33 Ways To Be Happier
DINA SPECTOR
Humans have remarkable control over their own happiness. In her book, “The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want,” psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky says a person’s happiness is 50% due to genetics, 10% due to circumstances, and the remaining 40% is “within our power to change.” Happiness is different for each person, which is why we’ve compiled dozens of different methods to help you find your inner sunshine.
Find your “flow.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, says that the secret to happiness is finding your “flow” — the creative moment when a person achieves an “effortless state of concentration and enjoyment.” These exceptional moments are unqiue to each person, and generally occur when a person is doing his or her favorite activity — cooking, singing, or playing chess, for example. Writing in Psychology Today, Cikszentmihaly provides the example of someone who experiences “flow” while skiing: Imaging that you are skiing down a slope and your full attention is focused on the movements of your body and your full attention is focused on the movements of your body, the position of the skis, the air whistling past your face, and the snow-shrouded trees running by. There is no room in your awareness for conflicts or contradictions; you know that a distracting thought or emotion might get you buried face down in the snow. The run is so perfect that you want it to last forever. We engage in these activities for our own sake, and “the happiness that follows flow is of our own making,” Cikszentmihaly says.
Focus on what you’re doing right now.
Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing? If the answer is “yes” then you are less happy than people who don’t have a wandering mind, according to research from Harvard University. About 46% of people spend their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing, say Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert. “The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost,” the study, published in the journal Science, concluded. Read more of this post
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