Happiness Strategies | How to be Happy

It seems Thursday July 10 has been claimed as International Happiness Day.

I figured it was worth coming out of happiness hiatus to tell you about that!

The purpose:
"To create a focus on individuals and communities choosing Happiness in every moment. It’s a scientific fact: People who experience a preponderance of positive emotions tend to be successful and accomplished across multiple life domains."
[http://www.internationalhappinessday.com/]

You can check out the site and participate - they have a bunch of suggestions for how to do that.

Or you can have a DIY happiness day and simply choose happier thoughts throughout the day. There are plenty of tips for that right here at Happiness Strategies.

Or - and this might be my favorite - you can choose NOT to be happy. Buck the trend. Stay miserable. You’ll find everything you need for unwavering woe in the series How *NOT* To Be Happy.

You don’t even have to wait till July 10th.

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight

If you have any doubt about the wonderful job our brains do, you’ll be won over by this riveting, disturbing and emotional story from Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroanatomist and stroke survivor.

‘How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their brains from the inside out?’ she asks.

In this fascinating 18-minute talk from last month she describes the euphoria and misery that accompanied the mental machinations of experiencing a stroke, and of perceiving the world alternately from the 2 sides of her brain - the parallel-processing right brain and the serial-processing leftie.

She speaks with obvious heartfelt conviction of the life-changing wisdom it brought her - the peace, synthesis and joy that’s possible by perceiving life through the right bran.

Technorati Tags: Right brain,left brain,stroke

A new British study has shed more light on the genes/personality contribution to happiness. Genes may contribute up to 50% of the variance in happiness, and the new research suggests this genetic influence on happiness is essentially conveyed via personality.

Researchers using a representative sample of 973 twin pairs found that the heritable differences in happiness were pretty well explained by the differences in personality, particularly the dimensions of neuroticism, extraversion, and conscientiousness.

What does that mean for people who’d like to be a bit cheerier but may not have inherited the ideal personality? Co-researcher Tim Bates from University of Edinburgh said in an article on the study:

‘If people want to raise their own levels of well-being, our best advice is that they practice the kinds of behaviors that characterize calm, conscientious, extroverts…Try and be active and social, even if with just a few people. Practice the things you find emotionally challenging, maybe even keeping a diary to help you keep a sense of reality, and allow you to reflect on which strategies work, and which do not.’

Uh - does this all sound familiar? That’s because we’ve covered a lot of this ground in 101 Happiness Strategies.

To recap:

How to be happy - 11. Focus on what you can do to be happier

Genes - via personality - contribute at most 50% of happiness variance. That leaves a lot of wriggle room around the genetic stuff for boosting happiness.

How to be happy - 12. Make peace with your personality

Much of the personality influence works via the way people act - which is why Bates suggests we ‘practice the kinds of behaviors that characterize calm, conscientious, extroverts’. What you do affects how you feel.

How to be happy - 13. Act like you’re an extravert - even if you aren’t

Introverts who behave like extraverts are happier than those who don’t. Again, personality might be the premise, but it’s not the whole story. You drive the narrative.

How to be happy - 14. Concentrate on intentional factors

When you take into account that genes/personality might contribute 50% and external conditions another 10% to happiness, you’re left with a solid 40% up for grabs. That’s too much happiness potential to leave on the table while complaining about your personality shortcomings.

Happiness Life Strategy: Know your personality

Knowing your personality traits can help you make choices for happiness. For every personality profile there’s a situation that brings out the best - and the worst - in a person.

Technorati Tags: happiness,personality,genes

Image: PixelPet

Following last week’s bad news about anti-depressants I wanted to bring you some good news too.

A research study at Duke University found that a 30-minute brisk walk or jog 3 times a week worked as well as antidepressant drugs in beating depression.

OK, so now we know these drugs may be no better than a sugar pill. But wait. There’s more.

Longer lasting

The researchers followed up participants six months after the study ended, and found people in the exercise-only group were much less likely to become depressed again than either the medication-only group or the medication+exercise group.

Proactive recovery

According to the lead researcher, exercise had a big advantage over pills in the study - it gave people an active role in their own recovery:

‘Simply taking a pill is very passive… Patients who exercised may have felt a greater sense of mastery over their condition and gained a greater sense of accomplishment. They may have felt more self-confident and had better self-esteem because they were able to do it themselves, and they may have attributed their improvement to their ability to exercise.’

Walk away (from) the troubles in your life

According to Mayo Clinic, exercise can help depression as well as anxiety sufferers in a numbers of practical ways, including:

• Confidence and a sense of accomplishment
• Distraction and a more positive focus
• Interactions that help prevent isolation
• Providing a healthy coping strategy

They offer some sound tips for starting and sticking with exercise if you’re anxious or depressed.

So if you’re looking for a mood booster, think about adopting that thrice weekly, 30-minute walk/jog into your life. You stand to gain a bunch of benefits and you might just ditch those doldrums too.

iPod recommendation for your walk/jog:

Image: Kandoka

What makes kids happy? A new iPod? The Wiggles? An industrial-sized pack of M&Ms?

A new study by Mark Holder at the University of British Columbia has checked in to the question of childhood happiness. And the findings might not be what you expect.

At the bottom of the contributing factors are money, the child’s gender and parents’ marital status, each adding less than a measly 1% to sense of happiness in the average child.

Seems the little guys know whether or not they’re rich - it just doesn’t matter that much.

Strong contributors are leisure activities like sport, as well as the child’s temperament.

But the big kahuna of childhood happiness is - drum-roll - sprituality, or an inner belief system, which accounts for 8-17% of sense of happiness in the average child. (Compare this with 4-5% in adults.)

Why spirituality? Could be the sense of hope, could be the ready-made social network of many religions - although in an article on the study the researchers were quick to say religion and spirituality are not the same.

Whatever it is that makes spirituality important to a child’s happiness, it’s worth knowing that how a child sees the world matters much, much more than the things they have.

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Happiness and childhood: do we need happier classrooms?

Image: stevekrh19