Happiness seems to be a topic on the top of many people’s minds. You will find more than happy when you answer each question.
1. Have Goals to Look Forward to Feeling good about the future is important for our happiness. We all need goals to motivate us, and these need to be challenging enough to excite us, but also achievable. If we try to attempt the impossible, it brings unnecessary stress. Choosing ambitious but realistic goals gives our lives direction and brings a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when we achieve them.
What are your most important goals?
2. Find Ways to Bounce Back All of us have times of stress, loss, failure, or trauma in our lives. But how we respond to these has a big impact on our well-being. We often cannot choose what happens to us, but we can choose our own attitude toward what happens. In practice, it’s not always easy, but one of the most exciting findings from recent research is that resilience, like many other life skills, can be learned.
How do you bounce back in tough times?
3. Take a positive approach. Positive emotions—such as joy, gratitude, contentment, inspiration, and pride—are not just great at the time. Recent research shows that regularly experiencing them creates an “upward spiral,” helping to build our resources. So although we need to be realistic about life’s ups and downs, it helps to focus on the good aspects of any situation—the glass is half-full rather than the glass half-empty.
What are you feeling good about?
4. Be comfortable with who you are. No one’s perfect. But so often we compare our insides to other people’s outsides. Dwelling on our flaws—what we’re not rather than what we’ve got—makes it much harder to be happy. Learning to accept ourselves, warts and all, and being kinder to ourselves when things go wrong increases our enjoyment of life, our resilience, and our well-being. It also helps us accept others as they are.
What is the real you like?
5. Be part of something bigger. 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 stress, anxiety, and depression. But where do we find “meaning and purpose”? It might be our religious faith, being a parent, or doing a job that makes a difference. The answers vary for each of us, but they all involve being connected to something bigger than ourselves.
What gives your life meaning?
Missed Part 1 of the article? Read it here: