How to Be Happy
August 6th, 2007Since being happy is a personal goal of almost every person alive I decided to write some tips on how to be happy that have worked for me. Although everyone considers happiness to be important it seems like we don’t always take specific action regarding how to be happy, instead we simply just hope what we do will eventfully lead to happiness. For this reason many people rarely achieve the level of happiness they truly desire.
How to be happy requires action on your part since it probably will not just happen on its own. One reason I believe why so many people are not as happy as they could be is because they spend too much time in the past and the future. I know this was certainly true in my case before I got to a level of happiness where I habitually felt good about myself and the circumstances in my life. It took some time and some mental work on my part to find that happy place and stay there for the majority of the time.
I learned how to be happy by deliberately taking steps to avoid thinking about the past mistakes I had made by kind of turning off my thoughts. I found it difficult at first to stop thinking about the past since it was an ingrained bad habit. I think it is probably a bad habit for most people but until you do something about it, you will have trouble moving closer to happiness and away from unhappiness or the flat and lifeless feelings that plague you daily.
One of the first steps I took was to remain focused on exercises whenever I worked out. I exercise regularly but I used to entertain negative thoughts even when I was training when it would have been a perfect time to just keep my mind on my workout. As I got better at staying focused on my training and avoiding negative thoughts when I was happily engaged in doing something I liked, I tried to spend even more of my time avoiding the negative thoughts that would pop into my head at other times. Whenever a negative thought about the past came into my head and once I was consciously aware of the thought, I immediately replaced that thought by repeating the word, success, to myself to kind of drown out the negative thought. In all honesty, this was quite difficult to do sometimes since I was often not even consciously aware of a negative thought until I had perhaps been thinking about it for quite some time.
Since my main concern was how to be happy I decided to take deliberate steps to spend more time being happy by planning blocks of time doing things that I already knew made me happy and where it would be easy to keep my thoughts focused on enjoying what I was doing. I found I was actually getting unhappy with myself when I took so long to become aware of negative thoughts when they popped into my mind while I was working or performing my daily tasks. So what I did was to simply go about my daily business as usual and let my thoughts wander in both positive and negative directions without worrying about it. However I did plan some time every day to do something I enjoyed. Some days it was working out, other days it might be to go for a wander around the city or watch a funny, feel good movie or on my days off I would get out into the country or go to the beach and take long walks. I love all types of nature whether it is in the forest or by the water, this always has a calming effect on me and taking a brisk walk as well got my body moving which added to the natural high.
I figured out how to be happy comes down to me and me alone. I was in total control of my life when I was free to do whatever I liked doing. I still had negative thoughts when I was busy with work or taking care of my other responsibilities but I kind of brushed the edges off those unhappy feelings since I became aware of the fact that life isn’t just about running around having fun. I stopped taking the happy moments for granted and realized I should cherish them and then I began to enjoy working more since I knew I always had a beautiful moment just around the corner the next time I went for a walk, watched a feel good movie or spent time with people I liked.
You can learn how to be happy through acceptance. I accepted that life has ups and downs but it continues moving forward and as you spend time in the moment by looking around and marveling at the changing faces of your experiences you will have little reason to look back at the past or feel the need to look so much towards the future. I learned that my future was made in the present, how I felt today was projected into the future. The happier I was today the brighter the future would be.
One way I was able to successfully release the past from my habitual thinking was to release the happy moments as I moved through them. By trying to cling to the happy moment I ended up back in the past. Basically I enjoyed the moment while it lasted but I gave in to the fact that nothing in nature or in life lasts forever. This takes practice since we often do not want the moment to slip away from us but once you accept that moments good and bad come and go, you remain open and ready for the next happy moment to arrive in your life. The expectation of more happy moments seems to bring them more frequently into your life. However, trying to cling onto the moments seems to have the opposite effect and it might take some time for the next happy moment to arrive in your reality.
I have written about it before but if you let go and trust in the flow of life and realize everything in life is forever changing, you allow yourself the freedom to move happily from one happy moment to the next and the moments in between are merely necessary bridges you must cross to experience habitual happiness.
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August 13th, 2007 at 9:08 am
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