of research volunteers were asked to hold a pencil in their mouths and rate how funny they found a series of cartoons.
    One half of the group were told that they had to hold the pencil in their teeth and that it mustn't touch their lips, and the other group were told to hold the pencil in-between their lips and that it mustn't touch their teeth.
    Thus forcing half of the group to smile and the other half to frown.
    The results showed that by forcing your facial muscles to smile you can dramatically change the way that you feel.

    It's been named "The facial feedback hypothesis" and it has even been shown to have the same effect when the muscles for frowning are disabled with Botox injections.
    Brain scans showed that there was a reduced activation in areas of the brain involved in emotional processing!

    Further research even shows that when you stop smiling, the positive influence of the smile doesn't immediately fade away, it lingers for quite some considerable time.

    As for sitting up straight, participants in research by Colorado College were divided into a sitting up straight group and a slump in your chair group, and were asked to do it for 3 minutes before given a mood assessment and a maths test.
    On average, the group that has been sitting up straight not only had a higher score of happiness but also scored higher in the test as they were able to keep calmer and think easier.
    So if you're feeling a bit low, sit up straight and smile and you'll start to see differences.
    With some issues that I treat, Confidence for example, pretending to be something that you're not can cause you to move further and further away from your goal. But when it comes to being happy, if you act as if you are it genuinely brings you closer to the real thing providing you do it properly.
    Saying to yourself "I am so happy, everything's going just right" when you know full well it isn't will not help. But wearing brighter clothes and using your hands a little when speaking does help. Smiling when you meet someone and speaking in a jolly fashion are great ways of improving the way that you feel. Similarly if you want to bring yourself down, speaking slowly, mumbling and wearing dull clothes will do just that. If you've got into that sort of habit then it's time to change it.
  • Doing The Right Things
    I often ask my clients that if they could wave a magic wand, what would they do to improve their life, the answer comes back so many times "I'd win the lottery!"
    Yet we've already learned through research that once a country has a moderate level of cash the happiness of its citizens begins to drop the higher their salaries get rather than rise.
    This is down to the same old thing, our happiness "set point".
    In one experiment participants were split into two groups and asked to measure their levels of happiness. The first group had experienced a rise in their happiness due to what's called "circumstantial change", such as moving house or getting a pay rise. The second group had experienced "intentional change", they'd changed careers or joined a local society.
    The participants continued to measure their happiness levels for several weeks to see what differences all these things make. The group who had experienced intentional change remained happier for a lot longer. The researchers concluded that the circumstantial change group had suffered from what's called "hedonistic habituation", where their familiarity with the new source of happiness meant that their positive feelings soon faded away.
    In the same way that having a new car feels great, and you wash it every weekend, give it a month and it's just a car and nothing more.
    In the case of the intentional change group, the constant flood of positive emotions they’d experienced caused a much longer-lasting state of happiness.
    It seems that Intentional activity really does have the best potential to elevate people into the higher end of their happiness range.
    So if you want to stay happier for longer, learn how to get out of your comfort zone and do something different. It's easier to do this by extending the things that you already enjoy, if you enjoy draughts learn to play chess, if you like playing tennis then try badminton.
    As for overriding hedonistic habituation all we need to do is spend some time thinking about the things that generated happiness in the first place. The people that we like, nice things in nature etc. This is particularly effective if you have some experience with hypnosis or meditation.
    Once you've gotten into the habit of thinking more positively it's easier to make the effort to think positively about other things that don't normally create much pleasure, so we generate more happiness over the simpler things in life, even the people we don't like so much!

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